A Note from the Guest Editor

The following contributions are cited separately in RILM: John T. HAMILTON, Così fan tutti i compositori: The Cephalus-Procris myth and the birth of romantic opera in Hoffmann's Aurora (RILM 2013-12919); Julia RANDEL, Un-voicing Orpheus: The powers of music in Stravinsky and Balanchine's 'Greek' ballets (RILM 2013-12920)

Erik Satie’s Socrate (1918), Myths of Marsyas, and un style dépouillé

In arguing that underneath the placid, 'stripped-down' style of Socrate there lurks a hidden violence, this essay does not focus on Satie's compositional process, documented in his notebooks; instead, it examines Socrate's performance history and the creation of the work's libretto, which the composer completed before sketching his musical ideas. Satie's novel selection and setting of the text is critical to this reading. The author examines how Satie reinterprets the violent myth of Marsyas and Apollo in the first movement, and how he ruminates on Socrates's dying words in the last movement. Understanding the ideas and events that led to the creation of Satie's enigmatic masterpiece allows us to view Socrate's portrayal of Plato's dialogues as part of a project of dépouillement, a neoclassical aesthetic that sought to strip down musical material in favor of an ascetic aesthetic uniting musical and moral Hellenism. This reading of Socrate allows us to reexamine the early 20th-century style dépouillé and to place Socrate at the center of debates on Socrates, Hellenism, and morality

Atossa’s Dream Yoking Music and Dance, Antiquity and Modernity in Maurice Emmanuel’s Salamine (1929)

This essay explores the conflicting trends of tradition and modernism, unity and independence in Parisian musical and dance culture in the late 1920s through an analysis of Maurice Emmanuel’s (1863-1938) aesthetics of contemporary and ancient Greek music and dance. It begins by outlining and critiquing Emmanuel’s relevant scholarly contributions to ancient Greek dance history and music history before demonstrating how these tensions manifested in the 1929 production of Emmanuel’s opera Salamine based on Aeschylus’s The Persians. Exploring Emmanuel’s aesthetics of music and dance (ancient and modern) affords a unique opportunity to see how these creative media were theorized and practiced in the tumultuous years after the Ballets russes, while illustrating some of the conflicts between what Léandre Vaillat termed “the academic and the eurhythmic” in dance and music

Ballets Suédois (1920–25)

Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois was active from 1920 to 1925. It was the chief artistic rival to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and de Maré was often referred to as the Swedish Serge Diaghilev. With Jean Börlin as chief choreographer, the company created twenty-four ballets in collaboration with prominent modern artists and composers, including Fernand Léger, Giorgio de Chirico, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, and Cole Porter. When first launched, the troupe performed ballets in a style similar to the Ballets Russes, but de Maré’s interest in the visual arts and the vibrancy of modern, contemporary life resulted in a greater emphasis on abstraction and popular idioms in both the design and choreography of Ballets Suédois productions

Eva Palmer-Sikelianos Dances Aeschylus: The Politics of Historical Reenactment when Staging the Rites of the Past

Eva Palmer-Sikelianos (1874–1952), along with her husband, the poet Angehlos Sikelianos, founded the first modern Delphic Festival in 1927 in an effort to revive the Ancient Greek rites that took place on that spot over 2,500 years before. She invited “overseers of culture” from around the globe to convene in the holy city of Delphi for a reenactment of the performance of Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus in the ancient amphitheater, an Olympic-styled athletic contest, and an exhibition of Greek crafts. This paper explores Palmer-Sikelianos’s choreography, music and dramaturgy for her reconstructed Prometheus Bound in light of her own research on ancient Greek culture and our modern theories of historical reenactment. Based on silent film records of Palmer-Sikelianos’s 1930 festival, her own autobiography, her collaborations with Natalie Barney on Greek-themed theatricals in the early 1900s, and comparisons to the movement vocabulary and other contemporary stagings of ancient Greek festivals and sport, I demonstrate how Palmer- Sikelianos blended the oldest sources on ancient Greek ritual music and dance that she could find with what she saw as an authentic “spirit” of Greek culture as observed in modern Greek society. Compared to the Ballets Russes’s reenactment of ancient Greece, Palmer-Sikelianos’s project to reenact “authentic” Greek theater and choreography illustrates that theories of theatrical historical reconstruction in the early twentieth century were heavily influenced by contemporary theatrical, political, and social events. And like the Fokine and Nijinsky models, Palmer-Sikelianos’s staging redefines ancient dance through the prisms of ancient sources and modern aesthetics

Seeing Sappho in Paris: Operatic and Choreographic Adaptations of Sapphic Lives and Myths

