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In: Immersion and Distance
In: Immersion and Distance
In: Word and Music Studies: Essays on Performativity and on Surveying the Field
In: Word and Music Studies: Essays on Performativity and on Surveying the Field
Volume Editor:
The main section of this volume of essays addresses the topic of ‘Performativity in Literature and Music’, a subject of high contemporary relevance since a substantial part of recent reflections in the humanities are concerned with the performance aspect of cultural activities, particularly in the arts. This decisive reorientation of scholarly interests in the arts, trendily called the ‘performative turn’, has yielded significant contributions to an increasingly refined understanding of artistic processes from an up-to-date perspective, and specifically what has been called the ‘crisis of the work concept’ has sharpened our awareness of the need of finding the ‘proper’ object of such scholarly investigations, which, as in most traditional studies, cannot be exclusively the written documents of our cultural heritage, but additionally, and essentially so, their actualizations in performance situations.
This volume for the first time offers a set of careful case studies from a wide range of artistic genres (narrative fiction, poetry, opera, instrumental music, songs, jazz) and historical phases (from Elizabethan verse to 21st-century HD opera performances) which give detailed insight into consequences of addressing issues of performativity in the field of word and music studies. Closely examined examples range, in music, from the romantic reception of Bach and the opera singer Maria Malibran through Mahler and Schoenberg to Brigitte Fassbaender, Philip Glass and Charles Mingus, and, in literature, from Sidney through Yeats and Celan to Katherine Mansfield, Alejo Carpentier and Toni Morrison.
In addition, the volume contains a smaller section on ‘Surveying the Field’ of word and music studies which includes an essay of general reflection on interart relationships and an attempt at identifying new features of the ‘musicalization of fiction’.
This collection of essays will be relevant to students and scholars from a wide variety of fields: performance studies, intermediality studies, art theory, musicology, voice studies, literary criticism, and philosophy.
Author:

Abstract

The documentary film Night Mail, propagating the services of the British General Post Office in the 1930s, reflects the political ideas, typical of the period, of increased democratisation and a collective work ethic. At the same time, it reflects those advanced aesthetic ideas of the period that favoured a public function of art and saw art works as products of collaborative creative activity by artists from different media, with film taking a leading role in the coaction. The g.p.o. Film Unit was able to engage W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten as contributors to the formation of Night Mail. This paper argues that their cooperative efforts turned the film into a unique case of what it calls a “collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk” showing a particularly close interaction of picture, words and music, and analyses the effects which the closeness of interaction has on the working of the participating media.

In: Music, Narrative and the Moving Image
Author:

The great variety of Benjamin Britten’s ‘song-cycle’ oeuvre forms the empirical basis for identifying three types of song cycles. Criteria for defining these types are both the strength of coherence among the individual songs of the cycle and the dominating features which establish coherence. In this essay the types are accordingly labelled as ‘loose’, ‘literary’ and ‘musical’ song cycles, and a substantial number of individual cohesive features, constituting these types, are discussed. Their defining properties are demonstrated by referring to representative examples from Britten’s works. Contributions from Britten criticism to the song-cycle issue form the starting point for much of the theoretical discussion of this paper, which concludes on some general definitional considerations.

In: Essays on the Song Cycle and on Defining the Field
Volume Editor:
Ulrich Weisstein, an international authority in the fields of comparative literature and comparative arts, has been a pioneer paving the way for present-day intermedia studies. Among his broad intermedial interests opera has always held a central place. For the first time this volume makes available his major contributions to opera criticism in compact form, thus meeting a serious scholarly demand.
The necessarily stringent selection of essays from Professor Weisstein’s large output on opera, reflecting fifty years of involvement with the genre, is primarily governed by the wish to present texts that are representative of their author’s work and, at the same time, are unlikely to be readily available through other channels. The fourteen essays collected are arranged in chronological order, some of them showing Ulrich Weisstein as an initiator of librettology, others tracing adaptive processes extending from textual sources to final operas, or investigating writer/composer collaborations. Further topics are satirical reflections on operatic activities in early-eighteenth-century Italy and practices of opera censorship, artist operas or definitions of romantic and epic opera. The essays are written in an accessible, essentially non-technical language and are expected to make both a profitable and a pleasurable reading for literary scholars as well as musicologists and general art lovers.