Laurie Anderson's Big Science

Shimmering in maximal minimalism, joyful bleakness, and bodiless intimacy, Laurie Anderson’s Big Science diagnosed crises of meaning, scale, and identity in 1982. Decades later, the challenging and strange questions it poses loom even larger: How do we remain human when our identities are digitally distributed? Does technology bring us closer together or further apart? Can we experience the stillness of “now” when time is always moving? How do experiences become memories? This book attends closely to Anderson’s artistic voice, detailing its unique capacities for ambiguity and revelation. It traces the sonic histories etched in the record’s grooves, from the Cold War to a burning future, from the Manhattan skyline to the empty desert, from the opera house to the pop charts. Ultimately, in Big Science, one can hear an invitation to rise above the dualities of parts and wholes, images and essences, the lone individual and the megasystem. The first and most enduring superstar of performance art, Anderson is recognized here for pioneering philosophically rich techniques within the medium but is also taken seriously as a musician and composer. Packed with scrupulous new research, reception history, careful description, and dizzying creativity, this book is an interdisciplinary love letter to a record whose sounds, politics, and expressions of gendered identity grow more relevant each day.

Ripensare l’opera lirica nell’era di Internet, a ritroso fino a Jules Verne

A cominciare dalla fine del ventesimo secolo, l’emergenza del Web, delle tecnologie digitali e dello streaming ha profondamente influenzato il mondo musicale. In questo articolo, mi concentro sull’impatto di questo processo trasformativo sulla diffusione e sulla ricezione della musica d’opera. Alcune novità della cultura operistica contemporanea includono il servizio Met Live in HD e Met Opera on Demand a New York, il sistema Friday Rush della Royal Opera House di Londra, la Troisième Scène dell’Opéra de Paris, e la rinnovata popolarità mediatica della serata inaugurale del Teatro alla Scala. Si tratterà anche, in una prospettiva storica di più lunga durata, di tracciare le origini culturali del rapporto fra opera e Web e di esplorare il nesso che, fin dall’Ottocento, lega divismo, melomania, nuovi media e tecnologia di registrazione. Lo studio dell’immaginario letterario e fantascientifico è particolarmente proficuo. Per esempio, nel suo romanzo gotico Le Château des Carpathes (1892), Jules Verne descrive la melomania del barone Rodolphe de Gortz: in un lugubre castello della Transilvania, il barone riporta in vita sotto forma di ologramma la diva italiana La Stilla attraverso proiezioni visive e registrazioni fonografiche.

Beyond the libretto

Nowadays both intra- and interlingual surtitles are an inherent element of almost all opera produc­tions and, partly thanks to this technology, opera is now going through a renaissance. The trend of staging operas in a modernised fashion is especially popular these days, but it represents a particu­lar challenge for surtitlers. It is argued in this article that while surtitles accompanying traditional opera productions are usually intrasemiotic, as their source text is just the libretto, modernised productions often have intersemiotic surtitles. The article analyses fragments of surtitles prepared for four different operas staged in the Metropolitan Opera House, Bayerische Staatsoper and Royal Opera House. The result show that while traditionally surtitles provide the viewers with the mean­ing of the libretto, the role of intersemiotic surtitles is much more extended, as they provide the audience with more comprehensive information about the whole opera production.

A Night at the (Imaginary) Opera: The Visual Dimension in Hector Berlioz's Lelio, Romeo et Juliette and La Damnation de Faust

<p>In keeping with the spirit of Romanticism, Hector Berlioz has always been something of a rogue figure. Works like Lelio, Romeo et Juliette and La damnation de Faust, which Daniel Albright refers to as 'semi-operas', occupy an uncomfortable place within the concert hall. The intersections between song, symphony, opera and the spoken word that form these works immediately pose questions concerning musical unity, narrative interpretation, issues of genre, and performance style. While the musical and literary aspects of the three compositions have been the subject of scholarly attention, this study turns its gaze onto the various visual dimensions that are present within Lelio, Romeo et Juliette and La damnation de Faust. By emphasising the presence of spectacle in Berlioz's compositions, questions soon arise concerning the implications of these visual elements for performance. Berlioz's relatively early work, Lelio, illustrates the extent to which the composer is already concerned with how the visual suppression of performing bodies can create and change narrative meanings. Romeo et Juliette raises the curtains that hide Lelio's musical forces. Rather than simply distilling Shakespeare's drama into music, Berlioz relies instead on a visual memory of Romeo and Juliet to replace the absence of physical characters within his 'symphonie dramatique', thus creating an aural rendition of a past theatrical event. Through an exploration of the spectacle within Lelio and Romeo et Juliette, we see how Berlioz has constructed a visually detailed imaginary theatre that resides within the score. An understanding of this imaginary theatre is integral in the subsequent analysis of Berlioz's controversial and wonderfully diabolical La damnation de Faust. This work is performed as often in the opera house as it is in the concert hall. However, an in-depth analysis of the libretto and score reveals curious and occasionally contradictory visual implications. The impact that these contradictions have on the visual dimension in the performance of La damnation de Faust will be explored through a reading of two ground-breaking productions: Raoul Gunsbourg's La damnation de Faust from 1893 - the first production to treat Berlioz's score as an opera; and Robert Lepage's mixed-media production of La damnation. The work of these two directors serves to highlight, perhaps inadvertently, the problematic effects of Berlioz's imaginary theatre on the necessarily more concrete realisations of La damnation when confined within the opera house. However, the cinematic approach of Lepage suggests another avenue of performance that has the potential to reveal new dimensions of Berlioz's unique dramatic-symphonic works. Ultimately, it may be that the supreme technicolour nature of Berlioz's music always functions to transport us beyond our own mundane experiences and forever challenges us to seek something beyond the limits of the possible, however much those limits might change.</p>

