- 160 views
- 541 downloads
Emergent Media and Opera Circulation in Twentieth-Century North America
-
- Author / Creator
- Wells, Brianna L.
-
In North America, opera constitutes both an art form and an industry. Because companies rely on philanthropy and ticket revenues, they respond to a mass audience among the public at large, and yet granting agencies’ and critics’ influence suggests restricted circulation and in some ways a “high” culture status. Opera’s multifaceted performance practices and its contradictory social roles in North America are reflected in the diverse disciplines currently engaging in its study. Critical musicology has, since the early 1990s, increasingly studied operatic texts through theoretical lenses of post-structuralism (Levin, Kramer) feminism (McClary), psychoanalysis (Abbate) and musical dramaturgy (Bianconi). More recently, issues of prominence include digital contexts of performance and composition (Morris, Michaels) and indigeneity (Karantonis, Robinson). Literary scholars have examined issues of adaptation and intertextuality (Lindenberger, Hutcheon, Wiesenthal). Historians have investigated the business of opera (Preston, Dizikes), and social science approaches, especially those related to Bourdieu’s formative study Distinction, focus on the relationships between the art form and its audiences (Calhoun, Benzecry, Johnson). As a richly multidisciplinary field, opera studies follows, in general, two trends. The first treats the opera score or performance context as its object of study, and the second focuses on political or social circumstances of opera production in specific historical periods or geographic locations. This study investigates the boundaries between these approaches. It takes as its primary archive the circulation of opera in North America in the twentieth century: within live performance, mediated through recording and broadcasting, and adapted into popular contexts far removed from the opera house. It posits contemporary opera circulation as a site of aesthetic and social negotiation in North America, traceable through the intertwined histories of opera and emergent media in the twentieth century. Using methods of media genealogy (Gitelman, Parikka), circulation (Warner, Povinelli and Gaonkar) and cultural theory (Williams, Appadurai) this study proposes the concept of “operascape” to account for the circulation of specific opera texts, and the impacts of that circulation on the broader public culture of North America. Treating opera as multi-form media frames its musical, dramatic and performance facets in the context of the related, reified social activities that have developed over time. These “protocols” include publics’ investments in celebrity culture, the primacy of the voice, attentiveness, and negotiations around expertise; they are archived in the early histories of mass media throughout the twentieth century. As industries of recording and broadcasting emerged in North America, they relied upon opera in a number of ways to make their new media desirable for potential consumers. This long-standing media-opera relationship impacts repertoire decisions, casting, and communications practices in the opera industry today. It also resonates throughout contemporary cultural production beyond opera.
-
- Graduation date
- Fall 2017
-
- Type of Item
- Thesis
-
- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
-
- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.