Call for Papers
Music and the Melodramatic Aesthetic
Conference, University of Nottingham (5-7 September 2008)
The early nineteenth-century stage genre of melodrama, as exemplified by
Pixérécourt’s mélodrames à grand spectacle, expressed the moral struggle
between good and evil through the interrelationship of music, speech,
gesture and tableau in scenes of high emotion. This cross-disciplinary
conference (Music, Theatre, Film, Art History, Philosophy) is the
culmination of an AHRC-funded Research Workshop exploring melodrama as a
performance process and an aesthetic, and tracing the nature of its
influence on later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century drama – including
opera, ballet, pantomime and early sound and film recordings.
The keynote speaker will be Prof Jacqueline Waeber (Duke University).
Individual papers and session proposals are invited on (though not
restricted to) the following topics:
* The gestural language of melodrama, opera, ballet, silent film
* Performance materials (including treatises, manuals, images, recordings)
* Gestural and musical clichés
* The high/low divide
* The communication process between actors/singers and audience
* Ethics and aesthetics
* The evolution of melodrama through the nineteenth century
* Tableaux
* Static/kinetic moments
* Gesture and movement in music
* Performative processes
* Excess
* Sonic/visual spectacle
* Body—voice—orchestra as locus of meaning
* Sound vs. image
* Cultural transfer
Please send proposals for 20-minute papers (max. 300 words) and/or 90-minute
panel sessions to the conference organiser, Sarah Hibberd
([log in to unmask]) by 31 May 2008. Please include your
institutional details and email address. We aim to notify applicants within
three weeks of this deadline. It is envisaged that a selection of papers
will be published.
For more information please visit the project website:
www.nottingham.ac.uk/music/mma
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