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"Opera Philosophy and aesthetics."
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All ears
An archeology of auditory surveillance combined with an analysis of representations of spying in works of literature, music, and film that provide philosophical reflections on the drives that animate listening: the drive for mastery and the death drive.
eBook
Aesthetic technologies of modernity, subjectivity, and nature : opera ¨ orchestra ¨ phonograph ¨ film
\"The book addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the nascent twentieth century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumas---cultural, social, and personal---associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the development of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back\"--Provided by publisher.
BOOK
In search of opera
In her new book, Carolyn Abbate considers the nature of operatic performance and the acoustic images of performance present in operas from Monteverdi to Ravel. Paying tribute to music's realization by musicians and singers, she argues that operatic works are indelibly bound to the contingency of live singing, playing, and staging. She seeks a middle ground between operas as abstractions and performance as the phenomenon that brings opera into being.
Weaving between opera's \"facts of life\" and a series of works includingThe Magic Flute, Parsifal, andPelléas, Abbate explores a spectrum of attitudes towards musical performance, which range from euphoric visions of singers as creators to uncanny images of musicians as lifeless objects that have been resuscitated by scripts. In doing so, she touches upon several critical issues: the Wagner problem; coloratura, virtuosity, and their critics; the implications of disembodied voice in opera and film; mechanical music; the mortality of musical sound; and opera's predilection for scenes positing mysterious unheard music. An intersection between transcendence and intense physical grounding, she asserts, is a quintessential element of the genre, one source of the rapture that operas and their singers can engender in listeners.
In Search of Operamediates between an experience of opera that can be passionate and intuitive, and an intellectual engagement with opera as a complicated aesthetic phenomenon. Marrying philosophical speculation to historical detail, Abbate contemplates a central dilemma: the ineffability of music and the diverse means by which a fugitive art is best expressed in words. All serious devotees of opera will want to read this imaginative book by s music-critical virtuoso.
eBook
Metaphysical song
In this bold recasting of operatic history, Gary Tomlinson connects opera to shifting visions of metaphysics and selfhood across the last four hundred years. The operatic voice, he maintains, has always acted to open invisible, supersensible realms to the perceptions of its listeners. In doing so, it has articulated changing relations between the self and metaphysics. Tomlinson examines these relations as they have been described by philosophers from Ficino through Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche, to Adorno, all of whom worked to define the subject's place in both material and metaphysical realms. The author then shows how opera, in its own cultural arena, distinct from philosophy, has repeatedly brought to the stage these changing relations of the subject to the particular metaphysics it presumes.
Covering composers from Jacopo Peri to Wagner, from Lully to Verdi, and from Mozart to Britten, Metaphysical Song details interactions of song, words, drama, and sounds used by creators of opera to fill in the outlines of the subjectivities they envisioned. The book offers deep-seated explanations for opera's enduring fascination in European elite culture and suggests some of the profound difficulties that have unsettled this fascination since the time of Wagner.
eBook
Aesthetic technologies of modernity, subjectivity, and nature
Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, around December 1910, human character changed. Aesthetic Technologies addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the new century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumas—cultural, social, and personal—associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the development of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back.
eBook
Reclaiming late-romantic music
Why are some of the most beloved and frequently performed works of the late-romantic period—Mahler, Delius, Debussy, Sibelius, Puccini—regarded by many critics as perhaps not quite of the first rank? Why has modernist discourse continued to brand these works as overly sentimental and emotionally self-indulgent? Peter Franklin takes a close and even-handed look at how and why late-romantic symphonies and operas steered a complex course between modernism and mass culture in the period leading up to the Second World War. The style’s continuing popularity and its domination of the film music idiom (via work by composers such as Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and their successors) bring late-romantic music to thousands of listeners who have never set foot in a concert hall. Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music sheds new light on these often unfairly disparaged works and explores the historical dimension of their continuing role in the contemporary sound world.
eBook
Interpreting Music
Interpreting Musicis a comprehensive essay on understanding musical meaning and performing music meaningfully-\"interpreting music\" in both senses of the term. Synthesizing and advancing two decades of highly influential work, Lawrence Kramer fundamentally rethinks the concepts of work, score, performance, performativity, interpretation, and meaning-even the very concept of music-while breaking down conventional wisdom and received ideas. Kramer argues that music, far from being closed to interpretation, is ideally open to it, and that musical interpretation is the paradigm of interpretation in general. The book illustrates the many dimensions of interpreting music through a series of case studies drawn from the classical repertoire, but its methods and principles carry over to other repertoires just as they carry beyond music by workingthroughmusic to wider philosophical and cultural questions.
eBook
Remaking the Song
Opera performances are often radically inventive. Composers' revisions, singers' improvisations, and stage directors' re-imaginings continually challenge our visions of canonical works. But do they go far enough? This elegantly written, beautifully concise book, spanning almost the entire history of opera, reexamines attitudes toward some of our best-loved musical works. It looks at opera's history of multiple visions and revisions and asks a simple question: what exactly is opera?Remaking the Song, rich in imaginative answers, considers works by Handel, Mozart, Donizetti, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Berio in order to challenge what many regard as sacroscant: the opera's musical text. Scholarly tradition favors the idea of great operatic texts permanently inscribed in the canon. Roger Parker, considering examples ranging from Cecilia Bartoli's much-criticized insistence on using Mozart's alternative arias in theMarriage of Figaroto Luciano Berio's new ending to Puccini's unfinishedTurandot,argues that opera is an inherently mutable form, and that all of us-performers, listeners, scholars-should celebrate operatic revisions as a way of opening works to contemporary needs and new pleasures.
eBook
Genius, Instrumental Music, and “Great Mistakes”: Amadeus Wendt and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
Forin order to develop the wonderful power and effect of instruments ever more, it was necessary to make use of them in the most multifarious combinations and exchanges, which could only be sufficiently motivated by a romantic and fanciful play of ideas. The attribution can be well established on circumstantial grounds, i.e., by tracing references in the critic's other reviews and solidifying Wendt's activity with the journal. [...]the language and views that the correspondent employs are fully consistent with Wendt's. Most knowledge of Wendt derives from the aforementioned Fidelio review of 1815.12 Though this review is a complex piece of aesthetic writing, spread across six issues and taking up roughly fifty columns, it was summarily dismissed in MacArdle's Beethoven Abstracts as \"a not particularly enthusiastic analysis of Beethoven's style. Because so little about Wendt is known or available, some basic knowledge about Wendt's career and movements is given here in order to demonstrate that he was in a position to write the infamous 1826 Leipzig review. Often spoken of in the same breath as Hoffmann, nineteenth-century biographical sources chronicled Wendt at a length comparable to that given Friedrich Rochlitz (editor of the AmZ), Adolf Bernhard Marx (Beethoven supporter and editor of the BamZ), and Ludwig Rellstab (reputedly responsible for the \"Moonlight\" title of the Op. 27, no. 2 sonata).14 Wendt's importance to aesthetics is shown in his correspondence with leading German thinkers.15 Hegel, who clearly influenced Wendt, referred to him as a friend.16 Among composers, Carl Maria von Weber befriended Wendt in Dresden-the critic had wintered there in his years as a private tutor.17 Robert Schumann names Wendt among the Davidsbiindler and had his work reviewed in the NZ/M, a project which Wendt supported and to which he certainly would have contributed had he not died soon after its inception.18 Born Johann Gottlieb Wendt on 29 September 1783, he possibly adopted the Latinate Amadeus in emulation of his favorite composer, Mozart-as had E. T. A. Hoffmann (born Ernst Theodor Wilhelm).
Journal Article