Videos by Jelena Novak
Interconnecting the perspectives of visual art, technology and opera, Post-Opera explored the cha... more Interconnecting the perspectives of visual art, technology and opera, Post-Opera explored the changing relationship between the human body and the voice today. For this cross-disciplinary project guest curator Kris Dittel and musicologist Jelena Novak initiated a collaboration between TENT and V2_Lab for the Unstable Media and Operadagen Rotterdam.
19.04.-30.06.2019.
Rotterdam 14 views
In the last decade or so visual artists have paid more and more attention to the voice. According... more In the last decade or so visual artists have paid more and more attention to the voice. Accordingly, an increasing number of art works have emerged that take opera as their principal subject matter. At the same time several existing operas have been presented in a visual arts context. Both these tendencies have assigned fresh meanings to the genre of (post)opera in contemporary Western society.
I will discuss the staging of Einstein on the Beach (1976) by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson as an installation authored by Berthold Schneider and Veronika Witte (2001, 2005), Opera for a Small Room by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2005), Sirens Taken for Wonders (2009) by Paul Elliman and The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures (2012) by Marguerite Humeau.
Strategies of ‘going beyond itself’ prompt discussion about the state of contemporary opera while inviting definitions of what is undeniably operatic once opera has been installed as its own signifier. 81 views
Videos by Jelena Novak
Transmedia Arts seminar, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University, 2022
This roundtable brings together a diverse group of opera practitioners and scholars focusing on t... more This roundtable brings together a diverse group of opera practitioners and scholars focusing on the transmedia flow of opera in the twenty-first century. The global pandemic offered an opportunity for opera to spearhead innovative transmedia storytelling formats that move fluidly across media boundaries, artistic genres, and geographical borders. Long considered innovative storytelling formats, site-specificity, VR, and video games have influenced opera in multi-faceted ways, transporting audiences into an “otherworld.” Recently, we have witnessed a shift towards site-specific reimagination of repertory opera (Twilight: Gods by Lyric Opera of Chicago and Michigan Opera Theater), gamification of opera (Yuval Sharon’s Die Walküre Act III, White Snake Projects’ PermaDeath, Death by Life), and a radical re-conception of opera as observed in VR – and zoom – operas (On Site Opera’s Lesson Plan, Kamala Sankaram’s Parksville Murders, all decisions will be made by consensus). Engaging with transmedia aesthetics through the lens of cross-border exchanges, transnational co-productions, and co-creations will offer deeper insights into the distributed mode of creative agency in our contemporary scene today which ventures away from a hegemonic framework. In doing so, we aim to contribute to new transmedia frameworks in situating opera studies today. Scrutinizing the media integrated into the live productions will lead outwards to a critical issue concerning media as place-making, as well as the intermedial affinities between opera and other remotely delivered compositions in the here-and-now.
Books by Jelena Novak
Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body, 2015
Both in opera studies and in most operatic works, the singing body is taken for granted. In Posto... more Both in opera studies and in most operatic works, the singing body is taken for granted. In Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body, Jelena Novak reintroduces an awareness of the physicality of the singing body to opera studies. Arguing that the body-voice relationship itself is a producer of meaning, she furthermore posits this relationship as one of the major driving forces in recent opera. She takes as her focus six contemporary operas - La Belle et la Bête (Philip Glass), Writing to Vermeer (Louis Andriessen, Peter Greenaway), Three Tales (Steve Reich, Beryl Korot), One (Michel van der Aa), Homeland (Laurie Anderson) and La Commedia (Louis Andriessen, Hal Hartley) - which she terms ‘postoperas’. These pieces are sites for creative exploration, where the boundaries of the opera world are stretched. Central to this is of the impact of new media, a de-synchronization between image and sound, or a redefinition of body-voice-gender relationships. Novak dissects the singing body as a set of rules, protocols, effects, strategies. That dissection shows how it acts within the world of opera, what interventions it makes, and how it constitutes opera’s meanings.
