Music and the Melodramatic Aesthetic
Cripps Hall, University of Nottingham (5-7 September 2008)
CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
(All sessions will take place in the Hall Conference Room)
Friday 5 September
10.00—10.45
COFFEE AND REGISTRATION
10.45—11.00
Welcome (Sarah Hibberd)
11.00—1.00
Music and Text
Chair: Sarah Hibberd (University of Nottingham)
Anthony Rooley (Schola Cantorum, Basel)
‘John Stafford Smith (1750-1836): Early Dramatic Musical Examples of 'ProtoMelodrama', c.1790’
Kate Astbury (University of Warwick)
‘Performance, the Press, and the Rise of Melodrama in France’
Millie Taylor (University of Winchester)
‘The British Tar is a Soaring Soul’: Exploring Satire and Parody in HMS Pinafore’
1.00—2.00
LUNCH
2.00—4.00
The ‘Total Artwork’
Chair: Virginia Anderson (University of Nottingham)
John Tyrrell (University of Cardiff)
‘The Thirteenth Head: Reflections on Fibich's Stage Melodrama Hippodamia’
Jennifer Sheppard (University of California, Berkeley)
‘How the Vixen Lost her Mores: Gesture and Music in Janáček’s The Cunning
Little Vixen’
Elinor Olin (National-Louis University, Chicago)
‘Reconstructing Greek Drama: Saint-Saëns and the Melodramatic Ideal’
Kristi Austin (Librarian, Idaho State University)
‘Big Drama Back Stage: The Ballets Russes Premieres of L’Après-midi d’un
faune and Daphnis et Chloé, Paris, 1912’
4.00—4.30
TEA
4.30—6.00
Recitation
Chair: Annette Davison (University of Edinburgh)
Marian Wilson Kimber (University of Iowa)
‘The Feminization of Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and Musical Recitation in
America’
Laura Tunbridge (University of Manchester)
'Words before Music: Recitation and Lieder Recitals in the Early Twentieth
Century'
Virginia Anderson (University of Nottingham)
‘“I Fought a Monster Today”: Melodrama, Experimentalism, Politics and the
Spoken Voice’
7.00
DINNER & BAR
Saturday 6 September
9.00—10.30
Music as Mediator
Chair: Jake Smith (University of Nottingham)
Jonathan Hicks (New College, Oxford)
‘Music and Encounter in the Melodramatic Metropolis’
Jens Hesselager (University of Copenhagen)
‘Sept heures (1829) and its Music’
Ceridwen Higgins (Trinity College, University of Wales)
‘Composing the comedia ranchera: Image and Music in the Mexican Musical
Melodrama’
10.30—11.00
COFFEE
11.00—12.30
Opera and Melodrama
Chair: Trish Sheil (Cambridge)
George Taylor (formerly University of Manchester)
‘Scenes of Incarceration and Exile in British Romantic Opera and Melodrama’
Sarah Hibberd (University of Nottingham)
‘Macbeth: Opera meets Melodrama in 1820s Paris’
Philip Carli (Eastman House, Rochester, NY)
‘English Romantic Opera’
1.00—2.00
LUNCH
2.00—3.30
Stage and Screen
Chair: Roberta Pearson (University of Nottingham)
Nanette Nielsen (University of East Anglia)
‘Opera for the People: Melodrama in Hugo Herrmann’s Vasantasena (1930)’
Fiona Ford (University of Nottingham)
‘Melos and Musical Clichés in the Emerald City: Features of 19 th-Century Stage
Music in between Harold Arlen’s Songs in the The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939 and
MUNY, 1945)’
Robert Dean (University of Glamorgan)
‘Discord Underscored: Anempathetic Music in Nineteenth Century Melodrama’
3.30—4.00
TEA
4.00—5.00
Keynote paper:
Jacqueline Waeber (Duke University)
‘Music-Image-Text: Searching for the Melodramatic’
5.00—6.00
Music Department foyer
Wine reception sponsored by Routledge
6.00—8.00
Djanogly Recital Hall, Music Department
Screening of Within the Law (1923, dir. Frank Lloyd, starring Norma Talmadge);
introduced and accompanied by Philip Carli (piano)
8.15
DINNER & BAR
Sunday 7 September
9.00—10.30
Technological Transformations
Chair: Gilli Bush-Bailey (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Polly Goodwin (London)
‘Acting Suspicious: Exemplification of Silent Film Acting Technique(s) in
Hitchcock’s Early Crime Talkies’
Trish Sheil (Cambridge)
‘Beyond the Real: Music, Melodrama and Theatrical Gesture in Michael Powell
and Emeric Pressburger’s 1947 Black Narcissus’
Jake Smith (University of Nottingham)
‘Tearing Speech to Pieces: Voice Technologies of the 1940s’
10.30-11.00
COFFEE
11.00—12.30
Voice
Chair: Jacqueline Waeber (Duke University)
Sarah Townley (University of Nottingham)
‘“O Wicked, Wicked Voice, Violin of Flesh and Blood!”: the Resistance of Material
Form and the Role of the Melodramatic Aesthetic in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural
Tale “The Wicked Voice”’
Gabriela Gomes da Cruz (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
'On the Properties of Gems and Voice'
Louis Bayman (King’s College, University of London)
‘The Operatic Expressivity of Italian Melodrama’
12.30—1.30
LUNCH
1.30—3.30
Virtual Melodrama
Chair: Laura Tunbridge (University of Manchester)
Violaine Anger (University of Evry Val d’Essonne)
‘Melodrama without Text, and without Body: the Invocation au tombeau in
Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet’
Jeremy Barham (University of Surrey)
‘Mahler’s Apocalypse: Symphony 2 and Virtual Melodrama’
Jessica Payette (Oakland University, Rochester, MI)
‘Die Frau as Diseuse: Twentieth-Century Monodrama’s Roots in Cabaret’
Ivan Raykoff (New School, New York)
‘Schumann’s Melodramatic Afterlife’
3.30—4.00
TEA
END OF CONFERENCE