Composition and performance history

1991 ◽  
pp. 25-46
Author(s):  
Katherine R. Larson

Although music was integral to masques, the genre’s visual extravagance tends to overshadow its acoustic elements in scholarly and classroom discussions. This chapter focuses on “Sweet Echo,” the Lady’s song in Milton’s A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus), which was performed in 1634 by 15-year-old Alice Egerton. The unusual level of detail that survives about this masque’s performance history, combined with the musical settings extant in Henry Lawes’s autograph manuscript, now held at the British Library, facilitates a suggestive evaluation of early modern song in terms of the rhetorical interplay between lyric, musical setting, and performance context. It also constitutes a striking case study for considering the acoustic impact of women’s singing voices. Milton’s depiction of temptation and self-discipline in Comus, whose moral message is encapsulated in miniature in the Lady’s performance of “Sweet Echo,” hinges on his audience’s experience of song as an acoustic, embodied, and gendered phenomenon.


2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 777-820 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden

Abstract This article examines Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem: Three Pictures of Chassidic Life, considering its score, its performance history, and early recordings of the second movement, “Nigun,” by Yehudi Menuhin, Joseph Szigeti, and Mischa Elman, to investigate the idea, promoted by the composer and many of his performers and critics, that the music represented Jewish identity through the evocation of Hasidic song. Bloch's score and Menuhin's performances were described as expressing what was often characterized during the early twentieth century as a self-affirming racial feeling that linked the modern diaspora in America to Eastern European Hasidic Jewish communities. With Baal Shem, Bloch and his performers and listeners participated in a self-conscious effort to construct a modern Jewish identity that they believed could be conveyed in the sounds and structures of art music. Menuhin's lifelong friendship and collaboration with Bloch underscores the crucial roles of Bloch's performers in working with the composer to devise compositional and performance tropes for the representation of Hasidic song, and in creating his broad reputation as a composer of a definitive Jewish music, a reputation Bloch would sometimes embrace and at other times disavow.


Author(s):  
Veronika Ryjik

This chapter surveys the history of Russian translations of Golden Age Spanish theatre from the early 18th century until now, with a special focus on the relationship between translation trends and performance history. Our main goal is not only to document all known Russian translations of Spanish classical plays completed in the past 300 years, but also to elucidate the processes by which translation took part in the development and transformation of a specifically Russian comedia canon.


Author(s):  
Penny Farfan

Focusing on some of the best-known stage plays and dance performances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates that queer performance was integral to and productive of modernism, while also suggesting that queer modernist performance played a key role in the historical emergence of modern sexual identities and that it anticipated, and was in a sense foundational to, the insights of contemporary queer modernist studies. Chapters on Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Loie Fuller’s Fire Dance, Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun, Noël Coward’s Private Lives, and Djuna Barnes’s metatheatrical parodies To the Dogs and The Dove explore manifestations, facets, and dimensions of and suggest ways of reading—and of viewing earlier “readers” reading—queer modernist performance. Together, these case studies clarify aspects of both the queer and the modernist and how their coproductive intersection was articulated in and through performance. The book contributes to an expanded understanding of modernism across a range of performance genres, the central role of performance within modernism more generally, and the integral relationship between performance history and the history of sexuality. In doing so, it adds to the ongoing transformation of the field of modernist studies, in which drama and performance remain underrepresented. It also contributes to revisionist historiographies that approach modernist performance through feminist and queer critical perspectives and interdisciplinary frameworks and that consider how formally innovative and more conventional works collectively engaged with modernity, at once reflecting and contributing to historical change in the domains of gender and sexuality.


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