Music

This paper maps Isadora Duncan’s navigation of public and private venues, audiences, and receptions of “Greek” dances from her early career in Paris. I explore Duncan's relationship with Paris’ lesbian communities and the proliferation of ancient Greek dance in both private and public venues. Through comparisons to her contemporaries I contend that Duncan was aware of her early audiences’ interest in exotic and erotic representations of antiquity, and that she realigned these aspects of her art in later writings to appeal to changing aesthetics and interpretations of antiquity.

Sappho’s oeuvre exists in tantalizing fragments providing fodder for generations of interpreters to re-imagine her life and poetry in myriad ways. This paper looks at three Parisian fantasies of Sappho: Charles Gounod’s first opera Sapho (1851 and 1884), Charles Cuvillier’s operetta Sapphô (1912), and the Sapphic music and dramatic activities held in the garden of Natalie Clifford Barney (ca. 1900). For each of these productions, musical scores provide scant information as to how the authors and performers imagined the myths and lives of Sappho; iconographic sources, however, open doors to new readings, illustrating how these pieces appropriated past Sapphic fictions to create nuanced and often satirical productions.
Gounod’s opera reveals the transformation of Sappho’s image from mid-nineteenth century Hellenism to fin-de-siècle debauchery, as evidenced by differences in costume and set design between the 1851 premier and the 1884 revival. In addition to expanded roles for the courtesan, the simple classicism of the original production is replaced with a decidedly more decadent décor. In Cuvillier’s operetta, photos published in the journal Le Théâtre provide enough evidence to recreate plot, as well as decipher satirical elements that poke fun at the battle between Cyprian and Hellenic mores despite the lack of a score and libretto for the work. Finally, in my discussion of Natalie Barney’s queer Sapphic theatrics, I will use photographic and anecdotal evidence to illustrate the dialectical understanding of early twentieth-century Sappho as emblematic of the refined Hellenism of the mid nineteenth century and the decadent Orientalism of fin-de-siècle erotic Sapphic fantasies. The paper contends that visual culture played a privileged role in the reception of musical representations of Sappho histories and fantasies.

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This paper explores the conflicting trends of tradition and modernism, unity and independence in Parisian musical and dance culture in the late 1920s through an analysis of Maurice Emmanuel’s (1863-1938) aesthetics of contemporary and ancient Greek music and dance. I will begin by outlining and critiquing Emmanuel’s relevant scholarly contributions to ancient Greek dance history and music history before demonstrating how these tensions manifested in the 1929 production of Emmanuel’s opera Salamine based on Aeschylus’s The Persians. Exploring Emmanuel’s aesthetics of music and dance (ancient and modern) allows us a unique opportunity to see how these creative media were theorized and practiced in the tumultuous years after the Ballets Russes, while illustrating some of the conflicts between what Léandre Vaillat termed “the academic and the eurhythmic” in dance and music.

The following essays engage with our continual reshaping of the premodern world, its fragments, ruins, and myths as mediated and performed over time. They concern the frictions and debates between Classical antiquity and the modern world in opera and dance. In reimagining Classical drama, which was the Promethean spark igniting the genre of opera, the means by which composers and librettists might re-create the dramatic ideals of the ancients have repeatedly come into question. The Classical origins of opera have also served as a point of reference throughout the subsequent history of "opera reforms," most familiarly through Gluck and Wagner, but, as these essays demonstrate, also by E. T. A. Hoffmann and George Balanchine. As the German literary critic Hans Robert Jauss reminds us, the process of imitating the ancients is never-ending; however, while Classical models are ever present, their "after-lives" "are only present where they are responded to." 1 The works discussed in these essays respond to and draw upon these Classical models from new approaches to opera. In his essay on E. T. A. Hoffmann's opera Aurora, John Hamilton reexamines the mythic, literary, and philosophical sources for this early Romantic opera, while Julia Randel's reappraisal of Balanchine's "Greek" ballets explores the silencing of opera through the choreographer's reinvention of the all-too-familiar symbols of Orpheus and Apollo.

Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890-1930 investigates collaborations between French and American scholars of Greek antiquity (archaeologists, philologists, classicists, and musicologists), and the performing artists (dancers, composers, choreographers and musicians) who brought their research to life at the birth of Modernism. The book tells the story of performances taking place at academic conferences, the Paris Opéra, ancient amphitheaters in Delphi, and private homes. These musical and dance collaborations are built on reciprocity: the performers gain new insight into their craft while learning new techniques or repertoire and the scholars gain an opportunity to bring theory into experimental practice, that is, they have a chance see/hear/experience what they have studied and imagined. The performers receive the imprimatur of scholarship, the stamp of authenticity, and validation for their creative activities. Drawing from methods and theory from musicology, dance studies, performance studies, queer studies, archaeology, classics and art history the book shows how new scholarly methods and technologies altered the performance, and, ultimately, the reception of music and dance of the past. Acknowledging and critically examining the complex relationships performers and scholars had with the pasts they studied does not undermine their work. Rather, understanding our own limits, biases, dreams, obsessions, desires, loves, and fears enriches the ways we perform the past.

This paper explores the simultaneous eroticization and exoticization of Ancient Greece in the choreography of Madame Mariquita (1830-1922) for the Opéra and the commodification of this exotic ancient Greek eroticism in the popular fashion and music press in fin-de-siècle Paris. Building on work by art historian, Nancy Troy, and musicologist Mary Davis on the fashion press’s influence on modernist music and theater, this paper looks specifically at how a particular brand of exotic opera engaged with the popular press to create a truly multimedia cultural phenomenon that influenced musical “fashions.”
Contributing to popular magazines like Musica, Comœdia Illustré, and Le Théâtre, Mariquita helped sell fantasies of the ancient world to a predominantly female readership. Mariquita and her students capitalized on the magazines’ format as they wrote articles and posed for photographs that highlighted the fashionably exotic nature of the dances they created. Operas choreographed by Mariquita, like Erlanger’s Aphrodite (1906), and the early Greek inspired works of the Ballets Russes fed the hunger for the exotic on the pages of Parisian periodicals. Including these presses into the discourse provides a tantalizing entry into how exotic Greek opera functioned within a multimedia society coming to terms with a rapidly advancing media frontier.

Erik Satie’s Socrate: Drame Symphonique, (an austere ode to the martyred philosopher for chamber orchestra and four sopranos) contains sparsely colored, contrapuntal, simply adorned musical lines predating the neoclassical aesthetic favored by Stravinsky in the 1920s. Recent scholarship on Socrate focuses on the musical sketches. This study examines the performance history, creation of the work’s libretto, how Satie’s setting of the text reinterprets the violent myth of Marsyas and Apollo and the implication of the philosopher’s dying words to reexamine the style dépouillé (“stripped-down” style). The essay places Socrate at the center of debates on philosophy, Hellenism and morality.

Eva Palmer-Sikelianos (1874–1952), along with her husband, the poet Angehlos Sikelianos, founded the first modern Delphic Festival in 1927 in an effort to revive the Ancient Greek rites that took place on that spot over 2,500 years before. She invited " overseers of culture " from around the globe to convene in the holy city of Delphi for a reenactment of the performance of Pro-metheus Bound by Aeschylus in the ancient amphitheater, an Olympic-styled athletic contest, and an exhibition of Greek crafts. This paper explores Palmer-Sikelianos's choreography, music and dramaturgy for her reconstructed Prometheus Bound in light of her own research on ancient Greek culture and our modern theories of historical reenactment. Based on silent film records of Palmer-Sikelianos's 1930 festival, her own autobiography, her collaborations with Natalie Barney on Greek-themed theatricals in the early 1900s, and comparisons to the movement vocabulary and other contemporary stagings of ancient Greek festivals and sport, I demonstrate how Palmer-Sikelianos blended the oldest sources on ancient Greek ritual music and dance that she could find with what she saw as an authentic " spirit " of Greek culture as observed in modern Greek society. Compared to the Ballets Russes's reenactment of ancient Greece, Palmer-Sikelianos's project to reenact " authentic " Greek theater and choreography illustrates that theories of theatrical historical reconstruction in the early twentieth century were heavily influenced by contemporary theatrical, political, and social events. And like the Fokine and Nijinsky models, Palmer-Sikelianos's staging redefines ancient dance through the prisms of ancient sources and modern aesthetics.

