Image–Music–Text: Operatic Experiments in the Age of the Audiovisual Essay

Abstract

Emerging as a new tool and form of criticism and theorizing, the audiovisual essay has stirred many different opinions within the academy, with its many different outcomes. For scholarly purposes, combining it with text, reflection and commentary seems to be the most common and most accepted form of audiovisual essay, easily found all over the internet in well-known video archives such as YouTube and Vimeo. Towards a more poetic end of the spectrum, breaking both the horizontal and vertical dimensions of any work may deepen and reveal new possibilities, often resulting in the creation of new hybrid pieces. This paper aims to demystify these new for­mats and concepts, focusing on its potentiality as a tool for criticism and its creative possibilities regarding music and, more specifically, opera.

Make-Do-With Listening: Competence, Distinction, and Resignation on Music Streaming Platforms

“…Nonetheless, numerous studies and social commentaries have highlighted several critical issues. These include the supposed capability of platforms to reinforce social divisions among listeners (Prey, 2016), the alleged homogenization of musical taste resulting from recommendation systems’ bias and platform curatorship ( The Economist , 2018; European Commission, 2020; The Guardian , 2019), the perceived reduction of exploratory approaches to music discovery practices (Ratliff, 2016, p. 6–7; Snickars, 2017), the assumed decline of culturally meaningful experiences with music products (Chodos, 2019; Rekret, 2019), the purported tendency of platforms to disfavor listening to niche artists (Chambers, 2023; Mulligan, 2014), or the presumed transformation of recorded music into a surveillance device (Drott, 2018), among other concerns (Hesmondhalgh, 2022).…”