Explore the vast range of titles available.

Written in the form and style of the popular “novel of circulation” (or “itnarrative”), this article examines and provides an experience of the performance practices of eighteenth-century amateur music. It tells the typically complex history of a minor hit, “Come Haste to the Wedding,” a tune that was sung in a 1760s Drury Lane pantomime, rewritten as a rondeau for London publishers, danced as a jig in Irish and Scottish halls, transcribed as a fiddle tune by a captain in the Continental Army, circulated as a flute or guitar melody as far abroad as Calcutta, and collected by a young loyalist in Charleston, South Carolina. I argue that common to all these versions—and among many similar and neglected amateur genres, including sectional variation sets and dance collections—was the practice of desultory reading. The term “desultory” itself comes from the period, and the practice suggested here extrapolates from evidence of readers’ experience of approaching literature and periodicals out of order. Many musical texts asked readers to skip between pages and sections, rondeaux chief among them but also instructional treatises. Some of those same treatises, by C. P. E. Bach (1753–62) and Quantz (1752), hint at desultory reading in subtle admonitions. Through a lively engagement with period style, this article outlines a new definition of music reading informed by eighteenth-century language and practical context, a definition attuned to the ocular and physical habits of the era’s most plentiful practitioners: domestic performers of domestic music.

First-Wave Approaches to Musical Narrative The focus of the first wave of musical narrative theorists was on devel- oping the means to adapt the narrative tools of literary theory to music. In his classic Morphology of the Folktale ([1928] 1968), Propp outlines thirty-one \"functions\" (minimal narrative units) of Russian fairy stories, from which various archetypal narrative patterns or plots can be derived.2 The basic shape of the tales studied by Propp is similar to that of Joseph Campbell's \"Hero's Journey\" ([1968] 2008), and can be summarized thus: (1) a hero (protagonist) sets out on a quest; (2) various obstacles are met and overcome; (3) the hero returns from the quest with new knowledge or power. Some functions belong to the opening stages of a narrative and serve as initiating factors in the unfolding of the plot, such as Function II, in which the hero is given an interdiction or order which motivates the ensuing quest (Ibid., 27). In a series of articles that since have become classics in the field of musical narrative, Anthony Newcomb (1984; 1987; 1992) adapted Propp's insights for music by drawing an analogy between functional sequences and plot archetypes in literature, on the one hand, and formal types in music, on the other, explaining that both can be thought of as \"a standard series of functional events in a prescribed order\" (1987, 165).

It has long been argued that opera is all about sex.Siren Songsis the first collection of articles devoted to exploring the impact of this sexual obsession, and of the power relations that come with it, on the music, words, and staging of opera. Here a distinguished and diverse group of musicologists, literary critics, and feminist scholars address a wide range of fascinating topics--from Salome's striptease to hysteria to jazz and gender--in Italian, English, German, and French operas from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The authors combine readings of specific scenes with efforts to situate these musical moments within richly and precisely observed historical contexts. Challenging both formalist categories of musical analysis and the rhetoric that traditionally pits a male composer against the female characters he creates, many of the articles work toward inventing a language for the study of gender and opera. The collection opens with Mary Ann Smart's introduction, which provides an engaging reflection on the state of gender topics in operatic criticism and musicology. It then moves on to a foundational essay on the complex relationships between opera and history by the renowned philosopher and novelist Catherine Clément, a pioneer of feminist opera criticism. Other articles examine the evolution of the \"trouser role\" as it evolved in the lesbian subculture offin-de-siècleParis, the phenomenon ofopera seria's\"absent mother\" as a manifestation of attitudes to the family under absolutism, the invention of a \"hystericized voice\" in Verdi'sDon Carlos,and a collaborative discussion of the staging problems posed by the gender politics of Mozart's operas. The contributors are Wye Jamison Allanboork, Joseph Auner, Katherine Bergeron, Philip Brett, Peter Brooks, Catherine Clement, Martha Feldman, Heather Hadlock, Mary Hunter, Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, M.D., Lawrence Kramer, Roger Parker, Mary Ann Smart, and Gretchen Wheelock.