The subject of this study is the operatic singing body and its reinvention in recent operatic wor... more The subject of this study is the operatic singing body and its reinvention in recent operatic works that I call postoperas. Both in opera studies and in the majority of operatic pieces the singing body is often taken for granted. My main argument is that the body-voice relationship establishes meanings produced by opera and that furthermore it becomes one of the major driving forces in recent opera. In my theoretical objects - La Belle et la Bête (P. Glass), Writing to Vermeer (L. Andriessen, P. Greenaway), Three Tales (S. Reich, B. Korot), One (M. van der Aa), Homeland (L. Anderson) and La Commedia (L. Andriessen, H. Hartley) - the relationship between the singing body and the voice becomes a site for creative exploration where the boundaries of the opera world are stretched. The reinvention of vocalic body there assumes the changes that came as the result of the impact of new media, a de-synchronization between image and sound, or a redefinition of body-voice-gender relationships.
I dissect the singing body as an object of what Žižek names ‘the naïve ideological consciousness’, set of rules, protocols, effects, strategies that are embedded in a reality in which they intervene, in what appears to be a quasi-intuitive way, due to the fact that they are not theorized. That dissection pulls out the singing body from its invisible/inaudible status, and shows how it acts within the world of opera, what interventions it makes, and how it constitutes opera’s meanings.
Introduction, Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama, 2019
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s most celebrated collaboration was premiered at the Avignon Festi... more Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s most celebrated collaboration was premiered at the Avignon Festival in France in 1976. During its initial European tour, the Metropolitan Opera premiere and revivals in 1984 and 1992, Einstein evinced diametrically opposed reactions from audiences and critics. Embedding repetitive structural principles in a spectacle reflecting the late-capitalist media age, the work problematized commonly held assumptions about opera, music, theater, and
dance. Today, Einstein is well on its way to becoming a canonized avant-garde work, widely acknowledged as a profoundly significant moment in the history of opera or musical theater, whichever of these terms is considered more fitting, but apparently not – after all – repeatable, at least not in such a way that continuity between this work and what followed in the history of the genre would have seemed unavoidable: the result of a linear progression from one stylistic development to the next.
Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama, edited by Jelena Novak and John Richardson, Routledge , 2019
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s most celebrated collaboration, the landmark opera Einstein on th... more Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s most celebrated collaboration, the landmark opera Einstein on the Beach, had its premiere at the Avignon Festival in 1976. During its initial European tour, Metropolitan Opera premiere, and revivals in 1984 and 1992, Einstein provoked opposed reactions from both audiences and critics. Today, Einstein is well on the way itself to becoming a canonized avant-garde work, and it is widely acknowledged as a profoundly significant moment in the history of opera or musical theater. Einstein created waves that for many years crashed against the shores of traditional thinking concerning the nature and creative potential of audiovisual expression. Reaching beyond opera, its influence was felt in audiovisual culture in general: in contemporary avant-garde music, performance art, avant-garde cinema, popular film, popular music, advertising, dance, theater, and many other expressive, commercial, and cultural spheres. Inspired by the 2012–2015 series of performances that re-contextualized this unique work as part of the present-day nexus of theoretical, political, and social concerns, the editors and contributors of this book take these new performances as a pretext for far-reaching interdisciplinary reflection and dialogue. Essays range from those that focus on the human scale and agencies involved in productions to the mechanical and post-human character of the opera’s expressive substance. A further valuable dimension is the inclusion of material taken from several recent interviews with creative collaborators Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, and Lucinda Childs, each of these sections comprising knee plays, or short intermezzo sections resembling those found in the opera Einstein on the Beach itself. The book additionally features a foreword written by the influential musicologist and cultural theorist Susan McClary and an interview with film and theater luminary Peter Greenaway, as well as a short chapter of reminiscences written by the singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega.
