Abstracts for the Environmental Opera Research conference
Keynote by Joy H. Calico: “Blue Opera Studies in the Anthropocene”
What is the point of opera and Opera Studies in the Anthropocene? Neither operas about climate change nor the scholarship that interrogates them will save the planet or the life forms that call it home. Building on the Blue Humanities work of Stacy Alaimo and Melody Jue – and bearing in mind the limits of the New Materialism in which that work originated – I will argue for Opera Studies as a means of developing “the imaginaries that seas require in the twenty-first century” (Alaimo, 2020). This talk draws on work by music scholars Aaron Allen, Andrew Chung, Isabelle Moindrot, Kirsten Paige, Nicholas D. Stevens, Juha Torvinen, Susanna Välimäki and others to argue for an eco-aesthetic approach to musical representations of the sea. I will make a case for a concept of operatic convention informed by but not limited to topic theory and use it to analyze the convention of the sea in several operas that are not about climate change. One grouping of is based in the Mediterranean (Saariaho’s L’amour de loin, Dallapiccola’s Ulisse, Adams’s Death of Klinghoffer) and one is in the Atlantic (Davis’s Amistad, Weinberg’s The Passenger, Heggie’s Moby-Dick). My hope is that this approach will yield new perspectives on the imaginary that opera producers, performers, and audiences can develop for the aquatic in the Anthropocene.
Joy H. Calico is Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Musicology and Professor of German Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN (USA). She is the author of two monographs: Arnold Schoenberg’s ’A Survivor from Warsaw’ in Postwar Europe (California, 2014) and Brecht at the Opera (California, 2008; paperback 2019). The Schoenberg book received the 2015 Award for an Exceptional Book in Jewish Studies and Music from the AMS study group, as well as honorable mention for the 2016 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies; it will be published in Italian translation in 2022. Her current book projects are a monograph about operatic convention based on Saariaho’s L’amour de loin, and a co-edited volume with Justin Vickers entitled Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary.
Recent articles include studies of Saariaho’s writing for voice in Contemporary Music Review, Olga Neuwirth’s opera Lost Highway for Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, and an XQuery analysis of music in avant-garde periodicals for the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. Forthcoming publications include an article on Joan La Barbara in West Germany, and a chapter on the dramaturgies of experimental opera with Chaya Czernowin’s Infinite Now as case study.
Her research has been supported by the Sacher Stiftung, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the ACLS, the American Academy in Berlin, the DAAD, the Howard Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the NEH. In winter 2019 she was Gerstein Visiting Distinguished Professor at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.
She is former editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS) and served as director-at-large on that society’s board 2019-21. She is a member of the Advisory Board of Directors for Nashville Opera, the editorial board of the Cambridge Opera Journal, and the Black Opera Research Network (BORN) working team.
Juha Torvinen: Opera, an ultimate ecological genre?
Dr. Juha Torvinen is Senior Lecturer at the Musicology department of the University of Helsinki. In 2014–2019 he was awarded Academy of Finland Research Fellowship for the research project Music, Nature, and Environmental Crises. Torvinen holds Title of Docent (habilitation) in musicology at the Universities of Helsinki and Turku, Finland. His areas of expertise include ecocritical music research (ecomusicology), Finnish music of the 20th and 21st centuries, and philosophy of music.
Torvinen’s publications related to ecomusicology include, for example, Music as Atmosphere: Collective Feelings and Affective Sounds (Routledge, ed. with Friedlind Riedel 2020), “Nordic Drone: Pedal Points and Static Textures as Musical Imagery of the Northerly Environment” (written with Susanna Välimäki, in The Nature of Nordic Music, ed. by Tim Howell, Routledge 2020), Musiikki ja luonto: soiva kulttuuri ympäristökriisin aikakaudella (Music and Nature: auditory culture in the age of environmental crisis, ed. with Susanna Välimäki, Utukirjat, 2019),“Resounding: Feeling, Mytho-ecological Framing, and the Sámi Conception of Nature in Outi Tarkiainen’s The Earth, Spring’s Daughter” (MUSICultures 45/1–2, 2019), “Stockhausen´s Helicopter String Quartet and The Challenge of Conceptual Music” (written with Susanna Välimäki, Popular Inquiry, 2019), “Musical Meaning in Between: Ineffability, Atmosphere, and Asubjectivity in Musical Experience” (written with Tere Vadén, Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 2/1, 2014).
Isabelle Moindrot: Where do the operatic rivers flow to?