The arch of Palmyra stood in modern day Syria for over 1800 years until the Islamic State (Daesh) destroyed the remaining traces of the Roman monument in early October 2015. The loss of the UNESCO World Heritage Site elicited world-wide condemnation, but also calls to reconstruct the ruins to their former ruined glory. In April 2016, Oxford’s Institute for Digital Archaeology in collaboration with an international team of researchers and artisans unveiled a reconstruction of the famed arch in London’s Trafalgar Square. The ceremony included speeches by dignitaries, but also a performance by singer/songwriter Stef Conner and harpist/musicologist Andy Lowings of excerpts from their 2014 album The Flood. Connor and Lowings’ music sets the 4000-year-old Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh in its original language in a contemporary setting blending contemporary musical styles to the accompaniment of a reconstructed 4500-year-old Lyre of Ur. The creators of The Flood do not claim to faithfully reconstruct long lost melodies. The reconstructed arch, on the other hand, does claim near perfect fidelity to the lost original. “My intention,” declared Roger Michels, project director and chief benefactor, “is to show Islamic State that anything they can blow up we can rebuild exactly as it was before, and rebuild it again and again.” Music, of course, follows different rules, but neither audiences nor organizers of the Palmyra ceremony seemed to mind the geographic, temporal, or stylistic dissonances between arch and music.
This juxtaposition of the various reconstructions of Levant culture not only provides a setting to test the limits of musical reconstructions, refabrications and reinventions, but also demonstrates ways musical reconstructions challenge ideas of authenticity. My paper examines Conner’s neo-Sumerian music (structure, borrowings) and the reconstruction and performance of Mesopotamian lyres in light of recent scholarship in digital archaeology and reperformance in Performance Studies. Such performances, I argue, sidestep scholarly questions of authenticity and allows us to see how, when and to whom scholarship becomes “real” to audiences.

Eva Palmer-Sikelianos (1874–1952), along with her husband, the poet Angehlos Sikelianos, founded the first modern Delphic Festival in 1927 in an effort to revive the Ancient Greek rites that took place on that spot over 2,500 years before. She invited "overseers of culture" from around the globe to convene in the holy city of Delphi for a reenactment of the performance of Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus in the ancient amphitheater, an Olympic-styled athletic contest, and an exhibition of Greek crafts. This paper explores Palmer-Sikelianos's choreography, music and dramaturgy for her reconstructed Prometheus Bound in light of her own research on ancient Greek culture and our modern theories of historical reenactment. Based on silent film records of Palmer-Sikelianos's 1930 festival, her own autobiography, her collaborations with Natalie Barney on Greek-themed theatricals in the early 1900s, and comparisons to the movement vocabulary and other contemporary stagings of ...

InDone into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America, Ann Daly writes that Isadora Duncan defined her dance as high art, and describes how Duncan raised the dance from the bottom of the cultural landscape to the top of American society:Dancing was considered cheap, so she associated herself with the great Greeks, who deemed the art noble, and she associated herself with upper-class audiences by carefully courting her patrons and selecting her performance venues. Dancing was considered mindless, so she invoked a pantheon of great minds, from Darwin to Whitman and Plato to Nietzsche, to prove otherwise. Dancing was considered feminine, and thus trivial, so she chose her liaisons and mentors—men whose cultural or economic power accrued, by association, to her. Dancing was considered profane, so she elevated her own practice by contrasting it to that of “African primitives.” The fundamental strategy of Duncan's project to gain cultural legitimacy for dancing was one of exclusion. (Daly 1995...