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Classical music and Ventriloquist Dance:
Publication . Novak, Jelena; Centro de Estudos em Música (CESEM - NOVA FCSH)
The film RHYTHM IS IT! (2004) by Thomas Grube and Enrique Sánchez that records the educational project of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Simon Rattle follows the process in which 250 youngsters, previously strangers to classical music, danced to Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. Observing the Berlin Philharmonic during a rehearsal of Le Sacre in 2003 (documented in Rhythm is it), French dancer and choreographer Xavier Le Roy decided to work on Stravinsky's classic from an interest in the movements of conducting. Having no musical training, Le Roy ventured into a laborious process of studying a conductor's interpretation as if it were choreography of its own. As he states: “an inversion of cause and function unfolds: the gestures and the movements that are meant to prompt musicians to play appear at the same time to be produced by the music they are supposed to produce”. Le Roy’s Le Sacre du Printemps (2007) (performed in 2009 in Teatro Maria Matos in Lisbon) provokes questions about the relationship of movement, image and sound. In this paper I will investigate ventriloquial dimensions of those relations, and my focus will be in discussing if, how and why those relations problematize the status and function of “classical music” in relation to contemporary dance.
Shaggy-Dog Minimalism in Operas by Tom Johnson
Publication . Novak, Jelena; Centro de Estudos em Música (CESEM - NOVA FCSH)
Back in 1978 American composer and music critic Tom Johnson created five ‘shaggy-dog operas’: Drawers, Dryer, Door, Window and Box. “I had always loved the Americans tradition known as ‘shaggy dog stories,’ those repetitive stories that take a very long time to tell until they finally end with some dumb punch line, usually a simple word play or an ironic remark, so my next operatic attempt, in 1978, went in that direction. The result was five chamber operas, about 15 minutes each, which I staged myself in a small loft space in Lower Manhattan.” (from The Four Note Opera, 32 Years Later by Tom Johnson). In Drawers, a solo soprano searches for her thimble; in Dryer, a fisherman catches fish and hangs them on the clothes line to dry; in Door, two women sing “yawn” a lot, and wonder whether they should answer the door; and in Window, two men strive to clean a dirty window. (Box was later abandoned and destroyed). In his article “Minimalism in Music: In Search of a Definition” Johnson among other things writes about how back in 1972 he didn’t fully realized that his Four Note Opera written that very same year “was also a form of minimal music”. I will discuss status and function of minimalism in early Johnson’s operas and through that prism I will illuminate the relationship between opera and minimalism in larger context.
Singing, Ventriloquism and the Body
Publication . Novak, Jelena; Centro de Estudos em Música (CESEM - NOVA FCSH)
In certain cases of postdramatic recent opera, or postopera, there are numerous ventriloquism-like desynchronizations between what we see and what we hear at the same time while action of singing is taking place. Those desynchronizations are related to breaking of silent conventions in relation to the singing body and the voice it produces. In opera studies, those issues of ‘ventriloquism’ are for a long time being taken as ‘blind spots’. Illuminating those fluent non-semantic relationships, ‘liminal utterances’ between the singing bodies and sung voices, and discussing their statuses and effects bring to light intriguing findings in relation to what contemporary opera is, and how it ‘talks’ about itself and the world that surrounds it. Those issues will be discussed in relation to recent pieces of some of the most important contemporary opera authors: Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, John Adams, Michel van der Aa, Laurie Anderson and others.
Opera on the Horizon of Postminimalism
Publication . Novak, Jelena; Centro de Estudos em Música (CESEM - NOVA FCSH)
In his essay “A Forest from the Seeds of Minimalism”, Kyle Gann discusses developments of postminimal techniques in various musical poetics that came after the era of strict minimalist procedures. Similarly to Gann, my aim is to consider ‘what came after’ minimalist music, although my discussions extends also to the visual arts. I will zoom in on what is happening to postminimalism in recent opera productions that further redefine the world of opera. This includes works by less central figures than those whose works had a major impact on postminimalist operatic aesthetics, such as Glass, Andriessen, Reich and Adams. Some of the postoperas I would like to discuss are: operatic installations by Marguerite Humeau, Claudia Molitor, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller; ‘television operas after TV’ where opera and television reinvent each other (minute operas by Michel van der Aa and the reality opera The News by Jacob ter Veldhuis (Jacob TV), Invisible Cities an opera for headphones by Yuval Sharon and Christopher Cerrone, and the opera Two Boys by Nico Muhly. The status of postminimalism in each of these works will be examined in order to see how and why its functions in opera change.
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Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
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SFRH
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SFRH/BPD/90244/2012