The history of opera is punctuated by animated landscapes (storms at sea or on lakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, offering scenic challenges in a combination of aesthetic sublimity and technical exploit (Hibberd & Stanyon, 2020). I would like to focus my talk on landscapes that imply the idea of movement while remaining generally peaceful, conveying images of ”nature” and of earthly origin while crossing spaces entirely shaped by human activities – streams and rivers. They share with music an obvious relationship to time and flow, and have been represented as scenic landscapes for multiple purposes, in particular for the renewal of musical dramaturgy. So the Seine in Lully’s lyrical tragedies or Rameau’s opéras ballets (which, through the river, inscribe the story in the space and time of the audience), the Loire in Meyerbeer’s grand opera (which reflects the glow of a bygone, sensual and feminine court life), the disturbing Rhône of the lyrical drama in Mistral and Gounod’s Mireille, or the Euphrates in Nabucco and the Nile in Aida (where geopolitical conflicts at the heart of the 19th century can be read), and of course the Rhine in Wagner’s Tetralogy. My hypothesis is that river landscapes, which at the beginning of the genre carried a pastoral imaginary, may have persisted on the lyric stage playing a discreet but powerful role in the survival of a premodern thought in operatic theatre. This persistence did not prevent the rise of contrary aspirations, while the genre was anchored in the heart of modern, industrial cities. With these streams and rivers, opera has, over time, created ’lyrical landscapes’, crystallising political, memorial, aesthetic and technical issues. Their staging today may help us in questioning our relationship to earth and future, in by creating a sense of belonging to the world and anthropological decentring.
Isabelle Moindrot is currently professor of theatre studies at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis and senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). Her research focuses on operatic dramaturgy, contemporary opera staging and the history of spectacle from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries (Le Spectaculaire dans les arts de la scène du Romantisme à la Belle Epoque, ed., 2006; Transhumanités. Fiction, formes et usages de l’humain dans les arts contemporains, ed. with Sangkyu Shin, 2013; L’Altérité en spectacle 1789-1918, ed. with N. Coutelet, 2015). With Céline Frigau Manning, she organised the third Transnational Opera Studies Conference in Paris, tosc@paris.2019. Having opened up her research to the ecological imperatives of theatrical production and their impact on creation through two research seminars, ”The Sound of the Anthropocene” at the Ircam (with François Ribac and Nicolas Donin, 2018-2019) and ”Théâtre et Ecologie” at ENS-Ulm (with Anne Françoise Benhamou and Frédérique Aït-Touati, 2018-2021), she has launched a pluridisciplinary program on opera facing climate change, in order to map and (re-) experience uses of nature in opera, and to work towards the eco-responsible practices of tomorrow (Opera and Climate Change, 2020-2025). Her recent publications include chapters on opera and mise en scène in Histoire de l’opéra français (ed. Hervé Lacombe, vol.2, 2020, and vol.3, 2022), Opéra et Ecologie(s) (with Leyli Daryoush, Brussels: Alternatives théâtrales, 144-145, Oct. 2021). She is now editing, with François Ribac and Nicolas Donin, Music and the Performing Arts in the Anthropocene: Nature, Materialities and Ecological Transformation (Routledge, forthcoming).
Jelena Novak: Nuke singing: Notes on Framing Questions of Mass Destruction in Opera
In one of the interviews about his Stuttgart production (1988) of Philip Glass’s and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach (1976) director Achim Freyer talks about the fantasy of the end of the world. He asserts that in all mannerist, non-classical epochs, including the one he himself is living in, apocalyptic themes are common. However, his point of view is that “we” are destroyers of our own world, even when we act to save it. The music of the spaceship scene of Einstein, in which the cadential-like formula is constantly reworked towards the climax, obviously intrigued Freyer, since in the synopsis of the fourth act the blast is mentioned, as is the beauty of the explosion. Glass and Wilson’s idea of building a crescendo in the last act leads to the imaginary (nuclear) blast at the end (linked also with Einstein’s legacy).
Certain apocalyptic references in Einstein on the Beach chime with Nevil Shute’s novel “On the Beach” (1957). This novel tells a post-apocalyptic story following nuclear conflict, with life on earth effectively destroyed by inhabitants of the Northern hemisphere. The post-nuclear war drama is related to the clouds of highly contaminated radioactive matter that makes slow but steady progress towards Australia, threatening to make it a dead place too. The main protagonists battle to face their own ends in particular and unique ways.
