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]

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, includi…[Read more]

Talk on Beyoncé’s Lemonade and ANOHNI’s Hopelessness

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).

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 reena…[Read more]

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.…[Read more]