Browsing by Subject "Opera"

This dissertation consists of two parts: a chamber opera and an article on the work of Claude Vivier.

"Cardano" is a new chamber opera by composer Bryan Christian about the work and tragic life of the Renaissance polymath Gerolamo Cardano (1501-1576). Scored for three vocal soloists, an actor, and an eleven-part ensemble, "Cardano" represents a coalescence of Christian's interests in medieval and Renaissance sources, mathematics, and intensely dramatic vocal music. Christian constructed the libretto from fragmented excerpts of primary sources written by Cardano and his rival Niccolo Tartaglia. The opera reinvigorates Cardano's 16th-century scientific and philosophical models by sonifying and mapping these models to salient musical and dramatic features. These models prominently include Cardano's solution to the cubic equation and his horoscope of Jesus Christ, which was deemed so scandalous in the 16th century that it ultimately led to Cardano's imprisonment under the Roman Inquisition in 1570 - the opera's tragic conclusion. Presenting these ideas in opera allows them to resound beyond the music itself and project through the characters and drama on stage. In this way, the historical documents and theories - revealing Cardano's unique understanding of the world and his contributions to society - are given new life as they tell his tragic story.

Claude Vivier's homophonic treatment of combination tones--what he called les couleurs--demands an extension of traditional methods of harmonic and spectral analysis. Incomplete explanations of this technique throughout the secondary literature further demand a revised and cohesive definition. To analyze all variations of les couleurs, I developed the analytical concept of combination-tone classes (CTCs) and built upon Angela Lohri's (2010) combination tone matrix to create a dynamic CTC matrix, from which CTC sets may be extracted. Intensive CTC set analysis reveals a definitive correlation between CTC set and formal sections in Vivier's composition "Bouchara." Although formally adjacent CTC sets are often markedly varied, all sets share a subset of lower-order CTCs, aiding in perception of spectral cohesion across formal boundaries. This analysis illuminates the interrelationships of CTC sets to their parent dyads, their orchestration, their playing technique, and form in "Bouchara." CTC set analysis is compared with Vivier's sketches for "Bouchara," which suggest that les couleurs were intended as integral components of the work's musical structure.

As Catherine Clément argues in her 1979 publication "L'Opéra ou la Défaite des Femmes" most female operatic characters befall a tragic ending: death, suicide, madness, murder. Building on Clément and observations of more recent feminist scholars (Carol Gilligan, Susan McClary, Marcia Citron), and on the compositional work of Paula Kimper and others, the current project strives to problematize opera's dominant paradigm, and to use my artistic work as a composer to present a different one. With a dearth of stories that highlight the relationship between a mother and a daughter, I have sought to create an artistic work with strong female leads featuring women whose lives carry on and, even, thrive. It was a propitious opportunity to have been approached by conductor Sara Jobin and feminist theorist and author Carol Gilligan (under the auspices of A Different Voice Opera Project) to develop such an opera based upon Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter". What better way to break free from a paradigm than to do so with a popular and well-loved novel? The present artistic foray seeks thus to depart from an accepted paradigm while remaining within the bounds of something fundamentally familiar and popular. In a separately available essay "Gender and Music: A Survey of Critical Study, 1988-2012", I explored a wide survey of scholarship on gender.

The feminist reinterpretation of "The Scarlet Letter" was first developed into a play, "The Scarlet Letter", work-shopped and staged at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA, the Culture Project in New York City, the National Players, and the Primary Stage Theatre. It was ripe for development into a libretto for operatic presentation by a Different Voice Opera Project. As the selected composer, I began a long collaboration with Sara Jobin, Carol Gilligan, and poet Jonathan Gilligan (co-author of the libretto). Pearl, the opera, was presented in workshop versions by A Different Voice Opera Project at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, MA during the summers of 2012 and 2013. Subsequently, our collaborative efforts were expanded through the addition of Sandra Bernhard, a dramaturg and director for a community outreach program at the Houston Grand Opera. Through conversations with Sandra, the opera became more streamlined and I was able to give it a smoother dramatic flow. In particular, Sandra's advice informed much of the opera in terms of increasing the presence of the chorus to provide the medium through which Pearl understands her past. Musically, the chorus also becomes the third part of what I call "Dimmesdale's triangle of pressure" in which he is caught within a patriarchy and pulled by three separate forces: his love and family (Hester and Pearl), his responsibility as a minister (the townspeople represented by the Chorus), and a father figure and mentor (Reverend Wilson). The present work, extensively revised during 2013-2015, grew out of these experiences.

In Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", Pearl is a seven-year-old girl, born from the love affair of Hester Prynne and minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. The pregnancy of Hester immediately places her upon dangerous footing with her only preservation being silence. She is required to permanently wear a scarlet A upon her chest, whereas the minister, Dimmesdale, hides his identity as the father of the child both for himself and for the protection of his lover and child, also through silence. In the times of Puritan New England during the 17th century, a crime such as adultery (a term that is never mentioned in Hawthorne's novel) would have been punishable by death. Needless to say, the ability of Pearl and others to speak the truth within this story becomes much too perilous for the characters to voice. The silence surrounding the life of this little girl is the focus behind the development of our main character for the opera: Pearl as a grown adult, thus making this opera a sequel, of sorts, to "The Scarlet Letter". As quoted in Gilligan's 2003 publication, "The Birth of Pleasure": "At turning points in psychic life and also in cultural history - and I believe we are at one now - it is possible to hear with particular clarity the tension between a first-person voice, an "I" who speaks from human emotional experience, and a voice that overrides what we know and feel and experience, that tells us what we should see and feel know."

Pearl as a grown woman, reflects back upon her life as a child where she is both the main character and the narrator of the story, often breaking the fourth wall. In this sense, this opera is reminiscent of the term "memory play"; a term coined by Tennessee about his work, "The Glass Menagerie". In the opening of his play, Tom, the main character, begins with:

The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings. I am the narrator of the play, and also a character in it.

With the creation of Pearl, a new character, the opera is able to integrate the relationships that do not exist within Hawthorne's novel, providing the libretto fertile material through which to explore Carol Gilligan's psychological theories . (See page vi, Note 2). We now see the story through the lens of Pearl as she remembers her childhood with highlights upon her relationships with her mother (Hester Prynne), her father (Arthur Dimmesdale), her mother's husband (Roger Chillingworth, née Roger Prynne), the townspeople, her father's mentor, Reverend Wilson, and herself as a child, allowing for the creation of duets, trios, and ensembles to highlight these relationships. The most notable of these relationships is the one between Adult Pearl and her child self, Child Pearl. In this way, and reminiscent of Williams' "memory play", Pearl's memories and current life can now be juxtaposed, together in time, memorialized through the music that binds these events and memories together.

In life we can experience our past through memory. In film we can be provided with visual flashbacks to offer a retrospective. However, it is only within music where the relationship between two eras of self can be juxtaposed. Thus, the gambit of my opera is to find musical means where the audience may now experience the character of Pearl as a child, as an adult, and as both child and adult in duet, as an echo, as a memory, a reflection. This phenomenon is most effectively evoked within opera or musical theatre. While a libretto must fundamentally be created using fewer words than say a novel or a play - it takes longer to sing a line than it would to speak it - it falls to music to express that which cannot be extrapolated through words alone. This dilemma creates a most wonderful opportunity for music to soar with tension and emotion. It is the music that can bridge together certain characters and scenes through the creation of themes that represent (in the case of this opera) truth/honesty, a patriarchy, and love, among other themes as well as the representation of particular characters. The necessity for the score to embellish the drama through music's tools: melody, harmony, motivic development and orchestration, essentially enables the audience to draw closer to the story and the characters by means that only music can provide.

In creating Pearl, it was my hope to birth the first of many such operas that shift one operatic paradigm on its head. To create an opera where the main characters are women and where they both have independent voices and thrive. As I have written elsewhere: "Some, throughout history, have argued that music has been exhausted. That everything that can be said, particularly within the Western language of tonality, has already been said. However, I must wonder, did any of the authors of such statements consider that the female voice has yet to really sing? For, we are just beginning. And I cannot wait to hear what `she' has to say."

Roger Griffin notes that “there can be no term in the political lexicon which has generated more conflicting theories about its basic definition than ‘fascism’.” The difficulty articulating a singular definition of fascism is indicative of its complexities and ideological changes over time. This dissertation offers fascist performativity as a theoretical lens to better understand how Italian composers interacted with fascism through sustained, performative acts while leaving space to account for the slipperiness of fascist identities.

Although opera thrived in fascist Italy (1922-1943), extant scholarship on this period of music history remains scant, promoting a misleading narrative of operatic decline in the twentieth century. This dissertation examines the positions of four Italian opera composers within fascist culture by focusing on the premieres of four operas during the Italian fascist period: Pietro Mascagni’s Nerone (1935), Gian Francesco Malipiero’s Giulio Cesare (1936), Ottorino Respighi’s Lucrezia (1937), and Ennio Porrino’s Gli Orazi (1941). These musical settings of romanità (Roman-ness) were part of Mussolini’s efforts to glorify ancient Rome, a central tenet of fascist ideology.