Cinema and opera have become intertwined in a variety of powerful and unusual ways.Vocal Apparitionstells the story of this fascinating intersection, interprets how it occurred, and explores what happens when opera is projected onto the medium of film. Michal Grover-Friedlander finds striking affinities between film and opera--from Lon Chaney's classic silent film,The Phantom of the Opera, to the Marx Brothers'A Night at the Opera to Fellini's E la nave va. One of the guiding questions of this book is what occurs when what is aesthetically essential about one medium is transposed into the aesthetic field of the other. For example, Grover-Friedlander's comparison of an opera by Poulenc and a Rossellini film, both based on Cocteau's playThe Human Voice, shows the relation of the vocal and the visual to be surprisingly affected by the choice of the medium. Her analysis of the Marx Brothers'A Nightat the Opera demonstrates how, as a response to opera's infatuation with death, cinema comically acts out a correction of opera's fate. Grover-Friedlander argues that filmed operas such as Zeffirelli's Otello and Friedrich's Falstaff show the impossibility of a direct transformation of the operatic into the cinematic. Paradoxically, cinema at times can be more operatic than opera itself, thus capturing something essential that escapes opera's self-understanding. A remarkable look at how cinema has been haunted--and transformed--by opera,Vocal Apparitionsreveals something original and important about each medium.

In these essays, Roger Parker brings a series of valuable insights to bear on Verdian analysis and criticism, and does so in a way that responds both to an opera-goer's love of musical drama and to a scholar's concern for recent critical trends. As he writes at one point: \"opera challenges us by means of its brash impurity, its loose ends and excess of meaning, its superfluity of narrative secrets.\" Verdi's works, many of which underwent drastic revisions over the years and which sometimes bore marks of an unusual collaboration between composer and librettist, illustrate in particular why it can sometimes be misleading to assign fixed meanings to an opera. Parker instead explores works likeRigoletto, Il trovatore, La forza del destino, andFalstafffrom a variety of angles, and addresses such contentious topics as the composer's involvement with Italian politics, the possibilities of an \"authentic\" staging of his work, and the advantages and pitfalls of analyzing his operas according to terms that his contemporaries might have understood. Parker takes into account many of the interdisciplinary influences currently engaging musicologists, in particular narrative and feminist theory. But he also demonstrates that close attention to the documentary evidence--especially that offered by autograph scores--can stimulate equal interpretive activity. This book serves as a model of research and critical thinking about opera, while nevertheless retaining a deep respect for opera's continuing power to touch generations of listeners.

In a recent essay, Carolyn Abbate argues for a “drastic” rather than “gnostic” conception of music and would want to see musicology's efforts redirected accordingly. In the wake of the 1985 call by Joseph Kerman urging musicologists to shift their attention from “positivism” and “formalism” to “criticism” or “hermeneutics”—that is, to musicology centered on interpretation—Abbate issues a call for a new disciplinary revolution, one that would shift our attention from works to performances and thus undo what she perceives as the fatal weakness in Kerman's position. When we ignore the actually made and experienced sounding event in favor of the disembodied abstraction that is the work, we bypass the sensuous, audible, immediate experience (the “drastic”) and put in its place the intellectual, supra-audible, mediated (that is, interpreted) meaning (the “gnostic”) and thus avoid what is of real value in music—the experience, the powerful physical and spiritual impact it may have on us. While I am in fundamental sympathy with Abbate's arguments and aims, I believe that the opposition between the real performance and the imaginary work—the former the object of immediate, sensuous experience, the latter the vehicle of mediated (that is, interpreted, “hermeneutic”) intellectual meaning—on which her argument rests is overdrawn: The hermeneutic element cannot be wholly banished from the arena of performance; there is no such thing as pure experience, uncontaminated by interpretation.

