Liefde, eer, wraak: de passies laaien hoog op in Giuseppe Verdi’s eerste internationale hit, Ernani. Drie rivalen vechten om de hand van Elvira maar hun obsessies en manipulaties leiden enkel tot verbittering en dood. Het onderwerp ontleende Verdi aan Victor Hugo, wiens toneelstuk Hernani in 1830 een heuse esthetische oorlog ontketende over het bestaansrecht van het romantische theater. Op basis van de verhitte debatten in de theater- en operawereld van die tijd toont Annelies Andries hoe esthetische idealen botsten met de praktische vereisten van een operaproductie. De censuur verbood bepaalde politieke onderwerpen, zangers eisten dat hun stemmen zouden schitteren en het operahuis wilde een successtuk. Tenslotte illustreert de luistergids hoe Verdi in Ernani zijn dramaturgische en muzikale visies aanscherpte en zo de voedingsbodem legde voor zijn blijvende populariteit in het operalandschap.
sources, valuable insights can be gained from missionaries who directly engaged with enslaved populations. For Jesuits, this occurs from what should be considered a global perspective, and Mongin in particular exhibits a wider awareness of the Caribbean and France, as someone educated in the Jesuit system should. At the same time, the stereotypes regarding race, gender and nationality that appear in these letters must be seen as the product of that time period, but as long as such biases are acknowledged, these letters are valuable sources for studying French Caribbean plantations.
Hello. Hi, Jane, and hi, Lin. Welcome to this conversational review of Nina Eidsheim's book, The Race of Sound. My name is Annelies and I'm going to open with a more general review of my thoughts on this book.In The Race of Sound, musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim aims to make the readers rethink the way they approach the naming of 'voice'. Whenever one hears a voice, she argues, one automatically asks the acousmatic question: 'Who is this?' (1). This question betrays the way we name a voice and understand it as an essentialized expression of a knowable individual. She perceives this activity of essentializing especially in relation to vocal timbre-a concept that she understands very broadly as encompassing all characteristics that allow us to distinguish between two sounds of the same 'pitch and loudness' (6). It is important to realize, according to Eidsheim, that equating timbre with specific essences is an act of interpretation on the part of the listener, rooted in collective and cultural assumptions. Thus, she seeks to dispel the common notions that voice is 1) singular, 2) innate and 3) that its source is in the singer (9). Instead, she puts the listener in the limelight. It is important to note that vocalists themselves also fall under the denominator 'listeners'. After all, vocalists listen to their own vocal production and interpret and adjust their production based on their own and others' cultural and collective perceptions about voice in general, and theirs in particular.Throughout the chapters of the book, Eidsheim deconstructs how and why listeners read voices as a reflection of essence with a particular attention to race (often in the intersection with gender). She discusses how hearing timbre as racial leads to constructions of imaginary identities that often deny singers agency. In chapter two, for instance, she proposes the concept of a phantom genealogy in which the voices of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Black opera singers were framed within a minstrelsy performance culture. Discussing Billie Holiday in chapter five, she highlights how her voice is interpreted as autobiographical, channeling ancestral history, and biologically determined (156)-all ways of interpreting that suggest Holiday's sound came naturally and that keep us from understanding Holiday's artistic skills in crafting her own sound. A theme that also regularly comes back is how listeners expect that a voice's timbre corresponds to its visual, bodily representation-if this is not the case, representations will be adjusted to fit the vocal timbre; in chapter four, she demonstrates how this is even true of voice-simulation technology such as the Vocaloid.Ultimately, Eidsheim proposes to shift our attention to the elements of entrainment, style and technique as an approach that puts the singers' artistry in creating their sounds centre stage. Yet, even in describing voice in these terms, Eidsheim warns against essentializing and champions the restoration of what she calls 'the multiplicity of the thick event' (5). In other words,...
Opera & Ballet Primary Sources (OBPS) is one of the most recent and ambitious endeavours to make sources related to opera, ballet and other genres of music theatre easily accessible to scholars. The project focuses in particular on performance materials: libretti, ballet scenarios, scores in various formats, mise-en-scène documents, and programme announcements. It started in 2012 and is spearheaded by David A. Day, the curator of the special music collections at the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University, which also hosts the website (https://sites.lib.byu.edu/obps/). Day's work has concentrated on two kinds of activities. 1 First, he joined forces with the Internet Archive to digitize existing collections of music theatre sources at various institutions. 2 They started with digitizing BYU's own special collections, and then expanded to libraries and archives in Belgium. 3 Second, he is also in charge of creating two databases: the Index to Opera and Ballet Primary Sources Online (https://atom.lib.byu.edu/ obps/), and the Name Authority Files (https://atom.lib.byu.edu/obpsna/). The former is a searchable online database that brings together the sources from the BYU-Belgian collaboration with an ever-growing number of digitized collections with related contents from other institutions. The latter is a complimentary biographical database with information about the persons involved in creating the works included in the Index. These databases are the most visible and impressive part of this project. The Name Authority File contains 58,927 entries bringing together biographical data from about 90 scholarly works including various dictionaries, lexicons, encyclopaedias, and online catalogues and databases. The Index is continuously expanding and at the moment brings together documents from over 40 institutions in Europe, the United States and Canada (see Appendix). 4 It includes smaller 1 The initial stages of this project are described in David A. Day, 'Digital Opera and Ballet: A Case Study of International Collaboration', Fontes Artis Musicae 61/2 (2014): 99-106. 2 The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of cultural artefacts including books, audio, video, images, software and websites that are made freely available to the public. It was founded in 1996 in San Francisco and works together with numerous libraries and institutions around the world to digitize existing collections of historical materials. See
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