In fascist Italy, a political society that extolled masculinity and musical composition, experiences of difference were often hidden beneath a guise of hypermasculine rhetoric. Opera composers associated with the fascist regime were almost exclusively men and in a patriarchal society with prescribed gender norms, they performed gender. I situate each composer through an investigation of their relationship with the regime, through musical analysis, and an account of the reception of their operas. While not all the composers included in this dissertation were outspoken fascists, or even confirmed members of the National Fascist Party, they nevertheless performed fascism to obtain favor with Mussolini and the fascist regime.

The Persistence of Smoke is a documentary opera. The libretto is based on interviews with various individuals related to the former Liggett and Myers Tobacco Company headquarters in Durham, North Carolina.

The cigarette industry once dominated Durham, but saw its decline in the 1990s as the link between cancer and smoking became increasingly clear. The American Tobacco Company and the Liggett and Myers Tobacco Company were once the biggest cigarette manufacturers in the city. As these companies left Durham, their factories and tobacco warehouses first sat vacant, but were gradually preserved and transformed into new spaces for offices, apartments and restaurants.

This project focused on the former Liggett and Myers headquarters along Main Street, a collection of buildings now known as "West Village". I interviewed current and former Durham residents who had a connection with these buildings, including local business representatives, community leaders, former Liggett employees, historians, current residents in the downtown area, municipal urban planners, journalists, and an architect. These interviews were given to local playwright John Justice, who created a libretto based on the themes that emerged.

The opera's story focuses on Kevin, an architect about to unveil his visionary master plan for redeveloping several defunct cigarette factories in an unnamed city. As Kevin leaves his newly renovated apartment for the press conference, he is confronted by his estranged father Curtis, a former cigarette worker who desperately wants to reconcile and reconnect, deliriously recalling the glory days of tobacco and the money that followed.

This dissertation consists of two parts: the artistic part is a dramatic cantata for Baritone, Chamber Ensemble, Male Choir and Electronics. The scholarly part is an article which inquires into compositional aspects of Luciano Berio’s choral and symphonic piece Coro.Chapter 1 presents The Pit and the Pendulum, a dramatic cantata, in full score. Using the enhanced sonic environment allowed by the superimposition of vocal and acoustic music with a fantastic landscape created by means of electronic sounds, my composition explores the themes of Poe’s story. The tale, full of powerful metaphoric images, could be seen as a description of the experience of imprisonment. The pendulum descending from the ceiling, beyond being a clear metaphor of the inexorable passing of time, was actually one of the tortures used by the Spanish Inquisition. The blazing walls directly recall instruments of torture used at the time, as well. Nonetheless, the pit, whose black abyss is a symbol of indeterminacy, seems to point us to the annihilation of our conscience, typical of the most brutal torture of every kind and era. Victims of torture normally succumb to delirium though isolation, starvation and the alternation of torture and respite. On the brink of the pit, faced with the blackness of death, the mind of the condemned is, in this case, pushed beyond its limits and, ironically, he becomes able to conceive things that otherwise would be beyond his intellective and emotional faculties. From this terrible experience, in Poe’s tale, the prisoner gains the intuition and the knowledge of a deeper inner reality. In this regard, The Pit and the Pendulum is a tale of salvation and growth, against all odds. Chapter 2 presents the theoretical part of the dissertation, “Formal Plan and Constructive Principles of the Heterophonic Textures in Berio’s Coro.” This analytic essay on the large choral/symphonic work Coro, written in 1976 by Luciano Berio, is based on my study of his manuscripts preserved at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. I was able to consult the archive in June 2019. The article explores Berio’s motives in his placement of the choir in relation to the orchestra onstage, its premises and its consequences from a compositional point of view. It also investigates the relation between Berio’s music and the work of the ethnomusicologist Simha Arom on central African music, which inspired the composition. Thanks to some sketches left by the composer, I have been able to reconstruct the motivation behind some of the most significant compositional choices of the piece as well as several compositional procedures used by the composer to present and develop his musical discourse. In Chapter 3 the aesthetic and scholarly conclusions of this dissertation are summarized.

Lee Edelman notes that “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one.” This statement reinforces a particular view of queerness: one that suggests that it is, first and foremost, an action, and secondly, that it is an action that is meant to challenge already existing structures. And while the act of disruption itself is not always queer, queering-as-action emphasizes the destabilization of entrenched ideas, norms, and binaries.

