Between Realism and Re-enactment: Navigating Dramatic and Musical 'Problems' in Voyage to the Moon

How do practitioners understand the relationship between performance, history and emotion in Western art music? Based on an ethnographic study of a contemporary pasticcio opera, we take the rehearsal room as an important, yet often overlooked, site in which creative artists imagine and perform different relationships with their musical and cultural heritage. Focussing on the interplay between two performative modes, which we call realism and re-enactment, we describe how the creative team navigated various dramatic and musical challenges associated with the opera, generating a final production that was ambiguous and multi-layered in its emotional registers and attitudes towards the past

Crowded Voice: Speech, Music and Community in Milan, 1955-1974

This thesis explores the relationship of voice, language, and politics in Italian musical history. I do this through a double geographical and chronological lens: first, the city of Milan, a powerful political and cultural interface between Italy and Central Europe; secondly, the years 1955-1974, key decades in the constitution of Italy’s first democratic government and years of vertiginous anthropological changes across the peninsula.Across the four chapters of my thesis, I sketch a heterogeneous and thickly populated network of musical activities—ranging from high-modernist tape music to opera, neofolk records, to pop hits. I argue the musical production for voice of this time expresses long-standing anxieties about speech and communication through the recurring use of nonsense languages, distorted recorded speech, and para-linguistic phenomena such as laughter as musical materials. The root of these anxieties lies in a version of Italy’s fivecentury-old language question—the question of Italy’s absent common tongue—and at the same time, a European Enlightenment tradition that sets Italy as the southern land of the beautiful voice, and yet also ineffective policies and underdeveloped language faculties. What is at stake in the musical and vocal production of 1950s and 1970s Milan, then, is a potential philosophy of the voice as neither aesthetic excess nor as carrier of language, but as an unresolved multiplicity of articulations, languages, and political subjectivities

Perception of Words and Pitch Patterns in Song and Speech

This functional magnetic resonance imaging study examines shared and distinct cortical areas involved in the auditory perception of song and speech at the level of their underlying constituents: words and pitch patterns. Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed to isolate the neural correlates of the word- and pitch-based discrimination between song and speech, corrected for rhythmic differences in both. Therefore, six conditions, arranged in a subtractive hierarchy were created: sung sentences including words, pitch and rhythm; hummed speech prosody and song melody containing only pitch patterns and rhythm; and as a control the pure musical or speech rhythm. Systematic contrasts between these balanced conditions following their hierarchical organization showed a great overlap between song and speech at all levels in the bilateral temporal lobe, but suggested a differential role of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and intraparietal sulcus (IPS) in processing song and speech. While the left IFG coded for spoken words and showed predominance over the right IFG in prosodic pitch processing, an opposite lateralization was found for pitch in song. The IPS showed sensitivity to discrete pitch relations in song as opposed to the gliding pitch in speech. Finally, the superior temporal gyrus and premotor cortex coded for general differences between words and pitch patterns, irrespective of whether they were sung or spoken. Thus, song and speech share many features which are reflected in a fundamental similarity of brain areas involved in their perception. However, fine-grained acoustic differences on word and pitch level are reflected in the IPS and the lateralized activity of the IFG

Cyber-Narrative in Opera: Three Case Studies

This dissertation looks at three newly composed operas that feature what I call cyber-narratives: a work in which the story itself is inextricably linked with digital technologies, such that the characters utilize, interact with, or are affected by digital technologies to such a pervasive extent that the impact of said technologies is thematized within the work. Through an analysis of chat rooms and real-time text communication in Nico Muhly’s Two Boys (2011), artificial intelligence in Søren Nils Eichberg’s Glare (2014), and mind uploading and digital immortality in Tod Machover’s Death and the Powers (2010), a nexus of ideologies surrounding voice, the body, gender, digital anthropology, and cyber-culture are revealed. I consider the interpretive possibilities that emerge when analyzing voice and musical elements in conjunction with cultural references within the libretti, visual design choices in the productions, and directorial decisions in the evolution of each work. I theorize the expressive power of the operatic medium in dramatizing and personifying new forms of technology, while simultaneously exposing how these technologically oriented narratives reinforce and rely upon operatic tropes of the past. Recurring themes of misogyny and objectification of women across all three works are addressed, as is the framing of digital technology as a mechanism of dehumanization. This analysis also focuses on the unique sung and embodied aspect of opera, and how the human voice shapes concepts of identity, agency, and individuality in the digital age. All three case studies demonstrate how opera gives the cyber-narrative every possible mode of expression to explore the complexities and anxieties of human-machine relationships in the digital era, as all three operas question how the thematized technologies may come to re-define our perception and experience of humanity itself