In several other operas the subject of nuclear explosion is elaborated: Three Tales (Bikini) (2002) by Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, Dr Atomic (2005) by Johan Adams and Peter Sellars and All the Truths We Can Not See: A Chernobyl Story (2022) by Uljas Pulkkis and Glenda D. Goss. In this paper I will discuss how nuclear mass destruction was questioned in those pieces and how different ethical and aesthetical questions related to nuclear blast are illuminated when one sings about them.
Jelena Novak is a researcher at CESEM (Center for Study of the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music), FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. Her fields of interests are modern and contemporary music, recent opera and musical theatre, music and new media, capitalist realism, voice studies in the age of posthuman and feminine identities in music. Exploring those fields, she works as a researcher, lecturer, writer, dramaturge, music critic, editor and curator focused on bringing together critical theory and contemporary art. She has been a founding committee member of the Society for Minimalist Music and a founding member of the editorial collective TkH [Walking Theory]. In 2013 she won the Thurnau Award for Music-Theatre Studies from the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her most recent books are Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body (Routledge, 2015), Operofilia (Orion Art, 2018) and Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama (co-edited with John Richardson, Routledge, 2019). She is currently co-editing (with Joao Pedro Cachopo) a special issue for The Opera Quarterly dedicated to operas based on films and preparing co-edited volume (with Kris Dittel) “Singing beyond Human”.
Tiina Rosenberg: Blossoming gender: flowers in operatic performance
Alpine iconography with high mountains and snowy peaks, idealized pastoral landscapes with gentle winds, blue skies, and rushing water falls. A significant part of the operatic performance (and the entire Lied repertoire of Franz Schubert and Robert Schuman) is about idealized nature. There is a lot to explore here, but my interest in this paper is directed to the presentation of the rose in Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier (1910).
Flowers are frequently presented as gendered and sexual symbols in opera: flower music in Carmen, Madama Butterfly, La Traviata, Adriana Lecouvreur, and Lakmé, to name a few. Vitella’s aria “Non piu di fiori” in Clemenza di Tito where she mourns that there are to be no more flowers or pleasure for her. Opera buffa is also saturated with flower imagery and in the pastoral setting of Così fan tutte, Guglielmo claims that Fiordiligi is a “flower of the devil.”
Representing femininity, flowers are often used to symbolize women’s unpredictable emotions and their presumably unstable sexual nature. However, as I argue in this paper, the trouser role Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier queers the presentation of the rose by literally handing over the female sex to Sophie. In this way, the trouser role turns the ritualized and public seduction scene into a sexual statement and has the power over the flower symbolism in this opera. My argument is based on the idea of what performance does to us in the audience, how it comes across, rather than trying to sort out the more conventional interpretations of this scene. In my interpretation, the presentation of the rose becomes a queer symbol of the love affair between Octavian and Sophie.
Tiina Rosenberg is professor of theatre studies and gender scholar at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her latest books include: The Palgrave Handbook of Queer and Trans Feminisms in Contemporary Performance, co-edited together with Sandra D’Urso and anna Renée Winget (2021), HBTQ spelar roll – mellan garderob & kanon (2018); Mästerregissören: När Ludvig Josephson tog Europa till Sverige (2017), and Don’t Be Quiet, Start a Riot. Essays on Feminism and Performance (2016).
Milla Tiainen + Sini Mononen: Performing with the forest and to the forest: Tree Opera as a more-than-human performance collective
In this presentation, we explore the Finnish-Latvian Tree Opera (2019), focusing on how different elements and dimensions of its performance – libretto, staging, musical textures, and vocal expressions – question and disperse the traditional hierarchy between the human and the more-than-human. This site-specific opera premiered in the summer of 2019 in the forest surrounding the artist residency Mustarinda located in Northern Finland. Composed by Latvian Anna Ķirse, the opera is inspired by the idea presented by Peter Wohlleben in his book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World (2015), in which he discusses trees and the forest as an inter-communicating community.
We will discuss Tree Opera as a non-anthropocentric and ecocritical interspecies opera (on interspecies performance, see e.g. Chauduri 2013; Knowles 2013; Kokkonen 2014), in which the forest that constitutes the project’s venue and milieu is invited to actively participate in, or co-construct, what we call the opera’s more-than-human performance collective together with humans; Tree Opera, we argue, is performed with the forest and to the forest. By listening to and watching the audiovisual documentation of the performance filmed in Mustarinda during the summer of 2019 (dir. Mārtiņš Grauds), we will examine this operatic project with the concepts of sonic technoecology (Tiainen 2017) and aesthetic activism (Kontturi & Tiainen, forthcoming). While sonic technoecology refers to co-constitutive relations between sound, human and more-than-human life forms, and technologies that carry potential for deconstructing the anthropocentric hierarchy between these terms, aesthetic activism helps us to frame the transformative experiential and political potentials of art, including opera.
