scholarly journals From Callas To Netrebko: Diva power, vocality, and the mediatisation of the operatic voice

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jennifer Wollerman

<p>Maria Callas’s fame as an opera star in the 1950s is still recognised today, and, for many, her name is synonymous with the modern concept of the opera ‘diva’. The increasing diversity of mediatised forms of operatic performances since her time has altered the way audiences engage with the art form. This has implications for singers in terms of values around vocality, authorship and power, and, in particular, the agency of singers in creating the meaningful, affective, and distinctively personal vocal tone that opera calls for. I suggest that for “divas” as defined by twentieth- and twenty-first century global stardom, power is amassed at least in part through particular ways in which they make use of their vocality or vocal timbre, and the way they manage their voices’ presentation in the mediatised versions of their performances.  The recent turn towards a performative focus in musicology encourages the investigation of such aspects of performance. While authorship remains central in the consideration of performance, the contribution of the singer to the authorial and creative process has tended to be ignored, and at times the singer’s work has been regarded as servile to the point of nullification. A critical examination of scholarly writings around operatic performance, with reference to those of diva, voice, and stardom studies, forms the foundation of my study. In case studies of Callas and two later divas, Kiri Te Kanawa and Anna Netrebko, I examine the individual vocality of each singer, their interaction with the forms of mediatisation of their time, their position in the continuum of vocal fashion and influence, and the function of all of these factors in relation to perceptions of creative agency.  My study investigates these issues from the standpoint of a singer, and it provides insights into the singer’s processes around the creation of vocality. It offers a new perspective through a fine-tuned analysis of vocal production, which reconnects perceptions of specific timbres with explicitly defined techniques for their production. Through this dissertation I show how signature vocality works: how it is created and managed by these divas, and how the mediatisation of vocality affects perceptions of their power as performers.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jennifer Wollerman

<p>Maria Callas’s fame as an opera star in the 1950s is still recognised today, and, for many, her name is synonymous with the modern concept of the opera ‘diva’. The increasing diversity of mediatised forms of operatic performances since her time has altered the way audiences engage with the art form. This has implications for singers in terms of values around vocality, authorship and power, and, in particular, the agency of singers in creating the meaningful, affective, and distinctively personal vocal tone that opera calls for. I suggest that for “divas” as defined by twentieth- and twenty-first century global stardom, power is amassed at least in part through particular ways in which they make use of their vocality or vocal timbre, and the way they manage their voices’ presentation in the mediatised versions of their performances.  The recent turn towards a performative focus in musicology encourages the investigation of such aspects of performance. While authorship remains central in the consideration of performance, the contribution of the singer to the authorial and creative process has tended to be ignored, and at times the singer’s work has been regarded as servile to the point of nullification. A critical examination of scholarly writings around operatic performance, with reference to those of diva, voice, and stardom studies, forms the foundation of my study. In case studies of Callas and two later divas, Kiri Te Kanawa and Anna Netrebko, I examine the individual vocality of each singer, their interaction with the forms of mediatisation of their time, their position in the continuum of vocal fashion and influence, and the function of all of these factors in relation to perceptions of creative agency.  My study investigates these issues from the standpoint of a singer, and it provides insights into the singer’s processes around the creation of vocality. It offers a new perspective through a fine-tuned analysis of vocal production, which reconnects perceptions of specific timbres with explicitly defined techniques for their production. Through this dissertation I show how signature vocality works: how it is created and managed by these divas, and how the mediatisation of vocality affects perceptions of their power as performers.</p>


2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilaria Natali

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man presents a non-linear compositional progression, characterised by continual fractures, bifurcations and revisions; the genetic dossier includes pre-compositional notes and works that were never published, such as Epiphanies, A Portrait of the Artist and Stephen Hero. The genetic analysis of this long process of writing, the documentation of which covers a period of around fourteen years, reveals not only how the Portrait was conceived and composed, but also Joyce's evolution as a writer from the very first evidence of his literary activity. This new perspective on Joyce's mode of composition opens the way to a range of potential interpretations of the individual texts, as well as methodological and theoretical insights regarding genetic criticism.