Sappho’s oeuvre exists in tantalizing fragments providing fodder for generations of interpreters to reimagine her life and poetry in myriad ways. The paper looks at three Parisian fantasies of Sappho: Charles Gounod’s first opera Sapho (1851 and 1884), Charles Cuvillier’s operetta Sapphô (1912), and the Sapphic music and dramatic activities held in the garden of Natalie Clifford Barney (ca. 1900). For each of these productions, musical scores provide scant information as to how the authors and performers imagined the myths and lives of Sappho; iconographic sources, however, open doors to new readings, illustrating how these pieces appropriated past Sapphic fictions to create nuanced and often satirical productions. Gounod’s opera reveals the transformation of Sappho’s image from mid-19th c. Hellenism to fin-de-siècle debauchery, as evidenced by differences in costume and set design between the 1851 premiere and the 1884 revival. In addition to expanded roles for the courtesan, the simple classicism of the original production is replaced with a decidedly more decadent décor. In Cuvillier’s operetta, photos published in the journal Le théâtre provide enough evidence to recreate plot, as well as decipher satirical elements that poke fun at the battle between Cyprian and Hellenic mores despite the lack of a score and libretto for the work. Finally, photographic and anecdotal evidence of Natalie Barney’s queer Sapphic theatrics illustrate the dialectical understanding of early 20th-c. Sappho as emblematic of the refined Hellenism of the mid-19th c. and the decadent Orientalism of fin-de-siècle erotic Sapphic fantasies. In all three phenomena visual culture played a privileged role in the reception of musical representations of Sappho histories and fantasies

Ancient Mesopotamian Music, the Politics of Reconstruction, and Extreme Early Music

I write this piece primarily as a musicologist and amateur early music practitioner (viola da gamba player) who tries to understand the ways twentieth- and twenty-first century musicians and scholars have imagined and performed ancient music and dance. This essay emerged from my book project Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890-1935 and brings my training as a historical musicologist and dance historian to bear on issues typically of concern to archaeologists, classicists, and linguists. While working on that book, I kept running across a number of individuals working now who are deeply engaged in the same kinds of reconstruction and performance projects like the ones I discuss. This essay serves as the first step toward a “sequel” so to speak to my previous book. I started by interviewing a number of these practitioners of extreme early music (music from before 800 CE), including performers, instrument builders, and scholars in classics and archaeology. Their generosity of time and willingness to share inform my gentle treatment of their work. I am not here to serve as judge and jury to determine if their interpretations, recreations, restorations, or composition are authentic, and I hope that readers don’t get too caught up in these questions either. Instead, I hope readers use the politics and performance of extreme early music to interrogate the ways we perform multiple pasts today.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/books/1077/thumbnail.jp

Can Process Theory Constrain Courts?

The political process theory introduced by the Carolene Products footnote and developed through subsequent scholarship has shaped much of the modern constitutional landscape. Process theory posits that courts may justifiably intervene in the political arena when institutional obstacles impede corrective action by political actors themselves. Judged by this standard, the United States Supreme Court\u27s decision in Bush v. Gore was a failure, because the majority could not explain why its interference was necessary. More broadly, Bush v. Gore points to a central deficiency in process theory: it relies upon the Justices to guard against their own overreaching, but does not prescribe correctives to such overreaching when it occurs. This Essay argues that the legislative and executive branch cannot check judicial overreaching without threatening judicial independence. The authors suggest that principled criticism of judicial decisions by members of the legal academy can play a checking function but that much of the academic criticism of Bush v. Gore - especially those broadsides that accuse the majority Justices of subjective bad faith - will not be productive in that way. The authors then offer criteria for principled criticism

Can Process Theory Constrain Courts?

The political process theory introduced by the Carolene Products footnote and developed through subsequent scholarship has shaped much of the modern constitutional landscape. Process theory posits that courts may justifiably intervene in the political arena when institutional obstacles impede corrective action by political actors themselves. Judged by this standard, the United States Supreme Court\u27s decision in Bush v. Gore was a failure, because the majority could not explain why its interference was necessary. More broadly, Bush v. Gore points to a central deficiency in process theory: it relies upon the Justices to guard against their own overreaching, but does not prescribe correctives to such overreaching when it occurs. This Essay argues that the legislative and executive branch cannot check judicial overreaching without threatening judicial independence. The authors suggest that principled criticism of judicial decisions by members of the legal academy can play a checking function but that much of the academic criticism of Bush v. Gore - especially those broadsides that accuse the majority Justices of subjective bad faith - will not be productive in that way. The authors then offer criteria for principled criticism

"How to Talk about Opera at a Time of Crisis"

Musicologist and dance historian Samuel N. Dorf reflects on the role or purpose of the pre-performance lecture, especially at a time when tragedy extends outside the theatre into the local community