Through our discussion, we hope to exemplify the capacities of contemporary opera and operatic performance practice to contest and reimagine previous (European/Western) human-centered regimes of understanding and power in the age of anthropogenic ecological crisis.
PhD Sini Mononen is a musicologist and an art critic based in Helsinki, Finland. Mononen has defended her PhD at the University of Turku in 2018 on the music of stalker films. Currently, she works as a post-doctoral researcher in a project “Music researchers in society: Advancing social justice through activist music research” (PI Juha Torvinen, University of Helsinki, funded by Kone Foundation). She has written on music and sound in film, television, and media art as well as on activist music research. In addition to her work as a scholar, Mononen is an art critic contributing regularly for Helsingin Sanomat.
Dr. Milla Tiainen is a musicologist whose areas of expertise span performance and voice studies, new materialist and posthumanist study of music and the arts, cultural and feminist studies of music, and sensory studies. She is a Senior Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Turku, a Docent of Musicology at the University of Helsinki, and the chair of the Finnish Musicological Society. Her current research focuses on non-anthropocentric approaches to/in contemporary musical performance as well as trans studies of music and voice. In addition to numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, she is author of Locating the Composer (2005; in Finnish) and Becoming-Singer (2012). She is also co-editor of Reconfiguring Authorship in Music and Theatre (2005; in Finnish), Musical Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari (2017), and special issues for such journals as Body & Society (2014), Cultural Studies Review (2015), and The Polish Journal of Aesthetics (2020), among others. Her monograph on a process ontological, new materialist approach to operatic performance is under contract with the University of Minnesota Press.
Kirsten Paige: Der Ring des Nibelungen as “Green” Mythology
In 1898, George Bernard Shaw famously interpreted Wagner’s Ring as a “toxic discourse” of nineteenth-century capitalism. Wagner’s steam effects, powered by locomotives, materially captured the capitalist and industrialist impulses lying behind the tetralogy’s primordial ecologies that, in turn, signified Wagnerian aesthetic ideations. Patrice Chéreau presented a Shavian Ring at the 1976 Bayreuth Festival, while Stephen Wadsworth staged a “green” Ring in Seattle in 2009. Stephen Langridge conceived the first sustainable Ring at the Göteborg Opera in 2019-21, exposing the tetralogy, Wagnerian thought, and even the opera house, as artifacts of industrialism—and the Anthropocene. This paper asks what it means to think “Anthropocenically” about opera and the opera house, and how the Ring and its critical history instructively entwine opera with Anthropocenic conditions of possibility. Drawing on production footage, critical responses, and directorial descriptions, I argue that the Ring could be read as diagnosing opera’s Anthropocenic debts: Bronislaw Szerszinsky and James Q. Davies argue that the false dichotomy of industrialism and Romantic “nature worship” underlies the Anthropocene’s material and aesthetic conditions of possibility. Chéreau, Wadsworth, and Langridge’s Ring cycles make visible aspects of Wagner’s tale that “show the consequences of using natural resources of personal power,” each modulating the Anthropocenic dialectic of nature, capital, and power. Reifying strains of Wagnerian eco-aesthetics within vernaculars of eco-power, these productions could be read as lodging not just the Ring, but dominant conceptions of “the stuff we call music,” within the conditions o
Kirsten Paige is Assistant Teaching Professor of Musicology at North Carolina State University, where she is also an NC State Impact Scholar. She earned her Ph.D. in Music History from UC Berkeley in 2018, and served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at Stanford University from 2018-2021. Kirsten’s work asks how forms of scientific knowledge—particularly environmental and climate knowledge—shaped musical practices and aural cultures in the long nineteenth century. Her essays have appeared in Opera Quarterly, The Cambridge Opera Journal, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and Sound Studies, among other journals. Kirsten guest-edited and contributed an essay to a special issue of 19th-Century Music (“Music and the Invention of Environment”), which appeared in the summer of 2021. Her first book, Richard Wagner’s Political Ecology, is under advance contract with The University of Chicago Press.