2001 ◽  
Vol 209 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Kleinsorge ◽  
Herbert Heuer ◽  
Volker Schmidtke

Summary. When participants have to shift between four tasks that result from a factorial combination of the task dimensions judgment (numerical vs. spatial) and mapping (compatible vs. incompatible), a characteristic profile of shift costs can be observed that is suggestive of a hierarchical switching mechanism that operates upon a dimensionally ordered task representation, with judgment on the top and the response on the bottom of the task hierarchy ( Kleinsorge & Heuer, 1999 ). This switching mechanism results in unintentional shifts on lower levels of the task hierarchy whenever a shift on a higher level has to be performed, leading to non-shift costs on the lower levels. We investigated whether this profile depends on the way in which the individual task dimensions are cued. When the cues for the task dimensions were exchanged, the basic pattern of shift costs was replicated with only minor modifications. This indicates that the postulated hierarchical switching mechanism operates independently of the specifics of task cueing.


Author(s):  
Fiona Sampson

Today, poetry and art music occupy similar cultural positions: each has a tendency to be regarded as problematic, ‘difficult’, and therefore ‘elitist’. Despite this, the audiences and numbers of participants for each are substantial: yet they tend not to overlap. This is odd, because the forms share early history in song and saga, and have some striking similarities, often summed up in the word ‘lyric’? These similarities include much that is most significant to the experience of each, and so of most interest to practitioners and audiences. They encompass, at the very least: the way each art-form is aural, and takes place in time; a shared reliance on temporal, rather than spatial, forms; an engagement with sensory experience and pleasure; availability for both shared public performance and private reading, sight-reading, and hearing in memory; and scope for non-denotative meaning. In other words, looking at these elements in music is a way to look at them in poetry, and vice versa. This is a study of these two formal craft traditions that is concerned with the similarities in their roles, structures, projects, and capacities.


Author(s):  
Beatrice Marovich

‘The art of free society’, A.N. Whitehead declares in his essay on symbolism, is fundamentally dual. It consists of both ‘maintenance of the symbolic code’ and a ‘fearlessness of [its] revision’. This tension, on the surface paradoxical, is what Whitehead believes will prevent social decay, anarchy, or ‘the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows’. Bearing in mind Whitehead’s own thoughts on the nature of symbolism, this chapter argues that the figure of the creature has been underappreciated in his work as a symbol. It endeavors to examine and contextualize the symbolic potency of creatureliness in Whitehead’s work, with particular attention directed toward the way the creature helps him to both maintain and revise an older symbolic code. In Process and Reality, ‘creature’ serves as Whitehead’s alternate name for the ‘individual fact’ or the ‘actual entity’—including (perhaps scandalously, for his more orthodox readers) the figure of God. What was Whitehead’s strategic motivation for deploying this superfluous title for an already-named category? In this chapter, it is suggested that his motivation was primarily poetic (Whitehead held the British romantic tradition in some reverence) and so, in this sense, always and already aware of its rich symbolic potency.


1970 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-42
Author(s):  
Елена Старовойтенко

Персонологическая интерпретация текстов предполагает реализацию общенаучных, а также специфических для персонологии, герменевтических установок, к которым относятся: установка на интерпретацию текста как исследование, установка на разнообразие герменевтических действий с текстом, установка на выявление неисследованных содержаний текста, установка на творческое постижение тайн текста, установка на целостное отношение к личности и "Я" автора текста, установка на выявление способности автора быть "практикующим феноменологом", установка на определение места изучаемого текста в континууме текстовых репрезентаций "личности", установка на соотнесение своего понимания текста с другими интерпретациями и их интеграцию, установка на раскрытие сущности авторской "идеи личности", возможное только в единстве интерпретаций, установка на построение и применение герменевтической модели, определяющей процедуру интерпретации как исследования и творчества, установка на определение места проделанного герменевтического поиска в культуре познания и жизни личности, установка на интерпретацию различных видов "текстов личности". Personological interpretation of texts suggests the implementation of the general scientific and also hermeneutical settings specific for Personology which include the setting of the interpretation of the text as a research, setting of a variety of hermeneutical actions with the text, setting to identify unexplored contents of the text, setting of the creative comprehension of the mysteries of the text, setting of the integrity of the attitude of the individual and the "I" of the author of the text, setting to reveal the author's ability to be "practicing phenomenologist", setting of the definition of the place in the text in the continuum of textual representations of the "personality", setting in the correlation of the understanding of the text with other interpretations and their integration, setting of the disclosure of the author's "ideas person" is possible only in the unity of interpretation, setting of the construction and usage of hermeneutical models defining the procedure for the interpretation of both studies and work, the setting to determine the place of hermeneutical research in culture and knowledge of a person's life, setting of the interpretation of various types of "texts of the individual."