ISBN 9781472473707
Why Wild analyses?
Wild analyses is a metaphor for developing one of the most fashionable problem... more Why Wild analyses?
Wild analyses is a metaphor for developing one of the most fashionable problems of musicology today – question of its borders and ‘mixture’ with other disciplines. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote La Pensée Sauvage (Paris, Plon, 1962) claiming that the wild thought isn’t the thought of the savages, but unrestrained, vigorous, ‘untamed’ thought of huge ambition, analytic and synthetic at the same tame, strongly orientated towards analyses.
Ivan Colovic, Serbian cultural theorist, also problematized theoretically the term wild in his book Divlja knjizevnost (Wild Literature, ethno-linguistic studies of para-literature, Belgrade, Nolit, 1984). For him, wild literature denotes “texts in which the same means, procedures and forms are used like in literary works, but do not belong (or problematizes its belonging, remark by J.N.) to the world of literature”.
Leaning on those two concepts of wild as a metaphor – the term which on one side signifies aiming towards endless re-examining, and on the other shows functioning on the edge/border of the world of established institutions - wild analyses in musicology constantly initiates and produces questions and gives open answers about possibilities of formalist, structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to music and uncertainties produced by confronting these paradigms. As such, wild analyses functions in a broader frame, within the culture studies, often signified as new musicology.
Criterion according to which analyzed works are chosen, is, up to some point, the result of personal taste of the author, but it also represents an attempt to discus some of the significant points on the ‘map’ of the 20th century music – from the experimentalism of John Cage, minimalism of Philip Glass, European answers to minimalism created by Louis Andriessen and Arvo Pärt, dodecaphonic music by Anton Webern, deconstructivism of Luciano Berio and neoclassicism of Francis Poulenc.
Journal articles and book chapters by Jelena Novak
The Opera Quarterly, 2024
Two women, Ms. X and Ms. Y, unexpectedly encounter each other in a restaurant on Christmas Eve. W... more Two women, Ms. X and Ms. Y, unexpectedly encounter each other in a restaurant on Christmas Eve. While Ms. X, who is busy shopping for her family's presents, engages in a continuous monologue, Ms. Y remains silent. Immersed in illustrated magazines, Ms. Y responds solely through facial expressions and body language. The narrative takes a turn as it unfolds while Ms. X reveals her husband's affair with Ms. Y. Initially, it seems that the married woman is imparting a lesson to her single rival, yet the overpowering silence from the other side complicates the dynamic. Strindberg demonstrates that, regardless of her societal standing, security, and authority, the married woman emerges as vulnerable and hysterical. The torrent of her passionate words rebounds against the wall of silence projected firmly from the other side. However, the disturbing hegemonic gaze of the same invisible, absent, “beloved man” governs them both. This encapsulates the essence of August Strindberg's short play The Stronger (1889).
The Sound of Žižek, 2023
Opera may not be Žižek's central intellectual interest, but it is never far from his theoretical ... more Opera may not be Žižek's central intellectual interest, but it is never far from his theoretical purview. He is especially engaged by the music dramas of Richard Wagner, and when he writes or speaks about opera he invariably uses Wagner as his main theoretical focus. However, it is in more recent operas that I see several instances of real synergy with the thought of Žižek.
New Sound International Journal for Music vol62 no 2, 2023
The twenty-first century saw an abrupt and remarkable resurgence of activity in the contemporary ... more The twenty-first century saw an abrupt and remarkable resurgence of activity in the contemporary opera scene in Serbia. In this essay I construct a 'map' that affords a glimpse into different tendencies, styles, and approaches to opera by contemporary artists who live and work in Serbia, as well as by artists who live beyond Serbia's borders but remain connected to its cultural space through education, language, and the experience of living and/or working there during some period of their lives. I offer a brief outline of developments within each of the following three groups of pieces: 1. reinventing tradition: folklore and beyond; 2. postmodernist strategies: challenging the voices of conventional opera; 3. conceptual and experimental approaches to opera.
