Dear All,

We are excited to announce the calendar for Music Faculty Colloquia for Easter Term. Please join us for our first event on Wednesday, 27 April at 17:00 in the Recital Room.
 
We’ll hear from Dr. Laura Vasilyeva (formerly Protano-Biggs), who will present a paper titled “Architectural Surfaces and the Politics of Colour at the teatro all’italiana.” An abstract, along with a list of all Easter Term talks, can be found below.
 
For those wishing to participate online, you can email [log in to unmask] for the link.

We hope to see you there!

Best wishes,

Nicky Swett, Alexandra Leonzini, and Tadhg Sauvey
Cambridge Music Colloquium Committee, 2021-2022

Architectural Surfaces and the Politics of Colour at the teatro all’italiana
Laura Vasilyeva (formerly Protano-Biggs)

This talk centres on a main question: what drives our attachment to architectural surfaces, and in particular those that line opera house auditoria? While scholars have characterized the  nineteenth century as a time of important material transformations in opera, in which auditoria were darkened and newly-constituted audiences learned to sit in absorbed silence,  architectural surfaces—in particular their texture and colour—have tended to elude discussion. With a focus on the teatro all’italiana—the classic opera house built thousands of times since  the 1800s—this talk advances the claim that the now-iconic theatrical aesthetic of red and gold  within opera houses was an invention of the nineteenth century. While, around 1850, there was  no standard colour aesthetic at the opera house, in the later nineteenth century red—and  above all red silk—became standard across such theatres.  

Whence, then, these red silks? How did these textiles—rather than others—become inviolable architectural skins within theatre auditoria? I argue here that in the later 1800s red silks were selected on the basis that these could animate faces: much as red tint coloured onto black and white photos at mid-century imbued faces with hue and motion, a red ambience within  auditoria was believed to intensify the rosiness of flushed cheeks, and so imbue faces with character. Those who advocated for the red theatrical surface did so, in other words, on the basis that theatrical walls were much like faces themselves: sites that allowed inner worlds to  spill outwards. 

But if red was believed to animate faces, it should not be missed that it was one sort of face  alone that it was thought to animate well: those of white females. This was true even as red  became the colour choice across a vast theatrical infrastructure, including in locations where  pale skin was the exception, not the norm. Colour, in other words, was used to enact distinctions. This is all the more striking when we consider that unlike actual skins, architectural skins are not of course auto-generative, that each time theatres were redecorated their textiles  needed to be sourced. Red silks were the end result of interactions that turned insects—their  skin, tissue and secretions—into commodities that were traded in international markets;  markets that underwrote entire colonial economies. To be curious about the architectural  surface within these theatres is thus to consider how the built environments of opera are  connected to the politics of life itself. 

Wednesday, 27 April, Recital Room
Dr. Laura Vasilyeva (formerly Protano-Biggs)
Title: Architectural Surfaces and the Politics of Colour at the teatro all’italiana
 
Wednesday, 4 May, Lecture Room 2
Dr. Mary Caton Lingold
Title: Sonic Artifacts, African Music, and the Atlantic World
 
Wednesday, 11 May, Lecture Room 2
Dr. Renee Timmers
Title: An embodied and cross-cultural perspective on aesthetic emotions in music
 
Wednesday, 18 May, Recital Room
Dr. Alisha Jones
TItle: Ultrasonic Tastemakers: Towards a Critical Gastromusicology
 
Wednesday, 25 May, Recital Room
Dr. Maiko Kawabata
Title: The New “Yellow Peril” in Western European Symphony Orchestras
 
Wednesday, 1 June, Lecture Room 2
Dr. Kenny Monrose
Title: TBC
 
Wednesday, 8 June, Lecture Room 2
Dr. Lola San Martín Arbide
Title: TBC
 
Wednesday, 15 June, Lecture Room 2
Dr. Fumitaka Yamauchi
Title: TBC

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