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46
Author(s):  
Stanislava Varadinova

The attention sustainability and its impact of social status in the class are current issues concerning the field of education are the reasons for delay in assimilating the learning material and early school dropout. Behind both of those problems stand psychological causes such as low attention sustainability, poor communication skills and lack of positive environment. The presented article aims to prove that sustainability of attention directly influences the social status of students in the class, and hence their overall development and the way they feel in the group. Making efforts to increase students’ attention sustainability could lead to an increase in the social status of the student and hence the creation of a favorable and positive environment for the overall development of the individual.


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Luisa Frick

Against the background of the trend of Islamizing human rights on the one hand, as well as increasing skepticism about the compatibility of Islam and human rights on the other, I intend to analyze the potential of Islamic ethics to meet the requirements for vitalizing the idea of human rights. I will argue that the compatibility of Islam and human rights cannot be determined merely on the basis of comparing the specific content of the Islamic moral code(s) with the rights stipulated in the International Bill of Rights, but by scanning (different conceptions of) Islamic ethics for the two indispensable formal prerequisites of any human rights conception: the principle of universalism (i.e., normative equality) and individualism (i.e., the individual enjoyment of rights). In contrast to many contemporary (political) attempts to reconcile Islam and human rights due to urgent (global) societal needs, this contribution is solely committed to philosophical reasoning. Its guiding questions are “What are the conditions for deriving both universalism and individualism from Islamic ethics?” and “What axiological axioms have to be faded out or reorganized hierarchically in return?”


Author(s):  
Hannah Cobb ◽  
Karina Croucher

This book provides a radical rethinking of the relationships between teaching, researching, digging, and practicing as an archaeologist in the twenty-first century. The issues addressed here are global and are applicable wherever archaeology is taught, practiced, and researched. In short, this book is applicable to everyone from academia to cultural resource management (CRM), from heritage professional to undergraduate student. At its heart, it addresses the undervaluation of teaching, demonstrating that this affects the fundamentals of contemporary archaeological practice, and is particularly connected to the lack of diversity in disciplinary demographics. It proposes a solution which is grounded in a theoretical rethinking of our teaching, training, and practice. Drawing upon the insights from archaeology’s current material turn, and particularly Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages, this volume turns the discipline of archaeology into the subject of investigation, considering the relationships between teaching, practice, and research. It offers a new perspective which prompts a rethinking of our expectations and values with regard to teaching, training, and doing archaeology, and ultimately argues that we are all constantly becoming archaeologists.


2013 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 329-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan O. Drinkwater

Roman elegy is well known for its reversal of traditional Roman gender roles: women are presented in positions of power, chiefly but not exclusively erotic, that bear little or no relation to women's lived experience in the first centuryb.c.e. Yet the way elegy presents the beloved in a position of power over her lover, as Sharon James has observed, ‘retains standard Roman social and power structures, thus suggesting an inescapable inequity even within a private love affair: rather than sharing goals and desires, lover and beloved are placed in a gendered opposition … Hence resistant reading by thedominais an anticipated and integral part of the genre’. James's remark is indeed correct for each of the instances in which thedomina, or female beloved, speaks directly. When she does so, as James also shows, she speaks at cross-purposes with her lover, following a script that is designed ‘to destabilize him’ in an attempt to keep his interest. Yet what has not been noticed is that when the beloved is instead male, the situation is quite different. Tibullus' Marathus in poem 1.8, our sole example of a male elegiac beloved-turned-speaker, is the exception that proves the fundamental rule of gender inequity. Marathus, that is, when given the opportunity to speak, does in fact share the aims of a male lover, albeit in pursuit of his ownpuella. When the gendered opposition so integral to elegy is erased, the beloved no longer protests against the strictures of the genre; when both are male, lover and beloved alike are entitled to speak as elegiac lovers.


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