A Symposium Organised by the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre at the University of Sussex
David Osmond Smith Room, Falmer House 120, University of Sussex, 8 June 2011
Historically, the musical and dramatic structures of operas have reflected wider cultural conceptions of temporality. During the 1600s and 1700s, time was understood to be cyclical – naturally recurring cycles such as the phases of the moon and the seasons of the year governed human life. In the mid-1700s a more linear view of time emerged, each irreplaceable moment was seen as progressing toward a future goal. The musical and dramatic structures of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century operas mirror this cultural shift. Handel's da capo form requires that the first section of an aria circle back and repeat after a short contrasting stanza, thus conveying the eternal nature of certain human emotions and a cyclical view of time. As musicologists Karol Berger and Scott Balthazar have shown, musical and poetic forms in Mozart's and Verdi's works become more linear in nature. By the late 1800s many operas focus on a series of causal events and a single strand of time.
Several recent operas appear to draw on twenty-and twenty-first century conceptions of time, specifically Einstein's space-time theories that the past, present, and future are in constant interplay. Philip Glass' Satyagraha (1980), John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), and Daren Hagen's Amelia (May 2010), for instance, depict multiple layers of time simultaneously or cross-cut between them. Is time fractured, integrated, or stratified in these works? Does the music meld these levels of time together or hold them apart? Or does it operate within its own temporal parameters? Or do these works present a new conception of time at all?
Programme
- 10.00 Coffee and Registration
- 10.30 Laurel Zeiss: Time, realism and convention in recent opera: introduction to the symposium.
- 11.00-12.30 First Session
Jonathan Cross: "I remember": representations of time and temporality in Birtwistle's The Mask of Orpheus.
Pavel Jiracek: Among the Living Dead: Luigi Nono's azione scenica Al gran sole carico d'amore (1975) and its angels of history.
- 12.30-13.30 Lunch
- 13.30-15.30 Second Session
Pwyll ap Sion: Plot as process in the Postminimalist Operas of Glass, Ashley and Nyman.
Tristian Evans: Post-minimal unfoldings? Temporality and (anti-) -narrativity in film music and opera.
Orlando Gough (Composer)
- 15.30-16.00 Tea
- 16.00-17.30 Third Session
Jelena Novak: Writing to Vermeer: Singing Letters and Opera after Drama.
Paula Gomes Ribeiro: Restaging the cultural memory of the present: operatic dramaturgyin the light of media culture from Nixon to Jackie O.
- 18.00 Close
Registration
Symposium Fee: £40 (including lunch and refreshments); £20 students (including lunch and refreshments)
Registration deadline: 31st May 2011.
To register contact Nick Till (symposium organiser): n.till@sussex.ac.uk