Vocal Writing for Solo Soprano Voices in Oratorios by Antonio Salieri

Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) was a well-respected composer who served the Hapsburg court in Vienna as Hofkapellmeister for thirty-six years, from 1788-1824; his students included such luminaries as Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), Franz Schubert (1797-1828), Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837), and Maria Theresia Paradis (1759-1824). Today, he is remembered mostly for his operas, and for his rivalry and friendship with Mozart. Salieris oratorios have received less attention from scholars than his other works. This study is an analysis of three roles for soprano voice in Salieris oratorios: Maddalena in La Passione di Ges Cristo (1776), and Eva and La Fede in Ges al Limbo (1803). Vocal range, tessitura, orchestration, duration, and technical demands of each role are considered. Vocal profiles and temperaments of the singers for whom Salieri wrote the parts, including Catarina Cavalieri (1755-1801) and the Empress Maria Theresa (1772-1807) are described. The musical analysis is contextualized with information about the circumstances of each composition and the theological and cultural beliefs about the figures portrayed in these oratorios

Revisiting Claudine: Schubert’s GoetheSingspiel

The consistently natural and lively prose dialogue of Claudine von Villa Bella is one of the Singspiel’s many attractions Thematically, scenically, and atmospherically rich and varied, lyrical, humorous, and with a lucid plot that produces one coup de théâtre after another and the most complex stage action in any of Gothe’s plays and with musical settings by Seckendorff, Reichardt and Schubert to choose from, it deserves to be better known and more performed than it is

Revisiting Claudine: Schubert’s GoetheSingspiel

The consistently natural and lively prose dialogue of Claudine von Villa Bella is one of the Singspiel’s many attractions Thematically, scenically, and atmospherically rich and varied, lyrical, humorous, and with a lucid plot that produces one coup de théâtre after another and the most complex stage action in any of Gothe’s plays and with musical settings by Seckendorff, Reichardt and Schubert to choose from, it deserves to be better known and more performed than it is

fMRI-Compatible Registration of Jaw Movements Using a Fiber-Optic Bend Sensor

A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-compatible fiber-optic bend sensor was investigated to assess whether the device could be used effectively to monitor opening and closing of the jaw during an fMRI experiment at 3 T. In contrast to surface electromyography, a bend sensor fixed to the chin of the participant is fast and easy to use and is not affected by strong electromagnetic fields. Bend sensor recordings are characterized by high validity (compared with concurrent video recordings of mouth opening) and high reliability (comparing two independent measurements). The results of this study indicate that a bend sensor is able to record the opening and closing of the jaw associated with different overt speech conditions (producing the utterances /a/, /pa/, /pataka/) and the opening of the mouth without speech production. Data post-processing such as filtering was not necessary. There are several potential applications for bend sensor recordings of speech-related jaw movements. First, bend sensor recordings are a valuable tool to assess behavioral performance, such as response latencies, accuracies, and completion times, which is particularly important in children, seniors, or patients with various neurological or psychiatric conditions. Second, the timing information provided by bend sensor data may improve the predicted hemodynamic response that is used for fMRI analysis based on the general linear model (GLM). Third, bend sensor recordings may be included in GLM analyses not for statistical contrast purposes, but as a covariate of no interest, accounting for part of the data variance to model fMRI artifacts due to motion outside the field of view