One of most enigmatic figures in mythology is Helen of Troy. The portrait that ancient authors and scholars alike paint is that of a woman with an uncertain history and a name marred by generations, both contemporary with her life, as well as those contemporary with ours. Each of these stories has an agenda in that each writer means to portray…[Read more]

Franz Waxman composed over 150 film scores, the most famous of which is Billy Wilder’s film noir
Sunset Boulevard (1950). The film plot bears a striking resemblance to Rod Serling’s teleplay for The Twilight Zone,
“The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” (1959). Waxman, composer of the film, was approached to compose a score for
a television episode…[Read more]

This paper examines the aural conceptions of futuristic dystopias in episodes
of The Twilight Zone, focusing on one specific episode, season five’s “Number
Twelve Looks Just Like You.” I examine how the music director of CBS conceived
of the future, aurally representing these episodes as having an affinity with
the premise of Brave New World…[Read more]

In the newly popularized genre of opera during the seventeenth century, the allegorical
prologue was commonly used as a preface from about 1600 to 1670, with
no fewer than 98 opera prologues composed throughout Venice during this period.
These prologues, often sung by allegories and/or characters from myth, set the
stage for the proceeding…[Read more]

During the rise of Italian immigration to the United States between 1870 and 1930, the sceneggiata, a musical theater genre popular in Naples, began its tenure in the theaters located within predominantly Italian neighborhoods of the United States. The sceneggiata revolved around specific Neapolitan songs and was one of the few types of…[Read more]