Puccini's Soundscapes
Author: Arman Schwartz
Publisher:
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 179
ISBN-13: 9788822281487
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Giacomo Puccini and His World
Author: Arman Schwartz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-08-09
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 0691172862
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) is the world's most frequently performed operatic composer, yet he is only beginning to receive serious scholarly attention. In Giacomo Puccini and His World, an international roster of music specialists, several writing on Puccini for the first time, offers a variety of new critical perspectives on the composer and his works. Containing discussions of all of Puccini’s operas from Manon Lescaut (1893) to Turandot (1926), this volume aims to move beyond clichés of the composer as a Romantic epigone and to resituate him at the heart of early twentieth-century musical modernity. This collection’s essays explore Puccini’s engagement with spoken theater and operetta, and with new technologies like photography and cinema. Other essays consider the philosophical problems raised by "realist" opera, discuss the composer’s place in a variety of cosmopolitan formations, and reevaluate Puccini’s orientalism and his complex interactions with the Italian fascist state. A rich array of primary source material, including previously unpublished letters and documents, provides vital information on Puccini’s interactions with singers, conductors, and stage directors, and on the early reception of the verismo movement. Excerpts from Fausto Torrefranca’s notorious Giacomo Puccini and International Opera, perhaps the most vicious diatribe ever directed against the composer, appear here in English for the first time. The contributors are Micaela Baranello, Leon Botstein, Alessandra Campana, Delia Casadei, Ben Earle, Elaine Fitz Gibbon, Walter Frisch, Michele Girardi, Arthur Groos, Steven Huebner, Ellen Lockhart, Christopher Morris, Arman Schwartz, Emanuele Senici, and Alexandra Wilson.
Puccini in Context
Author: Alexandra Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2023-09-14
Total Pages: 517
ISBN-13: 1108875688
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Exploring the many dimensions of Giacomo Puccini's historical legacy and significance, this book situates the much-loved opera composer within the cultural, social, political, and aesthetic contexts of his time and demonstrates how political concerns shape the way we approach and interpret his works in the present day.
Middlebrow Modernism
Author: Christopher Chowrimootoo
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2018-10-09
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13: 0520970705
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Situated at the intersections of twentieth-century music history, historiography, and aesthetics, Middlebrow Modernism uses Benjamin Britten’s operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics, and audiences mediated the “great divide” between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the middlebrow, Christopher Chowrimootoo demonstrates how Britten’s works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat it: to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism, and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, this study offers a powerful model for recovering shades of grey in the traditionally black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music.
Operatic Geographies
Author: Suzanne Aspden
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-04-22
Total Pages: 328
ISBN-13: 022659601X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Since its origin, opera has been identified with the performance and negotiation of power. Once theaters specifically for opera were established, that connection was expressed in the design and situation of the buildings themselves, as much as through the content of operatic works. Yet the importance of the opera house’s physical situation, and the ways in which opera and the opera house have shaped each other, have seldom been treated as topics worthy of examination. Operatic Geographies invites us to reconsider the opera house’s spatial production. Looking at opera through the lens of cultural geography, this anthology rethinks the opera house’s landscape, not as a static backdrop, but as an expression of territoriality. The essays in this anthology consider moments across the history of the genre, and across a range of geographical contexts—from the urban to the suburban to the rural, and from the “Old” world to the “New.” One of the book’s most novel approaches is to consider interactions between opera and its environments—that is, both in the domain of the traditional opera house and in less visible, more peripheral spaces, from girls’ schools in late seventeenth-century England, to the temporary arrangements of touring operatic troupes in nineteenth-century Calcutta, to rural, open-air theaters in early twentieth-century France. The essays throughout Operatic Geographies powerfully illustrate how opera’s spatial production informs the historical development of its social, cultural, and political functions.
The Oxford Handbook of Timbre
Author: Emily I. Dolan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021
Total Pages: 740
ISBN-13: 0190637226
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"With essays covering an array of topics including ancient Homeric texts, contemporary sound installations, violin mutes, birdsong, and cochlear implants, this volume reveals the richness of what it means to think and talk about timbre and the materiality of the experience of sound"--
Technology and the Diva
Author: Karen Henson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2016-09-12
Total Pages: 245
ISBN-13: 0521198062
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Focuses on the operatic soprano as the diva and her relationships with technology from the 1820s to the digital age.
African Performance Arts and Political Acts
Author: Naomi Andre
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2021-10-28
Total Pages: 289
ISBN-13: 0472128752
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →African Performance Arts and Political Actspresents innovative formulations for how African performance and the arts shape the narratives of cultural history and politics. This collection, edited by Naomi André, Yolanda Covington-Ward, and Jendele Hungbo, engages with a breadth of African countries and art forms, bringing together speech, hip hop, religious healing and gesture, theater and social justice, opera, radio announcements, protest songs, and migrant workers’ dances. The spaces include village communities, city landscapes, prisons, urban hostels, Township theaters, opera houses, and broadcasts through the airwaves on television and radio as well as in cyberspace. Essays focus on case studies from Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania.
Fanfare for a City
Author: Jacek Blaszkiewicz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2023-12-05
Total Pages: 263
ISBN-13: 0520393481
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Fanfare for a City invites us to listen to the sounds of Paris during the Second Empire (1852–1870), a regime that oversaw dramatic social change in the French capital. By exploring the sonic worlds of exhibitions, cafés, streets, and markets, Jacek Blaszkiewicz shows how the city's musical life shaped urban narratives about le nouveau Paris: a metropolis at a crossroads between its classical, Roman past and its capitalist, imperial future. At the heart of the narrative is "Baron" Haussmann, the engineer of imperial urbanism and the inspiration for a range of musical responses to modernity, from the enthusiastic to the nostalgic. Drawing on theoretical approaches from historical musicology, urban sociology, and sound studies to shed light on newly surfaced archival material, Fanfare for a City argues that urbanism was a driving force in how nineteenth-century music was produced, performed, and policed.
Networking Operatic Italy
Author: Francesca Vella
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2022-01-26
Total Pages: 262
ISBN-13: 0226815714
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A study of the networks of opera production and critical discourse that shaped Italian cultural identity during and after Unification. Opera’s role in shaping Italian identity has long fascinated both critics and scholars. Whereas the romance of the Risorgimento once spurred analyses of how individual works and styles grew out of and fostered specifically “Italian” sensibilities and modes of address, more recently scholars have discovered the ways in which opera has animated Italians’ social and cultural life in myriad different local contexts. In Networking Operatic Italy, Francesca Vella reexamines this much-debated topic by exploring how, where, and why opera traveled on the mid-nineteenth-century peninsula, and what this mobility meant for opera, Italian cities, and Italy alike. Focusing on the 1850s to the 1870s, Vella attends to opera’s encounters with new technologies of transportation and communication, as well as its continued dissemination through newspapers, wind bands, and singing human bodies. Ultimately, this book sheds light on the vibrancy and complexity of nineteenth-century Italian operatic cultures, challenging many of our assumptions about an often exoticized country.
