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Dear All,
I would like to draw your attention to the following conference. Best
wishes,
Dr Katherine Hambridge
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The Melodramatic Moment, 1790-1820
King’s College London, 27-29 March 2014
Supported by King’s College London, the European Research Council,
University of Warwick and the AHRC
In the last two decades, melodrama and the melodramatic have been
brought to mainstream scholarly attention in an effort to revisit
long-standing assumptions about a much-maligned cultural form. A growing
number of musicological publications—Emilio Sala’s 1995 L’opera senza
canto, Jacqueline Waeber’s 2006 En musique dans le texte and Sarah
Hibberd’s 2011 edited collection Melodramatic Voices—have staked the
claim for melodrama’s historical importance and lasting influence. Yet
the relationship between the melodramatic technique (spoken word over or
alternated with instrumental music), melodramatic aesthetic (strong
contrast between good and evil, extremes of emotion), and the
melodramatic genre (combining the two) has remained both historically
and conceptually mysterious.
In this conference, we aim to address these relationships by focussing
on the period in which melodrama as a stage genre came to prominence, a
period in which several of the key European traditions overlap and
coincide. The earlier German, Rousseauian tradition of melodramas
produced at court and at Nationaltheaters (most famously represented by
Georg Benda’s Medea and Ariadne auf Naxos) continued in the form of
performances of older works and the composition of new ones. At the same
time, the Napoleonic period saw the emergence of the so-called
“popular”, boulevard melodrama in France, often treated as a distinct
entity, which was subsequently exported in translation to a number of
European theatrical centres as well as to the growing cities of the
United States. There were further forms of melodrama practised in this
period in the Italian peninsula. Indeed, for some thirty years,
melodrama in its various guises was one of the most important stage
products across much of Europe. Categorisation by national tradition or
division into high and low art forms has often led to the treatment of
these different traditions as distinct entities. Yet in this period,
the overlap of repertoire in cities and on stages, as well as obvious
similarities in content and technique, suggest the fruitfulness of
examining these phenomena together.
We invite proposals for papers that engage with this melodramatic moment
from all disciplinary perspectives. Particular points of focus include:
• the relationship between high-art and low-art variants of melodrama
• the relationship between melodrama as genre and melodrama as aesthetic
• musical and other adaptations of exported melodramas to new
surroundings
• the relationship between music and stage action (gesture, scenery,
lighting)
• melodrama’s relationship to broader social and historical conditions
• the relationship between melodrama and romanticism, classicism, and
the gothic
• issues of gender and identity in melodramatic performance
As it is envisaged that selected conference papers will be developed
into an edited essay collection, we are asking for an abstract of
500-700 words, to be emailed to [log in to unmask] by Friday
15 November 2013. We aim to review applications as quickly as is
reasonable and will notify applicants of our decisions by mid-December
at the latest. Those invited to contribute to the symposium will be
expected to send a 3000-5000 word draft of their paper for circulation
to other delegates prior to the meeting. The meeting itself will
include a performance workshop of representative repertoire.
The conference language is English.
Katherine Hambridge (Warwick) and Jonathan Hicks (KCL)
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