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From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragédie en musique). In Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, Olivia Bloechl reveals another layer of French opera’s political theater. The make-believe worlds on stage, she shows, involved not just fantasies of sovereign rule but also aspects of government. Plot conflicts over public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear side-by-side with tableaus hailing glorious majesty. What’s more...
This major essay collection takes a fresh look at how differences among people matter for music and musical thought.
In this fascinating collection of essays, an international group of scholars explores the sonic consequences of transcultural contact in the early modern period. They examine how cultural configurations of sound impacted communication, comprehension, and the categorisation of people. Addressing questions of identity, difference, sound, and subjectivity in global early modernity, these authors share the conviction that the body itself is the most intimate of contact zones, and that the culturally contingent systems by which sounds made sense could be foreign to early modern listeners and to present day scholars. Drawing on a global range of archival evidence—from New France and New Spain, t...
"Grounded in new archival research documenting a significant presence of foreign and racially-marked individuals in Medici Florence, this book argues for the relevance of such individuals to the history of Western music and for the importance of sound-particularly musical and vocal sounds-to systems of racial and ethnic difference. Many of the individuals discussed in these pages were subject to enslavement or conditions of unfree labor; some labored at tasks that were explicitly musical or theatrical, while all intersected with sound and with practices of listening that afforded full personhood only to particular categories of people. Integrating historical detail alongside contemporary per...
Olivia A. Bloechl reconceives the history of French and English music from the sixteenth through to the eighteenth century from the perspective of colonial history. She demonstrates how encounters with Native American music in the early years of colonization changed the course of European music history. Colonial wealth provided for sumptuous and elite musical display, and American musical practices, materials, and ideas fed Europeans' taste for exoticism, as in the masques, ballets, and operas discussed here. The gradual association of Native American song with derogatory stereotypes of musical 'savagery' pressed Europeans to distinguish their own music as civilized and rational. Drawing on evidence from a wide array of musical, linguistic, and visual sources, this book demonstrates that early American colonization shaped European music cultures in fundamental ways, and it offers a fresh, politically and transculturally informed approach to the study of music in the early colonial Atlantic world.
Essays based on papers presented at four international conferences held at the UCLA Clark Library, 2005.
Music, Place, and Identity in Italian Urban Soundscapes circa 1550-1860 presents new perspectives on the role music played in the physical, cultural, and civic spaces of Italian cities from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Across thirteen chapters, contributors explore the complex connections between sound and space within these urban contexts, demonstrating how music and sound were intimately connected to changing social and political practices. The volume offers a critical redefinition of the core concept of soundscape, considering musical practices through the lenses of territory, space, representation, and identity, in five parts: Soundscape, Phonosphere, and Urban History Urban Soundscapes across Time Urban Soundscapes and Acoustic Communities Urban Soundscapes in Literary Sources Reconstructing Urban Soundscapes in the Digital Era Music, Place, and Identity in Italian Urban Soundscapes circa 1550-1860 reframes our understanding of Italian music history beyond models of patronage, investigating how sounds and musics have contributed to the construction of human identities and communities.
Long before the Boston Tea Party, where colonists staged a revolutionary act by masquerading as Indians, people looked to Native Americans for the symbols, imagery, and acts that showed what it meant to be “American.” And for just as long, observers have largely overlooked the role that Native peoples themselves played in creating and enacting the Indian performances appropriated by European Americans. It is precisely this neglected notion of Native Americans “playing Indian” that Native Acts explores. These essays—by historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and folklorists—provide the first broadly based chronicle of the performance of “Indianness” by Natives in North ...
Contemporary Aboriginal music from powwow to hip hop, the people that make it, and the issues that shape it.
In this book, author D. R. M. Irving traces the emergence of such large-scale categories as "European music" and "Western music," showing how they originate from self-fashioning in contexts of intercultural comparison outside the European continent rather than the resolution of national aesthetic differences within it. Taken as a whole, this study demonstrates how reductive labels for the musics of a continent or a hemisphere often imply homogeneity and essentialism, and how a renewed critique of primary sources can help dismantle historiographical constructs that arose within narratives of musical pasts involving Europe.