Professor Joy Calico of Vanderbilt University presents theories around the role of amplified breath and whispering in recent operas in her talk, "Spatial Dramaturgy in Recent Opera.”
Note: This talk will be live-streamed.
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Synopsis
A response to Ryan Ebright’s clarion call for opera scholars to take up sound design as an essential element of the creation and production of contemporary opera. In this paper I adapt Luigi Nono’s concept of spatial dramaturgy, which is the mobility, directionality, and diffusion of amplified sound in the service of storytelling, to theorize the role of amplified breath and whispering in recent operas by Chaya Czernowin and others.
Biography
Joy H. Calico is University Distinguished Professor of Musicology and German Studies and Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Music at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of two monographs, Brecht at the Opera (2008) and Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’ in Postwar Europe (2014), and is working on a book about scene types as an analytical tool for contemporary opera. Recent publications include work on Joan La Barbara, Kaija Saariaho, and Olga Neuwirth, as well as the pedagogical uses of music encoding and digital mapping. A former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, she is a current member of the advisory board of The Nashville Opera and the working team of the Black Opera Research Network (BORN).