Giacomo Puccini and His World

Giacomo Puccini and His World PDF Author: Arman Schwartz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400884063
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 A rich array of primary source material, including previously unpublished letters and documents, provides vital information on Puccini’s interactions with singers, conductors, and stage directors, and on the early reception of the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.

Giacomo Puccini and His World

Giacomo Puccini and His World PDF Author: Arman Schwartz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400884063
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Hollywood Soundscapes

Hollywood Soundscapes PDF Author: Helen Hanson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838716211
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book Here

Book Description
The technical crafts of sound in classical Hollywood cinema have, until recently, remained largely 'unsung' by histories of the studio era. Yet film sound – voice, music and sound effects – is a crucial aspect of film style and has been key to engaging and holding audiences since the transition to sound by Hollywood's major studios in 1929. This innovative new text restores sound technicians to Hollywood's creative history. Exploring a range of films from the early sound period (1931) through to the late studio period (1948), and drawing on a wide range of archival sources, the book reveals how Hollywood's sound designers worked and why they worked in the ways that they did. The book demonstrates how sound technicians developed conventions designed to tell stories through sound, placing them within the production cultures of studio era filmmaking, and uncovering a history of collective and collaborative creativity. In doing so, it traces the emergence of a body of highly skilled sound personnel, able to apply expert technical knowledge in the science of sound to the creation of cinematic soundscapes that are alive with mood and sensation.

Puccini in Context

Puccini in Context PDF Author: Alexandra Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108875688
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 517

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Operatic Geographies

Operatic Geographies PDF Author: Suzanne Aspden
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022659615X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Middlebrow Modernism

Middlebrow Modernism PDF Author: Christopher Chowrimootoo
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520970705
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Technology and the Diva

Technology and the Diva PDF Author: Karen Henson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316760448
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Technology and the Diva, Karen Henson brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the neglected subject of opera and technology. Their essays focus on the operatic soprano and her relationships with technology from the heyday of Romanticism in the 1820s and 1830s to the twenty-first-century digital age. The authors pay particular attention to the soprano in her larger than life form, as the 'diva', and they consider how her voice and allure have been created by technologies and media including stagecraft and theatrical lighting, journalism, the telephone, sound recording, and visual media from the painted portrait to the high definition simulcast. In doing so, the authors experiment with new approaches to the female singer, to opera in the modern - and post-modern - eras, and to the often controversial subject of opera's involvement with technology and technological innovation.

Opera After the Zero Hour

Opera After the Zero Hour PDF Author: Emily Richmond Pollock
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190063734
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book Here

Book Description
'Opera After the Zero Hour' argues that newly composed opera in West Germany after World War II was a site for the renegotiation of musical traditions during an era in which tradition had become politically fraught.

The Oxford Handbook of Timbre

The Oxford Handbook of Timbre PDF Author: Emily I. Dolan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190637226
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 740

Get Book Here

Book Description
"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"--

African Performance Arts and Political Acts

African Performance Arts and Political Acts PDF Author: Naomi Andre
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472054821
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores how performance arts, whether staged or in daily life, regularly interface with political action across the African continent

Fanfare for a City

Fanfare for a City PDF Author: Jacek Blaszkiewicz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520393481
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.