A Night at the (Imaginary) Opera: The Visual Dimension in Hector Berlioz's Lelio, Romeo et Juliette and La Damnation de Faust

<p>In keeping with the spirit of Romanticism, Hector Berlioz has always been something of a rogue figure. Works like Lelio, Romeo et Juliette and La damnation de Faust, which Daniel Albright refers to as 'semi-operas', occupy an uncomfortable place within the concert hall. The intersections between song, symphony, opera and the spoken word that form these works immediately pose questions concerning musical unity, narrative interpretation, issues of genre, and performance style. While the musical and literary aspects of the three compositions have been the subject of scholarly attention, this study turns its gaze onto the various visual dimensions that are present within Lelio, Romeo et Juliette and La damnation de Faust. By emphasising the presence of spectacle in Berlioz's compositions, questions soon arise concerning the implications of these visual elements for performance. Berlioz's relatively early work, Lelio, illustrates the extent to which the composer is already concerned with how the visual suppression of performing bodies can create and change narrative meanings. Romeo et Juliette raises the curtains that hide Lelio's musical forces. Rather than simply distilling Shakespeare's drama into music, Berlioz relies instead on a visual memory of Romeo and Juliet to replace the absence of physical characters within his 'symphonie dramatique', thus creating an aural rendition of a past theatrical event. Through an exploration of the spectacle within Lelio and Romeo et Juliette, we see how Berlioz has constructed a visually detailed imaginary theatre that resides within the score. An understanding of this imaginary theatre is integral in the subsequent analysis of Berlioz's controversial and wonderfully diabolical La damnation de Faust. This work is performed as often in the opera house as it is in the concert hall. However, an in-depth analysis of the libretto and score reveals curious and occasionally contradictory visual implications. The impact that these contradictions have on the visual dimension in the performance of La damnation de Faust will be explored through a reading of two ground-breaking productions: Raoul Gunsbourg's La damnation de Faust from 1893 - the first production to treat Berlioz's score as an opera; and Robert Lepage's mixed-media production of La damnation. The work of these two directors serves to highlight, perhaps inadvertently, the problematic effects of Berlioz's imaginary theatre on the necessarily more concrete realisations of La damnation when confined within the opera house. However, the cinematic approach of Lepage suggests another avenue of performance that has the potential to reveal new dimensions of Berlioz's unique dramatic-symphonic works. Ultimately, it may be that the supreme technicolour nature of Berlioz's music always functions to transport us beyond our own mundane experiences and forever challenges us to seek something beyond the limits of the possible, however much those limits might change.</p>

Opera and the Built Environment

In June 2020 one more video was released into the all-accommodating cloud. This one shows a concert addressed to 2,292 plants, one in each seat of a red velvet-lined auditorium at the Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. These hand-selected plants are the leafy audience at a performance of Puccini's ‘Crisantemi’ string quartet, conducted in honour of healthcare workers amid lockdown measures to slow the spread of COVID-19. Once the usual announcements about silencing cell phones have been made, the camera closes in on four musicians as each bows to the verdant audience and takes a seat. When the music starts, our view advances from behind the musicians into the opera house: the camera scans the initial rows of the orchestra stalls, then moves into the boxes and balconies. In each successive section of the theatre we see the avatars chosen to listen in place of us. Our representatives are docile and beatific – Puccini seems to soothe them. For a moment the wondrous intrusion of the outside world indoors even starts to seem natural, as if the auditorium can hold the whole world within it, as if there is no outside to this windowless world.