Author: Hilary Poriss
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 019538671X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
This study is the first to explore the significance of aria insertion, the practice that allowed singers to introduce music of their own choice into productions of Italian opera during the nineteenth century. Each chapter investigates this practice from varying perspectives and through the experiences of some of the century's most famous prima donnas.
Author: Sean M. Parr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197542662
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
Nothing strikes the ear quite like a soprano singing in the sonic stratosphere. Whether thrilling, chilling, or repellent to the listener, the reaction to cascades of coloratura with climaxing high notes is strong. Coloratura-agile, rapid-fire singing-was originally essential for all singers, but its function changed greatly when it became the specialty of particular sopranos over the course of the nineteenth century. The central argument of Vocal Virtuosity challenges the historical commonplace that coloratura became an anachronism in nineteenth-century opera. Instead, the book demonstrates that melismas at mid-century were made modern. Coloratura became an increasingly marked musical gesture during the century with a correspondingly more specific dramaturgical function. In exploring this transformation, the book reveals the instigators of this change in vocal practice and examines the historical traces of Parisian singers who were the period's greatest exponents of vertiginous vocality as archetypes of the modern coloratura soprano. The book constructs the historical trajectory of coloratura as it became gendered the provenance of the female singer, while also considering what melismas can signify in operatic performance. As a whole, it argues that vocal virtuosity was a source of power for women, generating space for female authorship and creativity. In so doing, the book reclaims a place in history for the coloratura soprano.
Author: Karen Henson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521198062
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
Focuses on the operatic soprano as the diva and her relationships with technology from the 1820s to the digital age.
Author: Jim McGhee
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780761827528
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
It has been said that Don Nigro now has more plays in print than any American playwright. This is surprising considering that he remains relatively unknown to the general public. Despite his obscurity, Nigro is on his way to being regarded as one of the country's great dramatists. His work has been performed in colleges, universities, off-off-Broadway, and community theaters both in the U.S. and abroad. In Labyrinth, McGhee chronicles Nigro's stories, plays, settings, and characters of almost 200 monologue, one-act and full-length plays. Given the breadth of Nigro's characters and exciting plots, Labyrinth is a useful resource for directors, actors, and enthusiasts in both professional and repertory theater. In addition, Labyrinth introduces readers to generations of gripping tales about extraordinary people. McGhee's book is a welcome addition to any theater library.
Author: Christoph Clausen
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042018879
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
In what sense did Shakespeare's representation of the Weird Sisters participate in the rewriting of village witchcraft? Was it likely to "encourage the Sword"? Did opera's specific medial conditions offer Verdi special opportunities to justify the presence of stage witches more than three centuries later? How valid is the parallel between 19th century opera and the voyeurism of madhouse spectacle? Was Shakespeare's play really engaged in the project of exorcizing Queen Elizabeth's cultural memory? What does Verdi's chorus of Scottish refugees have to do with shifting representations of 'the people'? These are among the questions tackled in this study. It provides the first in-depth comparison of Shakespeare's and Verdi's Macbeth that is written expressly from the perspective of current Shakespearean criticism whilst striving to do justice to the topic's musicological dimension at the same time. Exploring to what extent the play's matrix of possible readings is distinct from Verdi's two operatic versions, the book seeks to relate such differences both to the historical contexts of the works' geneses and to their respective medial conditions. In doing so, it pays particular attention to shifting negotiations of witchcraft, gender, madness, and kingship. The study eventually broadens its discussion to consider other Shakespearean plays and their operatic offshoots, reflecting on some possible relations between historical and medial difference.
Author: Massimo Zicari
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1800643357
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
The fields of performance studies, empirical musicology, and the musicology of recordings have seen a tremendous development in recent years, shedding new light on the recent history of our performing tradition and conveying essential information to music practitioners, critics and audiences. This innovative work considers the notion of bel canto and the manner in which this vibrant tradition lives in the records of Luisa Tetrazzini (1871-1940), one of the most celebrated sopranos ever. Tetrazzini, whose discographic career includes about 120 recordings, belongs to that generation of inspirational performers who heralded the dawn of a new era of music appreciation, alongside such iconic figures as Enrico Caruso, Adelina Patti and Nellie Melba. Drawing on a vast body of scholarship and a number of contemporary reviews, Massimo Zicari establishes Tetrazzini’s role in the Italian operatic tradition and its much disputed set of performing conventions. His transcriptions of her recorded interpretations from Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi will prove invaluable to singers and conductors interested in a tradition that goes back to legendary figures such as Jenny Lind and Maria Malibran. The author also discusses her voice quality and technique, tempo flexibility, her use of vibrato and portamento—features of musical performance that question several widely-held, normative views about aesthetics and interpretative tradition. The volume includes eighty-eight musical examples and its closing section consists of the vocal scores of thirteen operatic arias. The musical material (both examples and transcriptions) is entirely original. This unique approach seeks to combine an academic perspective with the making of the music, in the hope that the plea for originality may be enhanced by models from the past.
Author: Edward Swift
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1480470414
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
DIVDIVThe misadventures of a motley group of artists making their way in New York City/divDIV A misfit collection of wannabes, has-beens, and never-weres, the Christopher Park Regulars gather frequently in the heart of New York’s Greenwich Village. Here they share their hopes, dreams, and memories (and in the case of the abnormally obsessed C.C. Wake, an irrational fear of earthquakes), as they wait to become famous./divDIV Andrew T. Andrews left a fancy home, job, and wife behind to struggle downtown as a starving writer and has now almost finished his third book on his best subject: himself. Maria la Hija de Jesús has also come a long way from where she started—when she was a he—to become a bona fide off-off Broadway star . . . when she isn’t spending time in a senior citizen home taking the residents on fantasy excursions to Europe. And then there’s the rice cereal heir, the High Fiber Man, watching helplessly in horror as his mother fritters away his inheritance./divDIV Author Edward Swift’s love of endearing eccentrics, rebels, and oddballs has been well documented in such acclaimed novels as Splendora, Principia Martindale, and A Place with Promise. Now he brings the sideshow from the dust of East Texas to the hustle and bustle of New York City, chronicling the struggles of his irrepressible Regulars in a story that is funny, sad, and totally outrageous./divDIV/div/div
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Periodicals
Languages : en
Pages : 1104
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Book Description
Author: Corina Rotar
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443857467
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 496
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Book Description
This book features the second selection of the most representative papers presented at the international conference “Dying and Death in 18th–21st Century Europe” (ABDD), a traditional scientific event organized every year in Alba Iulia, Romania. The book invites the reader on a fascinating journey across the last three centuries of Europe, using the concept of death as a guide. The past and present realities of the complex phenomena of death and dying in Romania, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, Serbia, Macedonia, Poland, USA, Germany, Sweden, Finland, and Italy are dealt with by authors from varying backgrounds, including historians, sociologists, psychologists, priests, humanists, anthropologists, and doctors. This is proof that death as a topic cannot be confined to one science; the deciphering of its meanings and of the shifts it effects requires a joint, interdisciplinary effort.
Author: James Albert Richards
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Encyclopedias and dictionaries
Languages : en
Pages : 520
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Book Description
