In general, this often cross-listed pro-seminar, taught in alternation by various faculty members, explores theories and models of historical investigation, exemplifying specific approaches to literature, cinema, and the performing arts. For musicology students, it often includes: analysis of historiographic writings and musicological works exemplifying particular approaches, such as transnational, environmental/landscape, gender/sexuality, critical race studies, performance studies, archives, and the digital humanities.The following is the description of the Fall 2018 instance, cross-listed by Music, Italian Studies, and Comparative Literature:
Musc 604 / Ital 602 / Coml 602: PERFORMANCE STUDIES (Calcagno)
“Performance” is a term used differently within a variety of academic disciplines and human activities (theatre, anthropology, visual arts, business, sports, politics, science) signaling “a wide range of human behaviors” (Diana Taylor). In connection to an explosion of scholarship in performance studies during the last forty years–in theater and dance studies (Schechner, Schneider, Worthen, Fischer-Lichte, Roach, Davis etc.) and musicology (Abbate, Cook, Levin)–we will explore the relationships between this wide constellation of meanings on the one hand, and examples of today’s music, theatre, and dance performances on the other (generally subsumed under the terms “avant-garde” and “experimental”). Readings from performance theorists and practitioners will be included, from Appia, Brecht and Artaud to LeCompte, Wilson, De Keersmaeker, and Castellucci. The repertoire and case studies include operas, oratorios, and dance works (with music by Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart) as well as theatrical adaptations of poems from the medieval and early modern periods (esp. by Dante, Ariosto, Tasso). Among the topics and concepts covered: research and writing methodologies, agency, performativity, reconstruction and re-enactment, technology and mediation, materiality, spectrality, gender, uses of body, movement and voice, text vs. performance, history and memory, performance and museums, intercultural and postdramatic approaches.
Musc 730: Staging Baroque Opera Today
Instructor: Mauro Calcagno
Semester: Fall
Offered: every two years
This graduate seminar examines stagings of Baroque operas available on video. In particular we will discuss: 1. How today’s directorial approaches impact the relationships between text and performance, and how, in turn, these relationships reflect a particular view of history; 2. The role of the singer as compared to that of the actor in theater, and the relationships between singer and character (both historically and today); 3. The permeable boundaries of opera as spectacle in its relationships with other genres (oratorio, for example) and art forms (dance and video art, for example); 4. theorizations of theater/performance vs. those of opera. Other topics will include the role of the various agents of production that collaborate in opera production, the role of mediation that arises in today’s videorecordings, and the current research directions concerning staging, acting, and performance practices during the Baroque period.
UNDERGRADUATE
Musc 33: History of Opera
Semester: Fall or Spring
An investigation, through a series of representative works, of the central problem of opera: how does the combination of music, text, and visual spectacle create an art form in which the whole is more powerful than its parts. Today this issue can be examined not only in live performances but also through media such as film, DVD, streaming video– media to which this four-centuries-old multimedia form has adapted, evolving in still compelling ways.