The author examines the most significant arguments leveled against the existence of musical narrative, most prominently those of Jean-Jacques Nattize and Carolyn Abbate. The author suggests that these arguments can be problematized by an examination of other theories in literature, or by discussion of other ways to think about the relevant issues. A preliminary definition of musical narrative is suggested and a number of features that contribute to the definition are highlighted. This discussion is used as a backdrop for a model of narrative analysis that is centered around the concept of \"narrative archetype.\" The model is informed by myth criticism, by the \"classic\" writings of Northrop Frye, and by the work of semiotician James Jakob Liszka. A single narrative archetype is illustrated with a short analysis of Frédéric Chopin's \"Prelude\" in C minor, op. 28, no. 20.

This essayistic introduction to The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality begins in part one by explaining the Lacanian foundations of voice studies as manifested in the writings of Mladen Dolar. From there, it goes on to consider how voice studies have confronted issues of materiality through embodiment, language, sonic disturbance, postcolonial encounter, the mechanical, and the technological, as well as through race and difference, with further attention to the writings of Roland Barthes, Michel De Certeau, Carolyn Abbate, Gary Tomlinson, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, and Josh Kun, among others. The essay ends by exploring thematic and theoretical connections among the various contributions in the volume, with synoptic accounts of each, looping back to issues raised in the opening part of the essay.

Probably to the vast mass of English people, \"opera\" means something ridiculous, or a singer who has never sung on the operatic stage, appearing on a talent show with a microphone. [Carolyn Abbate] and [Roger Parker] have fun with Jackie Evancho, who, aged 12, swept a TV talent show with an \"eerie\" version of \"Nessun Dorma\". As you and I know, but Jackie apparently didn't, this is the big G major tenor aria from the third act of Turandot, in which the singer promises to take the princess in bed at dawn - quite in accord with operatic manners, but not suitable for a 12-year-old girl. Nobody cared, though similar expressions about sexual congress in the rapper Azaelia Banks's \"212\" get a Parental Guidance sticker. The fact is that opera has removed itself from the meanings of its fervent expressions, and now that these are safely in museums, they can be brought out randomly without anyone wondering what they were about. This is an art form that changes only slowly. Operabase.com, which keeps records of performances worldwide, shows that tastes in opera haven't developed much in the past 50 years. The most popular operas remain La Boheme and La Traviata. Dreadful old warhorses such as Gounod's Faust are still hanging on - imagine a spoken theatre in which The Second Mrs Tanqueray was the most familiar play in performance. If you thought that the shifts in intellectual fashion that brought late Verdi such as [Don Carlos] and modern classics such as Berg's Lulu and [John Adams]'s Nixon in China to the forefront were reflected in performance, think again: Aida, with its elephants, is still the most popular. The only real shift in taste in recent decades, as performance evidence makes clear, is the rise of Richard Strauss's operas to the centre of the repertory. \"That now so ascendant Ariadne? \" Stravinsky remarked. \"I hate Ariadne. It makes me want to scream.\" Abbate and Parker have written an interesting and alert history of the art form, which follows the unusual path of paying little attention to the industry around it. There is little about the opera houses, the financial structure of patronage that has always been necessary to support this expensive art form, and very little about individual singers. We do sometimes hear about the behaviour of audiences when - as in the case of French grand opera - it explains curiosities of the form, such as the requirement for a ballet in the second act. But pleasingly what we read about most are the operas themselves, in great schools - opera seria, French light opera (given a thorough and welcome reappraisal), Meyerbeerian spectacle, verismo and so on. It's welcome, too, to place composers in proper intellectual company, and try to see exactly where Richard Strauss lies in his age - that opera to the greatest of librettos, Rosenkavalier, seems evasive, but still as crucial as his Salome's pre-war declaration that \"There haven't been enough dead yet.\"

A study is presented that aligns Karlheinz Stockhausen's concept of the \"strong movement\" with three unusual section's of Claude Debussy's \"La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune\" and invokes Linda Hutcheon's theory of parody and Carolyn Abbate's reformulation of musical narrative to help interpret the ensuing discontunity.