Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>A vogue for coloratura dance arias began in the 1850s. This emerging genre combined melismatic singing with two hugely popular social dance genres: the bolero and the waltz. Scholars have observed an association between these social dances and a certain euphoric feminine sensuality, but the connection between this youthful ebullience in dance and virtuosic female vocality has been largely ignored. Dancing was notorious in the nineteenth century because of its dangerously arousing and vertiginous effects. As dances increased in speed and difficulty, so too did the singing of sopranos in midcentury Paris. In exploring relationships between dance, femininity, and singing, this article situates coloratura dance arias in the Paris of Napoléon III's Second Empire, a city sometimes condemned for its decadent materialism or dismissed because of its political impotence, in spite of its cultural, architectural, and technological importance.</jats:p> <jats:p>I argue for a connection between coloratura and the female body in precisely the era when the venerable singing style became the almost exclusive domain of the female singer and, simultaneously, reached its apogee in a Paris devoted to all the joy and glamour it could afford. Specific performers such as Marie Cabel and Caroline Carvalho were key to the success and even creation of these dance arias. These sopranos were certainly objectified in a problematic manner, but they were also “envoiced” (Carolyn Abbate's term) as wielders of a compelling musical power: coloratura. In providing virtuosic and luxurious expressions of femininity, these coloratura dance arias established a new sense of female vocality in the aural imagination of the Second Empire.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The word “melodrama” has accumulated a vast range of uses and definitions. It is the name given to the technique of combining words and music (as in the nineteenth-century musical genre); it is also used to name a mode of expressivity that is exaggerated, excessive, sentimental. These definitions appear unrelated, yet the melodramatic mode also seems to emerge frequently in musical contexts, such as opera and film—raising the question of whether the joining of words and music as such already tends toward, or attracts, a melodramatic impulse. This article first sketches the features of the melodramatic mode as they are described in writing on theater, film, and the novel before turning to a close reading of Richard Strauss's Enoch Arden, op. 38, a melodrama for speaker and piano. I aim to show that not only the themes of Enoch Arden's narrative but also the form of its narration, the meaningfulness it draws from the facts or conditions of narration as such, provide its claim to the melodramatic mode.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>One of the pivotal scenes of Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time takes place during a performance of the fictional composer Vinteuil's Septet in Mme Verdurin's salon. The narrator and protagonist of the novel, Marcel, finds himself caught off-guard by the beauty of Vinteuil's Septet; he hears in the Septet a calling to the true life of an artist and vows to begin work on his own masterpiece. As he listens to the Septet, Marcel struggles with the concept of artistic individuality. He tries to discern the similarities and differences between the phrases of Vinteuil's Septet and the same composer's Violin Sonata. Marcel comes to the conclusion that it is not superficial or intellectual similarities between two works by the same composer that really count, but rather some underlying substance that can only be “felt as the result of a direct impression.”</jats:p> <jats:p>The aesthetic philosophy embodied in these thoughts is not only applicable to Marcel's appreciation of the Septet. It also provides a lens through which we can come to terms with Proust's twenty-page-long description of the Septet, and it allows us to situate this passage meaningfully within In Search of Lost Time. The Septet scene is one of the most deeply intratextual passages of the novel. But just as Marcel gives pride of place to the “profound similarities” between Vinteuil's compositions over musicologists' “analogies ingeniously discovered by reasoning,” so too can the reader distinguish between more superficial connections between the Septet and earlier scenes, and subtler references that bind the novel together on a deeper level.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This article approaches narrative ballet as a theatrical art created through the intersection of dance, music, and literature. Following the nineteenth century's tendency to separate ‘the Arts,’ scholars, journalists, and often the dancers themselves portray ballet as an art of choreography and virtuoso bodies, while relegating the music, story, and visual designs to supportive if not negligible roles. My article counteracts this trend by approaching ballet as a multimedial art, in which meaning is made at the points where the specific arts intersect. Audience members perceive the ballet as a composite work, in which all three elements are equally present and important. Using this model, musicologists and literary critics can and should engage contemporary narrative ballets as complex and relevant art of our time.</jats:p> <jats:p>John Neumeier's The Seagull (2002) demands this type of analysis, because it is clear that as the author of the choreography, costumes, lighting, and set design, Neumeier considers all media involved—visual, aural, and literary—as equally generative elements of a ballet. His role is more of a multimedia artist than a choreographer. He is also responsible for the adaptation from Chekhov's eponymous play and for application of musical selections borrowed from Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, Shostakovich, and Evelyn Glennie. Indeed, his choice to present a Chekhov play known for its subtle weaving of verbal dialogue to convey character, mood, and themes seems to force the audience member and critic to reconsider her traditional understanding of what ballet can and cannot do.</jats:p> <jats:p>As an example of a multimodal approach to ballet, this article presents five literary and musical devices expanded to describe the varied interplay of the visual, aural, and literary components in The Seagull. Bakhtin's idea of heteroglossia appears on the ballet stage in the assignment of distinct dance styles to each of the four protagonists, a technique that develops each character by imbuing them with the historical and social connotations of their movement style. Neumeier manipulates the irrefutable connection between music and dance through audiovisual irony in two scenes, where the dance conveys one message, but the music belies it, revealing the underlying ironic truth of the characters' situations. All three modalities are employed to shift time into and out of a reflective space, where the sincerest characters are shown to explore their emotional and artistic dilemmas. Like Chekhov, Neumeier employs echo characters—secondary figures who mirror the conflicts of the main protagonists, allow the author(s) to further develop the play's themes. In this ballet, Masha “echoes” Nina's unrequited love, her movements, music, color palette, and her choices by negation. Through overt application of seagull imagery, Neumeier draws dance and music history—namely, Swan Lake and the pathos of the dying swan—into his ballet, The Seagull.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Among characterizations of the Darmstadt Summer Courses, none is more pervasive than the assertion that Darmstadt represented an intense Modernism, in particular a form of Modernism diametrically opposed to the excesses of Romanticism. But if Darmstadt is to be understood as a response to Romanticism, what are we to make of the ascendancy of Friedrich Hölderlin, a key figure in German Romanticism, as a source for texts? Hölderlin's texts have been a perennial favorite for Darmstadt composers since its inception, but Bruno Maderna undertook the most ambitious use of Hölderlin's works during the period from 1960 to 1969. Maderna's Hyperion, a collection of works based on Hölderlin's writings, amounted to no less than a rethinking of the Modernist project—one that does not shrink from its roots in Romanticism. Like the epistolary novel on which it is based, its idea is only approached through an interchangeable series of fragments, thereby engaging Romantic ideals of the work. Maderna's Hyperion continually awaits its completion through performance.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD series has sparked interdisciplinary interest in understanding opera in twenty-first-century contexts. This article posits that the Live in HD series creates an intermedial experience for its viewers, one that forms new relationships between operatic performance and audiences through the ongoing intersections of production elements (story, text, music, mise-en-scène, performers) and media-specific concerns (spectatorial gaze, hypermediacy, immediacy, reproducibility, liveness). A reading of act I from the 2009 Metropolitan Opera simulcast of Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann engages the shifting relations regarding the human and the technological as presented to the Live in HD viewer from the vantage point of on, back, beside, in front of, and yet completely discrete from the Lincoln Center stage.</jats:p> <jats:p>The mediated and mediatized relationships engendered by this constant resituating of the audience create a sense of the familiar rendered strange, of being somehow out of place in one's relation to the stage. Media and performance theory are employed in concert with Freud's influential work on the uncanny to describe this as the “intermedial uncanny”: an important aspect of this emergent audience experience.</jats:p>