My dissertation examines the music, productions, and subsequent reception of four operas by Britten at the time of their premieres — Billy Budd (1951), Gloriana (1953), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), and Owen Wingrave (1971) — focusing on how these operas each present various ways of queering and forms of queer disruption. On a musical level, these works subvert a largely nineteenth-century heteronormative model of opera that dictated voice types within certain roles, the power and relationship dynamic between male and female characters, and portrayals and performances of gender. On a social level, these four operas tell stories that engage with and disrupt ideas of wartime-era constructions of nation and empire at a time when the desire to depict British strength and relevance competed with the rise of new global superpowers.

Britten’s operas fit within a timeline that runs alongside the postwar era in Britain. In a period shaped by World War II and its aftermath, postwar Britain encapsulated significant political and cultural shifts that includes the dissolution of the British Empire, student and youth protest movements, and the decriminalization of homosexuality. How these works were reviewed and discussed by critics as well as citizens will show how these operas (and their disruptions) relate to, reinforce, and reject these social shifts. Through the perusal of press reviews and archival materials, I explain how these disturbances are realized by those experiencing these operas at the moment of their premieres. These primary sources also reveal how Britten’s postwar operas run counter to and engage with large cultural and societal changes in postwar Britain.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a one-act opera (in three scenes) for dramatic soprano and chamber orchestra (eleven instruments). The libretto is a free adaptation by the composer of the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The instrumentation required is: flute (doubling piccolo), oboe (doubling english horn), clarinet (doubling bass clarinet and E-flat clarinet), bassoon, horn, soprano, piano (doubling celesta), violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and contrabass. The approximate duration is one hour. The work is dedicated to soprano Aimee Marcoux.

This dissertation consists of two parts: a composition for chamber ensemble and an article discussing musical signification in Thomas Adès’s opera, The Tempest.

Through the Mangrove Tunnels is a forty-five minute composition inspired by my experiences growing up in the swamps and bayous of Florida. Its eight movements for string quartet, piano, and drum set are drawn from my memories as well as the colorful history of Weedon Island, a nature preserve in St. Petersburg that I spent much of my childhood exploring. The island’s many legends include ceremonial gatherings of Native Americans, landings by Spanish conquistadors, burned-down speakeasies, shootouts, bootlegging, a failed movie studio, plane crashes, and an axe-murder. Despite the island’s long history of encounters with humans, to the newcomer it appears to be a pristine natural landscape. Though they have been almost fully reclaimed by nature, traces of its history remain: the line in the dirt of a long-forgotten runway, an ancient sea-faring canoe buried in the mud. The piece evokes this history in impressionistic fashion alongside my personal memories of canoeing through the island’s mangrove tunnels. In combining these stories the continuum of past and present are collapsed, resulting in an exploration of the relationships between memory, history, place, home, and the natural world.

In the article I demonstrate how a complex hierarchy of associative musical ideas are used to represent specific characters and ideas in Thomas Adès’s Shakespearean opera The Tempest (2004). At the top of this hierarchy are two interval cycles, the dyadic cycle and the <2,3,4> aligned cycle, which together inform the majority of both melodic and harmonic material in the opera. The dyadic cycle is primarily associated with Prospero, the artifice of his magic, and his plan for vengeance. Consisting of a repeated sequence of three descending dyads (P5, P5, M6) pivoting around a connective half step, it generates the storm music that opens the opera as well as much of the music surrounding both Prospero and Caliban. The <2,3,4> aligned cycle is associated with the love between Miranda and Ferdinand, accompanying both characters’ introductions. It consists of three vertically stacked, concurrent interval cycles of two, three, and four half steps. At the bottom of the hierarchy of musical materials, and with the most associative specificity, are four leitmotifs that are responsible for creating dramatic meaning in the music: Prospero’s Revenge, Miranda’s Defiance, Nature, and Reconciliation. As these leitmotifs combine and develop, they generate a narrative in which Prospero’s grand plans for retribution are thwarted by Miranda and Ferdinand’s love, leading instead to reconciliation and freedom from his magical control.

I begin the article by defining "leitmotif" within the analytic framework introduced in Matthew Bribitzer-Stull's book Understanding the Leitmotif, justifying the use of the term in my analysis. Next, I offer critical analysis of scholars’ readings of he harmonic language of and signification in the opera, focusing on prior analytical works by Emma Gallon, Hélène Cao, John Roeder, and Philip Stoecker, reviews, and Adès's own words (including both published interviews and my private conversations with the composer). After a brief exploration of the opera’s historical precedent in Berg’s Lulu, I outline my hierarchical system of associative musical material in The Tempest, followed by my reading of the opera.