In a letter dated to 1960, Harry Partch describes living two lives simultaneously—one in modern America and another in ancient Greece. Furthermore, throughout his life, Partch exhibited striking dualities in both his music and personal life. Partch’s affinity for Greek themes and modalities in his music and musical theory is well known, but les…[Read more]

American musical theater occupies a unique space relative to other popular music genres. This is particularly true with regards to the ways aging performers are valued. Whereas aging or aged voices in popular music are often revered as “authentic,” aging musical theater performers face an industry largely uninvested in positive representations of…[Read more]

“To engage with CocoRosie requires absolute suspension of disbe- lief,” writes The Guardian. This has as much to do with their music as their appearance, for sisterly duo CocoRosie have embraced what they call a “posthuman kind of style” rooted in the dissolution of gender. In an effort to imagine a world beyond human constructions of gender,…[Read more]

Edition von 41 Farb- und Tintenrezepten zur Buchherstellung aus der Handschrift Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. germ. 1 mit einem textgeschichtlichen Kommentar.

Marco Heiles, Die Farb- und Tintenrezepte des Cod. germ. 1 der Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg und ihre Vorlagen, in: Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Fo…[Read more]

Introduction to The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music.

Popular music artists, as performers in the public eye, offer a privileged site for the witnessing and analysis of ageing and its mediation. The Late Voice undertakes such an analysis by considering issues of time, age, memory, innocence and experience in modern popular…[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]

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 by re…[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]

Este artículo acusa que historiadores y críticos de las dramaturgias chilenas del S. XX padecen de agorafobia: pavor súbito a los espacios ajenos. Esto porque, en sus trabajos, desatienden espacios de producción teatral situados en los extramuros de los campus universitarios. De acuerdo con este diagnóstico, se proponen claves para una agenda de i…[Read more]

Henry V has one of the most divisive critical histories in the Shakespeare canon. For the first two hundred years after being published, it was seen as a patriotic celebration of the heroic warrior King Henry V and his victory at Agincourt. But in 1817 William Hazlitt made remarks critical of the King and several subsequent commentators interested…[Read more]

This PowerPoint accompanies Ramala: An American “Indianist” Opera Musicological Lecture Concert (http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M67K1J).

Ohio State University Opera & Lyric Theatre presents “Ramala”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6HEzeWw9SI Wednesday, November 1, 2017 – 7:30pm Weigel Auditorium Charles Wakefield Cadman, Francis La Flesche, and Nelle Richmond Eberhart began collaborating on this opera in 1908, at that time titled Daoma (sometimes spelled Da O Ma). In the 1930s,…[Read more]

‘Watch the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves’; so says the Duchess in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But can we be so sure of this? The Duchess, like her creator Lewis Carroll, often seems to put more emphasis on the sound of words than their sense, a technique that can also be detected in other written texts and in works of so…[Read more]

An audio taster of my book The Sound of Nonsense. The taster includes samples of recordings of the work of some of the novelists, poets, musicians and performers who are used as case studies in the book. The taster is designed to both provide an overview of the subject matter of the book and to model one of the types of sonic nonsense discussed in…[Read more]

This review-essay discusses George Brant’s play Grounded (2013) in the context of its production at the Gate Theatre (London). It begins with a critical examination of my own “mis-seeing” of the play’s protagonist as a version of the tragic Heracles. The analysis which follows compares key aspects of The Pilot’s narrative with Euripides’ Heracles…[Read more]

These are examples to go with http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M64Z69. The handwritten examples existed only in hardcopy, so rather than simply scanning them, I redid them. Aside from a couple of clearly marked changes, they are the same as the 1981 versions.

This is an updated version of the 1981 paper. The first part, published in Theory and Practice, is substantially unchanged save for some details of the analysis and several added comments. The second part, written over the past year, is an appendix that addresses the role of memory in Ives’s music. There is an additional analysis of his song “The…[Read more]

This essay explores how the early American stage functioned as an incubator for ideas about national identity, artistic expression, and masculinity. Reading four plays from the early years of the Republic – Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, William Dunlap’s Andre´, John Augustus Stone’s Metamora, and Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator, I demonstrat…[Read more]

In 1587 the Flemish composer Carolus Luython, employed by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, published an unusual motet collection in Prague. Titled Popularis anni jubilus, the collection describes the sounds and rituals beloved by Central European peasants, recasting them as the ecstatic songs of rustic laborers (jubilus) famously celebrated by Saint…[Read more]