In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • How to Make Sense of Music in the Theatre:A Primer for Beginners
  • Joseph Cermatori (bio)

Introduction

Several years ago I had the pleasure to co-teach a special seminar on opera and musical theatre at Yale with my friend and colleague Jason Fitzgerald. As many of our students hailed from backgrounds in English and theatre and lacked backgrounds in music, we anticipated that they would require certain tools to help them articulate the meanings that music can produce, particularly alongside drama and theatre in performance. Bearing in mind a vivid phrase from William Schumann’s 1988 introduction to Aaron Copland’s What to Listen for in Music, we wanted our students to do more than just “sit in an emotional bath and limit their reaction to music to the sensuous element of being surrounded by sounds” (xiii). We desired a working vocabulary that would offer students untrained in musical analysis the ability to distinguish sensuous sound as a medium for the communication of ideas.1 Especially for students approaching music and “music theatre” as academic subjects for the first time, it is imperative to learn not only how to perform close readings, but also what scholar and opera librettist Charles Bernstein has described as “close listenings” (4). We needed to develop a teaching tool, something on the order of Elinor Fuchs’s landmark essay “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,” which had profoundly shaped us both as students and young teachers of drama.

In response to these needs, I began developing the following essay, which we offered to our students as an entryway point into music as a system of formal and rhetorical conventions, something that can be both felt affectively and analyzed critically. Without recourse to musicological terminology, this essay pursues instead an analytical framework focused on questions of music’s relation to gesture, a term I borrow from Nietzsche, Adorno, and, more distantly, Brecht’s writings on music and theatre. It borrows its shape from Fuchs’s “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet”—an inventory of questions and prompts designed to provoke a student’s careful attention. These prompts can be assigned as class reading in traditional pedagogical scenarios, and can be specifically helpful to generate student writing.2

In our Yale seminar, we introduced them at the outset of the semester, together with a YouTube recording of soprano Cecilia Bartoli performing Mozart’s aria “Ah, chi mi dice mai” from Nicolaus Harnoncourt and Jürgen Flimm’s 2001 production of Don Giovanni.3 We screened this clip without offering students any historical context or background details of plot or character, playing it several times. We played it first without an English translation of the aria’s lyrics and without projecting the video of Bartoli’s performance; we played it a second time, with both audio and video content together, but again without the translated lyrics; finally, we played it with audio, video, and translated text all together, with a brief synopsis of Donna Elvira’s situation within the larger opera. After each screening we asked the students, who had read the prompts and questions below, to describe in a few sentences of in-class writing what they had heard, and by turns how the addition of the aria’s visual performance components and dramatic details had altered their hearing. The first screening [End Page 67] gave students an opportunity to hear and respond to Mozart’s musical writing as a musical and vocal performance first and foremost; the subsequent repetitions opened up questions of how this music interacted with Bartoli’s stage acting and with Da Ponte’s libretto. At first, students remained focused on the gallant, rococo elegance and vivacious sprightliness of the instrumental and vocal writing, with all their allusions to the gestures and choreographies of the Enlightenment court. After a second or third hearing, most students began to sense the deep rage, personal injustice, and psychological frustration dramatized in this scene. Putting the music into conversation with the character’s dramatic situation then opened up a more pointed consideration of representation: Why might it be significant for this scene of thwarted, unrequited, vengeful, violent desire...

pdf

Share