Sound, Stage Screen Journal, 2022
The father, without his daughter's knowledge, and unable to bear the emptiness caused by the loss... more The father, without his daughter's knowledge, and unable to bear the emptiness caused by the loss of his wife, decided to end his biological life and continue his existence in digital form. In a special clinic, he scheduled the process of uploading, which meant transferring his entire physical and mental being into a computer file. In the father's understanding of the world, everything remains the same even though his body no longer exists. However, his rejection of the body still led to some fractures, and especially in his relationship with his daughter. This is a brief plot summary of the film opera Upload (2020), composed and directed by Michel van der Aa. In The Book of Water (2022) by the same author, however, there is no science fiction context, only “rain [--] pouring down”. The Book of Water is based on the novel Man in the Holocene (1979) by Max Frisch. The erosion of the mind (dementia) in the case of The Book of Water takes place in parallel with the erosion of the planet and the climate. In both operas there is a pre-condition of sorrow, depression, loss and melancholy.
The world we live in has changed. The notion of liveness still constantly evolves even as the mode of re/mediation changes. We all learn the new rules and adapt as we evolve. Both Upload and The Book of Water are about loss – loss as a learning process. They are about how we learn to lose (father, memory, home, body, planet) while at the same time entering new worlds. Fractalization of life, its transmission to all kinds of screens acting together and performing togetherness on our behalf, is actually the central theme of both pieces.
Revista Dramaturgiasn. 21 (2022): Palhaçarias: Caminhos Poéticos e Cômicos para Subversão , 2022
Palestra sobre novas dramaturgias da ópera contemporânea, apresentando uma tipologia que procura ... more Palestra sobre novas dramaturgias da ópera contemporânea, apresentando uma tipologia que procura descrever experiências recentes nas relações entre cena, música, espaço e audiência e o impacto de novas tecnologias.
Sound, Stage, Screen journal 1/2, 2021
Marina Abramović is a conceptual and performance artist with a particular interest in the relatio... more Marina Abramović is a conceptual and performance artist with a particular interest in the relationship between the artist and the audience. She is especially interested in exploring the extreme limits of her (the artist's) body. In recent years, she has nurtured these interests by restaging some of her earlier works of performance art. To chart some of the more important stages of her career I single out a few key works. In Rhythm 0 (1974) Abramović stood silent and motionless for six hours in a gallery in Naples, while members of the audience were allowed to do to her whatever they wanted, having at their disposal seventy-two objects. The Great Wall Walk (1988) was performed with her then partner Ulay; they walked for ninety days from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, and when they finally met, they ended their relationship and said goodbye to each other. Balkan Baroque (1997) reflected on the horrors and tragedies unfolding in post-Yugoslavia. In The Artist is Present (2010) Marina sat motionless in a chair at the MOMA (New York) for ninety days, eight to ten hours per day, gazing into the eyes of members of the audience who took turns sitting in front of her one by one.
In "7 Deaths of Maria Callas" Abramović used operatic music by five his-torical composers of the Western canon: Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Georges Bizet. One living com-poser, Marko Nikodijević, was invited to assemble all these separate strands into a single fabric. Nikodijević wrote the Introduction, then a kind of ep-ilogue “The Eighth Death,” and also some interludes conceived as “cloud musics,” as he calls them, which were incorporated between the arias.
The conversation transcribed here took place via Zoom on October 15, 2020, as the first talk in the Resvés Ópera Series of Conversations organized by CESEM, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.
PARSE journal n. 13 (2), 2021
The title of this article carries an inherent contradiction. How could something so elusive, and ... more The title of this article carries an inherent contradiction. How could something so elusive, and most of all, invisible, as the voice, be exhibited? Despite the availability of recording technologies for over a century, the voice still conveys the impossibility of being caught in place and time. It was this contradiction that the exhibition Post-Opera (TENT, V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, Operadagen Rotterdam, 2019) worked with, in order to show the affect of the singing voice, the bodies they emit it, and challenge the socio-cultural frame that influence the perception of who can have a voice and what is considered a voice. In the Western world, the notion of "having a voice" is commonly associated with the right to have a vote, to have a voice in society, often expressed in individualised and humanistic terms. Critics of humanism, and in particular critical posthumanists, have already pointed out the non-neutrality and inherent privileges the term carries, with its underlying connection to white, patriarchal, anthropocentric and colonial meanings. Instead of this rather Eurocentric conception of the voice, Post-Opera demonstrated a disconnect between this view and brought forth a proposition where singing machines, mechanisms, beasts, animals and other "others" joined in a collective form of vocal expression. They sung beyond opera and at the same time beyond human. This way Post-Opera proposed a different ontological understanding of voices and their potentialities, as well as the variety of ways voices are let to be heard.This text reflects on the ways in which the exhibition and surrounding programme materialised on the intersections of visual art and postdramatic opera, while confronting voice studies and theories of critical posthumanism in order to posit the voice beyond its humanist license.
Uploads
Videos by Jelena Novak
The talk was recorded in 2007 at Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon and it was included in opera's DVD.
https://www.azguime.net/discography-blog/2018/9/6/remix-ensemble-miguel-azguime-derrire-son-double-rt2hp-l33ye-r2csw-xanfg
19.04.-30.06.2019.
Rotterdam
I will discuss the staging of Einstein on the Beach (1976) by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson as an installation authored by Berthold Schneider and Veronika Witte (2001, 2005), Opera for a Small Room by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2005), Sirens Taken for Wonders (2009) by Paul Elliman and The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures (2012) by Marguerite Humeau.
Strategies of ‘going beyond itself’ prompt discussion about the state of contemporary opera while inviting definitions of what is undeniably operatic once opera has been installed as its own signifier.
Videos by Jelena Novak
Books by Jelena Novak
I dissect the singing body as an object of what Žižek names ‘the naïve ideological consciousness’, set of rules, protocols, effects, strategies that are embedded in a reality in which they intervene, in what appears to be a quasi-intuitive way, due to the fact that they are not theorized. That dissection pulls out the singing body from its invisible/inaudible status, and shows how it acts within the world of opera, what interventions it makes, and how it constitutes opera’s meanings.
dance. Today, Einstein is well on its way to becoming a canonized avant-garde work, widely acknowledged as a profoundly significant moment in the history of opera or musical theater, whichever of these terms is considered more fitting, but apparently not – after all – repeatable, at least not in such a way that continuity between this work and what followed in the history of the genre would have seemed unavoidable: the result of a linear progression from one stylistic development to the next.
ISBN 9781472473707
Wild analyses is a metaphor for developing one of the most fashionable problems of musicology today – question of its borders and ‘mixture’ with other disciplines. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote La Pensée Sauvage (Paris, Plon, 1962) claiming that the wild thought isn’t the thought of the savages, but unrestrained, vigorous, ‘untamed’ thought of huge ambition, analytic and synthetic at the same tame, strongly orientated towards analyses.
Ivan Colovic, Serbian cultural theorist, also problematized theoretically the term wild in his book Divlja knjizevnost (Wild Literature, ethno-linguistic studies of para-literature, Belgrade, Nolit, 1984). For him, wild literature denotes “texts in which the same means, procedures and forms are used like in literary works, but do not belong (or problematizes its belonging, remark by J.N.) to the world of literature”.
Leaning on those two concepts of wild as a metaphor – the term which on one side signifies aiming towards endless re-examining, and on the other shows functioning on the edge/border of the world of established institutions - wild analyses in musicology constantly initiates and produces questions and gives open answers about possibilities of formalist, structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to music and uncertainties produced by confronting these paradigms. As such, wild analyses functions in a broader frame, within the culture studies, often signified as new musicology.
Criterion according to which analyzed works are chosen, is, up to some point, the result of personal taste of the author, but it also represents an attempt to discus some of the significant points on the ‘map’ of the 20th century music – from the experimentalism of John Cage, minimalism of Philip Glass, European answers to minimalism created by Louis Andriessen and Arvo Pärt, dodecaphonic music by Anton Webern, deconstructivism of Luciano Berio and neoclassicism of Francis Poulenc.
Journal articles and book chapters by Jelena Novak
The world we live in has changed. The notion of liveness still constantly evolves even as the mode of re/mediation changes. We all learn the new rules and adapt as we evolve. Both Upload and The Book of Water are about loss – loss as a learning process. They are about how we learn to lose (father, memory, home, body, planet) while at the same time entering new worlds. Fractalization of life, its transmission to all kinds of screens acting together and performing togetherness on our behalf, is actually the central theme of both pieces.
In "7 Deaths of Maria Callas" Abramović used operatic music by five his-torical composers of the Western canon: Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Georges Bizet. One living com-poser, Marko Nikodijević, was invited to assemble all these separate strands into a single fabric. Nikodijević wrote the Introduction, then a kind of ep-ilogue “The Eighth Death,” and also some interludes conceived as “cloud musics,” as he calls them, which were incorporated between the arias.
The conversation transcribed here took place via Zoom on October 15, 2020, as the first talk in the Resvés Ópera Series of Conversations organized by CESEM, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.
The talk was recorded in 2007 at Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon and it was included in opera's DVD.
https://www.azguime.net/discography-blog/2018/9/6/remix-ensemble-miguel-azguime-derrire-son-double-rt2hp-l33ye-r2csw-xanfg
19.04.-30.06.2019.
Rotterdam
I will discuss the staging of Einstein on the Beach (1976) by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson as an installation authored by Berthold Schneider and Veronika Witte (2001, 2005), Opera for a Small Room by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2005), Sirens Taken for Wonders (2009) by Paul Elliman and The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures (2012) by Marguerite Humeau.
Strategies of ‘going beyond itself’ prompt discussion about the state of contemporary opera while inviting definitions of what is undeniably operatic once opera has been installed as its own signifier.
I dissect the singing body as an object of what Žižek names ‘the naïve ideological consciousness’, set of rules, protocols, effects, strategies that are embedded in a reality in which they intervene, in what appears to be a quasi-intuitive way, due to the fact that they are not theorized. That dissection pulls out the singing body from its invisible/inaudible status, and shows how it acts within the world of opera, what interventions it makes, and how it constitutes opera’s meanings.
dance. Today, Einstein is well on its way to becoming a canonized avant-garde work, widely acknowledged as a profoundly significant moment in the history of opera or musical theater, whichever of these terms is considered more fitting, but apparently not – after all – repeatable, at least not in such a way that continuity between this work and what followed in the history of the genre would have seemed unavoidable: the result of a linear progression from one stylistic development to the next.
ISBN 9781472473707
Wild analyses is a metaphor for developing one of the most fashionable problems of musicology today – question of its borders and ‘mixture’ with other disciplines. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote La Pensée Sauvage (Paris, Plon, 1962) claiming that the wild thought isn’t the thought of the savages, but unrestrained, vigorous, ‘untamed’ thought of huge ambition, analytic and synthetic at the same tame, strongly orientated towards analyses.
Ivan Colovic, Serbian cultural theorist, also problematized theoretically the term wild in his book Divlja knjizevnost (Wild Literature, ethno-linguistic studies of para-literature, Belgrade, Nolit, 1984). For him, wild literature denotes “texts in which the same means, procedures and forms are used like in literary works, but do not belong (or problematizes its belonging, remark by J.N.) to the world of literature”.
Leaning on those two concepts of wild as a metaphor – the term which on one side signifies aiming towards endless re-examining, and on the other shows functioning on the edge/border of the world of established institutions - wild analyses in musicology constantly initiates and produces questions and gives open answers about possibilities of formalist, structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to music and uncertainties produced by confronting these paradigms. As such, wild analyses functions in a broader frame, within the culture studies, often signified as new musicology.
Criterion according to which analyzed works are chosen, is, up to some point, the result of personal taste of the author, but it also represents an attempt to discus some of the significant points on the ‘map’ of the 20th century music – from the experimentalism of John Cage, minimalism of Philip Glass, European answers to minimalism created by Louis Andriessen and Arvo Pärt, dodecaphonic music by Anton Webern, deconstructivism of Luciano Berio and neoclassicism of Francis Poulenc.
The world we live in has changed. The notion of liveness still constantly evolves even as the mode of re/mediation changes. We all learn the new rules and adapt as we evolve. Both Upload and The Book of Water are about loss – loss as a learning process. They are about how we learn to lose (father, memory, home, body, planet) while at the same time entering new worlds. Fractalization of life, its transmission to all kinds of screens acting together and performing togetherness on our behalf, is actually the central theme of both pieces.
In "7 Deaths of Maria Callas" Abramović used operatic music by five his-torical composers of the Western canon: Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Georges Bizet. One living com-poser, Marko Nikodijević, was invited to assemble all these separate strands into a single fabric. Nikodijević wrote the Introduction, then a kind of ep-ilogue “The Eighth Death,” and also some interludes conceived as “cloud musics,” as he calls them, which were incorporated between the arias.
The conversation transcribed here took place via Zoom on October 15, 2020, as the first talk in the Resvés Ópera Series of Conversations organized by CESEM, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.
February 29–March 15, 2020, Los Angeles State Historic Park.
Creative Team: Raven Chacon, Composer; Du Yun, Composer; Aja Couchois Duncan, Librettist; Douglas Kearney, Librettist; Cannupa Hanska Luger, Direc-tor and Costume Designer; Yuval Sharon, Director. Program notes and video streaming available on demand: https://theindustryla.org/sweet-land-opera/.
to be a huge challenge – aesthetic, artistic, and even legal. Einstein brought into sharp focus the enhanced status of the opera director, who becomes in effect the co-creator of the piece. As a result, Wilson’s imagery is firmly interlaced with Glass’s music, and the structure of the piece relies both on its musical and its visual elements.
Over a long performance history, spanning more than 40 years,
Einstein has been staged by artists other than Wilson on only four occasions. In this chapter, I focus on those stagings.
http://ojs.newsound.org.rs/index.php/NS/issue/view/3
over the sounds produced on stage. His “natural speech” is constantly upgraded by his interventions, using samples of his own voice, processing them, making loops and superimposing processed sound on the live performance. His speech is about the absence of the author, sound, silence, text, body, alienation, voice. Being the author of the text and the music and actor only in the live performance on stage, Azguime is in a position to make a virtuoso questioning of the ideas of authorship of music and libretto in this opera.
Nedeljnik Vreme br. 1552
1. oktobar 2020.
https://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=1824073
Opera "Sedam smrti Marije Kalas" je donekle i didaktički muzičko-scenski spektakl kojim Marina Abramović maestralno pokazuje Kalasovoj i ostalima kako se ona u različitim svetovima (iz)borila sa svojim smrtima, životima, usponima, padovima i nesrećnim ljubavima i kako je proizvela te večne teme u glavne impulse svojih umetničkih radova
Svi su oni u ovoj operi deca, razna deca, raznih boja oblika i stilova: “slaba ljudska deca, pokvarena uplakana besna, teturava drhtava skakutava, pomamljena omamljena potuljena...“ I sva ta deca plešu i sviraju i pevaju: horski, solo, raznim glasovima, dečijim, odraslim, operskim, glumačkim, običnim, neobičnim, drugačijim. Najčešće pevaju i kreću se skupa, tražeći zajedničke glasove, i ta potraga je nesvakidašnja. Pevanje podiže budnost jer magično menja značenje teksta. I najozbiljnija situacija, kada je pevana, balansira na litici smisla koji se začas može preobratiti iz ozbiljnosti u komediju, iz komedije u melanholiju, iz melanholije u grotesku itd. Zato opera i realizam nisu dobri prijatelji. Originalni 'nemir' stihova romana „Dece“ možda jeste i neka nasušna potreba da se na realnost koja se u njima pojavljuje gleda barem iz još neke perspektive, pa zašto ne i operske koja se i inače često naziva 'većom od života'.
Program notes commissioned by BBC Radio 3 for Total Immersion Louis Andriessen festival (12-13 February 2016) at Barbican
Program notes commissioned by BBC Radio 3 for Total Immersion Louis Andriessen festival (12-13 February 2016) at Barbican
See also:
https://lesenfantsterribles09.wordpress.com/
NAXOS 8.551408 - BEETHOVEN, L. van: Piano Trios Nos. 3 and 4 / Allegretto in B-Flat Major (arr. for oboe, bassoon and piano) (Trio Cremeloque)
Technological developments also shift the ways in which we look at bodies, voices and identities today. As we become increasingly accustomed to an intrusive intimacy with technology, and are surrounded by artificial voices, new questions emerge: In what ways do such disembodied creatures affect our understanding of what constitutes a voice? And how do such voices gain presence?
Insights from opera
There is hardly any other artistic genre where the voice is more essential than in opera. Yet the operatic singing body was long overlooked, not considered important enough to be taken seriously in the process of meaning making. Contemporary postdramatic opera engages in a reinvention of the body-voice relationship, using technology to alter voices or to break the seamless connection between singing body and voice, thus stretching the borders of the body and the voice and of the opera genre itself. Post-Opera takes a similar approach, with a lively combination of new commissions to both visual artists and composers, installations and live performances, vocalists stretching the possibilities of the human voice and singing machines.
In this text I examine some cases of recent (post)operas from the perspectives of concepts and strategies developed by Slavoj Žižek. Those are: The Fall of the House of Usher of 1987 (composer: Philip Glass, Libretto by Arthur Yorinks based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe. stage director: Serge van Veggel), Dog’s Heart of 2008-09 (composer: Alexander Raskatov, libretto: Cesare Mazzonis, stage director: Simon Mc Burney), Aliados [Allies] of 2010-2013 (composer: Sebastian Rivas, libretto: Esteban Buch, stage director: Antoine Gindt) and Thea-tre of the World of 2013-2015 (composer: Louis Andriessen, libretto: Helmut Krausser, stage director: Pierre Audi). I discuss those operas with reference to Žižek’s cinematic project The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2006).
Looking back to Mark Fisher’s discussion of capitalist realism through the lens of the singing voice, it may become obvious that singing as a state of extreme fragility is more pertinent than ever before in the continuing uncertainty found in all spheres of human existence today. When Madeline’s voice is heard singing in The Fall of the House of Usher, it is divorced from the body, threatening us by virtue of its unpredictable larger-than-life dimension. It is a metaphor of uncertainty. When the dog Sharik sings with several voices in Dog’s Heart, it is clear that the author manipulates this extreme fragility, playing with identity, but at the same time demonstrating the extreme power of singing. The singing that takes over the character of Margaret Thatcher in Aliados demonstrates that power. And finally the Witches in Theatre of the World, their grotesque voices threatening us with the famous Ode, are erased by the eternal power of an ecstatic singing (Sor Juana) that engulfs our whole planet, relativizing the struggles and troubles of the human condition.
Cecilia Livingston, ‘Here Be Dragons’: Voice and Opera at the Edge of the Map
https://doi.org/10.1017/S095458671600046X
Published online: 20 March 2017