Nicholas David Stevens: Voices Unsung and Unheeded: Gaia, Solaris, Opera
Early in the 1961 science fiction novel Solaris, Stanisław Lem describes an encounter with vocality at an ecosystem’s scale: “low-pitched murmuring…the very voice of the planet itself. ” The novel’s title refers interchangeably to a planet and its living surface: “one massive ocean body…sentient on a scale beyond human comprehension,” as Melody Jue puts it. After human scientists bombard it with radiation, the ocean/planet/creature retaliates, haunting them with figments from their own memories – an irresistible scenario for opera creators in the 2010s. In this talk, I describe a feedback loop between opera, science fiction, and eco-oriented philosophy that developed in the 2010s, as creators drew boos and accolades for adapting Solaris as opera.
Timothy Morton argues that in depicting Solaris as a conscious collectivity with its own feelings, Lem anticipates environmentalist understandings of Earth as hyper-organism capable of reacting to human-caused devastation – the “Gaia Hypothesis.” While I mention operas by Detlev Glanert (2012) and Enrico Corregia (2011) after this novel, I focus on more recent productions. Helen Malkowsky and Kathrin Kemp staged a live-streamed version of Dai Fujikura and Saburo Teshigawara’s Solaris (2013/2014) in 2021 for Neue Oper Wien, and Claus Guth placed the music and characters of La bohème into the setting/scenario of Solaris for the Opéra de Paris in 2017. In both, human beings sing of personal loves and losses even as the planetary voice goes unheard. This, I argue, offers an apt allegory for policy agendas in today’s industrial nations – and a message for the opera world regarding attachments to human drama, touring productions, and art tourism.
Nicholas David Stevens is a musicologist for Naxos of America. He earned the PhD in musicology at Case Western Reserve University in 2017, with dissertation work on contemporary opera supported by the U.S. Library of Congress and the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities. In his time as a university professor, he specialized in courses on Western art music and American popular genres, such as hip hop. His current work involves product, prose, and podcast publication for a global classical-music record label. He has presented academic work on contemporary opera across Europe and North America. His publications have appeared in the Opera Quarterly and an edited collection, Thomas Adès Studies, from Cambridge University Press. His monograph Crisis Mode: Opera as Form and Medium After the End of History is under contract at the University of Michigan Press. Other books and articles are currently under peer review. He lives in Kentucky.
Nicholas Till: A Major Dramaturgy for Opera in the Age of the Climate Hyperobject
In 1994 the Belgian dramaturg Marianne van Kerkhoven distinguished two kinds of dramaturgy: minor and major. The first refers to the time and place of the theatrical production and its audiences, ‘those things that can be grasped on a human scale’, while beyond it we find the major dramaturgy: ‘around the production lies the theatre and around the theatre lies the city and around the city, as far as we can see, lies the whole world and even the sky and all its stars.’ Kerkhoven urged that it is now ‘extremely necessary’, that we turn our attention to major dramaturgy.
In this paper I want to suggest that discussion about what represents an adequate response to the environmental emergency cannot consist in conventional operas dramatizing human-centred stories (the kinds of anthropocentric world view that have brought us to this mess), nor well-intentioned sustainability measures, but demand a radical re-imagining of our relationship to the natural and material world. Climate change has been described by Timothy Morton as a ‘hyperobject’– an entity of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that it defeats traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. If we are to do justice to the enormity of the crisis we face, we need a dramaturgy that decentres the human, recognises the scale of the infinitesimal as well as the infinite, and the extreme disjunctions of human and geological temporality represented by, e.g., the knowledge that it took the planet 4 million years to recover from the last mass extinction, and we now have less than 4 years left within which to prevent the next. We are unable to experience hyperobjects directly, says Morton, ‘so we need philosophy and art to help guide us’. Opera, invented at the birth of the modern age, gave form to the new scientific, anthropocentric vision of the world: time and space measured; places conquered; Orpheus dominating the rocks, trees and beasts with his song. The rocks, trees and beasts must reclaim their own song.
Nicholas Till is a historian, theorist and practitioner in opera and music theatre, Professor of Opera and Music Theatre at the University of Sussex, and Pierre Audi Chair in Opera and Music Theatre at the University of Amsterdam. His publications include Mozart and the Enlightenment (1992), The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies (2012), Beckett and Musicality (2014), and a manifesto for a critical practice for new opera and music theatre entitled “’I don’t mind if something’s operatic, just as long as it’s not opera’. (Contemporary Theatre Review, 2004) based on his practice as a maker of experimental music theatre with his company Post-Operative Productions between 1998-2006. His current research projects include a study of the origins of opera entitled ‘Opera, Myth and Modernity’, and a study of the politics of the operatic chorus in a post-communitarian age. Since 2018 he has been an activist and organiser with the environmental movements Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain.