editorial five keywords and a welcome identity • the proliferation of new methodologies and areas of research has opened up enormous opportunities for the study of music and increasingly also sound. we participate in this movement towards expansion as it reflects music’s gregarious nature and fluid identity. as its disciplinary boundaries expand, music also seemingly dissolves. sss seizes upon this moment to rethink and align musical scholarship with a wide range of theoretical reflections, historical reconstructions, and practical interventions from across the humanities and social sciences. sound stage screen • sound not only expands but also seeps through various media and environments, giving rise to multifaceted situations that call for a redefinition of musical expertise. we propose the “stage” and the “screen” as both literal and metaphorical loci where such an effort may begin and eventually flourish. heteroglossia • koreans and filipinos communicate in english, as do indians from different states, thais with australians, or swedes with brazilians. we welcome the role of english not only as a global but also a trans-local language, notwithstanding its status as a legacy of the former british empire or the reach of american military, commercial, and cultural influence. the choice of the english language will, we trust, encourage the participation from scholars and practitioners from around the globe, irrespective of their native language: in uno, plures. theory/practice • as artists seek to share their experiences and knowledge in an academic setting, scholars continue to explore opportunities to take part in the curatorial and creative process in a variety of contexts—the concert hall, gallery, theater, film, and all manner of newly emerging platforms. to buttress this convergence, sss will function as a forum where people of different persuasions can meet and work together.through the multimedia apparatus on its website, the journal will also provide a record of their encounters. editorial6 sound stage screen 2021/1 future • our project is borne out of a desire to embrace new branches of knowledge but also a concern over the viability of musicology as an academic discipline. is an institutional reset in order? can we apply our knowledge to a new range of tasks and pair up with new professional figures? rather than reimagining the study of music solely across disciplinary lines, then, we wish to open up a space in which people with different interests and specialities meet and over time give way to new protocols of collaboration. we champion the rapprochement between historians, theorists, and practitioners because we believe this to be the foundation of new musicological practices. *** we are delighted to welcome you to the first issue of sss. we owe a big “thank you” to our authors, anonymous reviewers, and board members for making this publication possible and helping us formulate the motives underpinning this enterprise (as expressed in the five keywords above). if this journal is to function as an open space for new practices, it goes without saying that we need to nurture critical perspectives but also encourage practical interventions. though we now live suspended in time, as soon as this incredible pandemic ends we will organize meetings, performances, and workshops that will bring to fruition some of the principles that inform this editorial. se son rose fioriranno (if it’s meant to be, it will be). hong kong-milan, march 2021 giorgio biancorosso and emilio sala, editors × review contents footnotes performance review children, an opera in seventeen songs, with music by irena popović, based on the novel by milena marković. belgrade, national theatre, october 8, 2022. sofija perović sound stage screen, vol. 2, issue 2 (fall 2022), pp. 161–66, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2022 sofija perović. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss19975. children is an opera in seventeen songs composed and staged by irena popović. the libretto, based on the award-winning novel/poem of the same name by milena marković, was written by dramaturg and playwright dimitrije кokanov (who ventured for the first time into the world of operatic librettos), while the choreography was created by igor koruga, the scenography by miraš vuksanović, the costumes by selena orb, and the musical dramaturgy by jelena novak. the structure of the opera resembles a soundtrack where each song could be listened and performed independently but, when put together, these seventeen “songs” create a coherent theatrical work which made quite an impact on the local audience in belgrade, serbia. the work consists of a prologue and three parts: “the skyscraper forest,” “sea of tears, mother’s milk and children’s urine,” and “the wind” in which the topics—such as growing up in the blocks of new belgrade, a complicated relationship with the mother, teenage pregnancy, the search of identity in a no-longer existing country—are brought up. children had its world premiere on october 8, 2022, on the main stage of the national theatre in belgrade, the institution that hosts opera and ballet productions in the serbian capital since the nineteenth century, with the opera ensemble being officially formed in 1919. [1] even though the opening of an independent opera house has been the main focus of the ministry of culture of the republic of serbia (and formerly yugoslavia) for almost half a century, with every other government promising to prioritize the construction of the opera house, belgrade still does not have one. the fact that this brand new chamber opera, composed and staged by a contemporary serbian composer such as irena popović, opened the national theatre season 2022/2023 brings a ray of light and hope for the future of opera in serbia. this is also the first time that the national theatre in belgrade produced a contemporary opera based on a present-day novel. the attention that was accorded to the creation of this opera in the media and the public is without precedent. probably, the main reason lies in the work of milena marković (1974), a dramatic author and poet whose book children won the most prestigious literary award in serbia (nin award) for best novel in 2021. this choice made by the jury was, to say the least, surprising, since children is not really a novel – it is a poem – and giving an award for the best novel to a book that doesn’t strictly belong to this genre was a very bold and unexpected move. but no matter how controversial and certainly unprecedent this choice might seem, the reactions of the general public and literary circles were unanimously positive. fig. 1 and 2. children by irena popović, national theatre in belgrade, 2022, © national theatre in belgrade. in children, the voice in all its meanings and forms is predominant. the composer, who is also the stage director, rethinks voice as a tool, in opera and on stage, by juxtaposing operatic and regular singing. by means of the voice (and of being vocal), the very idea and notion of expressing oneself freely, truly, and completely despite the restrictions imposed by internal and external factors—such as a conservative upbringing, social expectations, traditional concepts of gender roles, among others—are also questioned in this operatic piece. in the patriarchal society, such as the balkan one, the children’s voices are united with the female voices which are altogether often neglected, considered as second grade, misunderstood, regarded as not serious enough, not important and, even when expressed, not taken into consideration. in her book, milena marković tries to represent all those voices through the prism of autofiction and her own growing up in former yugoslavia. although at the first glance it might seem like an inner quest, a search for the lost childhood, the poem is much more than that. as writer miljenko jergović said: “it is a dangerous novel about history, the most important and traumatic one for us, which starts with the second world war, continues through the eighties, the decade of our growing up, and overruns us during the nineties.” [2] the collective aspect of this poem is emphasized and made obvious in the opera where the author(’s voice) is “represented” by fourteen actors, three singers, and the choir. irena popović took direct inspiration for this collective aspect of the opera from marković’s novel: “in the music i composed for children, i tried to find the tone of the collective voice, i.e. milena’s being. the complexity of milena’s poetry and its many layers allowed me to make this collective voice both operatic and ordinary, childlike and also perfect in its imperfect tone. the voices in children are a unique combination of things that cannot be combined, and it seems to me that we get an overtone that floats through spaces and simply refuses to be defined and caught in the trap of classical analysis.” [3] although marković examines the specific issues related to the generations that grew up in former yugoslavia (the country that became a sort of neverland for many) and that, because of the historical events in their country, were not able to become independent adults—they could not find their ways in the war and the transition stricken newly formed countries; they couldn’t manage to get the jobs which would enable them to leave their parent’s houses and have enough means to create and provide for their own families; and they got stuck in a sort of peter pan complex, not being able to accept their own responsibilities—this poem is much more universal. it talks about finding one’s voice(s), about accepting the fact that we all have contradictory voices and feelings within us, that it is absolutely fine not knowing what we want or how we feel, that it is alright not to feel as we thought we would or as we were taught we should, that growing up is a hard thing to do and that we are allowed to feel overwhelmed by it. this is a work whose belonging to the operatic genre is questioned by many professionals from the opera world in serbia. it was created mostly by the members of the dramatic ensemble of the national theatre, [4] it was inspired by the novel which is not a novel, and the result was a cathartic theatre piece that brought the audience to tears. this work is not what a regular opera lover in serbia would expect (or want) to see. in order to understand the importance of this work one should know that the opera scene in serbia is still very conservative, that opera is often mistaken with bel canto, that serbian audiences have very few opportunities to see new stagings and even fewer new operatic works (and when that happens it goes almost unnoticed, since the media is not paying any interest to such endeavors), that the repertoire of the opera ensemble at the national theatre is very limited (based mostly on italian romantic works), and almost all the productions were created decades ago and return each season. in such circumstances, the fact that children was given the main stage of the national theatre instead of the smaller one, and the opportunity to open not just the opera but the full 2022/23 theater season, can be considered as an important step forward. however, this work is not only relevant and special for the local scene (despite being sung in serbian), but it is a powerful and original theatrical piece that is even questioning the status of opera today in the much broader sense. as a composer, irena popović is famous for her applied music and work in theater, and she is consciously and intentionally mixing the voices of the actors with those of the opera singers. she questions the very essence of opera by using “ordinary” voices, children’s voices, voices of the orchestra players (who are on stage behind the actors and singers, visible to the audience at all times and actively involved in the staging), and by mixing many musical genres including musical theater, pop music, turbo-folk, and world music. popović’s musical language, already well known in serbia, is easily recognizable in this work and, despite being a mixture of many influences and genres, [5] in the end it feels like easy-listening music. the power and force of the human voice on stage, and the importance of internal voices in each human being, are represented in this opera by emphasizing the communal aspect of singing—in the primal sense of coming together to sing. the teamwork is one of the most striking elements of this piece—a collaboration between actors, singers, and musicians all involved in each aspect of the work. a very special contribution is made by the children’s choir called “hopes,” which brings together children coming from the “margins” of society, thus providing an extra aura of innocence and authenticity to this opera both musically and theatrically. the opera, as well as milena marković’s poem, invites us to look deep in ourselves and search for the inner child hidden inside. children is an anti-opera that brings hope for the future of the genre in belgrade and can be recommended to contemporary opera lovers all over the world. [1]   for more information about the history of opera in belgrade, please see raško jovanović, olga milanović, zoran jovanović, eds., 125 godina narodnog pozorišta u beogradu (belgrade: sanu, 1997); mirka pavlović, „75 godina od institucionalizovanja opere (i baleta) (1919–1994),” pro musica 154–55 (1995): 14; sofija perović, “l’opéra de belgrade (1992–2000),” in caroline giron-panel, solveig serre, eds., les lieux de l’opéra en europe (xviie–xxie siècle) (paris: ecole des chartes, 2017), 43–50. [2]   “to je opasan roman o istoriji, onoj nama najvažnijoj i traumatičnoj, koja poteče sa drugim svetskim ratom, nastavi se kroz osamdesete, ta decenija našeg odrastanja i pregazi nas tokom devedesetih,” quoted in tanjug, “premijera kamerne opere deca u narodnom pozorištu: spoj muzike, drame i poezije za otvaranje sezone,” euronews serbia, october 8, 2022. [3]   irena popović as quoted in “children—composer’s and director’s note (extract),” national theatre, belgrade, official website, accessed december 18, 2022. [4]   despite the fact that it is described as an opera in seventeen songs, on the official website of the national theatre in belgrade, children is labeled as “drama.” see “performances,” national theatre, belgrade, official website, accessed december 18, 2022. [5]   in the musical style of irena popović, jelena novak has recognized the influence of michael nyman, philip glass, arvo pärt, meredith monk, laurie anderson, and david lang (see children, program notes, national theatre, belgrade, 2022, 26). × review contents footnotes performance review jennifer walshe, ireland: a dataset national concert hall, dublin, 26 september 2020, broadcast online (imagining ireland livestream series). björn heile sound stage screen, vol. 1, issue 2 (fall 2021), pp. 219–223, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2021 björn heile. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss16656. in a possibly (and pleasingly) apocryphal remark, the irish novelist john mcgahern is supposed to have said that “ireland skipped the twentieth century—it went straight from the nineteenth into the twenty-first.” it is this tension between a mythologized past and a promising but uncertain future that forms the basis of jennifer walshe’s composition. in few other european countries, the premodern past encounters the postindustrial present, represented in this case by tech giants like apple, google, and facebook who made ireland their european base for tax reasons, quite so starkly; an experience ireland shares with other postcolonial countries at the periphery of western modernity. that, like so many irish artists and intellectuals before her, walshe is an emigrant and lives mainly in london and stuttgart may have additionally sharpened her sensitivity for the contradictions peculiar to her birthplace (i am writing this as a german living in scotland, so i can claim personal insight into the emigrant perspective, although i have no specific knowledge or understanding of ireland). five performers—the vocal ensemble tonnta (robbie blake, bláthnaid conroy murphy, elizabeth hilliard, simon machale) and the saxophonist nick roth—complemented by a sparsely used pre-recorded tape—perform what walshe describes as a “radiophonic play.” generically, the result can best be described as “semi-staged” in a way that is familiar from experimental music theater from the 1960s onwards, and not all that different from classical-modernist precursors such as schoenberg’s pierrot lunaire or stravinsky’s histoire du soldat or renard (although there is no hint at a continuous narrative or dramatic roles in this case): all performers are miked individually and, with one short exception, remain rooted to their spot. thus, the delivery is based on concert performance on one level; at the same time, however, the performers enact some of the generic characters, such as present-day american tourists or a gang of irish criminals targeting the 1893 chicago world’s columbian exposition, who make an appearance through vocal and gestural mimicry (“simple acting” in michael kirby’s classification of acting types). [1] instead of scenery or props, a video screen completes the stage. all these elements are used economically: overall, this is a tight concentrated experience, rather than a sensory overload. tonnta and roth have to be congratulated on well-judged performances covering all nuances, from neutral through deadpan to full-on (well, almost full-on) panto delivery and back again, all the while executing the music with great precision and aplomb. structurally, the work consists of sections focusing on aspects of irish culture, history, and identity, alternating with interludes composed by artificial intelligence trained on (mostly) irish musicians—such as enya, les baxter (amusingly transliterated as leaslaoi mac a’bhacstair, although baxter was born in detroit), the dubliners, riverdance—and on sean-nós (highly ornamented, unaccompanied traditional irish song). to what extent the interludes were really composed by ai, and how, remains unclear, but they are very effective parodies of their respective models, faintly reminiscent of luciano berio’s folk songs and coro, or, in the more satirical numbers, mauricio kagel’s kantrimiusik. in particular, the close harmony singing in the les baxter number and the clumsy pseudo-folk dancing in the dubliners parody (the only occasion when the singers move their entire bodies and leave their spot) will stick in the audience’s minds. as funny as these sections undoubtedly are, the wider point is the digital simulation, reproduction, and manipulation of ideas of irishness. walshe undermines simplistic dualisms between “real” and “fake” or, for that matter, “honest” human craft and digital machine culture, by emphasizing the manufactured and manipulated nature of the models employed. it is worth pointing out that one of baxter’s (or mac a’bhacstair’s) claims to fame is the invention of the genre of “exotica.” even though the endpoint is sean-nós (in digitally adulterated form), it would be naïve to assume that the idea is that “authenticity” can be accessed by peeling off the successive layers of representation one by one. what the ai interludes suggest about music, the other sections argue about wider culture, including visual culture, using variously spoken, recited, and sung language (apparently written by walshe herself), and the video screen as media. all the sections share a focus on the creation and reproduction of images and myths of ireland. the first part is a critical essay on man of aran, a 1934 “documentary” by robert j. flaherty on the premodern life on the aran islands that has later been revealed as almost wholly fabricated. the second is a parody of a tv show (or possibly youtube video) on how to look irish. after a disquisition on ai and datasets, particularly referencing john hinde, an english photographer who specialized in nostalgic picture postcards of rural ireland that aestheticized the reality of grinding poverty, we encounter north american tourists on their visit to the fort of the kings on the hill of tara, followed, after the ai-produced les baxter parody, by a “lecture on the picturesque,” which ranges from eighteenth-century landscape painting through nineteenthand twentieth-century picture postcards to present-day tourist snaps on instagram. the number on the 1893 chicago world’s columbian exposition takes the form of a stylized comedy sketch routine involving a presumably fictional raid by the historical valley gang on the two rival exhibits representing ireland—part of the self-representation of the british empire—one featuring a donegal village and the other irish industry, with an incommensurate replica of blarney castle. one of the jokes concerns the gang’s needing to dress up to “look irish” in the way depicted by the exhibition to blend in, complete with what must be the tallest hat ever to be conceived but almost certainly never worn. the final number is, perhaps unexpectedly, genuinely moving, narrating a car trip around ireland, which allows an apparently dying child to see real-world sites he or she only knows from films representing fantasy places, such as westeros (from the tv series game of thrones, largely shot in northern ireland), middle earth (from the film series lord of the rings, shot mostly in new zealand, although the hobbits’ “shire” seems to evoke a leprechaun colony) and the planet ahch-to (from star wars: episode vii – the force awakens, shot on skellig michael, off the southern coast of ireland). in the end, the child seems to miraculously recover. as with many of the elements within this complex artwork, there are several possible interpretations of this ending. to me, the break from the ironic detachment and pervasive parody (whether gentle or malicious), predominant throughout the work, suggested a form of acceptance: for the child, it presumably doesn’t matter whether the images or the places they depict are real or not; they are just as beautiful. if androids dream of electric sheep, maybe facebook’s dublin-based servers simulate the stone of destiny on the nearby hill of tara in their downtime. and if, as the late historian eric hobsbawm has argued, national identity consists of “invented traditions,” irish identity, jennifer walshe retorts, is a dataset of billions of images and sounds that are constantly being re-processed. artificial intelligence is just the latest form of such re-representations. yet, crucially, as also becomes clear in her work, these myths were mostly created by others about ireland: the association of the picturesque with the irish countryside is the work of british colonists who proceeded to refashion the very landscape in accordance with their ideas. the idealization of ancient, celtic, rural ireland, with all the trappings of gaeltacht, mythology, and folk music, literally declared “beyond the pale” by the british (the pale being the line that separated the lands under direct british control from the rest of ireland during the late middle ages), is unthinkable without the nationalist reaction against colonization—and, notably, against the american construction of irishness (itself largely driven by the irish diaspora intent on idealizing their origin). again, facebook etc. are only the latest stage of this particular form of domination. as the text states at one point: “datasets are never neutral.” not that the irish have consistently refused to be complicit in their own exoticization and mythologization. over time, some began to see their own country through the eyes of others: man of aran is an excellent example. not only is it no longer possible to distinguish between authentic or fake, but also between native and foreign—and perhaps it never was. ireland: a dataset was premiered in late september 2020, broadcast online from an empty national concert hall as part of their imagining ireland livestream series. it was a rare highlight of new work for audiences deprived of live performances and subsisting mostly on a diet of canned art consumed through our screens. this too had to be viewed on a computer screen, but at least it was new and performed live. frankly, almost anything would have made me happy at that moment. yet the work proved rich and rewarding way beyond this particular context. it is created for live performance, not online viewing, but, due presumably to the aforementioned economy of means, it works very well on screen. still, i would love to see the work live, when it is possible to shift one’s attention between the individual performers and between the stage action and the video screen according to one’s own—not the video director’s—preferences (although they did an excellent job). at the time, it seemed as if the covid pandemic might be dying down, and there were hopes for a return to concert halls, theaters, and opera houses. these have been well and truly demolished by the second wave, although we are now holding out for a new dawn brought about by vaccination. it is hoped that ireland: a dataset will benefit from the promised revival and experience a second life in live performance, instead of remaining forever identified with that strange period that we like to think of as a temporary interruption of our cultural and artistic life although it may yet turn out to be a harbinger of coming realities. [1] michael kirby, “on acting and not-acting,” the drama review: tdr 16, no. 1 (1972): 6–8. sss_1_2.indb reviews 7 deaths of maria callas by marina abramović antonio pizzo – marida rizzuti if the event that marina abramović presented at the bavarian state opera in munich were an opera piece, we could try to compare the different codes that the artist has put in place, including linguistic offshoots from areas normally less frequented by opera houses. if that hour and a half of music, song, action, and video were decipherable through an aesthetics of production or reception, it would be fascinating to reconstruct the story narrated by the dramaturgy. if the elegance of the scenography could be part of a refined stage writing, we might evaluate the specific effectiveness of a personal approach to the intermediality of the performance. the hypotheticals are necessary considering that the overall creator is an artist who has established herself in the field of performance art so far from the operatic canon. yet, all these “ifs” constitute the most interesting and richest elements in abramović’s project, because they succeed to get to the core of the very notion of opera theater, to the idea of cultural heritage that guides many european productions, and to the traditional audience contract which links spectators with the stage. and abramović dives into this nucleus with grace and sincere participation, far from iconoclastic or violent rage. the work is constructed in such a way as to seduce the audience with the elements of opera, but at the same time it instills, in those who watch and listen, queries that erode the spectatorial experience itself. in other words, abramović fashions an event in real time whose raw material comes entirely from the tradition of opera, but she molds this material in such a way that the final result does not coincide with the horizon of expectation. back in 2018, the artist had a first experience with musical theater at the opera vlaanderen in antwerp, where she created the visual and conceptual apparatus for pelléas et mélisande, whose staging was intended as an opéra-ballet by choreographers damien jalet and sidi larbi cherkaoui. three years later, the show had a revival at the grand théâtre de genève. it is almost as if someone were using a canvas, colors, brushes, and even the painted subjects or the exhibition space typical of a figurative painting to obtain something that is not a figurative painting, but rather the enactment of thoughts on the essence of the painting. in any case, these metadiscursive reflections can be considered just the seeds that the work plants in the audience and in the history of opera itself. they may be regarded as the effects that this live event produces and therefore it is possible to review the mechanisms it puts in place for such pursound stage screen, vol. 1, issue 2 (fall 2021), pp. 224-228. issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2021 antonio pizzo, marida rizzuti. doi: 10.54103/sss16657. 225 sound stage screen 2021/2 performances pose. so, let’s proceed step by step and begin with the material organization of the space in which the actions take place. the orchestra is in the traditional pit, except for the choir which is distributed on two boxes facing the stage. the scenography is articulated in two main scenes: the first sees the entire proscenium covered by a veil (on which various projections of increasingly dark and disturbing clouds appear); placed right behind a platform, it covers the entire length of the stage from one wing to the other, hosting (on the left) an elegant bed—on which abramović lies motionless—and, from time to time, the singers. behind it, an equally large rear-projection screen on which various short films appear and illustrate the famous arias performed. at little more than half into the show, and after seven singers have taken turns, the screens and the platform retreat to reveal a luxurious room where, still on the right, we find the bed and abramović lying down. at the end of the show, the curtain falls to reveal the protagonist on the proscenium for the last, brief scene. the action has a very clear direction. during an orchestral prelude, clouds appear on the veil while a light frames abramović, whose recorded voice introduces the theme of the aria that is about to be performed. meanwhile, the singer who is placed at the center makes her entrance. when the orchestra begins to play the aria, a lighting effect allows the veil to become transparent, while a few videos are projected on the back screen; there, abramović (for five of them with willem dafoe) stages personal reinterpretations of the character portrayed. within this dramaturgical structure, seven singers alternate on stage to interpret just as many heroines and their respective arias: violetta valery, “addio, del passato” (la traviata); tosca, “vissi d’arte” (tosca); desdemona, “ave maria” (otello); cio-cio-san, “un bel dì vedremo” (madama butterfly); carmen, “l’amour est un oiseau rebelle” (carmen); lucia, “il dolce suono” (lucia di lammermoor); norma, “casta diva” (norma). immediately afterwards the scene darkens and an interlude, in which electronic music is followed by an original composition, favors a change of scene. after a few minutes, the raising of the curtain reveals her apartment’s room; this time, the orchestra accompanies abramović’s stage action: her recorded voice marks her awakening, the getting out of bed, the wandering around the room, until she leaves for the boudoir. the singers reenter as a group, armed with various cleaning tools, and start tidying up; at this point, the costumes worn during the arias acquire meaning because they clearly present them as the maids of the house where maria callas died. the cleaning ends as they cover the furnishings with black sheets, until one of the maids switches a turntable on. as the orchestra approaches the final 226 sound stage screen 2021/2 reviews sections of the score, the curtain falls, and from the left enters ambramović wrapped in the same golden lamé dress that defoe had worn in the video dedicated to norma. as the performer reaches the center of the stage, and we hear a recording of “casta diva” by callas, abramović’s grave gestures reenact callas’s own ones, avoiding any outward sign of emotion—but darkness cuts off the aria right before the end. therefore, much of the staging relies on the video’s narrative quality, both when dark clouds seem to foresee the heroines’ tragic destinies, and also when their most famous arias act as a background to the cinematic staging of what abramović considers their main themes. violetta is motionless on her raw deathbed while alfredo regrets his choices; tosca falls from a skyscraper and crashes onto a car; desdemona is strangled by otello/jago with pythons; butterfly gives up her son and lets herself die in a nuclear disaster setting; carmen, depicted as a bullfighter, is roped by don josé; lucia rages against the mirrors reflecting her dressed as a bride; norma and pollione (en travesti) approach a blazing fire in an ecstasy of flames. these slow-motion videos—whose formal beauty is reminiscent of bill viola’s installations—are integrated on the stage in a way that is by now widely accepted and understood in the context of multimedia performances: here, the arias are performed at the front of the stage, coupled with a few actions and marked by the motionless presence of abramović, while the background video elaborates on the arias’ themes. it matters little whether this is abramović’s personal critical interpretation of those characters, or callas’s dreams as she sleeps in her bed; the whole system works as a continuous restaging of the same content, which thus enters a loop of narrative references between abramović, callas, and the tragic heroines. the hierarchy of these three elements is constantly and wittingly put into question: which one is first? callas’s hypothetical dreams? abramović’s homage to a much-admired artist? the heroines’ tragic love haunting the lives of both? the conceptual scheme is made even more effective by the technical solution of having the platform and the lighting slightly raising from the floor the bodies of the individual singers and of abramović, leaving them almost afloat in front of the projections. the second part comments on these conceptual networks by highlighting the overlapping of performer and singer. we do not know if the actions on stage are part of a performance by abramović or the depiction of callas’s last hours—it could be both. the codes used are the ones we can recognize both in abramović’s artistic career and in the history of performance art (i.e., actions performed according to a predetermined, carefully ordered set 227 sound stage screen 2021/2 performances of instructions; the exposure of the body for a closer connection with the audience; the artist’s own life on stage (a photo of paolo canevari and abramović emerges among those kept in a drawer). the language in which these codes are set, however, is that of representation, opera, narration, and so on—until the end, when abramović seems to take on herself maria callas’s persona, embodying the recorded voice through a series of carefully measured gestures. it reads, therefore, as a dramaturgy which aims to fill the gap between the two women but also, interestingly, to juxtapose performance and representation to unveil the gaze towards a different status of opera and its present-day status. the music by marko nikodijević also moves in this direction; it is necessary to distinguish nikodijević’s original interventions from the use of the famous arias. therefore it is legitimate to argue that the use of pre-existing operatic pieces in 7 deaths of maria callas strongly recalls the universe of the compilation, of the greatest hits of the author. in any case, the composer creates a space for himself within the transitions from one aria to another, and most importantly in the introduction and in the second part (callas’ death). he treats them almost as a live dj-set. for the transitions, nikodijević has created fluid and undaunted musical spaces that sound like the opposite of arias—just listen to their register: the arias, here, sound like they are lingering mostly on the middle register, whereas the instrumental interludes open up to the high and low extremes. by contrast, for the introduction and the second part, the composer ties together small motifs from each aria and blends them to create new ones. here, he is re-arranging the operatic repertoire by combining musical motives and creating a modern texture where memories of the past can resurface. this technique is easily discernible in the opening overture with the curtain closed, when the incipit of “addio, del passato” (la traviata) emerges from the orchestra. the transition between the first part (the seven arias performances) and the second (callas’s death) is accompanied by an orchestral interlude with electronic music inserts and remixed voices from the choir. what is interesting is precisely that for this show we can identify a more traditional dramaturgy, that is to say a specific arrangement of the stage movements according to a narrative project. the production strategies can be traced back to the design of a meaning identifiable through the codes of theatrical language. such reading would be more of a stretch—if not downright untenable—for the celebrated performances of lips of thomas (1975) or imponderabilia of 1977, in which the aesthetics were completely performative and centered around the feedback loop with the audience. 228 sound stage screen 2021/2 reviews thus, once the representational component (even partially mimetic) of the live event has been established, it remains to be seen whether the narrative project—the story told—can be traced back to the making of (some) sense. if the meta-narration, as we have seen, aims to construct a framework of juxtapositions (between celebrated women, or performance codes), the story that emerges from the staged dramaturgy narrates the “divinity” of maria callas. indeed, it seems peculiar that the heroines are also the maids who cold-bloodedly rearrange the dead artist’s room. without her, their only purpose is cleaning; their existence is entirely dependent on the greatness of the performer, not the other way around. in such a context exuding autobiographical flavor, abramović creates an opera where the artist (herself, but also callas) is the true dramatic protagonist, and where she can tell without hesitation that the performer comes before the character. antonio pizzo teaches dramaturgy of the performance at the university of turin (dams). he directs the cirma interdepartmental center for research on multimedia and audiovisual, where he developed the computational ontology for the drama drammar (applied ontology 2019). he founded the officine sintetiche project (www.officinesintetiche.it). for years he has been conducting research on the contamination between entertainment, technology, and digital multimedia. he studies virtual characters and their dramaturgical implications, and has published several papers for the acting archives review. he has carried out research on the relationship between theater, algorithmic procedures, and artificial intelligence, with numerous contributions on journals and at conferences in both the it and theatrical fields (tdr/ the drama review 2019). he studies lgbt+ drama and has published on such topic (mimesis journal; sinestesieonline / rifrazioni). he is the author of materiali e macchine nel teatro di remondi e caporossi (1991), teatro e mondo digitale (2003), scarpetta e sciosciammocca. nascita di un buffo (2009), neodrammatico digitale: scena multimediale e racconto interattivo (accademia, torino 2013), teatro gay in italia. testi e documenti (2019). he is co-author (with vincenzo lombardo e rossana damiano) of interactive storytelling (2021). he has edited the italian translation of alan sinfield, out on stage. lesbian and gay theater in the twentieth century (2020). marida rizzuti is postdoctoral fellow at the university of turin. she has published books on kurt weill’s musicals and several essays on the history of musicals, film musicals, and musical tv shows, theory of adaptation and audio vision, music criticism in periodicals and the internet. in the last few years, she has been the recipient of several grants from institutions such as the paul sacher stiftung (basel), the kurt weill foundation for music (new york), and by the fondazione giorgio cini (venice). her primary interests are xx and xxi centuries american musical theater, exile and diaspora studies, film music, music criticism in the xx century (us and italy). she is the author of il musical di kurt weill. prospettive, generi, tradizioni (edizioni studio 12, 2006), kurt weill e frederick loewe. pigmalione fra la 42ma e il covent garden (eai, 2015), molly picon e gli artisti yiddish born in usa (accademia university press, 2021). × review contents footnotes book review tereza havelková. opera as hypermedium: meaning-making, immediacy, and the politics of perception. new york: oxford university press, 2021. 186 pp. isbn 9780190091262 (hardback). bianca de mario sound stage screen, vol. 1, issue 2 (fall 2021), pp. 211–218, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2021 bianca de mario. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss16655. conceptualizing opera today means not only to engage with a complex texture of arts and media, but also to look into the contributions offered by several approaches to the genre, from those inherited by performance and media theory, to the ones fostered by voice and sound studies, without forgetting contemporary art and film studies. tereza havelková’s opera as hypermedium moves exactly in this direction, challenging several theoretical frameworks emerging from the controversial debate around opera and media. her discussion is driven by the underlying question about the politics of representation and perception, which opera performs within the current audiovisual culture dominated by digital technologies. bolter and grusin’s concept of hypermediacy—i.e., the logic that makes us aware of mediation and reminds us “of our desire for immediacy” [1] —is the starting point for an approach to opera as audiovisual event, on both stage and screen. rather than a text or a work, opera is here considered as a theoretical object which can “‘think’ or ‘theorize’ in [its] own right and by [its] own means” (23). in this sense, the aim of this book is “to chart the theoretical terrain of opera as hypermedium” (23), highlighting the effects of immediacy it produces and the political potential of its hypermediacy. the case studies at the core of havelková’s exploration are two operas by dutch composer louis andriessen and british director and screenwriter peter greenaway, works which were both staged for the first time in amsterdam, “openly hypermedial” and “directly linked to the conception of intermediality in theatre and performance” (18). rosa (1994) is an investigation into the murder of juan manuel de rosa, a fictitious composer of music for western films whose love for his horse is deeper than the affection for his fiancée esmeralda. writing to vermeer (1999) is built around a series of eighteen letters written by three women—the artist’s wife, his mother-in-law, and an imaginary model—to the painter (who never appears on stage) during the spring of 1672, also known in dutch history as the rampjaar (disaster year). while rosa thematizes the use of film music on stage through the figure of the argentinian composer, writing to vermeer projects, deconstructs, and reenacts vermeer’s art. both combine stage action and live singing with sound technology—audible amplification in the former case, and electronic inserts by michel van der aa in the latter. before tackling the core of the discussion, the author clarifies how the issues at stake concern opera and contemporary staging by comparing two productions of wagner’s ring: robert lepage’s at the met (2010–12) and la fura dels baus’s in valencia (2007–09). in particular, the opening scene of das rheingold works as a mean to measure the relationship between technology and the human body: in lepage’s production, technology functions as role characterization, beautifying the bodies which are in control of it, while the visual interpretation of wagner’s music is “straightforward” (5) and transparent; conversely, la fura depicts this relation as “precarious” (5), introducing multiple “layers of signification that may be immediately decipherable to the audience” (5). these examples outline a solid overview of the theoretical debate which involves, on one hand, greg giesekam’s notion of “multimedial/intermedial” performances, [2] and on the other hand the relationship between illusionism and media transparency as discussed by gundula kreuzer and nicholas ridout. [3] in this regard, the audio-viewers’ sensory engagement is one of the main characteristics of contemporary audiovisuality, as explained by john richardson and claudia gorbman. [4] it is in this cultural frame that havelková’s concept of opera as hypermedium acts as part of the performative and material turns in opera studies and their related debates, of which she offers a survey of the major figures and theories. moreover, feelings usually described aspresence, absorption, immersion, and liveness are experienced not only through live performances, but also through opera on screen—the hypermedial transpositions that christopher morris defines as “‘videoistic’ productions.” [5] the author is here interested in how such effects are produced in a multimedia context, but—due to the importance of a “continuity between contemporary operatic practices and various aspects of the operatic past” (23)—her understanding of opera as hypermedium differs from notions such as “digital opera” and “postopera” (which imply a clear distinction with the previous tradition). [6] another reference for havelková is the work of cultural theorist mieke bal, from which she takes the notion of “preposterous history” to elaborate on opera’s afterwardness (“how opera as hypermedium is (re)though[t] in and for the present,” 24). [7] the use of speech-act theory for the analysis of multimedia—following bal, but also maaike bleeker—represents a turning point in discussing “the role of temporality in shaping the relationship between an audiovisual event and its audio-viewers” (25). moreover, “at stake in this theorization is the problem of how to formulate theoretical and artistic alternatives to a regime of representation that one is always already entangled in” (29). thus, reconfiguring the relationship between perceiver and perceived constitutes a challenging part of the study of opera as hypermedium. rosa ’s two subtitles—a horse drama for the theatrical productions (1994, 1998); the death of a composer for both the screen version (1999) and the audio recording (2000)—is a glimpse into the issue, highlighted by greenaway and andriessen’s work, at the core of chapter 1—i.e., the desire for knowledge. the reflection around rosa explores two features which hypermedial opera commonly deploys: “allegory and excess” (38-68). albeit at odds with opera’s narrative and alleged meanings, the excess of the operatic experience (mainly produced by “the physical, material effects of the singing voice,” 35) is approached here as the result of “a dialogic situation of meaning-making” (35). following craig owen’s work on allegory and postmodernism, havelková argues that allegory “complicates the reading of the opera’s signs” (39). [8] shoshana felman’s analysis of j. l. austin’s theory of performativity is then key to understanding the search for knowledge that, in rosa, is pursued in a seductive way through the character of the investigatrix—a dominatrix/seductress, whom the audio-viewers had already seen, first as madame de vries, advocating for the unveiling of the truth, then as the texan whore. [9] to shed light on the working of allegory, the study examines the striking scene in which an already-dead rosa sings in falsetto. crucified, the protagonist sits on his horse, whose corpse is stuffed with esmeralda and the money earned by the composer throughout his life. all the visual and aural ambiguities triggered by the scene are an allegory of the opera’s “unreadability” (59), and the whole theatrical frame becomes a part of the dramatic illusion. by treating opera allegorically, rosa makes the stage a “crime scene of opera itself” (60): a dead object whose mortification is the condition of possibility for its rebirth, a “rescue from … oblivion,” in owens’s words. [10] participating in the allegorical structure and in the process of meaning-making, voice becomes the vehicle of redemptive power. its symbolic unity of sign and referent (in contrast to the “body–voice gap” identified by novak) [11] operates beyond both music and libretto, as an “effect of immediacy” (63). rosa proves also useful for an in-depth analysis of the concepts of perspective, focalization, theatricality, and absorption. chapter 2 draws also on narratology to test how hypermedial opera “positions its audio-viewers toward what there is to be seen and heard on stage or screen” (71). after bleeker (and hans-thies lehmann), havelková explains how postdramatic theater offers a multiplication of perspectives which, while seemingly bringing attention to the act of framing, it paradoxically produces “an effect equal to the absence of frames” (70). [12] perspective is still at work, though it has become obscured. in rosa, it represents the principle that organizes the physical and virtual space: madame de vries, who is named after a dutch specialist in perspective, is the “internal focalizor” (80) bringing the audio-viewers’ attention to the agency behind the multiplicity of media—her brechtian beginning being “let me describe the stage.” using gorbman’s notion of “point of experience” to identify the position mediating perceiver and perceived, this section of the book shows how in rosa the positioning acts “may become obscured” (71). [13] absorption, following michael fried’s definition of it as “a strategy to obliterate the relationship between the observer and a work of art” (75), [14] the “supreme fiction” used to “persuade the beholder of its truthfulness” (76), is here also considered as the result of the interaction between a work of art and a specific viewer, both historically and culturally determined. rosa deliberately invites to step inside the drama (“we are to leave the opera house and go to the cinema”): a warning of absorption. music is the mean that enables “the transition from the theatrical frame to the inner drama” (83): on the one hand, music (primarily derived from andriessen’s previous work, hout) that “run[s] its course” (84) from a small motif into a steady rhythm full of tension and alertness; on the other, the music of the inner drama, vocal and melodic, is mostly made of quotations from classical and film music (especially hollywood westerns). this continuous split between the two dimensions threatens the absorption dynamic, while “the open theatricality of the descriptions and enumerations constantly reminds us of our ‘desire for immediacy’” (86). [15] the analysis of rosa’s and esmeralda’s arias, the former becoming a soundtrack for the cinematic projections offered to the audience, the latter being traditionally operatic and deeply intimate, demonstrates how the position suggested by the music depends on the actual audio-viewer’s freedom to choose among a multiplicity of positions. in chapter 3 (“liveness and mediatization. (de)constructing dichotomies”), andriessen’s and greenaway’s opera writing to vermeer prompts a discussion on how liveness is constructed “as an effect of immediacy within the overall context of hypermediacy” (31). the scenes from the domestic life of vermeer’s women are visual and sonic theatrical “windows” enlivened by andriessen’s live music and singing; the historical events of the outside world are represented instead by projections and by van der aa’s electronic inserts. by drawing on classic writing on film sound, havelková demonstrates how oppositions such as original vs. copy, presence vs. representation—allegedly “dismantled in theory” (36)—are instead productive as analytical tools. in this analysis, james lastra’s notion of the effect of sound recording as an “‘original’ independent of its representation,” [16] and jonathan burston’s idea of “quasi-live aesthetics” as a symptom of standardization of live theater, [17] contribute to identify liveness with a theatrical experience where a “shared acoustic space” and a “perceived unity of the singing voice and the performing body” (106) coexist: it is crucially the singing voice (and the operatic music) that foregrounds the performing bodies. as long as the performers sing and dance, they elicit a theatrical mode of audiovision. the women on stage appear as incarnations of the women from the paintings; they give them both bodies and voices (111). the relationship between sound and source is here reconfigured with respect to gender. mary ann doane’s theorization of the masquerade in narrative cinema—according to which masking allows women to attain distance from their image and to reconfigure the relationship with its female spectator—is key to understanding the relationships among the women on stage and the projections of vermeer’s paintings they represent. in this sense, writing to vermeer reveals a sense of “nostalgia for the live within the economy of reproduction” (125). the starting point of the book’s fourth and last chapter is a comparison between bolter and grusin’s critique of hypermediacy and laura marks’s concept of “haptic visuality” as a mode of perception and fruition that encourages a bodily, intersubjective experience of art. [18] several scenes in rosa’s screen version (for instance, when esmeralda is stripped naked) and writing to vermeer (e.g., the killing of the de witt brothers marked by evocative sounds) demonstrate how “hypermediacy elicits an embodied, multisensory mode of perception” (36). the author refers here to susan buck-morss’s discussion of walter benjamin’s “artwork” essay, exploring the twin systems of “(syn)aesthetics and anaesthetics” (133). while the former is a physiological connection between the external sense-perceptions and “the internal images of memory and anticipation” (134), the latter is its technical manipulation of environmental stimuli called phantasmagoria, “anaesthetizing the organism … through flooding the senses” and altering consciousness (135). [19] the social control produced by these dynamics in the second half of the nineteenth century is what prompted benjamin’s famous call for “politicizing art.” [20] not by chance, the wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk, a common reference both in bolter and grusin’s notion of hypermediacy and in buck-morss’s account of phantasmagoria, opened havelkova’s enquiry. this convergence is a signal that “modes of perception … may not be as divergent as they seem” (150); also, as foreseen by theodor w. adorno, the notion of gesamtkunstwerk highlights the immediacy of hypermediacy in a particularly effective way. [21] it is thus significant that the “excess of media and … stimuli” offered by hypermediacy, with its sensory impact, can be compared to the legacy of the wagnerian model (152). in this sense, music works as a powerful tool for “managing attention” against a general background of distraction (153). as havelková argues towards the end of the chapter, “new forms of the gesamtkunstwerk are being devised” (161) in the digital age; still, the tools offered by theorists such as benjamin or adorno prove productive in identifying mechanisms of remediation. in the conclusion, the author focuses on the fact that operas as cultural objects tend to resist theorization “while inviting, illuminating, and modifying others. … understanding the operas as being in dialogue with the theorizations of scholarship involves concentrating on what they do rather than what they say” (164). though havelková’s full immersion in theory, with its constant chain of references, runs the occasional risk of putting the reader’s attention under some strain, the premises and argumentation are explicit and never disorienting. without labelling contemporary genres and practices, opera as hypermedium is a book whose strength lies not only in its focus on northern european scholarship and artistic production—often regrettably overlooked—but also in a constant effort to create continuity between present and past, both in theoretical and practical terms. by questioning important notions commonly accepted in current theories on opera and media, tereza havelková suggests a way to analyze contemporary productions through the multiple lenses offered by different research fields, and her meticulous testing and mapping of theory over performance takes stock of a problematic state of the art. how to approach a series of operatic practices that are hard to confine under one suitable category? (digital opera? postopera? hypermedial opera?) how to overcome the deadlock of trite prejudices and tired preconceptions, while holding them as still essential for the interpretation of such a loaded cultural phenomenon? understanding opera as a hypermedial object may prove to offer an all-encompassing analysis while at the same time provide a way out of such an impasse. it might be a tortuous path, but one that certainly will be useful to better understand the nature of the genre which, far from being dead and buried, is constantly changing and reinventing itself, challenging all sorts of media to reach its audiences and produce meaning. [1] jay david bolter and richard grusin, remediation: understanding new media (cambridge, ma: mit press, 1999), 34. [2] see greg giesekam, staging the screen: the use of film and video in theatre (houndmills: palgrave macmillan, 2007), 8–9. [3] see gundula kreuzer, curtain, gong, steam: wagnerian technologies of nineteenth-century opera (oakland, ca: university of california press, 2018); nicholas ridout, “opera and the technologies of theatrical production,” in the cambridge companion to opera studies, ed. nicholas till (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2012), 159–76. [4] john richardson, claudia gorbman, “introduction,” in the oxford handbook of new audiovisual aesthetics, ed. john richardson, claudia gorbman, and carol vernallis (new york: oxford university press, 2013), 3–35. [5] christopher morris, “digital diva: opera on video,” opera quarterly 26, no. 1 (2010): 111. [6] the reference is to áine sheil and craig vear, “digital opera, new means and new meanings: an introduction in two voices,” international journal of performance arts and digital media 8, no.1 (2012): 3–9; and jelena novak, postopera: reinventing the voice-body (farnham: ashgate, 2015). [7] mieke bal, quoting caravaggio: contemporary art, preposterous history (chicago: university of chicago press, 1999). [8] see craig owens, “the allegorical impulse: toward a theory of postmodernism,” in art after modernism: rethinking representation, ed. brian wallis (new york: new museum of contemporary art, 1984), 203–35. [9] the reference is to shoshana felman, the scandal of the speaking body: don juan with j. l. austin or seduction in two languages , trans. catherine porter (stanford: stanford university press, 2003). [10] owens, “the allegorical impulse,” 203. [11] novak, postopera, 7. [12] the reference is to maaike bleeker, visuality in the theatre: the locus of looking (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2008), and hans-thies lehmann, postdramatic theatre, trans. karen jürs-munby (london: routledge, 2006). [13] the reference is to claudia gorbman, unheard melodies: narrative film music (bloomington: indiana university press, 1987). [14] see michael fried, absorption and theatricality: painting and beholder in the age of diderot (berkeley: university of california press, 1980), 66, 71. [15] the reference is to bolter and grusin, remediation, 34. [16] james lastra, “reading, writing, and representing sound,” in sound theory, sound practice, ed. rick altman (new york: routledge, 1992), 70. [17] jonathan burston, “theatre space as virtual place: audio technology, the reconfigured singing body, and the megamusical,” popular music 17, no. 2 (1998): 208. [18] see laura u. marks, touch: sensuous theory and multisensory media (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2002). [19] see susan buck-morss, “aesthetics and anaesthetics: walter benjamin’s artwork essay reconsidered,” october 62 (1992): 3–41. [20] walter benjamin, “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” in illuminations, trans. harry zohn, ed. hannah arendt (new york: schocken books, 1968), 242. [21] see theodor w. adorno, in search of wagner, trans. rodney livingstone (london: verso, 2005), esp. ch. 6 “phantasmagoria.” reviews performance reviews sweet land, a new opera by the industry. february 29–march 15, 2020, los angeles state historic park. creative team: raven chacon, composer; du yun, composer; aja couchois duncan, librettist; douglas kearney, librettist; cannupa hanska luger, director and costume designer; yuval sharon, director. program notes and video streaming available on demand: https://theindustryla.org/sweet-land-opera/. jelena novak opera and musical theater continue to serve as forums for debate, invoking a wide range of topics in history, mythology, power, and politics. recent north american operas are no exception, with composers and librettists often being preoccupied with questions of power and colonization. let me cite just a few examples. one of the first contemporary operas i ever saw was philip glass’s and robert wilson’s o corvo branco (the white raven) (1998) about the portuguese age of discovery, an age marked by the conquest of new worlds and above all by the famous expedition led by vasco da gama, who pioneered the sea route to india that gave portugal a dominant position in the spice trade of the time. another opera by philip glass, the voyage (1992), was commissioned and first performed at the metropolitan opera house to mark 500 years since christopher columbus’s discovery of america. curiosity and courage, overcoming a fear of the unknown, the discovery and conquest of the new worlds, the effects of colonization; these are all among glass’s themes in this work. the composer john adams and director peter sellars likewise turn to american history and mythology in their operas. they typically zoom in on some of the most spectacular and politically charged events from the united states’ complex history— the gold rush in girls of the golden west (2017), the trinity nuclear test in doctor atomic (2005), and, famously, richard nixon’s historical visit to sound stage screen, vol. 1, issue 1 (spring 2021), pp. 275–283. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. doi: 10.13130/sss15390. https://theindustryla.org/sweet-land-opera/ reviews276 sound stage screen 2021/1 mao zedong in nixon in china (1987). one might also mention here steve reich’s and beryl korot’s three tales (2002), one of which is dedicated to the testing of atomic bombs on bikini island, a grim episode from the cold war nuclear arms race. and finally there is laurie anderson, who problematizes what it really means to be american in several of her works, for example in homeland (2007). in all of these there is an attempt to discuss and illuminate, often critically, important dimensions of american history and mythology. in mapping out this context for sweet land (2020), the newest opera of the los angeles-based opera company the industry, i am tempted to invoke the arrow john cage fired into the operatic relationships between europe and united states: “for two hundred years the europeans have been sending us their operas. now i’m sending them back.” on the occasion of the production of cage’s europeras 1 and 2 by director yuval sharon, the industry’s founder and leader, this quotation was singled out.1 it signals the duality between european and american operatic worlds, a duality that appears to be of central importance to the poetics of sharon himself. his career as an opera director has developed successfully along two separate tracks. he has created site-specific ground-breaking contemporary operas with the industry, mostly with american artists— productions include invisible cities (2013), hopscotch (2015) and war of the worlds (2017)—while in parallel directing conventional, mostly european, operatic repertoire in opera houses and festivals both in europe and in the united states. recently sharon’s position in the world of conventional opera in the us was institutionalized when he became director of michigan opera theatre, while at the same time remaining artistic director and leader of the industry. on a different note from these north american composers and directors, there are at least a few made-in-europe operas dealing more specifically with american culture, myths, and stereotypes, and in particular with the “wild west”: rosa: the death of a composer, a horse drama (1994) by louis andriessen and peter greenaway, and the collected works of billy the kid (2017–2018) by gavin bryars, to mention but two. operas and music theater pieces by glass/wilson, adams/sellars, reich/korot, anderson, andriessen/greenaway and bryars all offer some of the coordinates that enable me to map sweet land: to contextualize it and interpret it. 1 the quotation appeared on the industry’s twitter account (@industryopera), february 8, 2018, https://twitter.com/industryopera/status/961641708369854464. 277performances sound stage screen 2021/1 “the company that created invisible cities and hopscotch, now brings you a grotesque historical pageant that disrupts the dominant narrative of american identity”: this is the announcement on the industry’s website.2 sweet land, the industry’s latest operatic spectacle, was world-premiered on march 1, 2020, in los angeles state historic park. however, the performances were soon halted by the covid-19 pandemic. the cast and crew gathered on march 15 to film the show in an attempt to save it from premature disappearance, and the two videos documenting the piece have since been streamed on demand.3 in the course of the original performance the audience was divided into two groups so that each group could only see one part of the show. members of each of the two audience groups were expected to finish the story on their own as the experience of being excluded from the other group was an important part of the concept. i believe that this concept of exclusion was clear to all of those who were lucky enough to attend the live performance. for the rest of us, experiencing sweet land only through the video, the division is not apparent, though it becomes clearer after reading the program booklet. “sweet land … is conceived as an opera that erases itself: as the audience processes through the la state historic park, the space behind you disappears, in a musical and visual experience revealing the mechanism of historic erasure. the audience is split on diverging tracks through a park to experience contrasting stories of america and its founding.”4 the two halves of the audience never actually saw the same show. consequently, there are now two stream-on-demand videos designed to mimic the live experience of seeing two sides of the same story. while reading about the divided audiences, i decided to follow the initial concept of the creative team in their account of the live performance in los angeles state historic park, and consequently for the purposes of this text i have focused mainly on the first online video. the other side of the story remains to be explored. to clarify the distinction between the two performance tracks, and the two subsequently made videos, i should list their contents. the work is in five parts. the first is named “contact” (music by raven chacon and du yun, libretto by douglas kearney), and here the audience has not yet 2 “sweet land,” the industry, accessed september 30, 2020, https://theindustryla.org/ sweet-land-opera/. 3 “sweet land: a new opera by the industry,” vimeo, march 17, 2020, http://stream.sweetlandopera.com/. the videos were edited by geoff boothby and produced by comotion. 4 lindsey schoenholtz, “meet the voices of sweet land”, the industry (blog), december 2, 2019, https://theindustryla.org/meet-the-voices-of-sweet-land/. https://theindustryla.org/sweet-land-opera/ https://theindustryla.org/sweet-land-opera/ http://stream.sweetlandopera.com/ http://stream.sweetlandopera.com/ https://theindustryla.org/meet-the-voices-of-sweet-land/ reviews278 sound stage screen 2021/1 been divided. after “contact,” the first audience group is assigned to “feast 1” (music by du yun, libretto by aja couchois duncan) and the second group to “train 1” (music by raven chacon, libretto by douglas kearney). the two groups reconnect at “the crossroads” (music by both yun and chacon, and improvisations by carmina escobar, micaela tobin and sharon chohi kim). after that the audience is divided again for “feast 2” (music by chacon, libretto by kearney) and “train 2” (music by yun, libretto by duncan), and at the end they all go back to the starting point for the final scene “echoes & expulsions” (music by chacon and yun, libretto by duncan and kearney). as in the previous operas by the industry, sweet land is site-specific. for example, the opera for headphones, invisible cities, was performed at los angeles union station, which is freighted with symbolic meaning in relation to the treatment of minorities by californian society.5 this is because the site originally housed chinatown, part of which was torn down in order to make way for the station. the urban planning historian david sloane talks about this urban intervention in an artbound documentary about the making of invisible cities. he says that “it was an act of white dictation, of power within the city and it is the symbol of the way that california had struggled with racial minorities, particularly asian minorities, for decades. in all those ways union station is a very complicated social space as well as a spectacularly beautiful built space.”6 similarly, the los angeles state historic park, also in a chinatown neighborhood, takes center stage in sweet land, since it too has a complex history related to immigrants—it used to be one of the busiest immigration stations for newcomers arriving to the city from the east. “in the sweet land program booklet and pre-show literature, much is made of the fact that la state historic park where this performance takes place sits roughly where the native american tongva village yaang-na and its cornfield once lay—an area replete with memories (many tragic) close to downtown and the original pueblo.”7 so the universal—yet at the same time specifically north american—story of “hosts” and “arrivals” in sweet land finds its 5 the industry’s invisible cities is the subject of megan steigerwald ille’s article “the operatic ear: mediating aurality” on this very same issue of sound stage screen (pp. 119– 143, https://doi.org/10.13130/sss14186). 6 “invisible cities”, artbound documentary, kcet, accessed october 2, 2020, 06:44– 07:15, https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/episodes/invisible-cities. 7 gordon williams, “the industry 2020 review: sweet land,” operawire, march 12, 2020, https://operawire.com/the-industry-2020-review-sweet-land/. https://doi.org/10.13130/sss14186 https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/episodes/invisible-cities https://operawire.com/the-industry-2020-review-sweet-land/ 279performances sound stage screen 2021/1 ideal partnership in this piece of land and in the historical layers of meanings it holds together. the opera is staged in a series of temporary structures designed by tanya orellana and carlo maghirang, all sitting lightly on the soil of the park, and easily removed. two of them are of a circular shape, and we have an impressive bird’s eye view of them at the beginning of the video. duality is one of the keywords for an understanding of this opera. there are two librettists (kearney and duncan), two directors (sharon and cannupa hanska luger, who is also costume designer), and two composers (yun and chacon). but there is more to sweet land than demonstrating how these several pairs work towards the same goal. the most important dimension of duality for the authors of this project concerns exclusion from the pair, and a resulting imbalance between the two sides. the focus is on how one feels and functions when not being “inside” and/or when one is not in a position of power. the authors, in other words, want to project their dialogue as a means of learning about each other’s experience. in the trailer for sweet land sharon announces the company’s turn towards the topic of americanness: “the industry has often taken the audience on diverging paths and telling different narratives simultaneously. sweet land is the first time that we are using that tactic to talk about american history … this opera is all about a reckoning with our american identity. that we really look at the myths around who we are and try to dismantle that”.8 in sweet land the question of what it means to be american is posed openly. however, it appears to me that several of the industry’s earlier pieces are equally about american myths and identity, even if that precise question is not brought up so directly. it is hard to imagine hopscotch, an opera for twenty-four cars, set anywhere other than the united states, and particularly los angeles. automobility, the use of automobiles as the major means of transportation, and the role of cars in daily life are all tightly connected to experiencing a los angeles—and more broadly an american—culture.9 another opera, war of the worlds, based on the 1938 radio drama created by orson welles, also raises particular questions germane to us culture, and especially the “country’s troubled relationship with truth.”10 those operas 8 yuval sharon in “sweet land trailer,” youtube video hosted on the industry home page, accessed august 29, 2020, 00:22–00:33, 02:15–02:24, https://theindustryla.org/sweet-landopera/. 9 see cotten seiler, republic of drivers: a cultural history of automobility in america (chicago: the university of chicago press, 2008). 10 jessica gelt “war of the worlds to invade disney hall and the streets of downtown http://theindustryla.org/sweet-land-opera/ http://theindustryla.org/sweet-land-opera/ reviews280 sound stage screen 2021/1 also look at the american myth in one way or another. but just why it is important for north americans to “really look at the myths around who we are and try to dismantle that” at this particular moment is the truly interesting question, and it needs to be answered in light of the political, pandemic, ecological, and other crises, as well as the racial, class, gender, and other inequalities still present in contemporary american society. “central to the project is the diversity of its voices”, emphasizes sharon. and indeed, the spectrum of various cultural heritages that various artists bring to this piece is impressive. “composer raven chacon is from the navajo nation and advocates for indigenous composers and musicians … du yun is a chinese immigrant whose recent work is rooted in a lack of understanding and empathy around immigration. … librettist aja couchois duncan is a mixed-race ojibwe writer with a focus on social justice. douglas kearney is a poet whose writing, in the words of bomb magazine, ‘pulls history apart, recombining it to reveal an alternative less whitewashed by enfranchised power.’ co-director cannupa hanksa luger is a multi-disciplinary installation artist of mandan, hidatsa, arikara, lakota, austrian, and norwegian descent.”11 all those “other voices” give off intriguing creative reflections that make the whole piece glitter with variegated color and light. for me, the question is what, if anything, holds the whole operatic tissue of such diverse creative voices together, and prevents the whole structure from falling apart? the answer that first comes to mind after watching the video is the role of stereotypes. the story, despite its non-linear structure, is quite stereotypical. there are hosts and there are arrivals. the arrivals arrive and start to trouble the hosts. this is confirmed musically when one of the main arrivals starts to sing with his countertenor voice. so the arrivals represent authority, order, and constructed tradition. hosts on the other hand, are actually “the others” for arrivals. and the music of the hosts is accordingly exotic–often modal, full of various “non-operatic” vocal peculiarities, and seasoned with the unpredictable, the experimental, and the unfathomable. a workable synthesis, a real cohabitation between two sides—operatic (conventional) and non-operatic (experimental, exotic)—is somehow not truly achieved for most of the opera. thus, the fragmented musical structure and the various musical l.a.” los angeles times, november 8, 2017, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/laet-cm-la-phil-war-worlds-20171108-story.html. 11 “sweet land,” yuval sharon’s personal website, accessed september 15, 2020, https:// www.yuvalsharon.com/#/sweet-land/. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-la-phil-war-worlds-20171108-story.html https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-la-phil-war-worlds-20171108-story.html 281performances sound stage screen 2021/1 languages and references add more to the cacophony of voices than to their synergy. the circumstance of the forced marriage between the arrival jimmy gin (scott belluz, countertenor) and the host girl makwa (kelci hahn, soprano) becomes “the screen” through which stereotypes of power in terms of gender and race are projected. the marriage scene is particularly rich with such references as efforts are being made to reuse stereotypes while trying to make them grotesque. it is a mechanism that remains stuck in the process, so that the stereotypes, rigid as they are, overshadow the intention to question them. the naturalistic acting of the operatic characters in “feast 1” and “feast 2” represents another stereotype. the characters assume postures and gestures of a “realistic” type, but realism in opera is a complicated issue, as singing invariably deconstructs the realism. with exaggerated naturalistic acting and conventional operatic singing, what happens in feasts is probably even more grotesque than the authors wanted it to be. to my surprise, given that the opera seeks to reinvent myths of american history and its people, including their struggles and their powers, i find the most striking section to be the one that features animals and monsters, including coyotes and immortal, wiindigo-cursed evil spirit with an appetite for human flesh (they come from the folklore of first nations algonquin tribes). monsters and animals are also “others,” in this case other than human. but unlike the line between hosts and arrivals—which is stereotypical and predictable, based as it is on the power that comes with colonization—that between animals/monsters and humans affords the authors more subtle opportunities, especially in the vocal sphere. “the crossroads” features two coyotes (carmina escobar and micaela tobin) and a wiindigo (sharon chohi kim). this part of the opera is rather short, lasting less than three minutes in the video. however, the video footage has been subject to some montage editing, so that what we see on the screen and what we hear at the same time is not synchronized, and the line between the singing body and the sung voice becomes blurred. that desynchronization is interesting and telling. the most impressive figure is wiindigo, who is depicted as an anthropomorphic creature with long black and white fur covering the entirety of its body, and (curiously) with a huge mouth and visible teeth at the back of the head (see figure 1). the mouth is half opened, and all kinds of screams and choking sounds are assigned to it in sharon chohi kim’s vocal improvisations. the desynchronization poses all kinds of questions, and works surprisingly well, as (for a short time reviews282 sound stage screen 2021/1 at least) both musical and visual elements of the opera escape the world of realism. the wiindigo creature becomes all mouth, all voice. it claims the right to have a voice, a right that is usually the exclusive preserve of the human domain, since monsters, like animals, are normally not considered to have a voice. wiindigo’s chocking sounds, combined with the howling improvisations of two singing coyote figures, constitute the deepest, the most “knowing” moment in sweet land, the moment at which those who normally are not allowed to have a voice finally sing. it is the moment when sweet land manages to escape from stereotypes, not taking the voice for granted and asking crucial questions about who owns the voice, both for singing and, metaphorically, for being human, and why. these are the questions that yuval sharon places at the heart of sweet land: who is telling america’s story? how can opera participate in an experiential “re-write” of that story? what can music and theatrical representation rectify that history books or documentaries cannot? and the most important question of all: how can the process of creating this work of art reflect the society we actually want to create?12 12 the industry, “sweet land workshop,” the industry (blog), may 21, 2019, https://theindustryla.org/sweet-land-workshop/. fig. 1 sharon chohi kim as wiindigo. still frame from the video trailer of sweet land by the industry. https://theindustryla.org/sweet-land-workshop/ https://theindustryla.org/sweet-land-workshop/ 283performances sound stage screen 2021/1 i find coyotes and the wiindigo monster the true heroes of this operatic quest for a new relationality. they are removed from stereotypes, realism, and conventions. they manage to reach beyond the history books and the documentaries; they are activists and poets at the same time. they fight metaphorically for their voice, a different voice that can also sing, together. they are the brave “others” who can make a difference, at least in this opera. 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, dramaturg, 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 (2015), operofilia (2018) and einstein on the beach: opera beyond drama (co-edited with john richardson, 2019). she is currently preparing the co-edited volume (with kris dittel) singing beyond human. her latest achievement as a dramaturg is: limbo, an opera (tel aviv, 2019) and that same year she co-curated (with k. dittel) the exhibition “post-opera” at tent, rotterdam. reviews book reviews andrew f. jones. circuit listening: chinese popular music in the global 1960s. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2020. 304 pp. isbn 9781517902070. timmy chih-ting chen andrew f. jones’s circuit listening: chinese popular music in the global 1960s marks the culmination of his three-decade exploration of chinese popular music, rounding out the trilogy which began with like a knife: ideology and genre in contemporary chinese popular music (1992) and yellow music: media culture and colonial modernity in the chinese jazz age (2001).1 running through these three volumes are the dialectics of mass-mediated sonic warfare. in like a knife, it is the ideological struggle between two competing genres around the time of the tiananmen square student movement of 1989: state-sanctioned popular music (tongsu yinyue) disseminated through mass media, and subversive, subcultural underground rock music (yaogun yinyue) represented by cui jian at rock parties. popular music is here compared to a double-edged sword, which can be used both for propaganda purposes and to protest against hypocrisy and oppression and construct an authenticity-oriented alternative public sphere. in yellow music, it is the ideological conflict between the “decadent sounds” of li jinhui’s yellow music or sinified jazz since the late 1920s, and nie er’s left-wing revolutionary mass music (qunzhong yinyue) in the wake of the january 28 incident of 1932, when japanese forces attacked shanghai’s zhabei district. 1 andrew f. jones, like a knife: ideology and genre in contemporary chinese popular music (ithaca: cornell east asia program, 1992); andrew f. jones, yellow music: media culture and colonial modernity in the chinese jazz age (durham: duke university press, 2001). sound stage screen, vol. 1, issue 1 (spring 2021), pp. 265–273. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. doi: 10.13130/sss15389. reviews266 sound stage screen 2021/1 as a book about the cold war, circuit listening not only picks up where yellow music left off—yellow music’s post-1949 exile to hong kong and taiwan, revolutionary songs’ monopoly in the loudspeaker soundscape of socialist china between the 1950s and 1970s, and the return of the repressed soft, sweet love songs from hong kong and taiwan such as teresa teng’s in deng xiaoping’s “reform and opening” era in the late 1970s—but also proves ambitious in mediating between two seemingly irreconcilable global musical events during the cold war contest in the introduction: the first is the beatles’ live studio performance of “all you need is love” which culminated “our world,” the first worldwide satellite broadcast on june 25, 1967. the other is the maoist anthem “the east is red” emitting from china’s first satellite on april 24, 1970. for jones, the capitalist/communist, entertainment/propaganda divides are bridged by the transistor technology, which connects and diffuses the global 1960s sounds of miniaturized and portable music. transistor circuits engender jones’s concept of circuit listening, which harks back to yellow music’s attention to the materiality of media technologies such as the gramophone, wireless broadcasting, and sound cinema. circuits not only enable but also restrict circulation of music, which makes circuit listening a malleable and playful framework for both “open circuits” linking hong kong, taiwan, the chinese diaspora, japan, the west, and the “closed circuit” of revolutionary china monopolized by the communist party. chapter 1, “circuit listening at the dawn of the chinese 1960s,” opens with the aerial aspirations in the opening number—“i want to fly up to the blue sky”—of the hong kong mandarin musical air hostess (evan yang [yi wen], 1959), starring “mambo girl” grace chang, who embodies not only postwar socioeconomic mobility but also linguistic and musical mobility. the chapter ends with the tragic ending of the hong kong mandarin musical because of her (wong tin-lam [wang tianlin], evan yang [yi wen], 1963), in which grace chang’s fatal fall prefigures the real-life plane crash in taichung, taiwan that killed loke wan tho, head of the mp&gi studio, which produced the self-reflexive air hostess and because of her, featuring the capitalist circuit along which mobile women and musical genres travel. jones listens to not only how afro-caribbean-derived genres like mambo and calypso circulated in the hong kong mandarin musicals of the late 1950s and the early 1960s, but also how “mixed-blood” taiwanese ballads covered japanese enka with taiwanese lyrics in the black and white taiwanese-language musicals throughout the 1960s. the latter was relegated to a more limited, local, and regional (albeit transnational) circuit of 267books sound stage screen 2021/1 taiwanese (southern min, hokkien) communities under the ruling kmt’s “mandarin-only” (1945–1987) language policy. chapter 2, “quotation songs: media infrastructure and pop song form in mao’s china,” is concerned with how a wired broadcasting network of loudspeakers as media infrastructure both disseminated and displaced chairman mao as media effect, penetrating the soundscape of rural china during the cultural revolution. the quotations of chairman mao (“little red book”) were set to music between 1966 and 1969 with the use of hooks drawn from the yellow music tradition in republican shanghai. the infrastructure of wired loudspeakers lacking bass determined the “high, fast, hard, and loud” sound of the era in duple march rhythm for effective transmission. for jones, the maoist media effect within this closed circuit was nevertheless diffused globally, as seen in jeanluc godard’s la chinoise (1967), which captures the affinity between propagandist quotation songs and the beatles-derived yé-yé (yeah-yeah) fever of the french 1960s. in the following four chapters, jones approaches the global 1960s through the medium of taiwanese music. chapters 3 and 4, the most original contribution of this study, celebrate the creativity in the cultural logic of belated covers and pirated copies, respectively. chapter 3, “fugitive sounds of the taiwanese musical cinema,” should be situated in the recent wave of digital restoration of taiwanese-language films (taiyupian) by the taiwan film and audiovisual institute since 2014. a close reading of the wen shia (b. 1928) vehicle goodbye, taipei (1969) was likely made possible by the film’s restoration in 2016. as part of the last and only surviving film of the ten-film series “wen shia’s drifter chronicles,” the prologue sequence of goodbye, taipei serves as an invaluable “intermedial archive” documenting and summarizing the nine preceding lost films. the film addressed its northbound rural-urban migrant audiences not only through wen shia’s chaplin-derived drifter image, but also through its eclectic soundtrack featuring instrumental covers of anglo-american pop songs and on-screen performances of taiwanese covers of japanese hits by wen shia and his band, the four sisters. chapter 4, “pirates of the china seas: vinyl records and the military circuit,” tells the fascinating story of how taiwanese pirate records of anglo-american music relied on u.s. military bases and gave rise to the guitar-driven taiwanese campus folk movement in the midto late 1970s and 1980s (discussed in chapter 5, “folk circuits: rediscovering chen da”). in 1947, it was hsu shih in the company of his student wen shia at the tender age of 20 that had transcribed and arranged chen da’s signature hengchun reviews268 sound stage screen 2021/1 folk tune “sixiang qi” or “su siang ki,” two decades before hsu tsang-houei and shih wei-liang’s 1967 field recordings of chen da as part of the folk song collection movement. the final chapter of the book, “teresa teng and the network trace,” begins with the infrastructure of beishan broadcasting wall, built in 1967, on the frontline island of quemoy (kinmen). taiwanese military broadcasting stations such as this one weaponized teresa teng’s sweet voice from 1974 to 1991 in a psychological and sonic warfare subverting the socialist sensibility and soundscape across the straits. circuit listening is written in such an engaging style that it inspires the detective work of an audiovisual readership, which involves sourcing the songs, records, movies, and other artefacts mentioned in the book on youtube and elsewhere, practicing the methodology of circuit listening, and excavating both overt and covert circuits and routes of how locally-inflected global vernaculars travel, in order to trace their remediation and reception history. to give an example, i would like to take issue with jones’s analysis of grace chang’s performance of “taiwan melody” in air hostess (discussed in chapter 1), which he claims was “composed by yao min with no reference to local musical traditions” (40) and “reputedly based on the melody of a cantonese popular song” (p. 216 n24). his misattribution of “taiwan melody,” following hong kong shidaiqu (mandarin pop) specialist wong kee-chee, points out the complex and circuitous networks and processes of remediation and reception. “taiwan melody” has been heard as japanese, taiwanese, and cantonese to different audiences depending on their audiovisual histories and access to audiovisual artefacts. in air hostess, the diegetic motivation for “taiwan melody” (grace chang’s taiwanese colleagues request a song from her as a gift and she complies by singing “a taiwanese song she just learned” on a local trip) and its very name give us a clue to its close connection to taiwanese folk songs and its uneasy relationship with japanese colonial past. “taiwan melody” is a mandarin cover of the first major hit of postwar taiwan, a “folk” love song entitled “night in a southern city” / “night in the city of tainan” 南都之夜 (1946). the song was composed by hsu shih 許石 (1919–1980, discussed in chapter 5) with taiwanese lyrics by cheng chih-feng 鄭志峯, and starts with the line “i love my sister.” hsu composed “night in a southern city” in 1946 upon his return from musical education in japan “so that taiwanese people can sing songs in their own language.”2 such decolonizing sentiment seems at odds 2 the early history of “taiwan melody” is briefly documented in a 1961 article by tsai mao-tang, collected in a 1980 memorial issue for tsai, “jin sa wu nianlai de taiwan liuxing 269books sound stage screen 2021/1 with the claim in the 1960s that the song was influenced by japanese music. according to tsai mao-tang’s 蔡懋棠 1961 article, hsu shih adapted this faux folk song from the first major hit of postwar japan, “the apple song” (ringo no uta, 1945), a new film song performed by namiki michiko in shochiku’s breeze (soyokaze, sasaki yasushi, 1945).3 however, a close comparison between “the apple song” and “night in a southern city” suggests that the latter is not so much an adaptation as a new composition.4 or, to be more accurate, “night in a southern city” was adapted from hsu shih’s “song for the construction of a new taiwan” 新臺灣建設歌 (1946) with taiwanese lyrics by hsueh kuang-hua 薛光華, which begins with the line “i love my beautiful island.” in a ttv (taiwan television enterprise) interview, hsu shih recalled that taiwan’s song circles in 1946 were saturated with japanese military songs, so much so that in order to compose “songs of our own” he started collecting folk songs.5 “song for the construction of a new taiwan” was the first piece resulting from hsu’s folk song collection effort, which reinvented indigenous musical materials while resisting the inevitable japanese influence in postwar taiwan. as c. s. stone shih points out, hsu shih’s insistence on composing original taiwanese songs went against the postwar trend of covering japanese songs in taiwanese.6 in 1946, hsu shih performed “song for the construction of a new taiwan” with tsai jui-yueh 蔡瑞月 (1921–2005), the mother of modern dance in taiwan, presenting the premiere of her dance piece “new construction” 新建設 at miyako-za theater 宮古座 in tainan, taiwan.7 “song for the construction of a new taiwan” was not popular until it ge” [taiwanese popular songs for the past 35 years], the taiwan folkways 30, no. 2 (1980): 68. 3 see joseph l. anderson and donald richie, the japanese film: art and industry (princeton: princeton university press, 1982), 159. see also michael k. bourdaghs, sayonara amerika, sayonara nippon: a geopolitical prehistory of j-pop (new york: columbia university press, 2012), 12. 4 music historian huang yu-yuan suggested in a private communication that “hsu shih insisted on not borrowing from japanese songs in his taiwanese ballads so i find it disrespectful to claim ‘night in a southern city’ was adapted from ‘the apple song.’” 5 see lin lan, “wo ai wo de meimei ya: ‘taiwan xiaodiao’ zuoqu jia xu shi” [i love my sister: the composer of “taiwan melody” hsu shih], ttv weekly 890, october 28–november 3, 1979, 44. 6 see c. s. stone shih, “entangled identities: the music and social significance of hsu shih, a vanguard composer of taiyu ballads,” in eva tsai, tung-hung ho, and miaoju jian, eds., made in taiwan: studies in popular music (new york: routledge, 2019), 75–89: 75. 7 shih, “entangled identities,” 80–82. reviews270 sound stage screen 2021/1 was adapted into a love song, “night in a southern city,” and became the first hit of postwar taiwan.8 the earliest recording of “night in a southern city” was perhaps a light music arrangement in the style of rumba, issued by hsu shih’s own label queen records as c3003 between 1956 and 1957.9 to further complicate the dialectics between local and japanese musical traces, “night in a southern city” was performed as a duet between hsu shih and liao mei-hui 廖美惠 at cathay theater in taipei as part of postwar japanese jazz queen ike mariko’s 池真理子 concert tour in march 1961. it appeared on the b-side of “folksongs of taiwan,” released by hsu’s own label king records (klk-59, 1962–1964, see figure 1) and performed live as a duet between hsu shih and ike mariko singing consecutively in taiwanese and then together in japanese (klk-003, 1968 and 1974).10 the original score and lyrics of “song for the construction of a new taiwan” were rediscovered in 2016 and presented anew in a 2017 exhibition at the national museum of taiwan history in tainan curated by huang yu-yuan 黃裕元 to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the february 28 incident of 1947.11 as to why “taiwan melody” has been misattributed to a cantonese melody, the reason would be that the popularity of “night in a southern city” engendered at least three cantonese covers in hong kong: “a star loves a moon” 星星愛月亮 with lyrics by chow chung 周聰;12 “old love is like a dream” 舊歡如夢 with lyrics by pong chow-wah 龐秋華 (1928–1991);13 one 8 shih, 80. 9 this information was provided by music historian huang yu-yuan based on teng-fang hsu’s collection. 10 for the score, lyrics in taiwanese and japanese, introduction, and nine record versions of “night in a southern city,” see huang yu-yuan, geyao jiaoxiang: xu shi chuangzuo yu caibian geyao qupu ji [ballad symphony: hsu shih’s composition and compilation of songs] (taipei: azure culture, 2019), 16–18. 11 on february 27, 1947, the beating of a female cigarette vendor and the killing of a bystander led to a protest and uprising against the corruption of the ruling kmt government the following day. on march 8, kmt troops from mainland china arrived and killed around twenty thousand taiwanese, which led to four decades of martial law (1949–1987) known as the white terror. see sylvia li-chun lin, representing atrocity in taiwan: the 2/28 incident and white terror in fiction and film (new york: columbia university press, 2007). 12 performed by chow chung and hui yim chau 許艷秋, released by the wo shing co., ltd. 和聲唱片 in 1961. 13 performed by tam ping man 譚炳文, included on a long-playing vinyl record entitled “connie chan po-chu’s songs,” 陳寶珠之歌 released by fung hang records ltd. 風行唱片 in 1971. “old love is like a dream” appears on “connie chan po-chu’s songs,” fung hang records ltd. fhlp-154, 1971. 271books sound stage screen 2021/1 year after the death of lyricist pong chow-wah, “old love is like a dream” was propelled to popularity through its inclusion in the film 92 legendary la rose noire (jeffrey lau chun-wai, 1992). the song was performed on screen in a karaoke fashion by wong wan-sze, petrina fung bo-bo, and tony leung ka-fai (synchronized to the voice of lowell lo), coming full circle as a film song like “taiwan melody.” furthermore, circuit listening is not just about the 1960s past but also about its relevance to the present and future, which has significant potentials for cultural policy, curatorial practice, and future research. the fugitive cultural forms of the taiwanese-language music and films of the 1960s have been fixed and made permanent by film preservation and restoration in the digital age. but the laborious and manual search for the fugitive sounds and images started during the analogue era. in a roundtable discussion about the rise and fall of taiwanese-language films between 1955 and 1962 titled “how to preserve taiwan cinema’s cultural heritage” convened at the chinese taipei film archive by its then director ray jiing on june 24, 1989, film critic and educator chang chang-yan mentioned how the neglect of taiyupian prompted a program he was curating with film critic alphonse youth-leigh for the taipei golden horse film festival in december 1989. the program was supported by ray jiing as the first step toward a long-term collection, preservation, and research of taiwan’s local film culture. the chinese taipei film archive was then transformed into taiwan film institute under film scholar wenchi lin’s leadership, who initiated the restoration of taiyupian including goodbye, taipei (discussed in chapter 3) along with classics such as king hu’s dragon inn (1967), a touch of zen (1971), and hou hsiao-hsien’s daughter of the nile (1987). taiwanese cultural policy under president tsai ing-wen since 2016 has emphasized local taiwanese consciousness and culture, thus the once marginal circuit of taiyupian has gone mainstream with the promotion and vision of film scholars chen pin-chuan and wang chun-chi as the second and current directors of the taiwan film institute (now taiwan film and audiovisual institute) after lin. wang’s research interests revolve around gender, sexuality, feminist studies, and taiyupian studies, which have gradually emerged from a male-centered, mandarin-dominated cultural landscape in the chinese-speaking worlds. circuit listening’s emphasis on taiwan resonates with the current trend-setting cultural policy and curatorial practice and should be brought into dialogue with recent scholarship, such as the special issue of the journal of chinese cinemas coedited by chris berry and mingyeh t. rawnsley in 2020, monographs by su chih-heng in 2019 and lin reviews272 sound stage screen 2021/1 kuei-chang in 2020 on taiyupian;14 a ph.d. dissertation by pien-pien yen in 2019, an anthology coedited by eva tsai, tung-hung ho, and miaoju jian in 2019, and monographs by hung fang-yi and peifong chen, respectively, in 2020 and teng-fang hsu in 2021 on taiwanese music.15 the collective and creative efforts in collection, preservation, restoration, research, curation, and consumption of audiovisual artefacts have created and will create new experiences and memories of audiovisual readership and spectatorship in expected and unexpected circuits. 14 see chris berry and ming-yeh t. rawnsley, eds. “taiwanese-language films (taiyupian),” special issue, journal of chinese cinemas 14, no. 2 (2020); su chih-heng, wu ganyuan de dianying shi: cengjing taiwan you ge haolaiwu [once upon a time in hollywood taiwan: the life and death of taiwanese hokkien cinema] (taipei: springhill publishing, 2019); lin kuei-chang, taiyupian de moli: cong gushi, mingxing, daoyan dao leixing yu xingxiao de dianying guanjianci [the power of taiyu pian: keywords of taiwanese-language cinema] (taipei: guerrilla publishing, 2020). 15 pien-pien yen, “reception of jazz music in taiwan,” ph.d. dissertation, national chengchi university, 2019; eva tsai et al., made in taiwan; hung fang-yi, qupan kai chu yi rui hua: zhanqian taiwan liuxing yinyue duben [lost sounds of pre-war taiwanese popular records] (taipei: yuan-liou publishing, 2020); peifong chen, gechang taiwan: lianxu zhimin xia taiyu gequ de bianqian [singing taiwan: changes in taiwanese songs under continuous colonization] (taipei: acropolis publishing, 2020); teng-fang hsu, liusheng qupan zhong de taiwan: tingjian bainian meisheng yu lishi fengqing [taiwan in phonograph records: listening to the music and historical moments of a century] (taipei: national taiwan university library, 2021). fig. 1 “taiwan melody” in air hostess (1959) is a mandarin cover of the first major hit of postwar taiwan, a “folk” love song entitled “night in a southern city” / “night in the city of tainan” 南都之夜 (1946) composed by hsu shih 許石. “night in a southern city” appears on “folksongs of taiwan,” king records klk-59-b, c. 1962-64. © national museum of taiwan history 273books sound stage screen 2021/1 timmy chih-ting chen is research assistant professor at the academy of film, hong kong baptist university. he received his ph.d. from the university of hong kong with the dissertation “in the mood for music: sonic extraterritoriality and musical exchange in hong kong cinema” (2016). chen has published in a companion to wong kar-wai (wiley blackwell), the journal of chinese cinemas, surveillance in asian cinema (routledge), the assassin (hku press), and frames cinema journal. × review contents footnotes review essay sound theory at grand theory’s end review of sound objects. edited by james a. steintrager and rey chow. durham, nc: duke university press, 2019. 312 pp. isbn 9781478001454 (paperback). julie beth napolin sound stage screen, vol. 2, issue 1 (spring 2022), pp. 161–169, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2022 julie beth napolin. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss18311. in an issue of feminist media histories dedicated to genealogies, roshanak kheshti begins the entry on “sound studies” with an aside, one with enormous weight for the humanities and social sciences today: “the interdisciplinary ‘studies’ that formed on the margins of the traditional disciplines toward the latter part of the twentieth century—american/ethnic studies, cultural studies, film studies, gender/women’s studies, performance studies—experienced feminist sound studies interventions.” [1] the second part of this point, that feminist sound studies first emerged as an intervention in other studies, is preceptive enough, but the first part is tenacious in its critical importance: “studies” first appeared in marginal relation to the disciplinary, which is afforded master status. but if the “studies” are subordinate, struggling for recognition and autonomy, then what is at stake in the appellation “theories”? much ink has been poured over the question “what is sound studies,” and in their recent collected volume sound objects, james steintrager and rey chow sidestep this question to arrive somewhere in the middle of this already well-established transdisciplinary conversation. “the collective thrust of this volume is to make a multifaceted case for thinking the topic of sound objects theoretically,” steintrager and chow write in the introduction (1). if the general object of sound studies is sound, then what kind of object is sound, particularly when the distinction between subject and object is one of the most entrenched distinctions in theory across the disciplines? this volume is not the first in which steintrager and chow appear as a duo, the collection being the third installment of an “ongoing project and intellectual collaboration” (vii) that began in 2011 with a special double issue of differences. [2] the project, they say in the introduction, was motivated by the spirit of curiosity and without yet knowing that “sound studies was rapidly congealing into a field—if, thankfully, not quite a discipline” (vii). this spirit—curiosity around the not-yet congealed—guides the volume, both as a whole and in its individual contributions. the volume does not attempt to discipline sound studies in the way that an anthology or handbook might, nor does it strive for a shared lexicon, but it does reinforce a famous place of beginning (i hesitate to say “foundation”): french composer pierre schaeffer’s term objet sonore, “usually translated into english as ‘sound object,’” french film theorist michel chion writes in the book’s opening chapter. it is a term that is “both one of the most frequently mentioned … and one of the most misunderstood” of schaeffer’s concepts, chion continues (23). i won’t attempt to define it here; that is the purpose of the volume. i will only say that, as the editors also point out, the question of the sound object comes to the fore with sound recording technology—i.e., the possibilities afforded by isolating and repeating sounds without visual reference, which schaeffer called the “acousmatic.” these possibilities pressurize the imputed relationship between sound and source. the problem of (mis)understanding schaeffer’s concept is not one of translation but application, particularly because schaeffer’s research was meant to guide new compositional practices, and these applications—as the volume’s contributors, ranging from comparative literature to communications and to musicology, demonstrate—far exceed what schaeffer imagined or intended. the misunderstanding, but also reimagining, was compounded when schaeffer’s thought moved out of mid-century france into anglophone contexts, but also into scholarly and artistic contexts almost totally unrelated to the compositional one in which schaeffer found himself as an artist and researcher. with this, it is safe to say that sound objects is both about schaeffer’s thought and the transdisciplinary reverberations of his theory, and not about him at all. steintrager and chow’s editorial beginning is a strategic one. isolating schaeffer’s concept as they do, they seem to suggest that to do sound theory today is in some way to come up against, even indirectly or without intending to, the sound object theorized by schaeffer. and this place of the beginning of sound theory is slippery. it’s a point of contact—a relation, another term favored by many of the volume’s essays—and not a foundation. it is important to say here that much of the thrust of the volume comes out in its brilliant groupings where themes emerge slowly over the time of reading and as a series of echoes and relations. if the volume is careful never to state exactly what sound theory is, then the claim nevertheless manifests in its collective refusal to “arrest a paradox,” write contributors jairo moreno and gavin steingo (178). this refusal is one that many of the essays implicitly associate with the notion of sound as a peculiar kind of object. for example, moreno and steingo reserve a place in thought, in agreement with chion, for “sound qua contradiction” (179). this claim is echoed by georgina born, who finds in sound “nothing but mediations—indeed, of nonlinear, recursive mediations of mediations” (196), and also by veit erlmann when he suggests that “sound is not an object but an abject” (159). returning to the misunderstood concept “sound object” introduces an ambiguity of aim that is never quite resolved in the volume, and with good reason. it would be incorrect to say that the book is dedicated to or is even a study of schaeffer’s thought, but steintrager and chow nevertheless position him as what one of the book’s commentators, dominic pettman, calls a “pioneer” (and as chion points out, he “invented” the book’s central term). schaeffer appears in the book as a primary text excerpted in interview with chion in the book’s opening section titled “genealogies.” consider, in contrast, how excerpts from schaeffer’s opus traité des objets musicaux (1966) are translated and reprinted in christoph cox and daniel warner’s seminal volume audio culture —first published in 2004 and expanded and updated in 2017—where schaeffer appeared amongst a wide group of other writers working under a similarly hybrid identity of artist-writer-theorist. [3] cox and warner presented schaeffer as one of many, some preceding and postdating him, and also as part of a longer story about modernism. one does not walk away from audio culture thinking that schaeffer is the progenitor of sound studies, and not only because cox and warner assembled their volume well before sound studies was a term. [4] instead, schaeffer appears in sound objects in a hitherto difficult-to-access interview that took place much later in his career with chion (who might be called one of his chief inheritors), and not in print but over the radio. the remarkable interview is here newly assessed and reframed by chion, who now finds himself redefined on the other side of a long career as a formidable figure (forefather) in “sound theory.” in other words, the volume’s very organization seems to say that to study a beginning of sound theory, you have to study what jacques derrida would call its dissemination, making schaeffer something of a trace. theory, as intellectual history, is traditionally revered as a story between fathers and their sons; and if the paternal metaphor is irksomely present at the beginning of the volume, it quickly gets deconstructed in practice. the editors’ contrasting approach has something to do with the definition of sound theory as it mounts not directly but through its execution across the chapters. in the interview with chion, translated by steintrager (also one of chion’s major translators in another intellectual history), schaeffer reminds his audience of his first identity as a researcher in music theory, which was not yet the sound theory that, i suggest, steintrager and chow are arguing schaeffer initiated not in himself but afterwards. what’s more, many of the chapters could be thought without him, making schaeffer a strange kind of progenitor. the book ends with an essay by david toop and thus where the book began, at the point of contact between sound theory and sound practice, toop sharing this hybrid identity. at the same time, the name schaeffer is nowhere to be found in toop’s essay. in fact, he ends by declining to provide footnotes, wary of academizing his contribution, wary of the very status of sound theory. “i am loath to quote from academic works for fear this will be taken as supporting evidence for a proposition that is entirely personal and speculative,” toop writes of his moving diary about drawing as sound (255). he instead hopes to reckon artistically (theoretically?) with what he calls, quoting julia kelly, “‘a temporal dynamic of the just-passed, of an ungraspable and unfixable lost moment’” (255). in these and other moments, i wondered if the book was not finding obliquely in sound what is left of theory after deconstruction. in the introduction, steintrager and chow remind readers of theory’s resistance to the philosophical currents of existentialism and, more importantly for this volume, the visualism of phenomenology. the linguistic turn of structuralism and poststructuralism—in many cases redeemed by this volume for sound and, again, not directly, but through its practices—was a move from image to text. in any case, sound is, steintrager and chow write, “forever playing the role of the disruptor” of the visual (4). it is against this backdrop that steintrager and chow redefine schaeffer as a (sound) theorist, one who was paying attention to the subject/object distinction differently. the mid-century research of schaeffer coincides geographically and chronologically with the emergence of what john mowitt summarizes as the tradition of “grand theory” instantiated by marx and freud (211). at the same time, steintrager and chow show, schaeffer’s work represented an investment in phenomenology while also revealing “deep structuralist affinities” (8). while schaeffer began “to categorize sound objects in morphological and typological terms” (9), he could not help but coincide, if implicitly, with foucault’s poststructuralist project in the order of things (le mots et les choses, 1966), appearing the same year at schaeffer’s treatise on musical objects . in other words, schaeffer is a theorist, part of the milieu of foucault and derrida, but those entanglements were never explicitly addressed or thought by his project. in this way, with the essays taken together, the volume picks up on foucault’s genealogical impulse to historicize what he called the “unthought” structures of prevailing schemata (9)—in this case the sound object and its guises. readers should not approach this volume hoping for an intellectual history. instead, they will be prompted forward through the chapters by themes that, loosened from context, “resonate.” [5] reading across the chapters, we do learn about how the sound object was constitutive of the subject for freud in the form of what jean laplanche, adapting jacques lacan, calls the “enigmatic signifier” (mowitt’s essay); about the thingliness of music and the instrument as reified objects (jonathan sterne’s and toop’s essays); of the unstable status of evidence of the object outside of its perception (steingo and moreno’s essay); how the subject/object binary introduces a tension between the human/nonhuman (born’s essay); of sound objects as they lay bare the myth of the unified subject or collective (michael bull’s essay). in each of these cases, the authors either invoke the older debate initiated by schaeffer or move beyond it. mowitt seems to summarize a collective view of the volume when he writes, “sound is precisely not what is retained. it is, instead, what leaks out, or ‘whistles’ between the limits of the imaginary and the symbolic as they frame the transcendental parameters of the speaking subject, of the human” (225). here the sound object appears to be something like the force of theorization itself. but what exactly is the relationship between sound theory and grand theory? the answer is not so clear, and readers have to attend to the ways that individual authors handle their material. in some moments, the answer seems to be that “sound” has always been a preoccupation of this tradition (steintrager returns to adorno, mowitt to freud, erlmann to julia kristeva, for example). this preoccupation only became evident later or, more precisely, recognized as “sound.” mowitt, bull, and chow retrieve a series of sounds from the pages of grand theory, a premise that, had it been collectively urged for by the authors, could amount to a retelling of theory as proto-sound studies—but that would be to miss the point. after reading the volume, i nonetheless wondered to what extent theory has always been sound studies, particularly if we are to believe martin jay’s thesis in downcast eyes (1993) that the history of theory is also the history of the denigration of vision. [6] steintrager and chow are aware that “sound theory” is itself a visual locution, theoria being a greek word for viewing. for more than one voice (2005), by italian philosopher adriana cavarero, a figure already established in ancient philosophy and feminist theory, was one of the first books to take as its object sound and to reassess the history of western philosophy and theoretical descendants on its basis. cavarero links theoria in plato’s lexicon to scientia as “seeing clearing after having sought to perceive.” [7] one might well ask what is possible for sound theory given theory’s origins in the discursive and linguistic turn? if theory is seeing clearly after having sought to perceive, a collection and division of objects into categories and classifications, then a theory based on sound would be based on the limits of theory itself, that is, hearing differently and ambiguously. at the very least, the question would have to remain open. steintrager and chow’s volume does not address the question of why sound studies now: the introduction abruptly transitions from the claim “theory itself must also proceed otherwise, with sound” (6), with a new section titled “sound objects: the problematic,” that is, its summary of schaeffer. but they do so without addressing the intellectual history in between. i asked myself, how did theory come to exhaust itself and find sound? this brings me to the volume’s importance in that it is the first to address (again, obliquely) the relationship between the linguistic turn and the sonic turn, and the tenuous relationship between sound studies’ debt to grand theory, particularly its white male inheritors, and the “other” studies. though fred moten’s name nowhere appears in sound objects , it is worth recalling, for a consideration of the meaning and existence of sound theory, that his book—largely classified in african american studies, yet a major contribution to what is now sound studies—came out in the same year as sterne’s the audible past (2003) (another now-canonical book in the field, though for very different reasons). [8] in a section titled “resistance of the object,” moten begins his magisterial in the break with a deconstruction of saussure’s suppression of sound, the scream of aunt hester, as a suppression of blackness. marx is not able to think through—or listen to, these two being intertwined in sound theory—“the commodity who speaks,” an inability that saussure inherits. [9] for moten, at the point of grand theory’s exhaustion, a black sound becomes audible and legible, the entanglements between race and theory being difficult to overestimate. thus, i want to suggest that even though the majority of the contributors to sound objects are white men, the organization and framing of the book resists the patrilineal metaphor that shapes the tradition of grand theory because (and one senses chow’s role here) something of it is actually postcolonial in its force. the volume touches on the postcolonial tout court in the middle section, titled “acousmatic complications,” where chow and pooja rangan (also teacher and former student) appear side-by-side, making this section something like the heart of the book. for chow, the acousmatic is compelling precisely to the extent that it supersedes the desire for the object (above all, the inner voice) to be “native” to its source. it turns out that when theory is thinking the subject and object relation, it is thinking acousmatically, chow convincingly argues, making the sound object the transdisciplinary phenomenon par excellence. in rangan’s brilliant essay, which offers a close reading of two films (julia dash’s illusions, 1982, and mounira al solh’s paris without a sea, 2007), she is careful to make a claim, in conclusion, on behalf of a series of terms coined by the essay. again, obliquely through a series of rhetorical moves, rangan wants to lay claim to or make legible an alternative intellectual history of sound theory, one where chow is to be found along with two contemporary female figures within african american studies and sound studies, nina sun eidsheim and jennifer lynn stoever. this grouping does not share the paternal metaphor of lineage traditionally attributed to the genealogy that also orients rangan’s essay (in this case, schaeffer, chion, and dolar). when rangan ends her close reading of two films by women of color directors, involving lip sync and colonized, racialized bodies both on-screen and acousmatically off-screen, she insists more than once that what she is proffering, by way of case study, is a series of “concepts,” such as “ventriloqual listening” and “the skin of the voice.” i am not sure it is correct to say these terms are concepts. the phrases enumerated seem to be something else, and this something else is important for the meaning of sound theory. for example, rangan credits eidsheim for conceptualizing “acousmatic blackness.” but race is not a feature of schaeffer’s thought (i’ve argued elsewhere that it is implied, though not directly stated, by chion’s thinking of darkness). [10] to go further, the term, as eidsheim uses it, is a citation and related to the academic writing of and eidsheim’s conversations with sound artist mendi obadike. [11] not having published this writing, obadike instead elaborates—theorizes?—acousmatic blackness in her work as a sound artist in the duo mendi + keith obadike. [12] this matrix raises questions of theory and practice in sound, of the slipperiness of citation, inclusion, and exclusion, once the patrilineal model of theory and discourse has left the scene. just in the way it becomes entirely appropriate for other essays in steintrager and chow’s volume to theorize the sound object without ever citing schaeffer, sound theory here surfaces as a break from theory’s abiding and paternal logic of inheritance. in a stunning move, rangan shows us how the ideological inheritance of the theory of the sound object—whose beginning, schaeffer posits, is the master listening sessions to pythagoras behind a screen, notably a myth that schaeffer’s inheritors go on to repeat [13] —is the continued idealization of a source in its absence. to be sure, there is a struggle going on in sound studies, as in any study, for conceptual status, a struggle to reach beyond the study and to take on the portability of the conceptual object. what the book leaves me with as a reader, as someone invested in theory’s remains, is the sense that, in sound, we approach the limits of what grand theory is supposed to be in its transmissibility. in the end, schaeffer—the forefather and master—gets loosened from the object of his thought for the “sound object” to live a much more interesting and varied life. [1] roshanak kheshti, “sound studies,” feminist media histories 4, no. 2 (2018): 179. thank you to amy cimini, who shared this essay with me and helped me grasp its importance. [2] rey chow and james a. steintrager, eds., “the sense of sound,” special issue, differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 22, no. 2/3 (2011). [3] audio culture revised edition: readings in modern music , ed. christoph cox and daniel warner (new york: bloomsbury, 2017; fist. publ. new york: continuum, 2004). see also pierre schaeffer, treatise on musical objects: essays across disciplines, trans. christine north and john dack (oakland: university of california press, 2017); orig. ed. traité des objets musicaux: essai interdisciplines (paris: seuil, 1966). [4] in 1995, i was a teaching assistant in the class that launched the book, and the class was titled “contemporary music and musical discourse,” signaling its distance in time from what we now call sound studies. discourse, particularly in its foucauldian valence, is a term that steintrager and chow claim as a central component of (sound) theory in the opening pages of their volume. theory is a discourse whose sedimented enunciations must be historically and institutionally analyzed (1). [5] here i mean to invoke the comparative mode of study described in my the fact of resonance: modernist acoustics and narrative form (new york: fordham university press, 2020). [6] see martin jay, downcast eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth-century french thought (berkeley: university of california press, 1993). [7] adriana cavarero, for more than one voice: toward a philosophy of vocal expression , trans. paul a. kottman (stanford: stanford university press, 2005), 36. [8] see fred moten, in the break: the aesthetics of the black radical tradition (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2003), and jonathan sterne, the audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction (durham, nc: duke university press, 2003). [9] moten, in the break, 1–24. [10] see napolin, the fact of resonance, 20. [11] see nina sun eidsheim, the race of sound: listening, timbre, and vocality in african american music (durham: duke university press, 2019). see mendi obadike, “low fidelity: stereotyped blackness in the field of sound” (phd diss., duke university, 2005). this dissertation is cited in relationship to “acousmatic blackness” in brian kane, sound unseen: acousmatic sound in theory and practice (new york: oxford university press, 2014), 228–29n26. [12] for samples of projects, see the artists’ website “mendi + keith obadike,” blacksoundart.com. [13] see kane, sound unseen, for a convincing study of how schaeffer mythologizes pythagoras. × review contents introduction on transcendence footnotes review essay identity, loss, and singing transcendence after the end of the world review-essay of the film opera upload and the chamber music theater piece the book of water by michel van der aa. * jelena novak sound stage screen, vol. 2, issue 2 (fall 2022), pp. 137–48, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2022 jelena novak. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss19973. upload (2019–20), film opera, 85’. stopera (dutch national opera, opera forward festival), october 1, 2021, amsterdam. cast, stage julia bullock—daughter roderick williams—father ensemble musikfabrik, cond. otto tausk cast, film katja herbers ashley zukerman esther mugambi samuel west claron mcfadden david eeles tessa stephenson team michel van der aa—composer, director, librettist otto tausk—musical director theun mosk—scenography & lighting elske van buuren—costume design madelon kooijman, niels nuijten—dramaturgs the book of water (2021–22), chamber music theater piece for actor, string quartet, and film, 60’. dutch premiere: muziekgebouw aan ‘t ij, november 11, 2022, amsterdam. rotterdam performance: de doelen, november 14, 2022. video recording: live performance, november 16, 2022, tivoli vredenburg, utrecht. cast and team samuel west—narrator/geiser (live) timothy west—geiser (film) mary bevan—corinne (soprano, film) amsterdam sinfonietta kamermuziek michel van der aa—composition, director, script madelon kooijman—dramaturgy fergus mcallpine—play out operator bart van den heuvel—light design judith de zwart—costume design joost rietdijk nsc—director of photography film producer—arjen oosterbaan | eastbound films i dedicate this text to the memory of my father tomislav novak (1951–2022) the father, without his daughter’s knowledge, and unable to bear the emptiness caused by the loss of his wife, decided to end his biological life and continue his existence in digital form. in a special clinic, he scheduled the process of uploading, which meant transferring his entire physical and mental being into a computer file. he then underwent a brief training designed to prepare him for the (im)possibilities of a potentially infinite digital existence. after the data transfer command was given, the father became an intangible being in perpetuity. he turned into a kind of avatar, a peculiar video entity that continues to live (so-to-speak) in a transparent screen two-dimensionality. the cognitive functions and emotional make-up of the father are preserved in this new variant, which continues to develop and “live.” in the father’s understanding of the world, everything remains the same even though his body no longer exists. however, his rejection of the body still led to some fractures, especially in his relationship with his daughter. she did not know about her father’s intention to move permanently to the digital sphere and resents him for not consulting her on such an important decision. she suffers greatly and is confused by her relationship with a father she will never be able to hug again. this is a brief plot summary of the film opera upload, composed and directed by michel van der aa. due to covid-19, the performance of the opera was postponed several times. however, after the abolition of almost all social distancing measures in the netherlands, it was finally possible to once again present concerts, as well as theater and opera performances; and on friday, october 1, 2021, the performance of upload took place at the dutch national opera in amsterdam. it was a full house with an electric atmosphere, since we were all deeply moved and excited to be able to return to attending live performances. at a reception following the première of upload, the director of the dutch opera sophie de lint spoke in a trembling voice about the damage done to the performing arts world during the period of pandemic isolation. it turned out to be the first reception held in this opera house in six hundred and thirteen days. the turbulent emotions in the air felt like a kind of epilogue to the performance itself: a feverish proof of the necessity of physical communication and togetherness. during the period when the performance was postponed, a film version of the opera was made, available on medici.tv. it serves a useful documentary purpose, but it is no substitute for a live performance, given that the work rests on a questioning of different media, and explores peculiar perspectives on, and relations between, these media on stage. all this is largely lost in the medium of film. van der aa is one of the most prominent european creators of opera and music theater. he is a composer and director, and often also the librettist for his works. for upload he wrote the libretto, composed the music, and directed the piece. he assumed the same responsibilities for the book of water, though in this case he wrote the script, not the libretto, since most of this music theater piece is not sung, though it involves music throughout. van der aa is interested in topics related to identity and technology. thus, for example, in his opera one (2003), he explored the boundaries between a human performer and a vocal/visual cyborg to the point where it became impossible to distinguish who was actually singing on stage and where the boundaries of that person were drawn. likewise, in the opera after life (2005–06) the protagonists are deceased people situated in a kind of purgatory. they stay there for a short period as they search for their most decisive memory, since they have the right to take only one memory with them into eternity. the drama of this work is rooted in the difficulties of choice that the characters face, and in defining their new identity in relation to a single event/person/relationship. in the opera eight (2019), which only one audience member at a time could experience in any one session, the boundaries between performers, audience, and technology are porous. with full vr gaming gear on, i experienced eight guided by different female characters. journeying from inaccessible mountain peaks and precipices, through caves and encounters with ghostly voices, i eventually found myself under the table with a virtual girl who sang while blinking with transparent, scary eyes. at some point, i realized that it was the decision of the artist that i should become myself one of the opera’s protagonists.[1] upload arises from a science fiction world similar to the ones that informed these pieces. in the book of water, however, there is no science fiction context, only “rain … pouring down.” [2] what happens on the level of the intimate human drama associated with the main character is superimposed, and with growing tension, on what happens outside, in nature, as the flood caused by extended periods of heavy rain creates the framework and the atmosphere within which the seven chapters/scenes of this piece unfold. the book of water is based on the novel man in the holocene (1979) by max frisch. the erosion of the mind (dementia) in the case of the book of water takes place in parallel with the erosion of the planet and the climate, a topic that resonates with contemporary environmental debates. in both operas there is a precondition of sorrow, depression, loss, and melancholy. dementia, which eventually overwhelms any sense of identity, is often preceded by depression. and maybe the fiction of upload is a kind of future dementia, a dementia of the body, where it is the body itself rather than memory and cognitive functions that destroys a sense of individual identity. the main character of the book of water is an elderly widower called geiser. he appears as an old man, played by timothy west in the film, whose image is projected on various screens on stage. the character of geiser as a younger (middle-aged) man, played by west’s son samuel, is also featured in the live performance. an intriguing dialogue is established between past and present, old age and middle age. since the actors are father and son, the physical resemblance between them is considerable, and this adds a particular piquancy to the basic concept, in which we observe them on film and on stage at the same time. like the father from upload, geiser has lost his wife. he slowly sinks into the chasm created by grief, dementia, and a stroke, while the water levels at his house and everywhere else steadily rise. conscious of his memory loss, the main character tries to keep an encyclopedic record of the ideas, images, and situations that are of special importance for him. as the water level rises, he slowly moves his important belongings from the ground floor to the attic. he is alone, although we see his daughter visiting him at the end of the piece. it appears that his only company at the time of the flood is a salamander that has sneaked into his bathroom. symbolically, it suggests that the relationship with nature is fundamental—a given—on this planet. it is impossible to escape from it. we are never alone. nature, the planet, climate change, and other global phenomena (hyperobjects) are always with us. [3] in the film we see an old geiser, engaged in domestic activities, in his detached house, cutting up parts of the books, remembering his wife, watching tv, putting out the water, making pagodas of crisp bread in the kitchen, gardening, moving stuff upstairs, going out for a walk, and so on. it is only towards the end of the film that his daughter arrives, concerned that she had not been able to make contact with her father. the younger version of geiser talks about his older self, comments on his behavior, complains about the weather, thinks about the golden section, amongst other things. at the beginning he shares with the audience a poetic typology of thunder: the twelve-volume encyclopedia explains what causes lightning, but there is little to be learned about thunder; yet in the course of a single night, unable to sleep, one can distinguish at least sixteen types of thunder: the simple thunder crack. stuttering or tottering thunder: this usually comes after a lengthy silence, spreads across the whole countryside, and can go on for minutes on end. echo thunder: shrill as a hammer striking on loose metal and setting up a whirring, fluttering echo which is louder than the peal itself. roll or bump thunder: relatively unfrightening, for it is reminiscent of rolling barrels bumping against one another. drum thunder. hissing or gravel thunder: this begins with a hiss, like a truck tipping a load of wet gravel, and ends with a thud. bowling-pin thunder: like a bowling pin that, struck by the rolling ball, cannons into the other pins and knocks them all down; this causes a confused echo. hesitant or tittering thunder (no flash of lightning through the windows): this indicates that the storm is retreating. blast thunder (immediately following a flash of lightning through the windows (…) groaning or lath thunder: a short, high-pitched crack, as if one were snapping a lath, then a groan, short or prolonged (…) chatter thunder. cushion thunder: this sounds exactly like beating a cushion with flat hands. skid thunder: this leads one to expect either bump or drum thunder, but before the windows begin to rattle, the noise slips over to the other side of the countryside (…) crackle thunder. screech or bottle thunder, often more frightening than blast thunder, though it does not make the windows rattle (…) whispering thunder. [4] the text of the script is rambling and prolix, and it sometimes approaches the absurd, as in this example. its length and density also carry meaning, arguably expressing the trauma of memory loss, of the loss of the house, and indeed the loss of the whole planet/world as we know it. the text intersects with various situations in the film and on the stage itself, and it is that intertwining of different realities, quite different from a conventional narrative, that actually tells the story. just as in our daily lives, we jump from analogous (we might say old-fashioned) activities such as cooking to all kinds of screens, mediated meetings, typed talks, delegated tasks, projected gatherings, transmitted performances, postponed presences, delayed intimacies, resulting in a radical reinvention of what used to be called “togetherness.” and this fractalization of life, its transmission to all kinds of screens acting together and performing togetherness on our behalf, is actually the central theme of both pieces. on transcendence upload begins in a darkened hall. only the voices of a daughter and her father are heard, almost whispering (in english) the names of body parts and the stereotypes associated with them: (…) daughter expand lungs support bones (…) taste tongue sprain ankle grab wrist shake heart bash fist carry weight reach arm father spread fingers blink eyes light smile daughter sweat fever father race thoughts aim view pick up scent (…) daughter tingle cheek (…) father see crimson hear chirping relish memory daughter hug shoulders (…) [5] physical and emotional intimacy and tenderness are displayed in this remembrance of body parts and of the memories associated with them. the scene gradually lights up and we see the daughter and the silhouette of the father. she remembers growing up with her father and the closeness they built. that closeness is deeply grounded in bodily reciprocity. she remembers her father’s shoulders carrying her when she was tired, his hands holding her as she learned to walk, the prickle of his unshaven beard when he kissed her. we also see the father-avatar on stage. although it exists as a projection on the screen, this projection is larger than the natural size of the human body and is prone to “wasting,” a pixelation of the image, and some other distortions that make it dynamic and create the illusion of some special “living” entity (see figure 1). physically, the projected father looks like, and does not look like, himself, but his voice remains unchanged and his thoughts and feelings are intended to remain true to the “original.” during the opera, we sometimes see the singing father (roderick williams, baritone) only as a projection, but at other times we see williams on stage, albeit with his singing voice synchronized with a projection of the digital father. fig. 1. roderick williams and julia bullock as father and daughter. michel van der aa, upload, still frame. in this multi-layered performance—shifting between the performer singing live, interacting directly with the character of his daughter (julia bullock, soprano), and their more complicated interaction through the introduction of screen projections—van der aa literally performs the drama of postponed and displaced realities on stage, while at the same time “talking” about them in connection to the father’s and daughter’s new virtual relationality. the drama between father and daughter is punctuated by parts of the story that unfold in the upload clinic. through these encounters, the audience is confronted with the true implications of the father’s decision—legal, moral, and other. these scenes, unlike the family dialogue, are cinematic, and are spoken rather than sung. they convey a lynchian aesthetic marked by both absurdity and humor. one candidate for upload, for example, is a researcher who has received a grant to digitize himself because it is allegedly in the interest of the status quo to preserve his invaluable knowledge of the holocene in this way. here, and elsewhere, van der aa represents humor as one means of refuting the absurdity caused by the tendency of homo sapiens to complicate both its individual existence and life on the planet in general. fig. 2. roderick williams and julia bullock as father and daughter. michel van der aa, upload, still frame. in the key scene of the opera, the final one, all the vertical screens and splintered perspectives are turned off and suddenly, in a darkened hall, a huge, partly stretched canvas is lifted like a sail over the audience. on it, we see the original, pre-digitized father and daughter in close-up, lying facing each other, singing again those words depicting parts of the body, as at the beginning of the opera (see figure 2). the size and intimacy of the image and the abrupt shift of perspective come as a sobering blow. stripped down in form, and conveying an almost painful melancholy, this scene conveyed to me a sense of the characters as almost palpable in their intimacy. it was as if members of the audience had sneaked in like voyeurs. many questions related to the new relationships and new circumstances caused by physical distancing are raised by this move, not least those relating to the warmest moments of the book of water, when corrine, the daughter of geiser, finally finds him, towards the end of the opera. the interrogation of identity, fear, memory, loss, nature, knowledge, erosion, and singing all takes place in the book of water in dialogue with an unexpected extension of the performance into a fluent 3d illusion created on stage. on the right side of the stage, we see the string quartet and the sound technician, while on the left we see an angular structure with translucent glass forming a kind of cabin. that structure provides tridimensionality with the film projection. it gives the projected image profundity, drawing the spectator and the live protagonist on stage, into the reality of the film. this intriguing game between different spaces and realities is seductive, and in many ways it is the motor of this piece. the game of involvement and in/dependency between all of them becomes palpable while making us part of the simulacra. fig. 3. timothy west and samuel west, as old and young geiser. michel van der aa, the book of water, still frame. among the impressive, hyper-realistic moments is the one when samuel west as young geiser enters the angular glass structure and initiates the projection of the rain storm. at that moment, he starts talking about various types of thunder (as in the text quoted earlier). this illusion of a storm appears to be so accurate in its faithfulness to the original natural spectacle of the rainstorm that it conveys a sense of kantian sublime. it is not the audiovisual theme, the rain storm itself, but the way it is performed—its efficiency, sharpness, elegance, velocity—that produces this effect of transcendence. the forcefields in upload—between simultaneous screens, projected and living entities, father and daughter, technology and art, speech and singing—are resolved through music. the ensemble musikfabrik, placed on stage and led by the conductor otto tausk, presented a convincing and finessed reading of a musical score that oscillates between electronic and symphonic sound. in recent works, the musical language of van der aa have slipped into various non-classical environments. here he makes reference to techno music, which, by sharpening the edges and the volume of the sound, excitingly conveys the psychological state of the characters. the daughter’s slow aria is touching and reminiscent of henryk górecki’s melancholic gestures, notably in his symphony of sorrowful songs (1977). it is as though all the sorrow and loneliness that the protagonists might feel is somehow absorbed by the music, in gestures of melancholy but not of pathos. in recalling those performances—trying not to be influenced by the recordings of upload and the book of water that have since become available—i clearly remember that actual singing appeared only twice in the book of water. and i remember, too, the special atmosphere of those arias—typical of van der aa’s vocal writing—with their combination of sustained notes sung non-vibrato, their sometimes considerable leaps in melodic line, and their quasi-improvised, non-directional rhythms, all informing and seemingly hovering over the ever-present feeling of melancholy. however, and not to my surprise, i did not immediately remember if both arias were sung from the screen or if it was just one of them. actually, in my memory i had started to doubt whether there was any live singing in the piece at all. in fact, we hear both arias coming from the screen. in the first, we do not see who is singing. the singing comes from the film, and the song appears as a memory, as it occurs in geiser’s head while he comes across the photo of his deceased wife (scene 3). in the second, the singer is geiser’s daughter corrine. we see her in the house in the film, while at the same time we hear her voice (scene 7). she is sometimes synchronized with her voice, so that she appears to be singing in the house of her father. at other times we hear her singing, but we only see her silent image, with closed mouth, going around the house. the figure of the daughter was incorporated so smoothly into the whole experience that i became indifferent to whether she was projected on screen or performing live on stage. in my memory she was there, although i was not sure how exactly. her presence and the aria she sang constituted the most tender moment of the performance and embodied the warm hug she gave to her father when she finally found him. my difficulty in remembering the media and protocol of singing is telling. the world we live in has changed, it seems to tell us. the notion of liveness still keeps evolving, even as the modes of re/mediation changes. we all learn the new rules and adapt as we evolve. both upload and the book of water are about loss—loss as a learning process. they are about how we learn to lose (father, memory, home, body, planet) while at the same time entering new worlds. the final verses sung by corrine are optimistic, although they introduce the pain of loss. despite the rays of divergent light (between digital and analog, life and death, memory and loss) the generosity of the sun is sustained:[6] my father, smiles at me in an unknown language. my father smiles at me. you diverge here, your intuitive gaze, imagined, understood, and lost. you diverge here, in shifting shadows, between sleep and dream. eternity, the sea fled away with the sun, between sleep and dream.[7] *  the short review “humor, apsurd i melanholija” that i wrote after the dutch premiere of upload for the belgrade weekly vreme, october 7, 2021, served as a departure point for the present article. this article was made possible through the support of cesem—centro de estudos de sociologia e estética musical da nova fcsh, uidb/00693/2020, and la/p/0132/2020, and the financial support of fct—fundação para a ciência e a tecnologia, i.p., through national funds. norma transitória—dl 57/2016/cp1453/ct0054. [1]  for more details about eight, see jelena novak, “eight, aus licht, and the unbearable lightness of being immersed in opera,” the opera quarterly 35, no. 4 (2019), 358–71. [2]  quote from the unpublished libretto of the book of water by michel van der aa. [3]  hyperobjects, according to timothy morton, are “entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.” some of them are global warming, climate, evolution, planets, capital, nuclear radiation. see hyperobjects: philosophy and ecology after the end of the world (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2013), summary. [4]  michel van der aa, the book of water, libretto, unpublished document. [5]  michel van der aa, upload, libretto, unpublished document. [6]  this reading of the generosity of a sun that is always giving, and not asking anything in return, is inspired by oxana timofeeva’s book solar politics (cambridge: polity press, 2022). [7]  michel van der aa, the book of water, script, unpublished document. × review contents footnotes performance review “there’s something missing here…” – milo rau, opera, and the search for the real (mozart) review of la clemenza di tito, music by wolfgang amadeus mozart, libretto by caterino mazzolà. orchestre de la suisse romande conducted by maxim emelyanychev. stage direction by milo rau. live streaming on february 19, 2021, gtg digital. creative team: anton lukas, set designer; ottavia castellotti, costume designer; jürgen kolb, light designer; moritz von dungern, videos; clara pons, dramaturg; alan woodbridge, choir director. cast: bernard richter, tito; serena farnocchia, vitellia; anna goryachova, sesto; cecilia molinari, annio; marie lys, servilia; justin hopkins, publio. carlo lanfossi sound stage screen, vol. 2, issue 1 (spring 2022), pp. 171–182, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2022 carlo lanfossi. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss18446. there’s no such thing as real opera. not that there is no ideal or genuine experience of opera. or even that opera is not “real”: of course it is, otherwise there would be no explanation for its stubborn persistence, against all financial odds, on the stages of every major opera house in the western realm. opera is very real for those who pay for it and for those who get paid for it. mozart, for instance, called the new version of the libretto for la clemenza di tito, which he set to music, a “vera opera”. not because it was (the) original: on the contrary, he thought it was “real” precisely because it was a heavily revised text which he believed would suit better his musico-dramaturgical taste. for mozart, opera was real when it let go of its own past. so, when the digital curtain opened for the new production of la clemenza di tito at the grand théâtre de genève and there was no music, no singing, only a few people dressed as artists/performers claiming, in spoken italian, that “there’s something missing here…” (“qui manca qualcosa…”), i was not surprised. fig. 1. serena farnocchia/vitellia and bernard richter/tito at the beginning of the show. still frame from the streamed performance on gtg digital (february 19, 2021). for many reviewers of this new staging by milo rau, however, that was just the beginning of a series of traumatic lacks. there appeared to be definitely something missing from this production of mozart’s clemenza: mozart himself. caught off-guard by the unexplainable absence of a composer who has been dead for more than two centuries, critics have blamed swiss-born, belgian-based, opera-virgin milo rau for a variety of sins: the swiss theater artist ventured into mozart’s la clemenza di tito in geneva and imposed on the opera whatever was in his head. mozart is forgotten in the process. [1] with the approval of the young conductor maxim emelyanychev, rau has drastically cut down mozart’s work: … a good part of the arias and a large part of the recitatives were replaced by spoken or on-screen biographical accounts. [2] we also came hoping to see mozart’s opera, and we really only get a side view of that. this tito—mozart’s one—is swamped in rau’s agitprop theatre: actually, you feel that maybe any text would have done for his purposes. … of course, [rau’s interpretation] is true. it’s just that, as mozart might have said, it’s not necessarily the slightly less teen-activist point [rau] was trying to make. [3] but opera and classical music are also much more, something which milo rau has no feeling for, and perhaps he doesn't even want to. [4] if we unpack the issues listed in this selection of digitally available reviews, the director is blamed for: cutting a good part of the opera’s recitatives (true, even though they were not even written by mozart); [5] cutting too many musical numbers (in truth, not a single musical number was cut, only a few da capo and small sections of the accompagnati, while the finale was featured twice and a bonus fantasia in c minor k.475 was performed by the conductor at the beginning of act 2, which amounts to the same or even more music than any other recent production of clemenza); [6] having extensively reworked the different sections of the metastasian libretto (spoiler alert: metastasio was already dead by almost a decade when mazzolà radically transformed the old 1734 libretto into a “ vera opera”, as mozart himself noted); [7] finally, having no predilection toward opera and classical music (there is no mention of the director’s feelings towards theater, which—last time i checked—the operatic genre belongs to). i believe this last issue to be not only at the very core of milo rau’s staging of his first opera, but also one that has serious implications for the survival of the genre as such. for the common association of opera to classical music is the product of a category mistake. “opera” is a genre of live theater inscribed through notation for future performances in which music plays a predominant (but not exclusive) dramaturgical role. “classical music” is a discoursive formation referring to a variety of social practices and cultural ideologies which is not limited to a specific musical genre, and whose body of works, its canon of representative exemplars, is constantly re-negotiated and in flux. thus, the problem is not whether milo rau cares or not about opera or “classical music” (whatever that is). the problem is that we care too much, to the point that we (european lovers of music from the past) are doing more damage than good. there is no opera, as long as we keep thinking about it as a relic to be preserved intact in a museum of historical musical artifacts, and we find unconceivable to adjust its content to say something about us, today, and to entertain the generations to come. which is what prose theater has always done and will: i don’t see anyone pointing to the critical edition of hamlet when it is staged in modern english with entire scenes and characters cut. for some reason, the same cannot be done with operas. the reasons put forward are many (historical relevancy, financial enormity, cultural distance, linguistic struggles, and so on). yet none of them really explains such stubborn refusal to allow stage directors to use (yes, use) a theatrical genre such as opera to interpret the world we live in (task, i must add, for which not much time is left given the current climate circumstances). such an obsession to keep opera free from what is presumed as “external” interference (stage directors coming from prose theater, dramaturgs coming from academia, artists coming from other musical cultures) is exactly that: an obsession, and as such it is in desperate need of analysis and consequently also a therapy. rau’s staging of la clemenza di tito makes brilliant use of the recent technological innovations of the grand théâtre de genève’s main stage, in particular the rotating system allowing a double-faced set to display two different planes of representation. the opening side is set as an art museum during a trendy vernissage (rau himself explains that it should resemble the haus der kunst in munich), [8] while the other side of the stage represents a dilapidated trailer park inhabited by marginalized communities struggling to survive after some post-apocalyptic disaster. dressed à la joseph beuys (tito), marina abramović (vitellia), and neo rauch (sesto), the protagonists of the play act as a posh-lib collective of artists whose leader, tito, is on a political mission to help the people from the other (side of the stage) by showing their desperate conditions with the aid of media coverage, philanthropy for the cameras, selfies complete with depictions of their misery, and artistic renditions of their everyday struggles, including dissent and a failed attempt at revolution. fig. 2. bernard richter/tito and anna goryachova/sesto arranging a photocall while visiting the “other” side of the stage (act i, scene 4). still frame from the streamed performance on gtg digital (february 19, 2021). in keeping with his previous works, and as a partial adaptation of the requests from his ghent manifesto, [9] rau plays with the post-dramatic tradition of contemporary theater by providing the audience — through titles, surtitles and video projections — with details regarding the staging itself: from the biographical background of the company and the local actors/extras to the interpretation of the opera’s late eighteenth-century historical context, and from the actor’s comments on how they feel as they re-enact traumatic gestures to the juxtaposition of different signifiers with similar signifieds (e.g., arias performed while screened interviews explore similar topics to those explored in the musical number). this relentless shifting of the dramatic planes, in which signified and signifier are constantly renegotiated and remediated (and whose point de capiton, to use a lacanian term, never seems to materialize), can certainly be tiring for a production which was intended for a streamed digital event. on experiencing it in front of a screen, the feeling sometimes is that of an overwhelming proliferation of dramaturgical angles and medial frames, leading to a potential confusion over what is going on. i suspect, though, that this is mostly a projection coming from those who have previous knowledge of the opera and who, inevitably, are drawn to disentangle every moment of the show and its many layers. this hermeneutical tour de force would likely be more easily dealt with by coming to it free of preconceptions and expectations informed by tradition. figg. 3 and 4. at the beginning of act ii, the actor gor sultanyan, interpreting the leader of tito’s militia, introduces himself and his son as descendants of a survivor from the 1915 armenian genocide. when he had to “kill” his son at the end of act i (at this point, he stops in a moment of commotion), he says he just did it, like he would have done any other scene. the son crosses the stage and gor holds out a hand to reach him, but the kid falls dead on the floor. mozart’s fantasia in c minor k.475 stops, gor comes back to the mic, and says: “this for me was the moment i understood my son’s talent.” he then proceeds with the hanging of the rebels, and the “opera” is restored. still frame from the streamed performance on gtg digital (february 19, 2021). it cannot be denied that, at times, mazzolà’s and mozart’s clemenza seems to stand in the way of rau’s project. but as should be clear by now, this is precisely the point: for a modern staging to interpret what it believes to be a relevant aspect of the play, worthy of modern reflection and critique, the historical frictions and the genealogical dispersions are unavoidable and even necessary. such dramaturgical juxtaposition of apparently discordant narratives, a trademark of rau’s directorial style, is far from gratuitous. while on a superficial level it makes theater a political act, a representation of societal struggles which—even after centuries—are still at play, it also allows rau to subject himself to a self-critique. the topic of human exploitation through artistic sublimation is obviously at stake when presenting your political views from the privileged stage of one of the most glamorous opera houses in one of the richest countries of the world: “obviously, this is self-criticism,” explains rau in the official making of video for the production, “so i asked myself, in the bourgeois system of the economy of feelings, and the real economy, is there a place for criticism? or is criticism itself just the capitalization of what is criticized?” [10] on a more subtle level, the simultaneous presentation of the stories’ inherent tensions—the constant feedback through which the present elaborates the past, après-coup—is what opera is (or at least should be): a visualization of the impossibility of the real (there is no real history, no real life, no real language on an operatic stage), a vocal performance of the indivisible remainder, a sonic rendering of the fourth wall. fig. 5. anna goryachova/sesto (act ii, scene 10). still frame from the streamed performance on gtg digital (february 19, 2021). to be accurate, moreover, this is not milo rau’s first encounter with opera. i can still feel in my body the emotional exhaustion and commotion i felt after attending his 2018 masterpiece la reprise. histoire(s) du théâtre (i). at the end of this play—a re-enactment of the april 2012 events and discourses surrounding the murder of ihsane jarfi, muslim and gay, in liege, but also a reflection on the role of re-enactment and theater in representing history and society—the actor impersonating the protagonist takes the stage alone to deliver henry purcell’s so-called “cold song” from king arthur (“what power art thou?”). performed over an electro-synth arrangement of the aria taken from the 1981 version by another tragic gay figure, klaus nomi, the actor’s voice—with all its frailty and the almost unbearable weight of the several histories chained to those words and notes—delivered what i believe was an instance of opera of the real, of the devastating impossibility for audiences to experience the same jouissance as the interpreter, and for the interpreter to experience the same jouissance as the interpreted. behind such a powerful embodiment of quintessential theatricality, there is a deep understanding of the theoretical implications of modern re-enactment and genre adaptation for contemporary society. in this, milo rau is not alone. directors coming from very different backgrounds such as barry kosky and romeo castellucci (not to mention peter brook), or companies such as the wooster group and third world bunfight, have all brilliantly demonstrated how “operatic” a show can be when deconstruction is explored to bring to the fore (rather than destroy) the core of a play. and rau is someone who takes very seriously not only theater and politics, but critical theory, too, the very same one that helped me disentangle (and ultimately enjoy) his staging of la clemenza di tito. formed as a sociologist under the guidance of scholars such as todorov and bourdieu, the director has always been vocal and self-conscious about the mechanisms governing his approach to theater and the politics of realism (a particularly cogent one in the case of opera): realism as an aesthetic method is a deficiency: namely, to accept you don’t know how to do it, but you have to keep trying no matter what. … realism is indeed something completely artificial, but also completely artistic. realism does not mean something real will be represented, but that the representation is itself real. —that a situation arises that carries all the consequences of the real for those involved, which is morally, politically and existentially open. [11] the tension between representation and the represented is explored by rau with an explicit reference to psychoanalysis: ultimately, what happens here [in theater] is the famous psychoanalytical phrase “je sais bien, mais quand même…,” or “i know, but still...”. thus, the main characteristic of human understanding is: “that everything is only an image, a play, and i am only an onlooker. but nevertheless…” … this “nevertheless” is, of course, the irrevocable, the so-sein—the essence—of the real (in the lacanian sense): these figures … fall out of the general symbolic agreement. [12] we were, of course, extremely relieved when the rwandan spectators [of rau’s play hate radio, a reconstruction of a rwandan radio broadcast, based on historical events] said, “it was exactly like that!” – although we didn’t completely understand what they meant because it wasn’t “exactly like that.” [13] such a dramaturgical translation of the freudian “fetishist disavowal” applies even more aptly to the operatic realm, as already noted by slavoj žižek in relation to wagnerian metaphysics and psychoses. [14] interviewed by clara pons, the dramaturg for his staging of clemenza, rau displayed an uncommonly deep understanding of opera’s peculiar dramaturgy: mr : what struck me when i first saw [la clemenza di tito] was that everything that is mentioned in it, everything that is talked about, none of it is in any way visible. there is talk of betrayals, disasters, putsch, and all these things are not in the opera at all. … [in opera] being political means being explicit. to make implicit things explicit, to make the invisible visible. … i chose to represent the elite (i.e., the main characters of the opera) as artists. they are not only locked together in their own bubble, but they also literally feed on the misfortune of others to create an art out of which they can make a living. this staging is therefore a mise en abyme of this process, a meta-fraud! i would even say an auto-meta-fraud because i include myself in this process. cp : how do you translate this into staging? mr : we must make what happens on stage real and concrete. one of the characters has to kill his son; another is stripped and his heart exposed, while an artist captures the image of the hanged men in a painting à la neo rauch. … it is the dream of a bourgeoisie in an enlightened politics, the elitist dream of a post-political utopia. it is a dream from which we are slowly waking up, a dream that we are currently finishing dreaming. … cp : so, there is no way out of this paradox for you? mr : at least not at the grand théâtre de genève or the wiener festwochen. institutions are built on this paradox, including opera. there is obviously the very positive aspect of the sign of equality that is placed between the value of individuals and the beauty of art. but for me, as a newcomer to opera, this institution implies a negative work, in the adornoian sense—i.e., that it represents the opposite of a utopia. … because of the very structure of opera, i have no elements to work with: i don’t have the rhythm, the text, the music, to fight against this “negativity”. i am the servant of the structure as it is, and i can only use this structure by showing something that is already in it, perhaps by showing what is false in it. but i cannot tell any other story than the one that the structure carries. this is what is “negative” in the process. even if i deconstructed, i could not bring another truth. so, i try to understand what i have to tell. this music is over 200 years old. you can’t transpose it or update it. … the choice of staging therefore thematizes the lie, the discrepancy between the discourse and the facts, in which we are fully involved. [15] a product of negative dialectics and an act of therapeutical resistance, the 2021 production of la clemenza di tito brings about much more than just a fresh take on eighteenth-century opera or the role of cultural politics and art in a postmodern (post-critical?) world. milo rau’s mozartian opera(tion) is a deliberate exposure of the gaps and lacks inherent to the genre’s production system, a re-enactment of its own constitutive deadlock. the 1791 clemenza, as one was constantly reminded of throughout the geneva production, came to light as an enlightened musical drama celebrating the ruler’s clemency at a time when a post-enlightened society was ready to behead their own masters. it was an outdated musical project in the first place, and mozart’s music underlined such discrepancy with its beautiful, passé style. the 1791 clemenza was “meta” long before milo rau’s: mozart and mazzolà showed their own nervous, aristocratic patrons the end of the opera seria culture. their clemenza was a radical look back to the origins of opera and to the intellectual genealogy of absolutism, which marked the genre’s slow but inevitable shift from the stage of aristocratic theatre to the bourgeois museum of canonical works. [16] given the deadliness of opera’s historical trajectory, rau’s staging of clemenza as a museum of realist art translates in lacanian terms as an imaginary mausoleum of real works, where the impossibility of the real is an almost ironic representation of art that has not been symbolized yet, of opera before its discoursification—a dramaturgy that is still able to evade the “stage to page” paradigm. the explicit political urgency of any of rau’s staging is not only directed at questioning the artistic exploitation of everyday traumas by cultural institutions and discourses, but it also functions as a generational call to free opera from its own historical impasse, to defend it against its devotees. figg. 6 and 7. final scene. still frame from the streamed performance on gtg digital (february 19, 2021). [1] “der schweizer theaterkünstler hat sich in genf an mozarts la clemenza di tito gewagt und der oper aufgesetzt, was in seinem kopf schwirrte. mozart geht dabei vergessen.” christian berzins, “milo raus erste opernregie: ein abend zum vergessen,” tagblatt, february 21, 2021. [2] “mit zustimmung des jungen dirigenten maxim emelyanychev hat rau mozarts werk drastisch zusammengestrichen: … ein gutteil der arien und ein großteil der rezitative waren ersetzt durch gesprochene oder auf dem bildschirm eingeblendete biographische erzählungen.” peter wolf-dieter, “anklage mit mozart – „la clemenza di tito“ als politische attacke an der oper genf,” nmz online, february 21, 2021. [3] robert thicknesse, “moving beyond the text—‘la clemenza di tito,’ geneva,” the critic, march 17, 2021. [4] “oper und klassik aber sind auch noch etwas anderes, für das milo rau kein gespür hat, vielleicht will er es auch nicht (wahr)haben.” reinhard j. brembeck, “kunstgeschwätz zwecks machterhalt—milo raus operndebüt als stream,” süddeutsche zeitung, february 21, 2021. [5] wolfgang amadeus mozart, la clemenza di tito, critical edition by franz giegling, neue mozart ausgabe, series ii, works for the stage, work group 5, vol. 20, foreword, x. [6] for a complete list of the musical numbers performed during the 2021 production, see la clémence de titus: opéra de wolfgang amadeus mozart, program notes, february 19, 2021, grand théâtre de genève, 22–23. the online streaming of the show (excluding the intermission) lasted ca. 2 hours and 25 minutes. rené jacobs’s 2006 recording—“nothing short of revolutionary [… as] it rehabilitate[s] the original score in its entirety”, claims the back cover—clocks in at 2 hours and 15 minutes (hmc 901923.24). [7] see ruth tatlow and magnus tessing schneider, “‘la clemenza di tito:’ chronology and documents,” in mozart’s “la clemenza di tito:” a reappraisal, ed. magnus tessing schneider and ruth tatlow, 1–32 (stockholm: stockholm university press, 2018): 13. [8] la clémence de titus , program notes, 39. [9] https://www.ntgent.be/en/about/manifest. [10] “évidemment, c’est une autocritique. je me suis demandé est-ce que dans le système bourgeois de l'économie des sentiments, est-ce qu’il y a là-dedans… et de l’économie réelle, y-a-t-il une place de la critique ? ou la critique elle-même est juste la capitalisation de ce qui est critiqué pour vendre cela après ?” grand théâtre de genève, “la clémence de titus – making of,” official video with interviews and backstage footage, uploaded february 18, 2021, 00:09:00–00:09:17. [11] milo rau, globaler realismus/global realism, trans. lily climenhaga (berlin: verbrecher verlag, 2018), 176–77. [12] rau, 172–73. [13] rau, 158–59. [14] mladen dolar and slavoj žižek, opera’s second death (new york: routledge, 2002), 114–17. [15] la clémence de titus , program notes, 39–41. [16] the obvious reference is to lydia goehr, the imaginary museum of musical works: an essay in the philosophy of music (new york: oxford university press, 1992; rev. ed. 2007). × review contents footnotes book review francesca vella. networking operatic italy. chicago: university of chicago press, 2022. 256 pp. isbn 9780226815701. luca battioni * sound stage screen, vol. 2, issue 2 (fall 2022), pp. 149–59, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2022 luca battioni. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss19974. francesca vella’s groundbreaking debut monograph networking operatic italy will certainly not go unnoticed across a wide spectrum of disciplines such as opera studies, reception, and performance studies. the author’s refreshing outlook and compelling prose contribute to making the text a must-read for any serious investigation of nineteenth-century italian culture. the question of mobility lies at the core of this book, and in particular the question of how movement came to play a role in articulating national discourses in nineteenth-century italy within the context of opera. on the one hand, vella’s intervention points to the long-standing culture of approaching italian opera exclusively through the rigid wide-angle lens of national discourses—an approach that ultimately erased identity pluralism and flattened dynamics of urban exchange and mobility. on the other hand, she touches upon the limitations of the “local” approach that looks at localisms as discrete entities completely disconnected from a broader national framework. in response to these restricting routes, vella proposes an alternative way that focuses on “how key aspects of an italian macro-identity were articulated through opera, both italian and foreign, in between distinct locations: liminal spaces that in turn transformed operatic ideas and aesthetics” (4). in other terms, by deflecting both a circular determinism—whereby operatic forms and national forces mutually inform each other—and a narrowed focus on cities as “discrete operatic milieus” (2), vella argues that discourses of identity-making were articulated in the liminal spaces, physical and/or imaginary, that operatic forms generated between locations. of note, this newly “liminal space” paradigm, very cogently articulated in the introduction, does not consistently bring the promised results in the body of the text and risks reinforcing the very local-national dualism that it is trying to overcome. for instance, the author argues that operatic relocations between cities are “a type of material interaction that challenges the notion that the peninsula’s urban centers altogether resisted the nation’s unifying impulses after 1861” (111). yet, a few pages later she points to the export of “local” products to other cities as battles for cultural supremacy, whose goal was far from any idea of national unity. the relocation of wagner’s lohengrin from bologna to florence actually guaranteed a new power position for bologna, while for florence “the whole trading operation risked undermining the prestige of a city that had itself once been preeminent in promoting “‘modern’ music” (114). perhaps a better way to reconcile the local and national dichotomy might be to rethink how this complex web of power relations informed or resisted nationalist discourses. furthermore, the presence of non-italian opera—for instance, meyerbeer and the parisian grand opéra —significantly complicates the picture. it is important to question what role this presence played for or against the italian nation-building process, and in what forms was italian opera resistant to this process. in the book’s introductory lines, the author positions her work within the field both by separating it from a series of methodological frameworks that have crystallized in the study of italian opera and by setting forth its continuity with the new scholarly trends in opera studies. she then introduces the reader to the themes that will counterpoint the whole text. unlike traditional introductions, vella does not unfold the synopsis of each chapter in an orderly and mechanical fashion. instead, in the introduction, the selected five case studies dialectically interface with the author’s narrative, creating an interesting holistic continuum. furthermore, vella defines plainly the terms that are key to her study. for instance, in her discourse, she reconfigures “mobility” not only as “vast, fast, and spectacular movements” (3) but as those inconspicuous movements and mechanisms involving both cultural and material artifacts. she clarifies that “media” in her study includes “transportation and communication technologies,” as well as “newspapers, wind bands, and the human voice” (6–7). furthermore, she posits the terms “italy” and “italian” “not as expressions of an existing political reality but as references to shared cultural markers” (5). ultimately, she situates her work in conversation with a broader framework of studies and against a tendency in italian studies of considering the italian case as distinctive and unique. although in a footnote vella mentions the resonance of bruno latour’s work in her approach to material and human actors, perhaps for the economy of this review it is worthwhile to recall here the relevance of actor-network theory (ant), as a good deal of this book bears such theoretical framework’s watermark. in broad terms, ant challenges the notion of society as a pre-fixed entity wherein non-social actors are embedded and framed. rather, in the words of latour society should be decoded as “one of the many connecting elements circulating inside tiny conduits.”  [1] thus, material elements as well as nonhumans agents contribute to the assemblage of any given actuality as much as human factors. following this reasoning, opera is both diluted in and produced by all the ingredients accounted for by vella’s monograph —from meyerbeer’s operas to marching bands, single operatic numbers, replicas, adelina patti’s voice, technological devices, and railways. furthermore, from an ant point of view, an interesting question here is not so much whether opera in nineteenth-century italy has to be understood locally, nationally, or globally, but how and the extent to which opera mobilized and was moved from one locale to another locale across shifting networks of human and nonhuman factors. by broadening the framework, ant theory might help us to better understand the politics of nineteenth-century european culture with its local and national rivalries as well as forms of “transnational cosmopolitanism” . [2] in addition to this, vella’s book echoes and elaborates the sonic implications of the spatial turn in musicology and sound studies by leaning toward an understanding of sounds as socio-material assemblages “located simultaneously in the materials and practices of production, transmission and reception (hearing and listening).[3] in chapter 1, vella explores a wide range of mobilities intersecting with the city of florence’s urban spaces in the 1850s. the tuscan capital premiered the first italian stagings of many of giacomo meyerbeer’s operas. as the author argues, over the course of an opera’s mobile life, the mapping of operatic objects (designed for a specific city or theater) onto the locality of a different place exposed tensions and sites of resistance. far from being passive reconstitutions of the parisian model, the florentine replicas of meyerbeer’s operas set in motion a complex set of technological and cultural negotiations. in other words, in the grand opéra-centric system, operatic mobilities gave agency to peripheral florence, allowing the tuscan city to constantly reposition itself into the european framework of urban modernity. for vella, meyerbeer’s operas contributed to setting in motion a paradigm shift from “an event-oriented operatic culture … to an understanding of operas as permanent works amenable to endless reproduction” (28). in other terms, operas became mobile objects that, in their journey across the globe, negotiate both their presence and their provenance locally. the complex social, political, and cultural imaginary that the object “opera” carried contributed to an incessant remapping of places within the virtual geography of the time. in light of the plurality of mobilities that revolved around opera productions, vella reconsiders modern interpretations of meyerbeer’s operatic cosmopolitanism, generally attributed to the composer by european critical discourses from the 1830s onwards. in vella’s argument, this was neither the result of the projection of external values onto his works nor the outcome of the composer’s struggle to overcome cultural and aesthetic hierarchies. rather, his cosmopolitanism was one of the many points of convergence for the various and multifaceted discourses that his operas circulated as commodities in a widespread interconnected global web. furthermore, from this very first chapter vella begins to shake the traditional reception theory’s tree. in fact, by departing from a constricted traditional view of newspapers as the site of critical responses by contemporary audiences, she argues that they “were central to the articulation of urban identities” (26), for the material assemblage on the page “encapsulated contemporary urban experience” and reflected “the fragmentation of city life” (26–27). thus, musical criticism and newspapers not only played a crucial role in the cultural and political mediation process but, by placing opera within a broader web of physical and imaginary relationships, they also contributed to the networking of operatic objects across space and time. one of the high points of the monograph, chapter 2 focuses on the circulation of a single operatic object—the marcia funebre from errico petrella’s opera jone (1858). although this opera has since disappeared from the operatic repertoire, in the second half of the nineteenth century petrella’s funeral march was a truly popular hit. by retracing the circulation of the march, vella unveils the intricated matrix of meanings and functions that its movements generated. vella starts her analysis of the march from the original operatic context—jone’s act 4, scene 1. on the stage, a marching band accompanies glauco to his death. the ensemble begins its performance offstage, thus producing an aural cue that later gets transformed into a visual cue as the band bursts on the stage, manifesting its diegetic presence. soon, the orchestra joins in and complicates the diegetic/non-diegetic dynamics at work by introducing “a stereophonic effect that momentarily unsettles the diegetic, monaural world woven by the band” (58). these musical movements in and out of both the narrative and the stage make petrella’s march an operatic object already associated to notions of mobility and mourning from its very initial appearance. furthermore, vella emphasizes that the very structure of the piece and its potential for endless repetition facilitated its migration from the opera house to public spaces and contributed to constructing petrella’s march as a portable mechanical device. what makes vella’s discussion even more compelling in this chapter is the linkage with wind bands outside the theatrical realm. the transposition of operatic music to popular forms of diffusion such as transcriptions, piano fantasias based on celebrated arias, barrel organs, and marching bands, guaranteed its capillary distribution within the social tissue of the nation. [4] originally designed for a marching band on stage, petrella’s march easily made its way into the repertoire and global circuit of wind band performances. yet, vella’s argument moves further and links civic wind bands to the military march as a technology of power used for disciplining body and generating “muscular bonding” (9). [5] in this vein, she argues that the spaces created by marching band performances of petrella’s marcia funebre functioned as funeral entrainments—i.e., forms of biopolitical technology instilling a specific attitude in both performers and audiences (69): weighty tread, minor mode, dotted rhythms, and other funeral march figures are not intended only, or even mainly, to signify particular situations. their function is not primarily to evoke death and grief, or to depict the inner landscape of a mourning heart. rather, it is to instill particular moral attitudes in and through the marching body. funeral marches, which by the mid-nineteenth century no longer had military purposes alone, were in this sense less music to be “listened to” in a modern, attentive, bourgeois fashion, and more music to be “acted upon” through repeated physical behaviors. the wealth of the second chapter’s content does not end here. vella positions petrella’s march within the broader context of post-unification italy and points to a developing death culture that at the time “was thoroughly transformed under the influence of competing political, social, and religious agendas” (47). petrella’s marcia funebre testifies to a transitional moment in the process of reimagining funeral rites within the framework of the new nation. jone’s march got caught in this restructuring mechanism, repurposed and absorbed into a new “expanded landscape of italian death culture” where “a funeral march such as jone’s could elicit variegated affective responses, and could even become a trademark of ‘exotic’ southern rituals” (72). in this context, i believe that this chapter could have benefited from a conversation with antonio gramsci’s idea of national-popular culture. the italian philosopher argued that, unlike other countries, nineteenth-century italy failed to produce a national-popular culture and that “in italian popular culture music has to some extent substituted that artistic expression which in other countries is provided by the popular novel”. [6] if music, the universal language par excellence, became the expression of national-popular culture in italy, for gramsci this spoke of the failure of a class of organic intellectuals to create a true national-popular literature. however, when vella argues that “jone’s marcia funebre provided an ‘emotional arena’ in and through which different social groups could imagine themselves as parts of the same national body, even as they articulated independent responses to human mortality” (9), this does provide, to a certain extent, a counterexample to the gramscian notion of music as an exclusively cosmopolitan phenomenon. as chapter 2 demonstrates, petrella’s march, aside from its wide mass diffusion, created a national-popular space wherein individuals of any class reimagined their place in the newly unified state. in her cogent analysis in this chapter, vella ultimately shows us that, when well situated, even an old-fashioned march such as petrella’s can become a sophisticated object that reveals the hidden modernity of its time. as vella puts it, “band performances understood as media for articulating collective grief on an everyday basis were symptoms of a new age” (47). chapter 3 investigates the figure of opera soprano adelina patti. born in spain to italian parents, patti grew up in the united states where she debuted in 1859 before embarking on an international career as a global ambassador of bel canto. in this chapter, vella shows that, because of the singer’s polyglot skills, adelina patti’s voice participated in multiple national communities and mobilized various political and national discourses—indeed, her voice could be localized both anywhere and nowhere. furthermore, vella argues that “patti’s vocal organs were imagined as a proto-recording device” (9) that could absorb and impeccably reproduce different languages. the global mobility of such a multilingual speaking and singing machine—and, in general, the broader circulation of voices in the nineteenth century—contributed to raising concerns related to diction and pronunciation as makers and markers of the so-called italianità. [7] like the other chapters concerned with the mobility of operatic objects and the way they both shaped and were shaped locally during their mobile trajectory, this section describes patti’s voice as yet another object. yet we should not forget that patti was a subject whose voice was deeply attached to a body. an overly narrow focus on how different critics and listeners perceived patti’s voice and articulated different national discourses, positions patti exclusively as a singing machine, and from my viewpoint denies her acoustical agency. for example, looking at how she shaped discourses about herself and her transnational background through her multilingual talents might be further investigated. as briefly addressed at the beginning of this review, in chapter 4 vella recounts the unprecedented mobilization of wagner’s lohengrin from the city of bologna to florence. drawing on axel körner’s work on the cultural politics of post-unification nationalism in italy, [8] the author points out that such extraordinary operatic transfer from the progressive center of bologna to the tuscan city exposed a complex network of power relations between italian localities. this meant that cultural and political tensions were continuously negotiated and remapped. furthermore, vella points to a new conceptualization of opera whereby railways not only guaranteed the mobility of operatic productions but were incorporated into “opera’s basic infrastructure” (126). in other words, she argues that operatic discourse expanded to include external technologies. interestingly, she follows this thread up to the introduction of the fascist thespian cars, where the mobilization of the spectacle was separated from the operatic performance and became in itself a spectacle that pointed to the modernity and efficiency of the regime. in the last section of this fourth chapter, the author briefly returns to the theme of death culture and public rituals. first, she points out that operatic translocations expose “the paradox that an act aimed at preserving and transplanting authenticity ultimately required ‘deadness’: a disassembling and recombining of the opera production’s various component parts” (129). second, similar to her analysis of operatic discourse, she emphasizes the late nineteenth-century incorporation of railway stations into the performance of public rituals, including the movement of mortal remains from one city to another. in other words, the author alludes to a clear tension at work in these railway spaces between mobility and immobility—between life and death—that intersects with the mechanized technologies transporting body remains or disassembled operatic objects to be staged either in opera productions or in funerary rituals. the concluding chapter is arguably the coup de théâtre of the entire monograph. in this section, vella measures her analysis of operatic objects against the yardstick of one of giuseppe verdi’s most studied operas: aida (1871). in these pages, the author lays out a groundbreaking methodological framework that is worth emphasizing in this review. vella opens the final chapter with an analysis of the famous “guerra! guerra!” moment in aida’s act 1, scene 5. the author reads this operatic micro-segment as a telegraphic communication event wherein “the repetitions of ‘guerra!’ and ‘radamès!’ by the chorus in aida are configured as relays, with the two words transmitted like electric signals” (141–42). this wireless telegraphic diffusion of sounds on stage is also linked to the creation of a community—that of the egyptians sharing their fear about the imminent ethiopian invasion. discussing aida today means coming to grips with edward said’s famous essay from his seminal book culture and imperialism, [9] which has indelibly marked the reception of verdi’s opera by orienting its analysis towards imperialist and orientalist frameworks. to complement this reading, instead of interpreting aida as a “proto-recording device that stored and reproduced its orientalist ‘origin’” (143), in her analysis, vella situates verdi’s opera “as both a work and an event, against a backdrop of italian and international experiences of long-distance communication and temporality prompted by contemporary media” (143). in other terms, despite being aware that her interpretative gesture might momentarily divert the object aida from the imperialist/orientalist logic, the author tries to make space for a repositioning, at the level of both composition and meaning, of verdi’s opera within the technological context of the time. and here, on the one hand, vella distances herself from what she terms the “deterministic shadow,” (143)—that is, the tendency to revert to technological determinism as the matrix through which artistic developments are understood; on the other hand, she acknowledges a certain degree of historical accuracy to such a technology-driven approach. thus, she is trying to reconcile these two strains into one methodological outlook/framework. to put it differently, the author is not asserting that aida is determined by the new nineteenth-century technologies, but that the work itself came into being as an object profoundly shaped by discourses that mobilized ideas across a wide range of fields. for vella, electric communication in the nineteenth century existed “at the midpoint between an idea and a technology” (144). while in the previous chapters she has focused on the articulation of italianness in the space produced by movement in between distinct locations, here once again it is in the liminal space between ideas and technology that works of art are articulated and come into being. to the author, this middle space is where scientific and cultural images proliferate, intersect with each other, and finally coalesce into various formats. this space works in such a holistic fashion that it would be “almost inappropriate for the historian to disentangle different domains of contemporary experience, given that the analogical mindset was what defined the age” (144). although her analysis is restricted to a very short fragment of aida, vella constructs a compelling methodological scaffolding for investigating musical objects. in her specific case study, she overcomes the traditional view that looks at the object aida exclusively as a reflection of the politics of its time and thinks of aida as a device that responded to the nineteenth-century technological mindset and, when performed, echoed telegraphic communications on and off the stage. finally, the author brings us back to the idea that technology not only affected how opera circulated and was performed on a global scale but also how this technology was incorporated into the very nature of operatic compositions. as trains and notions around mobility occupied the space of operatic thinking, in this final chapter vella links verdi’s search for simultaneity to a novel understanding of time in the opera production system, which ultimately led to a “newly networked sense of italian operatic experience” (166). to conclude this review, i want to circle back to the book’s introduction, where the author offers a critique of reception studies that provides the broader methodological framework for the five case studies discussed in the text. as vella recounts, the advent of the telegraph ushered in a new model of communication, whereby the transfer of meaning became independent of physical transportation. such a schism between producer and receiver reverberates in the way reception theory analyzes opera, that is by separating the text from its context and understanding these two as independent entities. this tendency, coupled with an inherent ineffability of the musical text, has contributed to placing the object “opera” in the background in favor of an emphasis on the receivers—for example, contemporaneous press materials or the personal accounts of people who attended the opera. the author’s critical operation for this book is twofold: first, to bring the musical text back to the center of historical investigation and, second, to complicate the notion of media understood as “message-bearing institutions”. [10] thus, reception theory is only one of the tools in the arsenal of a wider methodological system that, by looking at “how opera (was) networked across space and time,” (13) opens up a whole range of new perspectives for (re)studying operatic cultures. * this review grew out of the course introduction to italian studies taught by suzanne stewart-steinberg at brown university. i am deeply grateful to her for the careful reading and the great advice, while the views expressed in the article are my own. thank you also to anne kerkian for the invaluable help in the editing process. [1]  bruno latour, reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory (oxford: oxford university press, 2005), 4–5. [2]  the reference is to axel körner, “from hindustan to brabant: meyerbeer’s l’africana and municipal cosmopolitanism in post-unification italy,” cambridge opera journal 29, no. 1 (2017): 74–93. [3]  george revill, “vocalic space: socio-materiality and sonic spatiality,” in the question of space: interrogating the spatial turn between disciplines, ed. marijn nieuwenhuis and david crouch (lanham: rowman & littlefield, 2017), 43–62, at 58. [4]  see for example antonio carlini, ed., fuori dal teatro. modi e percorsi della divulgazione di verdi (venice: marsilio, 2015). [5]  vella’s reference is to william h. mcneill, keeping together in time: dance and drill in human history (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1995), chap. 1. [6]  antonio gramsci, selections from cultural writings, ed. david forgacs and geoffrey nowell-smith, trans. william boelhower (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1985), 378. [7]  recent opera studies scholarship has scrutinized the notion of italianità (italianness) under transnational and global lenses, revealing how nineteenth-century material culture and technological discourses, as well as transnational consumption and circulation of opera, endlessly reconfigured notions of operatic italianità both on the peninsula and abroad. from this new understanding, operatic italianità challenges nationally-bound interpretations of opera and becomes an analytical tool for a critical interrogation of opera’s fluid transformations across time and space. see axel körner and paulo m. kühl, italian opera in global and transnational perspective (cambridge university press, 2022). [8]  axel körner, politics of culture in liberal italy: from unification to fascism (new york: routledge, 2009). [9]  edward w. said, “the empire at work: verdi’s aida,” in culture and imperialism (new york: vintage, 1994), 111–31. [10]  john durham peters, the marvelous clouds: toward a philosophy of elemental media (chicago: the university of chicago press, 2015), 2. × article contents introduction interview footnotes interview the curatorial turn and opera: on the singing deaths of maria callas. a conversation with marina abramović and marko nikodijević. * jelena novak sound stage screen, vol. 1, issue 2 (fall 2021), pp. 195–209, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2021 jelena novak. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss16640. marina abramović is a conceptual and performance artist with a particular interest in the relationship between the artist and the audience. she is especially interested in exploring the extreme limits of her (the artist’s) body. in recent years, she has nurtured these interests by restaging some of her earlier works of performance art. to chart some of the more important stages of her career i single out a few key works. in rhythm 0 (1974) abramović stood silent and motionless for six hours in a gallery in naples, while members of the audience were allowed to do to her whatever they wanted, having at their disposal seventy-two objects. the great wall walk (1988) was performed with her then partner ulay; they walked for ninety days from opposite ends of the great wall of china, and when they finally met, they ended their relationship and said goodbye to each other. balkan baroque (1997) reflected on the horrors and tragedies unfolding in post-yugoslavia. in the artist is present (2010) marina sat motionless in a chair at the moma (new york) for ninety days, eight to ten hours per day, gazing into the eyes of members of the audience who took turns sitting in front of her one by one. in 2011 abramović collaborated with robert wilson on the music theater piece the life and death of marina abramović. although some people already considered that piece an opera, 7 deaths of maria callas (2020) is actually abramović’s first opera project. in 7 deaths of maria callas abramović used operatic music by five historical composers of the western canon: giuseppe verdi, giacomo puccini, vincenzo bellini, gaetano donizetti, and georges bizet. one living composer, marko nikodijević, was invited to assemble all these separate strands into a single fabric. nikodijević wrote the introduction, then a kind of epilogue “the eighth death,” and also some interludes conceived as “cloud musics,” as he calls them, which were incorporated between the arias. like marina abramović, nikodijević was born in yugoslavia, where he completed his composition studies at the belgrade faculty of music. he then moved to germany, where he built a successful international career. nikodijević has been influenced by techno music and by developments in advanced technology, including fractal procedures and computer music. his music is often freighted with a kind of melancholy that is somehow filtered through carefully calculated structural procedures. [1] nikodijević has himself composed an opera: vivier. ein nachtprotokoll (2013–14), a chamber opera in 6 scenes dealing with the canadian queer icon of new music claude vivier. the opera is related to vivier’s life, but also to his unusual death. the basic form of 7 deaths of maria callas is simple. seven arias were selected from the mainstream operatic repertoire, arias that have been performed by soprano maria callas in an unforgettable manner. seven sopranos were engaged, each taking one of the leading roles from the following operas: la traviata, otello (verdi), tosca, madama butterfly (puccini), carmen (bizet), lucia di lammermoor (donizetti), norma (bellini). the arias are separated by electronic interludes (nikodijević, with sound design by luka kozlovački). while the singer is performing an aria on stage, a short silent film (directed by nabil elderkin) is projected on stage as a kind of music video. in those videos abramović and the actor willem dafoe comment on operatic deaths in surreal, fantastical, and sometimes absurd scenes. unexpectedly, the arias are heard as a film music sequence. fig. 1. marina abramović, 7 deaths of maria callas, 2019. photo credit: marco anelli, courtesy of the marina abramovic archives. it might seem that the focus of the opera 7 deaths of maria callas is the life, voice, and career of maria callas, but first and foremost this piece is autobiographical. abramović tells us that she has been fascinated by the character and work of callas since childhood, when as a young girl in belgrade she discovered her voice and fell in love with her interpretations. as time went on, the relationship between marina and maria became more complex. marina realized that they both have a lot in common, that they even look alike, and that their lives were marked by an unhappy love. it might be claimed that this opera is primarily about marina abramović, depicting her art, her status as a diva, her rise on the international art scene, her ego, her pain, her suffocation, her motionless waiting, her undressing, her youthful looks, her unhappy relationships. against the background of electronic ligetian “clouds” in the interludes, abramović as the narrator speaks of her texts inspired by operatic heroines and their deaths. here, the disquieting, almost frightening music of nikodijević and kozlovački seems to “squeeze” through itself the transformed vocals. then, towards the end of the opera in “the eighth death,” abramović is on stage as callas is shown dying in her paris apartment. in the final moments, abramović is seen in a glittering golden dress, enacting slow, deliberate movements. the singing voice of maria callas is eventually heard, and the live, golden figure of marina becomes like a doll. abramović pays homage to callas with this opera, celebrating her unique capacity to connect body and voice into a single, extraordinary whole. [2] the opera 7 deaths of maria callas is also a kind of didactic musical spectacle through which abramović masterfully displays to callas and to everyone how she herself has struggled with deaths, lives, ups, downs, and unhappy loves in different worlds, and how she has re-channeled these eternal themes in her art. interview jn: why did you choose to create an opera today? what makes it different from a theater piece with music? and what is so intriguing about the genre of opera today that more and more artists, including those from the visual arts, take it as a source of inspiration or as a material to work with in their pieces? mn: opera provides an opportunity to bring different artistic media together. when successful, it can produce the kind of artistic effect and emotional impact that a purely musical work or a piece of video art, for example, cannot achieve. so, when all these different media come into a perfect union, then a type of theater magic happens, and that magic has been intriguing artists for more than four hundred years now. jn: marina, i know about your fascination with maria callas. what is it about opera that fascinates you? what exactly draws you to it? ma: maria callas is one thing. but opera is a different matter for me. i never liked opera, i think it is so boring and so long, it is like a dinosaur in art. there was a very traditional way for people to approach opera. any kind of change, any different point of view, would be disturbing for the public. the public really likes it done in the traditional way, as it was always done, and they want to continue with the genre in that form. it is so interesting for an artist to depart from tradition, to break the rules, to re-conceive the genre, and to make something new. to me, opera is one of those art forms that has never been touched, so that was reason enough for me to touch it and to put in it something really different, creating a much more complex work than opera as it has been conceived up to now. there is a video, an installation, a “situation,” a performance; there are opera singers, novel musical combinations, and so many other ingredients all working to create something fresh. normally, an opera lasts four hours, or even five hours, a very long duration for a work. this piece lasts only one hour and thirty minutes, because the act of dying takes less time than telling the story of an opera. with marko working with me, it was really a dream to create something that stands on its own in a very original way, a way that has not been attempted before. jn: when i look back at some of your pieces i find a fascination with the voice, and especially with the screaming voice. some of the early pieces, like aaa-aaa (1978) that you did with ulay, feature the screaming voice. there you screamed at each other’s mouths. and there was another piece, freeing the voice (1975–76), performed in the student cultural center in belgrade, where you were lying down and screaming for a long time. more recently, there was the piece the scream (2013–14) that referred to the famous canvas of edvard munch, in oslo, where members of the audience were invited to scream through the frame that you constructed on the spot where munch supposedly executed that painting. what is the relationship between the screaming and the singing? ma: it is so very different for me, because screaming really emerges from my way of being as a performance artist, trying to find my own physical and mental limits. i wanted to scream until i couldn’t scream anymore. and when you scream for such a long period of time, the voice becomes a kind of independent element, so that you start listening to things that you have never heard in your own voice: the voice of a child, the voice of a bird, the voice of anger, of fear, the voice of love. there are so many elements in the voice when you actually get to the point where you reach the limit of possibilities, where you actually scream until you lose your voice, which is what happened to me. for three months i lost my voice completely and so this was an investigation, an investigation of the body, and really had nothing to do with singing. but i worked with sounds, even before i got to performances. sound to me is interesting, the sound itself. as for the singing, i used it in some video works, and i even sang in bob wilson’s piece myself, but this is totally different. i don’t actually see a connection between releasing the voice, where i am exploring the limits of the voice, and singing. jn: marko, what is your reference point for the voice, and especially the operatic voice, both the conventional operatic voice and those non-conventional voices that are sometimes used in opera today? mn: the voice is a very limited instrument and has a very narrow range compared to most traditional instruments. but, as we communicate through the voice, we are used to registering even very small differences within it. the voice can transmit so much emotion and meaning in the smallest possible way. it is an instrument that is sitting inside our throat, and it is also somewhat fragile. we know that from opera singers who are constantly protecting their voices. at the same time, it is capable of communicating in a manner that does not exist in any other medium. jn: what is so special about maria callas’s voice? i was thinking about that when watching 7 deaths. at the munich performance we heard seven extraordinarily good singers, and it almost seemed at one point like a kind of an audition for maria callas, so to speak. you hear all of them, and then at the end you hear this recorded fragment of maria callas singing “casta diva.” at that point i realized that callas’s voice, when compared to all the other beautiful voices that we heard, exists in some kind of separate, and very special, dimension. why do you think she has this special dimension to her voice? what is that special there? ma: i only remember having breakfast in my grandmother’s kitchen when i was fourteen years old. we had an old bakelite radio, and i remember i heard this voice coming out of the radio. i had no idea it was callas, and i didn’t know what she was singing. i didn’t understand the words—it was in italian—and i remember that i stood up, feeling the electricity going through my body, and with this incredible sensation of emotions passing through me. i started to cry uncontrollably, and it was such an emotional effect that i have never forgotten it. after that i wanted to know whose voice it was, who was this person, and i really wanted to know everything about her. her voice has such an enormous emotional impact, and it has some kind of electric energy passing through it, a gift that very few people in the world have. mn: i think there are artists like maria callas who seem to break down conventions, the pedigreed ways of doing things. callas invaded the scene as a technically excellent singer, but she did so with exceptional vehemence, and in a society where, of course, women were certainly not seen as equal to men. she barged in with such force and decided to impose her artistic vision. a lot of people thought that her voice, especially from the early 1960s, when the registers acquired an even more extreme coloring between her chest voice and her head voice, had such an emotional impact because she had such a relentless need to communicate through music. she wasn’t just a canary that was twittering around and making nice melodies… it was really life and death to her, she died constantly on stage, day after day, night after night, and she sort of traumatized herself with this endless dying, because she had died so many times. i don’t know if there were many roles where she was actually alive at the end. she was either a broken woman or (usually) a dead woman. she lived through this, and it was a sort of a real-life performance. she brought herself to a state of expressing such extreme emotion with her voice and with her body that she was completely exhausted at the end. her marvelous career ended, and she left the operatic stage at just the age of forty-three which is incredibly young. jn: we can see that today opera more and more often becomes, so to speak, “curated” by the director. this opera project moves in this direction. in earlier times the main creator was the composer, or even before that, the librettist. but today there is a tendency in some pieces, notably with directors such as pierre audi or michal grover-friedlander in tel aviv, to piece together various pieces from musical history or arias from historical operas and sort of “curate” them into the new piece. how do you see this tendency? ma: i don’t have much opinion about this. i think opera can’t be made the same way it has always been made, so there can be very different approaches. the opera sets are not anymore made in a traditional way: the setting can be in a parkway, or a garage, or a hospital. the settings change, and the directors have many different ideas about how to give a new point to opera. i think it’s a kind of a normal evolution. jn: did you have in mind any reference from the world of what we might call new opera, like einstein on the beach, for example? ma: no. einstein on the beach, of course, i know, but i was trying not to look at anything for inspiration. i was trying to make something that is my own and original, though my original idea is more than forty years old now; i mean the idea that in every opera a woman dies in the end, so why not show only the deaths and nothing else? i don’t think that anybody had this idea before. so, i’m showing only dying scenes through the prism of callas. and then, there is also the eighth death. that is the death of callas herself and we don’t talk about that. we know that in the end there is a voice that comes out of the old tape recorder, and that is callas. marko nikodijević did an ingenious thing: he stopped the voice in medias res, so that the voice actually continues in our heads, even if you can’t even hear it. and then you understand that—yes, she can die, but her voice is immortal, her voice will never die. and that’s what i would like to leave the audience with. jn: i heard in some parts of the electronic music some transformation of the voice, even maybe the screaming voice… ma: marko went to such amazing lengths, he wanted to even record the sounds of the street where i was born in belgrade. mn: that was luka [kozlovački]’s recording of the street corner where marina was born, which is very beautiful, because she says: “it is only paris” and opens the windows and we hear the sounds of the stari grad (old town) from belgrade. we had children screaming, and we were adapting the electronic part as we went along. i’m opened to revisiting and redoing some things or making them somewhat different. i don’t think i have to be a living museum, so that there is just a statue and you cannot touch it and it has to be like that. i’m much more open to a sort of a live concept of music. jn: the male voice can be heard at some point towards the end of the opera, in “the eighth death”? mn: yes, that is willem dafoe recycling certain sentences from operas like carmen, traviata, lucia and so on, both in the original language and in english translation. in the national theatre munich [the bayerische staatsoper’s main venue] it probably didn’t sound the same as in the stereo mixdown for the video stream on television. it is a large opera house and has a very complete cupola so that these sounds literally go from the bottom to the top and then spin around, so that they sort of move around the whole opera house, including the audience and stage, so that you imagine you’re in the midst of a storm created by this voice. jn: 7 deaths of maria callas begins with what i would call the amazing “music of bells.” listening to it, i started to ask myself if this music stands for church bells, or some other kind of bells, and i think it’s extremely exciting to enter the opera in this kind of way. to me it was as if the church bells were ringing all the time at the beginning. and the oboe, maybe, represents the voice. if you narrated in this introduction, how would you describe it? mn: my starting point for this opening cloud music was actually how the clouds would appear. the first cloud sequence is one of early morning clouds. in the cloud sequences there are always these epigrammatic poetic texts before each of the film deaths, and they sort of explain, or give a poetic introduction to, what kind of a death we are moving towards. and so i looked at the clouds. it started with these morning clouds, so that is why there is so much italian impressionism. the oboe melody is just a slowed down aria from traviata that the singer is about to sing. “addio, del passato” is somewhat stretched out and slowed down, but exactly the same notes are used with just a few additional flourishes. jn: and how did you select these seven arias? why these seven and not some others, and why precisely seven of them? ma: seven is my destiny number, and i really like that. also, seven is such a biblical number, with the seven days in which god made the world… i was looking for all different types of deaths, so i actually chose tuberculosis, a leap, strangulation, burning, radiation, death from madness and knifing. i tried to present every possible way of dying, as far as i could; that was the idea. and then, also, i was looking for the best of the aria performances by callas. jn: it is intriguing to see this opera both through the prism of your art and through callas’s. at times it seemed as though you were maria, and at other times you were marina. you managed to entangle the two lives through this piece. moreover, there are references to some of your other pieces in the videos. ma: definitely, like the snake in the video—i was doing this before in the live performance. but, talking about number seven, i also wanted to present seven types of women, all different types, and all dying for love in the world. we all die for love and we are all different types of women, and i really wanted to show this through the singers. so, we were casting people who actually represented these types. normally, people cast singers just for their voice, but for me it was also important to see how they looked visually, and also where they came from, from a nordic country, for example, or from asia, or spain—so all these elements really played a role in my decision. i needed in this piece not just callas. it is a callas story, it’s my story and it’s seven different women’s stories, because i wanted these themes to be universal, applying actually to anybody in the world dying from a broken heart, and not just one person. it’s not the story of one person, but the story of all of us. jn: and what would you say about the question of realism in opera? i think achieving realism in opera is quite an impossible task, because opera always tends to be “larger than life.” even if what we can see in the opera is realistic, the very fact that characters are singing undoes that realism immediately. how do you look at these issues of realism in opera? ma: i was looking more into the conceptual part. i was thinking more of the fact that callas left everything to her maid bruna, all her possessions and all her jewelry and everything she ever had, because bruna was the only person who was always with her. so, all of the opera singers are actually different forms of bruna, the same maid, and they are all dressed in the same “uniform.” at the end, when they come to leave the room and clean the broken glass on the floor and cover all the possessions and take away the memorabilia, you understand that, actually, callas is not there anymore. so, i simplified the work to a point where there is indeed some kind of realism, but of a conceptually different kind. callas’s room on stage is the exact replica of the room where she really died in paris. we examined every single photograph and reproduced the furniture, the paintings on the wall, and even the sleeping pills next to her telephone. everything was done to enable that kind of realism. and yet within this realism, there in the bed is callas, but also me, because of the photographs i’m looking at. i’m not looking at callas, nor at photographs of onassis, zeffirelli, pasolini, or any of her friends. i’m looking at my own photographs, at the man over whom i really did almost die of broken heart. so, it is a mixture and it is constantly going on through the piece. [jpc]: 7 deaths of maria callas is truly an intermedia project. i wonder if you could tell us a bit more about its videographic component, namely about your collaboration with nabil elderkin and, more broadly, about how you elaborated that interaction between stage and screen. [3] ma: i was looking for somebody who was doing great music videos, because this is a music video in many ways. it’s not just the decoration in the back that you project. i wanted the video to be the integral part of the story. actually, i stripped the stage to nothing, to just a single singer singing in the middle. but that, in a way, is a part of the video at the same time, visually. so, working with nabil was great for me because i found he was a great filmmaker himself. i also wanted to have just one person in the video killing me over and over again, and that’s willem dafoe—because it’s basically in the mind of callas, with onassis killing her constantly over and over again. so, it was a very conceptual approach. then we lifted the stage a little bit higher, so that actually the singer became a part of the screen. so, sometimes she’s entering the room, and sometimes she’s a part of the killing scene, in some ways. and then there is also the bed, which is a replica of callas’s, on the stage itself, where i’m lying for an entire hour before “the eighth death” even gets started. so, this bed also becomes a part of the screen. in other words, the singer will go to the bed on the screen, which is on the stage, but at the same time you see the second bed of traviata on the stage, projected on the screen, so it all gets mixed up in a single entangled web. you have to have an image that works for the public. also, the fact that the orchestra is not in the pit—since for social distancing and coronavirus we had to raise it up—made it a part of this installation, too. it became in effect more opera installation then opera. i wanted to ask nikodijević one question myself. how did this change affect you? seeing the orchestra in that way and not hidden in the pit—how did that change the fabric of the music? mn: it depends on which hall it is done in, and on how high the parquet is. for me it is mostly an acoustic thing. being in a pit focuses the orchestral sound much more, so it sort of emerges from the orchestra pit already blended and glued together, much more so than when the orchestra is in the main hall, where there is just much more reverb. i mean, that is why wagner used the covered orchestra in bayreuth, to achieve the ultimate magic effect, where you don’t see the orchestra at all, it is completely covered and it allows the sound to come from everywhere, so to speak. you feel that you are in the midst of this enormous ocean of sound, but that doesn’t have any biting quality. there is always something very mellow produced by this covered orchestra. so, it has both a dramatic effect, and also a purely acoustic one. jn: what marina described worked especially well, i think, in moments when in the video—for example, i think, in the madness scene—you can see marina/maria screaming, but you cannot hear the scream, you can only see the open mouth screaming and then, at the same time, you can see the singer on the stage, singing. there is a discord or ventriloquism between what we hear and what we see on stage. these moments (and there are a few of them throughout the piece) work extremely well, and they open up all kinds of questions about the continuous discord of body and voice in opera. fig. 2. marina abramović, 7 deaths of maria callas, 2019. photo credit: marco anelli, courtesy of the marina abramovic archives. [fm]: are you planning to do different versions of 7 deaths when it will be performed in different spaces in the future? and are there also plans to put it on dvd? how can you preserve this kind of performance? [4] ma: right now, i’d really like to perform it as it is for a while. our next performances are going to be in paris and athens in 2021, and at the teatro di san carlo in naples in 2022. we also have plans for berlin and new york… we would like, at least for the next two or three years, to perform it as it is. as long as i can be on the stage, i will perform this piece. i don’t see any reason why we should change it and make another version. right now, it really works for me as it is and i want to have the pleasure of doing it for a while. moreover, every theater produces a different experience, and every audience is different. also, different countries—how will the italians react to this, for example, given that callas had her biggest career in italy; or how will the greeks react, and what will the french say, or what will happen if we perform it in asia? i want to experience this as long as i can. mn: and, of course, one cannot achieve the depth of sound and visual field on a video that you have in the theater. it’s just that it’s a very deep three-dimensional field and you cannot recreate what you are hearing even with the best hi-fi systems. it is simply impossible to reproduce that kind of sound experience. it cannot be recorded—it’s just made to be live. ma: i have to agree with marko completely, because, you know, the live stream and the dvd or anything else is only a form of documentation, it’s not the real thing and will never be the real thing. you have to be in a theater, you have to feel, you have to smell, you have to touch, you have to be there. jn: marko, i understood that you re-orchestrated the piece because of the pandemic developments, since the number of people in the orchestra needed to be smaller. so, will the next performances of the piece be in this reduced version, or will you return to a bigger orchestra? mn: that depends on the coronavirus and not on me. i mean there exists a version for reduced orchestra and a version for full orchestra, and it all depends on how many people we can have in the orchestra, and also in the audience, for which version we will use. i can manage with forty-five musicians, but i find it very hard to perform in an opera house designed for two thousand people with only three hundred people present. i mean, i know that the attention is there, but it is also a very strange situation. ma: in munich we gave five performances for five hundred people, which means 2500 people; it’s still something, and maybe it’s going to be the same in naples, so let’s see… mn: and we had to fight for five hundred people; we were given that number on the day of the premiere… mn: exactly, it was a very nervous moment, but we were lucky. so, every time it changes, and every time we have to see what the new situation will be; we can’t predict it. [in]: if the future is disembodied and even more distanced, physically and otherwise, what if the heartbreak ceases to exist, at least in the form we know it now? what is art going to do about that possible dystopian scenario? why is it still important to reenact love and longing in this way as in opera? [5] mn: well, i don’t think the tragedy of the future will be a matter of unfriending people on facebook, because i cannot see that platform as any kind of musical tragedy: i mean whether you get unfriended on facebook, or your instagram gets spammed. so, i mean, there are potentials in new technology, but obviously virtual reality and a one-dimensional “app society” is no substitute for the one thing that we feel as real. ma: so, we like to think that loneliness, solitude, alienation, and a broken heart are thousands and thousands of years old and have always been there with us, with or without the epidemic; none of that really changes. the same goes for how art will look. the epidemic comes and goes, and right now we have to wait for a better time. i hate to compromise because of the epidemic. i hate zoom performances with bad quality and terrible images. i just don’t see this is the right way to go. i really think we don’t need to compromise. we just have to wait. that’s it. since the beginning of her career in belgrade during the early 1970s, marina abramović has pioneered performance art, creating some of the form’s most important early works. exploring her physical and mental limits, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in her quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. abramović was awarded the golden lion for best artist at the 1997 venice biennale. in 2010, abramović had her first major us retrospective and simultaneously performed for over 700 hours in the artist is present at the museum of modern art in new york. abramović founded marina abramović institute (mai), a platform for immaterial and long durational work to create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields. her most recent publication is walk through walls: a memoir, published by crown archetype on october 25, 2016. her retrospective the cleaner opened at moderna museet, stockholm in february 2017 and has toured to seven additional european venues, ending at the museum of contemporary art, belgrade, serbia in 2019. in september 2020 the bayerische staatsoper presented the world premiere of 7 deaths of maria callas, which will continue to tour to other venues. in 2023 she will present the solo exhibition after life at the royal academy, and become the first female artist in the institution’s 250 year history to occupy the entire gallery space with her work. marko nikodijević was born in 1980 in subotica, serbia and studied composition in belgrade with zoran erić and srdjan hofman between 1995 and 2003. in addition, he attended courses and lectures in nonlinear mathematics and physics. following his education in the serbian capital, he undertook advanced training in composition with marco stroppa at the academy of music and the performing arts in stuttgart in 2003. nikodijević settled in stuttgart, from where he received stipends and attended master courses and composition seminars in apeldoorn, visby, weimar, amsterdam, salzwedel and baden-baden. his compositional production has won prizes and awards at the international young composers meeting in apeldoorn, the gaudeamus music week in amsterdam, the 3rd brandenburg biennale and the unesco rostrum of composers. he resided in paris from 2012 to 2013 as a scholarship holder at the cité internationale des arts. in 2013 marko nikodijević received one of the three composition furtherance prizes of the ernst von siemens music foundation and in 2014 was awarded the deutscher musikautorenpreis (german composers’ prize) in the category promotion of new talent. * the conversation transcribed here took place via zoom on october 15, 2020, as the first talk in the resvés ópera series of conversations organized by cesem, fcsh, universidade nova de lisboa. the talk was moderated by jelena novak. some questions were taken from the members of the audience and that is further indicated in the footnotes. the author would like to thank katarina kostić for her help with transcribing the interview. the article was made with the support of cesem – research center for sociology and aesthetics of music, nova lisbon university, fcsh, uid/eat/00693/2019, with the financial support of fct through national funds, under the norma transitória – dl 57/2016/cp1453/ct0054. [1] for further details about marko nikodijević’s music, see jelena novak, “music as an aggregate of colours: a conversation with marko nikodijević,” new sound international journal of music 57, n. 1 (2021): 1–17. [2] these remarks on the opera 7 deaths of maria callas draw on my critique written for the weekly vreme following the world première of the piece by the bavarian state opera. the audience was subject to covid pandemic restrictions, and the piece was also available for online streaming for a restricted period (this is how i watched it myself). the article is in serbian and is available on the news magazine’s website: jelena novak, “operski agregat uživo,” vreme, september 10, 2020. [3] this question was posed by joão pedro cachopo (cesem). [4] this question, by filipa magalhães (cesem), originated from the zoom chat box during the interview. [5] this question was posed by iva nenić (faculty of music, belgrade). × article contents introduction interview footnotes interview performance/media/documentation… thinking beyond dichotomies an interview with philip auslander alessandro cecchi sound stage screen, vol. 1, issue 1 (spring 2021), pp. 243–264. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.13130/sss15388. introduction philip auslander (georgia institute of technology, atlanta) barely needs to be introduced to the audience of this journal, his name being linked to such relevant contributions as liveness: performance in a mediatized culture, winner of the joe a. callaway prize for best book on theatre and drama. this book, with its two editions (1999 and 2008), has strongly influenced music, media, and performing arts scholars around the globe. one focal point of the book is the discussion of the relation between “live” and “mediatized” musical performance, which auslander does not consider in oppositional terms, but rather as concepts involved in a process of mutual definition and possible re-definition. in his own words: “far from being encroached upon, contaminated, or threatened by mediation, live performance is always already inscribed with traces of the possibility of technical mediation (i.e., mediatization) that defines it as live.” [1] consequently, he warns his readers against “theorizations that privilege liveness as a pristine state uncontaminated by mediatization” and that in so doing “misconstrue the relation between the two terms.” [2] he has then extended his discussion to other forms of experience, including that of digital technologies as live, tackled by him in the more recent article “digital liveness: a historico-philosophical perspective.” [3] this critical approach to commonsensical concepts and cultural dichotomies characterizes most of his projects. another relevant book, performing glam rock: gender and theatricality in popular music, [4] connects to a relatively different strand of research, that he has expanded further in in concert: performing musical persona, published in 2021. [5] the concept of “musical persona” was introduced for the first time in his seminal article “performance analysis and popular music: a manifesto” and became the title of the later article “musical personae,” which elaborates on erving goffman’s sociological perspective. [6] along these lines, the book chapter explicitly entitled “‘musical personae’ revisited”—included in the volume i recently co-edited with gianmario borio, giovanni giuriati, and marco lutzu entitled investigating musical performance: theoretical models and intersections —clarifies and completes his thought almost fifteen years later. here, auslander goes on to deny any clear demarcation between the musician’s “self-presentation” and the actor’s representation of a “fictional character”, thus offering the model of a “continuum of behavior rather than a dichotomy.” [7] this kind of self-critical refinement of his own theorizations is not uncommon in his work. as for the musicological discussion, auslander has a particularly strong position, which challenges many apparently obvious assumptions. for example, he does not understand music to be an “object” of performance, because he situates the concept of “musical performance” in a wider perspective. in so doing, he firmly suggests going beyond the distinction between “musical” (or “purely musical”) and “non-musical” (or “extra-musical”) aspects related to that complex intertwining of actions and interactions which is performance. in this regard, i want to mention a significant book chapter in which he returns to the epistemological and ontological issues he had previously identified in “performance analysis and popular music.” the chapter i’m referring to has been published as “music as performance: the disciplinary dilemma revisited” in the german collection sound und performance: positionen, methoden, analysen, and is the expanded version of his afterword to the edited collection taking it to the bridge: music as performance. [8] in his discussion, auslander addresses the distinction between what music “is” (an essence) and what music “does” (an effect), which leads him to rethink the relationship between sound and gesture. in his view, “music is not sound disengaged from the physical being of the person who makes it. … the sounds i hear result directly from all aspects of the person’s physical engagement with the act of music making—all of the sounds and gestures that constitute the performance.” [9] this is the result of a critical investigation aimed at questioning the still widespread idea that in a musical performance it is possible (and useful) to distinguish between “technical” (i.e., sound-producing) and “ancillary” (i.e., in some respects “unnecessary”) gestures. auslander concludes the chapter by suggesting that “the solution to the disciplinary dilemma” he had identified in 2004 could be simply “to recognize that there is no dilemma, no ontological or epistemological gap between music and performance that needs bridging. music ‘is’ what musicians ‘do’”. [10] auslander’s 2018 book reactivations represents another arena of his inquiry. here the author engages in a critical discussion of another strict demarcation, that opposing “performance” to “documentation.” to overcome this dichotomy, he reconsiders their relationship by focusing on the role of the audience—the one witnessing the original event, and the one beholding the document. as he puts it, “it may well be that our sense of the presence, power, and authenticity of these pieces derives not from treating the document as an indexical access point to a past event but from perceiving the document itself as a performance that directly reflects an artist’s aesthetic project or sensibility and for which we are the present audience.” [11] although the book is mainly about performance art in relation to photographic and video documentation, music is brought into the discussion in the last chapter through the example of karaoke performance. the book therefore comes to a much more general issue, that concerning the relationship between “original” and “copy,” which in the perspective of performance is anything but oppositional. on the whole, the philosophical and general cultural contribution of auslander’s work to music, media, and the arts considered as performance is the radical, critical, and self-critical questioning of cultural dichotomies that often trap our thoughts exactly when they seem to help us think more clearly. i suppose this suffices to justify the publication of this interview in the first issue of a scholarly journal entitled sound stage screen—namely, to underline the exploration of the “continuum” between sound and vision, technique and technology, performance and media, music and the arts considered in their continuously and mutually changing relationships. interview sound stage screen. three aspects or places of experience that encompass but are not limited to music (not directly mentioned in the title), and whose study is in no way limited to musicology, which, in turn, is redefined as an open, strongly interdisciplinary research field. what is the position of these three concepts in your perspective? given my obsessive interest in performance and performers, i would also place “stage” at the center. to me, “stage” stands for performance, though not necessarily only live performance. as you suggest in the introduction, my approach to terms like this is to interrogate the ways their relationships are traditionally configured, including the idea you also mention that sound is a means to musical performance, not its end. in books like liveness and reactivations, i try to destabilize traditional assumptions about the relationship between performances and recordings or documentations of them. how would you define your research field? do you place yourself at the intersection of different disciplines, for example, between performance studies and media studies or even musicology? i define my research field simply as “performance,” since my work always revolves around ways of thinking analytically about performance—how it is defined, its contexts, what performers do, and how audiences experience performance across a variety of social and cultural territories and media. i see myself described in all kinds of ways: as a theater or performance studies scholar, as a media scholar, sometimes as a musicologist, and sometimes even as an art historian. i have connections to all of these disciplines and practices, and i try to be a point of contact among fields that may not communicate with one another, but it’s more about fostering dialogue across the boundaries than believing the boundaries can be breached or eliminated. in retrospect, how would you describe your own overall performance as a scholar today? or, to put it in your own terms, what are the aspects of your “scholarly persona” that you would highlight at this stage? one thing i’ve noticed about myself is that i gravitate toward what seem to me to be unanswered questions or disciplinary lacunae. this was very much the case with liveness. reflecting on my experience as a young stage actor and the many times i had been told that the fact that theater is live is its essential characteristic, i went searching for writing in theater and performance studies that addressed this idea of the live directly and critically, and was shocked to find virtually none. i then discovered that liveness had been under discussion in television studies for some time, though there had been no dialogue between that field and theater studies. a similar thing happened with performing glam rock. i became interested in glam partly as a result of some historiographic work i had done where i discovered that there was a standard narrative in which rock reached a high point in the 1960s then fell into decadence in the 1970s until punk ostensibly restored it to its original project. there was no place for glam in this account, and i couldn’t help but wonder why not. at the time, there were only two books on glam (there are now many more), so i set about writing the one i’d wanted to find. of course, i was also looking for a topic that would enable me to write about musicians in the way i wanted, since musical persona is so central to glam. another standard narrative i sought to challenge, this time in the work that led to reactivations, was the idea that documentation necessarily betrays the live event; performance art is the context in which this idea has the most force, i think, though i have also addressed it in the context of jazz and improvised music. my insistence that musical performance is primarily about the performer, not the music, goes against much conventional wisdom in this area. my scholarly persona is impatient with received ideas and willing to interrogate them in those areas that interest me. and what about your academic performance specifically? i am very much aware of academic performance (conference presentations, lectures, and such) as precisely that: performance. when i was regularly attending theater conferences, i was always amazed at how poor the performance skills of many presenters were and how poorly prepared they were. i at least try to be entertaining when i present because i believe that intellectual value and entertainment value are not mutually exclusive. i also treat my presentations as performances. for example, whenever i give a presentation, even if i’ve given it many times before, i always rehearse it fully the night before. so, the public face of my scholarly persona is that of a performer talking about performance by performing. this seems to be linked to your experience as a professional actor… how has this influenced your thinking about performance, including musical performance? i’m sure that my performer-centricity derives from the fact that i’ve spent much of my life performing! for me, acting is and has always been the default model of performance (which i think is true for many people—when you say “performance,” most people probably think of acting first). as you mention in the introduction, a significant way for me to articulate the concept of musical persona has been by contrasting what musicians do in performance with what actors do. my knowledge and experience of acting gives me a way of framing questions about other kinds of performance and the contexts in which they occur. the other thing i would like to say about this is that i believe the fact that i am a performer (albeit not a musician) has been beneficial on those occasions when i have talked with performers directly for my research. i don’t do this often, but over time, i have drawn from exchanges with the rock singer-songwriter suzi quatro, two founding members of the doo-wop revival group sha na na, the violinist mari kimura and, in another vein, the actor willem dafoe. being a performer provides a common ground with other performers that can be a starting point for dialogue even if we don’t engage in the same kind of performance. we can speak more as colleagues than as researcher and subject. you raise an interesting point: that of a mutual influence of research and performance. in the last few years musicology has recognized the role and value of musical performance and musical practice for research. it is no longer just a matter of “research-led” musical performance; performance-led or practice-led research has also gained currency… right. i’m aware of these developments in music, art, and theater. i don’t think of myself as engaged in practice-led research, more like research informed by practical experience. this reminds me of a piece of advice offered to me by my mentor when i was an undergraduate studying the history of art, the late historian of american art john mccoubrey. he asked if i had ever taken a course in the fine arts department. when i told him i hadn’t, he said, “well, you’re studying this stuff, don’t you think you should have a sense of how it’s made?” so, i took a drawing course. i also studied music theory as an undergrad. i’m neither a visual artist nor a music theorist or composer, but having at least an idea of what goes into the making of the things i research, as well as familiarity with the technical vocabularies associated with making them, is valuable. in your many publications i find several intriguing discussions or interpretations of walter benjamin’s writings, especially his essay on “mechanical reproduction” or “technical reproducibility,” according to the german title of the unfinished, open project, existing in many different versions between 1935 and 1940, the year of his death. is benjamin’s thinking still relevant for contemporary scholars who work in such a different media environment than that experienced by him? i do return repeatedly to benjamin. first, i think some of the specific points he made regarding the functioning of media and their social impact are as true for our media landscape as they were for his. for example, when he speaks of “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly,” or when he speaks of how the development of newspapers and cinema was leading to a cultural configuration in which anyone could become an author or an actor, he could have been talking about social media, which reflects these impulses and possibilities even more than the media of his time. [12] second, benjamin’s idea that new media bring into being new ways of perceiving is a valuable lens through which to examine the evolution of media and their impact in any historical epoch. john berger’s classic ways of seeing is an elaboration of the same insight: that human perception is not neutral, or a given, but historically—and politically—conditioned. [13] i hope that in a small way, my contention that liveness is not a stable ontological characteristic of events but a moving target, an ever-changing way of describing experience that morphs along with the evolution of technologies of representation and modes of perception, continues this tradition of inquiry. a second, explicit model for your reflection is erving goffman—you often refer to his book the presentation of self in everyday life (first published in 1959) in your own writings. [14] not only does the concept of “musical persona” draw on his approach, but you clearly present musical performance mainly as a form of social, symbolic and strategic interaction, and develop a dramaturgical approach which (in some respect) can be traced back to him. how would you define the influence of goffman on your reflection? goffman is a major influence on me. i came to goffman indirectly through derrida and poststructuralism, which i explored deeply in the 1980s. i internalized what might be called the deconstructive gesture to such a degree that it is pretty much reflexive, most evident in my constant questioning of cultural dichotomies, as you mention in the introduction. i leave no binary unturned! but i also found that derridean deconstruction and other poststructuralist strategies were not paths forward for the ways in which i wanted to engage with performance. i was very happy to discover a strain of anti-foundationalism in certain mid-twentieth century thinkers, goffman chief among them, who were also pragmatically oriented toward social and cultural analysis. for goffman, reality (including identity) is anchored not in metaphysics or the psyche but in discourse, and he is interested in how we bring reality into being through performance, a perspective i have found to be incredibly productive, especially when trying to work out my ideas about musicians as performers. what about the potential usefulness of other models of analysis—for example, the one developed by goffman’s pupil harvey sacks, who pioneered such methods as conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis—for performance in general and particularly for musical performance, including the work of other scholars from goffman’s circle? as you note in the introduction, my first foray into the line of research that culminates in my recent book in concert: performing musical persona (2021) was the essay “performance analysis and popular music: a manifesto” (2004). this was the first time i used the word “persona” in this connection (i had previously used it in talking about stand-up comedy and experimental theater) and i had not yet realized how useful goffman would be in developing the concept. the analytical approach i was advocating was performance analysis as practiced in theater scholarship. recently, i was looking at a discussion of performance analysis by the theater scholar christopher balme, who identifies some specific approaches. in his terms, my style of performance analysis is product-oriented in the sense that i look at finished performances from a spectatorial standpoint, and structural in that i “emphasize a set of procedures—the choice and ordering of sign systems—rather than an interpretation derived from the text.” [15] i remain committed to the idea of performance analysis—close reading and thick description of performances—and i like the fact that performance analysis is not a strictly defined procedure (it is defined only as being interpretive, as opposed to theater criticism, which is evaluative) or associated with any particular method. in terms of analyzing musical performances, i have found goffman’s broad framework for self-presentation (i.e., the concept of social front and the categories of setting, appearance, and manner) to be sufficient for my purposes. i can see, however, that those whose approach is more processor event-oriented (balme’s terms again) might turn to other models derived from conversational analysis. musical performance and musical persona are strongly connected in your reflection. yet, the use of the concept of “persona” easily leads one to think of it as a pre-established identity that exists prior to and independently of its performances. how would you clarify this connection between musical persona and musical performance? this is a good question, but a complex one. there is one sense in which musical personae do exist prior to their performance. musical personae are social roles and, as such, are defined collectively (socially) prior to any particular iteration. for example, if i take a job as a pit musician, i know this means that i have to assume a certain persona. i recently found a contractual document from the tulsa symphony orchestra in tulsa, oklahoma that very explicitly defines the pit musician’s persona in terms of appearance: “black turtleneck or black mock turtleneck shirt, black pants, black socks and black shoes. t-shirts are not permitted.” this persona (including its front) is defined prior to my assumption of it, though this does not necessarily determine how i choose to perform it. individual performances of socially defined roles are always situated, to use goffman’s term. in some orchestra pits, wearing fluorescent socks might be an acceptable individualization of the persona, though clearly not in tulsa! some roles are defined more restrictively than others. obviously, rock musicians have much greater latitude in constructing their personae than do symphony players. the point is that there are aspects of any musical persona as a social role that are in place before any individual assumes the role. i also stress that not all performances of musical persona involve the performance of music. for example, the beatles famously performed their individual and collective personae at their press conferences, in interviews, in their films, and so on. [16] these performances played key roles in defining the public’s sense of who the beatles were, especially in the united states. but it is obvious that this was all in the service of creating identities the audience would understand to be the sources of the music they were hearing. in this sense, these personae were not independent of the music, since they have no meaning apart from it. when we factor in the role of the audience, it is clear that musical persona ultimately is neither independent of nor prior to its performance. for goffman, self-presentation is a fragile effort to persuade an audience to accept at face value the impression one is trying to create. whether or not this happens is up to the audience, not the performer. this is why goffman refers to the process as “impression management”—an active, cybernetic process of evaluating the impression one is creating through the feedback one receives from the audience and modifying one’s self-presentation as needed to maintain the impression. the musical persona, like all social identities, is not a static entity that the performer puts on display. it emerges through a negotiation with the audience and each iteration is specific to a particular interaction. this relationship with the audience is particularly clear in instances where a group seeks to change its persona. the beatles are again a good case in point, since they performed at least four different collective personae over the course of their career. if they still had been performing the same group persona and the music associated with it in 1967 as they had in 1964, it is doubtful they would have remained successful. at the same time, their change in persona from a cheerful boy band to avatars of the counterculture had to be managed in such a way that they would retain the massive audience they had built. indeed, the performance of change is strictly connected to the change of performance… agreed, though this kind of change can take many forms. the beatles undertook wholesale alterations of their group and individual personae in response to changing times and the rise of the counterculture. responding to these same pressures, chuck berry changed the emphasis of his repertoire. knowing that the rock audience of the late sixties was starting to understand the blues as the “roots” of rock, in his performances at the fillmore west and similar venues berry emphasized the bluesy portion of his song book (“wee wee hours,” for example) while still playing his famous rock and roll songs to adjust his persona to that of a progenitor of rock with a relationship to the blues. with your publications, you have contributed to the dissemination of the notion of “mediatization” (“mediatized culture” is a part of the subtitle of liveness ). one problem with the concept is that the media are not all the same. records, cinema, television, and youtube are different, they perform differently (and also a live concert is in some way a medium—a form of mediation). the same is true for the general use of “mediatized music.” as any other kind of experience, music is “mediatized” differently according to the different media. is the concept really useful and how? as i understand it, the term mediatization, which i took from jean baudrillard, is meant to describe a culture saturated by media, particularly mass media, and their representations, and i think it continues to be useful for that purpose, especially since the dominance of media in contemporary western societies and cultures, at least, has increased exponentially since baudrillard first wrote about it. [17] since one starting point for liveness was the live/recorded dichotomy, i was not that concerned with the different means of recording and the specific experiences they provide. however, there is a chart in liveness that maps the changing meaning of the term in relation to the evolving technological landscape. [18] here, the particularities of specific media and the experiences they help shape are key. in reactivations, i am concerned with the documentation of performances but not so much with the specific means of documentation, though the book does tend to emphasize photographic documentation, still the coin of the realm in performance art, as opposed to other kinds, and therefore does get into some ideas about that particular medium by way of benjamin and others. other examples of my work in which medium-specificity is central include “the liveness of watching online,” an essay i wrote for a tate modern publication, where i discuss the differences between watching a live performance on television versus one streamed on a computer. [19] another instance is “film acting and performance capture: the index in crisis,” in which i get into distinctions between chemical and digital photography and between film and motion capture. [20] in these discussions, technical details such as the fact that whereas television is a broadcast, one-to-many medium, the internet is a one-to-one medium since each user has their own stream, or that motion capture “cameras” do not capture light as do film or digital cameras but actually bounce light off the subject in order to capture data points, are central to my arguments. on the other hand, the recent historical and technological developments, with the pervasiveness of the new digital media, make the idea of a generalized “mediatization” expressive of the cross-media environment—quite a few live concerts, particularly in the last decades, involve not only lighting design and videos on huge screens, but also 3d hologram projections, the resort to virtual reality and so on; and the unifying flow of the web leads to the same consequence… in the essay on performance capture i just mentioned, i propose that the entity undertaking the performance is the one we see on the screen, not the actor whose performance was captured, nor the creators and manipulators of the digital puppet, etc. this is in line with some work i did earlier considering whether or not machines, robots, and software could be considered to be live performers, which i believe they can under some circumstances. i have somewhat the same feeling about the so-called holograms giving concerts now. the roy orbison hologram is not so much a mediatized version of roy orbison as it is a performing entity unto itself. the medium ceases to be a channel or conduit for a performance but becomes the performer. returning to your question about musical persona, i might argue that the hologram extracts the persona from the person: it is a representation of the persona but not as embodied by the person. do you have any reference points in your personal approach to the media, i mean: media scholars who have particularly influenced you? in addition to benjamin and baudrillard, raymond williams has had a significant influence on me, especially his lecture “drama in a dramatised society,” [21] his book television: technology and cultural form, [22] and his ideas of dominant culture and structures of feeling (both explicated in marxism and literature). [23] what i admire in williams, and seek to emulate in my own way, is his effort to get to the heart of what it feels like to live a specific culture at a particular moment, while simultaneously recognizing that there will always be aspects of complex societies that will remain elusive. i realize that williams may not be considered to be a media scholar exactly, but the materials i’ve just mentioned place media at the center of the cultural processes he describes and provide tools for understanding the role and dominance of media in contemporary society. in addition, he wrote beautifully in a way that is lucid, yet hints at conceptual depths that are not directly articulated. since i obtained the idea of liveness from television scholars, i have to give a shout out to jane feuer, who passed away this year, whose classic 1983 essay “the concept of live television: ontology as ideology” was an essential starting point that influenced the terms of my discussions of these issues. [24] another media scholar to whose work i find myself returning regularly is lynn spigel. make room for tv: television and the family ideal in postwar america is still one of my favorite books. [25] her examinations of how media are assimilated into everyday domestic life and interior design, and the later work she has done on the changing status of television in the age of the internet constitute a vital intervention on the evolving history of the medium in relation to other media and social discourses. on the side of historical musicology, i would like to touch on the vexata quaestio concerning the relationship between performance and “text,” which can take the form of a score but also of a libretto with stage directions, while in other artistic fields it can be a script or a screenplay. this question seems to be in some way “liquidated” by your approach to performance. for example, in “musical personae” you engage in a discussion with nicholas cook, who in his 2001 article “between process and product: music and/as performance” proposed to consider the score as a “script” for performance, a concept that is still present in his more recent book beyond the score: music as performance (2013) . [26] yet, i think performance studies could help us rethink musical and non-musical texts as integral parts of what musicians “do”—as aspects of “musicking,” to borrow christopher small’s term. performance studies, for example, provide the concept of “media performativity”—extremely relevant in media studies but in my view still undertheorized. the concept could be applied to musical texts as well—whether scores or scripts. in quite a few performances scores are directly visible on stage and exert their own “performativity” on the audience. in many cases texts are involved or used in some way: they are used in rehearsals, read, interpreted, discussed, and also questioned, overwritten, loved, hated, ruined, and so on. i would particularly stress the “material” and “pragmatic” aspects of texts used in performance. in your reflection, what is the place of “texts” as concrete written artifacts involved in music making as well as in other performance practices? cook devotes a whole chapter of beyond the score to the idea of seeing musical scores as what he calls “social scripts.” part of his argument is that if one is to think seriously of music as performance, the idea that the score is more akin to a theatrical script, which was written to be performed, is much more useful than the idea that a musical score is akin to a literary text, which was written to be read. i completely agree with this point. but i also think that cook is committed to an idea of the musical “work” that has little presence in my thinking. i’m not sure i can give you as direct an answer to the rest of your question. the “liquidation” you mention probably results from the fact that i came of age intellectually in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time when poststructuralist theory and cultural studies were proposing that everything could be considered a text, to put it crudely. the field of performance studies evolved amid this ferment; one of its premises was that performances could be “read” as cultural texts. another part of my background is in the history of art, where we treated visual objects as texts to be analyzed. so, for quite a long time, i’ve been used to a way of looking at performance that does not particularly privilege its textual elements but treats performances as texts in themselves. this perspective is no doubt reflected in my claim that musical compositions are among the “expressive equipment” musicians use to perform their personae rather than privileged texts whose conveyance to an audience is the purpose of performance. [27] i don’t in any way discount the idea that texts, understood broadly, are integral to performance. after all, performers always need something to perform, and that something is likely to be understandable as a text of some kind. the relationship of text as an element of performance to the performance in question is always worth investigating. but i guess it just goes against my grain to consider texts as privileged elements of performance. i also like your point about the presence and performativity of musical scores onstage. i was watching eric clapton’s tribute concert to the late ginger baker, and i noticed that steve winwood was consulting written notation, which certainly factored into my perception of his performance. i also recently watched two performances of john cage’s 4’33” (1952), one by david tudor and the other by william marx. whereas tudor had the score spread out on the top of the piano, marx had it in a music stand, and this difference contributed to the very different experiences of the two performances and the personae of the performers. texts (scores, scripts, screenplays, even written archival materials) are also “documents.” do you consider them as in some way connected to “documentation”? i don’t consider texts that in principle precede performance to be documents of the performance. i’m not saying that they can’t help one to comprehend the performance. i once saw a production of othello in lithuanian, which i cannot understand at all. since i know the play well enough, i was able to follow the action, so textual knowledge helped me to understand the performance. but that doesn’t make shakespeare’s play a documentation of that performance, at least not to my mind. but how would you consider scores and scripts when bearing the traces of specific performances? don’t you think they in some ways “document” the preparation of a performance or even the performance itself as specific event? this may be a somewhat indirect answer to your question. i do think it’s analytically useful to retain a distinction between score or script and document along the lines of assuming that a score or script precedes the performance and the document comes after it and records it in some fashion. however, it is clear that such documents can become scores or scripts in turn. to take a conventional example, let’s say i record a song. the song, the composition, is the score and the recording is the documentation of my performance of it. but if someone else learns the song and, perhaps, my way of performing it from my recording, the recording becomes a kind of script that engenders future performances. as we know, this is traditionally how rock musicians learn to play and learn the repertoire, and jazz musicians often seek to learn their idols’ improvisations from recordings. in the realm of performance art, those who wish to recreate or re-perform historical pieces do so primarily from documents rather than scripts or scores. in other words, my understanding is that the categories of “script/score” and “document” are functional, not ontological—a particular text or artifact can serve as either one or both, depending on how it is used. do you think your discussion of the performance/documentation relation in reactivations can help us to reconsider in some way the text/performance relation beyond the dichotomic thinking that usually opposes them? the short answer to your question is yes. in reactivations, i was trying to suggest that the document is itself a site on which the performance takes place via the beholder’s reactivation of the performance from it. i think this complicates the conventionally assumed relationship between the terms “text” and “performance” in what i hope is a useful way. to what extent can the media be considered as offering a form of “textualization” of performance? is the concept of text useful in this “active” meaning? to put it differently: can texts be considered as, say, provisional “de-activations” of performances in view of future “re-activations”, to play with the title of your book? well, if a performance is already a text in some sense, as i said before, i’m not sure how much more “textualized” it can become! perhaps it would be better to suggest, along the lines of what i say in reactivations, that a live performance and a recording, say, are two different textualizations of the same thing, and that an experience of this thing can be had from either kind of text. i do like the idea of a three-step process from performance (activation) to document (deactivation) to the performance reactivated from the document. the problem is that i don’t like the word deactivate in this context partly because it makes it sound as if the act of documenting a performance renders it inactive (or worse, kills it!), which is more or less the opposite of the point: the act of documentation enables future reactivations and reenactments and, thus, the continued life of the performance. in your recent writings, including “digital liveness” and reactivations (but not in liveness , if i am not wrong), you often refer to hans-georg gadamer’s hermeneutic approach, which started from the text/interpretation relationship… how is gadamer or german hermeneutics, even including reception theory, connected to your work? or how would you define the sense of your personal recovery and use of this tradition in your relatively recent writings? the honest answer is that i discovered gadamer because i was looking for a solution to a specific problem. i wanted to argue in reactivations that performance documents, including recordings, provide an experience of the performance in the partaker’s own time and place, a position i had already taken regarding recordings of music. they are not time machines that transport the partaker back to the circumstances of the original performance. benjamin’s notion of reactivation addresses this. but it is also true, if i’m being faithful to my own experience, that one of the reasons we are interested in certain performances and in reactivating them is precisely because they occurred in the past. gadamer addresses this in many ways. the simplest one is his point that since aspects of the past are always already embedded in the present, some artifacts of the past, including performances, are accessible to us through our present experience of them (in fact, this is the only way we can experience them). as he says in truth and method, “only the part of the past that is not past offers the possibility of historical knowledge.” [28] he also suggests that it is our ethical obligation as partakers to make the historical artifact immediate to ourselves (contemporaneous) without erasing its alterity. in this respect, gadamer makes the apprehension of a work from the past—as something that can speak to us today—the result of an active and conscious effort on the part of the audience. to me, this can be seen as a description of how reactivation works, since benjamin identifies it as a phenomenon without discussing its mechanism. i will also say that gadamer represents for me something similar to goffman: an anti-foundationalist thinker whose ideas lend themselves to practical analysis. the covid-19 crisis (this journal is produced in the past italian epicenter of the epidemic, milan) prompts a deep reflection on the importance of the media in everyday life. while the health emergency imposes “social distancing,” the media enhance their paradoxical performance of immediacy and presence—or at least this aspect has become more and more important to us. how would you describe the role of “performance” and “media performativity” in the age of covid-19? i am working on such questions right now as i prepare the third edition of liveness, which will be in part the “pandemic edition,” since i’m writing it in quarantine and because i’m in the peculiar position of writing about the cultural status of live performance at a time when traditional live performance is impossible. since i’m immersed in this situation, both intellectually and circumstantially, it’s difficult for me to get enough distance to be analytical about it. one thing i have noticed is that the absence of live performance has created the conditions for a resurgence of the kind of rhetoric valorizing the live experience that was one of the things i was reacting to when i first undertook to write liveness. this is accompanied at present in both theater and music by a fairly desperate-seeming search for online experiences that are equivalent to—or at least viable replacements for—live theater performances or concerts. this is entirely understandable from an economic perspective: performers and cultural institutions all over the world lost their livelihood overnight; some are only starting to recover, while others are threatened with extinction. it is perhaps ironic that the lack of in-person live experiences has created a glut of online ones: there is now more music, more theater, more everything available online than one could ever have time to watch. one of the dimensions of this situation that interests me the most is the way recorded performances, often recorded some time ago, are being repurposed as live events either by limiting access to a specific time period or by adding interactive features, such as real-time chat during the performance. i also take an interest in the new cultural performances that are emerging in the wake of the pandemic, such as people applauding first responders and hospital workers at shift change every night; people dressing up to take out their trash or coordinating times to be outside to sing or dance while maintaining social distance, and so on. the media and social media play a key role in promulgating these activities simply by reporting on them and giving people activities to emulate. yes, like all historical traumas, the health emergency has contributed and still is contributing to question many easy conceptual dichotomies, forcing us to rethink concepts and their mutual relationship, especially in the field of performance and performing arts. this same interview was born under the influence of covid-19, for example because it took shape at a distance and through subsequent online exchanges, which makes it a peculiar artifact, suspended between performance, media, documentation, and history. isn’t this a very clear and sufficiently complex case of “reactivation”? yes. strictly speaking, our readers are the ones who will reactivate and experience our dialogic performance from this document. their experience is analogous to that of listening to a highly produced studio album that was performed and recorded in discontinuous segments that were pieced together through an editorial process, yet the beholder’s perception of it is as a single, uninterrupted performance unfolding in real time. perhaps we can use this circumstance to unpack one last dichotomy: that between activation and reactivation, two of the trio of terms you mentioned earlier. in cases such as a studio album or this dialogue, where the document records a performance that never took place in real time and space in the same form as it is made available to the beholder, the beholder simultaneously activates the performance, in the sense of bringing it into being, and reactivates it in the sense of constructing an experience of it from the document. the document, in turn, becomes both a primary and a secondary source. primary in the sense that the document is the space in which the performance is initially activated, where it takes place, and secondary in the sense that it makes the performance available for reactivation. [1] philip auslander, liveness: performance in a mediatized culture. second edition (london: routledge, 2008), 56. [2] auslander, liveness, 56. [3] philip auslander, “digital liveness: a historico-philosophical perspective,” paj: a journal of performance and art 34, no. 3 (2012): 3–11. [4] philip auslander, performing glam rock: gender and theatricality in popular music (ann arbor: university of michigan press, 2006). [5] philip auslander, in concert: performing musical persona (ann arbor: university of michigan press, 2021). [6] philip auslander, “performance analysis and popular music: a manifesto,” contemporary theatre review 14, no. 1 (2004): 1–13; philip auslander, “musical personae,” tdr/the drama review 50, no. 1 (2006): 100–119. [7] philip auslander, “‘musical personae’ revisited,” in investigating musical performance: theoretical models and intersections , ed. gianmario borio, giovanni giuriati, alessandro cecchi, and marco lutzu (london: routledge, 2020), 45. [8] philip auslander, “afterword. music as performance: the disciplinary dilemma revisited,” in taking it to the bridge: music as performance, ed. nicholas cook and richard pettengill, (ann arbor: university of michigan press, 2013), 349–357. [9] philip auslander, “music as performance: the disciplinary dilemma revisited,” in sound und performance: positionen, methoden, analysen, ed. wolf-dieter ernst, nora niethammer, berenika szymanski-düll, and anno mungen (würzburg: königshausen & neumann, 2015), 541. [10] auslander, “music as performance,” 541. [11] philip auslander, reactivations. essays on performance and its documentation (ann arbor: university of michigan press, 2018), 40. [12] walter benjamin, “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” trans. harry zohn, in illuminations, ed. hannah arendt (new york: schocken books, 1969), 219, 223. [13] john berger, ways of seeing (london: bbc and penguin, 1972). [14] erving goffman, the presentation of self in everyday life (new york: doubleday, 1959). [15] christopher b. balme, the cambridge introduction to theatre studies (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2008), 144. [16] philip auslander, “live—in person! the beatles as performers, 1963–1966,” acting archives review 10, no. 20 (2020). [17] “what is mediatized is not what comes off the daily press, out of the tube, or on the radio: it is what is reinterpreted by the sign form, articulated into models, and administered by the code.” jean baudrillard, for a critique of the political economy of the sign, trans. charles levin (st. louis: telos press, 1981), 175–176. [18] auslander, liveness, 61. [19] philip auslander, “the liveness of watching online: performance room,” in perform, experience, re-live: bmw tate live program, ed. cecilia wee (london: tate publishing, 2016), 112–125. [20] philip auslander, “film acting and performance capture: the index in crisis,” paj: a journal of performance and art 39, no. 3 (2017): 7–23. [21] raymond williams, drama in a dramatised society: an inaugural lecture (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1975). [22] williams, television: technology and cultural form (new york: schocken books, 1974). [23] williams, marxism and literature (oxford: oxford university press, 1977). [24] jane feuer, “the concept of live television: ontology as ideology,” in regarding television: critical approaches—an anthology, ed. e. ann kaplan (frederick: university publications of america, 1983), 12–22. [25] lynn spigel,make room for tv: television and the family ideal in postwar america (chicago: university of chicago press, 1992). [26] nicholas cook, “between process and product: music and/as performance,” mto/music theory online 7, no. 2 (2001); cook, beyond the score: music as performance (oxford: oxford university press, 2013). [27] auslander, “musical personae,” 118. [28] hans-georg gadamer, truth and method, trans. joel weinsheimer and donald g. marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (new york: continuum, 2004), 290. × article contents introduction rehearsing laboratory rehearsing connection rehearsing van der aa footnotes article rehearsing upload * lea luka sikau sound stage screen, issue 2 (fall 2022), pp. 61–83, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2022 lea luka sikau. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss18841. i enter the rehearsal studio of the new opera upload by michel van der aa at the dutch national opera in february 2021. lights are low. projectors hum. the set consists of seven giant screens. two singers stand on the stage: the baritone roderick williams gazes into a motion tracking camera while the soprano julia bullock watches his oversized avatar, brightly projected on the screens. van der aa faces a multiple-screen setup, focusing on how to transform williams’s body into a virtual gestalt. the stage projections show the avatar’s face repeatedly disintegrating into thousands of particles, every time with different granular structures and contrasts. after some discussion, van der aa walks back to his desk and announces that he would like to run through the scene again. the stage manager queues the projections, the stage lights, and the click track. bullock starts singing, addressing the screens. [1] in this ethnographic vignette, all eyes are on the avatar. humans and nonhuman matter center around the virtual protagonist as upload stages a posthuman. the narrative tells a typical science-fiction tale, dealing with uploading the human mind to a server, developing into an avatar, and losing the physical body in the process. in the opera’s plot, the figure of the avatar is founded on the withdrawal of a foundation in the form of a congenital body. [2] a “father” (williams) uploads himself at a futurist laboratory and continues to exist as a virtual being: he thinks without having access to the tactility of a lived experience. surprising his “daughter” (bullock) with this transformation, a paternal dispute begins which questions life without a congenital body. in multiple ways, upload is reminiscent of the fiction presented in hans moravec’s mind children (1988) as well as tod machover’s and robert pinsky’s robot opera death and the powers (2010) developed at the mit media lab. [3] upload, too, explores state-of-the-art technology on stage. [4] composer, librettist, and director van der aa conceptualized this posthuman opera for two voices, a chamber ensemble of eleven players, an electronic soundtrack, film, and motion capture. the story is driven by films projected on gigantic screens, stage action, and the singing avatar of the father, rendered in real time. to portray him as a virtual body, the opera recalibrates canonical operatic practices. this article examines the process of rehearsing a posthuman opera from the perspective of a self-reflective ethnography. proposing a rehearsal-oriented ontology of opera, i avoid discussions of the performance and even the music itself. whereas ethnographic investigations of the performing arts have greatly added to other disciplines such as performance, theater studies, and anthropology in the last decades, i strive to make the case for including the rehearsal more substantially in discussions that bridge contemporary opera and media studies. [5] tying into transdisciplinary discourses within opera, media, and critical posthuman studies, rehearsal ethnography showcases moments in the process and elements of productions mediated by technologies that remain difficult to trace in retrospect. [6] in the midst of opera’s production process—after the composition phase and before the premiere—i situate myself in the rehearsal studio and observe the development of an opera over the course of two months. [7] within this case, i enter the field as a writer for the dutch national opera and a participant-observer with a background as mezzo-soprano, dramaturg, and director of new opera. [8] by looking into the rehearsal instead of at the performance, i shift my focus from the written score to verbal interactions and nonhuman sounds in the rehearsal studio. i comprehend opera’s contemporary practices as a continuation of a genre that has historically driven scientific experimentation and technological innovation. [9] operatic technologies both constitute the art form and interact with its agents. intertwining sounds, stages, and screens, the rehearsal detangles how opera can be understood as an interface which interacts vibrantly through nonhuman technologies and human bodies. [10] rehearsal ethnography offers the opportunity to examine the agential relations of material and bodies that sustain opera at large. rather than merely singling out one technology of wonder, such as the motion capture system, the rehearsal also highlights its embeddedness with material and bodies that have belonged to the operatic vocabulary for centuries. [11] the interface highlights opera’s technogenesis, the dynamic co-evolution of humans with “old” and “new” technologies. [12] beyond acknowledging the co-evolution within the rehearsal, i also draw on ursula k. le guin’s “the carrier bag theory of fiction” to conceptualize the rehearsal itself not only as an environment facilitating technogenesis, but as an immersive, co-evolving technology itself. le guin theorizes the first technologies in the paleolithic age as containers which carry their interiors, explicitly opposing the narrative of sharp tools sticking out and producing hero stories. [13] the rehearsal carries the ensemble of technogenesis over the course of several months. [14] its space contains physical connections between its agents, and its time carries electromagnetic signals and sound waves. [15] with the recognition of the rehearsal as immersive technology, i highlight its genesis in co-evolution with the matter and bodies inside, preventing to isolate singular operatic technologies in the discussion. transforming along with its production processes, an ethnography of the immersive technology not only sketches out upload’s production processes, but simultaneously reflects back on how the carrier bag of opera interfaces within the genre’s environment. in the process of this posthuman opera in particular, i interrogate how the immersive technology co-evolves in its production dynamics by transforming into a laboratory-like space. i dissect the composite of the avatar as an assemblage of (non)human agents that recalibrates processes of repetition and connection. ultimately, this leads me to trace how van der aa himself co-evolves into the posthuman form of an opera production. rehearsing laboratory the virtual body recalibrates the architecture of opera’s immersive technology and imposes a prioritization of the digital scenography over the live mise-en-scène. as the opera is dependent on rehearsing with an avatar, the technologically ambitious project results in a significant transformation of the space. for upload, the immersive technology evolves into a laboratory-like space. a technical crew sets up an interior architecture saturated with new technologies two days in advance of rehearsal. from the start, the rehearsals are embedded in a technological corset instead of a system of substitutes being simultaneously created around the performers. [16] whereas most opera productions nowadays work with set and prop substitutes while the final set is manufactured in operas’ workshops, upload exclusively employs parts of the original stage technology. from the first day of rehearsals, the score is set in stone as the sets and the electroacoustic soundtrack are preprogrammed. [17] when looking at other opera productions that are comparable in terms of their screen usage, they differ in that they only install the original projectors, full-size screens, and spotlights in the auditorium, not in the rehearsal studio already. [18] to incubate the virtual in an environment not originally designed for testing technology, upload becomes dependent on the material’s yet unknown affordances. the technological infrastructure erects a laboratory-like structure which is best described through the notion of the “experimental system” as theorized by the science and technology studies scholar hans-jörg rheinberger. this system is made up of two entities: technical objects and epistemic things. [19] technical objects repeat processes, transmitting knowledge that is common sense in the field, such as the opera’s schedule and technologies that have been part of the operatic vocabulary for centuries. these objects appear in the rehearsal as always already repeated. through repetition, they enable epistemic things—chimeras which embody what the field does not know yet—to occur and co-evolve. [20] generating difference within repetition, the epistemic thing is reworked with and against the repeated. this “thing” in flux magnifies the difference within repetitive structures and raises new questions, receiving the effort of knowledge. [21] in upload’s rehearsal, the chimera is literally the avatar which cannot be delineated by screen projections. its agency expands as a compound of relations: it spans from williams’ appearance, his amplified voice and the avatar designer’s code over van der aa’s vision, to the recalibration of the studio into a laboratory. the avatar introduces difference to the production practices of opera by experimenting with more responsive ways of interaction between performer and digital technologies. by being explored in the rehearsal studio, the motion capture system contributes to reproduce upload out of canonical practices, while it simultaneously reproduces itself out of the scientific context. according to avatar designer darien brito, the rehearsal forms an uncontrolled environment with significantly more unknown variables to navigate: we [the upload production team] are using tools that are not originally designed to behave in a way that is useful for opera productions. for these devices, the things that we are doing are a bit weird. they are not meant to be used in this setup. normally, you would have a studio with proper lighting and the actors would not move much.[22] brito describes the technological challenges in this production by taking on the perspective of the devices themselves. even if the rehearsal studio recalibrated itself to accommodate the epistemic thing, the opera affords new capacities, culminating in a performance that has to render the protagonist in real time without recalibration and delay (but with costumes and changing lighting) for ninety minutes consecutively. whereas performers can act as if a prop would be the original one—creating a culture of substitutes—the avatar only works with the original stage technology in place. the immersive technology of rehearsal modifies to co-evolve with the motion capture system at the same time as the computational system learns to adapt to the uncontrolled environment. what drives the rehearsal to produce an avatar (and repeat itself) out of canonical practices? van der aa seeks for an avatar look which is dynamic and at the same time abstract enough, and which does not resemble the imagery of a live projection. i extract the artistic research question of how the avatar can embody the congenital body of the father in the virtual space, displaying credibility towards both its existence as a virtual being and its human “nature.” during the coding sessions, the team intends to create an avatar that retains the attention of the audience, even in moments when it competes with williams’ physical body on the side stage. the avatar seeks to draw the audience’s gaze towards his virtual projection to make his congenital body appear as a substitute, proving liveness and serving the trend in contemporary music theater to reveal its own technical materiality. [23] for this effect to work, the avatar has to be projected in real time with minimal latency. robert wechsler argues that highly accurate motion capture systems mostly remain unused in realtime performances. [24] against the grain of industry practices, upload experiments with a real time motion capture system. as the look of the avatar changes in every scene, the rendering process is quite complex. the team tries to decrease the delay of the projected image so that the lip movement of the avatar is in sync with williams’s singing voice. van der aa is in close contact with brito about changing the look. a few times, the avatar designer replies that the composer’s requests are not feasible to translate into this virtual environment. van der aa counters half-jokingly: “i don’t like to hear no.” this back and forth between brito, van der aa, and the material capacities is characteristic for the research on the avatar’s properties. in these moments, the avatar receives the effort of knowledge as hypotheses are falsified. the immersive technology of rehearsal carries a laboratory for the process of technogenesis to evolve through testing and falsification. the director tests his theories while the technology fails to meet his expectations. but instead of compromising his aesthetic ideas to technological feasibility within the framework of opera’s schedule, he prioritizes the avatar imagery over rehearsal time with the cast. rehearsing connection beyond testing the technical affordances, the virtual body reverses how other bodies in the studio comprehend interaction. van der aa, brito, and the performers all interact distinctively with the avatar. the composer and the coder approximate the avatar while the performers are disconnected from their virtual interlocutor. despite its virtual character, the composer and the avatar designer see it evolving from an imaginary vision into a more tangible image. while van der aa steers the avatar artistically, brito is the expert who understands how to accommodate for the avatar’s affordances. in touchdesigner (a software to simulate virtual objects) brito creates a virtual environment that embeds the uploaded father and translates him into a cloud of particles in real time. the data tracked by the motion capture system is modified with different sets of filters that lend the avatar a different look in every sequence. the avatar designer is the only person interviewed who notices the avatar as “real and tangible,” as he can “touch, move, and transform [it] in a literal sense.”  [25] for the other team members, the avatar seems to be an untouchable body. they perceive the avatar projections more as a cinematic screening merging with the films and less as an interactive body within the mise-en-scène. this notion is intensified as the conversations at the avatar designer’s desk are so quiet that they remain incomprehensible for most of the production team. the knowledge generated about the epistemic thing in the studio is inaccessible and creates a distance between the virtual being and the team. the process relating to the avatar creation becomes opaque. the performers, usually the most connected with fellow performers, are removed from tangible connection as their interactions are always mediated via screens and loudspeakers. even for the baritone williams, who lends the virtual chimera his bodily appearance, the avatar is out of his reach of control. except when stepping out of the motion capture space and, thus, erasing the virtual body, williams is not involved in how his bodily input is processed. to learn his part, he is dependent on technical instructions by brito and conceptual guidance by van der aa. restricted to a tiny square captured by the motion tracking system, he carries out his gestures, displaced in a ninety degrees angle from his performing counterpart. in conversations, he mentions that he does not know how his facial expressions are mediated—eliciting estrangement and disconnect—but that he fully trusts van der aa in directing him. [26] the avatar projections require a counterintuitive acting style from williams and a real-time modification from brito that multiplies the performer, disseminates him all over the stage, and fragments his agency. in the meantime, bullock plays a daughter who is deprived of physical touch with her father, but still feels an emotional connection with him. in the rehearsal weeks, the soprano seeks to create this connection by acknowledging the virtual body as a sovereign stage persona: i need to connect emotionally and start establishing a relationship with [his] avatar. it is such a bizarre thought, but i have to build a connective tissue with the avatar separated from [williams] and [his] stage presence.[27] by splitting williams in two, she defines the projections as her counterpart, as if the avatar itself was an autonomous body. she intends to match brito’s viewpoint—i.e., seeing the avatar as an entity she can affect and which, in turn, can also affect her actions. however, the avatar’s constant fragmentation, the surround sound of its voice, and the several different filters make it difficult to locate and address her interlocutor. in the rehearsal process, the virtual body becomes a compound protagonist. visually and sonically fragmented, bullock seeks to find virtual touch points to connect with. dramaturg madelon kooijman facilitates this process by tying each scene to an emotional expression of the daughter’s character. bullock projects her emotions onto the screens even if she does not receive a human performer’s immediate response. zooming out from the individual interactions, the recalibration of connection culminates in the substitution of singers. whereas most opera productions work with fake sets and props in the rehearsals, which replace the original performance objects, upload uses the official sets from the first rehearsal day onwards. more specifically, it not only uses the same sets, but it replaces the performers to incubate the virtual, too. this process reverses canonical production logistics in modern opera houses. williams is replaced by an intern who stands in front of the motion capture camera to experiment with the technology. while one human turns into a substitute for another human, matter is explored in its vast affordances. in conversation, the intern said that she “started to do extensive yoga and stretching sessions every morning before the rehearsals as the hours of standing and little movement in front of the camera were physically quite exhausting.”  [28] in addition to the intern who facilitates the repetitive testing process, the performing covers for bullock and williams are frequently present in the studio. compared to other new opera productions, in which covers attend the last rehearsals only and practice the mise-en-scène separately (for instance, with the stage director’s assistant), this production includes them to a significant extent during the rehearsal period. [29] on one rehearsal day, van der aa starts staging the ninth scene of the opera, the daughter’s solo aria, even though bullock is not present. her cover, verity wingate, has to jump in so that van der aa can begin to stage the scene. in upload’s rehearsals, humans function as substitutes. by demanding qualities from humans that one might attribute to matter, and exploring the vibrant capacities of material, upload’s rehearsal practices propose a reversed understanding of nonhuman and human bodies in interaction, subverting canonical production practices. rehearsing van der aa who exactly is this virtual body that recalibrates connections by erecting a laboratory? up until this point, i focused on the avatar projection as a compound existence of williams’ appearance, his amplified voice, brito’s code, projectors, screens, and van der aa’s vision. the multiple agents are confounded by williams’ appearance, pretending to display his agency in the virtual realm. when he upsets himself, the particles of his face suddenly bluster around, seemingly elicited by his emotional reaction. however, williams has nothing to do with the fragmentation and does not even know how exactly his look changes, as it is engineered from the avatar designer’s desk. when seeing the avatar coming into being, his compound existence comes to the fore, made of the fusion of different data sets. does the inquiry about virtual bodies in rehearsal culminate in the avatar, or does it rather lead to a broader examination of how humans, through opera rehearsals, store data in (non)human forms as data carriers? brito argues that “the idea of the avatar itself is in a way quite romanticized in the human form.”  [30] staging a “romanticized” form, the avatar significantly impacts the immersive technology, the temporalities, and the interaction between (non)human bodies in the studio. however, when looking beyond the avatar projections, upload’s rehearsals function as the generation of data storage in less romanticized forms and with a broader scope. the avatar is always already in the studio, even before williams’ virtual body gets rendered smoothly. the baritone, for instance, recounts feeling like being a bodily extension of the composer, seeing himself as “an avatar for his artistic vision.”  [31] for van der aa, the rehearsal at large becomes his posthuman form. he stores his vision in the bodies and matter in the studio. he uploads his thoughts and corrections onto the rehearsal space, timing it precisely so that there is no overload. williams reports to get as much information the performer needs at a time. [32] in the following, i examine the ways in which van der aa sets up his data storage system, uploads his vision, and updates it during the evolving technogenesis. his wagnerian strive to create upload according to his artistic vision not only enables him to decide which bodies and matter are in the studio, but also how they, as well as the rehearsal space and time at large, co-evolve into the composer’s posthuman form.[33] in informal conversation during upload’s rehearsals, several production members mention the uniqueness of van der aa’s position. seldom does an opera house commission one person for the libretto, the film script, the film staging, the mise-en-scène, and the cast; as well as for deciding over large parts of the creative team and the technological crew. in opera productions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, multiple authorship is the default mode. [34] van der aa constitutes an exception, as he launched an organizational structure for independently producing his works, called doublea foundation. he co-produces the opera with the dutch national opera as one commissioning partner out of six, enabling him to expand his agency and “own [his] own works.” [35] before upload, van der aa has been successful in setting up this system, particularly in conceptualizing highly ambitious technological projects that augment realities, such as the 3d film operas sunken garden (2013) and blank out (2016), and the virtual reality installation eight (2019). his foundation focuses on technological experimentation and the possibility of showcasing early stages of creation for interested theaters and festivals. [36] for artistic directors of opera houses and performing arts institutions, this offer is especially promising as it minimizes risks inherent to technologically ambitious productions. by establishing partnerships that finance specific stages of development more so than commissioning an overall opera, the doublea foundation can make use of an independent budget to introduce technological experimentation early in the process. the emphasis on the technological and artistic development, realized by multiple, week-long sprints for testing the technology, points to an alternative approach to operatic creation that rethinks opera by modifying its process. [37] by combining self-producing and commissioning, van der aa’s strategy is reminiscent of the operatic entrepreneurship demonstrated, amongst others, in the realm of philip glass and robert wilson’s einstein on the beach (1976) or beryl korot and steve reich’s the cave (1993). seen as a precondition to experiment within opera in the late twentieth-century united states, korot and reich decided to self-produce the cave with multiple commissioning partners and, thus, were able to steer all aspects of the artistic process. [38] in a similar fashion, van der aa intends not to produce his operas under the umbrella of a single theater that chooses the production team. the doublea foundation enables him to surpass the role of the composer and oversee the entire chain of creation. within upload, he functions in multiple roles. moreover, he chooses the set designer, the singers, external dramaturgs, and the technological experts. this leads to a collective dominion of men in the rehearsal studio. beyond the gender-biased narrative told in the opera’s plot, the role division, too, reflects a gender divide with regards to responsibility. the leading roles in the production besides van der aa, such as the set designer, the conductor, and cinematographer, are occupied by men, whereas the assistants and the dramaturg, who are responsible for organizational tasks and the “emotional journey” of the daughter, are women. the biases are carried over to the bodies and matter that store data in the rehearsal—the printed libretto, the video servers preserving the film, and the people co-evolving with such data. similarly, the music is carried not only by the score, but also the spatial allocation of roles, van der aa’s tempi dictated by a click track, amplification mechanisms, and the singer’s position. the spatial organization of the studio gives indications of how van der aa turns the space into his avatar. in the rehearsal studios of most contemporary opera productions, there is a fixed spatial relationship: the musical side of the production situates itself on the right side and the singers on stage. both of these subspaces are expected to sound and have the main agency over the audible space of a rehearsal studio. the spatial relationship between the mise-en-scène and the music is clearly separated. the music comes from the right and the front while stage direction comments are uttered from the left. within upload, this idea of rehearsal soundscape is modified: the separation of sound and space is deconstructed, as upload’s sound spatialities are more enmeshed. as the stage director is also the composer, the lines between the mise-en-scène and the music are blurred. sound no longer comes from the right and the front, but from everywhere as the sources are separated from their origin and distributed via surround speakers. this detachment of singers from their vocal output ties into larger debates on the ineffability of the voice in opera and sound cinema. carolyn abbate argues that such simultaneity of disembodiment and omnipresence “sets up a situation of mastery and submissiveness.”  [39] in this case, the “mastery” over the sounds is animated by van der aa, as there is no piano and no accompanist. [40] the accompanist is swapped for van der aa’s electroacoustic tracks that are disseminated through surround speakers together with the singers’ amplified voices. the double-digit number of speakers is distributed along the walls of the studio and emits acousmatic sounds—an utterance that one hears without seeing the cause behind the sound. [41] the elaborated midi files mimic the orchestral sounds, making an accompanist redundant. while offering more diversification in sound than a piano accompaniment, they also disseminate the composed electronic track. in addition to restructuring the audible space, van der aa controls the musical time by storing his desired tempi in external matter. he works with click tracks—cues that give the exact beat to facilitate synchronization with the films projected. the performers learned their parts with the click track prior to arriving at the dutch national opera. having memorized the meter, they now experience more freedom in the studio as they sing on top of an electroacoustic track which does not feature any click. by following the conductor’s lead, they can increasingly focus on their musical interpretation without having to listen to every beat. in rehearsal, the metronome function is transferred to the conductor. the conductor’s desk is equipped with visual and audible signals. the beats dictate van der aa’s time. the conductor follows the pulse van der aa imagined for the music at a time when he composed the piece. via the click track, the composer inscribes a musical meter from the past and conducts invisibly. attached to the conductor’s desk i find a small click track box with a red and a green light. for the first beat in a bar, it shows the red light and for the other ones the green. additionally, there lies an mp3 player with earphones that sends cues, which are exclusively audible for the conductor. the assistant conductor fergus mcalpine comments on the shift in the conductor’s agency as manifested by the click tracks: the audio click isn’t simply like conducting to a metronome, it sends a pulse through your system that cannot not be followed; but it’s so rigid that it can take away from the music. the light, on the other hand, when on its own acts more like a guideline of the beat. this is nice, as my ears can completely open up to what’s going on around me—i can feel more musical. the downside is that if i’m not careful, it’s easy to lose the pulse. additionally, the beat in the music comes at the start of the light, and not when it’s at its brightest. so, one has to conduct even more ahead of the beat.[42] the rigidity of the click tracks and the midi files as well as the presence of the composer modify operatic sound spatialities—and thus also the conductor’s role. in addition, their agency is decreased because of van der aa’s time management to hand the score and the midi files to the singers in time to rehearse properly. [43] for the majority of blocking rehearsals, the conductor otto tausk is substituted by his assistant. in conversations, mcalpine compares his work for upload to conducting film music concerts, or ballets in which the choreographer’s steps are set in stone. [44] whereas typically the stage director and the conductor dominate the sound spatialities of opera rehearsals, here the relationship is shifted. while conforming to a sound source that nobody else in the studio can hear, the conductor translates the click tracks and musical dynamics into gesture. within upload’s rehearsals, the film cues, musical tempi, and dynamics are extremely precise, almost set in stone. the composer becomes a choreographer of time, while the conductor co-evolves into a translator rather than a musical interpreter—the composer diminishes the conductor’s area of responsibility. as the conductor’s agency gets significantly reduced to following instead of directing the music, van der aa’s agency, in return, expands. van der aa decenters the conductor, decreases the singers’ flexibility, and transfers agency to the acousmatic sounds and their dissemination technology. apart from the click track, the composer steers the vocal quality and the loudness of the singers in the rehearsal studio. he asks the singers for little vibrato while controlling their amplification via a mixing console. the singers are equipped with microphones in most rehearsals. whereas usually they would be able to quietly check in with their fellow singer, they suddenly cannot steer their voices like they are used. the control over the sound spatialities, musical dynamics, and adjusting to an acoustic situation—techniques perfected by the operatic performer—are lost once the amplification is outsourced beyond the performer’s body. [45] the composer seeks for an amplification, a “cinema-sizing” of voices. [46] this “cinema-sizing” changes the rehearsal at large: in the studio, the singers practice their parts with the amplification mechanism in place; they adjust their physical technique to the technological device; the amplification capacity of the operatic voice itself is no longer needed to the same degree and yields to another vocal quality. [47] associated with a more natural singing style, van der aa prefers a non-vibrato voice with clear text comprehensibility over the operatic voice. [48] maintaining the acoustic environment of the original stage in the rehearsal studio allows the singers to minimize insecurity factors and find the right technique early in the process. rehearsing at the opera house for a period of eight weeks, they take on another acoustic body, a body which is constantly “cinema-sized,” even in the production studio. this is an unusual practice for opera rehearsals. from my experience with various canonical and new operas, productions usually work with some form of acoustic balance in the rehearsal studio before introducing amplification in the auditorium. when singers are exclusively amplified in the final rehearsals and performances, the sound engineers turn their microphones on when they are on stage and off when side stage. however, for the setting of upload’s rehearsals, the microphones remain turned on throughout. sonically, the singers are in “performance mode” even when waiting side stage for the avatar projections to be tested. amplification makes each conversation audible in the studio, just like williams’s close-up projections are visible for everyone. detached from the privacy of personal interaction, and with their voices streamed with a surround sound setup, the singers reduce their utterances to whispering when they don’t sing. through amplification technology, the singers’ spoken voices ultimately get silenced. considering how much time the singers spend merely waiting for the avatar to be optimized, there are significantly few casual exchanges. the private speech yields to van der aa’s idea of singing. in the score for upload, vocal lines are written without any instruction for speech. thus, conversations disseminated over speakers seem alienating. within a rehearsal that is sonically set up to be a performance, the private speaking voice seems to dissociate from the singers’ bodies. even if the whispers are produced by the singer’s larynx, they mark estranged sounds. the amplification produces a different order in the sonic spatialities of the studio. the occasional whisper—albeit elicited by the singer’s body—is an utterance that distorts van der aa’s desired sound quality. the microphone hosts the voice, and the composer hosts the sonic space. following the wires of the microphone, i am again directed to the composer who feeds the connection between the amplification system, the singers’ bodies, their voices, and the laboratory space. the entire development process of van der aa’s opera can be read as a technogenesis of uploading that renders all involved (non)humans along with the immersive technology of rehearsal into van der aa’s data outlets. the “epistemic thing” is essentially the avatar behind the avatar—i.e., van der aa in his fragmentation of the rehearsals’ spaces and times. through the commissioning structure and the doublea foundation, he builds the carrier bag of opera according to his preferences of people and matter as well as his reimaginings of sonic and spatial setups. he outsources himself in bits of data that get continuously updated until the rehearsal phase ends. the opera is not premiered in a physical space at first but, instead, shot as a film and uploaded online on the medici.tv platform. [49] the posthuman technogenesis of van der aa’s rehearsal is ultimately compressed into one medium, reducing the space to one single screen, and condensing the years of development into ninety minutes. * i wish to thank the anonymous readers and editors of sound stage screen for their invaluable feedback on earlier versions of this article. beyond the scope of sound stage screen, other scholars have offered precious recommendations, amongst others peter mcmurray, susan rutherford, annouchka bayley, elisabeth van treeck, and shadi seifouri. moreover, i am grateful for the rehearsal insights facilitated by djoere de jong and the numerous exchanges with upload’s production team on site and on zoom. [1]  excerpt of my fieldnote journal formulated after a day at the rehearsal studio. [2]  see bernhard siegert, passage des digitalen: zeichenpraktiken der neuzeitlichen wissenschaften 1500–1900 (berlin: brinkmann & bose, 2003), 17. [3]  in machover’s opera, a man uploads his mind to gain eternal life and is confronted by the women of the family who question a life without a body. the divide between the “female-body versus male-brain” remains similar in upload. promoting problematic gender dynamics, the daughter argues: “i believe in my body more than in my soul,” while the father claims: “the world isn’t reduced to the surface of my skin … i can still think my own thoughts.” the rational of the vitruvian man is contrasted with the impulsive, subordinated woman. beyond the father-daughter hierarchy, binary gendered dynamics pervade the entire story line. one example off the main story being that upload tells side plots of other men who are uploaded to save their scientific knowledge while the respective women turn into avatars to spend more time with their children. for more on the gender divide in machover’s opera, see david trippett, “digital voices: posthumanism and the generation of empathy,” in the cambridge companion to music in digital culture, ed. nicholas cook, monique m. ingalls, and david trippett (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019), 244–48. for parallels in futuristic narratives about mind uploading, see hans moravec, mind children: the future of robot and human intelligence (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1988). [4]  the robotic opera death and the powers was developed at the mit as a research project within the opera of the future media lab group. as such, it circumvented canonical production practices. for more see peter torpey, “media scores: a framework for composing the modern-day gesamtkunstwerk” (phd diss., massachusetts institute of technology, 2013), and benjamin bloomberg, “making musical magic live: inventing modern production technology for human-centric music performance” (phd diss., massachusetts institute of technology, 2020). [5]  for more literature on rehearsal processes from anthropologists, sociologists, and theater scholars, see amongst others susan letzler cole, directors in rehearsal: a hidden world (new york: routledge, 1992); paul atkinson, “performance and rehearsal: the ethnographer at the opera,” in qualitative research practice, ed. clive seale et al. (london: sage, 2004), 94–106; atkinson, everyday arias: an operatic ethnography (lanham: altamira press, 2006); josette féral, “introduction: towards a genetic study of performance—take 2,” theatre research international 33, no. 3 (2008): 223–33; jens roselt, phänomenologie des theaters (paderborn: wilhelm fink verlag, 2008); jen harvie and andy lavender, making contemporary theatre: international rehearsal processes (manchester: manchester university press, 2010); jens roselt and melanie hinz, eds., chaos + konzept: proben und probieren im theater (berlin: alexander verlag, 2011); matthias rebstock and david roesner, eds., composed theatre: aesthetics, practices, processes (bristol: intellect, 2012); gay mcauley, not magic but work: an ethnographic account of a rehearsal process (manchester: manchester university press, 2015); vlado kotnik, opera as anthropology: anthropologists in lyrical settings (newcastle: cambridge scholars publishing, 2016); tamara yasmin quick, “methodologische diskurse der aktuellen probenforschung,” forum modernes theater 31, no. 1/2 (2020): 39–63. for an examination of historical rehearsal processes in opera, see amongst others heinrich porges, wagner rehearsing the “ring”: an eye-witness account of the stage rehearsals of the first bayreuth festival, trans. robert l. jacobs (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1983); james deaville, ed., with evan baker, wagner in rehearsal 1875–1876: the diaries of richard fricke, trans. george r. fricke (stuyvesant: pendragon press, 1998); mark everist, “rehearsal practices,” in the oxford handbook of opera, ed. helen m. greenwald (oxford: oxford university press, 2014), 419–41. for rehearsal ethnographies of western new music rehearsals, see amanda bayley and michael clarke, “analytical representations of creative processes in michael finnissy’s second string quartet,” journal of interdisciplinary music studies 3, no. 1/2 (2009): 139–57; bayley, “ethnographic research into contemporary string quartet rehearsal,” ethnomusicology forum 20, no. 3 (2011): 385–411; bayley and nicole lizée, “creative layers and continuities: a case study of nicole lizée and the kronos quartet,” musicae scientiae 20, no. 3 (2016): 392–412; bayley, “cross-cultural collaborations with the kronos quartet,” in distributed creativity: collaboration and improvisation in contemporary music, ed. eric clarke and mark doffman (new york: oxford university press, 2017), 93–113; nicolas donin, “domesticating gesture: the collaborative creative process of florence baschet’s streicherkreis for ‘augmented’ string quartet (2006–08),” in clarke and doffman, distributed creativity, 70–87. for ethnographies from practitioners and opera scholars, see daniel helfgot and william o. beeman, the third line: the opera performer as interpreter (new york: schirmer books, 1993); denis laborde, “l’opéra et son régisseur. notes sur la création d’une œuvre de steve reich,” ethnologie française 38, no. 1 (2008): 119–28; megan steigerwald ille, “bringing down the house: situating and mediating opera in the twenty-first century” (phd diss., university of rochester, 2018); steigerwald ille, “live in the limo: remediating voice and performing spectatorship in twenty-first-century opera,” the opera quarterly 36, no. 1/2 (2020): 1–26; michal grover-friedlander, staging voice (london: routledge, 2021); lea luka sikau, “‘i see marina, but feel maria’: marina abramović’s mediation of callas’ voice,” in singing out: the musical voice in audiovisual media, ed. catherine haworth and beth carroll (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, forthcoming); sikau, “rehearsing callas,” the opera quarterly (forthcoming). [6]  from the relations of cinema with opera to emerging technologies in new music theater, operatic performance and its mediation in the digital era take center stage in the current discourse, highlighted amongst others by the recent foundation of this journal. see also marcia citron, opera on screen (new haven: yale university press, 2000); melina esse, ed., “mediating opera,” special issue, the opera quarterly 26, no. 1 (2010); james steichen, “hd opera: a love/hate story,” the opera quarterly 27, no. 4 (2011): 443–59; jelena novak, postopera: reinventing the voice-body (farnham: ashgate, 2015); karen henson, ed., technology and the diva: sopranos, opera, and media from romanticism to the digital age (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016); milla tiainen, “sonic technoecology: voice and non-anthropocentric survival in the algae opera,” australian feminist studies 32, no. 94 (2017): 359–76; gundula kreuzer, “operatic configurations in the digital age,” the opera quarterly, 35, no. 1/2 (2019): 130–34; tereza havelková, opera as hypermedium: meaning-making, immediacy, and the politics of perception (oxford: oxford university press, 2021). [7]  upload was produced during a national lockdown in spring 2021 at the dutch national opera. the restrictions caused by the covid pandemic made it impossible to premiere the work in march 2021, as originally planned. however, the last rehearsal days on the main stage were used to shoot a film version of the production that was streamed via medici.tv even before its world premiere in july at the bregenzer festspiele. [8]  lea luka sikau, “upload en de stem zonder lichaam,” in “off 2021,” special edition, odeon magazine 30, no. 121 (2021): 56–57. [9]  david trippett and benjamin walton, “introduction: the laboratory and the stage,” in nineteenth-century opera and the scientific imagination, ed. david trippett and benjamin walton (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019), 2. [10]  hereby, i draw on daniel chua and alexander rehding, who elaborate on the interface of music at large as something that “interacts dynamically with a network of discourses and objects.” daniel k. l. chua and alexander rehding, alien listening: voyager’s golden record and music from earth (new york: zone books, 2021), 200. [11]  walton points towards the materials of operatic productions that remain invisible because of their long-lasting history within the genre. he proposes to include the multiplicity of material rather than merely zooming on the technologies of spectacle. see walton, “technological phantoms of the opéra,” in nineteenth-century opera and the scientific imagination, 226. [12]  katherine hayles, how we think: digital media and contemporary technogenesis (chicago: university of chicago press, 2012), 10. [13]  le guin lists some exemplary devices for containing goods: “a leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container.” ursula k. le guin, “the carrier bag theory of fiction,” in women of vision: essays by women writing science fiction, ed. denise du pont (new york: st. martin’s press, 1988), 3. [14]  “contemporary technogenesis is about adaptation, the fit between organisms and their environments, recognizing that both sides of the engagement (humans and technologies) are undergoing coordinated transformations.” hayles, how we think, 81. [15]  music and computation scholar shintaro miyazaki expands on wireless spaces with regards to the notion of containing and carrying: “a space is not a network, but a channel and container for an infinite number of physical connections and the carrier of an infinite number of signals.” miyazaki, “algorhythmics: understanding micro-temporality in computational cultures,” computational culture, no. 2 (2012). [16]  this is different from previous ethnographic fieldwork i have conducted within other new operas, for example within marina abramović’s opera production 7 deaths of maria callas (2020) or sivan eldar’s like flesh (2022). in these cases, the set on the rehearsal stage is constantly adapting, for example when new props are being added. contrastingly, upload does not employ props, other than a blanket and a pillow in the last scene. [17]  whereas in world premiere productions it is usual to change parts of the score quite flexibly or even to finish writing the music during the rehearsal phase, van der aa merely changed one note in the daughter’s part. the composer elaborated on this during a panel discussion at the symposium musiktheater der zeitgenossenschaft: michel van der aas schaffen an den schnittstellen der künste (ruhr university bochum, 16 september 2022). [18]  two examples for productions that work with elaborate live-cued screens, and from which i can recount the rehearsal processes, are the aforementioned like flesh and the 2012 collaboration between barrie kosky and the theater collective 1927 on mozart’s die zauberflöte (1791). [19]  hans-jörg rheinberger, toward a history of epistemic things: synthesizing proteins in the test tube (stanford: stanford university press, 1997), 28. [20]  rheinberger, toward a history of epistemic things, chap. 5 “reproduction and difference.” [21]  rheinberger, 29. [22]  darien brito, in interview with the author, february 25, 2021. [23]  ulrike hartung, postdramatisches musiktheater (würzburg: königshausen & neumann, 2019), 75. [24]  as exceptions to contemporary theatrical production processes, wechsler points out two projects conducted in collaboration with universities: motione by trisha brown, bill t. jones et al. (arizona state university, 2005) as well as luc vanier’s bob’s palace created at the krannert center for the performing arts (university of illinois urbana-champaign, 2003). see robert wechsler, “artistic considerations in the use of motion tracking with live performers: a practical guide,” in performance and technology: practices of virtual embodiment and interactivity, ed. susan broadhurst and josephine machon (basingstoke: palgrove macmillian, 2006), 60–77. [25]  brito, interview. [26]  roderick williams in interview with the author, january 12, 2021. [27]  julia bullock, in interview with the author, march 10, 2021. [28]  anne van brunschot, in interview with the author, february 17, 2021. [29]  as both covers verity wingate and michael wilmering are members of the opera studio of the dutch national opera, they are asked to join upload’s rehearsals whenever they do not have rehearsals for other productions running at the same time. [30]  brito, interview. [31]  williams, interview. [32]  williams, interview. [33]  the director of the dutch national opera, sophie de lint, introduces the composer as today’s wagner within the interviews for the documentary on upload. curiously, the first significant account of verbal interactions in operatic rehearsals at large focuses on wagner’s ring (1875–76). the choreographer richard fricke was asked by wagner to document everything he said during the rehearsals of the bayreuth world premiere. whereas this account could be considered as one of the first rehearsal ethnographies, it is almost entirely centered on the composer. in the diaries, it becomes apparent that wagner was an unpredictable director, who drastically changed his ideas on the mise-en-scène from one to another: “in this condition, it is a necessity for him to block everything one way today, and then change it tomorrow.” see deaville and baker, wagner in rehearsal, 80. while upload may be considered a gesamtkunstwerk in scope, van der aa’s direction is quite distinct from wagner’s rehearsal practices. whereas wagner constantly changed his mind during the final stages of production, van der aa arrives at the rehearsals with precise, uncompromising ideas. relating thereto, he might be considered to be more of a verdian type, who rehearsed to approximate his ultimate vision of the opera. for giuseppe verdi’s rehearsal practices, see clemens risi, “encore! oper wiederholen,” in chaos + konzept, 97-109. [34]  nicholas till argues that “the multiple authorship of opera has remained common throughout the twentieth century.” “the operatic work: texts, performances, receptions and repertories,” in the cambridge companion to opera studies, ed. nicholas till (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2012), 245. [35]  the opera upload was financed by the following commissioning partners: dutch national opera, opera cologne, bregenzer festspiele, ensemble musikfabrik, park avenue armory, and the doublea foundation itself. during a panel discussion at the symposium musiktheater der zeitgenossenschaft (see note 17), the composer claimed that he seeks to own his works. [36] see “doublea lab,” doublea foundation website, accessed january 8, 2023. [37]  this is not to say that opera theaters are not themselves already working on rethinking production processes. operas such as eldar’s like flesh demonstrate that there are alternative forms of collaboration with institutions such as the ircam within the framework of more traditional operatic production to enable research, experimentation, and testing phases. such development is further reinforced by european initiatives such as fedora (european circle of philanthropists of opera and ballet) and enoa (european network of opera academies), which establish partnerships between opera houses and other cultural institutions. [38]  see ryan ebright, “‘my answer to what music theatre can be’: iconoclasm and entrepreneurship in steve reich and beryl korot’s the cave,” american music 35, no. 1 (2017): 30. [39]  carolyn abbate, in search of opera (princeton: princeton university press, 2001), 148. [40]  the piano is replaced by a keyboard which is only used to give single notes to the singers. [41]  to expand on the notion of acousmatic sounds, see pierre schaeffer, treatise on musical objects: an essay across disciplines, trans. christine north and john dack (oakland: university of california press, 2017), 64–69 (“acousmatics”). [42]  fergus mcalpine, in interview with the author, march 8, 2021. [43]  from my previous experience in new opera productions, it is quite rare for opera creations to have such a fixed score this early in the process. during the musical rehearsals for upload with the ensemble musikfabrik, the conductor otto tausk stated that he only found two errors in the entire score, something he claimed to be extremely impressive. [44]  mcalpine, interview. [45]  having worked with van der aa before, williams states that he learned to trust both van der aa’s idea of the voice as well as the expertise of the sound engineers. during the interview, he elaborates further on van der aa disliking the canonical operatic voice and aiming for a non-vibrato one with crisp and clear diction. for williams, this vocal technique is quite effortless and gentle to produce. moreover, these features are reminiscent of vocal styles associated with other music theater works from the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century by steve reich, beryl korot, philip glass, and louis andriessen. [46]  jonathan burston, “theatre space as virtual place: audio technology, the reconfigured singing body, and the megamusical,” popular music 17, no. 2 (1998): 207. [47]  see paul sanden, liveness in modern music: musicians, technology, and the perception of performance (new york: routledge, 2013), 22. [48]  williams, interview. [49]  upload (2019–20), film opera, on medici.tv platform, accessed january 8, 2023. × article contents introduction from the stage to the future l’île à hélice, or the social role of sound in the metropolis opera fandom, music recording and the gothic supernatural: le château des carpathes conclusion footnotes article opera, audio technologies, and audience practices in the late nineteenth century: the case of jules verne * nicolò palazzetti sound stage screen, vol. 2, issue 2 (fall 2022), pp. 33–59, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2022 nicolò palazzetti. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss18617. introduction the french writer jules verne (1828–1905) is the second most-translated author in the world after agatha christie and before william shakespeare. [1] many of his novels and characters have shaped our modern imagination. verne’s legacy, nevertheless, has often been downplayed due to rigid genre classifications: his voyages extraordinaires have been frequently interpreted as adventure novels, science fiction precursors, serialized fiction, or children’s literature. in fact, less than a quarter of verne’s sixty-four novels could be counted as “genuine” or prototypical science fiction. [2] since the launch of his voyages extraordinaires in the 1860s, verne’s rising popularity undermined his literary reputation. in the last few decades, however, new studies have fostered a more complex image of the french writer, playwright, and intellectual. this new wave of interest was prompted by the posthumous publication of verne’s dystopian novel paris au xxe siècle in 1994. several scholars have stressed “the importance of verne as a key commentator on the anguishes of modernity, rather than as the over-enthusiastic promoter of the value of science and technology.”  [3] the accuracy of verne’s technical descriptions was functional to the investigation of the impact of emergent technologies on our social life. following michel serres, we can say that there is no scientific anticipation in verne: he reuses a fairly old scientific knowledge, from astronomy to earth science. … he is on time only for communication, and the artificial objects he stages are always means of communication, never production, from vehicles to the telegraph. [4] in verne’s thought, communication technologies challenge our understanding of culture and society, while also making available (and portable) specific technologies of production, such as the phonograph. it is perhaps no coincidence that verne’s most famous novel is le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (around the world in eighty days, 1872)—i.e., a celebration of the large-scale diffusion of steamships, rail networks, and the global circulation of people and ideas. this article focuses on verne’s literary production about opera, audio technologies, and audience practices—a relatively less known portion of his output which proves to be particularly thought-provoking for scholars interested in the cultural history of recording and communication technologies, technologically-situated listening practices, wider questions of audience behavior, and music-related fandom. in verne’s writing, the exploration of art worlds—e.g., music, opera, and performing arts—goes hand in hand with the exploration of technological devices such as recording and data transmission technologies. opera and music are often present in verne’s stories, most famously in the novel le château des carpathes (the carpathian castle, 1892) where a famous diva dies on stage as the memory of her music lives on record.[5] in fact, there are other works by verne that deal with operatic music, media, and technology. these include the short stories une fantaisie du docteur ox (dr. ox’s experiment, 1872), m. ré-dièze et mlle mi-bémol (mister ray sharp and miss me flat, 1893), and the novels paris au xxe siècle, l’île à hélice (the self-propelled island, 1895) and, to some extent, la jangada (eight hundred leagues on the amazon, 1881). this specific corpus of works has not been investigated from the perspective of sound, audience, and technology. as a matter of fact, the most thought-provoking scenarios about the relationship between sound, music, and technology are not to be found in verne’s musical tastes (which were somewhat unadventurous), but rather in his descriptions of the wider impacts of recently implemented systems for imparting, storing, or exchanging information on a large scale and over a distance (e.g., the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the théâtrophone, among others). innovations in the field of audio and communication technologies are scrutinized by verne against the backdrop of the era’s theatrical and musical realms, as well as the evolution of steam-powered transport systems, social infrastructures, daily life of audiences, and urban entertainment. this essay is based on a literary, conceptual, and contextual analysis of a selection of verne’s novels, with a privileged focus on l’île à hélice, set in a huge floating city inhabited by melomaniac billionaires, and le château des carpathes, set in an eerie castle haunted by an opera fan. all the examples and excerpts here analyzed are connected to their wider cultural, social, and technological contexts as well as to more recent theoretical frameworks developed in the field of opera studies, sound studies, media studies, fan studies, and the cultural history of technology. the main point is to understand, through the analysis of verne’s creative imagination, the role new recording technologies have in shaping new forms of audience behavior. l’île à hélice, for instance, provides vivid descriptions of technologically-mediated audience practices largely unknown outside vernian circles, such as collective acousmatic listening of live opera performances via the théâtrophone and distracted listening of ambient or therapeutical music via in-home loudspeaker systems. i draw on these examples to understand, through a critical analysis of verne’s viewpoints, the social and cultural impact of the mediatization of listening experience and the parallel commodification of performing arts as a form of entertainment. i then expand these reflections through an original inquiry into baron rodolphe de gortz’s peculiar listening practices in le château des carpathes. this novel and its memorable character—who recreates the figure and voice of a dead diva via phonograph recordings and projected photographs in a mysterious castle—are certainly more familiar to music scholars. however, i review the results and limits of previous analyses devoted to the novel to suggest a new, more cogent, interpretation for the character of de gortz based on fan studies literature. interpreting de gortz as a modern fan, rather than a mere obsessional character, changes our perspective on his role in the novel, while also shedding light on the technological history of opera fandom. the article is organized in three sections. the first explores verne’s work as a writer in the context of nineteenth-century performing arts, in particular with regards to his fascination for comic operas, french contemporary theater, and offenbach. it also considers verne’s dystopian novel paris au xxe siècle from a musical and theatrical perspective. the second segment delves into the impact of new recording technologies on audience behavior. the novel l’île à hélice serves as the case study here. the third and last section focuses on le château des carpathes. the overall aim of the article is to shed light on the genesis and evolution of the relation between operatic audiences and audio technologies via the analysis of a set of fertile and imaginative narratives. verne’s literary and scientific imagination constitutes a valuable repository—not fully explored—for the re-examination of a few aspects of the cultural history of sound reproduction and communication, and to better understand how such technologies have contributed to reshaping our daily life as listeners and music fans. from the stage to the future in the evening at 37° 2’ 7” w the coast of greenland put in a brief appearance through a clearing in the fog; through his telescope the doctor glimpsed a succession of peaks furrowed by broad glaciers; but the fog quickly closed again on this vision, like a theatre curtain that falls at the most interesting moment in the play.[6] recent scholarship has reappraised verne’s achievements in the field of drama as well as the theatrical references and techniques informing his work. as affirmed by timothy unwin: the theatre remains a constant presence throughout verne’s writing: not just in its gusto and pacy crescendos, its dramatic confrontations, its reversals and surprises, its complicated but neat solutions and its happy dénouements; but also in its contrived virtuosity and stagey artificiality, its humour and word-play, its colourful dialogues and eccentric characters, its ludic convolutions, and its rhythms of disguise, revelation and reconciliation. [7] verne’s early plays failed to receive substantial success in parisian theaters, and this lack of success contributed to his decision to embark on a career as a novelist in the 1860s. however, later stage adaptations by verne for some of his most famous novels, often conceived in collaboration with the playwright adolphe d’ennery (1811–99), are considered by scholars among the greatest achievements of nineteenth-century theater. the dramatic version of le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, for instance, was a sensational success for the théâtre de la porte saint-martin since its debut in 1874. it was regularly performed in paris up to the second world war, totalizing more than three thousand performances over the course of six decades. the incidental music for the play was composed by jean-jacques-joseph debillemont (1824–79), who also collaborated to the 1878 stage adaptation of les enfants du capitaine grant (in search of the castaways, 1867–68). another box-office success was the 1882 play voyage à travers l’impossible (journey through the impossible). this féerie is a potpourri of various novels from the voyages extraordinaires, such as vingt mille lieues sous les mers (twenty thousand leagues under the seas, 1869–70), voyage au centre de la terre (journey to the center of the earth, 1864), de la terre à la lune (from the earth to the moon, 1865). such extravagant spectacles led a few scholars to use the notion of theatrum mundi to describe verne’s dramatic work. [8] in verne’s theater, colossal machines, large companies of actors, oversized sets, wild or trained animals stand side by side on stage. it would be reductive, however, to consider verne’s theatrical production from this perspective only. throughout his voyages extraordinaires, there can be found sophisticated references to the realm of performing arts, including opera, music, and even the circus (as in the 1885 novel mathias sandorf). during a late interview with the journalist robert sherard, verne recalled his passion for the stage, mentioning his collaborations with the théâtre lyrique and its director émile perrin throughout the 1850s, [9] thus confirming the important role played by opera in his aesthetic views and biographical experiences. the théâtre lyrique was a leading opera company in paris, active during the middle of the nineteenth century and located at that time on the boulevard du temple; perrin directed the company between 1854 and 1855, but during his career he also directed the opéra-comique and the paris opera. more generally, verne’s theatrical works—most of them written during the 1850s [10] —show the extent of his collaborations with fellow playwrights and musicians, as well as his inclination to engage with various genres (comedies, dramas, vaudevilles, operatic libretti, and so on); in particular, verne was intrigued by opéras comiques, opéras bouffes, and opérettes. in collaboration with michel carré, verne wrote several libretti for the composer aristide hignard, including the one-act opérette monsieur de chimpanzé (1858) and the one-act opéra-comique l’auberge des ardennes (1860). hignard also set to music a collection of seven rimes et mélodies written by verne in 1857. it is also worth mentioning two operas by jacques offenbach adapted from verne’s literary works: the opéra-féerie le voyage dans la lune (1875) and the opéra bouffe le docteur ox (1876). according to laurence senelick, verne and offenbach shared “a basic belief in the ultimate futility of human endeavour.”[11] several novels by verne also feature characters who are inspired by the world of theater and music, [12] such as the operatic diva stilla in le château des carpathes or the members of a string quartet in l’île à hélice. another important musical character is the one featured in the novel la jangada (1881), who recounts the travel of a family down the amazon river on a large timber raft. a memorable personage in this adventure novel is the barber fragoso, a homage to beaumarchais’s figaro and his operatic progeny.[13] like other extrovert eccentrics populating verne’s novels, fragoso is a focus of entertainment for both the other characters and the reader. he acts as a symbol of the wondrous world of theater much loved by verne. to complete this brief examination of verne’s passion for theater and stage music, it is worth looking at the musical and theatrical futures depicted in his “lost novel” paris au xxe siècle. written in the early 1860s, the novel portrays a dystopian parisian society completely dominated by the cult of industrial and technological progress and efficiency. pierre-jules hetzel, the publisher who would shape verne’s fortunes, rejected the work as overambitious and verne locked it away for the rest of his life.[14] the posthumous publication of the novel in 1994 became a literary event. the futuristic dystopia portrayed in paris au xxe siècle was a perfect way to resurrect the myth of verne as the father of modern science fiction. [15] at various times in his novel, verne denounces the total equivalence between art and entertainment, and the spread of state-owned entertainment industries. let us consider the description of “le grand entrepôt dramatique” in chapter 14—i.e., the large “theatrical depository.” [16] the entrepôt is a proper industry for playwriting and staging organized according to a rigid assembly line and division of labor: some writers are specialized in writing denouements, some other in writing bravura pieces for divas, others in writing historical descriptions, and so on. the entrepôt is a state-owned institution and provides different genres of conventional yet effective plays to all french theaters. verne was first and foremost interested in denouncing the conventionalism of the parisian theatrical system of his time. the genres performed in the futuristic paris are identical to those appreciated by the parisian audience in the 1860s. verne’s entrepôt consists of five divisions, each devoted to a specific genre: comedies, vaudevilles, historical and modern dramas, opera, and light theatrical entertainments. actors are respected in the french society of the 1960s as “specialized employees”: [17] theater’s complete platitude and industrialization, implies verne, is a high price to pay for the social ennoblement of actors. in the 1960s, moreover, every aspect of theatrical production is now carefully organized, including the audience: legions of claqueurs are distributed by the entrepôt to different theaters to ensure the success of the performances. the claqueurs are paid for their work by the state and are trained in specific schools by renowned professors to learn “the delicate art of applause, and … the entire range of its nuances”.[18] paris au xxe siècle includes a chapter on the music of the future. the futuristic metaphor is an expedient used by verne to provide a satirical description of the music of his time. here the target of verne’s disdain is richard wagner and, indirectly, the wagnerians’ craze. in his study about the emergence of modern music lovers in the united states, daniel cavicchi describes the denigration of wagner fandom: the growing presence of wagnerians in the late nineteenth century … finally presented critics of music loving with a uniform symbol for derision and ridicule. wagnerians were known for their devotion to operatic music that was text-heavy and which by all accounts was atonal and difficult.[19] the early 1860s marked a turning point in the history of wagner’s reception in france. the 1860 concerts at the salle ventadour, conducted by wagner himself, marked “the birth of french wagnerism.” [20] a year later, the revised and translated version of tannhäuser at the paris opéra famously resulted in a major scandal. verne was on the side of wagner’s detractors: “in the last century,” says the character quinsonnas, “a certain richard wagner, a sort of messiah who has been insufficiently crucified, invented the music of the future.” [21] in 1960, under the influence of wagner, operas now last at least four hours without any entr’acte and they are based on a single, endless phrase. the audience simply swallows the music, talking business, while singers do not sing anymore and instead they neigh, bark, cry, bray as in a menagerie. the repertory of the paris opéra, practically “a branch of the bourse,” [22] is divided between a few, isolated revivals of classic masterpieces, such as offenbach’s orphée aux enfers, and the mass production of post-wagnerian operas curated by the grand entrepôt. l’île à hélice, or the social role of sound in the metropolis verne’s literary beginnings and early career in parisian theaters illustrate his interest in the impact of communication technologies on opera and performing arts. yet, the analysis of dystopian worlds, like the one in paris au xxe siècle, was soon abandoned in favor of more tangible surveys of imminent technological futures, as with cinq semaines en ballon (five weeks in a balloon, 1863), a novel celebrating the role of hot air balloons in fostering the exploration of large portions of uncharted african land. and with respect to his later, most celebrated works, “the generally happy juxtaposition of the fantastic with the post-scriptum verifiable … has its source in careful planning rather than clairvoyance.” [23] for instance, the design and description of the submarine nautilus, one of his most famous machines, were based on advice given by expert engineers. verne’s writings on sound technologies confirm his ambivalent approach to technological change. one of his favorite musical instruments was the pipe organ; in vingt milles lieues, verne places a large pipe organ in the center of the nautilus’s main hall. the brand-new modernity of the submarine is offset by the cumbersome presence of an old-fashioned, venerable musical instrument of the western tradition. this coexistence gives to the character of nemo a romantic and nostalgic dimension, as recalled by the narrator: “sometimes i heard the melancholy sounds of his organ, which [nemo] played with much expression, but only at night, in the midst of the most secret darkness, when the nautilus was sleeping in the ocean wilderness.”[24] another less famous short story entitled m. ré-dièze et mlle mi-bémol shows verne’s fascination for the complex mechanisms of pipe organs. in this grotesque fairy tale, set in a remote swiss village, verne explores the continuities between the organ pipe and the human voice, the climax of the story being the dream-like imprisonment of the children of the church choir within the pipes of the organ. the imprisoned children create a new, perfect organ registration centered on the “children’s voices.” [25] this vernian interest in the continuities between the human being and the automaton recalls e. t. a. hoffmann’s short stories, later adapted into world-famous ballets.[26] verne’s most daring views about the relation between sound, music, and technology can be found, however, in his descriptions of the social and cultural impact of recently implemented systems for imparting or exchanging information. verne is interested in showing how these new technologies fit within the late nineteenth-century transport infrastructure (e.g., steam-powered ocean liners and railroads), making mass communication a concrete reality. like a modern cultural historian focusing on recording technologies or like a sociologist dealing with new music-related practices, verne is concerned with the cultural and social forces that are at stake during the implementation of new technological devices and their impact on everyday life. l’île a hélice is a thought-provoking example of such preoccupations. in this novel, the future is meant to be “a concentration on the magnificent, cornucopian present which promises so many possibilities.” [27] published in 1895, l’île a hélice depicts the adventures of the members of a famous french string quartet during a visit to milliard city, a garden city inhabited only by billionaires and built on a massive oval boat roaming the pacific. likely set in the early twentieth century, the novel combines the topos of the floating city already explored in une ville flottante (a floating city, 1870) with the one of the ideal city-state from les cinq cent million de la bégum (the begum’s fortune, 1879). in l’île à hélice, the members of the quartet, called the quatuor concertant, are guided through the wonders and idiosyncrasies of milliard city by the cicerone calistus munbar. to the modern reader, the shining perfection, modernity, and inaccessibility of the floating city recalls a mammoth cruise liner. all the inhabitants of milliard city are art and music lovers. the city boasts a remarkable collection of paintings and sculptures. however, given the inaccessibility of the moving island and the subsequent lack of touring companies (the quatuor concertant would become the first permanent music ensemble of the city), music is commonly experienced via technological means. first, the billionaires listen to music with the aid of an advanced version of edison’s phonograph. as pinchinnat, the violist of the group, says to munbar: as i see it, your milliard city never heard anything but canned music and preserved melodies sent to you just like sardines and salt beef. … your phonographs carry only the past.[28] verne’s “musique en boîte” and “conserves mélodiques”” closely recall john philip sousa’s critique of sound recordings as “canned music”. [29] in sousa’s 1906 assertion, as discussed by jonathan sterne, “the possibility of recording sound is just one more form of preservation,” [30] since chemical preservation for mass production and distribution was a major innovation in nineteenth-century north american food culture. while recognizing the potential of the phonograph as a “photograph” of a performance, verne denounces the commodification of sound provoked by recording technologies, as well as the privatization of listening and the celebration of the recorded past: the phonograph provides a “faithful echo” of a dead, disembodied performance. to the modern reader, verne may sound conservative in his moral judgments, but he points out various cultural and economic shifts prompted by the technological innovations of the late nineteenth century. these shifts are at the core of sterne’s analysis in the audible past: i.e., how sound started to be “commodified… something that can be bought and sold,” losing “its ephemeral character” and its anchorage to the body. “people’s ears could take them into the past or across vast distances,” [31] claims sterne, and this also changed their experience of death. with regards to art music, and especially to opera, these considerations entail the question of liveness. as karen henson has noted, following philip auslander, the basic notion of opera’s essence “being live and technologically unmediated singing” is a historical by-product of the mediatization of performance events and the advent of recordings, “for one cannot have an ideal of unmediated singing unless one is in a profoundly technological environment.”[32] the listening practices of milliard-city’s music lovers, however, are many and varied. while sailing the pacific ocean, the billionaires regularly attend the concert hall of the boat, listening to operas that are being performed live in european and american opera houses via a cutting edge théâtrophone. here’s an extract of the dialogue between the members of the quatuor and munbar: “since our city is wealthy enough to satisfy all its whims, all its musical yearnings [for opera], it has already been done” [says munbar]. “how…?” “with our théâtrophones, installed in the concert room of this casino. as you know, our company [i.e., the society which manages milliard city] owns, submerged in the waters of the pacific ocean, many cables attached to madeleine bay [mexico] on one end and tied to powerful buoys on the other. so, when one of our citizens wants to hear a singer of the old or the new world, we pick up one of the cables and send a telephone order to our agents at madeleine bay. these agents establish communication with america or europe. the cables are then connected with the theater or the concert hall requested by our music lovers, who, seated in the casino, actually attend the distant performances and shower them with applause…” “but over there, the musicians cannot hear the applause…,” cried yvernès. “i beg your pardon, my dear mr. yvernès, they hear it by the return cable.”[33] the théâtrophone—which would appear in the 1888 utopian bestseller by matthew bellamy, looking backward: 2000–1887—was a telephonic distribution system active in several european cities from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, allowing its subscribers to listen to opera and theater performances in stereo over the telephone lines. this system was the evolution of an apparatus presented by clément ader at the 1881 exposition internationale de l’électricité in paris, allowing remote listening to concerts taking place at the opéra. the théâtrophone was commercialized in france around 1890 and later in other countries. the hungarian telefon hírmondó, set up by tivadar puskás in the early 1890s, lasted until the second world war: a radio service ahead of its time, it provided to its subscribers not only music and opera, but also news broadcast, lectures, and even linguistic classes. verne was enthralled by the théâtrophone. in 1889, a few years before the publication of l’île à hélice, a short story entitled in the year 2889 appeared in english in the north american magazine the forum. possibly written by michel verne by drawing on his father’s ideas, in the year 2889 describes a world heavily influenced by media in which journalists communicate the news to their “readers” viva voce using a system similar to the théâtrophone.[34] verne’s description of “acousmatic” concerts taking place in milliard city raises further observations. it may be useful to consider the concept of “acousmatic listening” (i.e., the occultation of the cause and the source of a sonic event) as reformulated by brian kane in his critical reappraisal of pierre schaeffer’s thought. kane defines the aesthetical and detached listening promoted by schaeffer in relation to acousmatic sounds as “a position of husserlian detachment and eidetic perfection.” [35] kane maintains, instead, that “acousmatic listening is a shared, intersubjective practice … of listening to the soundscape that is cultivated when the source of sounds is beyond the horizon of visibility, uncertain, underdetermined, bracketed, or wilfully and imaginatively suspended.” [36] in other words, acousmatic listening does not provoke a more intense concentration on an abstract sonic object, as schaeffer claimed. on the contrary, kane affirms that the separation of the source, cause, and effect of the sound provokes a feeling of stupefaction or anxiety that could open up the supermundane and transcendent universe of phantasmagorias. [37] in the case of verne, moreover, the use of the théâtrophone for live acousmatic listening supports the act of listening as a collective practice in which the audience has an active role, as attested by the final applause. more concretely, the visual absence of the performers is also a way to stress the emergence of the audience as an independent community and the act of listening as a practice which is perceived as separated and autonomous from music composition and production. the inhabitants of milliard city do not play music, they just listen to it; and the sudden arrival of the quatuor magnifies this absence. verne is thus particularly attentive to the rise of music reception as a self-standing habit, a transformative process fostered firstly by the commodification of urban entertainment around the mid-nineteenth century and later the widespread diffusion of media technology in the forms of recording and broadcasting.[38] moreover, according to verne’s writings, the increasing availability of recorded music fosters new forms of distracted listening, a notion similar to what walter benjamin would later argue over the last pages of his popular essay “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” [39]. as stated by david goodman, “distracted listening” is a constant occurrence in our mass-mediated world: “we are accustomed to having broadcast or recorded sound all around us, whenever we want, and to listening distractedly or closely at different times and places.” [40] the inhabitants of milliard city are familiar with this kind of listening thanks to the installation of loudspeakers in their private homes. they use these loudspeakers for listening to pre-recorded music broadcast by the company, as explained by munbar to the quatuor soon after the description of the “théâtrophonic” concerts. in l’île à hélice, these private audio apparatuses are mainly intended for therapeutic purposes, following the theories of frederick kill harford, a pioneer in music therapy in late victorian england. as yvernès affirms: “you just have to select the music that fits the diagnosis! wagner or berlioz for a weak constitution…,” to which munbar adds “and for fiery dispositions, mendelssohn or mozart.”[41] the use of classical music as ambient or therapeutic music represents for verne a reductio ad absurdum to denounce the commodification effects of recording technologies. the same vision is put forward by verne in the 1872 humorous short story une fantaisie du docteur ox. in this work, the lethargic inhabitants of quiquendone, a fictional flemish city, are metamorphosed by the excess of oxygen in the atmosphere of the town and its surroundings due to the side effects of a new system of gas lighting. the transformation affects their performing and listening practices, too. before the beginning of gas experiments, given the phlegmatic nature of the orchestras, singers, and conductors of quiquendone, grand operas such as robert le diable and les huguenots took several evenings to be fully performed at the local opera house. however, such productions are now astoundingly fast due to the effects of the gas: the fourth act of les huguenots, which used to last six and a half hours at quiquendone’s opera house, now takes eighteen minutes to be fully played. [42] this idea of a “fast-forward” listening has been thoroughly analyzed by cormac newark: doctor ox’s experiment ridicules the old-fashioned length and tediousness of grand operas, but also the uncritical faith in technological advances.[43] opera fandom, music recording and the gothic supernatural: le château des carpathes audience behavior, theatrical conventions, communication technologies, and literary imagination: all these topics seem to converge on the novel le château des carpathes. published in 1892, this work occupies a prominent position in verne’s late period and pivots entirely on the relationship between opera, fandom, and technology. the beginning is a magnificent literary exercise around the core features of the most blatant, even stereotypical, gothic fiction: a haunted and abandoned castle in the middle of transylvania; an environment of fear menaced by frightening rumors and supernatural events; the intrusion of the past upon the present. [44] even if the castle, which belongs to the baron rodolphe de gortz, is supposed to be uninhabited, several unexplainable phenomena horrify the residents of a nearby village—i.e., disembodied voices, a persistent smoke, and odd shapes of light above the donjon at night. after many vicissitudes, flashbacks, and plot twists, the reader discovers that the castle is haunted by a nostalgic opera lover. the baron was an opera fan obsessed with a young diva, stilla, and used to attend all her performances. but one day the diva suddenly died onstage at the teatro di san carlo in naples while singing the death scene from the opera orlando (composed by some arconati): “innamorata, mio cuore tremante, voglio morire…” this was supposed to be her farewell performance, since she had recently decided to retire from the stage to marry count franz de télek. the baron was devastated by stilla’s death. with the help of his assistant and scientist orfanik, the baron thus decided to bring stilla back to life in his gloomy castle in transylvania through projected images and listening to high-quality phonograph recordings from her last performances. the whole mystery of the haunted castle is revealed only in the final pages of the novel. it will be remembered how deep was the baron’s despair when the rumour spread that la stilla had resolved to retire from the stage and become countess of télek. … orfanik suggested that by means of the phonograph he should collect the principal airs from the operas she would appear in during her farewell performances at san carlo. this instrument had reached a high state of perfection at this period, and orfanik had so improved it that the human voice underwent no change, and lost none of its charm or purity. the baron accepted orfanik’s offer. phonographs were successively and secretly introduced into the private box at the theatre during the last weeks of the season; and in this way their cylinders recorded the cavatinas and romances from the operas and concerts, including … the final air from orlando, which was interrupted by la stilla’s death. these were the circumstances under which the baron had shut himself up in the castle of the carpathians, and there, each night, he listened to the music given out by the phonograph. and not only did he hear la stilla as if he were in his box, but … he saw her as if she were alive, before his eyes. it was a simple optical illusion. it will be remembered that baron de gortz had obtained a magnificent portrait of the singer. this portrait represented her in the white costume of angelica in orlando. … by means of glasses inclined at a certain angle calculated by orfanik, when a light was thrown on the portrait placed in front of a glass, la stilla appeared by reflection as real as if she were alive, and in all the splendour of her beauty.[45] verne’s novel le château has received substantial attention by musicologists. its wider reception was also relatively successful, giving rise to several movies and even an opera by the composer philippe hersant in 1992. the love triangle informing the novel is quintessential operatic: the pure and tragic love between a soprano and a young tenor (in this case, the count de télek) is impeded by a dark, monomaniacal baritone (i.e., the baron de gortz). newark has analyzed the resonances of the story of the carpathian castle in the context of nineteenth-century music and literature. one reference is certainly hoffmann (via offenbach). the name stilla echoes both the german stille (silent) and the italian stella (star), but it is also a reference to the character stella in offenbach’s les contes d’hoffmann. [46] newark rightly observes that verne’s novel also relies on a set of previous fictional works “featuring the erotic fascination of the tragic female singer”: the real-life sopranos who lost their voices or retired or died suddenly (falcon, malibran, and so on) were a staple of romantic writer-lore, and the fictional genre-pool from which stilla draws her inheritance includes numerous cases of the loss of voice, life, or both, from nodier’s inès de las sierras (1837) to various stories by méry.[47] the fascination for the technological afterlife of the singing body features in other contemporary science-fiction novels. henson has analyzed l’ève future (1886) by villiers de l’isle-adam, a novel in which a female robot, an android, is able to sing with a beautiful voice. [48] this reference is placed within the larger historical and theoretical framework of the 1820s and 1830s, a chronological turning point which henson also considers as a conceptual watershed. the italian word diva has already been associated with opera since the baroque era. however, as henson suggests, it was only during the golden age of european romanticism that diva became a synonym for an exceptional opera singer, one endowed with supernatural singing qualities and the ability to excite obsessive devotion in his listeners. the new operatic diva, exemplified by famous singers such as giuditta pasta and maria malibran, was praised by contemporary music critics especially in paris and italy. at the same time, the 1820s and 1830s were a turning point in the history of recording technologies, with the creation of the first mechanical devices to store and reproduce information and data, such as the photographic camera—a trend which would later lead to the invention of the phonograph. according to henson, the soprano in its mythologized form (i.e., the diva) may therefore be understood as a fantasy of technological modernization. when verne was writing his later novels, sound recording and data communication technologies were already a solid reality, in tandem with the emergence of the moving images industry. [49] in this context, le château can hardly be interpreted as futuristic science: at stake were the aesthetical and social practices favored by new technologies. in his comparative analysis of bram stoker’s dracula (1897) and verne’s le château, raj shah offers valuable insights on verne’s “fin-de-siècle anxiety” towards the aesthetical, philosophical, and even anthropological implications of recording technologies. as a writer and an artist, argues shah, verne perceived that recording technologies were able to severe ties between author and creation. by dislocating the aesthetical experience “from one of physical immediacy to one of alienation and distance,” the disembodied voice challenges “the phonocentric privileging of speech over writing,” thus “exposing the implicit metaphysical assumption of a speaking presence as illusory.” [50] the acousmatic separation between the sound and its source (l’île à hélice) becomes in the case of the recorded voice of a dead singer (le château) a tormenting and phantasmagorical separation between the presence of the singing voice and its transcendental existence. verne understood that the acute sense of nostalgia opened up by this technologically-mediated separation could generate new forms of cultural fetishism. sound and image recording technologies offered “new modes of perversion and fetishism in their transmogrification of the cult of relics through increasingly and uncannily accurate mechanical reproductions”. [51] this idea of cultural fetishism and its implications for the use of recording technologies has not been explored enough in musicological studies devoted to le château. in his detailed analysis of the novel, newark has insisted on the psychological, philosophical, and musical meanings of the novel. the core of his interpretation is the sense of duplication, distance, simultaneity, and eventually crisis provoked by the double existence of a real voice and its recording. [52] through the notion of re-enactment, newark links the tradition of the gothic novel as a genre (the return of the past haunting gothic narratives) to the new possibilities of listening offered by the recording—i.e., playback, pause, and re-play. and re-enacting seems to affect the overall structure of the novel.[53] the gothic quality of the recording—i.e., its being haunted by the past—is central in verne’s novel. de gortz, however, is not merely a dark, gothic character; he is also a pioneer in listening practices. the words used by newark and shah to describe de gortz’s behavior—e.g., “compulsively/compulsive,” “desperate,” “fetishism,” “fatalism,” “cult of relics,” etc.—tend to magnify his bizarreness and eccentricity, especially with regards to the use of stilla’s recording: “the vitality of opera reception in the theatre is replaced by, and contrasted with, the sterility of compulsive private listening.” [54] this is certainly true. yet, the use of the term “sterility” belies a potential misunderstanding. it seems to me that de gortz behaves as a fan towards stilla, as “a fanatic admirer.” [55] the use of recording technologies only reinforces his peculiar attachment to the diva. interpreting de gortz not as a “maniac” or a “psychopath,” but rather as a fan, changes our perspective of his role in the novel, while also shedding light onto the cultural history of opera fandom in relation to recording technologies. this perspective parallels verne’s ambivalent fascination with his character, as well as his general approach towards science fiction, where mystery and supernatural events—in this case the haunted castle and de gortz’s inscrutable behavior—are eventually explained through concrete scientific understanding and technological developments. even today, both mainstream and journalistic discourses tend to overemphasize unusual behavior, reducing fandom to a site of curiosity and stereotypes. the theories developed within the context of fan studies—a field emerged as an extension of media and cultural studies—can provide a better frame to understand de gortz’s practices. the transformative impact of mass media culture and the interplay between media, institutions, and highly engaged audiences are at the core of fan studies. in his seminal textual poachers (1992), henry jenkins offers an ethnographic account of particular niches among media fans—i.e., television fans (such as the fandom for star trek). through the analysis of their social institutions, cultural practices, and complex relationship to capitalism, jenkins posits the key notion of participatory culture: “rejecting media-fostered stereotypes of fans as cultural dupes, social misfits, and mindless consumers” to understand them “as active producers and manipulators of meanings.”[56] what links de gortz and a trekkie (a fan of star trek)? as a matter of fact, nineteenth-century music lovers have played an important role in the cultural historiography of fandom. over several important publications, cavicchi has studied the emergence of the music audience as a distinct community throughout the nineteenth century in the united states and has analyzed the development of the modern music lover in large urban areas. the word fan is an abbreviation of fanatic, meaning a religious maniac and a political zealot: even though there were no fans before 1880, there were amateurs, beggars, boomers, buffs, bugs, connoisseurs, devotees, dilettantes, enthusiasts, fanatics, the fancy, fiends, gluttons, habitués, heads, hounds, kranks, lions, longhairs, lovers, maniacs, matinee girls, nuts, rooters, lisztians, wagnerians, and more. in thinking about the history of fandom, then, rather than starting with use of the term fan, we might do better to consider the patterns of behavior the term was meant to describe.[57] from a sociological perspective, opera fans seem to practice their obsession via an ethic of self-sacrifice based on intense attendance. this “heavily personalized investment,” as explained by claudio benzecry in his ethnography of the teatro colón’s aficionados, tends to be “dismissed with suffixes like -mania, -philia, and -pathia” and clearly shows “the impossibility of finding an explanation among the usual sociological suspects (status, networks, class reproduction).” [58] according to antoine hennion, the opera fan “is more prone to thinking about music in terms of attaining intense states of emotion,” possibly “because of the singing, the body, the divas, the tendency to eroticize the voice.” the vocabulary of drug addiction or of sexuality is often mentioned, “as much by observers as by participants.” [59] however, the abrupt musical enjoyment and even the sense of spiritual elevation experienced by opera fans are the consequence of a set of practices, institutions, devices, and technologies. de gortz’s operatic passion for stilla can be interpreted as the mediated behavior of a fan. his sense of “longing,” to paraphrase cavicchi, is carried out not only through compulsive and private listening. rather, de gortz’s fandom involves a whole array of activities, such as: traveling around european theaters; collecting memorabilia about stilla; buying and organizing accommodation, tickets, and meals; and finally producing bootlegs, and even creating a quasi-hologram of his favorite singer, duplicating her voice in a rather peculiar setting—de gortz and orfanik thus create a site-specific audiovisual installation avant la lettre. the immediacy of the musical enjoyment felt by de gortz in experiencing stilla’s simulacrum is the result of several mediations, mediators, and actions. as benzecry observes, musical taste is driven “by the many devices and practices implied in liking something.” [60] the relationship between the music lover and the object of their passion is influenced by institutional contexts, the authority of other fans, relatives, and friends, and the social play of identification and differentiation; furthermore, musical passion is a reflective practice, fans being aware of their gestures and rites. as hennion notes, listening is a highly organized activity aimed at achieving a loss of control: it is not a matter of doing something, but of making something happen. [61] as cavicchi affirms in his study of nineteenth-century music fans, music lovers were those who wanted to perpetuate and support feelings of connection with music, performers and concert venues beyond the limited and ephemeral musical participation afforded by the purchase of a concert ticket. some [music lovers] maintained an extraordinarily active audience life, attending concerts several nights a week. … others pursued artists outside of the concert hall, waiting in front of hotels for a glimpse of their favorite star or going on pilgrimages to the homes of european composers and performers. many concertgoers, especially after the 1850s, attempted to re-create their favorite concert performances by collecting and playing sheet music for the pieces performed. others attempted to fix on paper every moment, every feeling during a concert, their diaries acting as stand-ins for the performances themselves.[62] others, one may add, started listening to their favorite operas, divas, and arias via remote live transmissions (i.e., the théâtrophone) and recording technologies. in the late 1890s, this practice was already a reality. the activities of the music lover described by cavicchi were reinforced by the possibilities offered by the fact of recording. de gortz as a fan repudiates “the primacy of direct experience through persistent mediatization.” [63] verne shows us how fandom and media technologies are strictly correlated: modern opera lovers are typically technophiles, and practices of cultural nostalgia (such as the cult of the voice of dead divas) are constantly shaped by the rise of new technologies. [64] verne was not a seer, but rather a sharp observer. de gortz is an opera fan placed between two eras of audience behavior; the evolution of his character—from the touring opera lover following stilla to the compulsive listener of her recorded voice—celebrates the coexistence, so to speak, between the typical behavior related to “nineteenth-century urban entertainment (in the form of commodified performance and mass-published texts)” and the new practices fostered by “twentieth-century media technology (in the form of recording and broadcasting).” [65] of course, this is not meant as a strict temporal dichotomy: even though the advent of the phonograph was a revolutionary moment in music, in which new kinds of repeated listening or mediated intimacy with performers emerged, we can also see how those behaviors might have opened up a bit earlier, especially in continuities carried over from the culture of nineteenth-century “music lovers.”[66] conclusion in this article, i have explored the evolution and development of the long-lasting relationship between opera singers, opera fans, and new recording technologies by drawing on the work of jules verne. based on reliable empirical observations, the literary imagination developed by verne in the late nineteenth century offers a viewpoint not only on the trends, idiosyncrasies, and fears of his epoch but also on new, emergent listening practices. a witty and knowledgeable observer of the french theatrical and musical world of his time, verne has offered some sarcastic critiques of this world and its idols, such as the grand entrepôt dramatique and the depiction of the music of the future in paris au xxe siècle, his satirical description of french grand operas in une fantaisie du docteur ox, or even his love for offenbach. but verne has also explored the impact of recording and communication technologies on the practices of audience and listeners in the late nineteenth century: collective acousmatic listening (the billionaires and their théâtrophone in l’île à hélice), distracted listening (in-home loudspeaker systems in l’île à hélice), “fast-forward” listening (une fantaisie du docteur ox), the privatization of listening and the wider activities of technologically-informed fandom (de gortz in le château des carpathes). more importantly, verne has offered some thought-provoking reflections, based on vivid concrete situations, on the long-lasting role of technology and the media in shaping the society and the cultural sphere, from the emergence of modern music fandom and the parallel commodification of performing arts as a form of entertainment and cultural industry to the philosophical implications of the act of recording and the mediatization of artistic experience. it does not matter today to verify the validity of verne’s predictions; rather, it is important to point out the concrete value of his preoccupations since they shed light on basic tenets and outcomes of modernization as a cultural force. verne did not mean to see into the future. [67] instead, he commented on the imminence of the present, aware of the entertaining role literature and theater have on our everyday life. opera, performing arts, and communication technologies were at the core of verne’s thought, and our present is also the result of his wondrously staged futures. * this article is part of the marie skłodowska-curie action opera fandom in the digital age, funded by the european union (horizon europe framework programme, grant agreement no. 101063989). i would like to thank emilio sala, carlo lanfossi, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. [1] “top 50 authors,” index translationum, unesco, website, accessed july 15, 2022. [2]  see edmund j. smyth, “verne, sf and modernity: an introduction,” in jules verne: narratives of modernity, ed. edmund j. smyth (liverpool: liverpool university press, 2000), 1. [3]  smyth, 2. [4]  michel serres, “le savoir, la guerre et le sacrifice,” critique 33, no. 367 (1977): 1072. my translation. [5]  “by a trick of technology (a combination of mirrors and a phonograph), the singer gives a performance from beyond the grave, watched by the solitary grievers who cannot live without her memory. she will remain forever in their minds as a stage figure, caught and frozen in that final, fatal performance.” timothy unwin, jules verne: journeys in writing (liverpool: liverpool university press, 2005), 129. [6]  jules verne, the extraordinary journeys: the adventures of captain hatteras, trans. william butcher (oxford: oxford university press, 2005), 36. [7]  unwin, jules verne, 96. [8]  sylvie roques, jules verne et l’invention d’un théâtre-monde (paris: classiques garnier, 2018), 7. [9]  robert harborough sherard, “jules verne at home: his own account of his life and work,” mcclure’s magazine 2, no. 2 (january 1894): 120. [10]  see alexandre tarrieu, “voyage au centre du théâtre,” revue jules verne, no. 11 (2001): 11—24. [11]  laurence senelick, “outer space, inner rhythms: the concurrences of jules verne and jacques offenbach,” nineteenth-century theatre & film 30, no. 1 (2003): 2. [12]  on this topic, see “jules verne et la musique,” special issue, revue jules verne, no. 24 (2007). [13]  jules verne, “en suivant une liane,” chap. 7 in la jangada: 800 lieues sur l’amazone, vol. 1 (paris: hetzel, 1881), 103–4. [14]  see piero gondolo della riva, “préface,” in jules verne, paris au xxe siècle (paris: le livre de poche, 1996), 11–21. [15]  see david platten, “a hitchhiker’s guide to paris: paris au xxe siècle,” in smyth, jules verne, 78–93. [16]  jules verne, paris in the twentieth century, trans. richard howard (new york: random house, 1996), ch. 14 “le grand entrepôt dramatique,” 203. [17]  verne, paris, 209. [18]  verne, paris, 207. [19]  daniel cavicchi, listening and longing: music lovers in the age of barnum (middletown: wesleyan university press, 2011), 153–54. [20]  “la naissance du wagnérisme français” (yannick simon, “les trois concerts wagner au théâtre-italien en 1860,” dezède online, posted on january 21, 2018). see also jeremy coleman, richard wagner in paris: translation, identity, modernity (woodbridge: the boydell press, 2019), esp. ch. 5–6. [21]  verne, paris, 116. [22]  verne, paris, 119. [23]  platten, “a hitchhiker’s guide to paris,” 80. [24]  jules verne, the extraordinary journeys: twenty thousand leagues under the seas, trans. william butcher (oxford: oxford university press, 1998), 275. [25]  jules verne, “mr. ray sharp and miss me flat,” in jules verne, yesterday and tomorrow, trans. i. o. evans (london: arco, 1905), 125–53: 149. [26]  on verne and hoffmann, see cormac newark, opera in the novel from balzac to proust (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2011), 123–25. [27]  unwin, jules verne, 39–40. [28]  jules verne, the self-propelled island, trans. marie-thérèse noiset (lincoln: university of nebraska press, 2015), 65. [29]  john philip sousa, “the menace of mechanical music,” appleton’s magazine 8, no. 3 (september 1906): 281. [30]  jonathan sterne, the audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction (durham, nc: duke university press, 2003), 292. [31]  sterne, the audible past, 3 and 1. [32]  karen henson, “introduction: of modern operatic mythologies and technologies,” in technology and the diva: sopranos, opera, and media from romanticism to the digital age, ed. karen henson (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016), 22. see also philip auslander, liveness: performance in a mediatized culture, 2nd ed. (new york: routledge, 2008). [33]  verne, the self-propelled island, 65–66. [34]  andrea sangiovanni, le parole e le figure. storia dei media in italia dall’età liberale alla seconda guerra mondiale (rome: donzelli, 2013), 58. [35]  brian kane, sound unseen: acousmatic sound in theory and practice (new york: oxford university press, 2014), 147. the reference is to pierre schaeffer, treatise on musical objects: an essay across disciplines, trans. christine north and john dack (oakland: university of california press, 2017), ch. 4 “acousmatics.” [36]  kane, sound unseen, 7. [37]  see violeta nigro giunta and nicolò palazzetti, “‘new avenues for listening.’ sensory culture in the digital age and the persistence of utopia. an interview with michael bull,” transposition 6 (2016). it is also worth mentioning the dramaturgical role of the “acousmatic voice” in the french melodrama les frères corses (1850): see emilio sala, “the ‘ghost melody’ as acousmatic voice. music and effect from melodrama to cinema,” trans. revista transcultural de música/transcultural music review 18 (2014). [38]  cavicchi, listening and longing. [39]  walter benjamin, “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” in walter benjamin, illuminations, ed. hannah arendt, trans. harry zohn (new york: schocken books, 1968), 217–51. [40]  david goodman, “distracted listening: on not making sound choices in the 1930s,” in sound in the age of mechanical reproduction, ed. david suisman and susan strasser (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2010), 15. [41]  verne, the self-propelled island, 66. [42]  jules verne, dr. ox’s experiment, and other stories (boston: j.r. osgood, 1875), 52. [43]  newark, opera in the novel, 116–23. [44]  for a general overview of gothic literature’s main themes, see jerrold e. hogle, “introduction: the gothic in western culture,” in the cambridge companion to gothic fiction, ed. jerrold e. hogle (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2002), 1–20. [45]  jules verne, the castle of the carpathians, trans. anon. (akron, ohio: saalfield, 1900), 208–209. [46]  newark, opera in the novel, 125. [47]  newark, 127. [48]  henson, “introduction.” [49]  as noted by unwin, “it was by no means unthinkable in such a climate to conclude that real-time sound-and-image communication was not far off, and there was feverish speculation about the possibilities it opened up” (jules verne, 45). [50]  raj shah, “counterfeit castles: the age of mechanical reproduction in bram stoker’s dracula and jules verne’s le château des carpathes,” texas studies in literature and language 56, no. 4 (2014): 429. [51]  shah, “counterfeit castles”, 429. [52]  “for verne, rather than stilla’s ceasing to exist when no longer allowed to sing, or when her song is stolen, it is the simultaneous existence of voice-object and its simulacrum that causes the crisis—a crisis that is as much narrative as emotional. … going round and round, like the wax cylinder secretly at its centre, the remainder of le château des carpathes is nothing less than a study of the compulsive aspect of various kinds of repetition: traumatic re-enactment, lacanian search for the lost comforting voice, desperate attempt to supply the lack of musical closure, gratification of the recurring need for operatic jouissance, and so on” (newark, opera in the novel, 132). [53]  newark, 130. [54]  newark, 131. [55]  verne, the castle of the carpathians, 209. [56]  henry jenkins, textual poachers: television fans and participatory culture (new york: routledge, 1992), 23. [57]  daniel cavicchi, “fandom before ‘fan’: shaping the history of enthusiastic audiences,” reception: texts, readers, audiences, history 6, no. 1 (2014): 54. [58]  claudio e. benzecry, the opera fanatic: ethnography of an obsession (chicago: university of chicago press, 2011), 186. [59]  antoine hennion, the passion for music: a sociology of mediation, trans. margaret rigaud and peter collier (new york: routledge, 2015), 275–76. [60]  benzecry, the opera fanatic, 8. [61]  hennion, the passion for music, 278. [62]  cavicchi, “fandom before ‘fan’,” 60. [63]  shah, “counterfeit castles,” 454. [64]  the burial of the recorded voices at paris opera in 1907 is a striking example. see emmanuel reibel, “fantasmagories de l’écoute: autour des urnes de l’opéra (1907–2007),” in écoute multiple. écoute des multiples, ed pierre fargeton and béatrice ramaut-chevassus (paris: hermann, 2019), 71–89. [65]  cavicchi, “fandom before ‘fan’,” 56. [66]  cavicchi, 56. [67]  daniel compère, “jules verne and the limitations of literature,” in smyth, jules verne, 42. × article contents dimensional hearing dolby stereo differences footnotes article rapt/wrapped listening: the aesthetics of “surround sound” james wierzbicki sound stage screen, vol. 1, issue 2 (fall 2021), pp. 101–124, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2021 james wierzbicki. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss14474. this essay is prompted by my personal experience with dolby 5.1, the sonic results of which have been evident in cinemas since the late 1970s and the encoding for which, on the soundtracks of dvds, since the turn of the century has been fairly ubiquitous. more to the point, this essay deals with the aesthetic differences (not just perceptual but also affective) between listening closely to environmental sounds in real life and listening to re-creations of more or less those same sounds, via a dolby system or otherwise, in the privacy and comfort of one’s home. dimensional hearing the homophonic adjectives in the essay’s title refer to two “conditions” of listening, one of them psychological and the other physical. in the first case, the condition of “rapt” listening has nothing at all to do with the content or quality of the sonic phenomenon at hand but only with the decidedly unilateral relationship between that phenomenon and its perceiver. our english word “rapt” of course derives from the past participle of the latin verb rapere, which means “to seize.” this latin root is the source of the term we use for birds such as eagles and hawks that swoop down from the sky and, with sharp talons, suddenly seize their prey; it is also the source of the word we use for the heinous criminal act in which a person is somehow—usually sexually—violated after first having been somehow “seized.” on a more positive note, the latin rapere, and more particularly its past participle raptus, is the source of the english word we use to describe the state of being so “taken” with something or other—so “seized” by it—that the “enraptured” person is, willing or not, in effect “transported” to a new and perhaps elevated state of feeling or even of existence. but our english word “rapt” also means something not nearly so wondrously ecstatic, or so scarily violent. the word “rapt”—and this is how i am using the word here—simply means “attentive,” although not just slightly attentive but very much attentive. the person who pays rapt attention to something or other is at least for the moment truly and deeply focused on that stimulus; in the mind of the rapt attender—whether he or she be listening to music or playing chess or doing a crossword puzzle, or knitting or repairing a motorcycle—there is no room for distraction. to use the term in circulation since the mid 1970s when it was introduced into the vocabulary by the hungarian-american psychologist mihály csíkszentmihályi, the rapt attender is experiencing “flow,” or—as csíkszentmihályi puts it in the subtitle of one his numerous books on the topic—“the psychology of optimal experience”; [1] to use a phrase current amongst players of computer games, the rapt attender is “in the zone.” the vast pigeonhole of rapt listeners certainly includes the erudite wagner idolater who, while indulging in a live or recorded performance of the “liebestod” from tristan und isolde, in effect “parses” every single nuance and compares the results with every other performance of this music that he or she has ever heard. but the pigeonhole of rapt listeners also includes the infant who suckles at its mother’s breast as she sings a wordless lullaby. as noted, “rapt” listening has nothing at all to do with the content or quality of the music, or the sonic phenomenon, at hand; it has to do only with the intensity with which the listener relates, psychologically, to the sonic stimulation. **** the condition of “wrapped” listening, on the other hand, has to do only with the listening experience’s physical circumstances, circumstances that we likely take for granted when we encounter them in our everyday lives but which we tend to celebrate when they are artificially re-created by stereophonic audio systems. human beings have just two ears, yet most of the time we listen three-dimensionally; the exceptions to that generalization, contrary to nature but increasingly common since the invention of the sony walkman portable cassette player in 1979, involve instances when, for a multitude of reasons that surely include psychic self-protection, by means of headphones or “earbuds” we make a conscious choice to limit our intake of sound. [2] except in such instances, with our two ears we listen three-dimensionally. and we do this because we are living creatures. were we robots, with our heads fitted on either side with microphones, we could sit motionless and have our electronic brains compare the differences in amplitude of a single sound whose vibrations are taken in simultaneously by both of our mechanical “ears”; by noting which of the two signals seems to be louder, we could determine the extent to which the source of the sound in question exists to the right or to the left of our robotic heads. but the electronic brain between the microphonic “ears” would be able to determine only that the sound source is located within one or the other of those two broadly defined areas. the robot’s electronic brain would easily know that the sound comes from the left or from the right; it would not be able to determine the extent to which the sound comes from in front of or behind its head, or from above or below it. this is because our robotic heads and ears would not move. in contrast, our human heads and ears, like the heads and ears of all warm-blooded creatures, do move, and constantly. no matter how hard we try, we cannot—as a robot might—sit motionless. our mere breathing causes our hearing apparatus to move; even if we held our breaths, the apparatus would still move because of the percussions of our heartbeats. and with each ever-so-slight movement comes, automatically, a shift in the relationships between various binary (i.e., left and right) fields of aural in-take. whereas a robot’s brain can compare the volume levels registered by a pair of immobile mechanical “ears” and calculate that the source of a particular sound exists somewhere within the left or right halves of a 360-degree sonic plane, the human brain—inside a head that not only moves on a rotational axis but also is “cocked” this way and that—can make comparable determinations in regard to an almost infinite number of sonic planes and thus determine, in an instant, the precise direction from which a sound seems to come. [3] simply because we live and breathe, we are always “wrapped” in sound, with our sound-perceiving human selves located at the very centers of listening spaces that are not circular but spherical. dolby the latest incarnations of consumer-oriented “surround sound” audio systems capitalize on the idea that people apparently enjoy being reminded that they naturally inhabit spherical listening spaces. but full-blown theatrical installations of the so-called dolby atmos system, with speakers located not just at the auditorium’s front and rear but also embedded in the ceiling and floor, are to date few and far between. [4] and the at-home system that is sometimes marketed as dolby atmos, but which is more accurately described as dolby 7.2, is an only slightly expanded version of the older and more familiar dolby 5.1 technology. [5] my personal relationship with at-home dolby 5.1 began just three years ago, when it became clear to me that i could not possibly write a promised monograph on sonic style in the films of terrence malick without engaging fully with this particular filmmaker’s crafty use of “surround sound.” before this i had been content to hear the soundtracks of malick’s films, and the soundtracks of films by countless other directors, through a simple two-channel stereo setup; i confess to not even noticing that most of the dvds i had acquired since the turn of the century feature on their back covers tiny icons that indicate the stereophonic extent—accessible, of course, only to those with the requisite playback equipment—of their soundtracks. [6] having at long last installed in my apartment the “surround sound” amplifier and six speakers, it was obviously with fresh ears that, early in 2017, i listened again to malick’s days of heaven. by this time days of heaven was hardly new to me. i had indeed encountered the film in the cinema when it was first released in 1978, and it was my vivid memory of a linked pair of scenes near the film’s start (when more than a minute of very loud noise from within a steel mill immediately follows a few seconds of very quiet stream-side sounds) that prompted me to respond, more than twenty years later, to a “call” for contributions to an edited volume devoted to malick’s work. but my 2003 chapter dealt mostly with the formalistic and arguably “musical” qualities of that sequence and comparable sequences that i had observed elsewhere in days of heaven and in two other malick films (badlands, from 1973, and the thin red line, from 1998). in this chapter i discussed the patterns of malick’s sounds, not the possible “meanings” of those sounds or their acoustical properties, and for the purposes of my analyses i could just as well have listened to all three films—albeit carefully and repeatedly—by means of a monaural speaker hung from one of the front windows of a car at a drive-in. [7] **** the french sound theorist michel chion, paraphrasing ideas first formulated by his teacher, pierre schaeffer, noted that for most of us there are “at least” three modes of listening, which he termed causal listening, semantic listening, and reduced listening. [8] spread over a period of almost forty years, my relationship with the sounds of the above-mentioned pair of scenes near the beginning of malick’s days of heaven cycled through all three of these listening modes. when i first experienced the film, as a paying customer at the cinema, i was interested primarily in the scenes’ narrative content, and thus almost all that i really noticed was that the tiny percussion noises in the stream-side scene seemed to be caused by bits of scrap metal being tossed by gleaners into buckets, and that the tremendous din of the steel mill scene seemed to be caused by furnaces and heavy industrial equipment. when i re-engaged with days of heaven for the sake of the aforementioned book chapter, my concern was with these scenes’ quasi-musical semantic properties, by which i mean the way in which the nine-second episode of pianissimo, holding to a model perfected by such theatrical-minded symphonic composers as beethoven and mahler, in effect forces listeners to “dilate” their ears so that they might be impacted all the more powerfully by the ensuing eighty-two seconds offortissimo. by the time i re-engaged again with days of heaven for the purposes of the monograph, [9] i was so familiar with the purely sonic content of these two scenes that i could transcribe it into more or less conventional musical notation, [10] but what was new to me—and what was strikingly “brought home” to me as i listened to the film for the first time with my just-installed dolby 5.1 system—was the idea of these scenes’ sounds as tangible “objects”; during the stream-side scene i felt, almost literally, as though i were being enveloped in a mist of metallic droplets, and during the scene in the mill’s interior i comparably felt as though i were being physically assaulted, the relentless barrage discomforting to the extreme not just because the various thuds and crashes were in themselves so forceful but also because each of them hit me from a direction i could not anticipate. having been thus “wrapped” (and soundly “rapped”) by the opening sounds of a film i thought i knew, i listened with “rapt” attention, again and again, to the entirety of malick’s by this time much-expanded oeuvre. [11] more relevant to my current contemplation of the aesthetics of “surround sound,” i re-listened as well to most of the other films that, along with days of heaven, constituted the first wave of “the dolby era” that in the late 1970s “exploded in all its novelty and excitement.” [12] these early dolby-encoded films of course included george lucas’s 1977 star wars, which almost overnight made dolby “surround sound” the norm because the director’s unusual arrangement with his distributor, twentieth century-fox, specified that this much-anticipated film could only be exhibited in cinemas equipped with potent subwoofers and speakers located not just at the front of the house but also at the rear; these films also included steven spielberg’sclose encounters of the third kind (1977), richard donner’s superman (1978), philip kaufman’s re-make of invasion of the body snatchers (1978), michael cimino’s the deer hunter (1978), jerzy skolimowski’s the shout (1978), francis ford coppola’s apocalypse now (1979), ridley scott’s alien (1979), ken russell’s altered states (1980), martin scorsese’s raging bull (1980), spielberg’s raiders of the lost ark (1981), scott’s blade runner (1982), and steven lisberger’s tron (1982). [13] **** even before my listening binge was over, i realized that these early dolby films fell into two basic categories. in the smaller group were films that i found, and still find, to be genuinely interesting; in the larger group were films that for me, back when i first experienced them in the cinema and when i experienced them again for the sake of my research project, have been entertaining but never much more than that. the interesting films explored human situations; their ear-catching instances of “surround sound” were few and far between, and usually brief, and more often than not they involved the relatively quiet noises of natural environments. in marked contrast, the merely entertaining films celebrated adventure; they teemed with “surround sound,” most of it involving the relatively loud noises of violent action and/or sophisticated—indeed, sometimes futuristic—technology. lest i seem self-contradictory here, i grant straightaway that the steel mill incident that occurs early in days of heaven indeed features both the noise of technology and a depiction of violence, and that the opening scenes of both close encounters of the third kind and raiders of the lost ark indeed revel in environmental sounds. but days of heaven, once set in motion, settles quickly into a conventional mode of storytelling built for the most part on front-and-center verbal content, the linear flow of its plot interrupted only occasionally by taciturn moments of “enveloping” naturalistic sounds. after a brief toot of extra-diegetic music, close encounters begins with the prolonged and almost deafening roar of a desert sandstorm, and raiders of the lost ark begins with an extended scene whose sparse underscore is a pale backdrop for the rich cacophony of a south american jungle; in both of these spielberg-directed films, however, the slow-paced and sonically immersive opening scenes are preludes to fast-unfolding narratives whose sequences of episodes consistently ratchet up suspense even as they provide audience members with a veritable crescendo of audio-visual spectacle. that the soundtracks of so many of the first-wave dolby films were obviously spectacular has not escaped the notice of critics who, like me, prefer cinematic experiences of a more subtle sort. apparently drawn to meteorologic imagery, charles schreger early in the dolby era wrote that upon first hearing the eponymous vocal utterance in skolimowski’s the shout “the audience is suddenly inundated with a multitrack, all-enveloping, hurricane-force sound,” and he went on to argue, as i argue, that the new dolby technology was capable of much more than just “making the moviegoer think he has a typhoon between his ears.” [14] other writers described the standard dolby gesture in biological terms, noting that the subwoofers especially provoked in listeners “a pure gut, … straight-to-the-brainstem physical response” [15] and that “big” sound soon became central to the potential blockbuster’s “visceral aesthetic.” [16] still others likened the “vulgar extreme[s]” [17] of the early dolby films—the spaceship fly-overs, the wham-bang vehicle chases, the shoot-’em-up fight scenes—to the thrills offered by amusement parks; with dolby technology, the interior of the cinema became for patrons “a kind of sonic playground,” [18] the sound designs in many cases “allow[ing] the filmgoer to ride the film rather than simply view it,” [19] its sonic attractions comparable to “mere fairground phenomena.” [20] stereo in fact, it was the recorded noise of a real fairground phenomenon—the “atom smasher” roller coaster at the rockaways’ playland amusement park in queens, new york city—that introduced listeners around the western world to “surround sound.” this is cinerama , to be sure, was not the first film to lure audiences by offering them special content that was not just visual but also aural. in 1940 the walt disney studios’ fantasia famously pioneered the use of multiple soundtracks whose mostly musical content emanated from loudspeakers located at the rear as well as at the front of auditorium. but fantasia with its complex “fantasound” setup [21] played to a limited audience before lingering pressures from the great depression and new economic pressures from the war in europe all but forced disney to close down the film’s planned “road show”; despite fantasia having been booked into almost ninety theaters, it was displayed in only thirteen, [22] and as early as april 1941—eight months before the united states entered world war ii—the “fantasound” amplification systems had been dismantled and rights to the film had been sold to rko radio pictures. rko reduced by a third fantasia’s running time and released it with a monophonic soundtrack; in 1946 rko re-issued fantasia with its deleted segments for the most part restored, [23] but it was not until february 1956, after distribution of the film had been signed over to disney’s recently established buena vista company, that fantasia became available with a soundtrack in two-channel stereo. by this time, the term “stereo” (from the greek στερεός, stereós, meaning “full” or “solid”) had become something of a buzzword in the entertainment industry. at least since the 1850s the adjective had been applied to a visual device called the stereoscope that had its users viewing simultaneously a pair of photographs whose cameras had been located at least a few inches apart; the peepholes of the stereoscope’s viewing apparatus guaranteed that each of the user’s eyes saw only one of the photographs, and it was left to the user’s brain to combine the two similar but slightly different images into a single image that—comparable to what a person commonly perceives when looking with both eyes at anything, focusing alternately on what seems to be close and on what seems to be distant—offered at least the illusion of depth. applied to sound, the prefix “stereo” had been regularly used since the early 1930s to describe experiments in “binaural” sound—which offered an illusion not of three-dimensional depth but of two-dimensional spatiality—of the sort that alan blumlein and other engineers had been conducting under the auspices of various british record companies. [24] but in a sonic context the prefix circulated for the most part in the scientific community, and likely it was not until december 1952 that it entered the vernacular, when veteran broadcaster lowell thomas, speaking in the first-person plural, ended his introduction to this is cinerama’s post-intermission demonstration with the portentous words: “we call it stereophonic sound.” **** audiences at this is cinerama heard stereophonic sound aplenty, emanating from a quintet of speakers arrayed across the front of the house and a pair of speakers at the back. only in a few of the film’s segments, however, did the “surround” nature of the sonic mix call attention to itself: when the silence of a cathedral’s interior is quietly broken by the voices of choristers processing from the rear; [25] when in the episode devoted to the water-skiing show the noise of a motorboat comes first from behind and then from the right and then moves from right to left; when, at the very start of the film, after thomas’s perhaps deliberately pedantic twelve-minute lecture on the history of humankind’s relationship with imagery in general, the giant curved screen in effect “opens wide” to offer a full-color rider’s-eye (and -ear) encounter with the “atom smasher.” but even in its more conventional segments—some of them documentations of musical performances, some of them panoramic flyovers of natural wonders featuring suitably up-lifting accompanimental scores—the stereophonic sound of this is cinerama was enormously different to what most listeners of recorded audio (except laboratory-based engineers, and those who might have remembered attending the first run of fantasia a dozen years earlier) had ever before heard. like most of the early reviewers, the new york times’s bosley crowther commented at length on the film’s visual features, which were “so overwhelming in sheer physical sweep and size” that audience members “sat back in spellbound wonder” as though they “were seeing motion pictures for the first time.” but he dealt as well with the film’s sound. “to heighten the immensity of the impact of the images projected from this screen,” he noted a few days after the premiere showing, “cinerama is augmented by a system of multiple sound, which means that the accompanying sounds of the picture—the music, natural sounds and dialogue—are fired at the audience from outlets all around the theatre. this concentration of assault upon the eardrums, added to the saturation of the eye, inevitably produces sensations that are rousing, intoxicating—and unique.” crowther wondered, as would many other reviewers, about the extent to which such effects could be successfully incorporated into a filmic narrative. but he granted that this is cinerama is “frankly and exclusively ‘sensational,’ in the literal sense of that word.” everything about this film, he wrote, “is clearly designed to smack the nerves.” [26] **** the palpable sensations offered by this is cinerama did not go unnoticed by an american film industry that throughout the prosperous and technology-focused 1950s struggled desperately to compete with television. within just a year of cinerama’s premiere audiences around the nation were treated to more than thirty films that, for better or worse, featured stereophonic soundtracks. some of these, to be sure, were low-budget “b pictures” whose makers hoped to capitalize quickly not just on the novelty of stereophonic sound but also on the novelty of stereoscopic visual effects that by this time went by the moniker “3-d” [27] ; others of them “simply” featured stereophonic sound in combination with one form or another of cinerama-inspired wide-screen imagery. [28] by the end of the decade films of the former sort had proved to be just the flash-in-the-pan efforts that they only ever were, but films of the latter sort—with large budgets and subject matter that arguably put them on the high end of the culture scale—triggered a wave of “blockbusters” [29] that held their own at the box office in large part because the public regarded their showings as “special events well worth the increased admission price that first-run exhibitors charged to see [them] on a big screen and to hear them in stereo sound.” [30] i remember very well how exciting it was to go, as an impressionable kid in the company of just my older brother and a cousin, to the “prestige” cinemas in downtown milwaukee and see some of these films. and i remember at least something of hearing them. the angelic voices resonating from the rear speakers during the nativity scene near the start of ben-hur, and the several seconds of eerie wraparound wind noise that later marks the return home of the title character’s leprous mother and sister, are sonic niceties of which i was reminded only upon revisiting the film via my dolby 5.1 system, but this same recent revisitation triggered genuine feelings of déjà entendu, especially during the sea battle scene during which the percussion accents of miklós rózsa’s score mix three-dimensionally with the crashes and bangs of weaponry, and during the judean chariot race that for almost nine minutes features nothing but rumbles and roars. [31] when i popped a newly bought copy of journey to the center of the earth into the dvd player, the triggered sense was of an almost haptic sort; [32] how could anyone who once upon a time attended a showing of this film ever forget, i asked myself, how it felt—not emotionally but physically—when the professor chips off a rock sample and unwittingly lets loose a near-fatal flood, or when the members of the expedition make their way along a ledge in an underground canyon and are almost lifted off their feet by a powerful updraft? [33] in truth, the actual memories of these films that i have carried over the past sixty years have been vague, and they have had much less to do with the films’ sonic content than with their visual spectacles and their story lines. on the other hand, a sonic memory from back then that is not at all vague—one that remains so clear in my mind that i sometimes wonder if it has turned into a personal “myth” that grows in grandeur with each recollection—has to do with my experience of listening for the first time to stereo at home. **** this must have happened sometime in the second half of 1960. i suggest this approximate date because i know that it was only in july of that year that this is cinerama at long last arrived in my hometown, [34] and i am pretty sure that it was my father’s exposure to that film (in the company, i think, of me and several siblings) that inspired him to surprise the family by one day bringing home a relatively huge magnavox console and remote speaker. [35] i also suggest this approximate date because i know for a fact (having checked the catalogues) that at least a few of the lps included in the stereo system’s purchase package had only recently been issued. to my twelve-year-old ears the music contained on these lps seemed all fine and good; indeed, i thought that the recording of tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture, with all the cannons and bells, was pretty “cool.” [36] but what really blew me away, much more than the windy scenes in ben-hur and journey to the center of the earth could ever do, was what i heard on the demonstration disc. there were no nerve-smacks here, just an array of sounds largely of a sort with which i was already quite familiar. yet these sounds proved to be fascinating—and memorably so—to a degree i still find hard to fathom. by this time in my young life i had been often to the zoo, and to parades; the field where i and my friends regularly played was bordered by a railroad track; in our basement we had, and almost nightly used, a ping-pong table. i knew well the sounds of barking sea lions and marching bands and passing trains and table tennis. but never—until i heard them stereophonically rendered and coming from just a pair of loudspeakers set up in our living room—had i given these sounds more than a passing thought. [37] i did not wonder then but i certainly wonder now: why is it that mechanical reproductions of certain sounds—at least for me, but i suspect for others as well—tend to be so much more compelling than their real-life equivalents? why might a person be inclined to pay more attention to stereophonic recordings of certain sounds than to the actual sounds that such recordings represent? why might someone be more “rapt” in his or her at-home listening to two-dimensional replications of sounds than when he or she, outside the home, encounters the very same sounds and is three-dimensionally “wrapped” in them? differences at the risk of seeming tautological to the extreme, i will state here some of the obvious differences between “surround” sounds in real-life situations and their at-home equivalents. of these, the most obvious, surely, has to do with the simple fact that sounds of the latter type are heard at home. for me or anyone else to experience in real life some of the recorded sounds i have just described might well be thrilling. but for us to be face-to-face with the real-life sounds of, say, an underground deluge or a sandstorm or a steel mill we would have to actually be in a flooding cavern, or a wind-swept desert, or a steel mill. in such circumstances we might well have on our minds numerous things other than how “interesting” our environment sounds (we might be concerned, for example, with the dangers of being drowned, or with how it feels, physically, to have the skin on our faces scratched by particles of blowing sand or to be fairly cooked by the heat of blast furnaces). even if the real-life situations were relatively safe, we would still be thinking, i imagine, about such things as how we happened to be there and how much time we might be spending there. these thoughts would of course be part and parcel of our experience, and they would distract considerably from the act of “pure” listening. in marked contrast, hearing not long stretches of real-life sounds but just recorded bits of them in the comfort of our homes allows us to attend to the sounds with our ears alone. upon first encountering such recorded bits we are of course likely to be put in mind of the real-life contexts in which such sounds might actually occur. but if the sounds themselves catch our fancy we have the option of forgetting altogether about their real-life contexts. if we so choose, we can fiddle with our devices’ “rewind” and “replay” buttons and just listen, again and again. another obvious difference between real-life “surround sound” and its mechanical reproduction has to do with the fact that the latter, regardless of its sophistication, and regardless of its sonic content, is in essence a fiction. in disney’s 1940 fantasound setup, the relatively low-volume sounds that came from the rear speakers were indeed the actual sounds of the orchestra whose recorded performances issued primarily from the auditorium’s left and right-hand speakers; in the 1952 this is cinerama, the “surround” sounds of the roller coaster, the motorboat, and the processing choir were indeed documentary recordings of the real thing, and even in the many stereo demonstration discs from later in the 1950s most of the sounds that purportedly represented sonic “realism so true to life you have to hear it to believe it” were, in fact, true to life. [38] stereophonic sounds in narrative cinema, on the other hand, have almost always been artificial. the quiet chirps of crickets that lend such a feeling of intimacy to the lovers’ late-night snuggle in malick’s days of heaven, like the barely audible snaps of dry twigs in the autumnal mountain scene near the start of cimino’s the deer hunter and the faint buzzes of swamp insects heard so clearly near the end of coppola’s apocalypse now, are no more “real” than are the roars of the dinosaurs in merian c. cooper’s decidedly monophonic 1933 king kong or steven spielberg’s spectacularly stereophonic 1993 jurassic park. yet in all these films the sounds, stereophonic or not, have by means of careful editing been made to seem real, and the audience accepts them as such. in a section of his audio-vision book headed “sound truth and sound verisimilitude,” michel chion notes that audiences have long assessed “the truth” of cinematic sound not by how the sound relates to what they know from their “hypothetical lived experience” but by how it conforms to the “codes established by cinema itself, as well as by television and narrative-representational arts in general”; [39] exploring this same theme, film historian john belton argues that one of the problems encountered by makers of the late-1950s “blockbusters” entailed an over-reliance on stereophonic sound as an element of the spectacles they sought to sell, the result being that “stereo sound became associated for audiences not so much with greater realism as with greater artifice.” [40] still another obvious but often overlooked difference between real-life “surround sounds” and their recorded counterparts has to do with how these sounds are organized; whereas the former simply “come” together, paratactically or accidentally, the latter are almost always “put” together, deliberately, and thus it remains—whether their artifice is audible or not—that they are artifacts. when i step out onto my third-floor balcony and pay attention to the sounds of my urban environment, i have expectations of what i might hear but no control over what i actually do hear, and it is the unpredictable combination of the expected norm with the occasional surprise that makes this real-life three-dimensional sonic experience at least potentially interesting. were i to make a narrative film that included a nocturnal scene in which someone for a moment or two stood on a balcony and did nothing but listen, my dolby 5.1 soundtrack might well feature noises of the sort that i, in similar circumstances, regularly encounter: the squawks of nightbirds, for example, or the distant thrum of a passing helicopter, or the constant but usually quiet din of vehicles moving this way and that. but this soundtrack most probably would be something constructed, something designed—with care and craft—so that, for example, the squawks are heard only in those brief instants when the noise of the traffic has ebbed, or that the sound of the helicopter is heard only when the film’s tacit narrative suggests that the scene’s protagonist is thinking about something, say, policeor hospital-related. in real-life situations, the sounds of birds and helicopters and traffic would by definition be juxtaposed or superimposed; in re-creations of comparable situations, mixes of these very same sounds—perhaps merely for the sake of making them seem credible, but also perhaps for the sake of serving some narrative purpose—would surely be composed. [41] **** this essay has not dealt with “surround sound” compositions per se , that is, works of music intended by their creators to be heard in situations where the sounds come not from a conventional stage located in front of the listeners but, rather, from places more or less all around the listeners. the long history and rich repertoire of three-dimensional music in western culture ranges from the aptly named antiphons of medieval chant to the sixteenth-century cori spezzati pieces designed for the echoey interior of st. mark’s cathedral in venice, from the grandiose nineteenth-century operas and symphonic works that featured offstage brass ensembles to the insouciant musique d’ameublement with which erik satie during world war i decorated parisian theater lobbies, from the poème électronique of edgard varèse that coursed through more than 350 loudspeakers inside the philips pavilion at the 1958 brussels world’s fair to the handful of recordings by pink floyd and other art-rock groups that tried to exploit the short-lived fad for “quadraphonic sound” in the early 1970s, from the 1959 string quartet no. 2 of elliott carter that required its players to sit on the same platform but as far apart as possible to the 1995 helikopter-streichquartett of karlheinz stockhausen that had the four players perform from positions within airships that flew a choreographed pattern high above the listening space. much of this music is available on commercial recordings, but mostly in two-channel stereo formats. [42] it would be puritanical priggery to declare that one misses the point entirely when employing “mere” two-channel stereo to listen to music along the lines of thomas tallis’s ca. 1570 spem in alium (written for eight five-voice choirs and supposedly first performed not just from the cardinal points on the floor but also from the high-up balconies in the dining hall of the earl of arundel’s nonsuch palace in surrey) or john cage’s 1951–53 williams mix (created by aleatoric methods and consisting of snippets of recorded sounds contained on eight separate reels of monophonic tape). it is fair to say, however, that to hear such music emerge from just a pair of loudspeakers is to miss at least something of what the composers had in mind; such listening is not without value, but it is arguably akin to viewing the paintings of rembrandt and vermeer in black-and-white textbook reproductions, or taking in architectural wonders by means of photographs alone. the debate about the relative merits of hearing music performed “live” and hearing it via one form or another of stereophonic recording, in any case, is one that can be saved for another day. in this essay i have simply explored the aesthetic/experiential differences between listening to real-life “surround” sounds and listening to at-home replications of more or less those same sounds, and i have regularly raised the question as to why over the years at least some listeners—certainly including myself—seem to have been more intrigued by the latter than by the former. again at the risk of seeming tautological, let me conclude by reminding readers that most examples of real-life “surround sound”—ranging from the perhaps awe-inspiring noise of a thunderstorm to the quotidian noise of traffic—are, by definition, ordinary. in contrast, “surround sound” recordings, including recordings of traffic and thunderstorms, are quite extraordinary, at least in comparison with what we normally hear within the confines of our homes. whereas real-life “surround sound” exists in space, crafted equivalents are examples of what the announcer for one of the early stereo demonstration discs aptly called “sound sculptured in space.” [43] no matter how expert has been the sculpting, we cannot help but be aware, by virtue of the physical circumstances of the listening experience, that at-home “surround sound” results from human agency. even the most natural-sounding examples, we know, are man-made, and perhaps that is why—almost rapaciously—they grab our attention. [1] born in 1934 to a hungarian family living in rijeka (croatia)—a city that at the time was known as fiume, part of the kingdom of italy—and since 1969 a professor of psychology at the university of chicago, csíkszentmihályi first used the term “flow” in his beyond boredom and anxiety: the experience of play in work and games (san francisco: jossey-bass, 1975). the widespread popularity of the term doubtless owes to its appearance as the one-word main title of csíkszentmihályi’s first mass-market book, flow: the psychology of optimal experience (new york: harper and row, 1990). capitalizing on the popularity not just of the term but of its underlying concept, in 2000 the publishers of the earlier book retitled it beyond boredom and anxiety: experiencing flow in work and play . [2] defenders of the cassette-based walkman and its digital successors typically argue that the devices’ prime value lies in its allowing the “average person”—like the nursery rhyme’s “fine lady” from banbury cross who sported “rings on her fingers and bells on her toes”—to “have music wherever she (or he) goes.” but numerous critics, vociferous especially in the 1990s, have labeled the walkman (and other players) as devices whose main purpose is to insulate their users from the world around them. for pioneering commentary on the walkman, see shuhei hosokawa, “considérations sur la musique mass-médiatisée,” international review of the aesthetics and sociology of music 12, no. 1 (1981): 21–50, and “the walkman effect,” popular music 4 (1984): 165–80, partially derived from hosokawa’s walkman no shûjigaku ( the rhetoric of walkman) (tokyo: asahi shuppan, 1981), which remains untranslated into english but is available in german as der walkman-effect, trans. birger ollrogge (berlin: merve verlag, 1987). for later commentary, see, for example, iain chambers, “a miniature history of the walkman,” new formations 11 (1990): 1–4; theodore gracyk, “listening to music: performances and recordings,” journal of aesthetics and art criticism 55, no. 2 (1997): 139–50; and michael bull, “the world according to sound: investigating the world of walkman users,” new media & society 3, no. 2 (2001): 179–97. for extended overviews, see, for example, paul du gay et al., eds., doing cultural studies: the story of the sony walkman (london: sage publications, 1997), and andrew williams, portable music & its functions (new york: peter lang, 2007). [3] anyone who doubts the natural human capacity for determining the directionality of sound need only attend briefly to the environment with only one ear. this experiment will not succeed if a person merely holds a hand over an ear or uses an earplug, for such efforts will decrease but not entirely eliminate an ear’s in-take; for the experiment to work one needs to place a finger on the tragus (the bit of cartilage located at the front of the outer ear) and firmly press so that the cartilage in effect seals the ear canal. just a few seconds of one-eared listening should be enough to convince participants that the perception of sonic directionality depends crucially on the ability to hear with not just one ear but two. [4] the dolby atmos system was demonstrated for the first time in 2012; its “breakthrough” film was alfonso cuarón’s 2013 gravity, which won academy awards for both “sound editing” and “sound mixing,” but the system is currently installed in fewer than 5,000 cinemas worldwide. for details, see, for example, benjamin wright, “atmos now: dolby laboratories, mixing ideology and hollywood sound production,” in living stereo: histories and cultures of multichannel sound , ed. paul théberge, kyle devine, and tom everrett (new york: bloomsbury, 2015), 227–46; dong liang, “sound, space, gravity: a kaleidoscopic hearing (part i),” the new soundtrack 6, no. 1 (2016): 1–15; and “dolby surpasses 4,000 dolby atmos screens worldwide,” boxoffice, october 4, 2018. for a critical discussion of how gravity’s dimensional sound, especially in its opening scenes, relates to the narrative, see alison walker, “sonic space and echoes of the flesh: textual and phenomenal readings of gravity,” music, sound, and the moving image 14, no. 2 (2020): 119–39. [5] 5.1 and 7.2 are not decimal fractions but indicators of an at-home audio system’s array of speakers. 5.1 indicates five “surround” speakers—three in the front and two at the rear—and a subwoofer to which low-frequency sounds are assigned; 7.2 indicates seven “surround” speakers—the five just mentioned plus an additional pair located on either side of the listening space—and two subwoofers. [6] the icons take the form of squares embellished with dots. a monophonic soundtrack is indicated by a single dot located at the midpoint of the square’s topmost side; a two-channel stereo soundtrack is indicated by a pair of dots on either end of the topmost side; dolby 5.1 is indicated by three dots on the square’s topmost side and two in the lower corners, plus an additional dot (representing the subwoofer) in the square’s middle. [7] the results of my formalistic analyses appear in james wierzbicki, “sound as music in the films of terrence malick,” in the cinema of terrence malick: poetic visions of america, ed. hannah patterson (london: wallflower press, 2003), 110–22. [8] michel chion, audio-vision: sound on screen, trans. claudia gorbman, (new york: columbia university press, 1994), 25. orig. l’audio-vision (paris: éditions nathan, 1990). in a revised edition (paris: armand colin, 2017), chion changed the second of the three terms from “écoute sémantique” to “écoute codale,” and it appears as “codal listening” in gorbman’s new translation (2019) for columbia university press. in both editions, chion acknowledges that the concepts of different modes of listening, and especially the ideas of “semantic listening” and “reduced listening,” had earlier been explored by pierre schaeffer in his 1966 traité des objets musicaux. schaeffer’s book, translated by christine north and john dack, was published in 2017 as treatise on musical objects: an essay across disciplines (oakland, ca: university of california press). [9] james wierzbicki, terrence malick: sonic style (new york: routledge, 2019). [10] a transcription of the noises in the steel mill scene is included in my “zvukovoy ryad kak muzyka: o novykh putyakh v izuchenii kinoiskusstva” [hearing sound as music: on new directions in film studies], nauchnyy vestnik moskovskoy konservatorii [journal of moscow conservatory] 3 (2013): 120–35. [11] malick’s work by this time included not just the three already mentioned films but also the new world (2005), the tree of life (2011), to the wonder (2012), knight of cups (2015), and song to song (2017). malick released a ninth film, a hidden life, in 2019. [12] gianluca sergi, the dolby era: film sound in contemporary hollywood (manchester: manchester university press, 2004), 3. throughout his book sergi suggests, although not always convincingly, that “the dolby era … has its roots in the cultural and political movements of the 1960s” (3). he makes his strongest case, arguing for a linkage between “changes in cinema architecture” and “the rise of a ‘new’ audience” for film, in his final chapter (“the politics of sound”). [13] paraphrasing work by jay beck, mark kerins reports that “less than three years after star wars premiered, the dolby stereo format had already been used on 85 feature films, and decoding equipment had been installed in over 1,200 theaters.” mark kerins, beyond dolby (stereo): cinema in the digital sound age (bloomington: indiana university press, 2011), 32. the figures come from jay beck, “a quiet revolution: changes in american film sound practices, 1967–1979” (phd diss., university of iowa, 2003), 171. [14] charles schreger, “the second coming of sound,” film comment, september/october 1978, 36. [15] hudson miller, quoted in kerins, beyond dolby (stereo), 134. the comment from sound editor hudson comes from an interview that kerins conducted on 20 july 2004. [16] paul grainge, “selling spectacular sound: dolby and the unheard history of technical trademarks,” in lowering the boom: critical studies in film sound, ed. jay beck and tony grajeda (urbana: university of illinois press, 2008), 252–53. [17] ioan allen, quoted in sergi, the dolby era, 102. as a sound engineer, allen worked closely with ray dolby on the development of the “surround system”; throughout the 1970s he liaised significantly between the dolby company and various film studios. [18] gianluca sergi, “the dolby era: sound in hollywood cinema 1970–1995” (phd diss., sheffield hallam university, 2002), 125. [19] william whittington, sound design & science fiction (austin: university of texas press, 2007), 108. emphasis added. [20] michel chion, “quiet revolution … and rigid stagnation,” trans. ben brewster, october 58 (1991), 79. [21] the workings of fantasound are explained, in highly technical and richly illustrated detail, by its two principal designers—william e. garity and john n.a. hawkins—in “fantasound,” journal of the society of motion picture engineers 37, no. 8 (1941): 127–46. reader-friendly explanations of the system are offered by jesse klapholz in “fantasia: innovations in sound,” journal of the audio engineering society 39, no. 1/2 (1991): 66–70, and by kristina m. griffin in “fantasound: a retrospective of the groundbreaking sound system of disney” (master’s thesis, university of colorado at denver, 2015). [22] fantasia opened on november 13, 1940, at new york’s broadway theatre—not a cinema but a playhouse—and played there for forty-nine weeks. its other venues, likewise playhouses whose relatively flexible schedules accommodated shutting down for at least a week so that disney technicians could properly install the sound equipment, were in los angeles, san francisco, pittsburgh, cleveland, boston, chicago, philadelphia, detroit, buffalo, minneapolis, baltimore, and washington, dc. [23] the cut and then restored segments had mostly to do with explanatory commentaries by music critic deems taylor, but they included as well fantasia’s original opening segment, which featured a visually “abstract” interpretation of bach’s toccata and fugue in d minor, bwv 565. [24] an article from 1941, contemporaneous with the walt disney studios’ fantasia, indeed uses in its title the adjective “stereo phonic” to describe what blumlein had been working on; see harvey fletcher, “the stereophonic sound-film system—general theory,” journal of the society of motion picture engineers 37, no. 10 (1941): 331–52. most of the many patents filed during the period of blumlein’s experiments with “binaural” sound, however, used the never popular adjective “stereosonic”; see, for example, the applications for the patents granted to lloyd espenschied (sound recording and reproducing, us patent us1661793a, filed july 8, 1920, and granted march 6, 1928), julius weinberger (sound reproduction, us1850701a, filed november 10, 1928, and granted march 22, 1932), john f. dreyer jr. (sound reproducing system, us1915926a, filed october 17, 1930, and granted june 27, 1933), george l. beers (system for producing stereosonic effects, us2098561a, filed february 9, 1934, and granted november 9, 1937), and robert h. dreisbach (system for sound reproducing apparatus, us2110358a, filed june 6, 1936, and granted march 8, 1938). for a detailed narrative account of blumlein’s work, see robert charles alexander, the inventor of stereo: the life and works of alan dower blumlein (oxford: focal press, 1999). [25] tom gunning notes that, once the film is underway, only in this episode does this is cinerama refrain from use of technicolor cinematography. “i imagine [that here] they wanted to direct the audience’s attention to the sound,” he writes; in this episode in particular, he suggests, “they wanted to drain the colour so you’d be more tuned to the sound.” tom gunning, “a slippery topic: colour as metaphor, intention or attraction?,” in disorderly order: colours in silent film, ed. daan hertogs and nico de klerk, (amsterdam: stichting nederlands filmmuseum, 1996), 47. [26] bosley crowther, “looking at cinerama: an awed and quizzical inspection of a new film projection system,” new york times, 5 october 1952, x1. [27] the first film to use so-called “3-d,” or “three-dimensional,” imagery was house of wax (1953), a horror film from warner bros. that also featured a soundtrack in four-track stereo; other films from 1953 that featured both 3-d imagery and one form or another of stereophonic sound were warner bros.’ the charge at feather river, universal’s it came from outer space and wings of the hawk; twentieth century-fox’s inferno; rko’s second chance and devil’s canyon; allied artists’the maze; scott-brown productions’ the stranger wore a gun; pine-thomas productions’ those redheads from seattle; sam katzman productions’ fort ti; and parkland pictures’ i, the jury. [28] the early (i.e., 1953–54) round of wide-screen stereophonic films included universal’s thunder bay (1953); columbia’s the 5,000 fingers of dr. t. (1953); paramount’s shane (1953) and the war of the worlds (1953); twentieth century-fox’s the robe (1953) and demetrius and the gladiators (1954); mgm’s julius caesar (1953), mogambo (1953), and brigadoon (1954); horizon pictures’ melba (1953); and transcona enterprises’ a star is born (1954). [29] employing not just stereophonic soundtracks but such new wide-screen formats as cinemascope, super panavision, todd-ao, and vistavision, the “blockbusters” of the period included cecil b. demille production company’s the ten commandments (1956); twentieth century-fox’s carousel (1956) and journey to the center of the earth (1959); michael todd company’s around the world in 80 days (1956); rodgers & hammerstein productions’ oklahoma! (1955) and south pacific (1958); mgm’s ben-hur (1959); centurion films’ the big fisherman (1959); bryna productions’ spartacus (1960); samuel bronston productions’ el cid (1961); and the mirisch corporation’s west side story (1961). [30] john belton, “glorious technicolor, breathtaking cinemascope, and stereophonic sound,” in hollywood in the age of television, ed. tino balio (boston: unwin hyman, 1990), 189. [31] released in november 1959, william wyler’s ben-hur featured six-channel stereophonic sound. [32] the term “haptic” (from the greek ἁπτικός, haptikós, meaning “tactile”) is relatively new to the vocabulary of film studies. it appears nowhere in all the five editions (2000–2018) of susan hayward’s cinema studies: the key concepts (london: routledge), but it is indeed listed, under “haptic visuality (embodied spectatorship)”, in the 2012 a dictionary of film studies, ed. annette kuhn and guy westwell (oxford: oxford university press). as defined in the dictionary, the word is meant not literally but only metaphorically; “haptic visuality,” write the entry’s authors, involves visual imagery whose “close engagement with surface detail and texture” gives viewers “a sense of physical touching or [of] being touched” (s.v.; emphasis added). for extended discussions of haptic film imagery in general, see, for example, laura u. marks, the skin of the film: intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses (durham, nc: duke university press, 2000) and jennifer m. barker, the tactile eye: touch and the cinematic experience (berkeley: university of california press, 2009). for a discussion of arguably haptic qualities in alfonso cuarón’s 2013 film gravity, see walker, “sonic space and echoes of the flesh.” [33] henry levin’s journey to the center of the earth, released in december 1959, featured a 4-track stereo soundtrack. [34] by the end of the decade, many film historians suggest, the novelty of cinerama had worn thin, yet “road-show” installations involving cinerama’s special audiovisual setup continued for years to come throughout the united states and in europe. various of the wide-screen stereo films mentioned in notes 28 and 29 had already by this time been exhibited at such “prestige” milwaukee venues as the riverside and the strand, but it was only on 28 july 1960 that this is cinerama itself debuted at the city’s palace cinema. for details on the showings at the palace not just of this is cinerama but of all its sequels, see michael coate, “remembering cinerama (part 33: milwaukee),” cinema treasures, blog, june 18, 2009. for extended commentary on the short-lived novelty of not just cinerama-esque sound but also of “3-d” imagery, see catherine clepper, “the rigged house: gimmickry, exhibition, and embodied spectatorship in mid-century american movie-going” (phd diss., northwestern university, 2016). [35] for commentary on how throughout the 1950s the idea of at-home stereo was marketed to a decidedly male demographic that possibly included my father, see keir keightley, “‘turn it down!’ she shrieked: gender, domestic space, and high-fidelity, 1948–59,” popular music 15, no. 2 (1996): 149–77. [36] featuring the minneapolis symphony orchestra under the direction of antal dorati, along with cannons from the united states military academy at west point and the carillon at new york city’s riverside church, the tchaikovsky album (mercury living presence sr90054, 1958) proved to be the decade’s best-selling classical lp. for an account of the album’s legacy, see john schauer, “how hi-fi popularized tchaikovsky’s ‘1812’ overture (with cannons),” ravinia backstage blog, 11 july 2017. [37] the demonstration disc that in 1960 my father brought home was audio fidelity’s 1959 demonstration & sound effects (afsd 5890). numerous other record labels, and equipment manufacturers, at around the same time released demonstration discs of their own, many of which are readily available on youtube; see, for example, rca’s sounds in space: a stereophonic sound demonstration record (sp-33-13, 1958), london’s a journey into stereo sound (ps 100, 1958), bel canto’s stereophonic demonstration record (sr 1000, 1958), packard bell’s space age stereo (pb 1, 1962), and admiral’s stereophonic demonstration record (prs-218, 1964). along with musical examples, these demonstration discs included a wide array of “sound effects”; to the best of my knowledge, however, only the audio fidelity disc featured the back-and-forth ping-pong clicks that in my memory remain so permanently fixed. [38] the quoted words are spoken by announcer howard viken on the admiral disc mentioned in the previous footnote. [39] chion, audio-vision, 107. [40] john belton, “1950s magnetic sound: the frozen revolution,” in sound theory, sound practice, ed. rick altman (new york: routledge, 1992), 158. in chapter 9 (“spectator and screen”) of his widescreen cinema (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1992), belton deals at length with the issue of the “perception of stereo as artifice” (207) and its effect on filmmaking in the 1960s. [41] a variation on this generalization applies even to the recorded sounds of documentary films and of television newscasts, the episodes of which typically are presented for public consumption only after several “takes” have been made, and often the decisions as to which “take” to use has very much to do with the recorded sounds’ communicability. for commentary on sounds in news footage and documentaries, see, for example, richard j. schaefer, “editing strategies in television news documentaries,” journal of communication 47, no. 4 (1997): 69–88; b. william silcock, “every edit tells a story—sound and the visual frame: a comparative analysis of videotape editor routines in global newsrooms,” visual communication quarterly 14, no. 1 (2007): 3–15; and karen collins, “calls of the wild? ‘fake’ sound effects and cinematic realism in bbc david attenborough nature documentaries,” the soundtrack 10, no. 1 (2017): 59–77. [42] there do exist commercial recordings of music that use the so-called sacd (super audio cd) format, and in 2005 the national academy of recording arts and science started to include in its annual grammy awards a prize for “best surround sound album.” but these recordings (available on such labels as audite, chandos, coro, mode, and telarc) are still few in number, likely because, as justin colletti notes, “consumers are slow to adopt systems that require a [special] setup and are hampered by competing delivery standards.” “music in 5.1 dimensions: how the best surround mixers approach the soundstage,” sonicscoop, january 21, 2014. [43] the words are spoken by the british actor geoffrey sumner near the end of the london label’s a journey into stereo sound disc that is mentioned in note 37. sss_3.indb articles sound stage screen, vol. 2, issue 1 (spring 2022), pp. 5–29, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2022 joão pedro cachopo. doi: 10.54103/sss18310. callas and the hologram: a live concert with a dead diva* joão pedro cachopo writing about callas in concert during the covid-19 pandemic brings with it a strange feeling. premiered in 2018, the show employs holographic digital and laser technology to bring the legendary diva back to the stage almost 50 years after her death. it is a technically and artistically savvy spectacle that reflects the spirit of the times with a tinge of nostalgia. at the same time, as so many other live shows, especially those that are meant to go on tour, callas in concert was severely impacted by the pandemic and its restrictions. lockdowns, quarantines, and curfews, leading to a wave of cancelations, brought the project’s career to a standstill. due to the phantom-like apparition of callas, the show itself—which i had the opportunity to attend in barcelona on november 7, 2019—is already somewhat uncanny. but the present circumstances provide an additional layer of strangeness to my memory of it. the experience feels distant, but also—thanks to the technological complexity of the concert—strangely familiar. to recognize the intersection of these two layers of unease is crucial for understanding the purpose of this article. in fact, while examining this recent instance of the callas myth, my aim is to understand what it tells us about the present situation of opera, in a moment when it becomes apparent that the pandemic has not only accelerated but also revealed changes that were already underway over the past two decades.1 * i am grateful to the two anonymous readers who provided critical observations and detailed suggestions. this work is funded by national funds through the fct – fundação para a ciência e a tecnologia, i.p., under the norma transitória – dl 57/2016/cp1453/ct0059. 1 for a philosophical reflection on how the pandemic—having accelerated the digital revolution and brought awareness to its ethical, social, and political consequences—transformed not only the way we imagine the arts, especially the performing arts, but also our experiences of love, travel, and study, see my recent book the digital pandemic: imagination in times of isolation (london: bloomsbury, 2022). callas and the hologram 6 sound stage screen 2022/1 i decided to focus on this show for still another reason. maria callas, it should not be forgotten, is not only opera’s prototypical diva, but also a dead singer whose cult has outlived her and, in some ways, even intensified in recent years. for this reason, callas in concert—a show in which the artist resurrects from the spirit of technology, as it were—provides an invaluable opportunity to examine how closely the interplay of opera and new media has evolved against the backdrop of latent anxieties about the alleged death of opera. it is this mixture of technological and artistic innovation, on the one hand, and recurrent concerns about opera’s survival in a media-saturated culture, on the other hand, that i try to disentangle in this article. 1. resurrecting the diva callas in concert was launched by base hologram in 2018.2 a branch of base entertainment, the new live entertainment company aims to introduce “a revolutionary new form of live entertainment artistry that fuses extraordinary theatrical stagecraft with innovative digital and laser technology to bring true music legends back to the global stage in a state-of-theart hologram infused theatrical experience.”3 four shows have been presented so far: in dreams: roy orbison in concert (2018), callas in concert (2018), roy orbison & buddy holly: the rock ‘n’ roll dream tour (2019), and an evening with whitney [houston] (2020). in 2019, the company was also working on a hologram of amy winehouse, but the show did not see the light of day.4 2 see “maria callas: callas in concert,” productions, base hologram, accessed february 10, 2022, https://basehologram.com/productions/maria-callas. 3 “base entertainment announces new cutting edge live entertainment company: base hologram,” news, base hologram, posted january 11, 2018, https://basehologram. com/news/base-entertainment-announces-new-cutting-edge-live-entertainment-company-base-hologram. 4 it could be questioned whether it is accurate to say that base hologram features a hologram of maria callas. the doubt is plausible not the least because, as i will explain below, the holographic apparition of the diva is based on the recording of an actress representing the soprano, rather than on the recording of any of callas’s performances. that having been said, for the purposes of this article, i’m less interested in discussing the definition of holography than in examining the phenomenology of the show—a show in which a 3d image of maria callas, synchronized with live and recorded music, appears and behaves on stage as a live performing artist. 7cachopo sound stage screen 2022/1 one thing is certain, maria callas is not alone in providing the inspiration for these multimedia adventures where the so-called great divide between high art and popular culture seems to have very little relevance. in fact, it is significant that almost four decades after the heyday of the postmodern debate, these holographic shows have been equally successful regardless of whether the performer being emulated is a pop singer or an operatic soprano. this gives us a hint as to what the fans of whitney houston and maria callas might have in common—i.e., not only a fascination with the unique voices and charismatic presence of the two singers, but also a penchant to fall for the thrill of attending a live concert with a dead singer. apparently, the blurring of the divide between high art and popular culture, which andreas huyssen celebrated in the 1980s, did not immediately entail the undermining of the ideological assumptions—namely those associated with the values of uniqueness, charisma, and authenticity—on which the edifice of high art stood.5 on the contrary such values seem to persist in the imagination of audiences and practitioners, albeit in updated or disguised forms. similarly to other base hologram projects, callas in concert proposes a two-in-one experience in which “liveness” and “mediatization” are indelibly intertwined. their relation, as philip auslander convincingly explains in seminal volume liveness, is never of opposition. the very notion of liveness emerged due to the need to distinguish between recorded and live performances on the radio.6 this conceptual and historical co-dependence finds in callas in concert a paradigmatic instance. from their seats in theatres and auditoriums around the globe, the spectators-listeners are given the opportunity of seeing the hologram of maria callas and hearing her recorded voice, while a live orchestra is performing on stage. needless to say, neither the voice nor the body of the dead diva is entirely “real.” contrarily to the orchestra and the conductor, the singer is not there, either in space or in time, despite the fact that callas in concert is a live show. yet in their posthumous appearances, the diva’s voice and body are “unreal” in different ways. this distinction is not irrelevant and drawing attention to it allows me to better explain how the show was put together.7 5 andreas huyssen, after the great divide: modernism, mass culture, postmodernism (bloomington: indiana university press, 1986). 6 philip auslander, liveness: performance in a mediatized culture (new york: routledge, 1999), 59. 7 here i use the terms “real” and “unreal” with the sole purpose of explaining how the show is constructed. on a more fundamental level, these elements—live performers, video callas and the hologram 8 sound stage screen 2022/1 compared to callas’s reproduced voice, her projected figure is “unreal” to the second degree: the movements of the hologram, though inspired by the soprano’s bodily postures and gestures, are not hers. that is to say, the hologram is not a reproduction of any of callas’s performances, but a reproduction of someone else reenacting her body language on stage. the company hired stephen wadsworth from the juilliard school, who worked closely with an actress so that she would move and behave like maria callas. “we worked on callas’ gestural language,” he recalls, “how she held herself, her physical life, down to how and when her fingers moved, and her symbiotic relationship with her gown.” the challenge, however, went beyond simply mimicking her gestures: “she [the actress] is three people up there,” the director adds, “the private callas; callas the public figure; and callas as the character she is embodying in any given aria.”8 the rehearsal process took twelve weeks, after which the double’s performance was recorded. it was this recording that a team of experts manipulated using new digital and laser imaging, and computer-generated imagery, so that the hologram would resemble callas in terms of physical appearance as well (figure 1). when it comes to the sonic part of the show, the creative process took a different path. we are actually listening to callas’s voice: that is to say, to remastered recordings of her performances. in fact, a partnership was established between warner classics—the company that owns the rights to maria callas’s recorded legacy—and base hologram, thus allowing the show to be developed. technology was crucial at this stage as well: the sound of the voice was carefully isolated from the sound of the orchestra, so that the original recordings of callas’s voice, dating from the 1950s and 1960s, could be paired with the sound of live performing orchestras today. in each performance, it is the job of the conductor to ensure that no temporal mismatch occurs.9 projections, or holographic images—are all, as components of a live performance, absolutely real and equally significant. 8 stephen wadsworth quoted in david salazar, “bringing maria callas back to life,” opera wire, june 16, 2018, https://operawire.com/bringing-maria-callas-back-to-life-the-teambehind-callas-in-concert-on-creating-a-hologram-of-la-divina/. 9 for a preview of the show, see “callas in concert: the hologram tour,” video trailer, uploaded on may 27, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zovzgoa_84. 9cachopo sound stage screen 2022/1 2. posthumous collaborations this is not the first time that a deceased callas “performs” with living artists. angela gheorghiu’s 2011 studio album homage to maria callas gave online access to a video in which the two singers interpret the “habanera” from bizet’s carmen in a duet.10 in “the limits of operatic deadness,” carlo cenciarelli rightly emphasizes that the dynamic of this “intermundane collaboration,” following jason stanyek and benjamin piekut, is less audacious than the announcement of a groundbreaking artistic project would suggest.11 “the habanera duet,” he claims, “shows a cautious approach to the boundaries that separate the dead from the living. and it shows that, when 10 “angela gheorghiu & maria callas – habanera,” music video, uploaded on november 20, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeh-u8dqzmm. 11 carlo cenciarelli, “the limits of operatic deadness: bizet, ‘habanera’ (carmen), carmen, act i,” cambridge opera journal 28, vol. 2 (2016): 221–26; the reference is to jason stanyek and benjamin piekut, “deadness: technologies of the intermundane,” tdr: the drama review 54, no. 1 (2010): 14–38. fig. 1 the hologram of maria callas next to a live performing orchestra. (© evan agostini/base hologram) callas and the hologram 10 sound stage screen 2022/1 it comes to opera, such boundaries are heavily over-determined. … they protect the aesthetic identity of the popular aria, the memory of the immortal diva and the truth of the photographic image.”12 an apparently anodyne detail about the video confirms this diagnosis, while also serving as a touchstone to compare this intermundane collaboration with the holographic concert: the use of color versus black-and-white footage. freedom to travel in time is not equally distributed in the habanera duet; callas stays in the past, or at least her image does, whereas gheorghiu occasionally joins callas on the evening of her 4 november 1962 concert at covent garden.13 in other words, whereas their voices mingle in the performance of the original “solo” aria—which only the fact of being sung by two voices, be it in sequence or in unison, allows us to distinguish it from a conventional rendering—the images of their bodies remain technically and stylistically distinct. most of the time, we see gheorghiu inside a pentagonal studio surrounded by screens projecting videos of callas. at a certain point, however, we also see the two singers side by side, as if gheorghiu had travelled to the black and white past in which callas remains stuck (figure 2). this marks a fundamental difference between the time-travelling video and the holographic show, since the purpose of the latter is first and foremost to bring callas’s auratic presence to the present. but there is a second, perhaps even more important, difference between the two projects: callas in concert happens live, whereas the duet of gheorghiu and callas is a video recording. as a live performance, what is unique about callas in concert is the fact that the live-recorded matrix pervades both the audio and visual dimensions of the spectacle. the situation is not as simple as when the image is live and the sound is recorded (in shows, for instance, where the singer is lip-syncing) or, conversely, when the image is recorded and the sound is live (when an orchestra accompanies a silent film or, to give a more concrete example, in philip glass’s 1994 opera la belle et la bête, whose singularity consists in the fact that the instrumental 12 cenciarelli, “the limits of operatic deadness,” 225. cenciarelli’s reflection culminates in the following observation: “the habanera duet can be seen as a representation of what is at stake in the debate about opera and digital culture: not so much the survival of the operatic canon, its canonical performances and canonised performers, but rather the role that media will play in their afterlife” (225). 13 although most of the footage used in the video is taken from this concert, the sound recording (of callas’s voice, not of the orchestra) originates in a studio performance with the orchestre national de la radiodiffusion française, made for emi between march 28, and april 5, 1961. 11cachopo sound stage screen 2022/1 and vocal parts were composed to match the pre-existing images of jean cocteau’s 1946 film). in callas in concert, both the auditory and the visual dimensions of the concert are partially recorded and partially live. true, this is also the case whenever a video is projected on stage during a performance. however, the three-dimensionality of the hologram, surrounded by flesh and blood musicians on stage, suggests physical presence in a way that no video does. while this fact illuminates the singularity and the appeal of callas in concert, it also complicates its description. more than any other mediatized performance, holographic shows rely on fiction. to understand the stakes of such fiction is crucial to interpret callas in concert. 3. back to the stage callas in concert has been—or was, before the pandemic hit—a box-office success. after a preview concert on january 14, 2018, at the rose theater in new york, callas’s hologram went on tour in the united states, mexico, puerto rico, europe, and south america. people adhere to the concept of a live concert with the hologram of callas because of their fascination with, interest in, or curiosity about the diva. i would argue, however, that fig. 2 still frame from the “gheorghiu-callas ‘habanera’ duet” video (emi classics music video. © 2011 emi records ltd. all rights reserved). callas and the hologram 12 sound stage screen 2022/1 the reasons behind the popularity of the show are more complex than they seem at first glance. is the opportunity of seeing and hearing “la divina” the only and main trigger? i think the answer to this question is twofold. on the one hand: yes, of course; people go to the show because they want to experience the art of callas with their own eyes and ears. on the other hand: yes, but not quite. for one simple reason: the possibility of seeing and hearing maria callas is not new. recordings of her voice have been widely disseminated for decades. they have been remastered and re-remastered several times.14 photos and videos of callas are not hard to find either. they are everywhere online. google, for instance, has nearly fifteen million entries on her name. in short, and despite the fact that video recordings of callas’s live performances are surprisingly scarce, opportunities to see and hear callas on stage, backstage, performing, rehearsing, being interviewed, walking her dog in paris, sunbathing on onassis’s yacht, starring as medea in pasolini’s film, and so on, are not exactly rare. what in any case is new, what this first-of-its-kind operatic show adds to all these instances of postmortem audio-visibility, is a “fiction of liveness” that none of the others possess. although the artist is not physically present, the conductor interacts with the holographic double of callas in front of the audience as if she was “really” there (figure 3). the spectators are also invited to suspend their disbelief. indeed, most of them applaud at the end as if the singer—and not just the orchestra and the conductor—had performed live. in short, the whole point of the show is to bring callas back: not to life, but rather to the stage—to resurrect callas as a live performer. callas in concert provides—and wants to be seen and heard as providing—a “drastic” experience. in fact, although only the orchestra and the conductor are physically present and performing live, the interaction between them and the pre-recorded, projected hologram happens hic et nunc. as always in a live performance, things can go wrong: the conductor might stumble; violin strings might snap; somebody in the audience might start singing; the diva’s disembodied voice and image, if a power cut occurred, would vanish immediately, while the orchestral music would continue for at least a few seconds. although the concept of drastic, as carolyn abbate formulated it in “music—drastic or gnostic,” refers first and foremost to 14 on callas’s recordings, see giorgio biancorosso, “traccia, memoria e riscrittura. le registrazioni,” in luca aversano and jacopo pellegrini (eds), mille e una callas. voci e studi, macerata: quodlibet, 2016, 293-306. 13cachopo sound stage screen 2022/1 physical presence and bodily engagement, the facts of technological mediation do not as such contradict it. as long as the thrill of unpredictability and the charm of ephemerality are in place, the drastic experience might well escape the claws of gnostic voracity.15 in sum, and to answer the question i raised above, the charm of authenticity that is still perceived as a sine qua non component of a live performance must to be taken into account in understanding why people adhere to the show. it is because callas in concert responds to a double fascination—with maria callas, certainly, but then also, not less important, with liveness and all the characteristics it entails—that the show has also been so popular. i will now consider these two fascinations in turn—with callas, considering the actuality and the genealogy of her cult, and with liveness— before i draw a few broader conclusions. 15 for a challenging reflection on abbate’s theory of the “drastic,” see martin scherzinger, “event or ephemeron? music’s sound, performance, and media (a critical reflection on the thought of carolyn abbate),” sound stage screen 1, no. 1 (2021): 145–92. fig. 3 the hologram of maria callas gesturing at the conductor and vice-versa. (©evan agostini/base hologram) callas and the hologram 14 sound stage screen 2022/1 4. the callas cult today callas in concert is not an isolated phenomenon. in fact, the admiration for the diva seems to be once again (or perhaps it has never ceased to be) in the air. the hologram show appeared in 2018 and was only possible, as i mentioned before, thanks to a partnership with warner classics. the label had recently launched two lavish box sets of callas live and studio recordings.16 around the same time, french filmmaker tom volf, a self-proclaimed newcomer to the cult of callas, had already dedicated four years of his life (which, he claims, was transformed by the encounter with callas) to gathering unique archival sources, including testimonies and audiovisual materials, many of which were still unpublished. his efforts eventually culminated in “maria by callas,” a multi-object project including one documentary film, one exhibition, and three books.17 what is unique about this enterprise—or so a well-devised marketing strategy wants us to believe—is that for the first time it gives voice to callas.18 needless to say, this is a well-worn—albeit still commercially-effective—cliché. at the same time, and despite the rhetoric of nostalgia and authenticity in which the project indulges, the fact that the documentary draws exclusively on words said or written by callas does produce some interesting results. acknowledging such merit is not meant to forget that no documentary is transparent. although callas’s words provide a filter through which volf ’s reading is conveyed, the film is the result of the filmmaker’s own sensibility, thoughts, and decisions (from the choice of materials to the narrative thread, up to the editing process). his film will always be a “maria by callas by tom volf.”19 16 maria callas remastered – the complete studio recordings (1949–1969), warner classics, 0825646339914, 2014, box set (69 cds, 1 cd-rom); maria callas live – remastered recordings 1949–1964, warner classics, 190295844707, 2017, box set (42 cds, 3 bds). 17 maria by callas, documentary directed by tom volf (elephant doc, petit dragon, and unbeldi co-production, 2017); maria by callas, exhibition created and curated by tom volf (la seine musicale, île seguin, boulogne-billancourt, france, september 16–december 14, 2017); tom volf, maria by callas: in her own words (new york: assouline, 2017); tom volf, callas confidential (paris: éditions de la martinière, 2017); maria callas, lettres & mémoires, ed. tom volf (paris: albin michel, 2019). 18 on the director’s personal website, a brief presentation of the documentary reads as follows: “tom volf ’s maria by callas is the first film to tell the life story of the legendary greek/american opera singer completely in her own words.” see “tom volf – director, producer, photographer,” accessed february 22, 2022, https://www.tomvolf.com. 19 for a brief analysis of maria by callas, see joão pedro cachopo, “the aura of opera 15cachopo sound stage screen 2022/1 to consider another recent example, marina abramović, after planning to consecrate a piece to callas for a long time, has ultimately put her ideas into practice. after leaving behind different plans—including collaborating with several contemporary filmmakers—her 7 deaths of maria callas, a performance-like opera, premiered on september 1, 2020, at the bayerische staatsoper.20 the opera should have taken on the stage in april 2020. however, due to the pandemic, these performances were postponed and a few adaptations—mainly regarding the distribution of the musicians in the theater—had to be made. the production, which was live-streamed on the company’s website on september 5, 2020, includes seven major scenes in which seven sopranos sing seven famous arias from seven well-known operas: verdi’s la traviata, puccini’s tosca, verdi’s otello, puccini’s madama butterfly, bizet’s carmen, donizetti’s lucia di lammermoor, and bellini’s norma. while each of these arias is performed live, a pre-recorded video by nabil elderkin is projected on the back of the stage. marina abramović stars in all of them, either alone or accompanied by william dafoe, to incarnate the seven deaths of the above-mentioned characters under the sign of consumption, jumping, strangulation, hara-kiri, knifing, madness, and burning. but there’s an eighth death at the end: the death of maria callas herself. in this epilogue, which fictionalizes the circumstances of the singer’s death in 1977 in her paris apartment, marina—this time on stage, where she had been lying in a bed since the beginning of the performance—embodies maria. it is also in this last scene that we have the chance to listen more to the music composed by marko nikodijević, who is also responsible for the composition of the prelude and the interludes between the scenes.21 among other points of interest, abramović’s project explores the sensual and imaginary transitions between what happens on stage and what happens on screen. this peculiarity also invites us to briefly compare callas reproduced: phantasies and traps in the age of the cinecast,” the opera quarterly 34, no. 4: 271–72. 20 see “7 deaths of maria callas,” video trailer, bayerische staatsoper, uploaded on september 1, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqmfd_kzffa. 21 for a “multivocal” examination of 7 deaths of maria callas, see “review colloquy: 7 deaths of maria callas, live stream from the bayerische staatsoper, munich, september 2020,” ed. nicholas stevens, the opera quarterly 36, no. 1-2 (2020): 74–98. see also jelena novak, “the curatorial turn and opera: on the singing deaths of maria callas. a conversation with marina abramović and marko nikodijević,” sound stage screen 1, no. 2. (2021): 195–209. callas and the hologram 16 sound stage screen 2022/1 in concert and 7 deaths of maria callas. both projects, unlike maria by callas, embrace fiction, yet while the former insists on the importance of liveness (for the price of giving up the corporeality of the performer), the latter seems to stake everything on presence (for the price of effacing both the voice and the image of callas). her voice is replaced by the voices of the singers. her demeanor is reinvented by the postures and gestures of abramović herself. this project, however, is not only a deeply personal homage to callas in which the images of marina and maria are brought together as if not only their faces but also their personae were akin to each other—it is also an artistic experiment that questions the hegemony of presence and liveness. it does so, perhaps unintentionally, insofar as it makes it impossible to assign greater importance to the marina on stage than to the marina on screen. since the same performer dominates the screen as much as the stage, the hierarchy between the two collapses (figure 4). in this sense, when it comes to the fiction of bringing the diva back to the stage, callas in concert is more literal. however ethereal and transparent, the hologram never ceases to appear as the real callas performing on an actual stage. fig. 4 7 deaths of maria callas (© charles duprat—onp) 17cachopo sound stage screen 2022/1 5. a deadly genealogy in addition to an effervescent context, callas in concert also benefits from a long and complex genealogy. the callas cult goes back to the years following the soprano’s death and persists, manifesting itself in both research-driven and fiction-based projects to this day. in cinema, for instance, films as diverse as tony palmer’s callas (1978), federico fellini’s e la nave va (and the ship sails on, 1983), and franco zeffirelli’s callas forever (2002) embody quite different visions, although an element of veneration seems nonetheless pervasive in all of them. i will not consider this genealogy in depth, let alone delve into the consideration of what seems to be its seminal episode: the cremation of callas’s body and the scattering of her ashes to the sea.22 instead, i propose two hypotheses that may shed some light on how the callas cult intersects with a broader debate on the contemporary fate of opera. the first concerns the connection between the historical and mythical dimensions of the callas cult, while the second suggests that this cult has known two peaks since the death of the singer. as marco beghelli claims, the importance of the singer and actress in the history of opera needs to be acknowledged beyond the myth. callas opened the path to and provided the model for a new operatic subjectivity. “by affinity or sheer instinct,” callas became “the vocal and dramatic instrument for the rebirth of the bel canto tradition.”23 however, according to beghelli, this is just the tip of the iceberg. not only did callas reconnect coloratura singing and dramatic truth—she also explored, with her “grainy,” “uneven,” and “ugly” voice, the ambivalence between female and male timbres as well as the transition between contralto and soprano registers. all this, and especially her capacity to reconcile “the personal need for reinterpretation and the faithful adherence to the composer’s intention” made of callas a model for the coming generations of singers.24 following beghelli, while also putting some pressure on his argument, it bears adding that it is impossible to completely excise myth from history when it comes to callas. the terms used by beghelli to capture the 22 for an exploration of this episode, in the context of an insightful reading of fellini’s e la nave va, see michal grover-friedlander, vocal apparitions: the attraction of cinema to opera (princeton: princeton university press, 2005), chap. 6 “fellini’s ashes,” 131–52. 23 marco beghelli, “maria callas and the achievement of an operatic vocal subjectivity,” in the female voice in the twentieth century: material, symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, ed. serena facci and michela garda (london: routledge, 2021), 46. 24 beghelli, “maria callas,” 44. callas and the hologram 18 sound stage screen 2022/1 singularity of callas are telling in this regard, namely when he claims that “callas proposed her own interpretation of coloratura as a completely individual outcome, having no living model from which to take her inspiration,” something she did “instinctively.”25 this formulation is curiously reminiscent of kant’s definition of genius. as “the talent … which gives the rule to art,” the genius has no model.26 it corresponds to an innate creative aptitude, which they exercise instinctively, being unaware of what they do. of course, when it comes to the performing arts, the notions of talent, genius, or creativity are as much a matter of creation/production as of recreation/reproduction. but, as long as the myth of the genius survives, the values of originality and singularity persist, despite the need to negotiate an alliance between the “genius of the composer” and the “genius of the performer.” the question, however, arises whether identifying the “historical modernity” and “everlasting relevance” of a performer with their capacity to put their subjectivity at the service of the “objectification of the score” is not itself another myth.27 this interrogation paves the way for my second hypothesis. in fact, looking at the previous decades without forgetting the inextricability between the mythical callas and historical callas, there seems to have been two golden ages in the callas cult: the 1980s and 2010s, that is to say, the two decades in which the subgenre of opera film, in the first case, and the cinecast phenomenon, in the second case, reached their peaks of popularity.28 i don’t think this is a coincidence. could the obsession with the diva’s death not be seen as a symptom of the broader preoccupation with the demise of the genre? this would explain why the cult of the diva reemerges each time the debate about the genre’s survival, and the media fuss around it, is on everybody’s lips. beyond these two hypotheses, one thing is certain: today, whenever the promoters, critics, spectators, fans, or detractors of callas in concert talk or write about it, the metaphor of “resurrection” consistently emerges. fur25 beghelli, 48. 26 immanuel kant, critique of judgment, § 46, trans. james creed meredith (oxford: oxford university press, 2007), 136. 27 beghelli, 57. 28 on the opera film debate, see marcia j. citron, opera on screen (new haven: yale university press, 2000); on the cinecast phenomenon, see james steichen, “the metropolitan opera goes public: peter gelb and the institutional dramaturgy of the met: live in hd,” music and the moving image 2, no. 2 (2009): 24–30 and “opera at the multiplex,” ed. christopher morris and joseph attard, special issue, the opera quarterly 34, no. 4 (2018). 19cachopo sound stage screen 2022/1 thermore, this metaphor seems to be all the more effective when it presupposes a symbiosis between the artist (callas) and the genre (opera). one says “diva,” yet one also means “opera,” and vice versa. “many are already resigned to watching old videos or listening to old recordings,” david salazar comments in the opera wire, “but there are some that have different ideas. in fact, their ideas involve bringing her back.”29 of all critics, anthony tommasini has been the most explicit in emphasizing how closely the admiration for the artist and the concern with the genre intertwine, while also acknowledging the uncanny mixture of attraction and repulsion triggered by the spectacle: it was amazing, yet also absurd; strangely captivating, yet also campy and ridiculous. and in a way, it made the most sense of any of the musical holograms produced so far. more than rock or hip-hop fans—and even more, you could say, than fans of instrumental classical music—opera lovers dwell in the past. we are known for our obsessive devotion to dead divas and old recordings; it can sometimes seem like an element of necrophilia, even, drives the most fanatical buffs.30 this association of opera to death, murder, and suicide is far from being an anodyne feature of the genre. in temple of the scapegoat, alexander kluge follows the threads of various stories of sacrifice punctuating the history of the genre. these include anecdotes, such as the death of baritone leonard warren, while passionately interpreting don carlo in verdi’s la forza del destino on the stage of the metropolitan opera house in 1960, which for kluge emblematizes “warren’s total commitment—his readiness to sacrifice his own life;”31 or an episode during the nazi occupation of paris, when the entire cast of a production of beethoven’s fidelio got trapped in underground rehearsal rooms of the palais garnier, where they kept working nonetheless. “busy with their rehearsals,” kluge comments, “these lost souls in the opera’s bowels were blind to the desperate nature of 29 salazar, “bringing maria callas back to life.” 30 anthony tommasini, “what a hologram of maria callas can teach us about opera,” new york times, january 15, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/arts/music/maria-callas-hologram-opera.html. 31 alexander kluge, temple of the scapegoat, trans. isabel fargo cole, donna stonecipher, and others (new york: new directions books, 2018), 4. callas and the hologram 20 sound stage screen 2022/1 their situation. their bread and water were as tightly rationed as in a spanish prison at the actual time the opera was set.”32 seen from the perspective of gender, the problematic nature of such “sacrifice mania” boils down to the following perplexity: why does the soprano have to die in the end? why always (or almost always) the soprano? why is the price of tragic enjoyment to be paid by the female protagonist? in opera, or the undoing of women, catherine clément explores this issue with insightful vehemence: opera concerns women. no, there is no feminist version; no, there is no liberation. quite the contrary: they suffer, they cry, they die. singing and wasting your breath can be the same thing. glowing with tears, their decolletés cut to the heart, they expose themselves to the gaze of those who come to take pleasure in their pretend agonies. not one of them escapes with her life, or very few of them do.33 clément’s book has been widely debated and contested. abbate, for instance, was unconvinced by clément’s focus on the libretto, and agreed with paul robinson in claiming that when it comes to pondering the fate of these operatic heroines, their vocal triumph cannot be downplayed, let alone ignored.34 there may be other ways of putting pressure on clément’s reading that do not rely on the dichotomy of music and text—the text itself, in which the undoing of women becomes explicit, is prone to multiple interpretations. in any case, from catherine clément to marina abramović—but also to christophe honoré, who directed a production of tosca for the 2019 aix-en-provence festival, focused on the figure of the diva—the entanglement of adulation and violence that impregnates opera’s attitude toward women, both in fiction and in reality, remains a most debated topic among scholars, critics, and artists, one on which callas in concert also takes a stand. as i mentioned before, stephen wadsworth’s curatorial work went beyond choreographing the actress. it also involved devising a script reflecting the story of maria callas. in this regard, it is significant—and a sign 32 kluge, temple of the scapegoat, 14. 33 catherine clément, opera, or the undoing of women, trans. betsy wing (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1988), 11. 34 carolyn abbate, unsung voices: opera and musical narrative in the nineteenth century (princeton: princeton university press, 1991), ix; paul robinson, “it’s not over until the soprano dies,” new york times, january 1, 1989. 21cachopo sound stage screen 2022/1 that callas in concert is not only a business-oriented, but also an artistic endeavor—that in some versions of the concert the program kicked off with “je veux vivre” (from charles gounod’s roméo et juliette) and wraps up with the monologue “suicidio!” (from amilcare ponchielli’s la gioconda), as if suggesting that, at least in her afterlife as a hologram, callas regains power over her destiny.35 she wants to live, and it is by expressing such a desire that her posthumous show begins. it will not end before she decides, in hopes perhaps of holding those who rejected and betrayed her to account, to commit suicide. would there be an alternative way to put an end to the show? this question remains in the air. 6. to applaud or not to applaud the “suicidio!” may well be the last piece announced in the program. but will it be the last aria performed? will the hologram of callas not sing an encore? how willing will she be to take the audience’s wishes into account in making such a decision? these questions lead us back to the topic of liveness. it may, however, come as disappointing news for many spectators that the holographic diva, albeit keen to sing encores, will not be able, regardless of the audience’s reactions and wishes, to improvise her decisions. after all, technology has its limits—limits that one may either lament (while looking forward to new developments) or commemorate (as a proof that the gimmick has its flaws). the question of whether the hologram of callas will play an encore or not leads me to the consideration of a live in hd broadcast of donizetti’s la fille du régiment in 2019. in her introductory remarks, soprano nadine sierra announced that for the first time in the history of the met: live in hd series an encore during the performance might indeed happen. she had in mind javier camarena’s delivery of “ah! mes amis,” which in previous evenings had triggered the applause of the audience to the point of encouraging the tenor to resume the aria from the beginning. her prediction turned out to be exact and camarena did sing the number twice.36 35 this was the case for the performance of september 7, 2019, at the lyric opera of chicago. see maria callas in concert, program notes, september 7, 2019, lyric opera house, chicago, https://www.lyricopera.org/learn-engage/audience-programs/opera-program-books/ maria-callas-in-concert-program/. 36 see the metropolitan opera, “on opening night of the 2019 revival of donizetti’s la fille du régiment, tenor javier camarena made history by becoming one of only a handful callas and the hologram 22 sound stage screen 2022/1 i recall this episode because i think it bears interesting similarities with the pre-planned encores of callas in concert. of course, there are many differences between a hologram show and a live cinecast. however, in light of their analogous treatment of the encore, they both seem to lay bare the oscillation between predictability and unpredictability that characterizes a great number of live-mediatized performances today. i find this convergence symptomatic of how intricate and tense the marriage of operatic tradition and technological innovation has become in recent years. in fact, whether the drastic element is reconcilable with audiovisual remediation is a question to which both enthusiasts and detractors of technological innovation are far from being indifferent. now, i would like to turn the discussion to the audience’s perspective by considering a brief reportage after the paris concert at the salle pleyel in which several spectators share their impressions on the show. here are some statements worth considering: – it’s pretty powerful. you really feel like she’s there. i don’t know how it’s possible. – she’s there, she’s present. it’s an exceptional vibrato. – callas has always touched me, and here she didn’t. and that’s a shame. – she comes on like a diva, waiting for everyone to stand up and scream … and there’s some timid applause. people are wondering “is this art? is it serious? do i get on board or not?” and we’re captivated. it’s scary.37 to applaud, or not to applaud, that is (also) the question. the responses, as the previous pronouncements show, vary significantly between excitement and disappointment. however, there seems to be something in common between those who applaud and those who do not applaud, between those who are excited and those who are disappointed: the idea that a spectacle with the hologram of callas, much like a live concert featuring her, is meant to move the audience, to making it feel “touched.” in fact, what the gentleman who says that “you really feel like she’s there” and the young lady who corroborates “she’s there […], it’s an exceptional vibrato” share with the callas admirer who laments “callas has always touched me [m’a toujours of soloists to give an encore on the met stage,” facebook, june 29, 2020, https://fb.watch/ cg5p-wg5em/. 37 n. handel, a. mesange, r. moussaoui, “astonishment as hologram, live orchestra put callas back onstage,” afp news agency, post-show video reportage, salle pleyel, paris, uploaded on november 29, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ietskyg1_qo. 23cachopo sound stage screen 2022/1 fait vibrer], and here she didn’t” is the assumption that “making you vibrate” is the gauge on which a judgment about callas in concert should be made. they differ as to whether the show achieves the goal. yet they all agree about what the goal is: namely, nothing less than reproducing the sense of uniqueness, exceptionality, and authenticity associated with attending a live performance of maria callas. could we then conclude that reproducing the aura of maria callas as a live performer is what callas in concert is all about? as i suggested above, the fascination with the diva’s charismatic presence and the fascination with the charm of liveness are the two ingredients behind the success of callas in concert. however, since maria callas is not physically present on stage (nor is an actress embodying her, as is the case with abramović in 7 deaths of maria callas), it is not the aura” of the performer (the “originality” of their bodily presence) that is being reproduced. what is being reproduced, evoked, emulated is the aura of the performance (the “originality” of a live event happening hic et nunc).38 and yet, callas remains the raison d’ être of the show. in order to avoid this somewhat paradoxical formulation, we could perhaps say that what is being reproduced in callas in concert is the persona—not the aura—of maria callas as a live performer. in his recent book in concert: performing musical persona, philip auslander returns to the notion of “persona” to discuss the identity of musical performers.39 instead of thinking of the musical performer as a real person who may or may not—depending on whether they are portraying fictional entities (as singers sometimes do)—embody different personae, auslander argues that the identity of all and every performer consists of a persona. whenever they play or sing for an audience, performers, however modest 38 it is a complex question how the notion of aura, and the very dichotomy of original and copy, can be applied to the performing arts. in any case, if we address this question in light of benjamin’s theory of technological reproducibility, it becomes clear that, when it comes to the performing arts, the experience of the aura is associated not so much with the contact with an artwork as with the attendance of a performance: the performance—in its uniqueness and ephemerality—is the original that can be reproduced. meanwhile, as there is no performance without performers, the fact that performers and audiences are co-present in time and space is also part and parcel of that sense of originality. 39 philip auslander, in concert: performing musical persona (ann arbor: university of michigan press, 2021). see also “musical personae,” tdr/the drama review 50, no. 1 (2006): 100–119, “on the concept of persona in performance,” kunstlicht, vol. 36, no. 3 (2015): 63–64, and “‘musical personae’ revisited,” in investigating musical performance: theoretical models and intersections, ed. gianmario borio, giovanni giuriati, alessandro cecchi, and marco lutzu (london: routledge, 2020), 41–55. callas and the hologram 24 sound stage screen 2022/1 or self-effacing their playing or singing might be, are immediately performing their own identity (which is not the same as expressing themselves). in making this claim, auslander emphasizes that, no matter the genre, style, aesthetic, idiosyncrasy, character, race or gender, the identity of the performer, to the extent that it is socially and culturally constructed, is always already, to a certain extent, a fiction. while auslander does not intend to undervalue the importance of corporeality in musical performance, he nonetheless notes that he has in mind “all instances in which musicians play for an audience, including on recordings.”40 therefore, to the extent that it applies to live and recorded performances alike and stresses the fictional dimension of musical identity, the concept of “persona” also sheds light on how a show that turns around the admiration for an absent, long-dead artist can be so effective. moreover, since the hologram of maria callas portrays different characters in this concert, while at the same time never ceasing to behave as maria callas on stage, it seems adequate to claim that the “persona” of maria callas—notwithstanding her disembodied, technically reproducible substance (which is incompatible with the intimation of bodily presence that the notion of “aura” entails)—is indeed the core of callas in concert. 7. dreaming into the future the fiction of a live concert with a dead diva sets boundaries to the imagination that some critics, consciously or not, were eager to police. as i conclude, instead of looking at complaints about how the spectacle fails in its attempt to emulate a live concert with maria callas, i want to briefly consider reactions that go in the opposite direction. wondering about what the future could bring, critic richard fairman speculates: “at the speed technology is advancing, just imagine where this could lead. we could have operas starring imaginary casts from the past. how about verdi’s la traviata with callas and enrico caruso? or nellie melba and luciano pavarotti? neither pair was alive at the same time, but that will not matter any more.”41 in the same vein, but going even further, 40 auslander, in concert, 91 41 richard fairman, “the immortal (hologram) maria callas,” financial times, november 2, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/ee8c37c2-d872-11e8-ab8e-6be0dcf18713. 25cachopo sound stage screen 2022/1 media theorist tien-tien jong wrote (after attending the show at the lyric opera in chicago in september 2019): maybe it’s because our seats were way up in the balcony, and i spent most of the evening squinting down at the stage, but i kept thinking: why not use a skyscraper-sized maria callas, looming like a godzilla monster over the lyric orchestra? […] and why does the fantasy to recreate one of her concerts mean investing so much effort in constructing a strange deepfake of callas to realistically lip-sync along to old recordings […] instead of revolutionizing concert technology in a different way, like giving the audience really great headphones and a video headset to imitate attending an intimate chamber recital with callas instead?42 although a godzilla-sized hologram of callas might seem a bit over the top, i find these questions thought provoking. richard fairman’s “imaginary casts” underline that the hologram technology virtually effaces spatiotemporal boundaries, yet he does not question the assumption that everything should look like a regular live concert. that’s exactly what tien-tien jong’s more radical fantasy does in suggesting that, along with spatiotemporal coordinates, realistic conventions and audiovisual habits can also be challenged. following such a line of inquiry opens up a much more interesting discussion. when we look back at the tradition of opera films, we bump into works such as michael powell and emeric pressburger’s the tales of hofmann (1951) and hans-jürgen syberberg’s parsifal (1982), which not only defied lip-syncing protocols but also played with ontological boundaries, such as the human/machine and the male/female divides.43 a priori, there is no reason for a hologram spectacle to shy away from exploring experimental paths along similar lines. in practice, it would perhaps be naive to expect such a project to risk disappointing traditional operagoers even further. some of callas’s fans were quite taken aback already. be that as it may, it would be inaccurate to say that callas in concert fully complies with the principles of realism. the scene with the playing cards falling in slow motion is a noticeable exception and stands out as one of the most suggestive moments of the concert 42 tien-tien jong, “maybe it’s because our seats were way up in the balcony,” facebook, september 23, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/tientien.jong/posts/10217127834202181. 43 see citron, opera on screen, chap. 4 “cinema and the power of fantasy: powell and pressburger’s tales of hoffmann and syberberg’s parsifal,” 112–60. callas and the hologram 26 sound stage screen 2022/1 (figure 5).44 it contains a seed of fantasy that contrasts with the otherwise conventional tricks of the show. it also occurs at a significant moment—i.e., when the “card scene” from bizet’s carmen transitions into the “sleepwalking scene” of verdi’s macbeth. as soon as the cards, on which the future can be read, are thrown into the air, time is out of joint. the image slows down while the sound keeps its pace. it is as if we have entered a dream. fig. 5: the playing cards scene in callas in concert. (© evan agostini/base hologram) this dream is not only a reminder that the show boils down to an illusion (this is, in a sense, the brechtian moment of the show, in which the “fiction” of the hologram denounces itself in front of the audience). it is also an allegory of our time’s fears and desires. in fact, i think that this scene, considering the mix of perplexity and fascination it may cause, shows how strongly the fear of losing presence and liveness acts in the opera world. would the essence of opera, as a live performing art, not be damaged by these losses? the question may sound obsolete today, as we acknowledge that not only technology and opera are inseparable, but also that the notion 44 the scene is featured at the end of the official video trailer (see note 9). 27cachopo sound stage screen 2022/1 of liveness can only make sense in a highly mediatized culture. as karen henson argues, following auslander and jonathan sterne, “the very idea of opera’s essence being live and technologically unmediated singing is a product of technology, for one cannot have an ideal of unmediated singing unless one is in a profoundly technological environment.”45 however obsolete it may be, the question also expresses an anxiety that intensified during the pandemic as a defensive mechanism against the boom of online events. luckily, the resulting rhetoric that reserves the label of “operatic” to performances in which the physical copresence of singers, musicians, and audiences is preserved does not have the last word. in fact, the scene of the flying cards also suggests how radically new technologies can stimulate and enliven operatic imagination to the point of challenging the genre’s most ingrained musical and theatrical conventions. when we wake up from the dream, reality won’t be the same. 45 karen henson, “introduction: of modern operatic mythologies and technologies,” in technology and the diva: sopranos, opera, and media from romanticism to the digital age, ed. karen henson (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016), 22. callas and the hologram 28 sound stage screen 2022/1 works cited abbate, carolyn. “music – drastic or gnostic?” critical inquiry 30, no. 3 (2004): 505– 36. ———. unsung voices: opera and musical narrative in the nineteenth century. princeton: princeton university press, 1991. auslander, philip. in concert: performing musical persona. ann arbor: university of michigan press, 2021 ———. liveness: performance in a mediatized culture. london: routledge, 1999. ———. “musical personae.” tdr/the drama review 50, no. 1 (2006): 100–119. ———. “‘musical personae’ revisited.” in investigating musical performance: theoretical models and intersections, edited by gianmario borio, giovanni giuriati, alessandro cecchi, and marco lutzu, 41–55. london: routledge, 2020. ———. “on the concept of persona in performance.”  kunstlicht, vol. 36, no. 3 (2015): 63–64. aversano, luca, and jacopo pellegrini, eds. mille e una callas: voci e studi. macerata: quodlibet, 2016. beghelli, marco. “maria callas and the achievement of an operatic vocal subjectivity.” in the female voice in the twentieth century: material, symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, edited by serena facci and michela garda, 43–60. london: routledge, 2021. biancorosso, giorgio. “traccia, memoria e riscrittura. le registrazioni.” in aversano and pellegrini, mille e una callas, 293–306. cachopo, joão pedro. “the aura of opera reproduced: fantasies and traps in the age of the cinecast.” the opera quarterly 34, no. 4 (2018): 266–83. ———. the digital pandemic: imagination in times of isolation. london: bloomsbury, 2022. cenciarelli, carlo. “the limits of operatic deadness: bizet, ‘habanera’ (carmen), carmen, act i.” cambridge opera journal 28, no. 2 (2016): 221–26. citron, marcia j. opera on screen. new haven: yale university press, 2000. clément, catherine. opera, or the undoing of women. translated by betsy wing. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1988. grover-friedlander, michal. vocal apparitions: the attraction of cinema to opera. princeton: princeton university press, 2005. henson, karen, ed. technology and the diva: sopranos, opera, and media from romanticism to the digital age. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016. huyssen, andreas. after the great divide: modernism, mass culture, postmodernism. bloomington: indiana university press, 1986. kant, immanuel. critique of judgment. translated by james creed meredith. revised, edited, and introduced by nicholas walker. oxford: oxford university press, 2007. kluge, alexander. temple of the scapegoat: opera stories. translated by isabel fargo cole, donna stonecipher, and others. new york: new directions books, 2018. morris, christopher, and joseph attard, eds. “opera at the multiplex.” the opera quarterly 34, no. 4 (2018). novak, jelena. “the curatorial turn and opera: on the singing deaths of maria callas. a conversation with marina abramović 29cachopo sound stage screen 2022/1 and marko nikodijević.” sound stage screen 1, no. 2. (2021): 195–209. salazar, david. “bringing maria callas back to life.” opera wire, june 16, 2018. https:// operawire.com/bringing-maria-callas-backto-life-the-team-behind-callas-in-concerton-creating-a-hologram-of-la-divina/. scherzinger, martin. “event or ephemeron? music’s sound, performance, and media (a critical reflection on the thought of carolyn abbate).” sound stage screen 1, no. 1 (2021): 145–92. stanyek, jason, and benjamin piekut. “deadness: technologies of the intermundane.” tdr: the drama review 54, no. 1 (2010): 14–38. steichen, james. “the metropolitan opera goes public: peter gelb and the institutional dramaturgy of the met: live in hd.” music and the moving image 2, no. 2 (2009): 24–30. stevens, nicholas, ed. “review colloquy: 7 deaths of maria callas, live stream from the bayerische staatsoper, munich, september 2020.” the opera quarterly 36, no. 1-2 (2020): 74–98. abstract in this paper, i investigate callas in concert, a multimedia show that employs holographic digital and laser technology to bring the legendary diva back to the stage almost 50 years after her death. the aim of the spectacle, which bears witness to the persistence of the callas cult to the present day, is to allow audiences to see and listen to a digitally manipulated reproduction of the dead singer’s body and voice. at the same time, callas in concert is a live concert, where an orchestra performs in front of an audience. my interest lies in two interrelated issues. the first concerns the question as to whether the visual or the aural dimension takes the lead in the attempt to fictionally resurrect a dead singer as a live performer. the second revolves around the paradox inherent in the use of digital technologies of reproduction and remediation to emphasize the peerless uniqueness of maria callas’s artistry. in bringing together these two issues, my ultimate goal is to shed light on the artistic nuances and ideological assumptions that pervade the fascination with operatic liveness today. joão pedro cachopo teaches philosophy of music at the new university of lisbon, where he is a researcher at the centre for the study of the sociology and aesthetics of music. his interests include the relation of aesthetics, politics, and technology; the interplay between opera and film; and issues of performance, dramaturgy, and remediation. he is the author of the digital pandemic: imagination in times of isolation (bloomsbury, 2022), originally published as a torção dos sentidos: pandemia e remediação digital (documenta, 2020; elefante 2021), and the co-editor of rancière and music (edinburgh university press, 2020). an expanded version of his phd dissertation on theodor w. adorno’s aesthetics, verdade e enigma: ensaio sobre o pensamento estético de adorno, received the portuguese pen club award in the first work category in 2014. between 2017 and 2019, he was a marie skłodowska-curie fellow at the university of chicago. he also taught as a visiting professor at the pontifícia universidade católica do rio de janeiro (2016), the universidade estadual de campinas (2016) and the universidade de brasília (2022). he is currently working on two interrelated monographs titled “the profanation of opera” and “when film becomes opera”. × article contents introduction of boys, beasts, and postfeminist heroes from cock-rockers to crooners: the changing voice of masculinity “a whole new world” “i see the light” “lost in the woods” “heaven’s light” conclusion footnotes article “that’s how you know he’s your love”: the male singing voice and disney’s (re)interpretation of the male romantic lead maria behrendt sound stage screen, vol. 2, issue 2 (fall 2022), pp. 5–32, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2022 maria behrendt. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss17410. in the 2007 disney movie enchanted, soon-to-be princess giselle is expelled from the magical (and animated) kingdom of andalasia and separated from her betrothed prince edward who, just like her, is known to burst into song on romantic occasions, dazzling everyone with his operatic timbre. giselle eventually finds herself lost in new york city, where she meets divorce lawyer robert. she is puzzled by his matter-of-fact behavior towards his fiancée nancy and asks him (in song, of course): “how does she know you love her?” she suggests that he should sing to her, to reassure her of his affection, but he quickly states: “i really don’t sing.” naturally, in time, they fall in love and robert starts to sing to giselle, even if only with a quiet, breathy voice. enchanted presents edward as the classic disney prince and robert as his realistic counterpart, creating a clash of two different ways of expressing love: while edward is happy to share his feelings by singing about them, robert is bewildered by giselle’s suggestion that he address nancy in song. this is unsurprising when considering that many boys and young men seem to view singing as a gender-inadequate activity—and associate it with femininity or homosexuality. [1] enchanted thus suggests a juxtaposition of the “disney way” of expressing love, which is mostly done in song, and the “real world way,” where such behavior conflicts with traditional gender roles. the term “disney” refers here to the studio as a supra-agent, which, through its franchise, aesthetics, and marketing “set the standard for gendered representation in children’s motion picture production.”  [2] this juxtaposition is also visible in the overall habitus of edward and robert, who stand for two different models of masculinity. edward is a typical example of the “boy” as a cultural icon. according to ian biddle and freya jarman-ivens, the “boy” is “man enough to be desired and desiring, and yet boy enough to be unthreatening.”  [3] his androgyny, however (“the hairlessness, his ‘pretty’ face”  [4]) comes with the danger of disrupting the binaries of sex and gender, thus upsetting the structures of desire that are based on such binaries. [5] this is precisely what motivates robert’s more masculine habitus: by refusing to sing, robert makes sure not to appear too feminine. in the same way, his outer appearance shows no sign of androgyny: he appears more mature, is not as clean-shaven and—as an amazed giselle finds out—even has chest hair. my evaluation of the soundtracks to sixty feature-length disney animated movies (excluding pixar-productions and direct-to-dvd-sequels) reveals that the musical display of romantic masculinity is less coherent than the juxtaposition in enchanted suggests. the results do not align with the “disney way” of expressing love through song. instead, genuine love duets are relatively rare. i have only detected five examples: “once upon a dream” from sleeping beauty, “so this is love” from cinderella, “a whole new world” from aladdin, “if i never knew you” from pocahontas (featured only in the extended version), and “i see the light” from tangled. [6] solo love songs sung by the male protagonist are even rarer—i found only three titles: “one song” from snow white, “heaven’s light” from the hunchback of notre dame, and “lost in the woods” from frozen ii. [7] in many iconic romantic scenes, a third party performs the song, for example the teapot in beauty and the beast, sebastian the crab in the little mermaid, the italian cook in the lady and the tramp. this frequent use of the observer love song can be understood as a storytelling mode—the cinematic adaptation of the “once upon a time” in a fairy tale. ray’s love song to evangeline in the princess and the frog is a hybrid form: he sings about his own feelings and uses this song at the same time to comment on the emerging love between the leading couple tiana and naveen. despite enchanted claiming otherwise, the combination of masculinity and the musical expression of romantic feelings seems thus to pose a challenge, even in the disney universe. in this essay, i will conduct a comparative analysis of the love duets “a whole new world” from aladdin (1992) and “i see the light” from tangled (2010), as well as the solo love songs “lost in the woods” from frozen ii (2019) and “heaven’s light” from the hunchback of notre dame (1996). by choosing songs from the “renaissance era” as well as from the era of the “deconstructed diva” [8] it becomes possible to link the analyses to a historical timeline of vocal masculinities, in order to discuss if and how male singing contributed to and coincided with disney’s changing approach towards masculinity. to this date, this development has only been analyzed with regard to the princesses. liske and zelda potgieter observe that “over the span of the 76 years of her existence we see disney’s princess transformed from one who is always virtuous and never evil, and who has no other desire or purpose but to be a wife and mother, to one who knows her own strengths and weaknesses, her good side and her bad, and who no longer needs a man in order to feel fulfilled.”  [9] jennifer fleeger observes a similar development and links it to changing vocal styles: the first wave of princesses, the eponymous hand-drawn characters insnow white (1937), cinderella (1950), and sleeping beauty (1959) sing operatically. the second and largest group, which begins thirty years later with the computer-aided color of the little mermaid and then goes on to beauty and the beast (1991), aladdin (1992), pocahontas (1995), mulan (1998), and the princess and the frog (2009), performs as if they were on a broadway stage. the final category is characterized by 3d computer animation and pop vocalizations. in that vein, tangled (2010), its first entry, stars mandy moore. [10] building on these findings, i will focus on three central questions: (1) whether various models of romantic masculinity are mirrored in specific stylistic musical or vocal devices; (2) how these connections relate to the longstanding tradition of voice categories (stimmfach) in opera; and (3) in which ways the music, and especially the singing, comment on or even contradict the portrayed masculinity. of boys, beasts, and postfeminist heroes romantic love is a key topic in most disney films. according to a 2003 study of twenty-six disney films, falling in love is an almost inevitable and immediate consequence of a meeting between a man and a woman: [11] “in the fox and the hound, after big mama realized vixey and todd [sic] were about the same age, she got a big smile on her face and began to tell vixey about how handsome todd was. as soon as vixey and todd met, they fell in love.” [12] the indispensability of this narrative becomes evident in sequels to films such as the hunchback of notre dame: while quasimodo’s love for esmeralda is unrequited in the first film, he successfully wins the heart of the girl madellaine in the direct-to-video sequel the hunchback of notre dame ii. by giving in to this narrative, the sequel “both addresses and cheapens the previous movie’s notes of melancholy.” [13] according to amy m. davis, this concentration on romantic love is due to its low-risk potential. she argues that disney shies away from being too experimental and progressive in its depictions of gender due to the risk of losing audiences and thus losing money. [14] in contrast, the “tried and true plotlines found in traditional tales,” mostly based on romance, have proven to appeal to a mass audience. [15] of course, they pose the constant conflict of deciding how to navigate the space between the values transported in traditional folklore and contemporary ideas of relationships and gender. [16] for example, the aforementioned 2003 study found that many disney movies feature relationships with unequal divisions of power. [17] in the same way, laura béres claims that there is a tendency to romanticize men’s control over and abuse of women. [18] while the portrayal of the feminine is well researched, to some extent (e.g., by potgieter, fleeger) even with regard to changing vocal aesthetics, the vocal aesthetics of its male counterpart have widely been left undiscussed. despite a significant increase in gender-focused research, including studies analyzing the evolution and categorization of “disney men,” the singing voice and its role in the process of characterization remains undiscussed. amy davis’s monograph handsome heroes & vile villains: men in disney’s feature animation (2013), which twins with her earlier study on femininity good girls & wicked witches: women in disney’s feature animation (2007), [19] identifies three broad depictions of disney men: boys, heroes (both princes and non-aristocratic), and villains. [20] many of the following studies have made davis’s categorization their starting point, such as benjamin hine et al.’s article, which examines representations of gender in prince and princess characters in disney movies released between 2009 and 2016. [21] in an extensive statistical overview, they compare actions such as “fighting” and “crying” in order to shed light on the portrayal and evolution of gender-specific behavior. the category “shows emotion” is of particular interest in this paper, as it is a key aspect of the male romantic leads’ singing. while no disney prince has been caught crying so far, [22] hine detects that disney princes show more emotions in films from 2000 on. his statistics reveal that “shows emotion” accounted for almost 25% of the princes’ behavior between 2000 and 2010, which is striking given that stoicism is regarded as an important masculine characteristic. [23] he concludes that “the largely absent, passive princes of the 1930s and 1950s, and the muscular, brave heroes of the 1980s and 1990s appear to have been succeeded by a troop of sensitive, fearful, but dashing men in the 21st century, thus supporting the argument that the men of disney are complicated, to say the least.” [24] michael macaluso, who also observed this shift in the princes’ behavior, links it to the phenomenon of postfeminist masculinity. [25] he identifies a number of disney men “who [experience] some type of crisis or vulnerability, usually in relation to [their] understanding or performance of masculinity connected to work, family, partner, expectation, etc.” [26] to illustrate this finding, he offers two models of disney masculinity: the first is based on the categories established by davis, the second includes his newly formed category of postfeminist disney men. this category encompasses amongst others the romantic male leads flynn rider, kristoff, and prince naveen, who all struggle with finding their identity and place in a romantic relationship. table 1. model of disney masculinity (michael macaluso). table 2. revised model of disney masculinity (michael macaluso). the phenomenon of postfeminist masculinity has been widely discussed within media studies. diane negra and yvonne tasker understand postfeminist masculinity as a discourse that “celebrates women’s strength while lightly critiquing or gently ridiculing straight masculinity.”  [27] valerie palmer-mehta speaks of “mediocre masculinity.”  [28] in contrast, melissa zimdar understands postfeminist masculinity as a new version of hegemonic masculinity that includes both the alpha male and the new male, who stands for a kinder and gentler masculinity. [29] this is closely linked to the concept of “hybrid masculinity”, which tristan bridges and c. j. pascoe define as “the selective incorporation of elements of identity typically associated with various marginalized and subordinated masculinities and—at times—femininities into privileged men’s gender performances and identities.” [30] with this, new tropes of masculinity in the media are introduced. for example, negra and diane identify a regular use of “gay male identities,” especially in wedding films. [31] john alberti understands the “bromance” as a “splintering of the idea(l) of a unified construction of masculinity itself.” [32] with the example of animated films, berit åström demonstrates how the depiction of postfeminist fathers is strengthened at the expense of mothers, who “may be allowed, if they remain in the background, supporting their husbands. but it is best for everyone if they are removed, leaving father and son to create their own family.” [33] hine offers two contrasting explanations for the emergence of hybrid and postfeminist masculinity. on the one hand, the showing of emotions characteristic of these types of masculinity could serve as a means to discourage feminine behavior, as these traits are often portrayed in a negative way—the fearful and tentative naveen and the affectionate and sensitive kristoff being prominent examples. however, it is also possible that filmmakers want to act as a “catalyst for a dissection and re-evaluation of masculinity,”  [34] and, in doing so, to present their younger audience with alternative role models, offering “important models of feminine behavior for boys amongst a plethora of hyper-masculine messages present in child and adult media.” [35] from cock-rockers to crooners: the changing voice of masculinity previous non-disney related research shows that many of these questions attached to masculine emotionality, and especially romantic masculinity, are mirrored in discussions about male singing. simon frith and angela mcrobbie identify two main types of pop music which they label “cock rock” and “teenybop”: cock rock is “music making in which performance is an explicit, crude and often aggressive expression of male sexuality.” [36] in contrast, teenybop, which is mostly consumed by girls, transforms “male sexuality… into a spiritual yearning carrying only hints of sexual interaction. what is needed is not so much someone to screw as a sensitive and sympathetic soulmate, someone to support and nourish the incompetent male adolescent as he grows up.” [37] closely related to this is the genre “bubblegum music,” meaning pop music in a catchy and upbeat style. it was strongly marked by the teen idols of the 1970s, with figures like shaun cassidy and donny osmond, [38] developing into the boy band style of the 1990s, where harmonies, tenor voices, and outbursts of falsetto were frequently used to create a more juvenile male presence.[39] this categorization of linking music styles in general and singing styles in particular to masculinity is of course far more complex, and there are overlaps and contradictions. for example, ian biddle and freya jarman-ivens argue that in popular music, “vulnerability, multi-vocality, and falsetto are seen to be the stuff of ‘anti-masculine’ musics, situated in a dialogic relationship with the traditional ‘cock-rock’ canon and thereby exposing something of what we perceive to be ‘masculinity’ in musical expression.”  [40] in a similar way, georgina gregory observes that “boys are often reluctant to sing high notes when they approach their teen years.”  [41] however, there are at least two different varieties of voices belonging to the “cock-rock” genre, that do not exclude falsetto and vulnerability: the “power ballads” of the 1980s, with robert plant and freddie mercury’s heldentenor, and the bluesier, huskier sound of singers like paul rodgers. [42] another example for the complexity of this topic is the technique of crooning, the singing of “popular sentimental songs in a low, smooth voice, especially into a closelyheld microphone.”  [43] according to biddle und jarman-ivens, intimate and soft crooning performs “a gendered work very different from an imprecisely pitched, half-shouted voice that seems to come from a large space, such as is favored in various rock musics.”  [44] this style of singing has often been criticized for being too feminine; allison mccracken links this to historical and contemporary tendencies of effemiphobia.[45] at the same time, it seems to be powerfully attractive to many women, as mccracken demonstrates with singers such as justin bieber, for example, [46] and glee’s darren criss, who portrays a gay character and is “more than happy to be an erotic object for both sexes.”  [47] thus, “the pop crooner has been operating both in the commercial mainstream and on the fringes of gender normativity for decades and has been culturally stigmatized because of both associations.”  [48] of course, these questions are not exclusive to popular singing styles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but have a longstanding tradition dating back to the operatic stimmfach. the term stimmfach emerged in nineteenth-century germany when composers such as carl maria von weber aimed to transfer the role categories of traditional drama to opera. while role categories had been present in opera since its beginnings (e.g., “prima soprano” and “buffo” in 17th century opera), it was only in the nineteenth century that the description of voice types became more differentiated. [49] with the changing musical aesthetics and especially the growing orchestra, a need for heavier and more dramatic voices arose. this led to new categories such as the “tenore di forza” in contrast to the “tenore leggero.” [50] in the twentieth century, the german conductor and musicologist rudolf kloiber made the first systematic approach to define voice types based on traditional role categories stemming from traditional drama. hishandbuch der oper (1951) led to a normative understanding of the stimmfach, which is influential to this day. [51] in contrast to the overall term “voice type,” stimmfach refers specifically to the operatic tradition and its subcategories are much richer with semantic connotations. the fachsystem also plays a vital part in musicals. there, new categories like “pop soprano” or “broadway soprano”—and the attribution of voices to specific styles such as blues, gospel, and rock, or techniques such as belting—amend the traditional categories. [52] and, as will be demonstrated, it is also vital for voice casting in disney films, especially the princes from the early era—i.e., snow white’s, aurora’s, and cinderella’s love interests, who are classical tenors and sing with a classical operatic technique. as the aforementioned literature makes clear, the reception of the portrayal of masculinity in disney films is just as ambiguous and complicated as the portrayal itself. indeed, there seems to be a thin line between the exact amount of emotionality men tend to display: on the one hand, making men emotionally available; and on the other, overriding their masculinity. this balancing act is also crucial for the male protagonists of the love songs analyzed in this chapter: as my analyses will show, they each struggle with specific aspects of what is considered “masculine,” especially when it comes to negotiating this masculinity within the context of a romantic relationship. with aladdin from the 1992 movie of the same name, eugene from tangled (2010), and kristoff from frozen (2013, as well as its sequel frozen ii in 2019), we meet three characters who have a lot in common. all three stories feature couples with different social backgrounds, with the men being poor orphans and the women princesses. moreover, all three men are more experienced in the ways of the world than their respective princesses and they introduce the female characters to “real life.” aladdin and eugene sing a love duet with their princesses, making these duets a part of the very small number of genuine disney love duets. kristoff sings a solo love song, just like quasimodo, the protagonist from the hunchback of notre dame (1996). while kristoff, aladdin, and eugene are the male romantic leads in love stories with happy endings, quasimodo is less fortunate: the beautiful romani girl esmeralda only cares for him as a friend and falls instead for the dashing soldier phoebus. “a whole new world” in his revised model of disney masculinity, macaluso places aladdin between the categories “boy” and “hero/prince” and this categorization is visible in the production process: [53] in the oriental-chinese fairy tale aladin, which served as inspiration to the film, aladdin is a young boy from china. while the studio decided to reset the tale in arabia, they originally intended to keep aladdin as a 13-year-old boy. [54] after looking at the original sketches, which made aladdin look boyish (some filmmakers even noted a resemblance to michael j. fox), walt disney studios’ chairman jeffrey katzenberg began to worry that aladdin might not seem masculine enough. thus, he asked the animators to watch tom cruise movies as a reference point and redesign the character, [55] and it was ultimately decided that he needed to be older, more independent, and rougher—a “kind of indiana jones character.” [56] aladdin is thus a good example for the “boy” as a cultural icon: he is “man enough to be desired and desiring, and yet boy enough to be unthreatening.” [57] this negotiation of masculinity is also mirrored in aladdin’s voice acting, which is done by two different actors: 17-year-old scott weinger (speaking voice) and 19-year-old brad kane (singing voice). there are contradictory information on this casting process. in interviews, kane and weinger make it sound as if weinger had already been casted as speaking voice but had then experienced problems with the singing part. [58] hischak however states that originally kane was meant to do the speaking and singing voice, but at the last minute it was decided that weinger should do the speaking, who succeeded in making aladdin “young and appealing even as he was a bit of a playful ruffian.” [59] in any case, weinger’s speaking voice sounds somewhat rougher than kane’s, which corresponds to the producers’ wish to make aladdin less boyish. in the duet “a whole new world” (music by alan menken, lyrics by tim rice), aladdin, disguised as prince ali, invites jasmine onto his magic carpet and starts to sing: “i can show you the world | shining, shimmering, splendid.” throughout the song, aladdin underlines his ability to introduce jasmine to a “new world,” to “open [her] eyes” and to “take [her] wonder by wonder.” she confirms this by singing lines such as “a dazzling place i never knew,” and “now i’m in a whole new world with you.” in terms of the lyrics, aladdin thus asserts his masculinity by presenting himself as the more dominant, mature, and active party in the relationship. the music adds a different notion, however: aladdin’s boyish singing has the charm of an untrained voice. this becomes mostly noticeable in the lower register where his vocal cords do not always properly close and air leaks through, resulting in an altogether breathier voice with rather unbalanced registers (especially when singing “now when did you last let your heart decide?”) in addition, his pitch is not always fully accurate. this vocal roughness represents vulnerability and youth—a girl of the same age would probably have more control of her voice. this becomes especially audible when jasmine sings, voiced by 21-year-old lea salonga who moves elegantly through the registers and whose voice is equipped with a subtle and well-balanced vibrato. but there is more to the use of the lower register than just youth: when kane’s voice rises in pitch it becomes apparent that he is more at home in a slightly elevated tessitura, as the higher pitches are more resonant and colorful than the lower ones. his youthful voice and the higher register fit well into the dawning era of the boy bands of the 1990s, which the film just predates. moreover, all singing characters listed by macaluso as “hero/prince” (prince charming, prince philipp, hercules) or between the categories “boy” and “hero/prince” (aladdin, john smith, quasimodo) are tenors, which matches the tradition of romantic opera. [60] aladdin, despite having an untrained voice, thus fits vocally into the disney-prince tradition. he does, however, not yet trust in his inner prince and tries to conceal his insecurity by giving his voice a low, husky sexiness, in order to charm jasmine. especially in the beginning of the song, he acts like a lyrical tenor trying to play a “cavalier baritone”—a stimmfach, that is used to portray a gallant gentleman irresistible to women. prominent examples are don giovanni, who “has his way with every woman he sees” [61] or eugen onegin, who is responsible for tatjana’s romantic awakening. cavalier baritones often have an easy tenor top, as does aladdin, but also a recognizable baritone vocal color, which is what aladdin tries to obtain. it is noteworthy that the voice actors in the german and french version of the film—peter fessler and paolo domingo—face similar challenges, due to the overall vocal range of aladdin’s part in this song. this reveals that the vocal negotiation of masculinity in aladdin is not so much the result of an individual casting choice, but rather of a compositional decision by alan menken, whose choice of vocal range makes aladdin’s struggle with his romantic masculinity inevitable. halfway through the ballad, the balance of power shifts: when jasmine sings “now i’m in a whole new world with you,” aladdin repeats it, acknowledging for the first time that he is experiencing something new as well. jasmine then takes the musical lead by starting the second verse, with lea salonga singing even the highest notes with confidence and clarity (e.g., “i’m like a shooting star”). earlier in the song, the lovers had sung alternately, imitating and finishing each other’s verses. but in the final lines, they start to sing simultaneously (“let me share this whole new world with you”). as the song ends, jasmine realizes that aladdin is not a prince after all but the boy she met at the market earlier in the film. these developments shed light on the changing of aladdin’s masculinity in this romantic context: in the beginning, he presents himself as the more experienced and mature partner. at the same time, his uneasiness with the low register reveals the gap between self-understanding and actual abilities—he is still a boy, not yet a man, and most importantly not yet a prince. yet, when jasmine takes the lead, assuring him of her consent and accepting his boyishness and unrefined mannerisms, they start to act as equals, allowing jasmine to eventually recognize aladdin’s true self. aladdin’s vocals here already imply the eventual happy ending, as his voice clearly has potential: his voice comes across as that of an untrained tenor, a “diamond in the rough,” as the cave of wonders calls him at the beginning of the movie. given that most disney princes are tenors, his singing implies that it is indeed possible for him to win jasmine’s heart and to earn the status of a prince—which is precisely what happens next. “i see the light” while aladdin represents the shift between boyhood and manhood, tangled’s eugene is considerably more masculine. the character design of eugene came from a process called the “hot man meeting,” a one-time event held for tangled. the producers set up a meeting with all the studio’s female employees, and asked them what made a man good-looking regarding eye color, hair color and style, and body type—all in order to create eugene’s character design: all the ladies of the studio came into the “hot man meeting,” where we gathered pictures of their favorite handsome men [e.g., johnny depp, hugh jackman, brad pitt, david beckham, and gene kelly]—we collected pictures from the internet and from books and from women’s wallets. they were very specific about what they liked and what they didn’t like.”[62] thus, to quote the producers, they “created the ultimate man.” [63] it is noteworthy that several of these men are not only songor dance-men, but tend to have a vulnerable quality; while jackman and kelly appear more mature in a physical way than pitt, beckham and depp, they nevertheless strongly portray interiority and sensitivity. given the characters he was based on, it is therefore no surprise that macaluso categorizes eugene as a postfeminist hero, despite this physical hypermasculinity. the crisis, which defines the postfeminist hero, is here caused by his emerging love for rapunzel, which puts in question his former self-understanding and goals. by this, he differs from aladdin: aladdin falls in love with jasmine at first sight and bases all his actions on the aim of winning her. eugene first agrees to accompany rapunzel with the hope of winning back the tiara she took from him. it is only during their shared adventures that he falls in love with her. while the attraction between the two soon becomes clear, it is only in the duet “i see the light” (music by alan menken, again; lyrics by glenn slater) that they realize and express their feelings for each other. for the songs in tangled, alan menken took inspiration from 1960s folk rock, especially joni mitchell’s songs. [64] “i see the light” is much simpler and more folk-like than “a whole new world,” and prominently features the sound of an acoustic guitar adding to the folk-like tone. the first two verses are sung in the characters’ heads as an introspective comment on their respective situations. rapunzel, voiced by 26-year-old mandy moore, is singing about the overwhelming feeling of at last seeing the floating lanterns which are lit each year in memory of the lost princess. it is only in the last line that she makes the connection between these feelings and her love for eugene (“all at once everything is different | now that i see you”). but eugene, voiced by 30-year-old zachary levi, makes this connection much quicker. halfway through his first solo verse, he sings: “now she’s here, suddenly i know | if she’s here it’s crystal clear | i’m where i’m meant to go” and gently takes her hand. this action—taking her hand—makes rapunzel realize that eugene returns her affection. the beginning of the second chorus finds them finally singing together, and openly professing their love. while mandy moore’s broadway-like singing resembles jasmine’s style in “a whole new world,” zachary levi sings completely differently than brad kane; the song is vocally less demanding than “a whole new world” and voice actor zachary levi is able to sing comfortably within his range. in contrast to brad kane’s aladdin, levi’s eugene is more of a baritone, both in terms of the tessitura of the song as well as in terms of a warm, lush, and more “manly” color. combined with the overall sexualization and cockiness of the character, this places him near the operatic category of “cavalier baritone”. his voice is well-balanced with rich low notes (e.g., “shining in the star light”) and an effortless middle register (“never truly seeing”). he sings with a rather straight-toned, breathy voice and is almost crooning (“all those years living in a blur,” “all that time,” “and it’s warm and clear and bright”). with this, he takes on the typical qualities of the pop crooner, with his “alignment with the cultural feminine through his preference for romantic songs and commercial pop… his beauty and sensitivity, his emotional openness and transparency.” [65] however, in some moments, a slight vibration of the voice shines through (“it’s crystal clear,” his last “see you”). this vocal ability reveals that the use of breathy moments is a conscious choice to create an impression of vulnerability and emotionality, unlike with brad kane’s singing. the way romance develops throughout the song is thus profoundly different from “a whole new world”: aladdin takes action from the very beginning. he courts and eventually wins jasmine by singing to her and inviting her to fly—and sing—with him. while eugene eventually also takes action (by taking rapunzel’s hand), he never intended to court her and was actually caught by surprise by his feelings for her, making him much more passive and undetermined in his courtship. for the “boy” aladdin, romantic enthusiasm seems fitting, and he makes no secret of his infatuation. for eugene, in contrast, allowing himself to fall for rapunzel demands courage. for the boy aladdin, falling in love is a sign of growth and masculinity. for eugene, it is a crisis of vulnerability. in both duets, however, the male lead’s singing voice does somewhat contrast this confidence or, in eugene’s case, lack of confidence. aladdin, although being confident and active, sings with a boyish voice and almost oversteps his vocal limits. eugene’s crooning voice sounds much deeper and more mature; it is not only reminiscent of the “cavalier baritone,” but also corresponds to current popular aesthetics: in 2013, a british study found that women tend to find tender, deep, and breathy voices most attractive in men—all qualities that are inherent to “crooning.” while the deep pitch suggests strength and a large body size, the breathiness could be a way of neutralizing the aggressiveness associated with these features. [66] moreover, huskiness sometimes has a hormonal cause, and can be a cause of sexual desire. as mary talbot bluntly argues in her book language and gender, if a woman is aroused by a man’s breathy voice, “this just means she is turned on by the fact that she turns him on.” [67] thus, the vocal timbre serves as a counterbalance to the character’s overall coping with romance: the boyish timbre hinders the boy aladdin from appearing too masculine, whereas postfeminist eugene reasserts his masculinity through his mature and breathy voice. the same applies to chayanne, who voices eugene in the latin spanish version of the film. however, in the italian (massimiliano alto) and french (emmanuel dahl) version, this is less clear: while alto’s voice has breathy moments, his timbre is not as low as levi’s, and dahl’s singing sounds much more boyish than levi’s. thus, unlike with “a whole new world,” the negotiation of romantic masculinity is not so much integral to the composition, but rather to the respective singer’s interpretation. while levi’s eugene definitely does not sing like a traditional prince, he seems to have wonderful control of his vocal mechanism, contrasting his lack of emotional control whilst falling in love. thus, despite his postfeminist insecurities, eugene appears a more mature aladdin, with the same rough background but a much better command of his voice and body. “lost in the woods” as the analyses of the two duets have shown, romantic masculinity oscillates between dominance and vulnerability. the expressed feelings are consensual in the duets and the man is rewarded for taking the risk to navigate between these poles. this is different when the man sings a solo love song, as i will show through the example of frozen’s kristoff (who, like eugene, is a “postfeminist hero”) and the hunchback of notre dame’s quasimodo (who, like aladdin, is placed between “boy” and “hero/prince”). similar to aladdin and eugene, kristoff is an orphan, too, and stems from a different social background than his love interest, princess anna. and just like aladdin and eugene, he has more life experience than the princess, who seems much more innocent, almost childlike. in his outer appearance and overall behavior, he does however differ from aladdin and eugene—i.e., he is of the “loner” archetype, yet bashful and quirky at the same time. this becomes especially apparent in his friendship with the reindeer sven, with whom he shares food, sings duets, and talks—all while ventriloquizing the reindeer, which, unlike many other disney animal sidekicks, cannot talk. kristoff’s outer appearance—the bulkiness, the working-class vibe—responds to newly-arising masculine ideas such as the “lumbersexual.” this traditional masculinity is however paired with an emotional sensitivity which heike steinhoff understands as a sign of postfeminist masculinity: “like the beast representing the new man, kristoff is also kind, gentle, and caring. thus, kristoff’s portrayal aligns with contemporary hybrid ideals of heterosexual masculinity.” [68] the song “lost in the woods” (music and lyrics by kristen anderson-lopez & robert lopez) appears in the sequel frozen ii and marks an emotional turning point in kristoff’s relationship with princess anna: when anna, once again, seemingly puts her sister first and embarks on an adventurous quest with her, he starts to doubt her love and sings the power ballad “lost in the woods.” with this, kristoff is one of the very few male romantic leads in disney films who sings a genuine solo love song, and the only one who sings about the fear of losing love, rather than pining over a secret affection. this is even more remarkable when one considers that the producers had had difficulties in picturing kristoff as a singing character: in the first frozen movie, kristoff did not sing, apart from the short ditty “reindeer(s) are better than people.” instead, princess anna sang a love duet “love is an open door” with prince hans, who turned out to be the villain of the story. one reason for this lack of song was apparently kristoff’s gruff and solitary character, which did not make it very likely for him to break out in song. in an interview, voice actor jonathan groff stated: “i couldn’t personally imagine how they were going to get a mountain man to sing. the first one, okay, he’s got a lute, he’s singing a ditty with his reindeer, i buy that. … but how are they going to get kristoff to sing? i couldn’t even imagine it.” [69] groff here touches on the problem of singing as a gender-inadequate way of expression, which had already kept robert from singing in enchanted. besides the overall roughness of kristoff’s character, there is also a narrative reason for this lack of singing which has its roots in the first film. kristoff is presented as a counterpart to the false prince hans, who—unlike kristoff—looks and sounds like a disney prince, especially in his duet “love is an open door” with anna. denying kristoff a classical disney song underlines the juxtaposition of these two characters, who are also rivals in love. yet, before shooting the first frozen film, groff had already established himself as a successful musical theater actor, starring for example in the tv musical series glee. this led to many viewers being disappointed by kristoff’s lack of song—and demanded that he get a solo in the sequel. [70] to solve this dilemma, the composers robert lopez and kristen anderson-lopez drew inspiration from both karaoke and 1980s bands such as journey and queen: “there’s nothing better than a man feeling his feelings in a real way at a karaoke bar,” according to anderson-lopez herself. [71] groff states that he has “seen a lot of drunk dudes singing journey at karaoke. … and it’s ‘funny’?… there’s also a level of necessity for expression. and queen is a part of that. queen was so theatrical and big and when you do something that’s theatrical and big like that and it’s sung by a man, it gives boys the opportunity to really be theatrical and express themselves.” [72] lopez’s and groff’s statements imply that, in order to allow themselves to express their emotions, men need a catalyst, such as alcohol, or an explicitly dramatic or theatrical setting, allowing them to construct an ironic distance to their emotions. this is also visible in kristoff’s singing scene: in the beginning, it seems like he is only reprising the ditty from the first movie. he sings, unaccompanied, to sven: “reindeers are better than people | sven, why is love so hard?” suddenly, the light changes and sven answers: “you feel what you feel | and those feelings are real | come on, kristoff, let down your guard.” with a nod, sven invites kristoff onto an imaginary stage; a piano starts to play, distorted guitars join in, and kristoff begins to sing “lost in the woods.” interestingly, it is only after his best friend has assured him that his emotions are valid (and after the changing light and talking reindeer make clear that this is a dream-sequence, an introspective musical moment and not a public display of emotion) that kristoff starts singing the actual ballad (“again, you’re gone…”), thus letting out feelings he cannot express otherwise. the song is filled with visual and musical references to 1980s ballads: the solo piano, the background chorus, the singing into a pinecone, the hair flip, and the diva pose (“i probably could catch up with you tomorrow”) are all reminiscent of mid-1980s mtv music videos. the extreme close-up on the face resembles videos by journey, and the montage where kristoff sings with a visually multiplied sven (“wondering if you still care”) alludes to queen’s “bohemian rhapsody.” all these features create an almost ironic distance to kristoff’s showing of emotions. groff suspects that the “element of comedy might make the flood of kristoff’s emotions go down easier, especially with young boys.” [73] this aligns with konrad paul liessmann’s idea that it is possible to take the pleasures of kitsch with a grain of salt—one can keep an ironic distance to the conveyed message and at the same time indulge in the transported emotions. [74] thus, the cheesy visual references and the music both ridicule and enable kristoff’s postfeminist showing of emotion. while the music and the visual effects evoke comedy, the voice, however, does not, or at least not to the same degree: groff, in fact, does not only voice kristoff, but also sven, as well as the complete reindeer background chorus and a multiplied version of himself, resulting in 18 different vocal tracks. for this, he uses a variety of vocal timbres and colors, all of which correspond to different types of masculinity. as kristoff also dubs sven—and the reindeer almost seems to serve as his alter ego—it is worthwhile to examine sven’s voice, too, in order to shed light on kristoff’s masculinity. in the opening bars that he sings to sven, groff uses a raw and breathy voice, combined with a heavy sigh, reminiscent of a recitativo. for sven’s answer, he employs a slightly comical puffed-up voice, which underlines the scene’s surreal tone. when the actual song starts, kristoff’s voice changes once again into a typical broadway sound, with a soft and tasteful belting and numerous affective voice breaks (“when did i become the one who’s always chasing your heart?”, “when you’re not there”). the fact that he sings with a belt voice, rather than with a vibrato, matches his overall character: he is more of a down-to-earth nature boy, not a fairy tale-like prince charming. despite his roughness and the comic elements, the high level of training in kristoff’s tenor voice proves that he is the rightful hero of the love story. just as with aladdin, being a tenor makes kristoff a worthy candidate for the male lead. the song repeatedly features rather high pitches that he hits with comfort and ease. his registers are well-balanced and his voice has the same color from top to bottom. he mixes in head voice (“forever!”), as is typical of a 1980’s power ballad, [75] but never goes into full falsetto. it is likely that the use of this high range, combined with a belt voice, is meant to appeal to young girls—not too blatantly masculine, yet also definitely not feminine. in the choruses, sven joins it, but not with the reindeer voice he used in his short reply to kristoff. instead, the reindeer chorus is dubbed with the broadway-voice kristoff uses throughout the ballad. especially in the visual references to “bohemian rhapsody”, the background chorus sings much higher, but still within a range which seems fitting and not exaggerated for a 1980s power ballad. this giving up of irony in the vocals, combined with the strong emphasis on his professional tenor voice, assure a balance between the ridiculing and the acknowledging of kristoff’s heartache. this balance does however not necessarily translate to other languages. in the german version, for instance, leonhard mahlich does not sing with a belt voice and uses considerably less head voice and voice breaks. this makes his singing somewhat more natural and less theatrical. also, there is less struggling with showing emotions in the lyrics: unlike the english version, where sven encourages kristoff to show his feelings (“let down your guard”), german sven says: “sorg’ dich nicht mehr” (“do not worry any more”), thus omitting kristoff’s negotiating of masculinity and emotionality. while the references to the 1980s ballad and the connotations linked to this are thus still present in the music, groff’s interpretation as a broadway singer is much more subversive. “heaven’s light” just as he does with aladdin, macaluso places quasimodo between the categories “boy” and “hero/prince.” [76] quasimodo shows several character traits typical of the boy—innocence, youth, sweetness, and an enthusiastic infatuation for esmeralda, with whom he falls in love at first sight. moreover, as his love song “heaven’s light” shows, he is “man enough to desire,” [77] although his love for esmeralda is depicted as a gentle and romantic feeling, in contrast to the lust frollo displays in the corresponding song “hellfire.” while quasimodo is “man enough to desire,” he is not portrayed as desirable himself: he has a large hump, a squashed face, a lump above his left eye, a receding chin, and a central incisor—all reasons why his master frollo decided to keep him hidden in the cathedral where he leads a lonely life. after having experienced esmeralda’s kindness, quasimodo dares to hope that she returns his affection (a hope encouraged by his friends, the stone gargoyles) and sings the song “heaven’s light” (music by alan menken, lyrics by stephen schwartz). it is a short song, much less dramatic than his opening song “out there.” despite its shortness, it serves as an important dramatic device to underline quasimodo’s changing angle towards romantic masculinity. lyricist stephen schwartz states: “we thought quasimodo needed a moment to express his delusion or hope that esmeralda might actually think of him in a romantic way.” [78] the song is reprised when quasimodo realizes that esmeralda prefers phoebus. the producers considered placing a song there for the lovers, but ultimately decided that the focus should remain on quasimodo, who once again realizes his exclusion from romantic love. [79] as the song also serves as a contrasting element to the following “hellfire,” it underlines once more quasimodo’s moral superiority to frollo. quasimodo looks down on the city and reflects on both his own loneliness as well as the lovers he sometimes observes below, who “had a kind of glow around them | it almost looked like heaven’s light.” despite being already forty-three years old and thus twenty-three years older than his character, voice actor tom hulce sounds very bright, young, tender, and at ease in every register. for most of the tune he lets a lot of air leak through the folds and is much closer to a spoken voice than an operatic singing voice. this evokes an atmosphere of intimacy and honesty. the person whose voice we are hearing in this scene is apparently an honest, sensitive introvert and no pseudo-masculine show-off. when quasimodo concludes that his own hideous face “was [never] meant for heaven’s light,” he even briefly touches on the falsetto register with a high f, evoking an angelic, very innocent feeling, and indicating a vulnerable and rather soft personality. the accompaniment is discrete, featuring a soft string ensemble, solo harp, recorders, and solo strings. but in the second part, when he mentions esmeralda (“but suddenly an angel has smiled at me”), the string accompaniment suddenly swells, touching on common romantic hollywood aesthetics. the melody rises and changes again into falsetto (“i swear it must be heaven’s light”), followed by the bright and happy sound of the bells which sound much less tremendous and solemn than before. this falsetto is also audible in all other dubbings of the song, as it results from the composer’s choice of range, making it an integral part of the song’s aesthetics. falsetto holds a special place within the discourse of musical gender. it is much more associated with male singing than female singing. the castrati of the eighteenth century were considered desirable partners, and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in some styles such as gospel, such high voice can stand for a certain kind of masculine bravado, notably in the “power ballads” of the 1980s. [80] at the same time, falsetto is often understood as “anti-masculine.” [81] given this ambiguity, it is worth taking a closer look at its dramatic function. quasimodo repeatedly remarks that, due to his appearance, he feels excluded from society in general and specifically from romance—and thus also from traditional discourses of masculinity. this exclusion also means that he is not familiar with the conventions of masculine behavior and, even if he were, they would not apply to him. thus, unlike kristoff, he does not need to distance himself ironically from his feelings and is free to sing with whatever voice he likes. this is different when the song is reprised: when esmeralda tends to the wounded phoebus, quasimodo witnesses them kissing and is utterly shocked and saddened. he starts to sing “heaven’s light,” but unlike the first time, only in his head. here, sound design plays an important part in altering the meaning of the song: quasimodo’s voice is blurred and the overtones are reduced, thus making his voice sound less bright. with the beginning of the second part he stops singing and lets go of the card with the ace of hearts, which the gargoyles had given him as a symbol of esmeralda’s love for him. as the strings swell, he starts to cry. the concluding confident falsetto disappears along with his self-understanding as a romantically desirable man. humiliated, he does not dare to express his feelings openly. however, unlike kristoff, society does not force him to musically comply with contemporary conventions of masculinity and seek shelter in ironic theatricality: quasimodo has always been at ease with his own emotionality, and this ultimately helps him overcome his heartache. conclusion as my analyses have shown, the music is more than a mere mirror of the various categories of disney masculinity: it is only in the music, and especially in the use of the male singing voice, that the contradictions inherent to these categories become apparent. this is especially true for characters who find themselves in transition between two categories, like aladdin and quasimodo who are placed between the categories “boy” and “hero/prince.” in aladdin’s case, the transition between the stages of his character development becomes audible in his vocals. he is a “diamond in the rough” with an untrained voice. at the same time, his tenor and hence prince-qualities are clearly audible, especially when he stops pretending to be more than he actually is by disguising himself vocally as a baritone in order to win jasmine’s heart. quasimodo in contrast has never had the chance to approach esmeralda in a romantic way or to approach anyone at all in song. he is unburdened by traditional gender expectations, and this is audible in his voice which remains pure, soft, boyish, and, due to the falsetto and the overall airiness, lacking body and being almost androgynous. this creates a strong contrast to phoebus, whose muscles, beard, and low voice (he does not sing) correspond to contemporary concepts of masculinity. however, unlike with the “boy” as a “cultural icon,” the androgyny of quasimodo’s voice does not threaten to disrupt the binaries of sex and gender, as he is presented as non-desirable, at least in the first film. future research may further investigate to what extent these observations apply to the dubbed version of the films as produced by disney character voices international. especially since the 2000, voice actors are not only chosen for their resemblance to the english original, but also for their appeal to the local market. also, as has been demonstrated with the reprise of “heaven’s light”, sound design and post production can add additional levels of meaning to the singing which are worth examining. besides the transition between various categories of masculinity, music is an important factor within the balancing act that is the display of emotions with male characters, especially when expressed through song. eugene counters the vulnerability his character experiences by falling for rapunzel with a deliberately manly and alluring voice. despite his alleged weakness, his baritone voice proves that he is still desirable. kristoff takes a different approach: he counters his vulnerability with irony, allowing the spectator to choose how deeply to engage with this pain. while the music creates a comic relief, his tenor voice hinders the musical irony from covering the emotional sincerity necessary to touch the audience and vice versa. by combining the double-edged concept of postfeminist masculinity, the music, and particularly the vocal timbre, it is possible to determine how the hybridity of the male characters’ emotional displays is both allotted and received. [1] for statistics and possible reasons see scott d. harrison, graham f. welch, and adam adler, “men, boys and singing,” in perspectives on males and singing, ed. scott d. harrison, graham f. welch, and adam adler (dordrecht: springer, 2012), 3–12. this issue exists in many genres, as previous research has shown. for example, early 2000s r&b songs often pit female singing against male rapping. this reinscribes a longstanding “stereotyping of music as feminine, concerned with senses, and of language as masculine, a rational structure.” ian biddle and freya jarman-ivens, “introduction: oh boy! making masculinity in popular music,” in oh boy! masculinities and popular music, ed. freya jarman-ivens (new york: routledge, 2007), 10. [2] katia perea, “touching queerness in disney films dumbo and lilo & stitch,” social sciences 7, no. 11 (2018): 225, 2. [3] biddle and jarman-ivens, “introduction,” 6. [4] biddle and jarman-ivens, 6. [5] biddle and jarman-ivens, 6. [6] there are a few others, which for various reasons i do not consider genuine love duets: in “love is an open door” from frozen, hans only pretends to love anna. the exchange between simba and nala in “can you feel the love tonight” and between duchess and thomas o’ malley in the aristocats’ “everybody wants to be a cat” are too short to be considered true love duets. the same applies to “something there” from beauty and the beast. [7] “hellfire” from the hunchback of notre dame is in my opinion not a love song, as it only speaks of desire (and hatred) and not of love. [8] these categories follow potgieter’s analyses of the singing princess in liske potgieter and zelda potgieter, “deconstructing disney’s divas: a critique of the singing princess as filmic trope,” acta academica 48, no. 2 (2016): 49. [9] potgieter and potgieter, 55. [10] jennifer fleeger, mismatched women: the siren’s song through the machine (new york: oxford university press, 2014), 108. for the third group, fleeger also mentions frozen (2013) and brave (2012). [11] in 18 films, falling in love only takes minutes (dwarfs, bambi, cinderella, lady, sleeping, dalmatians, stone, jungle, aristocats, robin, fox, mermaid, beauty, aladdin, lion, pocahontas, hunchback, hercules). in the aristocats and the lion king it takes a little longer—about a day. litsa r. tanner et al., “images of couples and families in disney feature-length animated films,” the american journal of family therapy 31, no. 5 (2003): 364. [12] tanner et al., “images of couples and families in disney feature-length animated films,” 365. [13] jesse hassenger, “the hunchback of notre dame and mulan are from disney’s artistically vital years,” popmatters, march 14, 2013. [14] amy m. davis, handsome heroes & vile villains: men in disney’s feature animation (bloomington: indiana university press, 2013), 251. [15] davis, 251. [16] davis, 251. [17] tanner et al., “images of couples and families,” 365. [18] laura béres, “beauty and the beast: the romanticization of abuse in popular culture,” european journal of cultural studies 2, no. 2 (1999): 191–207. [19] amy m. davis, good girls & wicked witches: women in disney’s feature animation (new barnet: john libbey publishing, 2007). [20] davis, handsome heroes & vile villains. [21] benjamin hine et al., “the rise of the androgynous princess: examining representations of gender in prince and princess characters of disney movies released 2009–2016,” social sciences 7, no. 12 (2018): 245. [22] this makes the crying king in tangled, whom his tearlessly grieving wife consoles, even more striking. [23] hine et al., 11. [24] hine et al., 10. [25] michael macaluso, “postfeminist masculinity: the new disney norm?,” social sciences 7, no. 11 (2018): 221. [26] macaluso, 221. [27] yvonne tasker and diane negra, “introduction: feminist politics and postfeminist culture,” in interrogating postfeminism: gender and the politics of popular culture, ed. yvonne tasker and diane negra (durham, nc: duke university press, 2007), 21. [28] valerie palmer-mehta, “men behaving badly: mediocre masculinity and the man show,” journal of popular culture 42, no. 6 (2009): 1053–72. [29] melissa zimdars, “having it both ways: two and a half men, entourage, and televising post-feminist masculinity,” feminist media studies 18, no. 2 (2018): 278–93. [30] tristan bridges and c. j. pascoe, “hybrid masculinities: new directions in the sociology of men and masculinities,” sociology compass 8, no. 3 (2014): 246. [31] tasker and negra, “introduction,” 21. [32] john alberti, masculinity in the contemporary romantic comedy: gender as genre (new york: routledge, 2013), 37. [33] berit åström, the absent mother in the cultural imagination: missing, presumed dead (cham: springer international publishing, 2017), 254. [34] hine et al., “the rise of the androgynous princess,” 11. with this, hine is especially referring to the research by sarah coyne et al., “pretty as a princess: longitudinal effects of engagement with disney princesses on gender stereotypes, body esteem, and prosocial behavior in children,” child development 87, no. 6 (2016): 1909–25, and davis, handsome heroes & vile villains. [35] hine et al., “the rise of the androgynous princess,” 11. [36] simon frith and angela mcrobbie, “rock and sexuality,” in on record: rock, pop and the written word, ed. simon frith and andrew goodwin (london: routledge, 1990), 374. [37] frith and mcrobbie, “rock and sexuality,” 375. [38] kim cooper and david smay, eds., bubblegum music is the naked truth (los angeles: feral house, 2001). [39] georgina gregory, boy bands and the performance of pop masculinity (new york: routledge, 2019), 95–96. [40] biddle and jarman-ivens, “introduction,” 7–8. [41] gregory, boy bands, 96. [42] allison mccracken, real men don’t sing: crooning in american culture (durham, nc: duke university press, 2015), 318–19. [43] oxford english dictionary, oed online, s.v. “croon, v.”, accessed july 18, 2022. [44] biddle and jarman-ivens, 10. [45] mccracken, real men don’t sing, 34. [46] mccracken, 319. [47] mccracken, 327. [48] mccracken, 327. [49] thomas seedorf, “stimmfach / stimmfächer,” in lexikon der gesangsstimme: geschichte, wissenschaftliche grundlagen, gesangstechniken, interpreten, ed. ann-christine mecke et al., 2nd revised edition, instrumenten-lexika (laaber: laaber, 2018), 587–88. [50] seedorf, 588. [51] seedorf, 587, 589. the reference is to rudolf kloiber, handbuch der oper (regensburg: gustav bosse, 1951). [52] seedorf, 589–90. [53] macaluso, “postfeminist masculinity,” 3. [54] thomas s. hischak, disney voice actors: a biographical dictionary (jefferson: mcfarland, 2011), 220. [55] steve daly, “disney’s got a brand-new baghdad,” ew.com entertainment weekly, december 4, 1992, retrieved on december 1, 2022. [56] hischak, disney voice actors, 220. [57] biddle and jarman-ivens, “introduction,” 6. [58] “brad kane recording session one jump ahead from disney’s aladdin (behind the scenes),” disney’s behind the scene interview, uploaded on february 21, 2021; “a disastrous audition (alan menken & scott weinger featurette),” disney music vevo, uploaded on september 12, 2019. [59] hischak, disney voice actors, 220. [60] macaluso, “postfeminist masculinity,” 3. [61] paul yeadon mcginnis, the opera singer’s career guide: understanding the european fach system (london: scarecrow pres, 2010), 38. [62] roth cornet, “zach levi on being a disney hunk in tangled, a singer, a superhero & chuck,” screen rant, november 18, 2010. the names of the men discussed in this meeting are listed on “flynn rider,” disney wiki, fandom. [63] cornet, “zach levi on being a disney hunk.” [64] todd martens, “unwrapping the music in tangled: it all begins with joni mitchell, says alan menken,” los angeles times, november 24, 2010. [65] mccracken, real men don’t sing, 327. [66]  yi xu et al., “human vocal attractiveness as signaled by body size projection,” plos one 8, no. 4 (2013): e62397. [67] mary talbot, language and gender: an introduction, 2nd ed. (cambridge: polity press, 2010), 32. italics in original. [68] heike steinhoff, “‘let it go’? re-inventing the disney fairy tale in frozen,” in heroes, heroines, and everything in between: challenging gender and sexuality stereotypes in children’s entertainment media, ed. carrielynn d. reinhard and christopher j. olson (lanham: lexington books, 2017), 169. for bridges and pascoe’s definition of “hybrid masculinities,” see note 30. [69] joanna robinson, “frozen ii: the story behind jonathan groff’s surprising ’80s ballad,” vanity fair, website, november 15, 2019. [70] see robinson, “frozen ii.” [71] robinson. [72] robinson. [73] robinson. [74] konrad paul liessmann, kitsch oder warum der schlechte geschmack der eigentlich gute ist (wien: brandstätter, 2002), 74. [75] mccracken, real men don’t sing, 318–19. [76] macaluso, “postfeminist masculinity,” 3. [77] biddle and jarman-ivens, “introduction,” 6. [78] carol de giere, defying gravity: the creative career of stephen schwartz from “godspell” to “wicked” (milwaukee: applause theatre books, 2008), 245. [79] paul r. laird, the musical theater of stephen schwartz: from “godspell” to “wicked” and beyond (lanham: rowman & littlefield, 2014), 243. [80] mccracken, real men don’t sing, 318–19. [81] biddle and jarman-ivens, “introduction,” 7–8 articles the operatic ear: mediating aurality megan steigerwald ille during the final scene of christopher cerrone’s opera invisible cities, protagonist marco polo reflects on the central role the listener plays in narrative forms: “i speak and i speak, but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. it is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”1 polo’s words are (unintentionally) ironic: by this point in experimental opera company the industry’s 2013 production, the spectator hardly needs to be reminded of the importance of the ear. rather than being sung out to audience members seated around a proscenium stage, polo’s line, and indeed, the entire opera, has been transmitted into the listening ears of audience members via wireless sennheiser headphones. opera scholarship often begins with the voice then moves to the ear.2 *i wish to thank jacek blaszkiewicz, gabrielle cornish, the participants of the 2019 “mapping spaces, sounding places: geographies of sound in audiovisual media” conference, and the anonymous readers and editors of this journal for their enthusiastic engagement with earlier versions of this work. i would also like to thank the performers and production team of invisible cities who took the time to share their experiences with me. 1 partially adapted from italo calvino, invisible cities, trans. william weaver (new york: harcourt brace jovanovich, 1974), 135 2 in recent years, scholars in the field of voice studies such as martha feldman, nina eidsheim, jelena novak, brian kane, ana maría ochoa gautier, steven rings, james q. davies, and emily wilbourne, among many others, have done much-needed work to theorize and explore many capacities of the operatic voice, and in turn, the listening ear in operatic performance. work by carolyn abbate and michelle duncan played a significant role in establishing this turn to the material properties of the voice and sounding voice-body. see nina sun eidsheim and katherine meizel, eds. the oxford handbook of voice studies (new york: oxford university press, 2019); martha feldman, emily wilbourne, steven rings, brian kane, and james q. davies, “colloquy: why voice now?” journal of the american musicological society 68, no. 3 (fall 2015): 653–685; jelena novak, postopera: reinventing the voice-body (farnham: ashgate, 2015); ana maría ochoa gautier, aurality: listening and knowledge in nineteenth-century colombia (durham, nc: duke university press, 2014); michelle dunsound stage screen, vol. 1, issue 1 (spring 2021), pp. 119–143. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. doi: 10.13130/sss14186. the operatic ear: mediating aurality120 sound stage screen 2021/1 but what if we move in the opposite direction?3 that is, what can we discover about operatic sounds—including voices—by focusing on how processes of listening are mediated by social and technological patterns of behavior?4 while these questions have a precedent in studies of sound and voice, they also demonstrate how the operatic ear and operatic voice are co-constitutive elements in performance.5 if, as interdependent parts, they are also—pace polo—equally relevant, the technologically-mediated operatic ear that witnesses invisible cities offers much to studies of sound, digital media, and modes of narrative performance like opera. in this essay, privileging the biological and metaphorical ear over the voice allows us to consider the ways digital technologies create equivalent modes of understanding operatic listening as simultaneously fragmented, interstitial, and relational. the radical, mediated staging of invisible cities was hailed by critics as “the opera of the future” and an “unprecedented, interactive dramatic expecan, “the operatic scandal of the singing body: voice, presence, performativity,” cambridge opera journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 283–306; carolyn abbate, “music—drastic or gnostic?” critical inquiry 30, no. 3 (spring 2004): 505–536. 3 this inverted formulation—ear to voice rather than voice to ear—is, in part, indebted to the scholarship of ana maría ochoa gautier. ochoa gautier suggests that by “[inverting] the emphasis on the relation between the written text and the mouth (implied by the idea of the oral),” it is possible to “[explore] how the uses of the ear in relation to the voice [imbue] the technology of writing with the traces and excesses of the acoustic.” ochoa gautier, aurality, 7. while eidsheim approaches voice, text, and listening from a different perspective than ochoa gautier, she too suggests that “[voices are] located within [listeners].” nina sun eidsheim, the race of sound: listening, timbre, and vocality in african american music (durham, nc: duke university press, 2019), 13. 4 this approach, which brings together scholarship on technology, performance, and sound cultures more broadly, is rooted in the work of douglas kahn, benjamin steege, jonathan sterne, and emily thompson, among others. see douglas kahn, noise, water, meat: a history of sound in the arts (cambridge, ma: mit press, 1999); benjamin steege, helmholtz and the modern listener (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2012); jonathan sterne, the audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction (durham, nc: duke university press, 2003); emily thompson, the soundscape of modernity: architectural acoustics and the culture of listening in america, 1900–1933 (cambridge, ma: mit press, 2002). 5 gautier ochoa describes this shift as “the general auditory turn in critical scholarship,” aurality, 6. more specifically, eidsheim has pointed to the way voices are co-constructed through socio-historic processes of expectation and feedback—or, in other words, modes of listening. see eidsheim, the race of sound, 13. clemens risi describes the listening relationship between operatic performer and listener as “performative” and “erotic,” thus implying another type of relationship between the two parts. clemens risi, “the diva’s fans: opera and bodily participation,” performance research 16, no. 3 (2011): 49–54. 121steigerwald ille sound stage screen 2021/1 rience.”6 a key reason for the critical acclaim attributed to the performance was because of the way the opera used digital technologies to “reformulate” operatic listening, thus foregrounding the notion of the materially-enhanced ear. by asking spectators to listen to the entire opera through wireless headphones, the production foregrounded technological mediation. simply put, the performance spotlighted the role of aural perception over other modes of spectatorship. accompanied by the angular choreography of danielle agami and the efforts of the l.a. dance project company, the opera was performed twenty-two times in october and november 2013. wireless headphones allowed audience members to spectate from any location as each individual wandered the “stage” of los angeles’s union station while miked performers roamed the space. far from the rooted experience of sitting in a theater, viewers drifted through the ticket concourses, waiting areas, and outdoor patios of the historic station while attempting to both locate and link the voices in their ears to the bodies in front of them. the performers began the opera in street clothes—every commuter within the station a potential artist—and gradually donned costumes as the work progressed. following the opera’s dramatic conclusion, ushers drew audience members into a common space for the final scene, applause concluded the performance, spectators returned their headphones to the stage managers, and left the station. stage (and station) remained open, but the opera had ended. based upon several episodes from italo calvino’s 1972 surrealist novel le città invisibili, invisible cities recounts a series of conversations, memories, and elaborate stories exchanged between the explorer marco polo and the emperor kublai khan. as the khan listens, polo evokes the cities constellating the aging emperor’s realm with visceral detail. the work’s first inception, a concert staging at the new york city opera’s 2009 vox festival, revealed production and musical challenges. the industry founder yuval sharon first encountered a version of the opera when working at vox as a program director, and it was clear the work might need a different performance treatment to succeed.7 the ambiguity of the narrative, lyric opacity 6 jeffrey marlow, “is this the opera of the future?” wired magazine, october 22, 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/10/is-this-the-opera-of-the-future; shari barrett, “bww reviews: invisible cities offers a total immersion experience at union station,” broadway world, los angeles, https://www.broadwayworld.com/los-angeles/article/bww-reviews-invisible-cities-offers-a-total-immersion-experience-at-union-station-20131025. 7 see anthony tommasini, “sampling of new dishes, some still being seasoned,” the new york times, may 9, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/arts/music/05vox. html?mcubz=3. http://www.wired.com/2013/10/is-this-the-opera-of-the-future http://www.broadwayworld.com/los-angeles/article/bww-reviews-invisible-cities-offers-a-total-immersion-experience-at-union-station-20131025 http://www.broadwayworld.com/los-angeles/article/bww-reviews-invisible-cities-offers-a-total-immersion-experience-at-union-station-20131025 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/arts/music/05vox.html?mcubz=3 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/arts/music/05vox.html?mcubz=3 the operatic ear: mediating aurality122 sound stage screen 2021/1 of the text, and elongated musical lines meant that the work seemed to lack dynamism on the traditional stage. enter the mobile staging of the opera four years later, which fused sennheiser wireless headphones with audience imaginations, and drew in patrons through the allure of immersive and site-specific performance.8 the changes paid off: the 2014 pulitzer prize committee described the work as “a captivating opera … in which marco polo regales kublai khan with tales of fantastical cities, adapted into an imaginary sonic landscape.”9 the sennheiser wireless headphones, individual audio feeds, and earbud microphones for each singer, dancer, and orchestral musician might have seemingly indicated that the performance of invisible cities represented a new kind of work more akin to janet cardiff’s mixed media installations than to historical operatic convention. as i have argued elsewhere, invisible cities actually capitalized upon historic tensions inherent to the operatic form.10 this production structure, however, allows us to think about more than just the historic trajectories and iterations of the operatic genre.11 to 8 the question of what constitutes site-specific performance is a topic of much debate. for instance, mike pearson uses the work of designer cliff mclucas to distinguish between the “host”—the established elements of a site—versus the “ghost”—“that which is temporarily brought to and emplaced at the site.” the “host” of union station and “ghost” of invisible cities musicians, costumes, and staging would work together to constitute this performance as site-specific. however, visual artists such as richard serra read site-specificity as more particular to the art’s impact upon and relationship with the site itself. thus, serra argues that site-specific works should be “inseparable from their [locations].” as an opera revised for the la staging and made more meaningful within a space of transit, invisible cities fits uncomfortably within serra’s definition, but squarely within pearson’s. following language surrounding the reception of the opera, the descriptions of performers and audience members, and the musical changes made to the work for the la staging, i interpret invisible cities as site-specific opera. richard serra, “the yale lecture, in art in theory, 1900-2000: an anthology of changing ideas, ed. charles harrison and paul wood (oxford: blackwell, 2003), 1096–1099; mike pearson, “site-specific theatre,” in the routledge companion to scenography, ed. arnold aronson (abingdon: routledge, 2017), 295–301. 9 “finalist: invisible cities, by christopher cerrone,” the 2014 pulitzer prize finalist in music, the pulitzer prizes, last updated 2021, https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/christopher-cerrone. 10 megan steigerwald ille, “live in the limo: remediating voice and performing spectatorship in twenty-first-century opera,” the opera quarterly 36, no. 1 (2021), published ahead of print, january 7, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbaa012; see also megan steigerwald ille, “bringing down the house: situating and mediating opera in the twenty-first century,” (phd diss., university of rochester, 2018). 11 while not the focus of this article, productions like invisible cities by necessity put pressure on the concept of “opera” as a fluid generic designation. see steigerwald ille, “bringing http://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/christopher-cerrone http://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/christopher-cerrone 123steigerwald ille sound stage screen 2021/1 that end, as digital mediation becomes commonplace both in and out of the opera house, it is worth considering how technologically-enabled modes of narrative spectacle influence operatic performance, and vice-versa.12 rather than focusing on acoustic perception of sound as it relates to the concert hall, or the way the opera enacted forms of sonic gentrification, as other scholars such as nina eidsheim have productively explored, here i am interested in highlighting the material significance of the headphones themselves in the production.13 i put interviews and public press reviews in dialogue with the body of rich scholarship around historical and contemporary modes of listening. i situate these headphones within a history of mobile listening and behaviors in order to understand what elements shape the twenty-first century operatic ear. in focusing on the headphones, i reveal the significance of material technologies in constituting operatic aurality. what is the value of aurality as a critical framework?14 benjamin steege down the house,” phd diss. for broader exploration of the ontological understandings of opera in the context of invisible cities and other productions by the industry, see also the forthcoming monograph: megan steigerwald ille, opera for everyone: experimenting with american opera in the digital age (ann arbor: university of michigan press). 12 invisible cities is not the only twenty-first century opera production to engage with themes of aural mediation and spatial displacement. for instance, cerise lim jacobs’s alice in the pandemic, produced by white snake projects in late 2020, “enable[d] singers at remote locations to sing synchronously together as they [interacted] with each other and their 3d avatars who lip sync in real time to live performance.” “alice in the pandemic,” white snake projects, accessed december 10, 2020, https://www.whitesnakeprojects.org/projects/ alice-in-the-pandemic-a-digital-opera/. 13 for an alternate exploration of invisible cities and a thorough consideration of how the cultivated aesthetic of the opera can be thought of as another version of the designed acoustic of the opera house, see nina sun eidsheim, sensing sound: singing and listening as vibrational practice (durham, nc: duke university press, 2015), 80–94. marianna ritchey also briefly considers the opera in the context of urban gentrification, a topic that eidsheim also explores through the context of voice studies in a second article. see marianna ritchey, composing capital: classical music in the neoliberal era (chicago: university of chicago press, 2019), 90-113, and eidsheim, “acoustic slits and vocal incongruences in los angeles union station,” in the oxford handbook of voice studies, 301–313. 14 while to my knowledge, aurality has not yet been used as a critical framework in opera studies specifically, the concept has been productively used in a range of disciplines within musicology, ethnomusicology, and the humanities more broadly. see steege, helmholtz and the modern listener, and ochoa gautier, aurality. for a representative range of usages, see: jairo moreno, “antenatal aurality in pacific afro-colombian midwifery,” in remapping sound studies, ed. gavin steingo and jim sykes (durham, nc: duke university press, 2019), 109–134; lynne kendrick, theatre aurality (london: palgrave macmillan, 2017); kahn, noise, water, meat; and veit erlmann, ed. hearing cultures: essays on sound, listening, and modernity (oxford: berg, 2004). for a helpful overview of how aurality has been used as a critical http://www.whitesnakeprojects.org/projects/alice-in-the-pandemic-a-digital-opera/ http://www.whitesnakeprojects.org/projects/alice-in-the-pandemic-a-digital-opera/ the operatic ear: mediating aurality124 sound stage screen 2021/1 defines aurality as “a network of experiences, practices, and discourses of hearing and the ear.”15 similarly, ana maría ochoa gautier uses the framework of aurality as a mode of thinking through what she describes as “acoustic abundance” and “multiplicity,” in which the “entities that listen and entities that produce sounds … mutually produce each other.”16 correspondingly, a framework of aurality offers opera studies the opportunity to think through how modes of mediated spectatorship co-constitute audience perception. operatic aurality is a set of material contexts, discourses, and patterns that encompasses operatic performance and spectatorship within the hybrid environments i describe above. this article is concerned with the materiality of the 400 sets of headphones sitting on the station’s old ticket counter, waiting to be washed and dried in a nearby laundromat before the next evening’s performance. throughout the opera, these headphones had facilitated whispers, shouts, and highly trained operatic voices into the ears of those audience members paying for the performance. they had been shared with those passersby in union station who had no idea what musical event was interrupting their commute. they had translated arching phrases and rhythmic staccati into calvino’s landscapes as amazed onlookers listened and saw the train station from a new aesthetic perspective. and they had made it difficult for tenor ashley faatoalia’s friends to locate him in the train station by obscuring the aural signals that would reveal his specific location.17 (this was despite the fact that these individuals knew faatoalia was playing one of the central characters in the opera, marco polo.) the aforementioned advice from polo (“it is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear”) is key to not only the narrative of the opera, but also the mode of spectatorship upon which it relies. in this example, the operatic text works in tandem with the physical realities of the production. two analytic modes, hermeneutics and materiality, dialectically constitute the spectatorial experience in invisible cities. the libretto and open-ended compositional elements emphasize individual exploration and interpretation. at the same time, the headphones offer a singular experience of sound regardless of where the audience member or performer is in the station. on “epistemic threshold”, see david trippet, “sensations of listening in helmholtz’s laboratory,” essay review of helmholtz and the modern listener, by benjamin steege, studies in history and philosophy of science 47 (2014): 124–132. 15 steege, helmholtz and the modern listener, 7. 16 ochoa gautier, aurality, 4, 22. 17 ashley faatoalia, interview with author, san pedro, september 12, 2017. 125steigerwald ille sound stage screen 2021/1 the other hand, the headphones are also the gateway to a set of behaviors centered around individual interpretation and exploration. thus, invisible cities offers an operatic opportunity to expand the ways we as listeners conceive of the relationship between mediated sound and narrative. after providing an overview of the production, i situate the notion of operatic aurality within studies of sound and narrative. in so doing, i demonstrate how the operatic ear allows for a particular form of material and spatial listening. as a technologically-contingent work, invisible cities offers the opportunity to explore the implications of the operatic ear beyond voice. in analyzing the opera from the (aural) vantage point of the headphones, i argue that invisible cities catalyzed operatic spectacle by fusing mobile listening practices with live performance. contextualizing invisible cities within other modes of mobile listening demonstrates how the operatic ear exists within a spectrum of recorded, live, mobile, and place-bound sound. in effect, the operatic ear shapes the context, and thus the perception, of the mediated voice. by foregrounding the material processes inherent to invisible cities, i highlight the ways technology mediates aesthetic and social performance, and in turn, how social processes inform our expectations and experiences of mediated performances. logistics of invisible cities the industry is a self-described “independent, artist-driven company creating experimental productions that expand the definition of opera.”18 founded in 2012 by artistic director yuval sharon, the company has received national and international acclaim for their original, site-specific productions. the 2013 production of invisible cities played a large part in catalyzing the kinds of critical attention that have since become the norm for the company. invisible cities begins with a short speech made by sharon, in which spectators are told that each experience of the opera is meant to be determined by the individual choices of spectators. this speech is followed by an overture performed in the harvey house restaurant, which has been closed since 1967. following the overture, audience members begin meandering throughout the station.19 the overture is followed by a prologue and seven 18 “about,” the industry, accessed june 24, 2020, https://theindustryla.org/about/. 19 see eidsheim, sensing sound, 82–90 for a first-person account of the opera, and for a detailed walk-through of her individual experience of the work along with a diagram of the station in relation to the performance. the operatic ear: mediating aurality126 sound stage screen 2021/1 scenes which depict conversations between the two central characters of the opera, marco polo and kublai khan. the libretto’s text, lifted almost directly from the 1974 william weaver english translation of the novel, builds in complexity through layers of detail, sometimes paradoxical ambiguity, and suggestive dialogue. along with the khan and polo, two sopranos, an satb quartet, and a cast of eight dancers play a changing set of characters within the opera. two shows are given a night, one at 7 pm, and another at 10 pm. with a ticket, an audience member receives a set of sennheiser wireless headphones through which is broadcast the live-mixed version of the opera. while this person may be in any part of union station (ushers keep spectators within the boundary lines of the space), all audience members hear the same operatic stream. the singers and dancers move throughout union station wearing lavalier microphones and in-ear monitors. although there are no monitors for them to see conductor marc lowenstein, they hear a dry recording of the music being played by the orchestra dispersed into the in-ear monitors. as a result, they can hear the other singers, regardless of where they might be in the station. tenor ashley faatoalia, who played marco polo, described the experience: you’re singing for random people in a random space. some people will know what’s going on, some people won’t. and so, every night was a little bit different. when we started the run, we had a little more leeway because people were following us [versus during rehearsals when performances were less of a distinct event]. so, then some people were like “ok, something’s going on.” but even that was chaos, because then the curiosity would peak to a certain point where people who were or weren’t involved were cavorting around and following us in different crowds . . . some people came multiple nights to find different parts of the story—so because of that, someone was always peeking and looking with anticipation, so even when you weren’t ready to sing, you had to sit there, trying to be a character, or emote, or engage with the person on the other side of the entire campus that you couldn’t see.20 baritone cedric berry, who sang the role of the kublai khan, echoed faatoalia in underscoring the challenges of the unconventional staging: we had rehearsed for months, we were finally becoming comfortable with the music, and then we went to the space. and i know we had talked about 20 faatoalia, interview with author. 127steigerwald ille sound stage screen 2021/1 what we were going to do when we got to the space, and marc announced that the orchestra not only would be in a different space in the train station no less, but that there wouldn’t be a monitor and that it would all be aural—i thought “now he’s really crazy” . . . i never thought i wouldn’t be able to see a conductor somewhere, especially with music that really requires a conductor, but it worked!21 there were a number of compositional techniques that anticipated the challenges in coordination faatoalia and berry describe, including ostinati, a strong sense of pulse used as varying types of signals throughout the entire opera, and overall a small number of vocal forces. the final scene, which was the most complex in terms of ensemble, also required all of the singers to be in one room together, although the orchestra was still in a separate space. audience experiences of non-aural elements within the performance were completely variable. in other words, the live audio mix being streamed into spectators’ headphones was the only consistent element of the performance from night to night regardless of where those spectators were located in the station. unless audience members removed these headphones—which some did for brief moments throughout the performance, sometimes to share with other people in the train station, or to listen to a nearby singer live—they all heard the same live-mixed recording of the opera. thus, sharon’s production seemingly enfolded the role of visual spectacle in operatic production into the headphones worn by audience members. as i describe in greater detail throughout the rest of the article, this does not mean there was no aspect of visual spectacle throughout the production—far from it. rather, the consistent aural elements of the work (in the headphones) suggested that everyday events in the station were spectacular, regardless of if actual performers could be seen or not. because of the structure of the opera, the visual space of the proscenium stage that might be understood to be “controlled” by the director was not simply moved into the site-specific space of union station. rather, this consistent element of onstage spectacle was relocated to the headphones, the imaginary space of which was controlled by sound design.22 while sound designer e. martin gimenez originated the idea of the headphones in the opera along with sharon, nick tipp worked as lead sound 21 the industry, “the industry company – cedric berry,” october 2, 2018, youtube, 3:36, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk-8wfl3dm4. 22 ryan ebright briefly situates invisible cities within a history of operatic sound design. ebright, “doctor atomic or: how john adams learned to stop worrying and love sound design,” cambridge opera journal 31, no. 1 (2019): 85–117. the operatic ear: mediating aurality128 sound stage screen 2021/1 designer for the opera after gimenez’s relationship with the industry ended suddenly. tipp juggled three mixes during the performance: a dry mix intended for singers and dancers, a live-mixed stream meant for audience members with a significant number of atmospheric and spatial effects, and a third mix for the orchestra that had balance adjustments made for the instrumental musicians and lowenstein to better hear one another. lowenstein noted that in technical rehearsals “we kept fiddling with the balance of what we heard, especially because the orchestra was seated in an unusual distribution and the pianists couldn’t hear each other very well acoustically.”23 the second of these three mixes (the live-mixed stream for audiences) was created with the goal of establishing a distinct “landscape” for listeners, one that was distinct from that of the train station where the action was taking place.24 reflecting on the use of postproduction techniques drawn from other genres in the final mix audience members heard through the headphones, cerrone felt that invisible cities was “as much a sort of studio album as it is a live piece” and described the influence of recorded and even compressed formats such as mp3s to the sound-identity of the opera. he said: “we wanted it to sound more like a pop record than a classical record. so it was sort of like bringing classical music into a more sonically connected pop music [sound] than your average classical recording.”25 indeed, the use of sound design within the live performance of the piece along with the headphones themselves played a large role in cultivating the imagined aural space described by both audience members and performers. these elements together further intensified the likelihood that audience members would listen to the recording by drawing on behaviors of listening associated with mobile music, and not live performance. precedents and opportunities of aurality what is the function of the operatic ear? how might we situate this concept within broader discourses around the dialectical construction of spectatorship? the operatic ear represents a biological and metaphoric node in 23 marc lowenstein, email correspondence with author, june 25, 2020. 24 see eidsheim, sensing sound, 81 for more on the use of sound design to render the “acoustic landscape” (90) in invisible cities. 25 christopher cerrone, phone interview by author, august 24, 2017. notably, combining sound design with live performance (as was done in invisible cities) is a key part of live electronic music performance as well as in the performance of live popular music. 129steigerwald ille sound stage screen 2021/1 a broader network of listening practices and behaviors. as steege notes, the “ear” as a historical concept can function in multiple ways: “physical, mechanical, organic, physiological, psychological, or cognitive.” 26 the singular ear of an audience member takes on multiple roles within a performance. the operatic ear is actually a multiplicity of ears simultaneously enacting various responses within a performance. moreover, the roles an “ear” might take on in one performance will be different in other performance contexts, thus constituting operatic aurality as a whole. operatic aurality creates a space for material technologies and somatic responses in listening. just as text and headphones work together to constitute the spectatorial experience of invisible cities, so too does aurality encompass both spontaneous experience and dictated spectatorial response. to think through this dialectic, consider a listener wearing the headphones during invisible cities. as i illustrate in the next section, wearing the headphones may, for her, trigger a set of scripted behavioral responses that imitate her personal experiences listening to music on a mobile music device like her smartphone. at the same time, as she listens, she feels a rush of air around her, and turns to notice a dancer sprinting by. turning to watch the dancer move away, she is distracted from the aural spectacle continuing to play on the headphones. in this hypothetical example, the spectator’s experience of reality is fragmented and layered. multiple ears, or modes of engagement, constitute her engagement with operatic aurality. moreover, the concept of operatic aurality foregrounds both historiographical and material approaches towards listening and space. in the twenty-first century, operatic performance is accessed through myriad spaces, modes, and practices of listening. the ear is likewise responsive to these shifts in space and mode of performance. works as diverse as david lang’s the mile-long opera, performed on new york city’s high line, adam taylor and scott joiner’s online opera connection lost: l’opera di tinder, and traditionally staged canonic works such as le nozze di figaro at the lyric opera of chicago or metropolitan opera house require a similarly broad range of listening behaviors, a multiplicity of ears. the operatic ear is the product of concomitant practices of listening and/ or spectating through multiple live and mediated forms. while here i am curious about the influence of material technological practices on the ear, 26 steege, helmholtz and the modern listener, 50. while steege is arguing for hybrid understandings of the historical ear, this conception, i believe, is helpful for contemporary analyses as well. the operatic ear: mediating aurality130 sound stage screen 2021/1 it is helpful to consider earlier conceptions of the operatic ear articulated by philosophers such as theodor adorno. adorno famously describes the ability of the operatic listener to protect herself from the adverse effects of being “[cajoled]” by the totality of the operatic experience by relocating the opera to the ear: shorn of phony hoopla, the lp simultaneously frees itself from the capriciousness of fake opera festivals. it allows for the optimal presentation of music, enabling it to recapture some of the force and intensity that had been worn threadbare in the opera houses. objectification, that is, a concentration on music as the true object of opera, may be linked to a perception that is comparable to reading, to the immersion in a text.27 for adorno, the operatic ear suggests a tantalizingly pure experience of operatic audition. the listening experience he idealizes, though, is divorced from the realities of space and materiality with which the listener should also be concerned. the lp might offer freedom from the stage, but with the lp comes a new set of material behaviors, a fact adorno conveniently ignores. in fact, fred moten highlights the way in which adorno’s interpretation of the listening experience enables him to ignore rather than recognize the role of materiality in listening. in moten’s words, adorno’s structural listening is “a scene of auditory reading [… related] to the literary experience of the score,” reinforcing the transcendental, autonomous object of the work.28 technically, structural listening does rely on a set of behaviors responsive to material technologies. adorno’s end goal of being immersed in the “work,” however, valorizes the autonomous art object at the expense of actual technologies and modes of behavior that make the listening possible. later conceptions of spectatorship acknowledge the role of space in the 27 theodor w. adorno, essays on music, ed richard leppert, trans. susan h. gillespie (berkeley: university of california press, 2002), 284–285. 28 interestingly, structural listening becomes a way of listening that relies on the visual: “thus the phonographic mise-en-scène, because of and despite the structuring degradations of the culture industry, is revealed to be the most authentic site of a mode of ‘structural listening’ that approaches reading, one where development and the closed totality of the work become the objects of a kind of ocular-linguistic musical perception in which music’s textual essence comes to light. as rose rosengard subotnik puts it, this kind of structural listening ‘makes more use of the eyes than of the ears.’” fred moten, “the phonographic mise-enscène,” cambridge opera journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 271. see also stephen c. meyer, “parsifal’s aura,” 19th-century music 33, no. 2 (fall 2009): 151–172. 131steigerwald ille sound stage screen 2021/1 spectatorial experience but are broader with regards to how this space is controlled. thinking about the experience of operatic attendance rather than the isolated listening with which adorno is concerned, joy calico highlights the ambiguity of the terms “spectator” and “audience member,” noting the ways these terms privilege certain sensorial modes and thus aural (and visual) expectations.29 admittedly, focusing specifically on the operatic ear does not allow me to sidestep the ontological mire of what the audience member is actually doing—watching, or looking. invisible cities, however, makes this choice for listeners by using aural spectacle as the main consistent element of the performance. in effect, the headphones in invisible cities mirror and miniaturize the experience of acoustic containment and manipulation emily thompson describes taking place in the first half of the twentieth century as concert halls and urban spaces were cultivated with architectural acoustics in mind.30 invisible cities foregrounds the ear as the means by which the rest of the performance is perceived. in so doing, the opera offers the unique opportunity to “isolate” the ear in operatic performance, inasmuch as such a thing is possible. in so doing, we are able to explore a specific example of how heterogenous operatic ears constitute one form of operatic aurality. the operatic ear in the headphones: performing audile technique audience members of invisible cities relied on specific sociocultural notions of listening—a multiplicity of operatic ears—to synthesize components of aural and visual alike within the work. this process of interpretation was premised upon each viewer’s past experiences with modes of mobile-music consumption like smartphones and portable media players. mobile music creates a narrative world around the listener that she herself controls. invisible cities was dramaturgically oriented around these notions of individual control and imagination borrowed from mobile-music practices. just as listeners might create a narrative linking a specific song heard on their smartphone to a rainy day, crowd of apathetic commuters, or flock of birds, spectators at union station linked the sounds emanating from the headphones to the physical actions of the station, regardless of where the actual 29 joy h. calico, brecht at the opera (berkeley: university of california press, 2008), 147–48. 30 thompson, the soundscape of modernity. the operatic ear: mediating aurality132 sound stage screen 2021/1 performers in the station were located. invisible cities was also designed around an assumed fluency with portable audio technology. just as attending an operatic performance in an opera house has a set of audile techniques associated with it, so too does listening to a work using headphones.31 the ubiquity of personal mobile-music technologies such as car radios, portable media players, and smartphones in the twentieth and twenty-first century united states has drastically changed the way music and space are perceived in relation to these innovations.32 moreover, electroacoustic composition and sound art more broadly have shaped how mediated sound is both composed and heard.33 thus, the headphones were more than just a practicality of the performance. rather, these devices initiated a specific set of spectatorial behaviors. indeed, this responsive pattern to material culture has a long historical precedent. jonathan sterne’s helpful term “audile technique” explains the ways in which listeners assimilate new ways of understanding and interacting with sound in tandem with these same technologies of mechanical reproduction. as sterne makes clear, in the early twentieth century, audile techniques—like the ability to “construct an auditory field with ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ sounds”—were learned through “media contexts” and “through sound-reproduction technologies like telephony, sound recording, and radio.”34 as technologies of mechanical reproduction—and corresponding audile techniques—developed, listeners began to 31 eidsheim refers to this set of sonic expectations as a two-dimensional figure of sound, in which sound is present both in front of and alongside a group of audience members, as in a proscenium-style opera house or traditional concert hall. sensing sound, 80–95. 32 miriama young describes these modes of mobile listening as “pod music,” which “engages with the creation and transmission of an aesthetic centered on internalized experience of the voice through the inner ear.” young, “proximity/infinity: the mediated voice in mobile music,” in the oxford handbook of voice studies, 404. sumanth gopinath and jason stanyek emphasize that mobile sound culture is not new to the digital age, nor was sound “static” prior to the technological innovations of the late-nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. rather, “technological developments and socialities” of these periods produced new relationships between capital, consumers, and consequently, new sociocultural patterns of listening. sumanth gopinath and jason stanyek, “anytime, anywhere? an introduction to the devices, markets, and theories of mobile music,” in the oxford handbook of mobile music studies, volume i, ed. sumanth gopinath and jason sanyek (new york: oxford university press, 2014), 2. 33 while beyond the scope of this article, examples that resound in particular with the listening experience of invisible cities include max neuhaus’s sound installations like drive-in music (1967), janet cardiff ’s walks (1991-2019), christina kubisch’s electrical walks (20042017), and most especially, salvatore sciarrino’s lohengrin ii (2004). 34 sterne, the audible past, 137–138. 133steigerwald ille sound stage screen 2021/1 understand auditory space as private and individually constructed. this emphasis on individual control has continued to dominate rhetoric surrounding mobile-music in the forms of commercial advertising and individual behaviors alike. the twenty-first century operatic ear is a product of these material technologies and well-practiced at incorporating these behaviors. one of the greatest allures of the individual, portable music device is the way in which it allows the listener to control her experience of space. in the act of covering her ears with the soft leather of headphones, or inserting earbuds, a listener demarcates a private aural zone and shapes personal perception of the visual arena beyond this intimate aural space.35 michael bull explains that those practitioners well-versed in the use of mobile music through hardware such as the portable cassette/cd player, mp3 player, smartphone, and even automobile use sound to control and aestheticize changing urban environments, often through what he terms a “filmic” experience.36 cerrone also acknowledges the effects of these patterns of musical consumption; his compositional style is a byproduct of the dominant technologies of the latetwentieth and early twenty-first centuries. this aspect of individual control and private space contributed to his own listening practices and subsequently, those compositional practices at work in invisible cities: 35 in young’s view, this process “produces … the auditory deceit of ‘closeness.” young, “proximity/infinity,” 405. gopinath and stanyek emphasize the intimacy of this experience of mobile listening: “just as vital to the story is the use value of that relationship, one that vitally produces a number of different intimacies: the intimacy of insertion (earpiece in the ear); the intimacy of enclosure (the sonic bubble of the earphoned headspace and the womblike envelopment of the covers); the intimacy of the human other (the radio deejay, the voices of the singers); the intimacy of the distributed collective (listeners drawn together through the synchronic time engendered by radio technology). there is also, crucially, the intimacy of the body with device, that other entity beside and besides the listener.” all of these intimacies produce a “network of interrelated bonds.” sumanth gopinath and jason stanyek, “the mobilization of performance: an introduction to the aesthetics of mobile music,” in the oxford handbook of mobile music studies, volume 2, ed. sumanth gopinath and jason stankyek (new york: oxford university press, 2014), 31–32. while not necessarily focused on the headphones as intimate mediator, holger schulze puts the question of intimacy into dialogue with other types of sound art that deal with similar staging concepts as those present in invisible cities. holger schulze, “intruders touching you. intimate encounters in audio,” in the bloomsbury handbook of sound art, ed. sanne krogh groth and holger schulze (new york: bloomsbury academic, 2020), 221–234. 36 bull distinguishes between two types of filmic experiences: “specific recreations of filmic-type experience with personal narratives attached to them and more generalized descriptions of the world appearing to be like a film.” michael bull, sounding out the city: personal stereos and the management of everyday life (oxford: berg, 2000), 86–87. the operatic ear: mediating aurality134 sound stage screen 2021/1 for me, [listening on headphones] is a very immersive thing, and i think it’s a more private experience. there’s something very public about hearing or playing music live for people, and there’s something very private about the idea that you’re having this experience and maybe no one else is around you. that’s very much a part of invisible cities, the sense of walking around in a world. it’s a modality that is much more private.37 cerrone’s words demonstrate how invisible cities works to aestheticize mundane actions and spaces, a key part of the artistic mission of the industry’s early productions. moreover, the experience of turning a private technology into a public spectacle allows for a dialogic exchange between public and private experience into operatic spectatorship. the headphones give the listener personal control over her auditory, and thus visual environment in a public space. at the same time, she loses the privacy associated with headphone listening in the process of participating in the spectacle of the opera as a listener. notably, scholars of mobile music emphasize the role of the individual within the listening environment. shuhei hosokawa describes the walkman’s capacity to “[mobilize] the self ” and in that process of mobilization, what hosokawa calls the “walk act,” to indicate to others the presence of a secret as indicated by the appearance of the walkman.38 in invisible cities, the control over the experience, the sense of individuation implied by the presence of “the secret,” is paradoxical. the audience member does not control the soundscape of the opera as she would control the streaming content on her own personal device, but the success of the narrative relies on her ability to link visual with aural spectacle. moreover, the opera broadens the notion of hosokawa’s individual secret to that of a communal secret. audience member ellen described her experience of seeing invisible cities through the headphones: listening to music on my headphones is really an intimate experience i have with myself. for people of our generation, it’s what you do—you listen to your headphones. and then there’s an element of almost cinematic storytelling that happens. where you’re listening to this beautiful song, and then a but37 cerrone, interview. 38 shuhei hosokawa, “the walkman effect,” popular music 4 (1984): 175–177. hosokowa’s conception of the walk act in connection with the walkman relies upon michel de certeau’s writing on urban geographies, also pertinent to invisible cities. michel de certeau, the practice of everyday life, trans. steven rendall (berkeley: university of california press, 1984), 98. 135steigerwald ille sound stage screen 2021/1 terfly floats by—and you feel like you’re in a movie—kind of making up this story about the people around you, and the light on the grass… and when i was watching invisible cities, because i had on the headphones—for the first few split seconds, i felt like that’s what was happening, and then i realized that every person around me was doing the same thing.39 ellen’s past experiences with mobile music not only allowed her to create synchronicity between audio and visual elements in invisible cities, but also heightened her sense of communal viewership. in fact, she explained that what she termed the “vernacular of the headphones” made invisible cities both more personal and communal than an experience in an opera house. she focuses on the communal experience of the opera, rather than on the sense of individuation. in this way, invisible cities mirrors similar headphone-based gatherings such as silent disco, in which participants choose one of several tracks to listen to in a large group. reviewer sarah zabrodski, too, emphasized the sense of connection with other spectators from the perspective of a communal space: “the thrill of invisible cities lies in creating a shared focus within a space where we intuitively tend to keep to ourselves.”40 heterogeneous accounts of spectatorship crucially, the headphones scripted certain audile techniques only to those well-versed in these techniques. correspondingly, the behavior of the operatic ear is dependent upon those materials and audile techniques to which it has been conditioned. to the listener trained in habits of mobile music, the visual spectacle of the opera could be choreographed in a number of ways among various audience members. meanwhile, the spectacle of the production, as we have seen, is firmly situated in the headphones themselves. ellen’s description relies on previous experiences with mobile music: “for people of our generation it’s what you do—you listen to your headphones.” audience members were primed for the experience of mobile listening thanks to the ways the piece built upon an established social dialectic of 39 ellen’s language echoes the mode of narration and control described by bull. ellen a., interview with author, los angeles, august 22, 2016. 40 sarah zabrodski, “the public spectacle of a personal opera in la’s union station,” hyperallergic, november 14, 2013, https://hyperallergic.com/92262/the-public-spectacle-ofa-personal-opera-in-los-angeles-union-station/. the operatic ear: mediating aurality136 sound stage screen 2021/1 mobile music consumption. the material agency of the headphones, however, was predicated on an assumption: that audience members would understand the implicit signal the technology communicated about how the opera should be watched. spectator accounts of the opera paralleled the hype of the press reviews. audience member andrew emphasized the individualized experience of the work, explaining that “you could follow someone, you could see where they go and sing, and then you could follow someone else, and then they would lead you to a totally different part of the train station.”41 rita santos, who managed the supertitles for the original run of the opera and assisted in the audio booth for the opera’s performance extension, also emphasized individuality and ownership. she explained that “invisible cities is totally your own exploration—you can see invisible cities many times, and never really see every single thing that happened—yuval [sharon] didn’t even see every single thing that happened, and he was walking around every night. the point is that you never really know what is going to happen.”42 as zabrodski noted for hyperallergic: “no one observes the show in the same way … making it a highly personal, not private, experience. it is this individualized element that provides the source for sharing different stories connected by a single, very public event.”43 many glowing reviews of the work also reveal this same fluency with modes of mobile listening and individual narrative creation. at the same time, these reports demonstrate how the visual experience of the opera did not add up to a consistent narrative. for instance, alissa walker wrote in gizmodo: “i discovered that i didn’t even have to follow the story to have a transcendent experience—it was more like i was stepping in and out of different conversations between the music, the public and the building.”44 similarly, lisa napoli of national public radio member station kcrw explained that the opera “made you pay better attention to the random other humans who happened in on the experience, as they gazed with wonder or concern or even disinterest at those dancers writhing on the floor of the terminal.”45 audience members described by maane khatchatourian seemed 41 andrew a., interview with author, los angeles, august 20, 2016. 42 rita santos, interview with author, los angeles, august 18, 2016. 43 zabrodski, “the public spectacle of a personal opera.” 44 alissa walker, “a secret opera erupts inside california’s biggest train depot,” gizmodo, october 21, 2013, https://gizmodo.com/a-secret-opera-erupts-inside-californias-biggesttrain-1447832488. 45 lisa napoli, “the drama of humanity unfolds in union station—oh, and an opera, 137steigerwald ille sound stage screen 2021/1 to be even more removed from any sort of visual spectacle: “some [audience members] wandered aimlessly throughout the building, listening instead of watching.”46 each of these people had a different experience of the work. at the same time, individual spectators were left to interpret their own experience as the visual staging of the opera. by contrast, those individuals who came to the production with different expectations of the type of listening required by the show were seemingly frustrated with some parts of the structure. reviewer isaac schankler reminds readers that although “cerrone’s music provides a powerful throughline for the entire duration [of the opera],” he nevertheless missed parts of the performance. “when we re-entered the station [from another scene], there were several audience members clustered around some chairs where two men were sitting. one looked bewildered, while one was sleeping or pretending to sleep. we had clearly just missed something, but what?”47 schankler seems to be disappointed with a lack of consistency in the visual narrative as compared to the aural spectacle provided by the headphones. his reaction exhibits the conflict between how certain material technologies shape audience perceptions of aurality and corresponding behaviors of spectatorship. another reason this kind of confusion occurred had to do with the setting of the opera in crowded union station as well as the fact that all of the performers began the piece costumed in everyday, casual clothing. (audience members were marked as audience members; however, performers were unmarked.) andrew described the unexpected discovery that certain individuals in union station were actually performers. “there were moments where i was like ‘oh, i’m standing right in front of someone who is singing,’ and sometimes i didn’t even realize the singer was actually a singer [because of the way sound was processed].”48 in other cases, spectators who came expecting to see a certain performer often had a difficult time finding that performer. the point was to engage with the aural experience as an audience member, not necessarily to actualtoo,” kcrw, october 18, 2013, https://www.kcrw.com/culture/articles/the-drama-of-humanity-unfolds-in-union-station-2014-oh-and-an-opera-too. 46 maane khatchatourian, “invisible cities opera gets immersive with wireless technology,” variety, november 16, 2013, https://variety.com/2013/legit/news/invisible-cities-immersive-opera-1200841486/. 47 isaac schankler, “invisible cities: choose your own opera,” new music box, november 27, 2013, http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/invisible-cities-choose-your-own-opera/. 48 andrew a., interview. https://www.kcrw.com/culture/articles/the-drama-of-humanity-unfolds-in-union-station-2014-oh-and-an-opera-too https://www.kcrw.com/culture/articles/the-drama-of-humanity-unfolds-in-union-station-2014-oh-and-an-opera-too http://variety.com/2013/legit/news/invisible-cities-immersive-opera-1200841486/ http://variety.com/2013/legit/news/invisible-cities-immersive-opera-1200841486/ the operatic ear: mediating aurality138 sound stage screen 2021/1 ly see all of the performers heard in the headphones. that purpose, however, was implicit in the headphones themselves, not stated directly. faatoalia explained that certain friends were disappointed when they couldn’t find him or locate a specific scene they had heard about. “i tried to tell people: ‘don’t feel bad if you missed different things. just be immersed in the experience and find your own sort of show.’”49 faatoalia’s advice to his friends— “find your own sort of show”—acknowledges the way in which invisible cities relied on singular, individual operatic ears that would ideally come together to constitute narrative. conclusions: from the operatic ear to the operatic voice invisible cities inspires a definition of the operatic ear that is highly individuated and responsive to listener experience (or lack thereof) with various technological interfaces. listening to sound simultaneously live and recorded demands a correspondingly hybrid form of spectatorship. sound helps to define space and guides behaviors within this space. at the same time, an audience member has more control over the types of space she chooses to occupy as the sound moves with her. she is separate from the people at the station not wearing headphones and yet a clearly defined— even marked—member of a listening community.50 her experience of spectatorship is fragmented by her decisions in the moment, and yet contingent upon the behaviors of others. as i have demonstrated, the operatic ear does not represent a monolithic set of behaviors, nor is it a singular concept. rather, operatic ears are situated in networks of technologies, material practices, sounds, and patterns of listening. as such, they allow listeners to absorb the similarly hybrid phenomenon of the operatic voice. relying on a variety of clues and behaviors, these listeners engage in ways both predetermined and spontaneous. operatic ears are also shaped by a number of other dialectic tensions: public/private; encultured/unaware of listening practices, and agent/subject of aural production and control. in the case of invisible cities, listener experiences with headphones 49 faatoalia, interview. 50 eidsheim has explored the way invisible cities created a form of sonic differentiation between audience members and commuters at union station. she describes this as a form of sonic gentrification through the lens of “air politics.” “acoustic slits and vocal incongruences,” 302–3. 139steigerwald ille sound stage screen 2021/1 shaped both spectating behaviors and the way voices were heard. as young describes, music created for headphone distribution leads to specific types of composition, “in particular, vocalizations in sotto voce and hushed tones, articulated in close proximity to the microphone,” techniques which in turn, lead to a “new aesthetic” of composition.51 the intimate aesthetic young describes certainly fits the bill for the production of invisible cities, in which performers drew on a range of pop-music techniques to sing in an appropriate way. as tenor faatoalia explained to me, “i think my experience with mikes before on pop and contemporary projects helped for sure to learn how to balance and engage [in invisible cities].”52 young’s words also reveal how the operatic ear might be understood as byproduct of the mediated ears of the twentiethand twenty-first centuries. the “fabricated aesthetic” she describes is meant to encapsulate the intimacy of the headphones, and this is certainly true of the pop aesthetic so described by cerrone when speaking of invisible cities. as such, the operatic ear indicates how operatic voices will be produced and subsequently heard. in turn, the notion of operatic aurality offers a new way to consider how practices of performance are inherently reliant upon other contexts. just as ear produces voice and voice produces ear, so too is this relationship of mutual production an interstitial one.53 by this i mean that spaces of possibility are produced in the context of aurality, and the mutually constitutive relationship i am describing will produce further heterogeneities of listening and spectatorship. i began by putting hermeneutic analysis in conversation with new materialism, and this dialectic is, i believe, a helpful way to conclude. invisible cities ends with a dramatic scene in which the kublai khan, who has previously been dressed in contemporary clothes, emerges in a dramatic costume as the emperor at the height of his glory. he faces marco polo, who stands at the other end of the historic ticketing hall of union station.54 the pair is surrounded by the now fully-costumed cast, as well as the headphone-wearing audience members who have been ushered into the space by stage managers. as the two face one another, polo and the quartet sing a repeating chorus: “kublai khan | seek and find | who and 51 young, “proximity/infinity,” 406. 52 faatoalia, interview. 53 see ochoa gautier, aurality, 22. 54 for a sense of the production locations as associated with specific scenes, see “select a scene at union station,” invisible cities: experience, accessed july 23, 2020, http://invisiblecitiesopera.com/experience/. http://invisiblecitiesopera.com/experience/ http://invisiblecitiesopera.com/experience/ the operatic ear: mediating aurality140 sound stage screen 2021/1 what, | in the midst of the inferno, | are not the inferno. | make them endure, | give them space.” this proscenium-like spectacle combines liveness, recorded sound, shared and fragmented-headphone space, voices, and ears. aurality offers a similar sort of amalgamation of signifiers. the important thing is to discover what signifiers—material, hermeneutic, and otherwise—are present, and to give them space to sound and be heard by listening operatic ears. 141steigerwald ille sound stage screen 2021/1 works cited abbate, carolyn. “music—drastic or gnostic?” critical inquiry 30, no. 3 (spring 2004): 505–536. adorno, theodor w. essays on music. edited by richard leppert. translated by susan h. gillespie. berkeley: university of california press, 2002. bull, michael. sounding out the city: personal stereos and the management of everyday life. oxford: berg, 2000. calico, joy h. brecht at the opera. berkeley: university of california press, 2008. calvino, italo. invisible cities. translated by william weaver. new york: harcourt brace jovanovich, 1974. de certeau, michel. the practice of everyday life. translated by steven rendall. berkeley: university of california press, 1984. duncan, michelle. “the operatic scandal of the singing body: voice, presence, performativity.” cambridge opera journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 283–306. ebright, ryan. “doctor atomic, or: how john adams learned to stop worrying and love sound design.” cambridge opera journal 31, no. 1 (2019): 85–117. eidsheim, nina sun. “acoustic slits and vocal incongruences in los angeles union station.” in eidsheim and meizel, the oxford handbook of voice studies, 301–313. ———. the race of sound: listening, timbre, and vocality in african american music. durham, nc: duke university press, 2019. ———. sensing sound: singing and listening as vibrational practice. durham, nc: duke university press, 2015. eidsheim, nina sun, and katherine meizel, eds. the oxford handbook of voice studies. new york: oxford university press, 2019. erlmann, veit, ed. hearing cultures: essays on sound, listening, and modernity. oxford: berg, 2004. feldman, martha, emily wilbourne, steven rings, brian kane, and james q. davies. “colloquy: why voice now?” journal of the american musicological society 68, no. 3 (fall 2015): 653–685. gopinath, sumanth, and jason stanyek. “anytime, anywhere? an introduction to the devices, markets, and theories of mobile music.” in the oxford handbook of mobile music studies, volume i, edited by sumanth gopinath and jason sanyek, 1–34. new york: oxford university press, 2014. ———. “the mobilization of performance: an introduction to the aesthetics of mobile music,” in the oxford handbook of mobile music studies, volume 2, ed. sumanth gopinath and jason stankyek (new york: oxford university press, 2014), 1–39 hosokawa, shuhei. “the walkman effect.” popular music 4 (1984): 165–180. kahn, douglas. noise, water, meat: a history of sound in the arts. cambridge, ma: mit press, 1999. kendrick, lynne. theatre aurality. london: palgrave macmillan, 2017. meyer, stephen c. “parsifal’s aura.” 19th-century music 33, no. 2 (fall 2009): 151–172. moreno, jairo. “antenatal aurality in pacific afro-colombian midwifery.” in remapping sound studies, edited by gavin steingo and jim sykes, 109–134. durham, nc: duke university press, 2019. moten, fred. “the phonographic mise-enscène,” cambridge opera journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 269–281. the operatic ear: mediating aurality142 sound stage screen 2021/1 novak, jelena. postopera: reinventing the voice-body. farnham: ashgate, 2015. ochoa gautier, ana maría. aurality: listening and knowledge in nineteenth-century colombia. durham, nc: duke university press, 2014. pearson, mike. “site-specific theatre.” in the routledge companion to scenography, edited by arnold aronson, 295–301. abingdon: routledge, 2017. risi, clemens. “the diva’s fans: opera and bodily participation.” performance research 16, no. 3 (2011): 49–54. ritchey, marianna. composing capital: classical music in the neoliberal era. chicago: university of chicago press, 2019. schulze, holger. “intruders touching you. intimate encounters in audio.” in the bloomsbury handbook of sound art, edited by sanne krogh groth and holger schulze, 221–234. new york: bloomsbury academic, 2020. serra, richard. “the yale lecture.” in art in theory, 1900-2000: an anthology of changing ideas, edited by charles harrison and paul wood, 1096–1099. oxford: blackwell, 2003. steege, benjamin. helmholtz and the modern listener. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2012. steigerwald ille, megan. “bringing down the house: situating and mediating opera in the twenty-first century.” phd diss., university of rochester, 2018. ———. “live in the limo: remediating voice and performing spectatorship in twenty-first century-opera.” the opera quarterly 36, no. 1 (2021). published ahead of print, january 7, 2021. https://doi. org/10.1093/oq/kbaa012. ———. opera for everyone: experimenting with american opera in the digital age. ann arbor: university of michigan press, forthcoming. sterne, jonathan. the audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction. durham, nc: duke university press, 2003. thompson, emily. the soundscape of modernity: architectural acoustics and the culture of listening in america, 1900–1933. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2002. trippet, david. “sensations of listening in helmholtz’s laboratory.” essay review of helmholtz and the modern listener by benjamin steege. studies in history and philosophy of science 47 (2014): 124–132. young, miriama. “proximity/infinity: the mediated voice in mobile music.” in eidsheim and meizel, the oxford handbook of voice studies, 403–418. abstract opera scholarship often begins with the voice then moves to the ear. but what if we move in the opposite direction? that is, what can we discover about operatic sounds by focusing on how processes of listening are mediated by social and technological patterns of behavior? i use the industry’s 2013 production of christopher cerrone’s opera invisible cities, which relocated the audiovisual space of the opera house to a set of wireless headphones worn by each audience member, to think through these questions. in this article, privileging the ear over the voice allows us to consider the ways digital technologies create equivalent modes of understanding operatic listening as simultaneously fragmented, interstitial, and relational. https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbaa012 https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbaa012 143steigerwald ille sound stage screen 2021/1 rather than focusing on the acoustic perception of sound as it relates to the concert hall, here i am interested in highlighting the material significance of the headphones themselves in the production. i put interviews and public press reviews in dialogue with the body of rich scholarship around historical and contemporary modes of listening (eidsheim, sterne, ochoa gautier, steege). i situate these headphones within a history of mobile listening and behaviors in order to understand what elements shape the twenty-first century operatic ear. i argue that the modes of spectatorship used in invisible cities built upon an established sociocultural tradition to show audience members how to successfully listen to the work. in focusing on the headphones, i demonstrate the significance of material technologies in constituting operatic aurality. keywords: mediation, aurality, spectatorship, opera, headphones. megan steigerwald ille is an assistant professor of musicology, educator at the college-conservatory of music, university of cincinnati. her research focuses on the roles of place and digital mediation in the twenty-first century u.s. opera industry. she is currently working on a book on the los angeles-based opera company the industry titled opera for everyone: experimenting with american opera in the digital age, that considers the impact of experimental spectatorship practices on contemporary operatic performance. she has published articles in the journal of the society for american music and the opera quarterly. × article contents folk music in de santis’s caccia tragica the power of the peasants’ soundscape: whistles and bells sounds on paper: noi che facciamo crescere il grano conclusion appendix footnotes article folkloric voices in neorealist cinema: the case of giuseppe de santis * giuliano danieli sound stage screen, vol. 2, issue 1 (spring 2022), pp. 31–70, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2022 giuliano danieli. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss16776. in 1952, the screenwriter and film theorist cesare zavattini (1902–1989) published “alcune idee sul cinema” (some ideas on the cinema), which is generally regarded as the retrospective manifesto of neorealism. the article extolled the “factual” nature of the new italian cinema, notably its quasi-documentary approach to the harsh reality of poor people living at the periphery of the nation, the use of nonprofessional actors playing themselves, the adoption of dialect, and the abolition of the cinematic apparatus. however, zavattini failed to acknowledge that the music and voices of subaltern subjects also merited consideration, if their world was to be faithfully captured on screen. [1] antonella sisto, among many others, has ascribed this inattention to sound to the supposed “lack of audiophilia” of neorealism, deriving from its “monosensory, visual foundation.” [2] this formulation of the problem surely contains a degree of truth—in his article, for instance, zavattini adopts a language that refers almost exclusively to the semantic field of “seeing”—, but it relies too much on the dubious polarization “image vs. sound,” which may be unhelpful for a more nuanced understanding of neorealist filmmaking. zavattini’s inattention to sound derives not so much from the supposed hierarchical superiority of the image as from the absolute precedence given to the broader concepts of plot, narrative, and characters. thus, it would be more accurate to introduce the issue of music and sound in neorealist film from the perspective adopted by richard dyer in his pivotal article “music, people and reality,” where he noted that a discrepancy existed between the plots, situations, and environments portrayed by neorealism—“a movement presumed to be about creating a cinema genuinely expressive of ordinary people’s reality”—and their seemingly conventional soundtracks. [3] in other terms, richard dyer has observed that neorealism often relied on well-established norms of film-scoring practices, despite the fact that, on every other level, it wanted to overcome cinematic convention. the soundtracks were the work of composers such as alessandro cicognini, mario nascimbene, goffredo petrassi, giuseppe rosati, and renzo rossellini. their late-romantic or modernist symphonic style clearly contradicted the purported aim of providing a transparent recording of the reality of the films’ protagonists—sub-proletarians, disadvantaged workers, beggars, peasants, fishermen, and so forth. in fact, the “music of the people” (folk tunes, popular and military songs, religious chants) featured in only a small minority of neorealist works, most often as source music. a fundamental incongruity lurked behind the fact that while neorealism’s ambition was to reduce “the distance between the films and their protagonists”, its typical subjects “cannot speak for themselves: music is needed to speak for them. but that music will not be their music.” [4] neorealist soundtracks, notes dyer, established an implicit hierarchy: the point of view on narrated events, usually expressed by non-diegetic music, was entrusted to a musical idiom that was foreign to the cultural world of the subjects portrayed; as such, their voices risked being drowned out and disempowered by the voices of the filmmakers. while agreeing with dyer’s general observation, i think that the assertion that neorealist films were oftentimes deaf to the music and voice of the people portrayed deserves further thought. the case of giuseppe de santis (1917–1997), one of the leading figures of italian postwar cinema, helps complicate dyer’s account. [5] de santis allocated a special place to folk songs and melodies, which were often the vehicle through which he allowed his protagonists—peasants and proletarians—to express a socialist worldview (one that he himself shared). in 1953, de santis even planned to make a film entitled canti e danze popolari in italia (folk songs and dances in italy). the project, rejected by goffredo lombardo, head of the film production company titanus, was conceived as a celebration of folk culture and music through the cinematic representation of traditional songs and dances from various parts of italy as collected, recorded, studied, and edited by the director and his assistants. [6] the rationale of canti e danze showed analogies with the ethnographic and ethnomusicological field research that was being carried out across italy around this time. in 1948, ethnomusicologist giorgio nataletti founded the cnsmp (centro nazionale di studi di musica popolare, currently known as the archivi di etnomusicologia) at the accademia nazionale di santa cecilia, which promoted fieldwork campaigns that made it possible to record and study an unprecedented amount of folk music. the most famous of these expeditions was the one with alan lomax and diego carpitella (1954–55), who travelled backwards and forwards between south and north italy, collecting thousands of folk songs and drawing an extensive map of italian musical folklore, which ignited a growing interest in this multifarious repertoire, especially among leftist intellectuals. a few years earlier, carpitella had joined ernesto de martino’s team expeditions to basilicata, calabria, and apulia. such experiences were informed by the idea that the cultural (and musical) world of the folk deserved to be studied and rescued from imminent extinction, not least because it was considered the bearer of positive values that the hegemonic capitalist system was obliterating. [7] the ideology and concerns of these campaigns had much in common with de santis’s canti e danze and, more generally, with his rural cinema. as i will show in this article, de santis’s films proved important agents in the process of elaboration and popularization of discourses about folk music in postwar italy, and the director attempted to empower voices that until then had remained unheard. the undeniable fact that this process was all but unambiguous makes it even more urgent to study it in depth. in keeping with this tenet, this article listens to, and looks at, the folkloric voices in de santis’s caccia tragica ( tragic hunt, 1947). [8] this film—as the others de santis made in the following years, such asriso amaro (bitter rice, 1949) and non c’è pace tra gli ulivi (no peace under the olive tree , 1950)—focuses on the cultural and political conflict between peasant communities and rapacious oppressors—the former group representing anti-hegemonic socialist values, the latter being symbolic of capitalist individualism. in the first part of the paper, i consider how music in caccia tragica provides de santis with a fruitful means of establishing the dichotomy “folk culture vs. capitalism” that was to become a trope between postwar italian marxist intellectuals, ethnographers, and ethnomusicologists who proclaimed the subversive power of the folk. not only did de santis’s representation of folk music sanction such discursive divide; as i shall show, at certain key junctures de santis’s films short-circuit the relationship between folk music and capitalism. i therefore ask whether blurring the boundaries between these two opposite poles might help to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which folk music was perceived in 1950s italy. by posing this question, my contribution resonates with maurizio corbella’s recent article on the musicscape of riso amaro, which “unintentionally reveal[s] fields of tension between the cultural values, hierarchies, and divides” in postwar italian culture, notably the precarious position occupied by popular music. [9] the second part of my study stretches beyond music alone by considering the broader folkloric soundscape invented by de santis. in particular, i claim that the sounds of bells, whistles, and clapping are just as important as music in constructing the anti-hegemonic values and force of de santis’s protagonists. dyer’s point on music in neorealist films—his implicit question about the disempowerment of the other’s voice—is complicated by this more comprehensive scrutiny of de santis’s soundtracks, which testifies to the director’s attempt to empower the subaltern through a number of sonic elements that would become characteristic of folkloric soundscapes in italian film. to substantiate my analyses of music and sound in caccia tragica, i do not limit the discussion to the released version of the film, but i also look at archival documents that shed light on de santis’s and his collaborators’ creative process. furthermore, i complement the discussion of this film with the examination of the unpublished script of noi che facciamo crescere il grano ( we who grow grain, ca. 1953), which i could study at the fondo de santis of the centro sperimentale di cinematografia, rome. this unfinished project proves not less crucial to understand de santis’s construction of the folkloric voice. [10] folk music in de santis’s caccia tragica de santis always demonstrated a marked interest in folklore and peasant culture. [11] between 1947 and 1950, he shot the so-called trilogia della terra (trilogy of the land), comprising three films set in rural areas of northern and central italy (the minefields and paddies of the po valley and the ciociarian mountains) which focused on farming communities and their stories of solidarity and resistance (caccia tragica, riso amaro and non c’è pace tra gli ulivi). in some ways, de santis’s works can be seen as a continuation of the rural strand that, under the fascist regime, had resulted in films such as alessandro blasetti’s sole (sun, 1929) and terra madre ( mother earth, 1931). yet, whereas fascist cinema generally portrayed field workers in an idyllic fashion, exploiting their alleged authentic rural traditions to reinvigorate a sense of national pride, de santis’s was a cinema of crisis that aimed to delve into the open wounds of postwar italy, notably by criticizing the status quo from the perspective of subaltern people and by extracting socialist messages from his rural exempla. [12] de santis’s cinematic output seems both to be informed by and act as a precursor to principles that resemble the gramscian notion of “ nazional-popolare,” which became a common theme in italian intellectual debates during the 1950s. mention could be made of a few essays by antonio gramsci in his prison notebooks, published in 1950: for example, “osservazioni sul folklore” (“observations on folklore”) encouraged the critical study of folk culture as a historical, subaltern “conception of the world,” one which was autonomous and in opposition to hegemonic culture. [13] in notebook 21 on popular literature, gramsci introduced the concepts of “national-popular” art and that of the “organic intellectual.” he claimed that “a national-popular literature, narrative and other kinds, has always been lacking in italy and still is” because of the gulf that existed between the worlds of intellectuals and ordinary people; an “organic intellectual” should arrive and finally bridge the gap between these universes, so as to guide (and be guided by) the folk towards higher levels of self-awareness and socio-political agency. [14] although de santis was unaware of gramsci’s vision, his work was not far from it, given that he wanted to make a national-popular cinema that could give voice to and empower the subaltern. [15] however, as many scholars have noted, his films do not offer an entirely straightforward rendition of the world in which his characters move. de santis’s was a “poetic realism,” a re-elaboration of reality that enabled a number of questions about society to emerge in a quasi-brechtian way. [16] the director himself defined his films as an instance of hybridity: “hybridization of genres is, in my opinion, the key to my cinema”. [17] thus, while narrating stories of peasants, he adopted a cinematic language that was also informed by american popular movies and russian cinema. [18] his poetics of hybridity often blurred the line between established cultural divides, such as the one that saw folk culture as essentially opposed to the capitalist universe. such ambivalences speak of the director’s own contradictory impulses, and leave a permanent mark on his films. this also applies to their music, the soundtracks interspersing preexisting folk repertoire (or, better, what at the time was considered to be “musica popolare” [folk music]), popular music, and newly composed film scores in symphonic style. in the pages that follow, i ask what values were attached to these musical repertoires (especially folk music and popular music) and explore what they reveal about the different ways in which postwar italian culture listened to the folkloric voice. given the space available here, i limit my discussion to caccia tragica, the first chapter of the trilogia della terra. caccia tragica takes place in the po valley immediately after the second world war. it is a parable of national reconstruction and class solidarity after years of devastation caused by the conflict, a story of desperate veterans returning from the front and poor peasants trying to unite to start a new communal life built on socialist values. there are four main protagonists. giovanna and michele are peasants working in a cooperative and, along with the community of field workers, they represent the film’s positive pole; representing the bad side of human nature is another couple, daniela and alberto, who are bandits. at the beginning of the film, the latter couple commits a robbery, stealing the money needed by the cooperative to lease land and agricultural machineries, and kidnapping giovanna (michele’s wife), whom they take as a hostage. daniela and alberto embody individualist and consumerist values, posing a threat to the peasant community’s peace and unity. yet alberto is an ambiguous villain: although daniela, his lover, has convinced him to become a bandit, he had actually been michele’s comrade during the war, sharing the shocking experience of the german concentration camps with him. as such, there is an unspoken bond between alberto and michele, preventing the former from being totally subsumed by an individualist vision of the world. indeed, as the film unfolds, we witness alberto’s gradual repentance. although he initially supports daniela and tries to flee with her from the community, who “hunt” them down to retrieve the money and rescue giovanna, he ultimately gets tired of his criminal life, sabotaging his partner’s evil plans and freeing their hostage before then embracing the cooperative’s socialist values. the soundtrack for caccia tragica includes several popular songs and folk melodies as sung and heard by members of the farming community (“ canti popolari,” as the director often calls them in the script). these pieces are associated with various rural traditions, as well as political songs heard and sung by the portrayed farmworkers. alongside these, several cues composed by giuseppe rosati also punctuate the action. rather than having a mere denotative role, popular music is here infused with values that help define the characters and develop the sociopolitical message that de santis had in mind. he typically associates folk music with the good characters, while reserving the use of popular music—the voice of capitalism, of mass culture—for the villains. in so doing, he contributed to the musical articulation of the “folk music vs. capitalism” dichotomy, which, as noted above, was becoming fashionable at the time. yet the boundary between these two poles is not always as clear-cut as one might imagine. fig. 1. giuseppe de santis, caccia tragica (1947). still frame at minute 00:42:19 (see note 19). the film’s central scene provides a good example of how de santis creates a link between popular music and the villains. at minute 00:41:07, [19] we see the bandits with their hostage giovanna in a country villa, a secret refuge where they have gathered to discuss their criminal plans. the place is filled with visual references to consumerism, such as advertisements, a bottle of champagne, and a radio (see figure 1). we hear the broadcast of a series of well-known wartime songs: the swing tune “begin the beguine,” the patriotic american march stars and stripes forever by john philip sousa, a partisan song (“avanti siam ribelli”), and the nazi-tainted tune “lili marleen” (which had become popular during the war both in germany and among its enemies). as guido michelone has observed, de santis here wants to “narrate and explain, through the music, the italian situation at the time” by drawing attention to the increasing “intrusion of americanism at the level of mass culture, a model that was replacing both the fascist rhetoric and genuine folk culture.” [20] as in de santis’s other films (such as riso amaro), the presence of musical reproduction devices (such as the radio or the gramophone) symbolizes the threat posed by mass culture, particularly american popular culture. [21] in this scene, the radio seems to commodify american music, war, and resistance songs by featuring them in a continuous stream that reduces all music into mere objects of aesthetic consumption. daniela, the antihero of caccia tragica, is passionately fond of the radio. as she talks to alberto about their crimes and future aspirations, she expresses her individualist vision of the world and desire to become famous like a star (“today everyone is thinking about us [because of our robbery]”, she exclaims). this moment is accompanied by “lili marleen,” which she is particularly fond of (indeed, “lili marleen” is her nickname). daniela is thus linked with a tune that, although appropriated in the 1940s by the allied troops, also had strong nazi connotations. [22] more importantly, she is associated with the world of popular music as epitomized by the radio. alberto’s position towards “lili marleen” and the radio, by contrast, is somewhat different. when the song starts, he tries to turn the device off (figure 2), yet daniela insists the song be allowed to play on. these simple gestures clearly signal the gap between the two protagonists and their cultural models. alberto oscillates between daniela’s individualism and the allure of capitalist culture on the one hand, and the more traditional values of solidarity embodied by giovanna and michele on the other. the parable of sin and repentance that ultimately leads him to embrace the cooperative’s communal life at the film’s ending is therefore prefigured in this scene on a musical level—i.e., as an attempt by alberto to reject popular music (and the radio) along with the values which are implicitly attached to it. fig. 2. de santis, caccia tragica. still frame at minute 00:47:40 (see note 19). while daniela is unequivocally associated with “lili marleen,” alberto is here musically characterized by the partisan song “avanti siam ribelli.” it is surely not coincidental that this music—which obviously had a positive connotation for de santis as well as, most likely, much of his audience—begins to play just as alberto tells giovanna of his guilt over his immoral life. as observed above, alberto is not a real villain and daniela’s dangerous appeal proves for him to be only a temporary departure from the good values associated with his rural upbringing. the allure of capitalism brings him to the verge of losing contact with the “genuine folk”—i.e., the peasant community. the scene thus seems to represent alberto’s unsettled and confused state of mind through a musical analogy. “avanti siam ribelli” is a reminder of the folk’s revolutionary power, and yet its juxtaposition on the radio to american popular music and “lili marleen” suggests that it has been commodified. in linking “avanti siam ribelli” with alberto’s remorse, de santis talks of the positive values embodied by this music; at the same time, he imagines a scenario in which the partisan song could be corrupted (just like alberto when he embraces daniela’s values), becoming an object of mere aesthetic consumption as it enters the domain of popular music mediatized by the radio. in other scenes in the film, folk music serves as a powerful agent of moral development and solidarity. in the sequence that precedes his final repentance (01:07:33), we see alberto fighting an irate michele who wants revenge for the kidnapping of his wife by his former comrade. michele hits alberto, calling him a “coward” and a “traitor.” while this happens, we hear the utterances of some veterans in the background; they are speaking at a meeting for the creation of the national popular front, which is taking place nearby. ironically, their speech is all about solidarity, peace, and mutual support (“no discord, no divisions between us”); yet the two fighters—particularly michele—seem oblivious to these words. it is only when one of the veterans’ chants is heard (01:09:17) that michele stops hitting alberto and forgives him for his crimes, thereby enabling him to be readmitted into the community. folk music thus acts as a cohesive agent: it provides the most effective expression of a mutually supportive community, the vehicle through which the sinner (alberto) can be pardoned and reject his individualistic ambitions. the fact that folk music in caccia tragica is imbued with socialist values and poses a serious threat to those who represent capitalism is also suggested by a scene in the original script that was ultimately deleted from the final cut: [23] daniela is on a boat with the hostage giovanna. while they are rowing down a river, the singing of the veterans heading towards their meeting resounds from one of the riverbanks. the scene’s physical, political, and moral space is defined through music. daniela wants to remain in the middle of the river because the song, which threatens her individualist conception of the world, grows louder when the boatman gets closer to the banks. folk music is perceived by the villain as a powerful and haunting presence. from what has been said above, it is apparent that de santis generally adheres to a straightforward binary opposition between folk and popular music, respectively, as the repositories of revolutionary/progressive values on the one hand and regressive/consumerist principles on the other. nevertheless, certain moments in caccia tragica complicate this rather simplistic, black-and-white divide. i have already noted how the use of “avanti siam ribelli” in the radio scene touches on this problematic dichotomy. at other points in the film, we find folk music accompanying the emergence of reactionary values. a good example occurs at the beginning of the film. here, the field workers are being forced by some of their despotic landowner’s henchmen to return the lands and agricultural machinery that they have been leasing; at the same time, a smaller group of peasants who have just arrived on some carriages help the henchmen to execute the landowner’s orders. the local community is thus internally divided, and the mercenaries mock the other peasants by singing the “osterie,”—i.e., certain well-known sarcastic folk songs (00:09:22). here, folk music becomes a divisive element rather than a tool that encourages social solidarity. the broader idea that the folk, as a revolutionary force, is immune to and rejects hegemonic culture is questioned in certain scenes within this film as well as in others that de santis directed. there are moments in which the peasants are shown to be enjoying the morally equivocal sounds of capitalism. the complex scene with the veterans’ train is a case in point (00:58:32). in this instance, some of the villains (alberto and a few black market dealers) and the peasants share the same physical and sonic space, since they are both on a train where a band is playing a “boogie-woogie” (see figure 3). while the performance is a musical index of deleterious americanism, the peasants nevertheless seem to be enjoying it. in the original script, de santis indicated that he wanted a folk tune to be performed here, whereas in the film’s final version the voice of the peasants has been erased and replaced by american music. of course, this might be read as the director’s critique of the risks of cultural contamination. on the other hand, this musical choice could also be interpreted as indicating the director’s penchant for hybridization, which informs at least part of the soundtrack and enables unexpected exchanges to emerge between folk culture and mass-mediated culture. fig. 3. de santis, caccia tragica. still frame at minute 00:58:56 (see note 19). the above examples show that different values are associated with folk music in de santis’s caccia tragica. even if its connection with the positive characters generally seems to prevail, folk music can also be entrusted to negative characters that are driven by individualist interests. moreover, members of the folk community seem at times to be allured by the sounds of consumerism. these short circuits certainly add complexity to the simplistic dichotomy “folk music vs. capitalism” (which is nevertheless at work in many scenes) and point to a broader tension that characterized postwar italian culture at large. indeed, the wave of folklorism that emerged in the wake of the publication of gramsci’s “osservazioni sul folklore” in 1950—a wave which found its immediate outlet in the aforementioned ethnographic and ethnomusicological expeditions, and culminated with the folk music revival movement in the 1960s and 1970s—was plagued with latent and unavoidable contradictions. in an article published in 1978, diego carpitella denounced the “false ideology” that informed the rediscovery of musical folklore. in his view, questionable paternalism and essentialism often lurked behind the revivalists’ attitude towards folk culture, depriving it of its agency. furthermore, carpitella noted that the call for “authenticity” by those who wanted to popularize folk music was in fact leading to a commodification of the repertoire, which was almost always decontextualized and spectacularized. such inconsistencies in the “ideology of folklore” were the result of the impossible attempt to deny the dialectical relationship existing between the revived folk music and the (capitalist) cultural system into which it was being introduced. [24] i contend that these insightful reflections—especially the point on the dialectic between folk music and capitalism—can be fruitfully applied to the representation of folk music in de santis’s soundtracks, for they appear to foreshadow questions that would become burning in the following decades. the power of the peasants’ soundscape: whistles and bells. there are other productive ways to explore de santis’s approach to the voice of the portrayed folkloric communities, and to address dyer’s questions about hierarchies and sonic representation of the subalterns. one such way is to abandon a music-centered perspective and focus instead on sound effects. elena mosconi has claimed that neorealism was characterized by a new sensibility towards sounds and noises. indeed, many italian postwar films portrayed not only landscapes, but also soundscapes “that were neglected by previous cinema.” [25] these soundscapes, i would add, were invested with cultural, ideological, and political values. this is particularly true for de santis’s films, where recurring sonic elements characterize and tend to empower the represented subaltern communities and their space. in the following pages, i shift my attention from traditional musical values to a consideration of the complex folkloric soundscape in caccia tragica. i discuss, in particular, the crucial role played by whistles and bells. [26] while i acknowledge that these sounds belong to different fields of human expression, discussing them together enables me to show how they achieve similar communicative and political functions in caccia tragica, and how they both provide the represented people with means to threaten the film’s villains and their values. the act of whistling pervades a scene in caccia tragica which follows the aforementioned “radio” episode. at 00:52:25, we see the bandits leaving their refuge, which has been discovered and put under siege by michele and his fellow companions. daniela, alberto, and their accomplices make their way through the surrounding crowd by using giovanna, their hostage, as a human shield. however, their escape is soon transformed into a walk of shame. one of the peasants starts whistling, and the gesture is repeated by his companions (see figure 4). a choir of whistles subsequently accompanies the bandits. daniela is the only one who shows indifference, while alberto looks nervous and frightened. whistling simultaneously empowers the peasants whilst also weakening the bandits. fig. 4. de santis, caccia tragica. still frame at minute 00:53:33 (see note 19). whistling is a sonic signifier of peasants and proletarians in many italian films. [27] a systematic examination of the role of whistling in narrative cinema is long overdue. here i will limit myself to a few general observations. whistling is often connected with ideas of difference and excess. in fact, with its potential noisiness and its distance from verbal language, whistling occupies a disreputable position. people have always whistled, but this sonic act inhabits the fringes of official culture, as testified by the difficulty of finding studies that explore its history, and by the rarity, in the musical realm, of professional whistlers. [28] whistling is often associated with the lowest classes and their supposedly rude behavior. it is not surprising, then, that well-mannered bourgeois rarely whistles in italian postwar films; this act is generally associated with people living on the edge of society, in particular peasants, miners, rascals, proletarians, and protesters. whistling implies the violent emission of high-pitched sounds, which defy the rationale, measured logic of verbal discourse, the dominant norm of logos. a good way of thinking about whistling—or at least some forms of whistling, which can be heard and seen in italian films portraying folk communities—is by drawing a parallel with nadia seremetakis’s definition of “the screaming” ( klama) in her ethnography of women’s mourning practices in inner mani, greece. seremetakis understands screaming in women’s laments as a bodily, excessive acoustic utterance that, for its violence and distance from the hegemonic acoustics based on low voices and “rational” sounds related with language, retains a certain degree of “transgression.” she argues that inner mani women “disseminate the signs of transgression through screaming. screaming is tied to the condition of anastatosi, disorder and inversion.” [29] for its excess, screaming participates in “dangerous” and “contagious” threatening attitudes against dominant powers, and it “demarcates and encloses a collectivity of subjects in exile.” [30] in a similar vein, we can read whistling as a marker of cultural, social, and political difference, which may be why italian directors frequently link it with folkloric or peripheral worlds that are believed to resist the hegemonic realm. as with klama, the excessive, abnormal whistling can represent a threatening and transgressive sound. this emerges with clarity if we go back to the aforementioned scene in caccia tragica. while the peasants are holding rifles, they cannot use these against the villains because a gunfight would potentially harm giovanna, the hostage. whistling, then, offers an alternative form of resistance. one of the peasants starts whistling and is immediately followed by the others as a sort of vocal ensemble that submerges the bandits—an effect that is visually reinforced by the dolly shot of the whistling people, and the shot/countershot showing the reaction of the villains. the idea of a threatening choral sound that stems from the initiative of an individual is a strong metaphor of solidarity, and the crescendo effect that is obtained through this process of sonic accumulation is a particularly effective way to show the overwhelming power of the folk’s whistling. [31] the sound of bells, like whistling, is another index of the folkloric space. in caccia tragica, bell sounds provide an additional way of symbolizing the peasants’ power. [32] if one thinks of the historical significance of bells in rural communities, this comes as no surprise. in his seminal study village bells, alain corbin discusses several values with which bells have been connected throughout different periods of european history, and he shows how they have been fundamental in shaping social time and space (one that is physical, spiritual, and political). indeed, before the advent of industrialization, bells were one of the most important sounds, and although their centrality and power declined with the onset of metropolitan soundscapes, they nonetheless retained a certain degree of relevance in the “peripheries” (i.e., towns and rural villages), hence their connection with the folkloric soundscape. [33] steven feld, who has also devoted himself to studying and recording bells, has reflected on how they can “signal both authority and disruption”—that is, they are invested with power in certain historical and social contexts. [34] caccia tragica is only one of many italian films in which bells are used to define the folkloric world. [35] what is interesting, here, is that the peasants’ bells exhibit a powerful agency of their own, an acoustical force that stands in opposition to the capitalist world. they can be heard at many points in the film, notably when the peasants ring them to mobilize the whole community in chasing the bandits (00:29:02: “sound the alarm with town bells, too!”). beyond this narrative circumstance, however, it is the quasi-expressionist treatment of their sound which makes them such a powerful signifier of the peasants’ antagonism. by using this acoustic device, de santis tends to blur the lines between the diegetic and the non-diegetic, and to play with our sense of space: indeed, in many scenes, the villains’ voices are drowned out by loud bell ringing, which seems to come from nowhere. for example, the bandits’ refuge is clearly located in an isolated area, and yet bells invade and pervade this space, often disrupting the communication between the villains in a way that reinforces the idea of folk as representing a haunting, controlling presence. at 00:39:40, daniela is shown entering a room to meet some of her accomplices. when she opens the door, the bells suddenly fill the air. the unnaturalness of the sync-point somehow empowers their sound by making it seem abnormal, strange, and unexpectedly spectral. later in this scene (00:45:40), daniela enters another room: the bells, which had stopped ringing, now invade her space once again. one of the accomplices hears them and makes an ironic comment about the peasants’ uprising (00:45:53); daniela will do the same while talking to alberto only a couple of minutes later in the film (00:47:47). this seems to contradict the idea that the bells occupy a non-diegetic space, but the sync-points prepared by de santis and the anomalous volume create an expressionistic effect of estrangement that would not be possible without the ambiguous blending of the diegetic and the non-diegetic. elsewhere (00:32:26–00:33:11) de santis opts for more traditional sonic bridges: different scenes and spaces in the film are connected through the bells’ sound—something which gives the impression that the bells (and by extension the peasants and their voices) are everywhere. sounds on paper: noi che facciamo crescere il grano before concluding, it is worth devoting a few words to an unfinished film project which de santis conceived in relation to thetrilogy of the land. the script for the film in question, entitled noi che facciamo crescere il grano (we who grow grain), is kept at the csc archive, and it was written in the 1950s by the director himself, in collaboration with corrado alvaro and basilio franchina. the aim of the authors was to narrate the precarious conditions of farm laborers in calabria in the years following the second world war, where latifundism, unemployment, and poverty were long-standing problems. drawing on real events that took place in corvino, near crotone, the film aimed to focus on peasant resistance against the exploitative system enjoyed by the landowners. folk music and sounds would have played a crucial role in relaying this conflict and in conveying the film’s progressive message. the film’s main protagonists are annibale zappalà and his family. with the aid of the town’s schoolteacher, who somehow epitomizes the gramscian “organic intellectual,” annibale tries to obtain the usufruct of the fief of san donato—an area of uncultivated land which figures among the territories managed by the authoritarian don carmelo zampa on behalf of the latifundist baron balsamo—from the crotone authorities. annibale convinces the community to rebel against don carmelo and sign a petition to obtain the fief, to which the peasants had legal rights. this consequently triggers a violent conflict between the peasant community and don carmelo. arrested by corrupt policemen, annibale is then released; he subsequently goes on to lead a peasant revolt which culminates in their reclaiming of these lands, don carmelo’s defeat, and ultimately annibale’s death, through which he becomes a sort of martyr. since the project was never completed, it is impossible to ascertain whether de santis planned to accompany this film with an orchestral score, as he had done in his previous productions. nevertheless, the script’s draft provides an insight into the role that sound and musica popolare would have played in the film. apart from decorative, atmospheric moments where folk music would have primarily added a touch of local color to the events portrayed, there are several other scenes in which this repertoire fulfills a crucial dramatic and ideological role. [36] a notable example occurs halfway through the film. after his initial attempts to occupy the lands and return them to the peasant community, annibale is arrested and imprisoned in la castella, a fortress built on a small island. tragic events follow: a landslide hits the village of corvino and causes the death of titta, one of annibale’s sons. out of despair, assunta secretly goes to the prison where her husband is confined and breaks the terrible news to him. in order to circumvent the jailers’ control, she improvises a dirge beneath the fortress’ walls. assunta performs her funeral lament from a boat, just below the cliff where annibale’s prison is located, and her song conceals the act of informative and emotional exchange that is happening between the pair. folk music thereby serves as a powerful way to transgress the oppressors’ control. a similar thing happens in riso amaro, where one of the mondine (rice weeders) explains to one of the protagonists, francesca, that “they [the landowners] don’t let us talk; if you have anything to say, sing it.” [37] an even more striking connection with noi che facciamo can be found in vittorio de sica’s ieri, oggi, domani ( yesterday, today and tomorrow, 1963). [38] in the film’s first episode (adelina, set in naples), the protagonist (a cigarette smuggler) is put in jail. one night, her husband carmine manages to reach the prison walls where he begins to sing a serenade under her window. carmine’s song provides a means to bypass the guard’s control and inform adelina of the mercy petition that has just been submitted. as this example reveals, the trope of using folk music to express subversive power seemingly had a long life in italian film. but, once again, it is especially through sound that de santis seeks to empower the folk’s voice. even in the case of noi che facciamo, the folkloric soundscape is not composed exclusively of songs, for it also includes numerous non-verbal signals that seeks to undermine the capitalist oppressors’ order. the first attempt by don carmelo and the police to disband the peasants fails. in this instance, the weapon used by the community against their enemies is the sound of clapping. this scene thus invites comparison with the one discussed earlier in caccia tragica that makes use of whistling. in both cases, whistles and clapping are used in a crescendo that goes from individual to group performance, and from low volume to high. [39] steven connor has provided an insightful ethnography of clapping, noting how the principle of “adversity”—an impact of things, namely hands—is a precondition of this gesture. as he explains, “clapping retains its associations with violence, functioning as an emblematic display on the body of the aggressor of what may be in the offing for his victim.” [40] of course, this violent, oppositional understanding of clapping is just one of many possible cultural interpretations of this gesture. connor acknowledges, for example, that clapping can also be linked to magical actions, therapy, and celebration, among other things. yet this reading fits perfectly with the situation relayed by the script of noi che facciamo. what is more, connor highlights how clapping “makes you aware of yourself” and facilitates a “circulation of energies” between the clapping subjects, which is precisely the same kind of empowerment that de santis’s peasants seem to experience. [41] the last fight between the peasants and the landowners is also accompanied by a complex audiovisual dramaturgy—one that is not dissimilar from the strategies that de santis had already employed in caccia tragica, with its alternation of villain and peasant sounds. here, the opposition is between a sowers’ song initiated by annibale and imitated by all the peasants, and the sound of the trotting horses of don carmelo’s henchmen. [42] this scene occurs immediately before the end of the film. the land has been reoccupied by the peasants following the authorization on behalf of the crotone committee. yet don carmelo refuses to capitulate and sends instead three horsemen to kill annibale and convince the peasants to vacate the property. while don carmelo’s plan ultimately fails, annibale does indeed get killed, in a portrayal of the villain’s last atrocity before the final triumph of the community of peasants. the conflicting groups are sonically characterized by the opposition between the sewers’ song, which becomes a threatening weapon that invades the villains’ space through a few sound bridges, and the trotting horses, whose noise periodically emerges and occasionally drowns out the other sounds. the juxtaposition of these two auditory elements creates the necessary counterpoint to enhance the underlying tension of this climactic scene. in keeping with the socialist ideal, we witness a shift from the individual singer to the singing community, and from a fleeting solo voice to the full-bodied chant of a whole group, magnified by the choral reprise of annibale’s song after his death, at the end of the planned film. conclusion in the script of noi che facciamo crescere il grano, folk music functions as a repository of anti-capitalist values, a socially-binding agent that inspires the peasants to rebel against the oppressors and their individualistic mentality. the discourse on folk music that emerges from this film, then, seemingly fits in well with the “folk culture vs. capitalism” dichotomy outlined by many leftist intellectuals and folk music rediscoverers at around the same time. such a dichotomy became even more marked during the 1960s, when the use of folk music became increasingly political, the surrounding debates displaying an obsessive concern about its alleged separation from consumerist, bourgeois society. de santis’s films are prescient in that they anticipate the tenor of these debates whilst also offering a complex picture of their subject. in caccia tragica the border between folk and capitalist culture is sometimes blurred. admittedly, short-circuits in this discursive divide are quite exceptional in de santis, but such exceptions are of particular interest, not least because they highlight ongoing tensions in italian society that cannot be addressed by black-and-white narratives that enshrine folk music as an antidote to capitalist culture. the seeming contradictions in de santis’s soundtracks show that a simplistic view of folk music (i.e., as repository of anti-capitalist values) in fact belies a more complex, dialectic reality. hence the importance of studying the representation of folk music in neorealist films, in spite of (or maybe because of) dyer’s observation that their soundtracks were inconsistent with the aims of this kind of cinema. the case of de santis’s films also shows that the claim about neorealism as being indifferent to the voices of subaltern groups is not entirely accurate. a study of the soundscapes constructed by de santis in his rural films gives a vivid impression of the director’s attempt to empower—literally and metaphorically—the voice of the folk (albeit through the inevitably artificial means and conventions of narrative cinema). the “resonance” given to bells, whistles, and clapping in caccia tragica and noi che facciamo endows the peasants with a strong, haunting sonic presence that poses a serious, tangible threat to their enemies. in this respect, the sonic strategies adopted by de santis to characterize his protagonists appear to be less ambiguous and more robust than his musical choices. mapping the folkloric soundscapes in other films by de santis and his contemporaries is the next step of a research—to my mind long overdue—aimed at exploring in a nuanced fashion the modus operandi and cultural politics that underpin the construction of subaltern voices in postwar italian cinema. **** appendix transcriptions of the original scripts in the fondo giuseppe de santis, biblioteca luigi chiarini, centro sperimentale di cinematografia, rome. doc. 1: excerpt from caccia tragica. sezione sceneggiature, sceneggiatura 1946–1947, sceneg 00 09691. 292 unbound pages, a4; typescript with autograph annotations. doc. 2: excerpt from noi che facciamo crescere il grano. sezione sceneggiature, sceneggiatura 1949, sceneg 00 09686. bound volume, a4; typescript with autograph corrections. doc. 3: excerpt from noi che facciamo crescere il grano. doc. 4: excerpts from noi che facciamo crescere il grano. * i want to express my gratitude to the staff of the biblioteca chiarini at the centro sperimentale di cinematografia (rome), who allowed me to study the archival documents kept at the fondo giuseppe de santis. all translations from italian (including the original scripts from the director’s archive) are mine, unless otherwise indicated. [1] cesare zavattini, “some ideas on the cinema,” sight and sound 23, no. 2 (1953): 64–69; originally published as “alcune idee sul cinema,” rivista del cinema italiano 1, no. 2 (1952): 5–19. for an overview of the history and theory of neorealism, see: mark shiel, italian neorealism: rebuilding the cinematic city (london: wallflower press, 2006); gian piero brunetta, il cinema neorealista italiano: storia economica, politica e culturale (bari: laterza, 2009); torunn haaland, italian neorealist cinema (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2012). [2] antonella sisto, film sound in italy: listening to the screen (new york: palgrave macmillan, 2014), 83. in the fourth chapter of her book (“the soundtrack after fascism: the neorealist play without sound”) sisto links the “lack of audiophilia” with neorealism’s passive acceptance of dubbing practices deriving from fascist cinema, and with the directors’ resistance against technologies of direct sound recording. however, this does not necessarily mean that neorealist filmmakers had no interest in sound as such, nor that their fabricated soundtracks played ancillary roles. the case of de santis’s rural films explored in this article demonstrates quite the opposite. [3] richard dyer, “music, people and reality: the case of italian neo-realism,” in european film music, ed. miguel mera and david burnand (aldershot: ashgate, 2006), 28–40: 28. [4] dyer, “music, people and reality,” 28. see also: sergio bassetti, “continuità e innovazione nella musica per il cinema,” in storia del cinema italiano, vol. 8, 1949–1953, ed. luciano de giusti (venice: marsilio, 2003), 325–35. [5] dyer mentions de santis’s films in his article and devotes part of his discussion to riso amaro. however, his method and questions are partly dissimilar from mine, as i shall clarify in the following pages. [6] a copy of the thirteen-page project of canti e danze and a letter attesting goffredo lombardo’s feedback on the film proposal are held at the director’s archive (giuseppe de santis, “ canti e danze popolari in italia,” sceneg 00 09796, sceneggiature soggetto 1950–1960, fondo giuseppe de santis, centro sperimentale di cinematografia, rome). for a transcription of canti e danze (without the related correspondence with lombardo), see antonio vitti, ed., peppe de santis secondo se stesso: conferenze, conversazioni e sogni nel cassetto di uno scomodo regista di campagna (pesaro: metauro, 2006), 491–95. [7] on the organization of the expedition, and the development of ethnomusicology in postwar italy, see: diego carpitella, ed., l’etnomusicologia in italia: primo convegno sugli studi etnomusicologici in italia (palermo: flaccovio, 1975); alan lomax, l’anno più felice della mia vita: un viaggio in italia 1954–1955 , ed. goffredo plastino (milan: il saggiatore, 2008); francesco giannattasio, “etnomusicologia, ‘musica popolare’ e folk revival in italia: il futuro non è più quello di una volta,” aaa – tac 8 (2011): 65–85; maurizio agamennone, ed., musica e tradizione orale nel salento: le registrazioni di alan lomax e diego carpitella (agosto 1954) (rome: squilibri, 2017). on the figure of ernesto de martino, his work and his collaboration with diego carpitella, see: ernesto de martino, morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico. dal lamento funebre antico al pianto di maria , ed. marcello massenzio (turin: einaudi, 2021; 1st ed. 1958); de martino, la terra del rimorso. contributo a una storia religiosa del sud (milan: il saggiatore, 2020; 1st ed. 1961); diego carpitella, “l’esperienza di ricerca con ernesto de martino,” in conversazioni sulla musica (1955–1990): lezioni, conferenze, trasmissioni radiofoniche (florence: ponte alle grazie, 1992), 26–34; george r. saunders, “‘critical ethnocentrism’ and the ethnology of ernesto de martino,” american anthropologist 95, no. 4 (1993): 875–93; maurizio agamennone, ed., musiche tradizionali del salento: le registrazioni di diego carpitella ed ernesto de martino (1959, 1960) (rome: squilibri, 2008); giorgio adamo, ed., musiche tradizionali in basilicata: le registrazioni di diego carpitella ed ernesto de martino (rome: squilibri, 2012). [8] i fully agree with michel chion’s notion of “audio-vision,” which implies a re-evaluation of the intertwined nature of all the components of audiovisual media. see michel chion, audio-vision: sound on screen, 2nd ed., trans. claudia gorbman (new york: columbia university press, 2019). in this article i attempt to show parallelisms and contrasts between sound, montage, and framing in film, for these elements complement each other and all are fundamental for the emergence of discourses on folklore. [9] maurizio corbella, “which people’s music? witnessing the popular in the musicscape of giuseppe de santis’s riso amaro (1949, bitter rice),” in music, collective memory, trauma, and nostalgia in european cinema after the second world war , ed. michael baumgartner and ewelina boczkowska (new york: routledge, 2020), 45–69: 47. see also francesco pitassio, “popular tradition, american madness and some opera: music and songs in italian neo-realist cinema,” cinéma & cie 11, nos. 16/17 (2011): 141–46. [10] for reasons of space, this paper does not take into account riso amaro and non c’è pace tra gli ulivi. nevertheless, it is my intention to devote a future article to the discussion of folk music, sound, and audiovisual strategies in these films (particularly on the less-studied non c’è pace ), which will enable me to expand on some of the points examined here. [11] for an overview of de santis’s cinema, see: antonio vitti, giuseppe de santis and postwar italian cinema (toronto: university of toronto press, 1996); marco grossi, ed., giuseppe de santis: la trasfigurazione della realtà / the transfiguration of reality (rome: centro sperimentale di cinematografia, 2007). [12] pepa sparti, ed., cinema e mondo contadino: due esperienze a confronto: italia e francia (venice: marsilio, 1982); michele guerra, gli ultimi fuochi: cinema italiano e mondo contadino dal fascismo agli anni settanta (rome: bulzoni, 2010). [13] antonio gramsci, “observations on folklore,” in the antonio gramsci reader: selected writings, 1916–1935, ed. david forgacs (new york: new york university press, 2000), 360. [14] gramsci, “concept of ‘national-popular’,” in the gramsci reader, 368. [15] on this topic, see: vitti, peppe de santis secondo se stesso, 189, 231 and 235. revealing of some connections between de santis and gramsci’s thought are also the director’s reflections in “cinema e narrativa,” film d’oggi 1, no. 21 (1945): 3. [16] see joseph luzzi, a cinema of poetry: aesthetics of the italian art film (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2014). [17] the translated passage is quoted in corbella, “which people’s music?”, 48. [18] one point that triggered harsh criticism and that appears to have been a source of anxiety for de santis himself is the director’s ambivalent attitude towards american culture. de santis was strongly influenced by american film, but at the same time he criticized american capitalism and its articulation through mass-media; see peter bondanella, italian cinema: from neorealism to the present (new york: ungar, 1983), 82-85. de santis never denied his admiration for the literature of the new deal era, which he considered one of neorealism’s sources of inspiration, and for american western and musical films. nevertheless, de santis’s reactions to interviewers’ and critics’ comments sometimes betrayed an anxious need to establish some distance between his cinema and the american models. in an exchange with antonio vitti, for instance, he bypassed this intuitive remark of the interviewer: “i’ve always wondered why you feel bothered when critics notice elements in your films coming from american westerns” (see peppe de santis secondo se stesso, 189; see also, in the same volume, vitti’s interviews with de santis at pages 61, 66 and 170–73, and vitti’s article “l’influenza della letteratura americana sul neorealismo”, 21–36). moreover, while de santis declared on several occasions his respect for american democracy, he also took a stance against the consumerist side of american culture, symbolized by “boogie-woogie, chewing gum, easy money”—elements that are nevertheless extremely seductive in his films; quoted in francesco pitassio, neorealist film culture, 1945–1954. rome, open cinema (amsterdam: amsterdam university press, 2019), 40. on the ambiguous cultural politics and ideologies that informed postwar italian leftist circles, see stephen gundle, between hollywood and moscow: the italian communists and the challenge of mass culture , 1943–1991 (durham, nc: duke university press, 2000). [19] i refer here to the streaming file available online: “caccia tragica (giuseppe de santis) 1947,” youtube, uploaded on october 12, 2021. the film has never been distributed on dvd, but, to my knowledge, some vhs copies were released in the 1990s by gruppo editoriale bramante – pantmedia, mondadori video and videoclub luce – videorai. [20] “raccontare e spiegare, attraverso la sola musica, la situazione in cui versava l’italia di allora,” “un’invadenza americana a livello di cultura di massa che ha sostituito sia la retorica fascista sia la genuinità popolaresca.” guido michelone, “dal boogie al neorealismo: musiche e colonna sonora in caccia tragica,” in caccia tragica: un inizio strepitoso, ed. marco grossi and virginio palazzo (fondi: quaderni dell’associazione giuseppe de santis, 2000), 29. [21] see corbella, “which people's music?”, 58. [22] in the film, these connections are indirectly reinforced by the fact that “lili marleen” is heard immediately after the end of “avanti siam ribelli”. [23] “caccia tragica – sul fiume c’è ancora la guerra ,” sceneg 00 09691, sceneggiature 1946–1947, fondo giuseppe de santis, centro sperimentale di cinematografia, rome. de santis erased a few sentences in the original script, as reflected in my transcription (see appendix, document 1). [24] see diego carpitella, “le false ideologie sul folklore musicale,” in diego carpitella, gino castaldo, giaime pintor et al., la musica in italia: l’ideologia, la cultura, le vicende del jazz, del rock, del pop, della canzonetta, della musica popolare dal dopoguerra ad oggi (rome: savelli, 1978), 207–39; diego carpitella, “etnomusicologica. considerazioni sul folk-revival”, in conversazioni sulla musica, 52-64. see also: goffredo plastino, “introduzione” and marcello sorce keller, “piccola filosofia del revival”, in la musica folk: storie, protagonisti e documenti del revival in italia , ed. goffredo plastino (milan: il saggiatore, 2016). [25] elena mosconi, “per un paesaggio (sonoro) italiano: ri-ascoltare il neorealismo,” in invenzioni dal vero: discorsi sul neorealismo, ed. michele guerra (parma: diabasis, 2015), 239–54: 246. [26] in this article i must limit my discussion to caccia tragica, but other italian postwar films feature whistles and bells as distinctive elements of rural/folkloric soundscapes. some examples are mentioned in notes 27, 32, and 35. [27] like caccia tragica, some films use the subalterns’ whistles in a non-musical way. this is the case of the whistling boys in the last scene of roma città aperta (dir. roberto rossellini, 1945): the noisy sound they produce can be intended as an expression of solidarity to don pietro and protest against his execution. in many other italian films—especially from the 1960s and the 1970s—whistles acquire musical value; nevertheless, they are almost always associated with folkloric, rural, and exotic contexts—i.e., with ideas of spatial and cultural otherness. pier paolo pasolini’s films abound in scenes where the “sub-proletarian” protagonists whistle folk tunes (e.g., ninetto davoli in decameron, 1971, and canterbury tales, 1972). other films adopt the whistle as an element of the extradiegetic score: particularly famous are the whistles of alessandro alessandroni that resonate in the music by ennio morricone for lina wertmüller’s i basilischi (1963) or for sergio leone’s western films. [28] there is scant literature on whistling. the most recent and comprehensive study is a brief history of whistling, by john lucas and allan chatburn (nottingham: five leaves publications, 2013). see also: peter f. ostwald, “when people whistle,” language & speech 2, no. 3 (1959): 137–45; a.v. van stekelenburg, “whistling in antiquity,” akroterion 45 (2000): 65–74. the reflections by steven connor in beyond words: sobs, hums, stutters and other vocalizations (london: reaktion books, 2014) might also prove useful to make sense of the act of whistling and its communicative values. connor focuses on “the world of sound events beyond articulate speech” (10); whistling does not feature in his analysis, but connor’s idea that “the [non-articulated, non-verbal] noises of the voice” (10) can have semantic, political, and cultural values might be productively applied to an ethnography or a history of whistling (both in cinema and beyond). [29] nadia seremetakis, the last word: women, death, and divination in inner mani (chicago: university of chicago press, 1991), 72. [30] seremetakis, the last word, 101. [31] the use of sonic crescendos associated with the folkloric world will become a trope in de santis’s films (for instance, in riso amaro and non c’è pace tra gli ulivi) and was also employed by other postwar italian directors (e.g., roberto rossellini, vittorio de seta), a topic i will discuss in another article. [32] in “per un paesaggio (sonoro) italiano,” mosconi examines the presence and role of bells in various neorealist films. as an example of bells used by peasant communities to resist the oppressors, she mentions the case of vivere in pace ( to live in peace, 1947, dir. luigi zampa). mosconi’s article does not provide close readings but proves a stimulating starting point for further analyses. [33] alain corbin, village bells: sound and meaning in the 19th-century french countryside , trans. martin thom (new york: columbia university press, 1998). see also: luc rombouts, singing bronze: a history of carillon music (leuven: lipsius leuven, 2014). [34] steve feld and donald brenneis, “doing anthropology in sound,” american ethnologist 31, no. 4 (2004): 469. [35] see, for instance, the opening of luchino visconti’s la terra trema (1948) and cecilia mangini’s stendalì (1960). [36] the first scenes are full of references to “joyful” folk songs and instrumental pieces for mouth harp and accordion, which help construct the idea of a folkloric environment. see, for instance, scene 2: “nell’aria il suono sottile e struggente di uno scacciapensieri” (in the air, the thin, heartbreaking sound of a mouth harp); “[paolo, one of zappala’s sons] suonando allegramente il suo scacciapensieri” (cheerfully playing his mouth harp); scene 3: “ogni tanto una fisarmonica fa sentire la sua stanca musica” (every now and then, you could hear some weary music coming out of an accordion); scene 5: “[paolo] canticchia allegramente” (sings merrily); see “noi che facciamo crescere il grano,” sceneg 00 09686, sceneggiature 1949, fondo giuseppe de santis, centro sperimentale di cinematografia, rome (see appendix, document 2). [37] see corbella, “which people’s music?,” 52–56. [38] for a comprehensive overview of this film, see gualtiero de santi and manuel de sica, eds., “ ieri, oggi, domani” di vittorio de sica: testimonianze, interventi, sceneggiatura (rome: associazione amici di vittorio de sica, 2002). [39] see appendix, document 3. [40] steven connor, “the help of your good hands: reports on clapping,” in the auditory culture reader, ed. michael bull and les back (oxford, new york: berg, 2003), 68. [41] connor, 72–73. [42] see appendix, document 4. × article contents the enormous voice of a pianississimo megaphone: technologies of public intimacy microphone: technologies of close-up intimacy the instruments’ grain: techniques of haptic intimacy tuning into the small sounds: techniques of hyper-intimacy conclusions footnotes article shocking intimacy: techniques, technologies, and aesthetics of amplification in clara iannotta’s intent on resurrection * giulia accornero sound stage screen, vol. 1, issue 2 (fall 2021), pp. 5–33, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2021 giulia accornero. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss15487. the bones i feel inside my skin are scaffolding that holds me in. earth will glean them when i’m chaff, and wafted off. those bones will be an implement, an ornament or instrument. fingers will wrap themselves around the hollow sound. they’ll play the bones fortissimo, disturb me when i’m lying low. intent on resurrection—spring, or some such thing. (dorothy molloy, “playing the bones,” hare soup) bring your hand to your ear and gently brush a finger from the earlobe up to the cartilage, before spiraling down towards the canal. what do you hear? michel chion would call these “small sounds.” [1] small sounds can reveal themselves in a broad palette of textures: rub a fingernail on the pad of your thumb, close to the ear, and the sound will transform into something “crisper.” their “small” quality however endures in their “weight-image”—that is, the perceived “strength of the cause in relation to our own scale,” regardless of what that cause is and whether or not we identify it. [2] while chion’s definition focuses on the small scale of their source of emission, i want to draw attention to the feeling of intimacy these sounds generally convey. they may bring to mind the image of a child’s room resounding with the whispered words of a bedtime story. or we might imagine the soothing sounds of a hairbrush running through our hair; or even the smack of a kiss that reddens our skin, embracing for an instant the whole of our face. in the epigraph above, the irish poet dorothy molloy envisions yet another world of small sounds deep underground. she can hear the “hollow sound” of her bones pounding “fortissimo,” damped by the deafening silence of the earth. [3] molloy’s poem also serves as the epigraph to clara iannotta’s intent on resurrection – spring or some such thing (2014), a work which invites us to question: what would happen if one attempted to listen to small sounds outside of these intimate, contained spheres? in a concert hall, for example? what happens to small sounds when they are transplanted in a public, larger space of interaction, possibly crowded with people, breathing, yawning, whispering, and brushing their arms against the velvet of their armchairs? in this article i explore how italian composer clara iannotta (b. 1983) brings small sounds to the public in the first minute of intent on resurrection (measures 1–13). [4] audio excerpt. beginning of clara iannotta, intent on resurrection, track no. 1 of a failed entertainment: werke 2009–2014, performed by ensemble intercontemporain, conducted by matthias pintscher, edition rz 10023, 2015. with permission of edition rz. what are the instruments, techniques, and processes that occasion or allow for small sounds? how does our listening craft small sounds, and vice versa? in answering these questions, i will look closely at the relationships between their modes of production, materialities, and aesthetics, paying particular attention to how the affordances of the actors involved exercise technological agency. [5] the more closely we examine small sounds, try to define them, or pin down their acoustic or perceived origin, the more they resemble a moving target, revealing the limits of chion’s static definition. reconsidering small sounds also leads me to shed new light on music-theoretical elements, such as dynamic signs, and the role of techniques and technologies in generating a sound quality that exists only at the intersection of the acoustic and the perceived worlds. [6] by articulating the technological means harnessed to allow for such a quality to emerge, we reveal the conditions that are necessary for a sound to be recognized as intimate—even when it is experienced in a large public venue. [7] first, a few words about my approach. the discursive frameworks commonly associated with the construct of new music—the field in which iannotta locates herself—could potentially have provided a predetermined context for my investigations of her work. [8] i will nevertheless keep them at a critical distance. i want to eschew the implicit historiographical discourse of “new music,” which posits a unified trajectory in which individual composers, acting in their capacity as rational minds, mark the progress of western art music—minds that, as if guided by “immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession,” [9] ensure a unified trajectory in the history of music creation. [10] i also want to avoid the temptation of this discourse to turn materials and mediators into black boxes—opaque devices that unidirectionally transform ideally determined inputs into ideally forecasted outputs. [11] i am interested instead in what we might gain if we shift our focus from the rational agency of human actors, and towards an alternative perspective that construes the composer as simply one actor in a network among others, thereby privileging an understanding of agency as distributive. [12] this leads me to follow bruno latour in decoupling action from consciousness, treating the composer instead as a “node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled.” [13] it also allows me to draw attention to how mediators “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry,” [14] and can thus be understood as part of an actor-network. and finally it compels me to jettison normative a priori understandings of this or that entity and their causal relations—be it an instrument and a performer, a composer and an architecture, or an affect and a new technology—in favor of a close observation of how action is distributed and translated between them. [15] thus, in this article, i explain intent on resurrection’s small sounds not in conjunction with the course of new music, but rather in relation to the emergence and withdrawal of the affordances of the sonic techniques and technologies of the past century. the focus on mediators also leads me to lend the concept of affordance significant weight. in music at hand: instruments, bodies, and cognition, jonathan de souza provides a useful point of reference for how the notion of affordance could be productive for the field of music studies, in particular when it comes to the interactions between humans and objects. relying on psychologist james j. gibson’s definition of affordances as “possibilities for action by a particular agent,” de souza reminds us that gibson thought of them “independently of an agent’s need or skills,” and thus independently of human intentionality. [16] in the next sections, therefore, i will guide you through an exploration of the affordances of megaphonic and microphonic amplification as they emerge from the first measures of intent on resurrection. these affordances, i will show, are part of scientific and artistic discourses that have been around since the invention of megaphones and microphones—and even earlier, when the microphone was just an imagined device—showing how the distribution of compositional agency is not just a synchronic phenomenon but also a diachronic one: it cuts through history. this exploration will also lead me to the discovery of unexpected forms of interplay between affordances and abilities. on the one hand, i will reveal how the affordances of small sounds as acoustical objects shock the listener, setting out parameters for action. small sounds invite us to focus our attention into their qualities, amplify them in our awareness, and perceive the sensation that is coupled with such a change in focus—the sensation of entering a zone of intimacy. on the other hand, we, as listeners, also bring into the network bodily and cognitive affordances that shape how we might perceive and identify small sounds. [17] while following intent on resurrection’s small sounds at the intersection of the acoustic and the perceived worlds, between human and instrumental technologies, we will necessarily follow the linear trajectory imposed by the means of writing. i hope, however, to disrupt the idea that such a trajectory reflects a specific line of causation. as listening is always at the boundary between nature and culture, we should expect that our affordances craft small sounds just as much as small sounds (and the network of techniques and technologies involved in their production) craft our abilities. the enormous voice of a pianississimo now imagine that you are holding an electric megaphone. bring your mouth as close as possible to its mouthpiece, turn it on, and move your lips and tongue “slowly and irregularly,” as if you were sucking a piece of candy. [18] actually, you already have part of this technology at hand—or better, at face—as the sound of your mouth can provide you with an approximation if you are in a silent enough room. intent on resurrection begins with the notation of these actions, entrusted to the flutist, the clarinetist, and bassoonist (see fig. 1). fig. 1. first page of clara iannotta’s score of intent on resurrection – spring or some such thing. the sounds obtained from these prescribed bodily movements are immediately mediated by electric megaphones placed on stands in front of each performer. the megaphone conceals within it a microphone located at the mouthpiece, which receives the acoustic sound and transforms it into an electric signal; a transistor, which amplifies the input electrical current into a more powerful output; and a loudspeaker, which transduces the electric signal into acoustic waves, amplified further by travel through the exponentially widening concentric ducts of the reentrant horn. on the score, iannotta indicates the sound quality these bodily actions should produce: a pianississimo (ppp). are these meant to be small sounds? what that ppp stands for is unclear, as the megaphone amplifies the mouth sound. if this sign is supposed to apply to the sound of the mouth before it is mediated by the megaphone, it would require the performers to focus and nuance their own mouth sounds. this interpretation however proves problematic because the closeness of the megaphone’s mouthpiece—“almost touching [it]”—makes it impossible for the performers to listen to their mouth sounds before mediation. they can sense and control their own mouth sounds only through the megaphone’s voice. perhaps, then, the pianississimo applies to an ideal mouth sound that the performers do not actually hear but convert in their imagination from the magnified sound of the horn. the performers then control their mouth sounds based on the feedback they hear from the megaphone. but the megaphone’s auditory feedback is complicated further by the presence of “audio feedback”—also known as the larsen effect—that is created by a positive loop gain between the megaphone and the mouth, which acts as both a sounding board and a locus of production. as iannotta explains in the performance notes: nb: opening the mouth slightly, one can cause feedback with a very strong dynamic. the effect itself is very pleasant, and it can be integrated into the texture as long as one moves away from the mouthpiece as soon as one hears the feedback emerging in order to maintain a quiet dynamic. [19] the performers must therefore also modulate their closeness to the microphone in order to obtain and control the faint growl of the larsen effect, coupled with the magnified sound of their mouth, while maintaining the “quiet dynamic” iannotta prescribes. thus, the mouth sound is from the beginning a megaphonic sound, produced in network with the megaphone. the pianississimo the performers must strive for thus quickly loses any quantitative connotation. the level of the constantly changing acoustic mouth sound has an average of 40 decibels (dba), with peaks of 60 when the tongue strikes the hard palate. however, a 50-watt megaphone amplifies that sound to 90 dba near the source—with peaks of 100 when, for example, the tongue is striking the hard palate—and has the potential to cover over 700 meters. (according to the american agency for the occupational safety and health administration, a construction site produces circa 100 dba.) [20] the pianississimo must therefore be a qualitative descriptor, rather than a measure of loudness quantifiable in decibels. preserving a ppp despite amplification means preserving the quality of chion’s “small sounds”—ensuring that no matter how loud, the small sound conjures small sources. dynamic signs thus begin to assume a different depth. so far, we have observed that small sources are one of the defining features of small sounds, just as chion suggested. the following exploration of the technologies harnessed in intent on resurrection will show, however, that focusing on small sources is not enough. megaphone: technologies of public intimacy having scrutinized how performers, the megaphone, and the notation interact in producing small sounds, i now want to locate the activity of the megaphone within a constellation of historical uses—thereby highlighting what i earlier called the “diachronic” distribution of compositional agency. these uses feed into the affordances of amplification that iannotta’s composition allows to emerge or withdraw to produce an aural-affective experience of intimacy in a large public venue such as a concert hall. what here is called a megaphone is the combination of a microphone and a horn. [21] the history of sound amplification and its cultural meanings have already been thoroughly examined, [22] but i now want to take a closer look at the horn’s basic affordance—the power to project sound across space—by considering the ways in which thomas edison’s aerophone (1878) was advertised. the aerophone, which today we might understand as a kind of megaphone, was exalted for its power to cover space and reach large gatherings of people, a power enacted in settings “from suffrage protests to the english admiralty.” [23] through it, edison believed, “the declaration of independence may be read so that every citizen in any one of our large cities may hear it.” but coverage was only one of the possible social constructions of the aerophone’s projective power. edison also imagined that his invention could be used to reduce distance in communication, so that for instance “steamships [could] converse at sea.” [24] in this case, the projective power of the megaphone was directed towards cutting through space and generate a sense of proximity, acting as a sort of (unprivate) telephone. intriguingly, the aerophone was designed to work in tandem with yet another piece of technology called the megaphone, as shown in figure 2, which at that time was an ear trumpet shaped to enhance the sound, but only at the receiver’s end. in edison’s imagination, not a crowd, but “two persons provided with this instrument, [were] enabled to converse in the ordinary tones of voice some miles apart.” [25] in other words, the projection power of the aerophone could afford to spread the loud word of its user to a public (i.e., to cover space), as well as to serve as the bridge for an intimate conversation between two users at a distance (i.e., to cut space). fig. 2. “the latest of mr. edison’s inventions,” daily graphic, july 19, 1878. iannotta’s megaphone displays a similar dual functionality. in the first measures of intent on resurrection, the megaphone participates in an actor-network constituted by sounds that are characterized by low air pressure, and a concert hall, which is generally optimized for orchestral sounds and imposes predetermined distances between performers and public. thus, in this environment, the megaphone becomes a prosthesis that establishes contact between the small movements of the performer’s mouth, and you, sitting multiple rows away in the audience. it thus generates a sense of closeness and intimacy that is customarily associated with the soundscape of the private sphere, despite concert-hall distances. [26] what could otherwise be heard only at close proximity now cuts through space to touch you. [27] this touch is also enhanced by the fact that the horn seems to be unmediated: unlike a normal microphone, there are no cables or loudspeakers dislocated from the sound source. at the same time, the megaphone’s power to cover space serves the public nature of a concert hall. while small sounds are usually heard at close range, giving the impression that they are reserved for you alone, the megaphone generates a sense of proximity for an entire concert hall. thus, an aural and affective oxymoron comes into being: an intimacy meant for public consumption, a proximity within imposed distance. through its affordances, the megaphone becomes a technology of public intimacy—that is, a technology that can mass-generate a feeling we are meant to experience alone. there are other ways in which the megaphone reinforces this oxymoron, distorting sound on both a material and a semantic level. as it is designed to magnify mid-high frequencies the most, in order to enhance the clarity of the articulated speech, it inevitably colors the intimacy of mouth sounds with a metallic overtone: “the anonymous bray of the infernal megaphone,” in virginia woolf’s notorious words. [28] moreover, the megaphone can be detached from the sound source to create an acousmatic setting. this is a feature that has been variously exploited towards artistic effect. [29] the megaphone of intent of resurrection is clearly visible on stage, but the audience entertains an indirect relation with the actual sound source—i.e., the performer’s mouth—because the megaphone also covers it. when we hear someone speaking through a megaphone, we might easily identify the sound source as the whole speaking body. but in the case of iannotta’s small sounds, the source is the mouth alone, and more specifically the inner cavity. looking at the megaphone “in action,” one is confronted with a disturbing ambiguity: does the megaphone simply cut out of our view the sound source it puts us in aural touch with, or does it instead become part of the performer’s face, revealing the actual sound source—i.e., the new megaphonic persona? [30] in the first case, by covering the sound source, the megaphone might “amplify” for the audience the feeling of an “unnatural” or “artificial” contact. [31] but in the second case, by witnessing the megaphone as an integral part of the performer’s body, we are reminded that bodies are mediators themselves. from this perspective, the dualism of natural and artificial starts to dissolve, and the various mediators (bodies included) are co-defined by the affordances and abilities revealed in a certain activity—in this case, through the production of small sounds. a close reading of this actor-network has shown how the megaphone transforms both the acoustic sound it brings forth and its meaning in ways that are ultimately independent from the composer’s intention—or, at the very least, that shape the composer’s intention. megaphones never simply serve as prostheses, understood in the narrow sense of “devices that extend the body’s ‘natural’ sound-producing capacities.” [32] rather, this amplification technology, by “mak[ing] sounds that do not already exist,” acquires the poietic function that johnathan de souza attributes to musical instruments. [33] according to de souza, we can salvage the word prosthesis (and rehabilitate the prosthetic qualities of instruments) insofar as we understand the term in accordance with philosopher bernard stiegler: “a ‘prosthesis’ does not supplement something, does not replace what would have been there before it and would have been lost: it is added.” [34] we can say that the megaphone as prosthesis does not represent the boundary between the “natural” human being and an artificial apparatus, but rather rearticulates what we thought of as the performer’s body in a new uncanny persona. microphone: technologies of close-up intimacy let us now shift our focus to the microphonic component of the electric megaphone. electric megaphones combine the technology of the horn with a microphone, which has the power to gain, magnify, and transmit the faintest sounds through either the horn or loudspeakers. considering the microphonic component of the megaphone will further enrich our understanding of how the public/intimate oxymoron plays out through intent on resurrection ’s small sounds. at first, the integration of a microphone’s affordances with those of the megaphone might simply be understood as a potentiation of the horn’s power to cut distances between the transmitter and the receiver. [35] this is a function exploited in technologies for speech transmission, such as the telephone or hearing aid, which are driven by what mara mills calls the concerns of “noise reduction, focused transmission, listener control, selective amplification … this is the history of speech becoming ‘signal’: a thing that could be isolated, amplified and otherwise processed or ‘improved.’” [36] but in addition to the regular “signal” (i.e., the speech), the microphone magnifies another world of acoustic nuance that might go unnoticed by the unassisted ear, even at close range. this affordance has been observed many times throughout history—and even was before the technology was invented. in a seventeenth-century treatise, the english clergyman narcissus marsh described an imaginary device called the “microphone” that could “render the most minute sound in nature distinctly audible, by magnifying it to unconceivable loudness,” as “microscopes or magnifying glasses help the eye to see near objects, that by reason of their smallness were invisible before.” [37] in the nineteenth century, d.e. hughes isolated the ability of alexander graham bell’s telephone to “magnify weak sounds” into a prototype of the microphone, an independent tool capable of rendering “the movement of the softest camel hairbrush on any part of the board” as “distinctly audible.” [38] and, as douglas kahn has observed, the same fascination eventually fed “into the arts, forming the krill in the baleen of musical and artistic experimentalism from john cage to the sonocytological and nano arts.” [39] iannotta is also fascinated by the microcosmic. in an interview for the chicago symphony orchestra, she describes the vision that guided intent on resurrection: i had this image of being in a room completely full of dust in which you do not see anything. … then, little by little, your eyes get used to this dust, and you can see the little particles of dust, each tiny cell. … the piece, for me, is that image. at the beginning, with all the megaphones, etc., what you hear is basically my dust. [40] the microphone in iannotta’s megaphone picks up the vibrational components of the mouth sounds that would otherwise be inaudible; in doing so, it turns their spectral micro-properties into an essential textural and timbral component. to return to de souza’s notion of prosthesis, i would argue that the poietic function of the microphone operates on both an acoustical and a semantic level: vibrations that previously fell outside the limits of human hearing are now made perceptible because, first and foremost, they have been gained and pre-amplified as signal by the microphone. the amplification system thus functions as a discourse network, defined by sybille krämer as “the networks of techniques and institutions that preprocess what will even be considered data in a given epoch.” [41] the more sophisticated the amplification system, the more vibrations once considered irrelevant or inaudible will be gained and consequently processed as data, and thus the more richly detailed the perceivable microcosm. by making microscopic sounds audible, when they are usually detectable only at close proximity (if at all), microphones are turned into technologies of close-up intimacy. the sense of intimacy they produce is enacted by the microscopic world of sounds that, without mediation, would unfold as undetected noise. from this perspective, however, the microphonic affordance of the megaphone seems rather unsophisticated. indeed, why wouldn’t a modern cardioid microphone, to take just one example, render a more detailed acoustical world? i have already partly answered this question by highlighting how the megaphone’s horn exercises its agency on an aural as well as on a visual level, in ways that a simple microphone could not substitute. but the issue of genre should also be taken into consideration. despite the methodological disclaimer i offered earlier, it is undeniable that the field of new music acts as a genre. [42] and recognizing oneself as a composer within a certain genre imposes the principles, behaviors, and expectations of a specific assemblage of social and institutional settings. in certain european new music circles, amplification systems that remain visually and sonically transparent—i.e., whose tools are not explicitly raised to the status of musical instruments through the compositional process—are still viewed with suspicion. [43] the instrumental nature and dramaturgic presence of iannotta’s megaphone complies with these expectations. nevertheless, during the first rehearsal of intent on resurrection at the concert hall of the cité de la musique in paris—a space that hosts up to 1600 people—iannotta discovered that the smallest sounds of her ensemble acoustic instruments were being lost. she thus decided to partially amplify the music box machines, harp, piano, and string instruments with cardioid microphones. [44] although this is the kind of amplification that could be considered visually and sonically transparent, it acts on small sounds in ways that no bare instrumental technique would make up for. for cardioid microphones, placed extremely close to the sound source in the technique known as “close miking,” allow for the hyper-amplification of peripheral spectral components and enhance the intimacy of the soundscape in several ways. first, close miking (especially with cardioids) produces what is known as the “proximity effect,” which is characterized by an increase in low frequency response that grants the sound a “warmer” quality. this effect was artistically deployed in crooning—the technical name of a vocal style popular from the 1920s onward, which paired the amplification technology of the microphone with softer voices, delivering (first by radio and then live) a recognizably “intimate singing aesthetic.” [45] second, close miking catches the direct sound and excludes many of the collateral reflections, providing the “subjective impression of listening to music in a large room and its sounding as though the room were small [, which] is one definition of intimacy.” [46] finally, increasingly sophisticated microphones have perfected the gain and fidelity of frequencies in the higher range as well, providing the listener with what is often described as a brighter and richly detailed sound. that sound is also associated with a lack of reflections from the environment, and thus suggests closeness to the sound source. since the premiere of intent on resurrection, amplification has been “highly recommended” on the score. iannotta’s decision to place it there confronts the stigma that associates amplification with poor orchestration, shaped by the humanistic fear of spoiling the ear with the artificiality of live amplification. in her next work, troglodyte angels clank by (2016)—which she thinks of as a continued exploration of the same material from intent on resurrection—the amplification takes on a structural role in the compositional process, and the piece is explicitly written for “amplified ensemble.” [47] iannotta not only fully acknowledges the poietic potential of “amplification” as part of the compositional process—she also introduces contact microphones in line with her interest in “creating and hearing the internal sound of each object.” [48] to allow for small sounds to emerge in the concert room, however, the amplification of megaphones and microphones is still not enough. these affordances act within the “small sounds” network only thanks to the combination of a specific set of compositional and instrumental techniques. if we consider the initial texture of the piece, which lasts around a minute, we observe that iannotta excludes the production of any louder instrumental sound or the presence of an articulated speech that would lead to an energetical and informational auditory masking effect. [49] moreover, the specific texture the instruments produce reinforces the haptic perception of a sound heard close-up, as if the matter generating those very sounds could enter in contact with our skin. for this reason, i will call these techniques of haptic intimacy. the instruments’ grain: techniques of haptic intimacy media theorists demonstrated decades ago already that no technology operates as a transparent medium for a transcendental theoretical sound. (adorno showed us, for instance, what it would mean to listen to a beethoven sonata over the radio rather than live.) [50] but this phenomenon proves even truer in this case—or at least, true on a different level—given that the medium takes on an additional poietic function. media theorist wolfgang ernst has clarified that “musical theory in the occidental tradition continued the pythagorean epistemology of harmonic calculations. sound is thus not perceived as the sonic event in itself but becomes a phenomenon of mathematics in the widest sense of the symbolic regime.” [51] but the unstable, unpredictable, and inharmonic events of intent of resurrection invite us to listen quite differently. musical instruments, including megaphones and microphones, do not simply convey a transcendental sound; their materiality does not simply “allow” sounds vibrations to be, but has a hand in the creation of their specific spectral texture that emerges in our acoustic foreground. the material of this piece is thus self-referential, in the sense that it stages the agency of the media that produced it. [52] what saturates our attention is the moist flesh of the mouth before the megaphone, the metallic distortion of the horn, the sensitivity of the diaphragm of the microphone to low frequencies, the stickiness of the rosined bow against the metal string—what i call the grain of the instrument. with the word grain, i intend to evoke two different discourses, both quite well known in music studies. the first is roland barthes’ concept of the “grain of the voice,” which indexes the bodies of singing humans through the sonorous materiality of their voice. [53] my own understanding of the word grain is however distinct from his in two respects. first, unlike barthes, who deems certain voices as “without grain,” i assume that the material conditions of sound production are inescapable, and thus that the grain of the instrument is always present. what changes is its level of emergence, or its centrality in the awareness of the audience. second, the voice we hear in iannotta’s work is that of the classical instruments, megaphones, and microphones played by trained musicians—not only human bodies, but instrumental bodies as well. to better explain what is at stake in this definition, i find it useful to draw on brian kane’s model, which “diagnoses” how the voice (phoné ) can be articulated: through logos (i.e., as conveyer of semantic meaning), echos (i.e., phoné’s “purely sonorous aspect, capable of subjection to all the standard forms of phonetic and acoustic analysis”), and topos (i.e., the voice’s “site of emission,” its “source.”) [54] according to kane, barthes aims with the “grain of the voice” to shift the focus toward topos and echos: the sonorous materiality of the voice produced by a given body. but, as he reminds us, the voice is never essentially just one of these things (logos, echos, topos), but is rather the “perpetual displacement” between these poles, a displacement—and here comes the most important point—“modified by technê,” which is to be understood both as technologies and bodily techniques. [55] applying kane’s model to the grain of the instrument, we observe that the source of the voice we hear, the topos, is that of technê in the action of displacing phoné. hearing the grain of the instrument is hearing the voice of technê. furthermore, in this specific instance, as a product of the overlap of topos andtechnê, what emerges in the listener’s attention is not a body per se as the site of sound emission, but its materiality. rather than an acousmatic question, this condition stimulates a haptic perception of the material friction produced by the matter of both human and instrumental bodies involved in the kinetic act of playing. the echos of the sounds i am dealing with is characterized by what chion would call high “materializing sound indices,” or qualities that cause one “to ‘feel’ the material conditions of the sound source.” [56] the second discourse about the grain that i am invoking here is the one developed by pierre schaeffer in his typology of sound objects. for schaeffer, grain is a microstructure of the matter of sound, which is more or less fine or coarse and which evokes by analogy the tactile texture of a cloth or a mineral, or the visible grain in a photograph or a surface. … every time it is the “overall qualitative perception of a large number of small irregularities of detail affecting the ‘surface’ of the object.” [57] what interests me about schaffer’s definition is the experience of a microstructure of discrete components rather than a continuum—an experience afforded, in his reflection, by a slowed-down tape recording. the shift from continuum to discrete—that is, from a sustained pitched sound to a sound composed of recognizable microstructures of sonic “grain”—is, i argue, what allows for the emergence of an experience of sound as echos (in particular, its material indices) rather than logos (e.g., an a440 heard within a specific harmonic system). [58] let’s return to the first texture of iannotta’s piece and examine the performance techniques that allow for the grain of the instruments to emerge. on the score (see fig. 1), the composer asks the horn, trumpet, and trombone players to crinkle (froisser) aluminum foil gently and irregularly, “one grain at a time.” [59] “one grain at a time” also appears in the instructions to the percussion player, who must rub (frotter) a damped low gong with the edge of a small dobachi, or singing bowl. the violins and violas are also damped and instructed to move a heavily rosined bow on the strings with the highest degree of pressure (écraser) but extremely slowly. this gives rise to a shattered (brisé) sound, cracked by small silences, that must be maintained between a nearly inaudible dal niente and pp. the texture is further enriched by the sounds that come from a music box machine, which allows the performer to control twelve different music boxes simultaneously. four of these are activated in sequence six seconds apart, set to rotate so slowly that the pins of the drum pluck the teeth of the comb against it one at a time, complementing the granularities obtained by the other instruments with a short crackling sound. [60] by renouncing periodic vibrations—the defining feature of the “musical tone” of western classical tradition—this texture encourages listeners to discard their propensity to listen for pitch, and direct their attention towards the exploration of sonic events unfolding in an unmeasured microtime. thanks to its high materializing sound indices, this texture can be perceived haptically, as if unfolding against our skin. [61] tuning into the small sounds: techniques of hyper-intimacy iannotta’s metaphor generates yet another reflection. she asserts that the illuminated dust is defined by the clarity of our attention. taking her idea seriously means accepting that the dust, her microcosmos of sounds, cannot actually be perceived clearly (as she would wish) without our attention tuning into them. our attention is not a set of given and unchangeable cognitive abilities; instead, we, as listeners, can be “shocked” into attuning to new ones. according to vladimir jankélévitch, tools such as musical instruments impact the performer’s cognition in unpredictable ways through “reverse shock”— i.e., through the way “they work, their material possibilities and the gestures they enable, and what they feel like under one’s hands.” [62] similarly, i argue that small sounds, bearing the material traces of the instruments and amplifying apparatus that generated them, are the instruments that shock the listener into generating new cognitive abilities. hearing small sounds is, first and foremost, hearing our own senses tuning in to a different perceptual wavelength as their affordances define our abilities. they shape our sense of hearing, touch, scale, and spatial distance. but at the same time, our bodily and cognitive affordances shape the way we turn small sounds into a perceptual object, into what might become an aural-affective feeling of intimacy. [63] i choose the word intimacy because it encompasses both spatial features (it etymologically refers to the innermost, the deepest) and the affective world—in fact, despite being a spatial indicator, we have learned to use the word intimacy mostly in a figurative sense, in reference to a range of affections and feelings. [64] in this sense, we as listeners could be thought of as microphones, transducing sound to our consciousness through more or less vibrating, more or less receptive membranes. unlike actual microphones, however, our affordances are constantly changing. the level of vibration and receptivity is affected by our own story; and, unlike objects which are constantly changing according to the law of decay, our affordances can follow unpredictable patterns. only if we are disposed to receive closeness and touch, can we then indulge in the pleasure of tuning into a heightened sense of emotional or haptic connectedness, turning anything else into background noise. if we can afford such an attunement, then small sounds could be turned into hyper-intimate objects, heralds of intimacy despite the reality of a public concert hall with its imposed distances. the prefix “hyper” can be understood in reference to the artistic genre of hyperrealism. [65] in a hyperrealist portrait, the artist confronts us with a saturation of details that goes beyond the photographic—beyond what we might notice in something physically present, close-up, erasing the visual appearance of the whole. it involves pictorial techniques that seem to augment or shock our senses. in marilyn minter’s blue poles, shown in figure 3, the grain of the skin overwhelms us with its details: its innumerable pores and freckles, infinitesimally small folds and wrinkles, the glistening points of sweat or grease, the sparkling makeup surrounded by thousands of thin hairs—all this, despite the distances a museum environment typically imposes, with its velvet ropes and museum guards. fig. 3. marilyn minter, blue poles, 2007, enamel on metal, 60 x 72 inches. courtesy of the artist and salon 94, new york. © marilyn minter. conclusions in intent on resurrection, we see how the multiple affordances of the megaphone emerge as technologies of public intimacy, and those of the microphones as technologies of close-up intimacy. we also witness the combination of compositional and performance techniques that enable the emergence of what i have called the grain of the instrument, leading the audience in turn to experience a haptic sense of intimacy. i have furthermore shown that we as listeners can craft small sounds as hyper-intimate objects, or turn them into undesired noise, as much as small sounds shock our perceptual abilities. the locution “small sounds” has served in this recognition as a sort of place holder. i asked you to experience them through a brief exercise—“bring your hand to your ear…”— as well as through your imagination. you heard them in the first minute of intent on resurrection. we also searched for them with the performer, between the score and the movement of their megaphonic mouth; in the microphones and the loudspeaker; and finally, in the interplay between amplified material traces and our bodily and cognitive abilities. small sounds, in other words, are best understood as relational, located neither in the “acoustic” nor in the “perceived” world, and always at the intersection between ourselves and the materialities of the sound source, sound waves, and space of resonation. [66] departing from chion’s static definition, we observed how small sounds are constantly dislocated throughout the actor-network i have here unraveled, and how their identity is each time constituted through provisional assemblages of specific mediators. my hope is that the necessary linearity of my descriptions was disrupted by the detailed acknowledgment of a continuous feedback loop that involves an actor-network of small sounds, and that this undermines the temptation to search for unidirectional vectors of agency that originate with the composer, or any of the other actors involved. the play of affordances i have so far retraced, in my last section, reflects back at us, as we realize how the right sort of microphones, real and metaphorical, can allow for the amplification of the smallest of sounds—not only those close to our bodies, but even within it. dorothy molloy’s epigraph witnesses the achievement of such an attunement: she can hear the microscopic sounds of her bones inside her body, behind the skin, out of sight, buried and damped in the earth playing fortissimo. even microscopic sounds can become fortissimo—and “vicinissimo” (“very close”), i would add—once we have tuned into them. could molloy’s internal sound be brought into a concert hall? the answer might be yes, as long as your ears had the right microphonic prosthesis. perhaps scientists have provided the means. towards the end of the nineteenth century, researchers in the field of surgical diagnosis—particularly one of its pioneers, a certain professor hueter—envisioned that possibility… the introduction of the microphone for the purposes of surgical diagnosis … has led professor hueter of greifswald to try whether it would not be possible by its means to detect certain sounds, whose existence might be a priori asserted, but which are inaudible by ordinary means. … he has proved that we can not only hear the rush of blood through the capillaries of the skin (dermatophony), but also the sounds of muscular contraction (myophony), of tendinous extension (tendophony), and of the vibration of the long bones when percussed (osteophony.) [67] * i started thinking about this topic back in the fall 2017 when i had the fortune to take carolyn abbate’s class aurality, listening, hearing at harvard. i am grateful for her encouragement and her revisions on an earlier version of this article. i also want to thank james bean and julio zuñiga for our stimulating conversations about amplification technologies, christopher danforth (harvard sound lab) for indulging my request to purchase a megaphone i could experiment with, the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their generous and constructive comments, and daniel walden and megan steigerwald ille for their precious suggestions on the final draft. [1] “certain sounds, even when they are loud or heard from close by, conjure small sources.” michel chion, sound: an acoulogical treatise, trans. james a. steintrager (durham, nc: duke university press, 2016), 7. [2] chion, sound, 7–8. [3] dorothy molloy, hare soup (london: faber & faber, 2004), 50. see the epigraph at the beginning of this article. [4] the premiere of intent on resurrection took place on october 17, 2014, at the concert hall of the cité de la musique, paris. it was given by ensemble intercontemporain as part of the festival d’automne. the attached recording of the first minute of iannotta’s intent on resurrection is from track no. 1 of clara iannotta, a failed entertainment: werke 2009–2014, performed by ensemble intercontemporain, conducted by matthias pintscher, edition rz 10023, 2015. the score will be published soon by edition peters in a revised version (2021). clara iannotta’s entire oeuvre, however, is riddled with small sounds. iannotta was asked to comment on this fact in a 2016 interview for the chicago symphony orchestra blog: “[sam adams]: there’s an incredible intimacy in your music, particularly in this piece. not just a metaphorical intimacy, but we are quite literally hearing the most intimate sounds that you can make. it’s like you’re sucking on a popsicle, these types of sounds. is that something that you’re really interested in and amplifying in your music, those small gestures? [clara iannotta]: yes. it’s been a few years, like four years, that [i’ve noticed] my sounds have become weaker and weaker—really, really small.” sam adams, “intent on resurrection composer believes ‘music should be seen as well as heard,’” cso sounds & stories (blog), may 3, 2016. [5] musicological literature has surveyed many technologies of acoustic and spatial illusions. see, for example: thomas l. hankins and robert j. silverman, instruments and the imagination (princeton: princeton university press, 1995); alastair williams, “technology of the archaic: wish images and phantasmagoria in wagner,” cambridge opera journal 9, no. 1 (1997): 73–87; carolyn abbate, in search of opera (princeton: princeton university press, 2001); emily i. dolan, “e. t. a. hoffmann and the ethereal technologies of ‘nature music,’” eighteenth-century music 5, no. 1 (2008): 7–26; francesca brittan, “on microscopic hearing: fairy magic, natural science, and the scherzo fantastique,” journal of the american musicological society 64, no. 3 (2011): 527–600; douglas kahn, earth sound earth signal: energies and earth magnitude in the arts (berkeley: university of california press, 2013); abbate, “sound object lessons,” journal of the american musicological society 69, no. 3 (2016): 793–829; deirdre loughridge, haydn’s sunrise, beethoven’s shadow: audiovisual culture and the emergence of musical romanticism (chicago: university of chicago press, 2016). [6] i am using “acoustic” versus “perceived” sound in reference to cornelia fales’s distinction: “the acoustic world is the physical environment where sound as acoustic signal is produced and dispersed; the perceived world is the subjective, sonic world created by listeners as a result of their translation of signals from the acoustic world.” cornelia fales, “the paradox of timbre,” ethnomusicology 46, no. 1 (2002): 61. [7] if we are learning through sound what to recognize as intimate, we are engaging in what could be called an “acoustemology of intimacy.” coined by anthropologist steven feld in 1992, “acoustemology conjoins ‘acoustics’ and ‘epistemology’ to theorize sound as a way of knowing. in doing so it inquires into what is knowable and how it becomes known, through sounding and listening.” steven feld, “acoustemology,” in keywords in sound, ed. david novak and matt sakakeeny (durham, nc: duke university press, 2015), 12. [8] on how iannotta identifies as a new music composer, see giulia accornero, “clara iannotta: bludenz and the business of responsible curation,” national sawdust log, november 7, 2017. [9] michel foucault, “nietzsche, genealogy, history,” in language, counter-memory, practice. selected essays and interviews , ed. and trans. donald f. bouchard (ithaca: cornell university press, 1977), 142. [10] other recurrent tropes of the new music litany are: the idea of the musical composition as investigation, often in explicit contradistinction to other musics created for public entertainment, which justifies commercial failure and the receipt of institutional support; the construal of “art music” as a mode of progress and innovation, which generally results in strenuous research for the “new” and the “original,” and is coupled by a more or less implicit valorization of new music above any other music. [11] my effort is inspired by previous works in this direction such as georgina born and andrew barry, “music, mediation theories and actor-network theory,” contemporary music review 37, no. 5–6 (2018): 443–87. [12] authors like tim rutherford-johnson and seth brodsky have recently attempted to renovate our understanding of the “histories of contemporary western art music” by moving away from the “precepts on which the post-1945 narrative is based” and giving them a new beginning: 1989, the date of the fall of the berlin wall, the triumph of a “neoliberal political and economic orthodoxy” and the design of the world wide web (launched shortly after in 1991). see tim rutherford-johnson, music after the fall: modern composition and culture since 1989 (oakland: university of california press, 2017), 5–7; seth brodsky, from 1989, or european music and the modernist unconscious (oakland: university of california press, 2017). [13] bruno latour, reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory (new york: oxford university press, 2005), 44. [14] latour, reassembling the social, 39. [15] i follow benjamin piekut’s understanding of latour’s “actor-network theory” as a heuristic methodological tool, rather than a theoretical statement in support of technological determinism. for bibliographical reference of ant theory in music history and sociology see benjamin piekut, “actor-networks in music history: clarifications and critiques,” twentieth-century music 11, no. 2 (2014): 191–215; born and barry, “music, mediation theories and actor-network theory.” the new organology approach proposed by john tresch and emily dolan, which treats musical instruments as “actors or tools with variable ranges of activity” is another important background reference to the present work. see john tresch and emily i. dolan, “toward a new organology: instruments of music and science,” osiris 28, no. 1 (2013): 281. [16] jonathan de souza, music at hand: instruments, bodies, and cognition (new york: oxford university press, 2017), 12, 52. james gibson coined the term, which was made famous through his work the ecological approach to visual perception (boston: houghton mifflin, 1979). [17] to say that one’s body has affordances means to recognize its “constitutive technicity,” as carolyn abbate and michael gallope (after vladimir jankélévitch) have recognized in “the ineffable (and beyond),” in the oxford handbook of western music and philosophy, ed. tomás mcauley, nanette nielsen, and jerrold levinson (new york: oxford university press, 2021), 748. [18] clara iannotta, intent on resurrection – spring or some such thing, score (self-pub., 2014), vi. [19] iannotta, v–vi. [20] see figure 3 “typical sound levels (dba)” of the osha technical manual (otm). section iii: chapter 5, occupational safety and health administration, united states department of labor, updated august 15, 2013. moreover, it is important to remember that the dba scale works logarithmically—that is, the level of perceived loudness doubles for every 10 dba of difference. [21] the horn’s reentrant design has the same effect on the sound as a correspondent unfolded version but has the advantage of being more manageable. the amplifying power of the horn, while minimal with respect to that of the transistor, is made possible by increasing acoustic impedance (i.e., the lack of dispersion of soundwaves at both the mouthpiece and the space of the reentrant horn). this allows the sound waves to accumulate resonance before their dispersal into an open space. moreover, by conveying the sound in a specific direction, the horn makes it louder for those in the line of its projection and softer for those off-axis, just as a laser focuses a light beam. [22] for reference, see jonathan sterne, the audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction (durham, nc: duke university press, 2003). [23] gyllian phillips, “‘vociferating through the megaphone’: theatre, consciousness, and the voice from the bushes in virginia woolf’s between the acts,” journal of modern literature 40, no. 3 (2017): 40–41. [24] j. b. mcclure, edison and his inventions: including the many incidents, anecdotes, and interesting particulars connected with the life of the great inventor (chicago: rhodes & mcclure, 1879), 141. [25] mcclure, 122. the aerophone paired the horn to a source of power (compressed air) that would magnify the sound waves produced by two vibrating diaphragms. this avoided, for example, the need to modify one’s dynamic by shouting or vocal projection, involving the mouth, larynx, vocal fold, and trachea—two main shapes known as “megaphone” and “inverted megaphone.” see ingo r. titze, “the human instrument,” scientific american 298, no. 1 (2008): 94–101. [26] as de souza (following gibson) acutely reminds us, “the environment is both natural and cultural, so these aspects of affordances should not be opposed. indeed, they are combined in musical instruments.” de souza, music at hand, 13. i understand the concept of affordances as merging natural, social, and semiotic agencies. under what de souza names the “cultural,” i distinguish between “social” and “semiotic,” following latour’s insight that these three sources of agencies cannot be clearly differentiated in the definition of an object. [27] it is worth noting that such prosthesis not only allows for small sounds to cut through space, but also preserves their clarity relatively well. in acoustic settings characterized by high reverberation time (e.g., historical cathedrals), small sounds would also be “amplified,” but at the expense of clarity. [28] virginia woolf, between the acts, ed. mark hussey (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2011), 135. [29] megaphones have been used to set a “demonic” atmosphere by amplifying off-stage choruses. think of meyerbeer’s robert le diable (1831), or the pre-recorded voices of luigi nono’s intolleranza 1960 (1961), which exploit the horn’s ability to dominate spectators through the power of acousmatic voices. [30] person and persona are related to the “classical latin persōna,” (i.e., the “mask used by a player, character in a play, dramatic role, the part played by a person in life,” etc.) latin writers used the word to indicate the wood mask through which the voice of the greek theater actor resonated. oxford english dictionary (oed) online, s.v. “person,” last modified september 2021. [31] a similar effect was reported by the audiences of some crooners. according to simon frith, “‘legitimate’ music hall or opera singers reached their concert hall audiences with the power of their voices alone; the sound of the crooners, by contrast, was artificial. microphones enabled intimate sounds to take on a pseudo-public presence, and, for the crooner’s critics, technical dishonesty meant emotional dishonesty.” frith, “art versus technology: the strange case of popular music,” media, culture & society 8, no. 3 (1986): 264. [32] de souza, music at hand, 25–26. [33] de souza, 23. [34] bernard stiegler, technics and time, 1: the fault of epimetheus, trans. richard beardsworth and george collins (stanford: stanford university press, 1998), 152. quoted in de souza, 26. [35] this is the case of the aerophone, in which an additional source of power in the form of air pressure made it possible “to increase the loudness of spoken words, without impairing the distinctness of articulation.” mcclure, edison and his inventions, 140. [36] mara mills, “when mobile communication technologies were new,” endeavour 33, no. 4 (2009): 146. [37] narcissus marsh, “an introductory essay to the doctrine of sounds, containing some proposals for the improvement of acousticks; as it was presented to the dublin society nov. 12. 1683. by the right reverend father in god narcissus lord bishop of ferns and leighlin,” philosophical transactions 14, no. 156 (february 20, 1684): 482. [38] d. e. hughes, “on the action of sonorous vibrations in varying the force of an electric current,” proceedings of the royal society of london 27, no. 185–89 (1878): 365. [39] kahn, earth sound earth signal, 34. kahn has written extensively on cage’s aesthetics and techniques for amplifying small sounds. see his noise, water, meat: a history of sound in the arts (cambridge, ma: mit press, 1999), especially ch. 6 “john cage: silence and silencing.” nanotechnology allows us to turn the inaudible vibrations of yeasts cells into sound by heightening their amplitude level. see sophia roosth, “screaming yeast: sonocytology, cytoplasmic milieus, and cellular subjectivities,” critical inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 332–50. carolyn abbate has also shown that the fascination for capturing inaudible sound persisted in the work of film composers and sound engineers who gave sounds to inaudible gestures in what she calls a “microphonic techno-fantasy.” see abbate, “sound object lessons,” 819. [40] adams, “intent on resurrection.” [41] sybille krämer, “the cultural techniques of time axis manipulation: on friedrich kittler’s conception of media,” theory, culture & society 23, no. 7–8 (2006): 98. [42] following eric drott’s latourian definition of the concept, i understand genre as a “dynamic ensemble of correlations, linking together a variety of material, institutional, social, and symbolic resources … [that] give rise to an array of assumptions, behaviors, and competences, which taken together orient the (individual) actions and (social) interactions of different ‘art world’ participants.” drott, “the end(s) of genre,” journal of music theory 57, no. 1 (2013): 9. [43] cathy van eck has recently dedicated a book to microphones and loudspeakers used in new music for explicitly artistic purposes, from karlheinz stockhausen’s mikrophonie i (1964) to her own composition. however, she never mentions the status of microphone and loudspeaker in new music when they are not manipulated towards unconventional results. see cathy van eck, between air and electricity: microphones and loudspeakers as musical instruments (new york: bloomsbury academic, 2017). [44] it may also be worth reflecting on the fact that this extremely important part of the sound design is generally handed off entirely to the sound engineer. the score, beyond recommending amplification, does not specify which kind of microphones are required, or where they should be positioned. the discretion is left to the sound engineer who, like actual performers, “can give a stylistically appropriate account of a piece” in accordance with the conventions of new music. see drott, “the end(s) of genre,” 10. [45] see allison mccracken, real men don’t sing: crooning in american culture (durham, nc: duke university press, 2015), ch. 2 “crooning goes electric: microphone crooning and the invention of the intimate singing aesthetic, 1921–1928.” [46] leo beranek, concert halls and opera houses: music, acoustics, and architecture , 2nd ed. (new york: springer, 2004), 513. [47] clara iannotta, troglodyte angels clank by, for amplified ensemble (leipzig: peters, 2018). [48] adams, “intent on resurrection.” [49] masking indicates “how sensitivity for one sound is affected by the presence of another sound.” stanley a. gelfand, hearing: an introduction to psychological and physiological acoustics, 6th ed. (boca raton: crc press, 2018), 251. [50] theodor w. adorno, current of music: elements of a radio theory, ed. robert hullot-kentor (cambridge: polity, 2009). [51] wolfgang ernst, sonic time machines: explicit sound, sirenic voices, and implicit sonicity (amsterdam: amsterdam university press, 2016), 22. [52] in pierre schaeffer’s terminology, the above-mentioned “self-referentiality” of the material would possibly translate as a prevalence of the “range of concrete sounds” (possibilités concrètes) of the instrument. see michel chion, guide to sound objects. pierre schaeffer and musical research , trans. john dack and christine north (self-pub., ears, 2009), 54. [53] roland barthes, “the grain of the voice,” in image, music, text, trans. stephen heath (new york: hill and wang, 1978), 179–89. [54] brian kane, “the model voice,” journal of the american musicological society 68, no. 3 (2015): 673. [55] kane, “the model voice,” 675. [56] michel chion, audio-vision: sound on screen, 2nd ed., trans. claudia gorbman (new york: columbia university press, 2019), 112. [57] chion, guide to sound objects, 171. [58] martin scherzinger, in this same journal, also notes in passing how “barthes’ famous notion of the voice’s grain … actually echoes schaeffer’s notion of the grain.” see his “event or ephemeron? music’s sound, performance, and media (a critical reflection on the thought of carolyn abbate),” sound stage screen 1, no. 1 (2021): 152. [59] iannotta, intent on resurrection, vi. [60] iannotta, viii. machine a and b were designed by the berlin artist collective quadrature. each consists of a six-track sequencer that can put into action through a button as many music boxes, each producing a “carillon-like” tune. the performer can also regulate the speed of each box independently with a nob. for info about the collective see the website. [61] as iannotta decides to provide the performers with notation, she requires a writing technology that does not presume a unity of rhythmic measure or stable pitch identities—two basic assumptions of western classical notation. chronometric notation is thus interpolated as an alternative in various segments of the piece. i suggest that iannotta’s notion of grain relies on pierre schaeffer’s and that the techniques she employs to obtain it are akin to those we find in helmut lachenmann’s musique concrète instrumentale. [62] abbate, “sound object lessons,” 803. the reference is to vladimir jankélévitch, music and the ineffable, trans. carolyn abbate (princeton: princeton university press, 2003), 27. [63] see de souza, music at hand, 13. [64] etymologically, the word “intimate” from latin intimus “inmost, deepest, profound” (adj.) has first and foremost a “spatial” connotation. however, we generally use it “figuratively” in reference to “inmost thoughts or feelings.” see oxford english dictionary (oed) online, s.v. “intimate, adj. and n.,” last modified september 2021. [65] “photorealist art refers to images of reality rendered in extreme detail, often with aid of photographs.” hyperrealism, is “a term once synonymous with photorealism, but which came to suggest an enhanced reality with heightened details, color, light and shading.” see anne k. swartz, “photorealism,” in the grove encyclopedia of american art (oxford university press, 2011). [66] this provides us with a concrete example of what isabella van elferen has defined “timbrality.” see “timbrality: the vibrant aesthetics of tone color,” in the oxford handbook of timbre, ed. emily i. dolan and alexander rehding (new york: oxford university press, 2021), 69–91. [67] “dermatophony,” the medical times and gazette, february 15, 1879, 179. × article contents mann and myth: adapting death in venice the street musician’s scene in visconti’s death in venice the strolling players scene in britten’s opera the laughing songs of death in venice uncanny resemblances: death in venice and doctor faustus transforming the performance footnotes article performance as transformation: the laughing songs of death in venice in literature, film, and opera janina müller sound stage screen, vol. 1, issue 2 (fall 2021), pp. 69–100, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2021 janina müller. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss14054. in a scene towards the end of thomas mann’s novella death in venice (1912), a musical performance leads to an outburst of laughter. shortly after the protagonist gustav von aschenbach becomes aware that cholera is spreading in the city of venice, a band of neapolitan street musicians entertains the unsuspecting guests of the grand hôtel des bains on the lido. both aschenbach and his beloved tadzio are present in what seems to be a precarious situation: the boy constantly turns his gaze toward the older man, who is trying hard to keep his affection from being noticed by tadzio’s family. meanwhile the band performs a love duet and a popular tune. the conspicuous looking guitarist-singer with his red hair, his salacious gestures, and carbolic smell soon reminds us of similar uncanny figures that already have crossed aschenbach’s path: the wanderer who stirred the protagonist’s desire for an adventurous journey at the cemetery in munich, the grotesque “false youth” on the ship to venice, and the charon-like gondolier. for the knowing reader, then, the leader of the ensemble is entangled in a net of symbolic references to death, sickness, and the dionysian spirit that haunts aschenbach’s soul. with this in mind, we can now turn to the fatal encore of the performance: “a brash popular number in an unintelligible dialect and with a refrain of laughter.” [1] the laughter soon spreads around the audience, who does not realize that it is being ridiculed by the outrageous figure: he bent his knees, slapped his thighs, clutched his sides, he nearly exploded, shrieking now rather than laughing; he pointed to the terrace, as if there were nothing more amusing than the people laughing up there, and before long everyone was laughing, everyone in the garden and on the verandah, including the waiters, lift attendants, and porters in the doorways. [2] through this act of mimetic contagion, the whole performance culminates in a dionysian frenzy. at the same time, the uproarious laughter hints at the dissemination of the cholera disease, symbolically anticipating the fateful destiny of those present, including aschenbach. the performance of the street musicians marks a particularly rich and dramaturgically central scene, one in which laughter gains a “transformative power” over the members of the audience, turning them from spectators into co-participants. [3] as such, it is given special weight in the two most famous adaptations of the novella—luchino visconti’s death in venice ( morte a venezia, 1971) and benjamin britten’s eponymous opera, which premiered only two years after the film. [4] except for the “brash popular number” with the laughing refrain, mann does not specify the repertoire performed by the band in detail. thus, each adaptation can potentially enrich the scene by inserting preexistent or newly composed songs that provide some sort of commentary on aschenbach’s infatuation. while it has occasionally been pointed out that the songs used by visconti and britten ring with irony, [5] it remains to be more fully explored how both the film and the opera convert an instance of narrated music into extended musical moments of embodied spectacle and the way in which they actualize or reconfigure the transformative space of the performance. a particular focus of this article, therefore, lies on the various manifestations of the laughing song. originally a popular hit dating back to the early days of phonography, mann first transcribed it from sound to text, after which it was re-rendered in sound again. [6] in addition to tracing this versatile phono-graphic shifting of the song and its paroxysm of laughter, i will also situate the respective scenes within the different interpretative frames adopted by visconti and britten. mann and myth: adapting death in venice as linda hutcheon reminds us, “the act of adaptation always involves both (re-)interpretation and then (re-)creation; this has been called both appropriation and salvaging, depending on your perspective.” [7] with this in mind, we can deliberately bypass some of the more dismissive evaluations championing mann’s original over its allegedly inferior remediations. [8] instead, let us start by recalling a few characteristic features of both adaptations that affect the scenes at hand. in the opera, aschenbach’s experience is rendered subjectively as a sort of interior monologue. what happens on stage might be conceived as a projection from within the protagonist, made visible. [9] this change in point of view, while allowing aschenbach to express himself in his own musical voice, entails a loss of narrational distance that mann so carefully composed into his telling of the story. the narrator here serves as a moral compass by which aschenbach’s increasing infatuation with tadzio is measured and eventually denounced: what the very skillfully shaped opera story jettisons is mann’s narrator, the mocking, moralizing, explicitly ironizing voice that both describes what aschenbach does or thinks, and tries to direct our thoughts about it. […] the outer narrative dimension was… absorbed into the music, submerged so to speak in the musical element, and especially into the orchestra. [10] edward said’s observation provides us with a first clue regarding the role of the staged performance of the “strolling players” (act 2, scene 10). as we will see, the scene furnishes exactly this kind of ironic commentary in place of the absent narrator. another substantial change concerns the visual as well as musical spelling-out of the novella’s symbolic subtext. the ominous half-mythological figures appearing in the story are impersonated by the same bass-baritone who also interprets the voice of dionysus (besides the roles of the hotel barber and the hotel manager). musically, this row of dionysian harbingers is connected by a returning motif associated with percussion instruments creating an exotic aura of strangeness. it is first presented by the timpani, when the mysterious traveller appears on the steps of the mortuary chapel in the munich cemetery (act 1, scene 1). though the motif has no fixed melodic or rhythmic structure, being varied throughout the opera, it nevertheless has a distinct shape, combining a descending scale movement with an upward leap (see example 1). ex. 1. britten, death in venice, act 1, scene 1, rehearsal no. 13, traveller’s motif. transcribed by permission of faber music, london. after the traveller’s aria, it immediately infiltrates aschenbach’s vocal line (“strange, strange hallucination,” rehearsal no. 16), as he is inevitably drawn into the stranger’s vision of a faraway tropical wilderness. in the remainder of the opera, it recurs in the vocal parts of the dionysian characters themselves (see, for instance, the introductory phrases of the elderly fop and the gondolier at rehearsal nos. 27 and 48), while various drums, including tom-toms, are usually present to remind the listener of their foreign origin. through musical means, then, the opera renders explicit what is only implied in the novella. this extends to the ancient gods themselves: dionysus and apollo both make a vocal appearance contesting aschenbach’s soul. for the silent role of tadzio, britten comes up with an ingenious solution. the boy and his entourage are cast as dancers as to occupy their own expressive realm, removed from that of aschenbach. tadzio’s glittering, light-flooded sonority invokes idioms of gamelan music. as such, it is more obviously connected to the sphere of apollo as manifested in the balletic beach episode (the games of apollo, act 1, scene 7), which closes the first act. [11] visconti’s filmic adaptation, by contrast, eliminates the novella’s mythological layers, including aschenbach’s nightmare of a bacchantic orgy signaling his complete surrender to the god of ecstasy, desire, and madness. thus, we do not necessarily identify the guitarist-singer with the dionysian force to which aschenbach, in both the novella and the opera, falls prey. yet, with his pale face and decayed teeth, he remains an unsettling appearance, combining features of death and devil. roger wiehe places the musicians’ scene in the late-medieval iconographic tradition of the danse macabre. [12] since the dance macabre imagery became popular with the spreading of the black death plague in the fourteenth century, the historical connection is clear enough. however, wiehe’s reading remains largely deaf to the music and the laughing song in particular, which gains a different meaning in light of visconti’s intertextual strategy. as many critics have noted—in some cases with a disapproving tone—visconti turned to mann’s doctor faustus (1947) in search of material that could be interwoven with the idea of aschenbach as a late-romantic composer and gustav mahler’s doppelgänger. [13] to establish this link in a straightforward manner, visconti has his protagonist arriving in venice on a steamer named esmeralda. further borrowings are restricted to flashback scenes, one of which shows aschenbach visiting a brothel. the episode is evidently a reference to the fateful syphilis infection which seals adrian leverkühn’s pact with the devil. another noticeable allusion to doctor faustus is the mocking laughter, a gesture originally associated with leverkühn. through its occurrences throughout the film, it links the various fateful encounters and invests the respective characters with diabolical overtones. i will come back to this point later on. the film’s soundtrack, with the adagietto from mahler’s fifth symphony as center piece, plays a key role in evoking a specific turn-of-the-century ambience. while the adagietto is more intimately tied to aschenbach’s inner state, the diegetic musical scenes add authentic local flavors through their use of popular genres, including operetta and italian song, as well as their deliberately flawed, true-to-life sound (think of the amateurish ensemble performing a potpourri of excerpts from franz lehár’s the merry widow in the hotel lobby or esmeralda’s piano playing in the brothel). with regard to the street musicians, however, mann already provided a detailed account of the event, down to minute descriptions of lighting, poses, gestures, singing style, as well as audience reactions. for visconti, the novella scene thus offered a sort of performance script that could be brought to life on the film screen. the street musician’s scene in visconti’s death in venice we enter this scene in medias res, the music having already begun. visconti indeed takes great care to reproduce the theatrical setting as described by mann: the two men and two women stood by the iron post of an arc lamp, lifting their faces, white in the glare, to the large terrace, where the guests sat ready, over coffee and cold drinks, to submit to the exhibition of local color. … the russian family, eager to enjoy everything to the hilt, had had wicker chairs moved down into the garden so as to be closer to the performers and sat there contentedly in a semicircle. [14] the camera soon cuts away from the musicians to the terrace where aschenbach is smoking a cigarette, his facial expression revealing his tense inner state. next, we see the reason for his anxiety. in one of his characteristic zoom shots, visconti captures the figure of tadzio leaning on the balustrade while turning his head twice toward aschenbach in a self-assertive gesture. [15] the second time, the camera comes to rest on a medium close-up of him, just as the band finishes its casual entrance number. throughout the scene, there are several synch points between the image and the music, lending a rhythmical flow to the editing. downstairs the band continues its program with the popular tune “chi vuole con le donne aver fortuna” (“he who wants to be lucky with women”) by the neapolitan singer-songwriter armando gill, who was famous in italy during world war i. the lyrics abound with irony when seen in light of aschenbach’s situation. first, the heteronormative framework of the song reminds us of his “aberrant” desire. second, the light-hearted approach to love that the singer advocates stands in obvious contrast to aschenbach’s desperate and insatiable yearning. [16] at the beginning of the song the band walks up to the terrace (figure 1). the guitarist first approaches aschenbach and then continues to walk around the other guests, including tadzio’s family. [17] his mother is repelled by the unpleasant appearance of the man but tries to keep her composure. tadzio, however, does not attempt to hide his repulsion: he backs away from the guitarist’s approaches and seeks aschenbach’s eyes. for a brief, intense moment, the latter returns the gaze by looking directly into the camera, which has taken tadzio’s position. in granting this intimate encounter (if only implicitly), visconti again takes a liberty with the novella. in the source-text, aschenbach strictly avoids meeting tadzio’s eyes out of fear of being exposed. with an inviting gesture, the guitarist holds his arm out in front of aschenbach as he sings the last line of the fourth stanza “come mi attira il letto di quel fiume” (how the bed of that river entices me.) not coincidentally, this allusion to death as relief from suffering is directed at aschenbach. tadzio’s mother soon becomes aware of the delicate constellation between the older man and her son and casts a watchful eye on both. fig. 1. visconti, death in venice, the guitarist visits the terrace. the strolling players scene in britten’s opera in britten’s opera, the corresponding staged performance (act 2, scene 10) opens with the announcement of the strolling players. while mann himself speaks of “straßensänger” (street singers) or “bettelvirtuosen” (beggar virtuosos), the somewhat antiquated term referring to a traveling theater group is introduced by helen tracy lowe-porter in her 1928 translation of the novella that britten and his librettist, myfanwy piper, used for their adaptation. [18] differing from the original ensemble, the group here consists of a boy, a girl, the leader, and two acrobats who mime several instruments (i.e., flute, guitar, and trumpet). at the beginning of the scene, the solo timpani’s repeated minor sixth leap (g♯2–e3), accompanied by a swirling triplet figure in the clarinet, immediately recalls the traveller’s motif. the musical texture with the ostinato scale passages in the piano is similar to the one that britten employs for the hotel in scene 4 of act 1 (rehearsal no. 66). having tied the identity of the leader to earlier scenes of the opera, the timpani motif conspicuously reappears at the end of the performance when the character finishes his “laughing song” with a “wild gesture” (rehearsal no. 257). while the hotel staff ushers the guests to their tables (“this way for the players, signori!”), the latter respond with a brief chorus commenting on the show they are about to see. its parodistic technique is explicitly signaled by the line “with old songs new turned.” through this extended introduction britten prepares the listeners for the ensuing performance that actually unfolds as a play-within-a-play, making aschenbach the prime target of mockery. the first number “o mio carino” is a waltz-duet sung by the girl and the boy, [19] while the second piece “la mia nonna” marks the entrance of the sinister leader. both numbers are parodies of italian folk songs. “o mio carino” is based on “giovanottino, mi garbate tanto” for voice and piano by the composer and band leader mario ferradini (1863–1907). [20] it was published as sheet music in 1903 by the florentine publisher genesio venturini and subsequently recorded in various arrangements by several different singers. while the precise origins of this popular tuscan folk song remain unclear, it appears in several anthologies dating from the mid-nineteenth century at the earliest. [21] piper translated ferradini’s version into english and provided a few additional verses, exposing aschenbach as the object of ridicule (“for you forgotten honour, work, and duty”). besides, the song’s religious rhetoric (“how shall i save my soul, l’anima mia?”) adds quite naturally to the mocking irony of the scene in suggesting that aschenbach’s relationship is morally reprehensible. the parodistic tone is further enhanced by britten’s burlesque arrangement and its sudden harmonic shifts (example 2). musically, the verses are grouped in six pairs, each featuring the same melody closely modelled after the first five bars of ferradini’s song. the oom-pah-pah accompaniment of the waltz is supplied by timpani, strings, and harp. throughout the song, the timpani plays a rhythmicized e pedal tone occasionally dropping “false” accents on the weak second beat. while the key signature indicates a major, the initial melodic ascent introduces b major and then turns to the tonic via a lowered d5 (“near me”). ex. 2. britten, death in venice, act 2, scene 10, “o mio carino,” beginning, vocal score. reproduced by permission of faber music, london. a similar shift occurs in the harmonization of the second verse “just as the siren needs the salt sea water,” which—after a succession of dominant seventh chords (b7, f♯7, e7)—plunges into the relative f♯ minor. the characteristic waltz accompaniment is temporarily suspended when aschenbach and tadzio appear on stage (rehearsal no. 241). right at this moment, celli and bassoons pick up the so-called “longing motif” associated with aschenbach’s amatory fixation. a row of shimmering chords by vibraphone and glockenspiel—tadzio’s signature sound—signals the visible presence of the boy on the terrace. in contrast to the novella and film scene, in which the exchange of glances establishes a more intimate connection between the two (tadzio actually seeks the eyes of the older man), the opera keeps them at a safe distance. however, as philip rupprecht aptly observes, there is a gaze-like quality about the boy’s musical presence in that its vibrant glistening texture and arrested temporality seem intrinsically linked to aschenbach’s perception. referring to the latter’s first catching sight of the boy (act 1, scene 4), rupprecht notes: suddenly, everything gleams—the timbre of the vibraphone theme itself, and the iridescent cluster-chords beneath. the freezing of the musical action here is a cessation of harmonic motion. … once tadzio has gone, aschenbach, as if released from hypnosis, reverts to the rational mood (and dry timbres) of his piano recitatives. [22] through what he calls aschenbach’s “sonic gaze,” [23] tadzio is rendered an object of remote exotic fascination and sensory appeal. from this point on the scene gets more and more oppressive as a brash trumpet signal announces the entrance of the leader. while the lyrics of his number “la mia nonna always used to tell me” are inspired by the popular song “la mia mamma mi diceva,” the punctuated melody itself (example 3) alludes to the beginning of the piedmontese song “le tre colombe.” [24] compared to the preceding duet and its subtle innuendos, the leader’s solo—though not explicitly engaging with aschenbach—strikes an uncannier note. on the surface, the song pokes fun at the infidelity of women, but the musical setting adds a grim undertone to the whole, thereby exposing the threatening character of the figure. each of the three stanzas is set in a different key according to a sequence of rising half steps (g4 – g♯4 – a4), with the incipit played by the solo trumpet and immediately taken up by the vocal line. otherwise, the instrumentation is utterly sparse, featuring a small drum as characteristic token of the dionysian musical exoticism, “thrummed” pizzicato strings and piano. the latter provide a series of brusque, dissonant arpeggios accentuating the leader’s repeated falsetto line “sono tutte traditore!” like an out-of-tune guitar. [25] the first of these disruptions (one measure before rehearsal no. 244) occurs with a bitonal harmony mixing c major with a♭ major. the vocal melody of “sono tutte vagabonde” further adds to the chromatic harshness through its modal inflection. the effect thus created is less comical than unsettling. ex. 3. britten, death in venice, act 2, scene 10, “la mia nonna,” beginning, vocal score. reproduced by permission of faber music, london. the same can be said of the closing stretta marked “gaily,” in which the leader repeatedly blares out his sarcastic punch line “so i shall never be able to marry—evviva la libertà!” the instrumentation now comes to include a tuba, whose dark and menacing tone carries associations of death and disease, as we will see shortly. [26] as in the novella and the film, aschenbach inquires about the disinfection of venice when the leader collects money from the guests. here, britten recalls another prominent motif signaling the eminent threat to which aschenbach remains willfully oblivious. it consists of four notes combining a descending whole tone and a half tone step separated by a rising major third, and is most commonly referred to as a sounding symbol of the plague. [27] however, tracing its deployment in the opera, it becomes clear that it has thematically intertwined connotations, ranging from dionysian enchantment and desire to death. britten first introduces the motif at the beginning of the traveller’s aria, set to the words “marvels unfold!” (rehearsal no. 14). its mysterious timbre is produced by the overlapping of sustained notes in the horn and bassoon, which also features a trill. at the end of act 1, in the section preceding the love vow, the motif now resounds in the low register of the bassoon (six measures after rehearsal no. 185), semantically enriched by undertones of madness and sickness as aschenbach rebukes himself for succumbing to the illusion of befriending tadzio (“the heat of the sun must have made me ill”). however, it is only with his following visit to the hotel barber’s shop (act 2, scene 8) that the motif’s linking with the plague becomes the predominant meaning. when the chatty hotel barber—who is part of the dionysian ensemble—asks aschenbach if he feared the sickness spreading in venice, the latter spontaneously expresses his irritation: “sickness! sickness! what sickness?” (rehearsal no. 198), while the tuba repeats the motif twice in a row (d2 – c2 – e2 – e♭2). in its accumulation of meanings, the musical theme thus serves as a symbolic nexus connecting the spread of the cholera with its mythical correspondence—that is, the coming of the “stranger god.” [28] the dialogue between aschenbach and the leader (rehearsal no. 248) is interspersed with pungent cluster versions of the motif played by the flute, oboes, clarinets, and a muted trumpet. at this point it has taken on an overtly menacing tone belying the leader’s explanations about the disinfection measures. rather than providing a mere comical insert, the performance of the strolling players is punctuated by motivic references. the orchestra, while supplying the music for the pantomimed instrumental playing on stage, also acts as a narrating voice, underpinning and connecting key moments of the unfolding drama. though the songs themselves are rooted in popular italian folk music and thus add couleur locale to the performance, britten’s parodistic treatment with its harmonic tensions and characteristic instrumentation serves to integrate them into the musical language of the opera as a whole. [29] the laughing songs of death in venice let us now turn to the climax of the performance—the ominous laughing song. in mann’s literary rendering, the laughter, as part of the song’s refrain, has an ambiguous character. in its rhythmically ordered structure, it constitutes an artificial musical device. yet, when uttered by the guitarist, the laughter gains a seemingly “lifelike” quality ready to cross the boundaries of the performance itself. the breaking of the fourth wall occurs gradually in the act of singing, as the stylized laughter of the refrain veers into plain mockery aimed at the clueless audience. [30] in an ingenious manner, mann fleshes out this liminal moment when the guitarist breaks into spasm losing control over his body and voice: he would choke, his voice would falter, he would press his hand to his mouth and hunch his shoulders till at just the proper moment an unbridled laugh would break, burst, bellow out of him and with such verisimilitude that it had a contagious effect on the audience, causing an objectless, self-perpetuating hilarity to take hold on the terrace as well. [31] in its display of bodily excess, the scene exhibits a “carnivalesque” quality. social etiquette is finally overthrown, as the audience falls into a state of intoxication. when the performance has finished, the guitarist sticks his tongue out at them, a gesture that explicitly symbolizes the inversion of hierarchy. in the novella, music and sound are associated with the foreign sphere of dionysus. as such, they border on the chaotic, the sexual, and the incomprehensible—from the strange, inarticulate murmuring of the gondolier and the alien-sounding idiom of the laughing song to the overpowering sonic assault of the bacchantic round dance that aschenbach joins in his dream. [32] for britten’s librettist, however, the “unintelligible dialect” of the song posed a problem of its own. for the leader’s second number to fit into the trajectory of the scene and develop its full dramatic potential on stage the lyrics had to be intelligible or least contain some allusive expressions: the real facer was the laughing song. what language could it be written in? though incomprehensible, words here and there ought to be understood. i toyed with macaronics, using italian, french and english or german perhaps, but my italian was not good enough to play about with, my german almost nonexistent and there seemed no excuse for french. i thought of nonsense verse but even if it had been possible, the englishness of it would have been unacceptable. at last it occurred to me that the venetian dialect would have been incomprehensible to the hotel guests, aschenbach included, […]. so with the help of a book of old venetian ballads and nursery songs … i wrote a version of what was eventually used. [33] with the draft in hand, piper eventually consulted an italian language expert who helped produce a more refined version in proper venetian dialect. the refrain itself, however, was kept in english. the fact that mann himself hints at the neapolitan background of the guitarist (“he seemed less the venetian type than of the race of neapolitan comedians”) is strangely ignored. [34] the “laughing song” of the opera (figure 2) consists of five stanzas comprising rhetorical questions such as “do roses flower in the midst of ice” answered by the chorus “how ridiculous you are!” while the first two stanzas present paradoxical phenomena, the following two question amorous relationships between young and old as if they were paradoxical, too. the tone of mockery is much more personal than in the novella as the leader seems to be quite aware of aschenbach’s passion for tadzio and his desolate condition (“can a tired bird whistle”). one could indeed speculate whether the whole scenario, as conceived by piper and britten, arises from the guilt-ridden consciousness of the old man who punishes himself for his illicit feelings. on the other hand, however, the lyrics also contain an element of concealment, since they avoid any obvious reference to the homoerotic nature of aschenbach’s feelings. fiorir rose in mezo al giasso e de agosto nevegar. how ridiculous you are! trovar onde in terra ferma e formighe in mezo al mar. how ridiculous you are! giovinoto che a na vecia tanti basi ghe vol dar. how ridiculous you are! bella tosa che se voia co un vecio maridar. how ridiculous you are! oseleto un fià stracheto che sia bon da sifolar. what a lot of fools you are! do roses flower in the midst of ice. does snow fall in august. (chorus) are there waves upon the dry land, or ants in the middle of the sea. (chorus) does a young man want to give an old woman kisses. (chorus) does a pretty girl wish to marry an old man. (chorus) can a tired bird whistle. (chorus) [35] fig. 2. death in venice, piper’s “laughing song,” lyrics. for the composer, the idea of mocking laughter provided an opportunity to exploit a genuinely operatic effect, as for example carl maria von weber in his freischütz and verdi in falstaff had done before. while one might have expected to find the ominous “plague motif” integrated into the musical texture, britten opts for another, less obvious solution that gives the song a completely different twist. his “laughing song” sounds like a dull nursery rhyme accompanied by a dreary change of chords in horns, clarinets, and bassoons imitating a concertina (example 4), while the vocal part is marked “con voce infantile.” ex. 4. britten, death in venice, “laughing song,” beginning. reproduced by permission of faber music, london. following the initial stanza, the boy, a waiter, and the hotel porter first join in with a rhythmically patterned laughter segued into the refrain. the next burst of laughter—the group is now enlarged by two hotel guests—interrupts the second stanza in a hocket-like manner with the voices imitating each other. the laughing chorus gradually builds in intensity as well as rhythmic complexity as soprano and alto voices are further included. throughout the song, the vocalized laughter is doubled by percussion instruments: tambourine, side drum, tenor drum, bass drum, as well as a small and large whip. while the drums recall once more the dionysian sonic realm, the whips add another characteristic component that lends an aggressive tone to the leader’s performance. britten uses them only in this particular song, thus casting a special meaning to them. as a symbol of dominance, the whip is strongly reminiscent of another ominous character—i.e., the mesmerist cavaliere cipolla from mann’s novella mario and the magician (1930). [36] in his show, the magician exercises power through the hissing tone of his riding whip, which can induce as well as remove trance-like states in members of the audience: two main features were constant in all the experiments: the liquor glass and the claw-handled riding-whip. the first was always invoked to add fuel to his demoniac fires; without it, apparently, they might have burned out. on this score we might even have felt pity for the man; but the whistle of his scourge, the insulting symbol of his domination, before which we all cowered, drowned out every sensation save a dazed and outbraved submission to his power. [37] in the “laughing song,” too, one gets the impression that the audience is under the spell of the leader, especially when looking at the climactic coda (two measures after rehearsal no. 255). here, the sound of the two whips is especially prominent (example 5). ex. 5. britten, death in venice, “laughing song,” coda. reproduced by permission of faber music, london. just before the beginning of the coda, the leader suddenly changes the refrain line into “what a lot of fools you are!” thereby insulting his obedient audience. he then starts to take control over the laughing chorus who follows his vocal utterances in close imitation. alternately, small and large whips accentuate the high points of his rising glissandi. these become more and more strident until the leader stops the escalating laughter by means of a single gesture. it is accompanied by the cracking of both whips at once (rehearsal no. 256), as if to release the hotel guests from their spellbound state. the transgressive element of the laughing song that we encountered in mann’s novella is thus transformed. instead of an uncontrolled outbreak of natural laughter, here we witness an uncanny act of will control exerted by the savage leader. though the whips are not visible on stage, their sound exposes the violent nature of the scenario. compared to britten’s musical realization, the laughing song heard in visconti’s film comes much closer to the “brash popular number” described in the novella. surprisingly close, one could say, since it unveils and gives a tangible presence to mann’s own source. in 1895, during the early days of phonography, the neapolitan singer and actor berardo cantalamessa came across a popular american tune called “the laughing song” composed and recorded numerous times by the afro-american singer george w. johnson. [38] discovered as a new york street artist with a penchant for whistling, he began to produce recordings on wax cylinders for several companies, including the new york phonograph company, the new jersey phonograph company, and columbia in 1890. both “the laughing song” featuring johnson’s distinctive, musically-timed laughter and another tune called “the whistling coon” established his pioneering role as the first black voice to gain fame in the nascent industry. [39] his enormous success, however, stemmed not only from the catchy melodies themselves but also from the then popular image of the “coon” (i.e., a racialized portrayal of the black man as the big-lipped, lazy fool that became a standard trope of the so-called “coon song).” [40] placing “the laughing song” in the wider context of early recording, jacob smith further emphasizes that “the laugh was a significant and powerful index of presence for the first audiences of prerecorded performances.” [41] as a case in point he cites the peculiar genre of the laughing records that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century. they feature deliberately flawed performances of classical music—usually in the form of a vocal or an instrumental solo containing some mistake—interrupted by a sudden breaking up in laughter from a member of the audience. this, in turn, affects the musician who bursts out in laughter as well. this idea of a reciprocal infection between performer and audience marks a striking parallel to mann’s novella scene hinting at its own intermedial character. the song that comes closest to mann’s description, however, is not johnson’s original but its neapolitan parody—namely, cantalamessa’s “ ’a risa.” how the italian singer came to adapt the song in 1895 is recollected by his partner nicola maldacea, another famous neapolitan comedian: on a certain day, after a rehearsal at the salon, we stopped in the galleria at a shop by the side of the crociera. … for the first time there were phonographs in naples, a very recent invention. … the major attraction was a popular song by a black north american artist. i don’t remember the name of the song. i know only that it created in cantalamessa and me a very great impression because it communicated an irresistible joy. the singer laughed at the sound of the music, and his laughter was so spontaneous and so entertaining that he [cantalamessa] was prompted to imitate it. [42] by 1895, johnson’s cylinder recordings had made it to italy, where they were showcased by exhibitors to a paying public. [43] cantalamessa was not the only one to seize upon the comic potential of johnson’s song by producing his own version of it (figure 3), but he was one of the few neapolitan artists at the time whose voice was preserved on cylinder and disc. in august 1901, he recorded several solo and duet numbers, including “’a risa” on edison cylinders with the milan-based anglo-italian commerce company. [44] the following year another version of his “canzonetta eccentrica,” now under the italianized title “la risata,” (“the laugh”) appeared on shellac disc (78rpm). it was issued by the international zonophone company, then the biggest competitor of the berliner gramophone company. fig. 3 cantalamessa, “’a risa”, cover of sheet music and first page. around the mid-1890s thomas mann was living in italy, where he visited rome, palestrina, venice, and naples in december of 1896. if he ever saw one of cantalamessa’s performances during this stay remains unclear, but it seems more than likely that he heard the song in one form or another and later incorporated it into his novella. [45] for visconti the connection must have seemed evident, all the more so since “’a risa” can be considered a popular classic. due to its hilarious spirit, it works perfectly in the film. when the guitarist starts singing the song, it quite naturally excites a mindless gaiety among the audience. if we consider the lyrics (figure 4), [46] the function performed by the laughter is that of a comic catharsis. in the context of the scene, however, this idea is ironically inverted. instead of becoming liberated through laughter, the audience is infected by it and thus symbolically rendered sick. io tengo ’a che sò’ nato, ’nu vizio gruosso assaje, nun l’aggio perzo maje, va’ trova lu ppecché! mm’è sempe piaciuto di stare in allegria. io, la malinconia, nun saccio che cos’è! sarrà difetto gruosso chistu ccà! (ride) ah, ah, ah, ah. ma ’o tengo e nun mm’ ’o pozzo cchiù levà! (ride) ah, ah, ah, ah. since i was born i have a very bad defect that i never got rid of, i wonder why! i always liked to enjoy myself. what melancholy is, i really don’t know! it’s probably a big weakness, this one here! (laughs) ha, ha, ha, ha! but i have it and i can’t get rid of it! (laughs) ha, ha, ha, ha. io rido si uno chiagne, si stongo disperato, si nun aggio magnato, rido senza penzà. chist’è ’o difetto mio, vuje già mo lu ssapite, ‘nzieme cu me redite ca bene ve farrá! redite e ghiammo jà: (ride) ah, ah, ah, ah! ca bene ve farrà: (ride) ah, ah, ah, ah. i laugh when someone cries, when i’m desperate, when i’m hungry, i automatically laugh. this is my flaw, you know it already, laugh with me it will be good for you! laugh and let’s go: (laughs) ha, ha, ha, ha! it will be good for you, (laughs) ha, ha, ha, ha. [47] fig. 4 cantalamessa, “’a risa,” lyrics. again, visconti has the guitarist walk around the guests beginning with the groups seated down in the garden. the musician’s performance is interspersed with buffoonish behavior as well as slightly obscene gestures, such as an explicit movement of the hip towards a woman at the russian table. in the middle of the song, then, the actual singing ceases for a moment as waves of giggling break out in the audience. the guitarist alone then revisits aschenbach on the terrace, continuing incessantly with his rhythmical laughter. as the singer approaches tadzio (who is not visible in the frame), aschenbach tosses and turns uneasily in his chair. after a prolonged zoom shot lingering on his erect posture and anxious face, visconti cuts to the whole ensemble, who have meanwhile returned to the original position (figure 5). compared to the novella, the performance resumes in a less hysterical manner. the mean-spirited guitarist brazenly points his finger at the hotel guests, taunting them with derisive laughter as the song continues. the camera remains focused on the band vanishing into the dark from where it had come. in a last close-up, the guitarist’s starkly lit pale face reemerges from the darkness, sticking his tongue out. fig. 5 visconti, death in venice, mocking of the audience. uncanny resemblances: death in venice and doctor faustus in the film, the mysterious figures not only share similar features, such as a foreign look and obnoxious behavior, but they all laugh at aschenbach in a devilish manner. this is not the case in the novella, and it seems unlikely that visconti simply added this element to make their relationship more obvious. the entrance of the young-old man is a case in point: before he enters the frame, we hear a goat-like bleating sound turning into sardonic laughter when the camera catches his sight with a quick zoom-in. the gondolier, too, answers the protagonist’s feeble objection to being taken to the lido by him with a sneering laugh before continuing with his unintelligible murmuring. this chain of motivic association, however, also comes to include the protagonist himself as well as alfred, his friend (or alter ego). after aschenbach’s breakdown at the fountain, visconti cuts to a symphonic performance of one of his works, which is booed by the audience. the scene does not represent an actual flashback, but rather a nightmare, as is clarified afterwards when we see aschenbach tossing and screaming in his hotel bed. in the dream, he begs alfred to send the hostile audience away: “send them away? i will deliver you to them!” shouts the latter, breaking out in vicious laughter. since his friend’s philosophical outpourings on music’s ambiguity and the demonic side of artistic creation directly reveal doctor faustus as their source of origin, his laughter, too, gains an uncanny diabolical resonance. to be sure, visconti’s conflation of the two mannian subjects has not gone without criticism. however, while his interpretative approach is certainly idiosyncratic, there are striking thematic similarities that should be considered. aschenbach and leverkühn are both driven by a subconscious desire for inspiration and transgression, an altered state of consciousness, which they eventually achieve through dionysian or diabolical intoxication. tadzio and esmeralda, whom visconti parallels by visual and musical means (they both play beethoven’s für elise on the piano), serve as catalysts for this experience. furthermore, in both novels, the dionysian/diabolical appears in different disguises, as noted by t. j. reed: “fate in doktor faustus and the technique used to suggest it recall der tod in venedig, often down to minute detail.” and he goes on to explain that: schleppfuß, who disappears from the university scene with the same suggestive unobtrusiveness as the stranger in the monumental mason’s yard, recurs like him in the leipzig guide and in the devil in palestrina. the figures of the two works even share the distinctive reddish hair. [48] in light of these analogies, visconti’s intertextual reworking seems well motivated, even if the palimpsestic overlayering of aschenbach, leverkühn, and mahler bears certain inconsistencies. [49] when aschenbach, while leaning wearily against the fountain, eventually erupts in convulsive laughter himself, this gesture not only brings to mind the young-old man, whose decadent appearance he has come to resemble, but it more generally reveals him as a “prefiguration of leverkühn.” [50] visconti indeed lends particular weight to this moment through the musical synchronization of the scene. not coincidentally, aschenbach’s outbreak of laughter coincides precisely with the last poignant eruption and subsequent tonal resolution at mm. 94–95 of mahler’s adagietto. echoing the music’s release of tension, the laughter does not sound desperate but rather liberating, as if the protagonist were finally embracing the demonic inside of him. in the novella, this act of identification (i.e., aschenbach’s final surrendering to dionysus) occurs during the nightmare: “but the dreamer was now with them, within them: he belonged to the strangergod. … and his soul savored the debauchery and delirium of doom.” [51] though visconti’s scene does not quite match the symbolic explicitness of this depiction, it nevertheless hints at aschenbach’s yielding to the darker forces he has tried to suppress. the mocking laughter, culminating in the laughing song of the guitarist, now has become his own. transforming the performance as a musical moment of liminality and transformation, the performance of the street musicians in mann’s novella calls for adaptation. not only does it lend itself to theatrical, operatic, and even cinematic treatment—if we think of the exchange of looks between aschenbach and tadzio—but it also evokes a strong sense of corporeality which gains a new kind of performative presence, whether on stage or the screen. at the heart of the scene lies the idea of contagious laughter as a comical device that is infused with tragic forebodings. the guitarist-singer himself is an ambiguous figure oscillating between the demonic and the dionysian, between devil and buffo. as such, his laughter is ambiguous, too, turning from comedy to mockery as it takes over the audience, eliciting an altered state of consciousness. in britten’s opera, the scenario is turned inside out as a staged projection of fears residing within the protagonist who seems to castigate his own desires. the songs performed by the strolling players hint with more or less subtle allusions at his hopeless condition. the leader, though musically connected to the dionysian principle, also performs the role of a mesmerist dominating the will of the members of the audience by turning them into accomplices of his act of humiliation through laughter. thereby, the transformative space of the performance is radically altered. the scene’s importance rests on the fact that it carves out a space for the inner voice of conscience, closely echoing the morally charged rhetoric and ironic distancing supplied by the narrator of the novella, once aschenbach begins drifting into the “dangerous” quicksand of erotic obsession. following his declaration of love as climax of act 1—which, as christopher chowrimootoo notes, exhibits stronger visceral charms than critics have generally admitted [52] —aschenbach himself occasionally pauses with moments of self-accusation. the performance of the strolling players, however, provides a more substantial counterbalance in this regard. this is apparent in its gradual shifting from the lighter, ironic humor of the duet “o mio carino” to the darker, menacing tone of the leader’s solo numbers. visconti’s adaptation initially focuses on the gaze motif that characterizes the disembodied relationship between aschenbach and tadzio. in the second part of the scene, however, the music becomes the dominant force as the devilish guitarist walks around the audience and performs his act of mimetic contagion. here, too, we witness a dissolution of boundaries, when he starts pointing his mocking finger first at aschenbach and finally at all of the noble guests in their blatant ignorance. while visconti takes more liberty with the novella as a whole, his treatment of the scene stays quite close to the original setting. by inserting popular italian songs from the time, including cantalamessa’s “ ’a risa,” the acoustic space of the novella is invoked in a way that rings with authenticity. this sense of recovering a bygone time through a plenitude of historical detail in terms of setting, costume, and music, is an underlying tenet of visconti’s period films, allowing the spectator to “savor the sights and sounds of the past.” [53] with the use of cantalamessa’s laughing song in particular, the film reaches back behind the source-text, thus uncovering a further layer of the novella’s own intertextually as well as intermedially resonant character. [1] thomas mann, death in venice, trans. michael henry heim (new york: harpercollins, 2004), 115. [2] mann, death in venice, 116. [3] my reading draws on erika fischer-lichte’s notion of performance as a liminal and transformative event from which “change to the physiological, energetic, affective, and motoric state” of the audience can emerge. though her focus lies on performance art since the 1960s, her understanding of performance as transformation is particularly well suited to examine the novella scene and its intermedial transpositions. see her the transformative power of performance: a new aesthetics, transl. saskya iris jain (london: routledge, 2008), 177. [4] several authors deal with the novella, film, and opera in a (media-)comparative approach without commenting on the scene at hand: ernest w.b. hess-lüttich and susan a. liddell, “medien-variationen: aschenbach und tadzio in thomas manns der tod in venedig, luchino viscontis morte a venezia, benjamin brittens death in venice,” in code-wechsel: texte im medienvergleich, ed. ernest w.b. hess-lüttich and roland posner (opladen: westdeutscher verlag, 1990), 27–54; roger hillman, “deaths in venice,” journal of european studies 22, no. 4 (1992): 291–311; philip kitcher, deaths in venice: the cases of gustav von aschenbach (new york: columbia university press, 2013). [5] hans rudolf vaget, “film and literature. the case of death in venice: luchino visconti and thomas mann,” the german quarterly 53, no. 2 (1980): 169. with regard to britten’s opera, lloyd whitesell notes the music’s “mocking, streetwise commentary on the ridiculousness of [aschenbach’s] desires.” see his “notes of unbelonging,” in benjamin britten studies: essays on an inexplicit art, ed. vicki p. stroeher and justin vickers (woodbridge: the boydell press, 2017), 226. [6] the laughing song described in the novella shows striking similarities with berardo cantalamessa’s popular neapolitan hit “’a risa.” that this song provided the template for mann is also noted by paolo isotta, il ventriloquo di dio: thomas mann, la musica nell’opera letteraria (milan: rizzoli, 1983), 160, and fausto petrella. the latter claims that mann knew the song from one of his venetian sojourns, citing a letter from erika mann to mann’s polish translator, andrzej dołęgowski, dated 24 september 1964 as proof. see his l’ascolto e l’ostacolo: psicoanalisi e musica (milan: jaca book, 2018), 167–70. in her letter, erika mann writes that everything depicted in the novella, including the encounter with the street singers, had really happened during the family’s 1911 stay at the grand hôtel des bains in venice. with this, she echoes the well-known autobiographical account given by mann himself in his lebensabriß (1930). however, since mann makes no reference to either the song or cantalamessa, the connection remains implicit. [7] linda hutcheon, a theory of adaptation, 2nd ed. with siobhan o’flynn (london: routledge, 2013), 8. within the field of adaptation studies, mikhail bakhtin’s notion of “dialogism” has proven especially influential in overcoming the pitfalls of “fidelity criticism.” see robert stam, “beyond fidelity: the dialogics of adaptation” in film adaptation, ed. james naremore (new brunswick: rutgers, 2000), 54–76 and, more recently, dennis cutchins, “bakhtin, intertextuality, and adaptation,” in the oxford handbook of adaptation studies, ed. thomas leitch (new york: oxford university press, 2017), 71–86. [8] this kind of criticism was mostly directed against visconti, whose film was seen as failing to match the complexity and subtle irony of mann’s novella. furthermore, his equation of aschenbach and gustav mahler drew strong objections. see, for example, philip reed, “aschenbach becomes mahler: thomas mann as film,” in benjamin britten: “death in venice,” ed. donald mitchell (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1987), 178–83. yet, as has also been remarked by several critics, turning the protagonist from writer to composer is more in tune with the possibilities of the filmic medium, favoring the immediacy of aural experience. see, for instance, irving singer, “death in venice: visconti and mann,” mln 91, no. 6 (1976): 1348–59. [9] the idea of visualizing the scenario as if it were a projection from the inside of aschenbach’s mind also informed colin graham’s minimalist staging of the first production of death in venice with peter pears in the role of aschenbach, which took place on june 16, 1973, at the snape maltings concert hall (snape, uk) near aldeburgh. see christopher chowrimootoo, “bourgeois opera: death in venice and the aesthetics of sublimation,” cambridge opera journal 22, no. 2 (2010): 183–85. [10] edward w. said, “not all the way to the tigers: britten’s death in venice,” in on mahler and britten: essays in honour of donald mitchell on his seventieth birthday , ed. philip reed (woodbridge: the boydell press, 1995), 269. [11] before his visit to asia in 1956, britten had come in contact with balinese music through the canadian composer and ethnomusicologist colin mcphee. in the words of anthony sheppard: “britten particularly enjoyed watching the performance of the boys’ gamelan, a type of ensemble initially formed by mcphee twenty years earlier. this connection between the musical exotic and homosexual opportunity is central to several of britten’s operas and receives its clearest expression in his final opera, death in venice.” revealing masks: exotic influences and ritualized performance in modernist music theater (berkeley: university of california press, 2001), 143. for a detailed account of britten’s compositional use of gamelan idioms, see mervyn cooke, britten and the far east: asian influences in the music of benjamin britten (woodbridge: the boydell press, 1998), 220–44. [12] roger wiehe, “the danse macabre as the crucial moment in story and film versions of death in venice,” in the symbolism of vanitas in the arts, literature, and music: comparative and historical studies , ed. liana degirolami cheney (lewiston: mellen, 1992), 89. the argument was first introduced in his earlier article “of art and death: film and fiction versions of death in venice,” literature/film quarterly 16, no. 3 (1988): 210–15. [13] vaget, for example, finds that “visconti’s toying with the doctor-faustus-connection strikes one as pretentious and constitutes a blunder in the conception of the film.” see “film and literature. the case of death in venice: luchino visconti and thomas mann,” 172. philip kitcher makes a similar argument in his deaths in venice, 132. for a more positive assessment of visconti’s alterations, see werner faulstich and ingeborg faulstich, modelle der filmanalyse (munich: w. fink, 1977), 20–23. [14] mann, death in venice, 108–9. [15] on the narrational function of the zoom, see michael wilson, “art is ambiguous: the zoom in death in venice,” literature/film quarterly 26, no. 2 (1998): 153–56. [16] the song tells the story of a man who temporarily ponders killing himself after having learned of the suicide of his former lover. however, the last stanza concludes: “vorrei morire per non soffrire, | ma il cuore si ribella, | dice: ‘perché? | tante ce n’è! | la troverai più bella!’” (i want to die so i won’t suffer anymore | but the heart refuses, | saying: “why? | there are so many [women]! | you will find a more beautiful one!”). [17] in this the film deviates from the scene in mann’s novella, where the whole ensemble remains separate from the audience on the terrace until the guitarist comes forward and starts collecting the money. [18] peter evans, the music of benjamin britten (oxford: clarendon press, 1996), 524. lowe-porter’s translation was instrumental in introducing death in venice to an english-speaking public. in 1925, she had been granted exclusive rights to translate the works of mann from german into english by alfred a. knopf. for a critical study of the novel-to-opera adaptation of death in venice, see clifford hindley, “contemplation and reality: a study in britten’s death in venice,” music & letters 71, no. 4 (1990): 511–23. [19] “o mio carino,” as well as the first version of the leader’s song which britten had to drop due to copyright issues, were already included in his sketchbook for the opera. see colin matthews, “the venice sketchbook,” in mitchell, benjamin britten: “death in venice,” 56. [20] see andrea sessa, il melodramma italiano, 1861–1900: dizionario bio-bibliografico dei compositori (florence: olschki, 2003), 188. [21] see canti popolari toscani, corsi, illirici, greci, raccolti e illustrati da n. tommaseo con opuscolo originale del medesimo autore , 4 vols. (venice: girolamo tasso, 1841), 1:104–9; canti popolari toscani: raccolti e annotati da giuseppe tigri (florence: barbera, 1856), 80 as well as canti popolari toscani, scelti e annotati da giovanni giannini (florence: barbera, 1902), 143–44. [22] philip rupprecht, britten’s musical language (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2001), 269. [23] rupprecht, britten’s musical language, 267. [24] see paul banks, ed., benjamin britten: a catalogue of the published works (aldeburgh: britten-pears library, 1999), 145. bank lists the song under the title “s’ai son tre colombe bianche.” [25] the falsetto voice is also used to characterize the elderly fop in the boat scene of act 1, scene 2. [26] see christopher palmer, “britten’s venice orchestra,” in mitchell, benjamin britten. “death in venice,” 137–38. [27] see evans, the music of benjamin britten, 526. [28] in the novella, dionysus is referred to as the “stranger god” due to his foreign asian origins. thus, his pursuing of aschenbach is symbolically connected to the spread of asian cholera into europe. [29] drawing on bakhtin’s notions of “dialogism” and “polyphony” in the novel, luca zoppelli argues that stage music with its diverse musical idioms and genres contributes to the “dialogical” character of operatic discourse. the characters speak for themselves in their own musical voice and thus become emancipated from the style and narrational control of the author. see “‘stage music’ in early nineteenth-century italian opera,” cambridge opera journal 2, no. 1 (1990): 29–39. in the case of britten’s death in venice, however, the composer’s voice closely aligns itself with aschenbach. the musical “i” of aschenbach could be said to present a plural, fragmented consciousness in that it is infiltrated or populated by multiple, opposing voices, each represented through a specific musical idiom, such as the sober voice of reflection articulating itself in the recitativic parts accompanied by the piano, the apollonian voice embodied in the gamelan-inspired orientalism pertaining to tadzio, and the more threatening vocal realm of the dionysian. [30] as manfred dierks pointed out, it is euripides’ late tragedy the bacchae, in which dionysus triumphs over king pentheus who refuses to worship him, that served as a model for the novella and for this scene in particular. in the play, the god comes to thebes in human disguise, accompanied by a traveling band of bacchantes from asia. when the messenger announces pentheus’ death, the chorus mocks him with a foreign-sounding song of triumph. see dierks, studien zu mythos und psychologie bei thomas mann. an seinem nachlaß orientierte untersuchungen zum «tod in venedig», zum «zauberberg» und zur «joseph»-tetralogie (bern: francke, 1972), 21–25. [31] mann, death in venice, 116. [32] see marc a. weiner, “silence, sound, and song in der tod in venedig: a study in psycho-social repression” seminar: a journal of germanic studies 23, no. 2 (1987): 137–55. [33] myfanwy piper, “the libretto,” in mitchell, benjamin britten. “death in venice,” 52. [34] mann, death in venice, 112. [35] the english translation is included in the printed full score. see benjamin britten, death in venice, an opera in two acts, op. 88 (london: faber music limited, 1979), appendix. [36] britten likely knew the story as it was included in the 1954 vintage books edition “death in venice” and seven other stories (translated by lowe-porter) which can be found at the britten-pears library in his house in aldeburgh (ref. 1-9601308). [37] thomas mann, mario and the magician and other stories, trans. helen tracy lowe-porter (london: vintage, 1996), 146. [38] some of johnson’s recordings—including different versions of “the laughing song”—can be found and listened to in the collected works of george w. johnson, internet archive, added february 20, 2004. [39] for a more detailed account of johnson’s life and career, see tim brooks, lost sounds: blacks and the birth of the recording industry, 1890–1919 (urbana: university of illinois press, 2004), 15–71. [40] the coon song emerged in the tradition of the minstrel shows, where it was typically performed by white men in blackface. in 1894, johnson himself joined a group of performers named the imperial minstrels who recorded miniature versions of minstrel shows on cylinder. [41] jacob smith, vocal tracks: performance and sound media (berkeley: university of california press, 2008), 19. [42] “un certo giorno, dopo la prova al salone [margherita], ci fermammo in galleria in un negozio di quel lato della crociera, […]. vi erano esposti, per la prima volta a napoli, i fonografi, recentissima invenzione. … la maggiore attrattiva era costituita da una canzonetta in inglese, speciale fatica di un artista moro del nord america. non ricordo il nome della canzonetta. so solo che essa produsse in cantalamessa e in me una grandissima impressione, perché di allegria irresistibilmente comunicativa. quel cantante rideva a suon di musica, e la sua risata era così spontanea e così divertente che si era invitati senz’altro imitarlo.” nicola maldacea, memorie di maldacea: vita, morte e resurrezione di un lazzaro del xx secolo (naples: f. bideri, 1933), 141–42; the english translation is taken from simona frasca, italian birds of passage: the diaspora of neapolitan musicians in new york (new york: palgrave macmillan, 2014), 84. [43] that johnson’s recordings reached an international market is indicated on the cover of the sheet music for the “laughing song,” published in 1894. the advertising line reads, “over 50,000 records up to date for phonograph use all over the world.” quoted in brooks, lost sounds, 40. [44] anita pesce, la sirena nel solco: origini della riproduzione sonora (naples: guida, 2005), 44–45. on the early international distribution of neapolitan songs, see her chapter “the neapolitan sound goes around: mechanical music instruments, talking machines, and neapolitan song, 1850–1925,” in neapolitan postcards: the canzone napoletana as transnational subject , ed. goffredo plastino and joseph sciorra (lanham: rowman & littlefield, 2016), 45–72. [45] see note 6. [46] the lyrics are printed in the sheet music for “’a risa.” the song originally comprises three stanzas, but the film uses only two of them in a free arrangement. [47] the english translation is mine. [48] t.j. reed, thomas mann: the uses of tradition (oxford: clarendon press, 1974), 395, 395n79. [49] most obviously, mahler’s music hardly embodies the rigorous formalism and lack of sensual quality that alfred accuses aschenbach of. [50] vaget, “film and literature,” 172. [51] mann, death in venice, 128–29. [52] though i would not necessarily reduce the climaxing gesture of the orchestra to a sounding “evocation of orgasm,” i sympathize with chowrimootoo’s defense of the sensually appealing qualities of britten’s musical rhetoric. see “bourgeois opera: death in venice and the aesthetics of sublimation,” 204–7. [53] giorgio biancorosso, “ludwig’s wagner and visconti’s ludwig,” in wagner and cinema, ed. jeongwon joe and sander l. gilman (bloomington: indiana university press, 2010), 336. × article contents new directions in the study of dubbing the transition to sound, and the consolidation of dubbing cines-pittaluga’s dubbing process: between routine and experimentation cines-pittaluga and the composer romano borsatti conclusion footnotes article translating music: dubbing and musical strategies in italian cinema of the early sound period luca battioni sound stage screen, vol. 1, issue 1 (spring 2021), pp. 47–76. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.13130/sss14132. throughout the 1930s, the large majority of films distributed and eventually screened in italy were dubbed. dubbing practices inevitably had an impact not only on the way sound was experienced in film but also the configuration of the emerging italian film industry following the introduction of synchronized sound on the one hand, and the consolidation of the fascist regime on the other. in fact, drawing on the work of andrew higson, among others, i wish to argue that dubbing complicates the notion of national cinema in the italian context of the 1930s. higson was among the first scholars to theorize the concept of national cinema. in his work, he argues against production-centric conceptualizations, pointing out that a full understanding of national cinema begins from the assumption that it is a complex cultural aggregate, and that at its core lies the reception of films by popular audiences. higson’s approach “lay[s] much greater stress on the point of consumption, and on the use of films (sounds, images, narratives, fantasies), than on the point of production.” this, in turn, encourages “an analysis of how actual audiences construct their cultural identity in relation to the various products of the national and international film and television industries, and the conditions under which this is achieved.” [1] the pervasiveness of dubbing in the 1930s needs to be addressed in these terms, and a film’s dubbed soundtrack must be considered as a channel through which audiences construct their own identities—regardless of the geographical provenance of the film screened. nevertheless, in the case of dubbed movies, the negotiation between the ‘national’ and the ‘foreign’ takes place in the film’s soundtrack at the stage of production as well: for the original images of a movie are combined with voices, sounds, and often music that are conjugated in national, or at least nationally familiar, terms. for this reason, both the productive and receptive sides of dubbing ought to be considered when discussing its use in national cinema. martine danan argues that “dubbed movies become, in a way, local productions,” [2] and pierre sorlin claims that, through the process of dubbing, a film becomes a different performance of the same text. [3] considering that dubbed foreign movies accounted for the vast majority of cinematic screenings in italy in the 1930s, it is no exaggeration to claim that these films significantly contributed to the shaping of italian national cinema, even and indeed especially at a time when domestic productions were few and far between. the way sound technologies were understood and used when cinema converted to sound indelibly oriented subsequent national filmmaking practices and aesthetics. for instance, in his foundational work on the introduction of sound in french and american film, charles o’brien contends that france’s preference for direct sound since the 1930s has shaped the development of french national cinema and defined its stylistic signature. [4] in italy, by the same token, the preference for dubbing for both imported and domestic films had a significant impact on later filmmaking practices. grasping the role of dubbing in italian cinema of the 1930s is fundamental if we are to better understand neorealism as well as the cinema of such auteurs as michelangelo antonioni, federico fellini, and pier paolo pasolini. these filmmakers’ style was defined by post-production sound techniques that crystallized during the first decade of sound cinema. in recent years, dubbing has increasingly been approached as an audiovisual translation technique. in translation studies, a fair amount has been written on both dubbing and subtitling from the perspective of both cultural studies and linguistics. [5] film scholarship on italian dubbing has focused mainly on the leading personalities and their voices. [6] for her part, antonella sisto compiled a groundbreaking work on dubbing from the perspective of sound studies. [7] this latter contribution traces the cultural trajectories of dubbing from its establishment under the fascist government to its artistic legacy as a postproduction technique used in italian films of the postwar period. in sisto’s work, however, the 1930s are considered only with respect to censorship and the discrepancy between the voice and its putative anchor, namely the image of the actor’s body. further scholarly research has pointed out that the choice of dubbing, including its institutional implementation, was indeed a reflection of fascist politics of foreign anesthetization. [8] new directions in the study of dubbing the singular focus on the fascist institutionalization of dubbing, however, overlooks the mechanics of the dubbing process itself. the political and ideological conditions that underpin the development of dubbing should be coupled with an understanding of it as a practical experience. admittedly, the scarcity of relevant primary film sources—often no longer accessible or difficult to locate—hampers the study of the subject. nevertheless, as i will illustrate, much archival material has survived, allowing for an investigation of dubbing that takes into account not only the final visual products but also the written documents that informed and accompanied their making. the backbone of this research is an assortment of archival materials preserved at the museo nazionale del cinema in turin. [9] these documents are critical to the study of dubbing in the early sound era. they contain official instructions followed in the dubbing process of many early 1930s foreign movies released in italy, and they illustrate that, as the dubbing process unfolded, the censors’ choices were closely linked to technological constraints and artistic considerations. in the following i illustrate my argument in three sections. in the first, i briefly chart the passage from so-called silent to sound cinema. the fascist government did not take long to perceive foreign voices and sounds as threats to national identity. film reviews of the time provide a rich taxonomy of the multifarious practices adopted in the transition to sound—multiple language versions of the same film, sound movies made silent again, movies with alternative italian soundtracks, and films poorly dubbed abroad were in the forefront of italian movie theaters before the arrival of dubbing around 1932. sounds, like images, underwent all sorts of manipulations. in the second section, i examine archival documents related to the earliest dubbed movies distributed by cines-pittaluga, the company which played a major role in the production and distribution of dubbed films during the early years of sound cinema in italy. here, i argue that since its origin, the dubbing process was an opportunity for experimentation with sound. in addition, the efforts revolving around dubbing made up for the lack of a robust domestic film industry and contributed to establish a technical and artistic framework that would inform italian cinema’s aesthetic outlook for decades to come. fully aware of its impact on a film’s narrative and consequently a film’s reception, dubbing directors gave particular attention to every aspect of the soundtrack. in the final section of the article, by foregrounding the collaboration of the italian composer romano borsatti with the cines-pittaluga studio, i contend that music contributed to the ‘domestication’ of foreign movies dubbed in italian. a close reading of letters sent by cines-pittaluga to borsatti will also provide a framework to understand the role played by italian composers in the dubbing process. as we shall see, dubbing not only shaped the minds of audiences and the modus operandi of composers but also public perceptions of language in its relation to the emergence of a national cinematic culture. the transition to sound, and the consolidation of dubbing we do not find it far-fetched to state that, when attending the screening of a foreign film, a large part of the audience does not perceive, recall, or know that the lines or voices they hear are not the original ones uttered and delivered when the film was shot—in short, they do not realize or recall that the film has been dubbed. [10] this passage by film critic tell o’darsa (pseudonym of dario sabatello) suggests that in 1937, just a few years after the emergence of dubbing, the practice went mostly unnoticed by italian audiences. however hyperbolic it may seem, this writing testifies to the quality of italian dubbing. indeed, foreign dubbed films could pass as local productions. to try and account for this seeming oddity, this section traces the convoluted trajectory of film sound as experienced by italian audiences in the early 1930s. this critical transition has been documented in the weekly magazine cinema illustrazione and will be discussed here with examples from specific sections devoted to reviews curated by film critic enrico roma. although very little is known about roma, he appears to be the only critic who, as italian cinema made the transition to sound, devoted a few weekly lines to the quality of dubbing. though less frequently and systematically than roma, other commentators also expressed informed opinions about dubbing; in 1931, for example, ettore maria margadonna wrote an extensive and skeptical review about it, despite foreseeing the potential of such postproduction technique. [11] while in the us the official narrative of the history of sound cinema begins in 1927 with the release of the jazz singer, in italy any such history would have to begin two years later, when the same film was screened for the first time in rome. however, since the italian film industry revolved around silent cinema, the establishment was reluctant to adapt to the new technology. [12] in every major italian city, movie houses had their own professional orchestras with renowned conductors and pianists who carefully studied the scores to synchronize with the films to be screened. [13] an entire industry, including musicians, composers, and editors, gravitated towards an art form that would soon phase out permanently. having screened foreign sound films for only a few months, italy made a quick turnabout. on october 22, 1930, a ministerial decree prohibited the screening of films that included speech in other languages, imposing the removal of any scene involving dialogue spoken in languages other than italian. [14] the result was catastrophic. of the original soundtracks of foreign films, only music and sound effects were left intact, while intertitles in italian were interpolated, constantly interrupting the images’ rhythm. those movies were termed “100 percent read films” by the satirists of marc’aurelio by way of contrasting them to the “100 percent spoken films” featured in other parts of the world. [15] the subsequent adoption of dubbing, while silencing foreign utterances, at least gave the voice back to italian audiences. [16] “silencing” movies was not the only option. hollywood production companies were already experimenting with alternative solutions to exploit the european markets. although dubbing technologies were already available by the early 1930s, film companies embarked on the production of multiple-language versions (mlv)—namely, movies that were shot simultaneously, or in a staggered fashion, in more than one language, with different actors, directors, and crews. [17] one of the most emblematic mlvs was the big trail (1930, us), which was produced in four versions—italian, french, german, and spanish—each starring different actors. in his 1931 review of the italian version (il grande sentiero, 1930), roma commented on it with irony, and criticizing mlvs produced in the united states for featuring italian-american actors who mainly spoke italian dialects influenced by american accents. furthermore, as roma noted, the actors’ lines were too poetic and literate, in jarring contrast with the characters’ or the plot. [18] the european hub of mlv films was joinville studios in paris. in his review of televisione (television, 1931, us) roma describes it in harsh tones: joinville! that says it all. only two days of programming, and the heckling resounds. it seems impossible. anytime the italian language is spoken in our cinemas, a storm quickly unleashes (aside from the pittaluga company, which takes things quite seriously in this respect). and understandably so. how could you expect a foreign régisseur to possibly judge the diction of our actors? i bet de rochefort considers orsini a great italian actor, whereas his obvious neapolitan accent (which at times is comical indeed) and his declamatory emphasis would make him a good addition to the compagnia scarpetta. [19] […] is this the end of joinville’s mishaps? i don’t believe so…. but we could truly do without… [20] italian audiences, as it turned out, did not appreciate these efforts produced abroad. the scripts were written in a language detached from everyday speech, and while the actors had an italian background they were still complete strangers to italian audiences, who instead laughed at the combination of southern italian dialects and english spoken with a contrived italian accent. mario quargnolo has written about another italian experience crucial to this period of transition to dubbing, namely the sonorizzazioni. the process involved either the accommodation of old silent films to suit modern taste or the adoption of imported sound films stripped of all foreign-language dialogue. [21] in his work, quargnolo uses the words sonorizzazione and ammutolimento (muting, i.e. “the process of making a film speechless by deleting all the dialogue”) interchangeably. however, in 1931 roma seemed to have identified them as two distinct practices: getting rid of doublages [dubbing]? easier said than done! which films could replace those with foreign speech, when experience suggests rejecting solutions like ammutolimento and sonorizzazione, which both strip a film of large sections of its footage, while the national industry is still in a swaddling blanket? [22] although roma does not clearly explain the two different processes, i would argue that ammutolimento applies to those instances in which the whole soundtrack (including music, sound effects, and dialogue) was wiped out, thereby leaving the original film literally “silenced.” on the other hand, sonorizzazione—in addition to the widespread practice of synchronizing afresh films from the silent era—could be understood to describe the process of rendering a sound film speechless, while retaining music and noises whenever possible (or remaking them for the occasion). both systems relied on italian intertitles to replace original dialogues. in 1930, roma described the sonorizzazione process as follows: it must be noted that this time the transposition from sound with full speech to sound only—save for the handful of harmless french lines—has turned out better than it has in previous foreign works released since the start of the season. the cuts go almost unnoticed and the intertitles, inserted to substitute speech, are well written and suffice for comprehension and effects. [23] arguably, the decision to either silence a film (ammutolire) or maintain/remake it as a speechless sound film (sonorizzare) also depended upon the kind of production to be adapted. il principe consorte (1929, the love parade, us), discussed in the review cited above, was a musical comedy. silencing this production (ammutolimento) would have ruined the film and compromised its success; thus, the sonorizzazione—“from sound with full speech to sound only”—was deemed a better option. in the early years of sound film other peculiar solutions were adopted in an attempt to overcome both political and national barriers: the film is spoken in italian (i.e., doublé [dubbed]) in the same manner as morocco. that is to say, there were insertions of footage shot in paris with italian actors. the trick, this time, worked out less badly. it is still annoying, though, because we can tell that the actors are different, and the disconnect between the two parts is inevitable. oh, well. [24] cutting scenes with english speech and replacing them with new footage of italian actors speaking their own language was a practical (though not fully successful) solution adopted in films such as marocco (1930, morocco, us) and disonorata (1931, dishonored, us, the actual subject of the review). interestingly enough, marocco, dubbed and released in france as coeurs brûlés in 1931, was well received by the critics and as such must be considered one of the first well-judged examples of dubbing. [25] the convoluted cinematic jungle through which an italian spectator had to move in the early thirties is aptly described by roma in the following passage: the old production reluctantly engages with the new one, and the latter with the brand-new one. every film undergoes modifications and adaptions depending on the market, the country, the screens where it is sent to by the distributors. we have killed the silent film, but we are now forced to mute the spoken ones because no one would understand them, and censorship would prohibit their distribution anyway. of a “100-percent-talkie” film we are now offered a version in which voices have nearly disappeared. [26] kilometers of intertitles replace these voices; yet amidst this silence, there suddenly appears a line in german or english, a song, a choir, or an insignificant noise. of a scene featuring fifty people moving, silently, we hear but the single blow of a stick, the slamming of a door, or knuckles tapping on a wall. puerility. confusion. [27] as roma points out, the situation for film critics over this period was more difficult and frustrating than ever. the edited movies presented in italy made it impossible for a critic to judge a piece of work impartially, and it is hardly surprising that films “received with shock in milan or rome had been completely successful in berlin or new york.” [28] it is also not surprising that in 1931, roma—having already been exposed to a few years of spoken movies—wished for a kind of cinema with little to no room for spoken dialogue, resulting in what he called “the cinematic symphonic poem” (il poema sinfonico cinematografico). [29] in roma’s nostalgic imaginary, music and images work together in perfect harmony, whereas speech is “a ball and chain” (una palla al piede) to the music. this vision falls within a widely shared opinion at that time which considered the use of dialogue as unaesthetic (i.e., too similar to everyday conversation) and condemned the talkies for abolishing the difference between art and reality. in this view, “silence and music were excellent vehicles for achieving the poetic prominence of pure form, understood as a sort of rhythm—visual, oral, or both.” [30] although roma’s prediction did not materialize, his descriptions and responses offer a frame of reference for the understanding of the italian situation at the time and reconstruct the zeitgeist of the early sound period. moreover, roma’s reviews represent a litmus test for the quality of sound technology from the dawn of sound cinema throughout the early thirties. the number of critical notices decrying the poor quality of italian versions of foreign films would gradually decrease. for example, in the reviews published in 1933, almost no reference is made to dubbing, accents, quality of scripts, etc. this would seem to indicate that by that time dubbing techniques had improved and audiences had become habituated to the new status quo. foreign experimentations came to an end as the process of dubbing found a permanent home in italy. the earliest dubbing efforts made in italy date back to late 1931 and involved primarily german films, [31] including, for instance, salto mortale (1931) and fortunale sulla scogliera (menschen im käfig, 1930). according to roma, these movies—dubbed by cines, an italian film company founded in 1906—were technically well made. roma also points out that director ewald andré dupont shot them with dubbing in mind, allowing images to better fit would-be dubbed voices: il fortunale is an italian spoken film presented by cines. and even from this angle, it is a good film. the voices are well chosen, and the acting is excellent. dupont, in shooting the german edition, must have taken into account the needs of the other versions, thus minimizing the difficulties. but the main reason for the laudable result is that the actors are not known and are therefore credible even when speaking italian. a doublage is therefore not a bad option as long as it does not involve celebrated film stars. [32] according to this review, dubbing influenced filmmaking techniques to the point where certain angles, shots, or montages were preferred to others so as to accommodate future versions. thus, cinematic aesthetics and techniques were often subordinated to a potential for dubbing. o’brien analyzes the aesthetic consequences of dubbing on shot composition in hollywood films, highlighting many of the techniques used to keep the viewer’s gaze away from the actor’s lips. [33] additionally, roma points to the practice of famous american stars speaking italian as a cultural constraint that dictated the failure of several dubbed movies. according to joseph garncarz, however, the cultural acceptance of dubbing must be considered as a learning process through which audiences began to embrace the discrepancy between bodies and voices that are out of sync with one another. [34] following these early experiments, the dubbing industry permanently settled in italy in spring of 1932, thus becoming the only avenue to screen foreign films. not only was dubbing in italy more in tune with the national taste than the imported films dubbed abroad, but its increasing frequency was also due to a 1933 measure by the fascist regime which prohibited the screening of italian versions produced abroad. [35] at that point, the fascist government had become aware of the potential role dubbing could play in shaping, through cinema, the understanding of anything “foreign.” dubbing finally “provided an ‘acoustic roof’ over the native soil, a linguistic barricade whether against the encroaching babel of generalized modernity or against regional political expansion.” [36] moreover, censorship could be smoothly disguised simply by adjusting the soundtrack over a cut sequence. [37] according to sisto, the “clash of the ordinary sonic with the unfamiliar visuals” engenders a “psychic resistance in the reception of the moving/sounding image,” and in so doing, “dubbing destroys any possibility and real empathic believability of the other into a fictitious domesticity that perceived as such becomes just an untrue and dismissible spectacle.” [38] this interpretation neatly applies to early audiovisual translation attempts, when the foreign and the national (“mock” national, in the case of productions made abroad for the italian market) clashed visually and orally in the audiences’ minds. however, and following o’darsa, i would argue that dubbing became widely accepted. the general audience no longer questioned the national character of the cinematic body with the same urgency, and eventually accepted the films as genuine italian products. of course, these audio-visual dissonances were more difficult to accept when well-known foreign stars were involved. nevertheless, the association of specific actors with their respective italian voices throughout their career—aided by the fact that their original voices had never been heard—gradually eliminated the perception of them as “foreign-national others.” to summarize, the development of sound cinema in italy unfolded, from its inception, under the rubric of nationalism. unlike other european countries, the spectrum of different solutions adopted to accommodate increasingly stringent fascist policies was very wide. the common denominator, however, was to wipe out possible ‘threats’ from abroad and within the country. dubbing was recognized as the perfect formula for both carving a strong national identity and controlling the intrusion of the foreign into the native soil. cines-pittaluga’s dubbing process: between routine and experimentation cines-pittaluga was the main player in the transition from silent to sound cinema in italy. founded as cines in rome on march 31, 1906, the company was then acquired by sasp (società anonima stefano pittaluga) in 1926. cines-pittaluga produced the first italian sound film, la canzone dell’amore (1930), directed by gennaro righelli, and became one of the main distribution companies in the country. the group was also the first to experiment with dubbing in italy, and it went on to establish the first roman dubbing production in the spring of 1932. the arrival of sound cinema in italy is indeed intertwined with the figure of stefano pittaluga himself, who was also responsible for the first screening of the jazz singer in italy. [39] the historical significance of cines-pittaluga in italy is connected to the development of a state-owned cinema and its vertically integrated model. importation, production, and pervasive distribution was the company’s modus operandi, as described by steven ricci: “while pittaluga built his position of strength by importing american films, his production studio (cines) was supported by a chain of first-run theaters in every major italian city.” [40] drawing on archival documents related to a number of foreign-language movies dubbed by cines-pittaluga in 1931, this section examines the company’s dubbing procedures in the 1930s. as i will demonstrate, dubbing grew into more than just a technical chore in that it tied into sound design, the choice of voices, and the use of music. this state of affairs, in turn, impinges on the relationship between dubbing and censorship. the idea of manipulation is often associated with censorship, dictatorship, power, or ideology. within the field of translation studies, jorge díaz cintas distinguishes two types of manipulation: technical (“changes and modifications to the original text are incorporated because of technical considerations”) and ideological (“unfair changes that unbalance the relationship between source and target products take place on purpose and unscrupulously”). [41] under the fascist regime, the suppression of a film’s scene, song, or speech prior to it being dubbed—and after its examination by the censors—clearly falls in the second category. however, when considering the final product of dubbing, it is important to ponder the dialectic between these two forms of manipulation. in fact, the lack of a technologically-informed reading of dubbing might at times bolster the common assumption that any deviation from the original resulted from the ideological agenda or political climate of the era. for instance, a pioneer of dubbing studies in italy, mario quargnolo, reported on the dubbed version of a 1930s french film with the following words: the main attraction of feux de joie, made in 1938 but released in italy only in 1942, was the popular band ray ventura et ses collégiens. well, ray ventura’s orchestra was completely dubbed over with an italian orchestra which remained anonymous. … probably they did not want to propagandize french music, which was carefully avoided even on the radio. [42] although censoring french music might well have been part of the fascist regime’s agenda at the time, a deeper understanding of french film sound technology helps us complicate such a reading. over the first decade of the sound era, the tendency in france was to simultaneously record images and sounds (son direct), as opposed to the hollywood practice of separating sound production from image production. [43] to retain the original music, the italian version would have had to rerecord the original music, which was otherwise impossible to separate as a distinct track from the images and dialogue. understanding sound technology provides the basis for a more accurate reading of censorship and its manifestations. the first archival testimony for our survey of cines-pittaluga is a file on the dubbing of hôtel des étudiants (student's hotel, 1932, france). the film, translated into italian as vita goliardica, was released in a dubbed version in 1933. the document “notes related to the dubbing of the movie” features a list of instructions on how to dub the film. [44] some of the guidelines—“dub all the dialogue”—are obvious enough. instead, other annotations testify to how the technical and the ideological are intertwined. at this early stage in the history of dubbing, the need to manipulate the original music was purely technical, since it was impossible to split the dialogue track from sound effects and music. only the physical separation of the different elements of the mix would have allowed producers to mix noises and music with the newly dubbed italian dialogue track. in its absence, an alternative kind of music had to be mixed with the dubbed dialogue. sometimes the original music track was sent to the distribution company for use alongside the dubbed track. occasionally there may have even been the opportunity to record the music again. yet this was not the most common scenario. in most cases, the italian dialogue was mixed either with newly recorded music similar to the original, or with a musical track taken from the dubbing company’s library of pre-existing music. [45] one possible reason for the removal of original songs or music from a film was that song lyrics were in a foreign language, or that the lyrical content had not been considered appropriate by the censors. it was therefore necessary to address these issues in the process of dubbing, as shown by the following excerpts taken from the aforementioned document: having suppressed the canzonetta sung by odessa as she cooks eggs, it would be useful to have a musical commentary on all the following scenes up until the end of the reel […]. dub the dialogue until the end—when the three teenagers go down the stairs singing, replace the singing with a simple vocal hint of the motif, i.e. a “trallalla, trallallera,” etc. … in the coffee scene, remove the french students’ singing and leave only their vocal “trallalla, trallallera”—or, if possible, use any local goliardic chorus to these scenes and dub gianni’s lines. when odetta and massimo leave, replace the mocking french tune with the well-known goliardic chorus “è morto un bischero,” or something of that nature. [46] in each of the above scenarios, musical editing was a necessary technical expedient to accommodate the modifications requested by the censors, rather than an ideologically driven choice per se. moreover, many changes in vita goliardica were not due to technical constraints; rather, they reflected specific cultural and aesthetic values: underscore with soft musical accompaniment those dialogue scenes that imply and thus call for it. underscore dialogues with music, and fill the transitions with the original score, if available, or a new piece. all scenes after odetta and gianni hug until the end of the reel will require a musical comment, to be mixed with the dialogue but without overwhelming the lines spoken by the actors … and ending on the header “end of part two.” [47] as these instructions make clear, the changes to the music are dictated by choices that have less to do with technological limitations than a purely aesthetic evaluation. another aspect worth exploring is the use of preexisting music. following tom gunning and martin miller marks, emilio sala distinguishes a “music of attractions” from a “music of narrative integration” to describe the different uses of music in the context of silent films. sala cautions against strictly adhering to the assumption that “music of attractions = preexisting music, while music of narrative integration = music composed ex novo,” and he opposes considering this dichotomy from a teleological perspective, that is to view the music of narrative integration as a step forward in film music history. [48] both tendencies have coexisted and interacted with each other throughout the history of cinema. as dubbing instructions illustrate, preexisting music was extensively employed in the early years of dubbing. the sources point to two scenarios. the first, as mentioned earlier, is the use of well-known italian goliardic songs such as “è morto un bischero”, a method which operates dramaturgically by activating a musical memory and drawing on the collective imagination. [49] the second case is the use of preexisting repertoire drawn from musical libraries, as evidenced by another dubbing instruction: replace the tune massimo plays on the gramophone with an italian record from the pittaluga musical library suitable to that scene and to the scenes that will follow, overdubbing the italian lines. [50] in this case as well, the indications corroborate an attempt at narrative and aesthetic integration. the preexisting pittaluga track must match the scene’s mood but must also interact narratively with the scenes that follow. in hollywood, the use of musical libraries and preexisting music at the time was typical of low-budget productions. [51] by contrast, the use of preexisting music in italian cinema was often the result of an attempt to culturally adjust the original product for the local audience. one last aspect emerging from the documentation on dubbing concerns the attention paid to sound design (i deliberately use an anachronistic term here to highlight the keen awareness of the filmic soundscape on the part of the practitioners of the time). instructions such as “reproduce such sound effects as strictly necessary” (riproducendo quei rumori che sono strettamente indispensabili,) for instance, raise a series of questions that are difficult to answer without having access to copies of these early dubbed films: which sound effects were deemed necessary to a film scene, and which were not? were they necessary for the sake of realism or narrative comprehension? dubbing instructions for several other films also showcase a similarly holistic understanding of the sound mix. the following example from the files on febbre di vivere (1932, a bill of divorcement, us) testifies to the great care put into the construction of the mix: after the opening titles (with the original music), play an english waltz (on the header: “christmas night in the old england”) mixed with the buzz of the conversation. continue with the waltz, in accordance with the appropriate sound perspective of the various settings, up until the moment when it joins the original. [52] the original music was likely an english waltz that had to be substituted because it could not be blended in. the new musical track had to be adjusted according to space and sonic context, and had to fade back into the original one. these instructions demonstrate an already clear and innovative awareness of the sound’s power to shape cinematic space. from the same file, we can see another example of “substitution of narrative integration” (i.e., a change that takes into account the film narrative): we cannot use the piano sonata composed by the protagonist included in the original [track]. [53] it is therefore necessary to choose a sonata that we own, keeping in mind that: 1) this new sonata must have with a closing allegro movement which will start a few moments before sydney’s final line, when she talks about joyful music. 2) the sonata must be in d major because the dialogue explicitly refers to a d major sonata. for the ending, the theme developed by the piano during the last scene must transition to the full orchestra. [54] it is unlikely that italian audiences would have noticed the exact key of the sonata (beyond perhaps recognizing whether it was in major or minor). nevertheless, such a method testifies to the meticulous, even fastidious care devoted to every aspect of the film during the dubbing process in order to strengthen the realistic quotient of dubbing itself. in notte di fuoco (1932, radio patrol, us), the dubbing director was given the freedom to silence the music to highlight a particularly salient moment: at the discretion of the dubbing director, for a few segments of the action it will be possible to use the original soundtrack, only without music—only noises and sounds. that is because the absence of music seems to enhance the meaning of those sounds intrinsic to the action—for instance, in the scene in which the two police officers chase kloskey in the slaughterhouse, or when the baby emits his first wails. [55] in this case, as against the original version, the subtraction of the music is a narratively motivated choice that enhances the soundscape while simultaneously drawing attention to a salient moment in the action. such interventions testify to a keen awareness of the soundtrack’s power to enhance a film’s narrative as well as the acknowledgment of the audience’s potential reception. the following example, referring to la pericolosa partita (1932, the most dangerous game, us), further supports this perspective: it is necessary to reproduce all the noises and voices which bear great importance in this film as they serve to create a particular atmosphere of fear and emotion—i.e., the screams of castaways, calls and screeches of birds, knocks on doors, a cup toppling over, the crashing of a piano, a vase falling, doors closing, dogs barking, water rushing, etc., etc., in accordance with the original. [56] in conclusion, dubbing in the 1930s was not simply a routine operation, but rather a process involving artistic and culturally sensitive choices. in this connection, it is worth pointing out that between 1930 and 1935, out of 1,700 talkies distributed for release in italy, only 128 were italian—a mere 7 percent of the total. [57] the remaining mass of foreign-language films constituted a vast field of experimentation and crystallization as regards dubbing and other post-production techniques. companies such as cines-pittaluga, which produced most of the early italian-language movies, also acted as one of the major distribution companies. the same technical staff, then, would work on both fronts, allowing for interactions and innovations across the italian-language / foreign-language divide. one could contend that dubbing in the 1930s represented a laboratory to test film sound techniques—a space to develop awareness of the role and potential of the soundtrack—which in turn influenced the production of domestic films. the post-production of the cinematic voice began in those very years. at the same time, work on accent, timbre, and interpretation—at first along the same lines as in the theater—was also precipitated by dubbing and its extensive use in the early years of sound cinema. it is certainly true that cinema developed through its constant interaction with radio and other media, too. [58] yet, dubbing too played a primary role in shaping the cinematic landscape, as corroborated in its use in subsequent eras (e.g., neorealism). such an outsized role would be unthinkable had dubbing been limited to domestic productions. as ricci points out, the mutual relationship between dubbing foreign films and the growth of a national cinema was due primarily to the sharing of the same infrastructure: to this day, this institutional regulation [i.e., dubbing instead of subtitling] affects the italian mode of production. it supports a small dubbing industry and encourages film producers to take advantage of its technical infrastructure. [59] by the same token, i would argue that the dubbing infrastructure enabled the italian film industry to develop a repertoire of post-production, sound techniques which contributed to the emergence of a national sound-film style. cines-pittaluga and the composer romano borsatti as shown by the dubbing instructions, music for dubbed films was often a mixture of both preexisting tracks available in musical libraries and original compositions. as dubbing was delegated to dedicated staff, in most cases composers played a rather marginal role. yet it is still worth asking: what was the role of composers in the dubbing process? and how much new music, if any, was composed specifically for dubbed productions? in the following pages, i explore the relationship between cines-pittaluga and the italian composer romano borsatti. drawing on letters sent by the company’s musical department to the composer, i provide a more detailed picture of the world of dubbing. this includes the way cines-pittaluga built its own musical library, and how this happened. due to a fire at the cines-pittaluga headquarters in 1935, which destroyed all their documents, these surviving letters are of great value to understand the development of sound cinema in italy in the early thirties. romano borsatti (1892–1962), born in trieste, began to study music at an early age. he studied both violin and piano, as well as counterpoint and composition. he taught violin at the conservatory of music in trieste before deciding to focus exclusively on composition and performance. during the silent cinema era, he also worked as a piano accompanist, providing music for screenings of films. as a violinist, he participated in various opera and symphonic seasons at the verdi and rossetti theaters in trieste. his work as a composer ranged from operas, operettas and several compositions for cinema, up to an array of popular songs interpreted by renowned local artists such as mario latilla, nino marra, dina evarist, and gabré. [60] this brief biography foregrounds aspects of borsatti’s career that might have been of interest to a film company like cines-pittaluga. first, borsatti had a solid musical education and a strong background as an established performer, conductor, and composer. second, borsatti was a popular composer, and his songs were successful among italian audiences, indicating his familiarity with the listeners’ tastes and expectations. these aspects of borsatti’s career may well account for why cines-pittaluga decided to turn to him not only to take care of the music in its dubbed films but also build a musical library for the studio. i have been able to locate six letters from the company addressed to borsatti. [61] they were written between may 1932 and may 1933 (the same time frame of the documents presented in the second section of this article). as previously mentioned, film dubbing by cines-pittaluga began around the spring of 1932, but it is likely that some practices such as the sonorizzazioni continued for a while. in the first letter addressed to borsatti (may 18, 1932), cines-pittaluga shows appreciation for the composer’s choice to release his compositions with their own publishing company, in line with the typical synergy between cinema, editors, and record labels of the time. [62] the music featured in popular films was then distributed by cines-pittaluga as part of an effective commercial strategy, and had to follow specific requirements: we inform you that, for our immediate needs, we would like some pieces of joyful character, but not dances. simple and graceful musical interludes, to be adopted for scenes featuring little movement, such as a living room conversation, an easy stroll, a house gathering, and the like. we would like to point out that these interludes should not be stylized, and they should preferably be in one tempo only. [63] recorded and stored in the company’s musical libraries, these compositions were likely utilized as backing tracks for producing dubbed dialogues in several films. the company also requested borsatti to limit himself to their list of instruments when orchestrating his compositions. this was likely due to the orchestral resources available at cines-pittaluga. on september 10, cines-pittaluga informed borsatti that one of his compositions had been used in the film l’ultima squadriglia (1932, the lost squadron, us), and asked the composer to arrange additional descriptive music for love scenes and dramatic scenes. in the letters from october 29 and november 9, respectively, cines-pittaluga notified borsatti that his compositions momento erotico (“erotic moment”) and agitato drammatico (“dramatic agitation”) had been accepted. one of the letters included a royalty form to be filled out and signed by the composer. the compositions were thereafter stored by the company and registered at the italian copyright collecting agency siae (società italiana degli autori ed editori) to allow borsatti to receive the requisite royalty each time they were featured in dubbed films. in the last two letters from the collection, cines-pittaluga informed the composer about the recording arrangements put in place in various dubbed movies. the first part of the letter (13 may 1933) is particularly relevant for our discussion: we have been informed by our maestro tamanini that you serve as musical conductor of several small orchestras in public venues, and that it would not be difficult for you to include our works for such ensembles in your programs. while we strongly recommend you make use of our repertoire, we kindly ask you inform us if you are in possession of any of our publications, and that you kindly provide us with the names and addresses of those “chef d’orchestre” [conductors] who currently perform with small orchestras in public venues. [64] cines-pittaluga, aware of borsatti’s activity as a conductor, openly suggested the use of its own musical repertoire published by the società anonima stefano pittaluga. furthermore, the composer was asked to provide the names of conductors performing in public venues. the company’s goal was to enlarge its distribution network to music venues, outside the realm of movie theaters, by asking conductors to play cines-pittaluga’s repertoire. the company was seemingly attempting to impose the pieces it featured in its dubbed or domestic productions on concerts and musical events all over the country, and to distribute them in its own editions. emilio audissino argues that the fascist attempt to strictly control the sound of italian cinema through dubbing was not only an effort to ban foreign voices, but also to help establish a homogeneous spoken language, analogous to standardized written italian, in preference to the predominant regional dialects. [65] this offers tantalizing points of similarity with the way in which cines-pittaluga attempted to spread its repertoire onto the concert stage to develop a standard soundscape that would be recognizably italian. the ramifications of this operation are significant, as the viewers’ musical imagination was thus shaped by the very same body of music produced by italian composers and which was heard both on the screen and in live concerts in public venues. in this sense, the early 1930s bear a continuity with the silent period, when many compiled scores featured in movie theaters were based on the orchestrine repertoire. [66] in the years of sound cinema, however, the orchestrine repertoire appears to be shaped by film scores featured in both foreign and domestic films. furthermore, the similarity of musical themes heard in concerts outside movie theaters raises the question of whether dubbed productions were truly perceived as foreign products, or whether they could have been experienced, to a certain extent, as domestic. the answer is not clear-cut, and additional factors such as the growing network of stars further complicate this perspective. to conclude, i would argue that the italian practice of compiling scores for films—the main modus operandi in the silent period—survived to some extent into the sound era, when sound for dubbed films was produced by compiling pre-existing pieces and the composition of original scores was still limited to a few domestic productions. conclusion locating and gaining access to the original films is one of the major difficulties in the study of dubbing. in this article, i have attempted to make up for the lack of audiovisual sources by inspecting alternative documents that provide insights into the early practice of dubbing and open new paths of research on the subject, and coupling them with studies on fascism, censorship, and propaganda as well as considerations on technology, film aesthetic, local adaptation, and the domestic production system. further complications to the study of conversion-era cinema springs from what o’brien calls a “historiographical prejudice” in film history—a prejudice that privileges the international film d’auteur at the expense of other films that while commercially and technically significant were and continue to be viewed as lacking in historical resonance. [67] because dubbing has traditionally been considered an anti-artistic practice that degrades an original product for the sake of profit, dubbed movies pay an even higher price in the history of cinema. however, as jean-françois cornu contends, in many countries the practice of dubbing brought talking cinema to every social class, a phenomenon which “can also help us better understand the development and standardization of film-sound processes and practices.” [68] o’brien points to two additional limitations of film historiography on dubbing. first, the supremacy attributed to the role of the visual over the sonic in film studies. while image techniques experienced a standardization by the late 1930s, o’brien argues that “the sound accompaniment may well vary substantially from one national cinema to the next to thus condition national approaches to mise-en-scène, cinematography, and editing.” [69] in other words, the uniqueness of a national cinema must be sought in the soundtrack, especially when discussing the first decade of sound cinema, and particularly, i would add, when considering dubbed movies. second, the tendency of film historiography to associate stylistic changes in films with specific directors or movements does not apply to the conversion era because “when style seemed so obviously a function of technical constraints, explanations in terms of filmmakers’ intentions seem applicable to only a small portion of the film industry’s output.” [70] although here i have focused mainly on the practical applications of dubbing, we are still left with a series of key questions concerning the way this technology made sense within the italian cinematic industry. to grasp the effect of postproduction on film style, one must analyze the italian national cinema in higson’s terms; that is, considering both filmic production and consumption. within this larger framework, we can begin to answer questions such as why italian domestic cinema wound up preferring the use of postproduction sound as opposed to direct-recorded sound. furthermore, how did the transition from dubbing-as-a-mode-of-audiovisual-translation to dubbing-as-a-mode-of-domestic-production develop? was it determined by sharing the same infrastructure, or was it driven by an aesthetic and stylistic outlook? further research might move along two lines. first, an investigation of the superseding of original music with music arranged by italian composers for dubbed versions of films would be welcome. although in many instances the companies drew on their own musical libraries, it was not unusual for new soundtracks to be composed with a specific production in mind. [71] the second research direction should involve an extensive investigation into the reception of dubbing. because the need for manipulation arose from a fascist decree and left an indelible mark, the point of emphasis should ultimately be the effect of such manipulations on audiences, regardless of their producers’ motivations. this is not a purely theoretical reservation, as this process had material consequences which become apparent when we recall the writings of roma and o’darsa: the increasing perfecting of dubbing techniques, the experimentation with sound design, and the construction of an italian soundscape might have been necessary for italian audiences to accept dubbing as such, and hence to an uncritical embrace of such an anesthetizing view of the foreign, which the fascist government was so keen to promote. [1] andrew higson, “the concept of national cinema,” screen 30, no. 4 (1989): 45–46. [2] martine danan, “dubbing as an expression of nationalism,” meta 36, no. 4 (december 1991): 612. [3] pierre sorlin, italian national cinema, 1896–1996 (london: routledge, 1996), 10. [4] charles o’brien, cinema’s conversion to sound: technology and film style in france and the u.s. (bloomington: indiana university press, 2005). [5] see, for example, irene ranzato, translating culture specific references on television: the case of dubbing (london: routledge, 2015); maria pavesi, maicol formentelli and elisa ghia, eds., the languages of dubbing: mainstream audiovisual translation in italy (bern: peter lang, 2014). [6] see, for example, mario guidorizzi, ed., voci d’autore. storia e protagonisti del doppiaggio italiano (sommacampagna: cierre, 1999); gerardo di cola, le voci del tempo perduto. la storia del doppiaggio e dei suoi interpreti dal 1927 al 1970 (chieti: edicola, 2004). [7] antonella sisto, film sound in italy: listening to the screen (new york: palgrave macmillan, 2014). [8] see carla mereu keating, the politics of dubbing. film censorship and state intervention in the translation of foreign cinema in fascist italy (bern: peter lang, 2016); mereu keating, “censorial interferences in the dubbing of foreign films in fascist italy: 1927–1943,” meta 57, no. 2 (2012): 294–309; mereu keating, “‘100% italian’: the coming of sound cinema in italy and state regulation on dubbing,” california italian studies 4, no. 1 (2013): 1–24. [9] fondo società anonima stefano pittaluga, museo nazionale del cinema, turin, italy. a work-in-progress digital catalog is available at http://pittaluga.museocinema.it/home. [10] “non crediamo sia azzardato affermare che una buona parte del pubblico nell’assistere alla proiezione di un film straniero non avverta, non ricordi o non sappia che le battute e le voci che sente non sono quelle originali, pronunciate ed emesse quando il film è stato girato, che in una parola non avverta o non ricordi che il film è stato ‘doppiato.” tell o’darsa, “le voci del cinema,” in cinema illustrazione, september 22, 1937, 9. all translations from cinema illustrazione and archival materials are mine, unless otherwise indicated. [11] ettore m. margadonna, “parabola del ‘parlato:’ il ‘dubbing,’” comoedia, november 15–december 15, 1931, 17–18. [12] mario quargnolo, la parola ripudiata: l’incredibile storia dei film stranieri in italia nei primi anni del sonoro (gemona: la cineteca del friuli, 1986), 1–3. [13] quargnolo, la parola ripudiata, 1. [14] quargnolo, la parola ripudiata, 13. [15] mario quargnolo, la censura ieri e oggi nel cinema e nel teatro (milan: pan, 1982), 49–50. [16] in italy, the dubbing industry was inaugurated in 1932 by cines-pittaluga. for a short recollection of the early phases of the introduction of dubbing in italy, see mario quargnolo, “pionieri e esperienze del doppiato italiano,” bianco e nero 28, no. 5 (1967): 66–79; paola valentini, “la nascita del doppiaggio,” in storia del cinema italiano, vol. 4, 1924–1933, ed. leonardo quaresima (venice: marsilio, 2014), 286–287. [17] see ginette vincendeau, “hollywood babel: the coming of sound and the multiple-language version,” in “ film europe” and “film america”: cinema, commerce and cultural exchange, 1920–1939, ed. andrew higson and richard maltby (exeter: university of exeter press, 1999), 212. [18] enrico roma, “le prime a milano,” cinema illustrazione, march 25, 1931, 13. [19] a neapolitan theater company. [20] “joinville! è detto tutto. due soli giorni di programmazione e fischi sonori. pare impossibile. quando, nei nostri cinema, si parli italiano, la tempesta non tarda a scatenarsi (la pittaluga a parte, che da questo lato fa le cose sul serio). e si capisce. come volete che un régisseur straniero possa giudicar la dizione di attori nostri? scommetto che per il de rochefort, l’orsini è un ottimo attore italiano, mentre il suo spiccato accento napoletano (in certi momenti decisamente comico) e la sua enfasi declamatoria, ne farebbero un buon elemento per la compagnia scarpetta. […] son finite le malefatte di joinville? non credo… ma potremmo anche rinunziarvi…” enrico roma, “i nuovi film,” cinema illustrazione, september 9, 1931, 12. [21] quargnolo, la parola ripudiata, 30. [22] “farla finita con i doublages? è una parola! con quali films sostituire i parlati stranieri, se l’esperienza induce a scartare altri ripieghi come l’ammutolimento e la sonorizzazione, che sottraggono a un film buona parte del metraggio più utile, mentre l’industria nazionale è ancora in fasce?” enrico roma, “i nuovi films,” cinema illustrazione, september 16, 1931, 12. [23] “si deve inoltre osservare che questa volta la riduzione da sonoro-parlato integrale a sonoro, salvo le poche battute di dialogo in francese, che non guastano, è riuscita meglio che nei precedenti lavori stranieri pubblicati dall’inizio della stagione. le amputazioni quasi non s’avvertono e le didascalie, messe a sostituir la parola, sono scritte a dovere e bastano alla comprensione e agli effetti.” enrico roma, “le prime,” cinema illustrazione, october 29, 1930, 12. emphasis mine. [24] “il film è parlato italiano, intendo dire doublé, con lo stesso sistema di marocco. cioè vi sono stati intercalati pezzi girati a parigi con attori italiani. il trucco, questa volta, è riuscito meno male. ma disturba lo stesso, poiché riconosciamo gli attori inseriti fuori testo, e lo stacco tra le due parti è inevitabile. pazienza!” enrico roma, “i nuovi films,” cinema illustrazione, january 20, 1932, 12. [25] martin barnier, “the reception of dubbing in france 1931–3: the case of paramount,” in the translation of films: 1900–1950, ed. carol o’sullivan and jean-françois cornu (oxford: oxford university press, 2019), 229–231. [26] the label “100-percent talkie” identified movies with audible dialogue throughout, distinguishing them from the “synchronized” films and the “part-talkie” ones. [27] “la vecchia produzione s’innesta suo malgrado alla nuova, e la nuova alla novissima. ogni film subisce modificazioni e adattamenti, a seconda del mercato, del paese, delle sale cui è avviato dai produttori. si sono uccise le ‘mute,’ ma poi si è costretti ad ammutolire le parlate, perché nessuno le capirebbe e la censura ne impedirebbe lo smercio. di un’opera, originalmente parlata al cento per cento, ci si offre un’edizione in cui le voci sono quasi scomparse. chilometri di didascalie prendono il posto delle voci, senonché, tra tanto silenzio, ecco a un tratto una ‘battuta’ in tedesco o in inglese, una canzone, un coro o un rumore insignificante. di una scena dove si muovono in cinquanta, silenziosamente, non ci giunge che un colpo di bastone su una tavola, lo sbattere di un uscio, un picchiar di nocche contro una parete. puerilità, confusione.” enrico roma, “le prime a milano,” cinema illustrazione, october 22, 1930, 6. [28] “non è raro il caso di leggere che un film, clamorosamente caduto a milano o a roma, ha trionfato a berlino o a new york.” enrico roma, “le prime a milano,” cinema illustrazione, december 9, 1930, 12. [29] enrico roma, “esperienze del sonoro e del parlato,” cinema illustrazione, april 15, 1931, 14. [30] giorgio bertellini, “dubbing l’arte muta: poetic layerings around italian cinema’s transition to sound,” in re-viewing fascism: italian cinema, 1922–1943, ed. jacqueline reich and piero garofalo (bloomington: indiana university press, 2002), 39. [31] antonio catolfi, “censura e doppiaggio nelle forme narrative del cinema italiano, nel cruciale passaggio al sonoro degli anni trenta,” between 5, no. 9 (2015): 11. [32] “il fortunale è un parlato italiano, per opera della cines. e anche da questo lato, è buono. le voci sono ben scelte e la recitazione è ottima. il dupont, nel girare l’edizione tedesca, deve aver tenuto presente la necessità delle versioni, limitandone al minimo le difficoltà. ma la ragione principale del lodevole esito è nel fatto che gli attori non hanno alcuna notorietà tra noi e perciò, anche parlando italiano, sono credibili. non è quindi escluso un possibile doublage, purché non si tratti di star famosi.” enrico roma, “i nuovi films,” cinema illustrazione, november 4, 1931, 12. [33] see charles o’brien, “dubbing in the early 1930s: an improbable policy,” in o’sullivan and cornu, the translation of films, 177–189. [34] joseph garncarz, “made in germany: multiple-language versions and the early german sound cinema,” in higson and maltby, “ film europe” and “film america,” 259. [35] quargnolo, la parola ripudiata, 36. [36] nataša ďurovičová, “vector, flow, zone: towards a history of cinematic translatio,” in world cinemas, transnational perspectives, ed. nataša ďurovičová and kathleen newman (new york: routledge, 2010), 102. [37] sisto, film sound in italy, 52. [38] sisto, film sound in italy, 77. [39] paola valentini, presenze sonore: il passaggio al sonoro in italia tra cinema e radio (florence: le lettere, 2007), 30. [40] steven ricci, cinema and fascism: italian film and society, 1922–1943 (berkeley: university of california press, 2008), 66. [41] jorge díaz cintas, “clearing the smoke to see the screen: ideological manipulation in audiovisual translation,” meta 57, no. 2 (2012): 284–285. [42] quargnolo, la censura, 52, quoted and translated in sisto, film sound in italy, 35. [43] o’brien, cinema’s conversion to sound, 111. [44] “note relative al doppiaggio del film vita goliardica,” undated, sasp0093, fondo società anonima stefano pittaluga, museo nazionale del cinema, turin. [45] for a detailed discussion on the issue of mixing dialogues with music, see ermanno comuzio, “quando le voci non appartengono ai volti,” cineforum 224, no. 5 (1983): 23–32. [46] “essendo stata soppressa la canzonetta che canta odetta quando si cuoce le uova, converrà commentare musicalmente tutte le scene che seguono da questo punto sino alla fine del rullo […] doppiare il dialogo sino alla fine – quando i tre giovani scendono le scale cantando, sostituire il cantato con un semplice accenno vocale del motivo – cioè un trallalla, trallallara, ecc. ecc. nella scena del caffè, abolire il canto francese degli studenti limitandosi a riprodurre il ‘trallalla, trallallera’ vocale degli stessi – oppure, se è possibile, applicare a queste scene un qualunque coro goliardico nostrano, doppiando le battute di gianni. quando odetta e massimo vanno via, al coro canzonatorio francese sostituire il famoso coro ‘è morto un bischero’ di carattere goliardico o qualche cosa del genere.” “note relative al doppiaggio del film vita goliardica.” [47] “sottolineare con accompagnamento musicale in sordina le scene dialogate che lo comportino e lo richiedono. sottolineare con musica i dialoghi e commentare quei passaggi di tempo riproducendo la musica originale dove esiste o applicandone della nuova. si ritiene che tutte le scene che si svolgono dal momento in cui odetta e gianni si abbracciano sino alla fine del rullo comportino un commento musicale, prendendo in mixage le battute, senza che per altro disturbi le battute… chiudendo sul titolo ‘fine della parte seconda.’” “note relative al doppiaggio del film vita goliardica.” [48] emilio sala, “dalla ‘compilazione d’autore’ al ‘poema lirico-sinfonico,’” archivio d’annunzio 4, no. 10 (october 2017): 147–148. the reference is to tom gunning, “the cinema of attraction[s]: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde,” wide angle 8, no. 3/4 (1986): 63–70, and martin miller marks, music and the silent film: contexts and case studies, 1895–1924 (new york: oxford university press, 1997), 61. [49] the song’s melody is the same as “qual mesto gemito” from the finale of act 1 in gioachino rossini’s opera semiramide. [50] “sostituire invece con un disco italiano di musica pittaluga adatto alla scena e alle scene che poi seguiranno il disco che massimo mette sul grammofono, eseguendo in mixage le battute italiane.” “note relative al doppiaggio del film vita goliardica.” [51] ronald rodman, “the popular song as leitmotif in 1990s film,” in changing tunes: the use of pre-existing music in film, ed. phil powrie and robynn stilwell (farnham: ashgate, 2006), 121. [52] “dopo il titolo di testa (sul quale rimane la musica originale) attaccare (sul titolo ‘notte di natale nella vecchia inghilterra’) un waltzer inglese, mixato col brusio della conversazione. continuare questo waltzer, nella debita prospettiva sonora a seconda del variare degli ambienti, fino al punto a cui esso giunge nell’originale.” “dispositivo per la sincronizzazione del film febbre di vivere,” 1934, sasp1363, fondo società anonima stefano pittaluga, museo nazionale del cinema, turin. [53] this might suggest either a copyright/licensing issues or technical limitations in the replacement of the original track with dialogue and noises/sounds. [54] “la sonata per pianoforte composta dal protagonista, non può essere utilizzata dall’originale. bisognerà quindi prendere un’altra sonata di nostra proprietà, badando soltanto: 1º) che questa sonata termini con un movimento allegro che attacchi qualche momento prima dell’ultima battuta di sydney, la quale parla d’una musica di carattere gaio. 2º) che essa sia nella tonalità di re maggiore, perché nel corso dei dialoghi si parla esplicitamente di una sonata in re maggiore. per il finale, lo stesso tema sviluppato dal pianoforte durante l’ultima scena deve passare in piena orchestra.” “dispositivo per la sincronizzazione del film febbre di vivere.” [55] “per alcuni brani dell’azione potrà pure, a giudizio del direttore di sincronizzazione, essere utilizzata la colonna originale composta di suoni e rumori, ma senza musica. e ciò perché l’assenza della musica sembra in tali brani valorizzare maggiormente il significato dei suoni inerenti all’azione. così, ad esempio, per la scena in cui i due poliziotti inseguono kloskey nel mattatoio, e per il momento in cui il bimbo emette i primi vagiti.” “dispositivo per la sincronizzazione del film notte di fuoco,” 1932–1933, sasp1721, fondo società anonima stefano pittaluga, museo nazionale del cinema, turin. [56] “è indispensabile riprodurre tutti i rumori e le voci che in questo film hanno una grande importanza in quanto servono a creare una particolare atmosfera di paura e di emozione. e cioè: grida di naufraghi, stridi e starnazzar di uccelli, colpi alle porte, tazza che si rovescia, fracasso del pianoforte, vaso che cade, porte che si chiudono, latrati di cani, fragore di acque, ecc. ecc. attenendosi all’originale.” “note relative al doppiaggio del film la pericolosa partita,” 1933–1934, sasp1375, fondo società anonima stefano pittaluga, museo nazionale del cinema, turin. [57] sorlin, italian national cinema, 56. [58] see valentini, presenze sonore. [59] ricci, cinema and fascism, 61. [60] these biographical notes draw on a brief biography written by borsatti’s daughter and various press articles collected in the personal archive the film critic quargnolo (fasc. 108, fondo mario quargnolo, la cineteca del friuli, gemona). [61] fasc. 108, fondo mario quargnolo, la cineteca del friuli, gemona. [62] see valentini, presenze sonore, 189. [63] “vi comunichiamo che per il n/ fabbisogno immediato ci sarebbero utili pezzi di genere gaio, ma non ballabili. intermezzi semplici, graziosi da poter adottare a scene di poco movimento come conversazione da salotto, passeggiatina flemmatica, un ricevimento in casa ecc. vi facciamo notare che tali intermezzi non debbono essere stilizzati e preferibilmente di tempo unico.” cines-pittaluga to romano borsatti, 18 may 1932, fasc. 108, fondo mario quargnolo, la cineteca del friuli, gemona. [64] “dal ns/maestro tamanini veniamo informati che voi dirigete orchestrine in pubblici ritrovi e che non vi riesce difficile poter inserire nei programmi di esecuzione la ns/produzione per orchestrina. mentre vi raccomandiamo caldamente tale ns/repertorio, vi preghiamo di volerci far sapere se siete in possesso delle ns/pubblicazioni e di volerci cortesemente fornire il nome e gli indirizzi di quei ‘chefs d’orchestre’ che attualmente dirigono orchestrine in pubblici ritrovi.” cines-pittaluga to romano borsatti, 13 may 1933, fasc. 108, fondo mario quargnolo, la cineteca del friuli, gemona. [65] emilio audissino, “italian ‘doppiaggio’ dubbing in italy: some notes and (in)famous examples,” italian americana 30, no. 1 (2012): 22–32. [66] marco targa, “reconstructing the sound of italian silent cinema: the ‘musica per orchestrina’ repertoires,” in film music: practices, theoretical and methodological perspectives. studies around cabiria research project, ed. annarita colturato (turin: kaplan, 2014), 135–167. [67] o’brien, cinema’s conversion to sound, 40. [68] jean-françois cornu, “the significance of dubbed versions for early sound-film history,” in o’sullivan and cornu, the translation of films, 191. [69] o’brien, cinema’s conversion to sound, 42. [70] o’brien, cinema’s conversion to sound, 102–103. [71] an interesting case i am currently working on is the italian edition of frank capra’s it happened one night (1934, us; it. accadde una notte). while the original american talkie does not present much music aside from the opening and ending titles, the italian version makes abundant use of a score composed by amedeo escobar. such a clear scoring strategy posits the idea of a direct involvement of the composer in the making of the italian edition. the result is two completely different movies, and two different ways of consuming films in italy and america. × article contents facticity suture modernity, metropolis, monstration a poetics of workmanship the body and the senses haptics an aesthetic of “attractions” (conclusion) footnotes article attention, music, dance: embodying the “cinema of attractions” * davinia caddy sound stage screen, vol. 1, issue 2 (fall 2021), pp. 35–68, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2021 davinia caddy. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss15963. who doesn’t love online cat media? evil cats, incredible singing cats, idiot cats that will make you laugh out loud: according to a recent estimate, a segment of the human race shares millions of cat images and videos each day, a global trend that both satisfies and stimulates a fondness for animal acrobatics, all things cute and wasting time, while modelling a liberated uninhibitedness (the cats) and self-facilitated entrapment (ourselves) by rampant corporate surveillance. [1] particularly off-beat, and potentially off-putting, is a 22-second sequence—readily available on youtube, the unofficial home of homemade cat media—titled boxing cats. featuring two sparring felines (wearing shoulder harnesses and boxing gloves), a boxing ring (pushed to the very front of the picture plane) and a referee (one professor henry welton, owner of a travelling “cat circus”), this short film dates from the very first crop of cat media to be commercially distributed across the us and western europe. this was back in the nineties, at the dawn of a new media age: that is, the 1890s. [2] it is this originary aspect—the historicity of the pugilistic pair—that interests me in this article. filmed in july 1894 inside thomas edison’s new jersey-based black maria studio, boxing cats is notorious not only as the world’s original cat video; it also has been seen to epitomize and encapsulate the so-called “cinema of attractions”—a genre of early silent film first identified and analyzed by film specialists tom gunning and andré gaudreault. [3] with minimal editing, a largely stationary camera, and limited depth of field, films of this kind aimed entirely at visual spectacle, foregrounding the act of display. most of these bizarre products documented live performances (magic tricks, comedy skits, acrobatics, feats of strength) or simulated travel voyages across exotic terrains; others recorded public events (parades, funerals, sporting activities) or different kinds of objects in motion (trains, bullets, knives, waves). storytelling and character psychology were avoided. conveying a sense of immediacy and physical presence, the “cinema of attractions” aimed to show not to tell, to exhibit not to explain; as a result, the sense of punctual temporality denied any kind of narrative development, offering little in the way of diegetic coherence, sustained characterization, or causality. equally significant, for present purposes at least, “attractions” cued a different configuration of spectatorial attention from that of now-standard, story-telling cinema: gunning calls this “exhibitionist confrontation,” a type of sensory fascination or visceral jouissance that contrasts entirely with classic narrative absorption, its seemingly uncritical transport and panoptic projection into the fictional screen space. [4] boxing cats— preserved as a single 33-foot reel in the archives of the library of congress—is exemplary. [5] clearly, there is no sense of narrative suspense, no linear plotting. (indeed, the impulse, when watching online, is to click repeat—an action that echoes the workings of edison’s own film loop system, used in his peep-show-like kinetoscope.) [6] instead, the cinematography appears to hypostatize a single, autonomous moment: lighting (from above, a rembrandt-like luminescence), framing (the ring, a typical frame-within-a-frame), and planar dimensionality (the dark backdrop, conveying minimal depth of field) direct the viewer’s attention towards the fighting cats. as does professor welton—or, rather, as does his disembodied head. grinning, the professor looks directly at the camera, acknowledging the viewer’s presence and seeming actively to solicit our gaze. more like a cinema showman (or is it shaman?) than a sports umpire, the professor performs a wholly pedagogical function, training his cats for the viewers’ scopophilic pleasure. the visual scene, the technology for capturing and projecting images, the conditions of viewing: these are defining components of what gunning calls the cinematographic dispositif, a concept that embraces both the material apparatus of early silent film and the attention economy such apparatus appears to endorse. [7] indeed, in the “cinema of attractions,” on both sides of the atlantic, the apparatus was arguably the real star of the show, as intimated by firsthand accounts of the earliest lumière screenings in the 1890s. recalling what was a characteristic mode of presentation, spectators describe how films were initially presented as still, frozen images, before the projector cranked up and brought the images to life. here is french film-maker georges méliès: a still photograph showing the place bellecour in lyon was projected. a little surprised, i just had time to say to my neighbor: “they got us all stirred up for projections like this? i’ve been doing them for over ten years!” i had hardly finished speaking when a horse pulling a wagon began to walk towards us, followed by other vehicles and then pedestrians, in short all the animation of the street. before this spectacle we sat with gaping mouths, struck with amazement, astonishment beyond all expression. [8] these “gaping mouths,” besides the intensity of physical movement, can act as a useful stimulus: in this article i want to take up the question of whether the “cinema of attractions” might be a useful tool for critical analysis not only of early silent film and its approach to spectatorship, but also of theatrical dance from the period. certainly, as historicized by gunning, gaudreault, and other colleagues, the “cinema of attractions” appears to encode the culture of modernity from which it arose: the onslaught of stimulation, visual spectacle, sensory fascination, bodily engagement, mechanical rhythm, and violent juxtapositions, besides new experiences of time and space now available within the modern urban environment. [9] moreover, as one of the most popular performing arts of the period, dance was central to the “attractions” industry (and to its origin in variety shows and vaudeville theater), prime raw material that starred the body in motion, a favorite fascination of contemporary cinema. [10] it seems inevitable, then, that there was some connective tissue: cinema and dance might not only share subject matter and affective lure; the two might also cue a similar mode of attention or visuality. and yet visuality is hopelessly narrow. while the topic of attention, as both a historical phenomenon and a theoretical problematic, has risen to prominence across the humanities, it has barely impacted scholarship on music and dance. [11] this is perhaps not surprising, given the fairly recent christening of so-called “choreomusicology,” besides its obvious (if rarely acknowledged) analytical-structuralist inheritance. [12] yet the topic is surely ripe for questioning. how might we conceptualize dance theater as a form of attention, a perceptual complex embracing not only visuality but also the auditory sense, its cognitive capacities, affective intensity, and imaginative dimension? alternatively, might dance be understood as a form of address, an exhibitionist regime of intermedial and purely “monstrative attractions”? [13] as for dancers themselves, how can we account for their individual and collective attentive capacities: their visual, aural, kinetic, and spatial relationships to their own music-drenched diegesis? and what has all this to do with the notoriously complex business of representation, invoking dancers’ various figurative, pictorial, decorative, indexical, symbolic, scriptural, or structural functions? [14] clues to these questions might emerge from burgeoning conversations outside “choreo” confines: opera studies, for example, has developed a hermeneutical strain of musicology that was fashionable in recent decades, speculating at times wildly on issues of embodiment, materiality, and the senses, besides what carolyn abbate once called opera’s “transgressive acoustics of authority.” [15] more immediately helpful in my search for stimulus for this article has been an accumulation of ideas within now-canonic film literature, including gunning’s and gaudreault’s many similarly-themed studies, as well as books by charles musser and ben singer. [16] before venturing further, though, i need to go back to my primary proposition—that the “cinema of attractions,” as both species of entertainment and discursive construct, might provide some purchase on theatrical dance of the period—and raise an objection, one that readers are likely to have sensed. cinema, on one hand; theater, on the other: how can we reconcile the two? more specifically, how can we analogize the cinematographic dispositif—its reproductive aesthetic, industrial mechanicity, and silent politics of acknowledgement (embodied in the work of the camera)—to a theatrical and specifically choreographic context? in the pages that follow i want to suggest that music can play a role, can help determine and sustain a particular attentive praxis while pointing to itself—à la professor welton—as artifice or contrivance. facticity my first and perhaps most obvious example is the american modern-dance pioneer loie fuller, known for her multi-colored dance-and-light displays. “displays,” indeed, is apposite, for fuller’s was a “dance of attractions”—she whirled giant veils around her barely-seen body while colored lights projected onto her shifting form—that rivalled contemporaneous cinema for novelty and sensationalism. moreover, like the “cinema of attractions,” fuller’s dancing was largely without narrative or characterization, besides any sense of linear trajectory. and it, too, was exhibitionary at base, designed to flaunt the spectacular potential not of fuller’s dancing body, for that body was almost wholly concealed, but of her carefully coordinated props, the huge drapes of cloth attached to baguettes that she twirled, as well as her trademarked electric light inventions. this cinematic potential was not lost on historical observers. along with phantom voyages and physical comedies, fuller-style veil-dancing (she had legions of imitators) became popular silent-screen footage—providing a “goldmine” of source material, as noted by french observer louis delluc. [17] perhaps the most famous example is the 1897 short film by louis and auguste lumière, one of their earliest cinematic attempts. a short sequence of silk-swirling by a convincing fuller look-alike, danse serpentine captures the striking iridescence of fuller’s characteristic staged metamorphoses: the brothers tinted the veils of each frame by hand in order to depict the continually changing colored effects (see figure 1). [18] fig. 1. still frames from the lumière brothers’ danse serpentine [ii], 1897. lumière catalogue number 765,1. © institut lumière. it might seem strange, then, that this cinematic aspect of fuller’s performance has received relatively little attention in the academic literature on the dancer. [19] following legendary critics stéphane mallarmé and paul valéry, both of whom wrote about fuller’s dancing at the theater, scholars have tended to conceptualize a dance of abstractions, envisaging fuller as an apparition—to jacques rancière, a (dis)embodiment of pure potentiality: “the poetic operation of metaphoric condensation and metonymic displacement.” [20] the role of the spectator, according to this line of argument, is primarily hermeneutical: attention is understood as an interpretive effort of sustained contemplation and creative conjecture—a kind of theatrical flânerie or imaginative license to investigate and intensify the mysteries of modern-day popular culture; and also a license that extends to musical experience. listening to one of fuller’s shows—she usually performed to preexisting instrumental pieces, familiar to audiences, such as wagner’s “ride of the valkyries”—was thought to call on an audience’s imaginative insight, provoking a seemingly unending process of interpretation of music and its elusive, ever-shifting meaning. fuller herself encouraged spectators to “read your own story into a dance, just as you read it into music,” seeming to endorse contemporary accounts of the mobility of musical meaning, the indeterminacy of the orchestra, and the special symbolic quality that her performance managed to exude. [21] it is doubly strange, then, that this mallarméan habit of thinking gives way under pressure of enquiry, a recently tapped vein of evidence revealing an alternative reception history. [22] reports of technical malfunctions, an acutely negative press, defeat in a us infringement suit, rampant commercialization and merchandising: an accumulation of historical sources reveals a kind of gestalt switch, a shift in perspective from envisaging fuller as a unique, irreplaceable form of semiotic wealth to eyeing her image for its marketable potential, draining her body of that boundless metaphoricity so vaunted by the symbolists. [23] in this revisionist analysis, attention can be understood as a kind of gawking or badauderie, an incredulity that has been dubbed “the lowest-common-denominator culture of the street.” [24] indeed, this is the same open-mouthed astonishment that gunning describes: “the viewer of attractions is positioned less as a spectator in the text, absorbed into a fictional world, than as a gawker who stands alongside, held for the moment by curiosity or amazement.” [25] as for music listening, evidence suggests that fuller’s characteristic soundtrack functioned less as a launch-pad for interpretive reverie than as a signature tune or aide-mémoire, a form of branding that circulated in a repetitive orbit, bearing and gathering the authenticating weight not of origination, consent, or any kind of cultural patrimony, but of consumption and commodification, an ethos of multiplicity. [26] consider, for example, the music used to accompany fuller’s serpentine dance in her first run of solo performances at the casino theatre in new york city, february 1892. ernest gillet’s loin du bal was chosen by theater director rudolph aronson not for its expressive potential or pictorial associations; rather, the tune, played initially by a single violin in a darkened theater, was immediately recognizable, identifiable, “hummable”—“a perennial drawing-room favorite,” according to an entry on gillet in baker’s biographical dictionary of musicians. [27] what’s more, when relocating well-known “classical” extracts within her personal design aesthetic (based, as intimated, on the cinematic smack of the instant), fuller could divest that music of its originary connotations. it is tempting to argue, even, that she metaphorized—or, rather, musicalized—the cinematic practice of gazing at the camera. while filmed “attractions” functioned by acknowledging the facticity of the cinematic apparatus (its mechanics, frames, dimensions, sequencing of shots), in fuller’s theater, it was music that was factic: bits of mendelssohn, chopin, schubert, and wagner no longer simulated illusionistic depth or psychological nuance, but rather served to remind audiences of music’s rootlessness and repeatability, its a-signifying potential. suture before we turn to a second “dance of attractions,” one in which music also functions within a quasi-cinematographic dispositif, it will be useful to sketch a contrasting or, even, contrary example: an example where narrative and causality define onstage activity, voyeurism, and identification, and where dance music functions as an integrative component of a theatrical diegesis—if you like, as pure suture. if, in the above case, visual and auditory attention can be understood as a kind of gawping or incredulous amazement, here a form of what we might call “fictive absorption”—enabled by visual design, gesture, and music—characterizes the spectatorial experience. or perhaps “conventional fictive absorption” is more appropriate, because this kind of spectatorship, and this kind of music, has of course a long and illustrious history. it is “la loie,” perhaps ironically, to whom we can turn once again, here in a theatrical performance that flashes red in the dancer’s history. unlike her typically abstract and decorative displays, fuller’s production of la tragédie de salomé, premiered at the newly renovated théâtre des arts in paris on november 9, 1907, was dramatic through and through. based on a libretto by theater director robert d’humières and a newly commissioned score by the young french composer florent schmitt, fuller’s “drame muet” (silent drama) comprised seven scenes, each designed to illustrate a particular aspect of the judean princess’s changing character. carefree and coquettish in the “danse des perles”; proud and haughty in the “danse du paon” (peacock); sensual and sinister in the “danse des serpents”; cold and cruel in the “danse de l’acier” (steel); lascivious and perverse in the “danse d’argent” (money); and terrified and delirious in the “danse de la peur” (fear): fuller portrayed them all (to varying degrees of success, according to contemporary observers), as can be seen in figure 2, the program front cover, with its six studio headshots—some distance from standard fuller iconography. moreover, besides these carefully choreographed in-character dances, the production offered a strong and detailed plot, replete with fin de siècle decadence and female seduction, as well as impressive scene and costume changes, including an outfit made from 4,500 peacock feathers, a six-foot artificial snake and a sea that turned to blood. fig. 2. program cover, la tragédie de salomé, théâtre des arts, paris, 1907. new york public library digital collections. accessed october 12, 2021. in terms of conveying the drama, schmitt’s score did more than its share of heavy lifting. praised in the press for its “skillful” and “sumptuous” orchestration, the music—dedicated to igor stravinsky—was thought to offer a “symphonic description” of the developing goings-on: [28] it supplied the unspoken words of the drama, conjured the somber mood, added a touch of mystery, and expressed the lascivious perversity of the dancing. [29] to one commentator, moreover, it simmered with an inner life that not even the onstage choreography managed to incarnate: schmitt’s score almost single-handedly evoked the “demonic phantasmagoria,” besides the numerous cataclysmic events that unfolded throughout the drama. [30] clearly, the music was dramatically contingent, an integrable part of the stage diegesis, and one that succeeded in enabling shifting identifications, variously binding spectators into the fiction. consider, for example, the sixth scene (“danse d’argent”), which begins with salome performing a diegetic dance before herod. this was a typical “attraction,” we might suppose: indeed, the dancing seems purely exhibitionary, designed to be displayed; and the music seems to endorse this diegeticism, its melodic patterning, textural clarity, and rhythmic propulsion setting apart the stage spectacle within the scene. yet the dance tune—shrieking woodwind sixteenth notes, punctuated by off-beat string and brass chords—screams salome: it is a melodic inversion of the opening motif of the work, performed to a closed curtain, an undulating line in the cellos and basses that offers a sonic inscription of the dancing body absent from the stage. here in the sixth scene, this formerly floating signifier takes corporeal form: it is, as it were, territorialized, bringing to the diegetic display a heavy dose of dramatic character, and one with which spectators are invited to identify. but identification is soon skewed. after only two bars, this diegetic dance is interrupted by a change of musical motif: blazing sixteenth notes are swapped for a drawn-out and sustained crescendo previously associated with herod, just as—according to the stage directions—herod himself gets up out of his seat. the two motifs jostle as herod moves towards the dancer, grabs her, even throws himself on top of her, stripping her of her clothes. salome lies naked on the floor, herod’s motif blaring from the upper winds and strings, repeated no less than fourteen times (at rising pitches and in various rhythmic diminutions). the message here—what the music is insisting on with all its repetitions—seems clear enough. to gain maximum impact, not only does salome have to be naked; she has to submit to patriarchal musical discourse. whatever we might think of this gendered argument (and its resonance across a vast terrain of salome-themed scholarship), music’s dramatic contribution—its interdependence with gesture and visuals—seems assured. [31] even the most cursory analysis of schmitt’s score reveals a striking incongruity within fuller’s choreographic output: while her typically abstract dances paraded music as a mere postulate, an empty and de-territorialized signifier, her salomé featured a specially simulated soundtrack, tightly interwoven with choreography and dramatic action. moreover, as press critics suggest, listening to that soundtrack involved a kind of figural entrainment: figural, as in bound to forms or characters derived from life; entrainment, as in a process through which we as distanced spectators are incorporated into the diegesis and, as a result, invited to assume ideological complicity. broadly speaking, this process itself can be conceptualized as an aural equivalent of the “optical visuality” described and historicized by film scholar laura u. marks (leaning on art historian alois riegl): a voyeuristic practice of dominance and control, associated with the emergence of renaissance perspective, in which spectators distinguish figures as distinct forms within an illusionistic space, before imaginatively projecting themselves into that space. [32] certainly, it is a mode of listening that, while traditional, falls some distance from the open-mouthed astonishment of the “attractions” industry. indeed, the latter has more to do with what marks identifies as “alternative economies of looking” associated with the “cusp of modernism,” economies in which the spectator relinquishes mastery over what is seen and heard in favor of an immediate embodied response. [33] modernity, metropolis, monstration my second “dance of attractions,” as heavily mythologized as the first, encapsulates precisely this perceptual economy; in doing so, moreover, it rivals early cinema as a distinct aesthetic practice. to be sure, the conceptual origins of productions such as l’oiseau de feu, pétrouchka, and le sacre du printemps—staged in the early twentieth century by sergey diaghilev’s ballets russes—are thought to lie principally within russian music theater and folk history. since the pioneering efforts of richard taruskin in the early 1980s, scholars such as tatiana baranova monighetti and olga haldey have located models for the troupe and their productions in russian folk song, the mir iskusstva circle, and savva mamontov’s private opera, to name a few. [34] yet the “cinema of attractions” might provide an alternative optic through which to view—and to hear—the famous russian company, off-setting now-familiar claims of russian primitivism with a vision of euro-american modernity, distinctly urban, technological, and vernacular. [35] suggesting this is not to deny the decade-or-so discrepancy between the two: the fact that, by the time of the ballets russes’s theatrical ascendancy in the early 1910s, the “cinema of attractions” had, according to gunning, sunk “underground,” magic acts, moving trains, and other purely exhibitionist displays replaced on film by the narration of stories set within self-enclosed fictive worlds populated by relatable characters. nonetheless, early cinema engendered an urban modernity—a particular experience described in terms of novelty, mobility, instability, and physical sensation—that continued to find expression, if not on screen, then in amusement parks, circuses, waxwork museums, postcards, posters, and, we might argue, music theaters. [36] moreover, despite the superseding of “attractions” by narrative film in the second decade of the century, its perceptual possibilities became the focus of film-theoretical discourse in the 1910s (and into the 1920s). as the ballets russes were winning audiences in london and paris, the first film theorists on both sides of the atlantic were contemplating new kinds of knowledge, feeling, and sensation that (they thought) only cinema could create, cinema lauded not for its realism or objectivity, but for its radical possibilities of perception. perhaps my particular example from this repertory will not surprise. of all the ballets russes’s pre-war productions, le sacre du printemps is the most obviously monstrative, non-narrative, and confrontational: it is a ballet, at base, about the act of display. what’s more, in its ability to circumvent a developmental trajectory, le sacre is marked by the same kind of formal non-continuity, dynamism, and flux that characterizes the “cinema of attractions.” it too aestheticizes the effects of modernity on city life, proceeding by means of temporally disjunct bursts of presence, eruptions of activity that signal what gunning describes as “the present tense” of pure display. [37] musicologists have long pointed to the defining compositional principles of stravinsky’s score, describing musical disjunctions and unsignaled interruptions as typically russian: according to taruskin, examples of drobnost’, the quality of splinteredness or fracture, of a whole being the sum of unrelated parts; and nepodvizhnost’ or immobility, a moment-by-moment absence of any forward-going motion. [38] yet these principles are also emblematic of early silent film. take, for example, the multi-shot films of georges méliès, in which, according to historian john frazer, “causal narrative links … are relatively insignificant compared to the discrete events. … we focus on successions of pictorial surprises which run roughshod over the conventional niceties of linear plotting. méliès’ films are a collage of immediate experiences which coincidentally require the passage of time to become complete.” [39] collage as a structural technique (with distinct temporal ramifications) can also be associated with le sacre, which—as mentioned a moment ago—is characterized by the abrupt juxtaposition of musical ideas separated in time and space (register, texture, timbre, or instrumentation). [40] indeed, the manner in which stravinsky’s music foregrounds its own formal apparatus—devices of superposition, stratification, and what pierre boulez famously called “false counterpoint” [41] —is also reminiscent of the “cinema of attractions,” known not only for its characters’ self-conscious gazing at the camera, but also for its promotion of the latest technological machinery, often over and above the visual content to be displayed. before drawing any further analogies in terms of spectatorship or attention, it might be useful to lend some specificity to this generalization about apparatus. to recall an earlier argument: in fuller’s typically non-narrative productions, music’s overt familiarity—its function as a signature tune wiped of pictorial or expressive meaning—engendered an equivalent to the aesthetic of acknowledgement (the staring at the camera) characteristic of the “cinema of attractions:” put bluntly, her music drew attention to itself as part of the artifice of presentation, the theatrical spectacle. in le sacre du printemps, i argue, this same effect is created but by quite different means. for while fuller’s dancing seems to have proceeded regardless of her musical accompaniment, the dancers in le sacre betray a striking receptivity to theirs. indeed, such is the nature of this receptivity that the dancers function as another kind of mediating technology: an apparatus for the inscription of music as visual pattern and visceral force. a poetics of workmanship this idea of the dancers in le sacre as some kind of technological apparatus is not new. [42] critics at the premiere described automatic and reflex movements, as well as an overall sense of dehumanization: [43] even the choreographer vaslav nijinsky admitted in a 1913 interview that “there are no human beings in it.” [44] scholars and practitioners over the years have tended to agree, showing in careful and detailed analyses how nijinsky’s choreography was strictly coordinated to stravinsky’s underlying musical pulse, as well as to the complex play of rhythmic counterpoint that unfolded across it. [45] in “rondes printanières” (spring rounds), for example—and as stravinsky himself indicated in his choreographic notation—one group of dancers moves to the syncopated rhythms of one musical motif, while a second group accents the downbeats of another. earlier in “les augures printaniers” (the augurs of spring), this choreo-musical interplay is visualized within the body: while the dancers jump to the musical downbeats, their arms and upper bodies bring out the music’s irregular accents. underlying these examples is what we might call a poetics of workmanship, a model of the body as a laboring machine. but it might be useful to speculate further on the type or kind of machine we tend to envisage—such speculation might help us, now over a hundred years after the premiere, towards a more nuanced conceptualization of the original interrelations between music and dance. on the one hand, prompted by the ballet’s setting and scenario, it is tempting to conjure up the very earliest technologies of inscription: prehistoric bones, rocks, or other hard materials incised with series of notches, marks, or tallies. clearly, visual artefacts such as figure 3—a broken baton from the grotte du placard, dating from magdalenian iv (approximately 15,000 years ago)—have nothing to do with pictorial representation; they are evidence, instead, of the abstract origins of counting, a one-to-one correspondence between a notch and, say, the sighting of an animal or the appearance of the moon. this singular correspondence, as archaeologists have revealed, likely involved neither physical resemblance nor abstract numeration: no stories or words accompanied the notches; nor were they necessarily conceived mentally as incremental numbers. the notches simply recorded single, unitary events: one animal or moon, one mark. [46] fig. 3. magdalenian perforated baton, grotte du placard (charente, france), pl 55064. musée d’archéologie nationale, saint-germain-en-laye, france. © alexander marshack. is it possible for us to envisage le sacre as a similar technology, a form of prehistoric inscription that exists outside any and all pictorial, symbolic, and narrative domains? to follow this thread might be to recall the anecdotal history of the ballet, replete with tales of counting: nijinsky, at the premiere, screaming the number of beats from the wings; [47] dancers trying to internalize complex meters (that often departed from notated musical ones). [48] we might also look afresh at the bent-over “stamping” motion—the hunkered-down bodies—that characterizes the ballet, at least in “les augures printaniers”: for what is this episode if not the ritual demonstration of non-figurative tallies, series after series of stubbornly illegible, meaningless notches inscribed onto three-dimensional space? on the other hand, attending to these notches—to a system of inscription that runs against our tendency to interpret images as signs or narratives—might lead us towards the opposite end of the historical spectrum: that is, to much more advanced apparatus. recent commentators have argued that le sacre fractures and fixes bodily movement in a manner similar to contemporary technologies of visualization such as early film and chronophotography, the name given by french physiologist étienne-jules marey to his method of capturing separate frames in succession and then graphically inscribing them alongside each other. [49] but, more important for present purposes, the ballet also fractures and fixes music, picking apart melodies and metrical systems, then rendering them as discrete, measurable units. the choreography, perceived in this way, might be envisaged as a particular type of machine, a sound-writer or phonautograph [cgl1] —the first instrument devised to inscribe the movements of a taut membrane under the influence of sound. indeed, early technologies of sound recording (i.e., not playback) were understood as predominantly visual apparatus: they translated soundwaves into series of etches or grooves, a type of visual patterning not unlike the notches and tallies described above (see figure 4). [50] fig. 4. detail of a phonautogram by édouard-léon scott de martinville, phonautographie de la voix humaine à distance, 1857. inpi. credits: firstsounds.org. of course, “reading” any modern art—literature, music, theater—against a backdrop of contemporary technological invention is a now-trending critical maneuver. inspired by the work of friedrich kittler and, more recently, sara danius, scholars readily assume a dialectical relationship between technology and early modernist aesthetics: the two, we are led to believe, are co-constitutive. [51] the nub of the argument here seems to relate to the dancers’ perceived internalization of a technological mode (however prehistoric or modern we consider the apparatus): that is, their function as a sensory-perceptual machine, a technology of musical inscription that filters, segments, and registers sound as a series of atomized quanta. there is also a more basic point here: according to this argument, the dancers are defined phenomenologically not in terms of their visual capacity, as we might expect following traditional enlightenment notions of self and narrative, but in terms of audition—hearing is thematized onstage, is privileged as a perceptual phenomenon. this point also resonates across the literature. recent studies, particularly within literary criticism, have explored the heightened significance of sound and auditory experience in modernity, gesturing not only to the development of various acoustic technologies in the early twentieth century (the telephone, phonograph, and later radio), but to an emerging affiliation between the self and the ear—what steven connor calls “the modern auditory i.” [52] indeed, at a time when increasingly complex visual apparatus brought into question the reliability of the naked eye, threatening a continuity between seeing and knowing, the ear opened up a new and different way of engaging in the world, a mode of lived experience defined in terms of presence, immediacy, and embodiment. more specifically, as connor explains, if the visual self can be conceptualized as a single perspective from which the exterior world opens up in three-dimensional certitude, the listening self is defined “not as a point but as a membrane, not as a picture, but as a channel through which voices, noises and musics travel.” [53] the body and the senses connor provides another—and especially useful—analogy, one that might well recall the above description of le sacre’s hunkered-down bodies, nudging us further towards that argument about the dancer as a laboring machine, an intermediary apparatus through which “noises and musics” pass. we could push the argument further by suggesting that le sacre stages the “modern auditory i”: that, like literature by auguste de villiers de l’isle-adam, marcel proust, and filippo tommaso marinetti (and, later, dorothy richardson, virginia woolf, and james joyce), the ballet uses sound and auditory experience to subvert traditionally ocular conceptualizations of subjectivity, in doing so modelling a new kind of phenomenological experience. indeed, if as connor writes “visualism signifies distance, differentiation and domination,” then audition implies intimacy, immediacy, and immersion—a way of being in the world that appeals directly to the body and the senses. [54] connor’s words are further instructive in that they provide a useful segue into the topic of attention: that is, the auditory experience of bodies in the audience, as well as those onstage, at the théâtre des champs-élysées, paris, on the evening of may 29, 1913. there is of course an embarrassment of literature about spectators’ response to le sacre, of which a good deal, particularly interviews and memoirs written many years after the premiere, has been exaggerated for effect. historians, perhaps inevitably, have made much of the “tumultuous demonstrations”: [55] the hissing, snickering, shouting, laughter, whistling, hushing, and applauding of an audience seemingly divided into strongly opposing camps. but efforts have also been made to get to the facts, in particular, the consternation felt with regard to nijinsky’s choreography: whereas stravinsky remained well respected and highly esteemed by the bulk of the audience (the composer was merely heading in the wrong direction, having “compromised” himself by working with nijinsky), the choreographer was subjected to a barrage of criticism, his choreography labelled “ugly,” “monotonous,” and “tedious.” [56] less has been made, though, of two features of critics’ reviews that strike a resonant chord with connor’s words, above. one is the sense of overall astonishment reported, an astonishment that no doubt contributed significantly to the infamous “ruckus,” but also to a critical loss for words. a number of commentators in the daily and specialist press acknowledged that le sacre seemed designed to shock, confuse, and startle; [57] some confessed their own professional bewilderment, admitting that they couldn’t express an opinion, couldn’t even understand the work, and couldn’t work out whether it was a masterpiece or not. [58] certainly, there was a shared sense of critical non-comprehension: an inability to register, contemplate, and compare the ballet to works of a more assured and collectively approved greatness. [59] this feature of the reviews, which might seem ironic in view of later attempts to co-opt stravinsky’s score into an emerging aesthetic of “cérébrisme,” [60] comes into greater clarity when viewed alongside a second feature: critics’ visceral reactions to the ballet. for while their mental and intellectual capacities may have been compromised, commentators registered acute sensory stimulation. to be sure, this kind of intense physiological response was not unusual in the face of a russian extravaganza. describing, at the outset of his le sacre review, the effect of diaghilev’s first parisian ventures, composer-critic xavier leroux writes: we trembled on our legs like drunken men as golden pinwheels and diamonds danced before our eyes, as our temples pounded. slowly we emerged from this state of numbness; and with our bodies still blue with ecchymosis we could finally reopen our eyes in which a thousand phosphenes were exploding. [61] others thought—or rather sensed—in similar ways. le sacre brought about “an absolutely new feeling,” a feeling “never before experienced and of the most incisive acuity.” it had an “overwhelming,” “intoxicating,” “suffocating” effect: it “crushes us”; it “knocks us flat.” [62] in a long and perceptive review, jacques rivière elaborated further. to rivière, the “oddities” of stravinsky’s score in particular were designed not to startle or to provoke admiration, but, rather, “to put us into direct contact, into immediate communion with the most wonderful and amazing things”: “[they] bring us close … to introduce us to the object on an equal footing.” [63] that “object,” we learn, is “the passions of the soul”: we are brought closer to them, we are led into their presence in a more immediate way, we contemplate them before the arrival of language, before they are hemmed in by a host of innumerable and nuanced yet chattering words. … in the dark night of the intelligence, we are aware; we are there with our body, and it is that which understands. [64] presence, immediacy, embodiment: this is a tantalizing proposition, and one that echoes connor’s words on the lived experience of the “modern auditory i,” a condition shot through with visceral reactions and almost erotic stimulation. are we to imagine, then, a shared mode of sensory receptivity—symptomatic of a self immersed in the world—both on stage and off? are the spectators in the theater to be aligned, in their mode of auditory attention, with the dancers pounding the floor? aligned might be the wrong word to use here, for at issue is the collapse of conventional boundaries between spectator and spectated: the capacity of auditory experience to disintegrate and reconfigure space. for the self as membrane, we might argue, spills out over the stage and into the stalls: with a marked auditory consciousness, that self enjoys direct, untrammeled access to the world, an affective experience that is inherently embodied and intersubjective. haptics it is tempting to describe this experience in terms of haptics, a relatively modern term, trending across phenomenology and film studies, that emphasizes proximity and mutually constitutive exchange: that is, a sense of reciprocity between subject and object, the former an active agent in a corporeal and quasi-erotic encounter with the latter. laura u. marks, mentioned earlier, has proved highly influential on the subject, exploring the remit of what she calls “haptic visuality,” a mode of experience in which the eyes function like organs of touch. marks’s seminal study the skin of the film investigates “haptic aesthetics” in relation to a specific kind of intercultural cinema, a genre that, dealing with “the power-inflected spaces of diaspora, (postor neo-) colonialism, and cultural apartheid,” appeals to an intimate, embodied viewing experience—the sensory and affective process of coming into contact with the skin of the film text. [65] marks’s work is not only interpretive, not only concerned with the fundamental nature of the decisions we make about how films embody meaning. it also has a valuable historiographical dimension aimed at loosening the grip of art-historical narratives that uphold the superiority of western illusionistic representation. “haptic aesthetics,” she explains, emerge within distinct cultural historical periods, such as modernism, when “meaning came to reside in the embodied and intersubjective relationship between work and viewer or reader.” [66] referencing a “modernist revaluation of tactility” (“the return of materiality to the mediums of art and literature”), marks identifies the modernist period with a flare up of interest in the subjectivity and physiology of vision, gesturing towards her broader attempt “to redeem aesthetics from their transcendental implications by emphasizing the corporeal and immanent nature of the experience of art.” [67] particularly important within marks’ analysis, at least for present purposes, is a case singled out for its overt haptic dynamics: “the early-cinema phenomenon of a ‘cinema of attractions,’” a genre that, according to marks, appealed to an immediate, “embodied response.” [68] enabling what she calls “bodily identification,” rather than “narrative identification,” the “cinema of attractions”—as gunning has not tired of telling us—addressed spectators directly, sometimes exaggerating the sense of confrontation such that it takes on the quality of a physical assault. [69] contact between subject and object, not mimetic representation, was the source and means of meaning constitution; distanced identification was substituted for the immediacy and intersubjectivity of sensory perception. an aesthetic of “attractions” (conclusion) marks thus steers us back towards the framing analogies that this article has sought to elaborate: at base, between the “cinema of attractions,” fuller’s dance theater, and the russians’ sacre du printemps; and between all three and the phenomenology of the modern metropolis. the first analogy, as i hope to have shown, is based not only on an equivalence of structure (fractured), temporality (disjunct), teleology (denied), narrativity (also denied), presentational mode (exhibitionary), and representational aspect (non-figural); parallel modes of attention (immediate, embodied, haptic, immersive) and experience (non-identificatory) can be discerned within historical source materials and envisaged in a hermeneutical sense. this is not to mention the positioning of music, in the two dance examples, as artifice, apparatus, or mediating technology—the sonorous equivalent of professor welton’s frontal stare: silent cinema’s aesthetic of acknowledgement. indeed, i would argue in favor of this musical equivalence despite radically different means. to put this other words, how both examples establish and sustain a similar musical disposition differs drastically: fuller tends to disregard her music’s expressive connotations, but powerfully foregrounds that music’s status as a signature tune, an artificial component of the theatrical spectacle; le sacre also foregrounds music as part of an apparatus of presentation, but does so by means of an intensity of inscription, a battery of music-movement alignments that suggests a distinctly modern and auditory phenomenological experience. in closing, i want to raise, albeit briefly, some further considerations on the historical stakes of my analogies. following gunning, gaudreault, and others, i have presented “attractions” as unique to the early twentieth century, a contingent product of a specifically modern experiential landscape defined in terms of mobility, flux, incredulity, novelty, non-continuity, and perceptual change. yet this claim surely oversimplifies: what, we might ask, of the emergence of “attractions” in other periods and genres? the cinematic “attractions” of sergei eisenstein’s montage practice, established in the early 1920s, come immediately to mind, as do the operatic “attractions” of nineteenth-century italy (say, the typical rossinian cabaletta), twentieth-century brechtian theater, besides the “acinema” of jean-francois lyotard’s philosophical imagination. a more obscure example might be the so-called “theater music” associated with the ancient greek dithyramb—a choral hymn to honor dionysus. this musical genre conforms almost exactly to the “attractions” template, with an emphasis on display, innovation, and variety, a formlessness of structure, an irregular temporality, an ethos of conscious display, and an appeal to the senses not to the intellect. [70] what if we were to embrace these far-flung examples as a call to envisage the “attractions” model not as a locus of stability or fixed meaning, but rather as an impulse of change, transformation, and mutability? charting “attractions” across historical periods and places might well unlock dimensions of significance that help us chronicle emergent practices of looking, listening, and spectating, as well as, in a formal-aesthetic sense, shifting modes of presentation, enunciation, intermediality, and address. this call to problematize the cinematographic dispositif might also lead inwards: that is, to a realization of the variability or transmutation that can emerge within a single work. in the case of le sacre, my thoughts on the hunkered-down “stamping” might well prompt a comparison of ballet and early cinema; but this comparison cannot be sustained across the entire work. to me at least, the very opening of the ballet does indeed epitomize the “attractions” aesthetic: the bassoon, acting as a kind of cinematic barker or bonisseur, accustoms the audience to a state of shock, its musical discourse (non-continuous temporality, wandering structure, agglutinative development, undisciplined rhythm and meter, as well as the uncertainty and variability of sound production) a means of mediating the theatrical “attraction” to follow. [71] but then there is the very end, the chosen one’s sacrificial dance. some commentators (taruskin, adorno) have described the vacuous dance of a helpless individual—stravinsky’s “great victim,” the original title of the work—willing to sacrifice herself “to the collective,” “without tragedy” and through “self-annihilation.” [72] with an emphasis on shocks, reflex actions, and physical immediacy, as well as stravinsky’s musical “hypostatization,” this now-standard description evokes a chosen one acted upon by the theatrical apparatus—evokes an aesthetic of “attraction,” we might argue. [73] but what about an alternative perspective (following tamara levitz’s nuanced and historically sensitive scholarship) that emphasizes the communicative potential of dance, the emotional experience of the spectator, and nijinsky’s/the dancer’s angry passion? [74] this line of interpretation might endorse the very opposite of the “attractions” principle—namely, narrative and causality, distanced identification, listening as that kind of “figural entrainment” described earlier. going further might raise the issue not of identifying opposites and generating labels, but rather of sketching the displacement process: the ways in which dance theater reshapes a cinematographic dispositif in its primordial dimensions; and, in doing so, produces new and heterogeneous subjectivities. while the concept of subjectivity has remained under the surface of this study, it surely demands interrogation, if only as a way of deconstructing basic dualisms such as activity and passivity, subjugation and domination, identification and estrangement, absorption and theatricality. with this last pairing, one that gestures to the landmark art-historical work of michael fried, i may have stepped into perilous waters: [75] how does the concept and practice of theatricality—the assumption of objecthood and attendant self-consciousness of viewing—relate to the cinematographic “attraction”? does absorption, into a kind of transcendental sphere, necessarily imply identification, what i loosely described as “figural entrainment”? what sort of phenomenological engagement might be shared by viewers of painting and performance art, and spectators of cinema and ballet? and how does art, not to mention fried’s “non-art,” variously disclose, uphold, and subvert the positions and activities of its beholders? on these questions, as on the matter of subjectivity/-ties, there is much work to be done, work that might well be both extensive, invoking multiple genres or media, and foundational, grappling with longstanding issues of art, its ontological reality, agentive qualities, signifying regimes, and psychic address, not to mention its in-built concept of the spectator, their sensory perceptions, and physiological orientation. this is not to mention the significance of what is nowadays a loaded business, “context”: in the present case, the distinctly modern and newly sensualized spectacle characteristic of the western metropolis. i hope that the wide-angled searching for conceptual equivalence attempted in this article might be productive going forward: on the one hand, it might help open up our subjects of study to truly interdisciplinary critique; on the other, it might prompt us to refine and refocus our attention on music and the intimations of meaning that flow from it. * sections of this article were presented in preliminary form at the 20th congress of the international musicological society (university of the arts, tokyo, 2017) and the annual meeting of the american musicological society (rochester, ny, 2017). i am grateful to the audiences at both presentations for their thoughtful and stimulating comments. this article has also benefited from close readings by maribeth clark, roger parker, emilio sala, and my anonymous reviewers. [1] see harriet porter, “why cool cats rule the internet,” the telegraph, july 1, 2016. [2] a 2015 exhibition at new york’s museum of the moving image— how cats took over the internet—celebrated the history of cats on screen: see reviews in the new york times (august 6, 2015), the guardian (august 7, 2015), and time magazine (september 22, 2015). for a nuanced account of the feline take-over, see e. j. white, a unified theory of cats on the internet (stanford: stanford university press, 2020). [3] see tom gunning, “the cinema of attractions: early film, its spectator and the avantgarde,” in early cinema: space frame narrative, ed. thomas elsaesser (london: british film institute, 1990), 56–62. gunning’s second essay on the topic is “an aesthetic of astonishment: early film and the (in)credulous spectator,” art & text 34 (1989): 31–45. see also andré gaudreault and tom gunning, “le cinéma des premiers temps: un défi a l’histoire du cinéma?” in histoire du cinéma: nouvelles approaches, ed. jacques aumont, andré gaudreault, and michel marie (paris: sorbonne, 1989), 49–63; eng. ed. “early cinema as a challenge to film history,” trans. joyce goggin and wanda strauven, in the cinema of attractions reloaded, ed. wanda strauven (amsterdam: amsterdam university press, 2006), 365–80. [4] gunning, “cinema of attractions,” 59; also see gunning’s entry “cinema of attraction,” in encyclopedia of early cinema, ed. richard abel (london: routledge, 2005), 124–27. [5] henry welton, the boxing cats (west orange, nj: edison manufacturing co., 1894), video, library of congress, washington, dc. [6] see ray phillips, edison’s kinetoscope and its films: a history to 1896 (westport: greenwood press, 1997). [7] there is a voluminous literature on the concept and definition of the dispositif, embracing film, media, and communications studies as well as critical theory and philosophy. important work includes jean-louis baudry, “cinéma: effets idéologiques produits par l’appareil de base,” cinéthique 7–8 (1970): 1–8; eng. ed. “ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus,” trans. alan williams, film quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974): 39–47, and his “le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité,” communications 23 (1975): 56–72; eng. ed. “the apparatus,” camera obscura 1, no. 1 (1976): 104–26; raymond bellour, “la querelle des dispositifs / battle of the images,” art press 262 (2000): 48–52; gilles deleuze, “qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?,” in michel foucault. philosophe: rencontre internationale, paris, 9, 10, 11 janvier 1988 (paris: éditions du seuil, 1989), 185–95; eng. ed. “what is a dispositif ?,” in michel foucault philosopher, trans. timothy j. armstrong (new york: harvester wheatsheaf, 1992), 159–69; michel foucault, “the confession of the flesh,” a conversation with alain grosrichard et al., in power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977 , ed. colin gordon (new york: pantheon books, 1980), 194–228; jean-françois lyotard, des dispositifs pulsionnels (paris: galilée, 1994); and christian metz, le signifiant imaginaire: psychanalyse et cinéma (paris: union générale d’éditions, 1977); eng. ed. the imaginary signifier: psychoanalysis and the cinema, trans. celia britton et al. (bloomington: indiana university press, 1982). davide panagia offers a particularly useful account of the breadth of significance of the term as used by foucault; see his article “on the political ontology of the dispositif,” critical inquiry 45 (2019): 714–46. specifically related to the topic of this article is frank kessler, “la cinématographie comme dispositif (du) spectaculaire,” cinémas 14, no. 1 (2003): 21–34; and kessler’s chapter “the cinema of attractions asdispositif,” in strauven, cinema of attractions reloaded, 57–69. [8] quoted in gunning, “an aesthetic of astonishment,” 35. [9] on the emergence of cinema as part of the modern urban experience, see ben singer, melodrama and modernity: early sensational cinema and its contexts (new york: columbia university press, 2001) and the essay collection film 1900: technology, perception, culture, ed. annemone ligensa and klaus kreimeier (new barnet: john libbey, 2009). [10] see laurent guido, “rhythmic bodies/movies: dance as attraction in early film culture,” in strauven, cinema of attractions reloaded, 139–56; and charles musser, “at the beginning: motion picture production, representation and ideology at the edison and lumière companies,” in the silent cinema reader, ed. lee grieveson and peter krämer (london: routledge, 2004), 15–30. [11] from the wealth of recent interdisciplinary studies of attention, i have found the following most inspiring: richard adelman, idleness and aesthetic consciousness, 1815–1900 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2018); eve tavor bannet, eighteenth-century manners of reading: print culture and popular instruction in the anglophone atlantic world (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2017); thomas h. davenport and john c. beck, the attention economy: understanding the new currency of business (boston: harvard business school press, 2001); lily gurton-wachter, watchwords: romanticism and the poetics of attention (stanford: stanford university press, 2016); and tim wu, the attention merchants: the epic scramble to get inside our heads (new york: alfred a. knopf, 2016). earlier studies that remain important include: jonathan crary, suspensions of perception: attention, spectacle, and modern culture (cambridge, ma: mit press, 1999); michael fried, absorption and theatricality: painting and beholder in the age of diderot (berkeley: university of california press, 1980); and james h. johnson, listening in paris: a cultural history (berkeley: university of california press, 1995). [12] dance scholar stephanie jordan offers a helpful review of music-dance research in her “choreomusical conversations: facing a double challenge,” dance research journal 43, no. 1 (2011): 43–64. jordan’s own research—including the award-winning books moving music: dialogues with music in twentieth-century ballet (london: dance books, 2000) and stravinsky dances: re-visions across a century (alton: dance books, 2007)—illustrates the dominant methodological and conceptual tendencies of music and dance studies over the past twenty or so years. having said this, her more recent work—for example, mark morris: musician – choreographer (binsted: dance books, 2015)—treads new ground, exploring perspectives from the cognitive sciences. [13] gunning, “cinema of attractions,” 97–99. [14] i attempted to tackle this last question in my chapter “representational conundrums: music and early modern dance,” in representation in western music, ed. joshua s. walden (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2013), 144–64. [15] carolyn abbate, “opera; or, the envoicing of women,” in musicology and difference: gender and sexuality in music scholarship , ed. ruth a. solie (berkeley: university of california press, 1993), 235 [16] see footnote 3 as well as andré gaudreault, from plato to lumière: narration and monstration in literature and cinema , trans. timothy barnard (toronto: university of toronto press, 2009); charles musser, the emergence of cinema: the american screen to 1907 (new york: charles scribner’s sons, 1990); his later article “rethinking early cinema: cinema of attractions and narrativity,” yale journal of criticism 7, no. 2 (1994): 203–32; and singer, melodrama and modernity. [17] louis delluc, “cinéma: le lys de la vie,” paris-midi, march 8, 1921. [18] louis and auguste lumière, danse serpentine [ii] (1897), lumière catalogue number 765,1. see, also, the short films by edison (serpentine dance, 1894) and pathé ( loie fuller, 1905). [19] there are two notable exceptions: tom gunning, “light, motion, cinema!: the heritage of loïe fuller and germaine dulac,” framework: the journal of cinema and media 46, no. 1 (2005): 106–29; and felicia mccarren, dancing machines: choreographies of the age of mechanical reproduction (stanford: stanford university press, 2003), esp. 43–64. [20] jacques rancière, aisthesis: scenes from the aesthetic regime of art, trans. zakir paul (london: verso, 2013), 99. for historical sources, see stéphane mallarmé, “considérations sur l’art du ballet et la loïe fuller,” national observer, may 13, 1893 and paul valéry, “philosophie de la danse” (1936), reprinted in oeuvres, vol. 1, ed. jean hytier (paris: gallimard, 1957), pp. 1390–1403. kristina köhler offers a summary account of both mallarmé and valéry on dance in her chapter “dance as metaphor—metaphor as dance: transfigurations of dance in culture and aesthetics around 1900,” real yearbook of research in english and american literature 25, no. 1 (2009): 163–78. [21] fuller, quoted in “lois [sic] fuller in a church,” n.d.; clipping, houghton library, harvard university, theatre collection clippings 1. she continued: “no one can tell you what beethoven thought when he wrote the moonlight sonata; no one knows chopin’s point of view in his nocturnes, but to each music lover there is in them a story, the story of his own experience and his own explorations into the field of art … you can put as many stories as you wish to music, but you may be sure that no two people will see the same story. so every dance has its meaning, but your meaning is not mine, nor mine yours.” [22] see my chapter “making moves in reception studies: music, listening and loie fuller,” in musicology and dance: historical and critical perspectives , ed. davinia caddy and maribeth clark (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2020), 91–117. [23] see caddy, “making moves in reception studies” and, on the legal case, anthea kraut, “white womanhood, property rights, and the campaign for choreographic copyright: loïe fuller’s serpentine dance,” dance research journal 43, no. 1 (2011): 2–26. emma doran provides an informative account of fuller’s product branding—how she pioneered her own merchandizing, harnessing the press and the consumer industry to her advantage—in her article “figuring modern dance within fin-de-siècle visual culture and print: the case of loïe fuller,” early popular visual culture 13, no. 1 (2015): 21–40. [24] gregory shaya, “the flâneur, the badaud, and the making of a mass public in france, circa 1860–1910,” american historical review 109, no. 1 (2004): 51. [25] tom gunning, “the whole town’s gawking: early cinema and the visual experience of modernity,” yale journal of criticism 7, no. 2 (1994): 190. [26] for more on this, see caddy, “making moves in reception studies.” [27] quoted in martin miller marks, music and the silent film: contexts and case studies, 1895–1924 (new york: oxford university press, 1997), 251 n40. marks notes that loin du bal was included in the volume masterpieces of piano music, ed. albert e. weir (new york: carl fischer, 1918), 365–67. for more on the serpentine dance, see sally r. sommer, “loie fuller’s art of music and light,” dance chronicle 4, no. 4 (1981): 391. [28] addé, “courrier des spectacles: la soirée au théâtre des arts,” le gaulois, november 10, 1907; henri gauthier-villars, “théâtre des arts – la musique,” comoedia, november 10, 1907; see also gaston carraud, “les concerts,” la liberté , november 12, 1907. clair rowden offers a useful account of the ballet in her chapter “loïe fuller et salomé: les drames mimés de gabriel pierné et de florent schmitt,” in musique et chorégraphie en france de léo delibes à florent schmitt , ed. jean-christophe branger (saint-étienne: publications de l’université de saint-étienne, 2010), 215–59. [29] see andré mangeot, “la tragédie de salomé,” le monde musical, november 15, 1907. [30] gauthier-villars, “théâtre des arts,” 2. [31] interestingly, fuller’s production was regarded as a feminist statement by both le temps, a daily newspaper, and the journal fémina. ann cooper albright discusses this aspect of the production, and fuller’s earlier salome outing (1895), in her book traces of light: absence and presence in the work of loïe fuller (middletown: wesleyan university press, 2007), ch. 4 “femininity with a vengeance: strategies of veiling and unveiling in loïe fuller’s performances of salomé,” 115–43. [32] laura u. marks, the skin of the film: intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses (durham, nc: duke university press, 2000). [33] marks, skin of the film, 167, 169. [34] see, for example, richard taruskin, “russian folk melodies in the rite of spring,” journal of the american musicological society 33, no. 3 (1980): 501–43; tatiana baranova monighetti, “stravinsky, roerich, and old slavic rituals in the rite of spring,” in “the rite of spring” at 100, ed. severine neff, maureen carr, and gretchen horlacher (bloomington: indiana university press, 2017), 189–98; and olga haldey, mamontov’s private opera: the search for modernism in russian theater (bloomington: indiana university press, 2010). [35] i should also note the alternative perspectives offered during centennial celebrations by two expert musicological voices: annegret fauser, “le sacre du printemps: a ballet for paris,” and tamara levitz, “racism at the rite,” both in neff et al., “the rite of spring” at 100 (83–97 and 146–78 respectively). [36] gunning, “the cinema of attractions,” 57. for more on this body of primary literature, see viva paci, “the attraction of the intelligent eye: obsessions with the vision machine in early film theories,” in strauven, cinema of attractions reloaded, 121–37. [37] see tom gunning, ‘“now you see it, now you don’t’: the temporality of the cinema of attractions,” velvet light trap 32 (1993): 3–12. [38] see richard taruskin, stravinsky and the russian traditions: a biography of the works through “mavra” (berkeley: university of california press, 1996), 2:1677–78. there is a sizeable music-theoretical literature on stravinsky’s characteristic structural disjunctures, including pieter c. van den toorn, the music of igor stravinsky (new haven: yale university press, 1983); jonathan d. kramer, “discontinuity and proportion in the music of stravinsky,” in confronting stravinsky: man, musician, and modernist, ed. jann pasler (berkeley: university of california press, 1986), 174–94; and jonathan cross, the stravinsky legacy (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1998). [39] john frazer, artificially arranged scenes: the films of georges méliès (boston: g. k. hall, 1979), 124. [40] see glenn watkins, pyramids at the louvre: music, culture, and collage from stravinsky to the postmodernists (cambridge, ma: belknap press of harvard university press, 1994). [41] pierre boulez, stocktakings from an apprenticeship, trans. stephen walsh (oxford: clarendon press, 1991), 57. [42] linda m. austin explores the trend towards marionettes and activated dolls in ballets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in her article ‘elaborations of the machine: the automata ballets’, modernism/modernity, 23/1 (2016), pp. 65–87. on dance’s centrality to modernist machine aesthetics, see mccarren, dancing machines. [43] truman bullard collates and translates all extant reviews of le sacre (dating from the months after the premiere) in his doctoral thesis “the first performance of igor stravinsky’s sacre du printemps” (phd diss., university of rochester, eastman school of music, 1971), from which this article’s english translations are taken, unless otherwise noted. see, in particular, gustave de pawlowski, “au théâtre des champs-élysées: le sacre du printemps,” comoedia, may 31, 1913. [44] “the next new russian ballet,” interview with vaslav nijinsky, pall mall gazette, february 15, 1913, 5. [45] see, for example, jordan, moving music, 36–42; millicent hodson, nijinsky’s crime against grace: reconstruction score of the original choreography for “le sacre du printemps” (stuyvesant: pendragon press, 1996); and hodson and kenneth archer, the lost rite: rediscovery of the 1913 “rite of spring” (london: kms press, 2014). [46] my admittedly crude account of the prehistory of counting is heavily influenced by the work of james elkins: “on the impossibility of close reading: the case of alexander marshack,” current anthropology 37, no. 2 (1996): 185–226, and his book on pictures and the words that fail them (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1998), esp. ch. 5 “the common origins of pictures, writing, and notation.” elkins himself, as the title of the above article makes clear, draws on the writings of archaeologist and art historian alexander marshack, especially his the roots of civilization: the cognitive beginnings of man’s first art, symbol, and notation (new york: mcgraw-hill, 1971, and on denise schmandt-besserat,before writing, vol. 1, from counting to cuneiform (austin: university of texas press, 1992). [47] see the diary of vaslav nijinsky, ed. joan ross acocella, unexpurgated ed. (new york: farrar, straus and giroux, 1999), xiii; and mindy aloff, dance anecdotes: stories from the worlds of ballet, broadway, the ballroom, and modern dance (oxford: oxford university press, 2006), 15. [48] stravinsky commented on this disparity in his notes to the four-hand piano version of le sacre; see igor stravinsky and robert craft, “the rite of spring”: sketches 1911–1913 (london: boosey & hawkes, 1969), appendix iii, 38–39. [49] see, for example, juliet bellow, modernism on stage: the ballets russes and the parisian avant-garde (farnham: ashgate, 2013), esp. 57. [50] for more on the earliest technologies of sound inscription, see jonathan sterne, the audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction (durham, nc: duke university press, 2003); and haun saussy, the ethnography of rhythm: orality and its technologies (new york: fordham university press, 2016). [51] see friedrich a. kittler, discourse networks 1800/1900, trans. michael metteer (stanford: stanford university press, 1990), and gramophone, film, typewriter, trans. geoffrey winthrop-young and michael wutz (stanford: stanford university press, 1999); and sara danius, the senses of modernism: technology, perception, and aesthetics (ithaca: cornell university press, 2002). [52] see steven connor, “the modern auditory i,” in rewriting the self: histories from the renaissance to the present , ed. roy porter (london: routledge, 1997), 203–23. i have also enjoyed (on literature) angela frattarola, “developing an ear for the modernist novel: virginia woolf, dorothy richardson, and james joyce,” journal of modern literature 33, no. 1 (2009): 132–53; and (on aurality more broadly) douglas kahn, noise, water, meat: a history of sound in the arts (cambridge, ma: mit press, 1999). [53] connor, “the modern auditory i,” 207. [54] connor, 204. [55] pierre lalo, “la musique,” le temps, june 3, 1913, 3. [56] lalo, 3. as bullard notes, lalo’s review offers a particularly severe criticism of nijinsky (and his “lack of choreographic imagination”), while remaining deferential to stravinsky (“a prodigiously ingenious and skillful composer”). see bullard, “the first performance,” 2:85. for a careful and thorough account of critics’ reviews, see sarah gutsche-miller, “what the papers say,” in the cambridge companion to “the rite of spring,” ed. davinia caddy (cambridge: cambridge university press, forthcoming). [57] see, for example, gustave linor, “au théâtre des champs-élysées: le sacre du printemps,” comoedia, may 30, 1913; and marguerite casalonga, “nijinsky et le sacre du printemps,” comoedia illustré, june 5, 1913. [58] see, for example, louis vuillemin, “au théâtre des champs-élysées: le sacre du printemps. ballet en deux actes, de m. igor stravinsky ,” comoedia, may 31, 1913; georges pioch, “les premières. théâtre des champs-elysées: le sacre du printemps,” gil blas, may 30, 1913; and pierre lalo, “la musique.” as bullard notes, only the most hostile critics—adolphe boschot, paul souday, henri de curzon, and adolphe jullien—wrote with any degree of self-assurance; see bullard, “the first performance,” 1:166–67. [59] jacques-émile blanche, writing an annual overview of theatrical life in the french capital, admits that “i hesitated a long time before i dared to take le sacre du printemps as the principal subject of these remarks.” he goes on to acknowledge that, following the 1913 russian season, “it has taken us a little while to regain our aplomb”; see his article “un bilan artistique de 1913. les russes—le sacre du printemps,” la revue de paris, december 1, 1913 (bullard, 2:313–14). [60] see the january–february 1914 edition of the short-lived journal montjoie!, including editor ricciotto canudo’s “manifeste de l’art cérébriste,” 9. [61] xavier leroux, “la saison russe,” musica 12, no. 131 (august 1913), 153 (bullard, 2:214). [62] see rené chalupt, “le mois du musicien,” la phalange 8 (august 20, 1913): 169–75 (bullard, 224–30); and jean marnold, “musique,” mercure de france 24, no. 391 (october 1, 1913): 623–30 (bullard, 250–68). [63] jacques rivière, “le sacre du printemps,” la nouvelle revue française 5, no. 59 (november 1, 1913): 706–30 (bullard, 280). [64] bullard, 298. [65] marks, the skin of the film, 1. [66] marks, 168. [67] marks, 167, 169. [68] marks, 170. [69] marks, 170–71. [70] see penelope murray and peter wilson, eds., music and the muses: the culture of “mousikē” in the classical athenian city (oxford: oxford university press, 2004); and barbara kowalzig and peter wilson, eds., dithyramb in context (oxford: oxford university press, 2013). [71] for more on the traditional bonisseur, see germain lacasse, “the lecturer and the attraction,” in strauven, cinema of attractions reloaded, 181–91. [72] see theodor w. adorno, philosophy of new music (1949), trans. robert hullot-kentor (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2006), 111; see also richard taruskin, “a myth of the twentieth century: the rite of spring, the tradition of the new, and ‘the music itself,’” modernism/modernity 2, no. 1 (1995): 1–26. [73] taruskin, stravinsky and the russian traditions, 1:962. [74] see tamara levitz, “the chosen one’s choice,” in beyond structural listening? postmodern modes of hearing, ed. andrew dell’antonio (berkeley: university of california press, 2004), 70–108. [75] see fried, absorption and theatricality, and his essay “art and objecthood,” artforum 5, no. 10 (1967): 12–23. × forum contents perović, introduction mounier-vehier, creating opera for the web: au web ce soir – ursule 1.1 and actéon “transposing the necessity of the present,” benjamin lazar interviewed by mounier-vehier romeo castellucci in conversation with perović simon hatab in conversation with perović julia bullock in conversation with perović footnotes forum web opera and opera on the web edited by sofija perović sound stage screen, vol. 2, issue 2 (fall 2022), pp. 85–136, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2022 sofija perović. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss19972. as an aspiring opera stage director with experience in music and theater, i started my research on opera stage direction more than a decade ago. at that point, i had not fully realized the potential and the importance of the internet as a tool in contemporary opera productions, and yet all my work was somewhat conditioned and certainly influenced by it. my first experience with opera was, of course, in person. nevertheless, around the same time i also started watching the vhs tapes of operas lent by my music teachers. i still vividly remember jean-pierre ponnelle’s production of rigoletto and ingmar bergman’s the magic flute. those vhs tapes were soon replaced by dvds and followed by live streaming in cinemas, on television, and finally on the internet. since i was living in belgrade, serbia, it was thanks to those privileges of modern technology that i had the opportunity to keep up to date with what was going on in the opera world. to me personally, the internet represents a window to the world. it brought me to la scala, the metropolitan opera, the royal opera house, the opéra de paris, and many other places, but it also gave me access to learning and research, and it allowed me to be in touch with colleagues all over the world, to connect with professionals with whom, otherwise, i would not have had the opportunity to get in touch and work with. now, i use the internet in my professional engagements as opera stage director every day—be it to do the research, to connect with collaborators, or as a tool in the process of making a new opera. for all the productions i worked with, most of the marketing and publicity was made over the web, on social media, and online magazines. it was partly a strategic decision, but it also came naturally since everyone involved in the process used social media on a daily basis. besides the use of the internet as a tool of communication and promotion, the most exciting experience i had with it was when i staged francis poulenc’s opera la voix humaine at the bitef theater in belgrade in 2016. in this production, i made use of the web camera with a specific aim—i wanted to bring closer the story of elle to a contemporary audience who could no longer relate to the troubles of the first telephones and interruptions made by party lines. [1] by showing their proper reflection on the stage, i wanted the people in the audience to get involved in the story, but also to raise awareness on the privacy issues related to online communications and the sharing of personal data over the internet—and that is why i opted for a web camera. this is just one of many examples of taking advantage of the internet and its products and services on the operatic stage. as we keep using it more and more in our daily lives, its use is expanding and becoming a standard in opera as well. however, even though its presence is constantly challenged and reexamined, after its covid-19-related explosion in relevance new tendencies (such as web operas) are now seen in a different light. the year 2020 has changed the world as we know it. the global pandemic has affected artistic and cultural scenes more than any obstacle over the past century, including wars and socio-economic crises. in a recent article, anna schürmer identifies social distancing as “a central (un)word of the pandemic year 2020”  [2] and examines the transformations the opera world went through during the covid crisis by identifying this historical moment as one of the main reasons for the “acceleration of digitisation and the appearance of non-human presences on virtual stages.”  [3] the global impact of the pandemic to the (mostly performing) arts scene reminds us of its interrelation with the general health of our planet, giving another tragic topicality to a relatively new operatic genre called “eco-opera.” this worldwide emergency has also highlighted the role of technology not only in our daily lives, but also as an essential part and tool for the performing arts and opera. this journey began with the first live broadcasts of opera on television and in cinemas, soon followed by online streaming. it was in 2006 that the new york metropolitan opera started its successful series of live streamings “met live in hd.” other important venues, such as the national theatre in london, followed the met’s example and started providing live streamings of its productions, first in movie theaters all around the world, but soon increasingly online as well. even though no one was prepared for such a drastic change in people’s habits and artistic creation, the (not so) recent liaisons that opera entertained with technology and media came as practical, to say the least, during this period. the new subgenres such as web opera, however, came into being long before the coronavirus. modern technologies were used on operatic stages on a regular basis—e.g., the common use of videos in opera stagings that even resulted in the creation of new software. some of the most representative examples of such practices can be found already at the end of the twentieth and the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and they include works by composer and innovator tod machover, namely his interactive brain opera from 1996 which “invites the audience to collaborate live and online,” and the “robotic” opera death and the powers from 2010 which tells the story of the inventor simon powers conducting his final experiment and trying to project himself into the future. [4] a couple of years earlier, for the revival of his staging of berlioz’s la damnation de faust at the met in 2008, director robert lepage and his artistic team “ex machina” recreated the video projections using an infrared camera that detects movement to make the projection interactive, which at the time was a novelty in the practice of video art for opera. the interactive images responded to the movements of the performers on stage, but they were also modified by the singers’ voices. the audience had the opportunity to see something close to the experience of hallucinating. the specificity of this type of video projections lies in its sharing the same quality of live performances, as each performance is different. experimentations in the field of video art for the opera stage have been replaced by developments in the field of broadcasting and filming. the absence of the audience in theaters opened new possibilities for the filming of the shows. for instance, it was possible to install the cameras directly on stage, which would be problematic during a live performance (except for when cameras on stage are used for specific purposes—e.g., in many productions by frank castorf or, amongst others, in the staging of no exit by andy vores at the florida grand opera in 2013). since its early era, postdramatic theater has always made use of video on stage, highlighting the poetic dimension of a production more than its content, as it can be seen in the works of jan fabre, romeo castellucci, or robert lepage. castellucci and lepage have used their experience with technology and media in spoken theater and have transposed it to the opera. a new operatic genre has recently emerged from this marriage between opera and new technologies and from the desire to make opera more accessible to young audiences—web operas, in fact, broadcast only on the internet and not in front of a live audience. the question that has emerged since is whether the very essence of opera as a genre has changed in the age of the internet or is it only our view of opera (and more generally of art) that has been altered? operas for television have been around since the 1950s; yet, with new digital technologies the expectations of global audiences have started to change. audiences, too, have changed. today, with internet at the opera becoming everyday reality, who are the spectators who go to the opera house and those who prefer to stay home and watch it as a tv/computer/mobile phone broadcast? opera stage director dmitri tcherniakov sums the issue up: “the opera on video, at the movies, on youtube? i don’t pay much attention to it, it seems quite natural to me, like mobile phones, computers, and foreign languages.”  [5] from a different perspective, romeo castellucci finds opera on screen to be “an inherent contradiction” as “one has the impression of what it might look like in reality, but it is not ‘the thing.’ the thing is an encounter, the thing is an act of presence, which is increasingly rare today.”  [6] in her book opera as hypermedium, tereza havelková notices how liveness today “maintains a high degree of cultural prestige.”  [7] new generations of opera creators are, however, less interested in keeping that allure of cultural prestige and are aiming more and more to bring opera to wider audiences (be it in more approachable public venues or virtual spaces). the connection and interdependence between opera and media began already in the nineteenth century with the first broadcasts of opera through telephones. there have even been examples of inventors who thought of opera for their creations. we already know that the tendency and desire to broadcast opera to remote audiences was already in place during the nineteenth century, and that the idea of making opera accessible to a wider audience isn’t a recent phenomenon. thomas edison was somewhat prophetic in providing for this, now customary, practice—i.e., watching operas on screen performed by singers who are no longer with us—when he collaborated on the creation of william dickson’s kinetograph: “i believe that in coming years … grand opera can be given at the metropolitan opera house at new york without any material change from the original, and with artists and musicians long since dead.” [8] given the abundance of scholarly literature on the phenomenon, with writings appearing already in the 1980s, video and new technologies, as well as new filming techniques, have remained closely linked to opera since then. during this period of the pandemic, the bond between opera and the internet grew stronger. we have already mentioned the new genre of web opera and the examples dating from the last few years before the covid-19 pandemic, but during this period without live performance activities, another new genre (or subgenre) has emerged: zoom operas (i.e., operas created exclusively for being broadcast over online peer-to-peer software platforms for video communications such as, among others, zoom). it will be interesting to observe the future of this phenomenon, as zoom is a digital platform which invites users to actively participate (with the likes, the applauses, and other possible“reactions”); this would create an atmosphere quite different from asynchronous performances one can experience on youtube or vimeo, for example, where the audience is invisible and have no direct relationship with the artists (of course, people can leave comments, likes, or dislikes, but this is not available to the artists in real time). how will this relationship between new technologies and opera develop in the future remains to be seen. yet, the subjects developed in the libretti for web operas are quite diverse and not necessarily focused on contemporary world issues. for example, the first web opera created in france, ursule 1.1, directed by benjamin lazar for the théâtre de cornouailles in 2010, recounts the story of saint ursula, princess of brittany, who allegedly succumbed to the arrows of the huns on her pilgrimage route to rome, along with 11000 other virgins. as part of the research initiative “opera and the media of the future—omf,” the center for research in opera and music theater (cromt) commissioned two “mini operas for the web” to be hosted on their website and presented at a two-day forum held in october 2014. the first of the two winning projects was presented at glyndebourne as candidates were invited to reimagine opera on the web and ask themselves the following questions: “what does opera ‘mean’ on this scale and through this medium? how can the composer/media artist engage an operatic audience? what is the work’s relation to the ‘live’?”  [9] of the seventeen submitted proposals, the jury nominated two winners: you are here (jaakko nousiainen, director; miika hyytiäinen, composer) and rur-rossums universal replicants (martin rieser, digital, visual, electronic, and interactive artist; andrew hugill, composer). the concept of you are here is based on the idea of connecting interior spaces of glyndebourne opera to exterior spaces of three opera houses in berlin (staatsoper, deutsche oper, and komische oper). you are here is organized around six short visual artworks, each containing a qr code that can be activated with a smartphone camera. the codes connect to short opera videos, forming, as described by its makers, “a virtual peephole between glyndebourne and berlin.”  [10] nousiainen and hyytiäinen have previously collaborated on a similar innovative project called omnivore, originally conceived as an opera “for mobile delivery.”  [11] the idea for this project was born in 2007 when the devices weren’t up to the creator’s idea, so it was filmed only a few years later in 2011, and in 2012 it got its online incarnation. this opera is considered to be the first opera written to be distributed as a mobile application and its making took effort and much enthusiasm and creativity from a large group of musicians, technicians, mobile media experts, video makers, and interface designers, among others. the work is also in the “mini format” since it lasts about twenty minutes, and another curiosity and specificity is the fact that there are several variations of the opera, as the system randomly chooses certain parts and the order of presentation. when compared to live performance, always different (even with the same cast) and unrepeatable, this could be considered as a digital match to the “uncertainty” which accompanies every live event. as explained in the online proposal, the rur “mini-web opera provides an explosive encounter between new technologies and the long-established tradition of opera.”  [12] by asking the audiences to actively participate through social media, “ rur transforms the way in which operatic works are produced and consumed” by making the online experience intermedial and immersive. two years later, in 2016, during the eighteen months when major renovations prevented access to the building, the opéra comique in paris presented the mystery of the blue squirrel, an opera designed exclusively for the internet, conceived as “a veritable operatic thriller, [which compiles] veiled references to the opéra comique and allusions to the trades and places of the theater. there [are] investigations and thrills but in a zany vein accessible to children aged 8 and up.”  [13] this opera in seven scenes (marc-olivier dupin, composer; ivan grinberg, librettist and stage director) was born out of the need for the artistic direction at the opéra comique to find new places to present its productions during the reconstruction of the salle favart. the opera’s director for the live broadcast was françois roussillon, already well-known in operatic and dance circles for his recordings, documentaries, and live filming. this full length web opera was advertised to be watched “on the web and with the family.” on the facebook event “webopéra à partir de 8 ans” (web opera for those aged eight and older) it was advertised as: “take note of the event for the family to attend the live creation.” another advertising slogan was: “the room will be virtual; it will be accessed free of charge from the comfort of your personal computer at home.”  [14] we can see that the opéra comique proposed this work as a family event and insisted on the collective and shared experience, to be consumed in the comfort of your sofa, while also insisting on the (clearly attractive) gratuity of the event. the opéra comique published the results and figures regarding the number of spectators for the facebook event: 2,800 unique visitors for the live broadcast, then 4,226 the days after. on the last evening, the platform recorded 7,362 requests. on social networks, the web opera was a success. live tweeting amounted to 496 tweets by 112 participants, with 362,654 people being reached globally. on facebook, 45,292 people were reached, with 725 likes. [15] in any case, these numbers reveal the presence of a strong community, albeit virtual. through likes and comments on social networks, automatic sharing with friends or followers, the internet community publicized this web opera created and produced by the opéra comique. all in all, a good marketing result, especially as the goal was not only the creation of a new work and genre, but also the presentation and promotion of an opera house which had been closed to the audience for a year and a half. the popularity of the internet was used also for the educational mission that the management of the opéra comique had set for themselves. fig. 1. nico muhly, two boys, metropolitan opera. photo credit: richard hubert smith. the link and interdependence between opera and the internet was already noted in the early 2000s. in february 2007, opera europa organized a conference in paris during which the question of how to rekindle the interest of younger generations in opera emerged. the conference (“european opera days”) focused on the possibility of using the internet for opera as a genre, either for its promotion or for the creation of new types. in his opening speech, jacques attali spoke of “the web revolution” and its potential for the realm of opera. according to attali, the web 2.0 and initiatives like myspace and youtube could succeed in transforming spectators into active protagonists. [16] during the conference, the example of the english national opera (eno) and its “inside out” project was brought up, which aimed to attract young audiences by using the internet as well as a familiar language. the eno website offered the opportunity to attend rehearsals in real time and comment on the latest performances on blogs. internet as the main subject of an opera was introduced for the first time ten years ago in nico muhly’s opera two boys (figure 1), jointly commissioned the by metropolitan opera house and eno, and based on a true story from the early 2000s—a tragic tale of two boys who met in one of the early chatrooms and ended their online “friendship” with one stabbing and fatally wounding the other. although this is a traditional operatic form, the libretto written by craig lucas depicts in an almost naturalistic manner the internet language, practices, and most importantly problems and perils of the internet realm which are, unfortunately, still very relevant in today’s society. the core topic of the opera is cyberbullying and its consequences, and the same subject also inspires a three-episode web opera composed by michael roth on a libretto by kate gale, calledthe web opera (figure 2). [17] another similarity with nico muhly’s production is the fact that this web opera (or web opera series) is also based on true events. this work in progress (there are five episodes planned in total) aims to raise awareness over cyber abuse through the operatic medium. the website operavision.eu is one of the newest and brightest examples of internet use for bringing opera to its younger audiences, but also for bringing together its creators or students from around the world without forcing them to change location. “operavision is an invitation to travel online to discover the diversity of musical theatre from wherever you want, whenever you want… convinced that opera can be accessible to everyone, operavision also believes in its role as a digital stage for emerging artists… operavision seeks to celebrate the positive impact and value of opera to society…”  [18] with such practices, the internet community is offered a new space for exchange, learning, and creation, which is essentially a new experience in operatic practice. fig. 2. michael roth, the web opera, still photo from episode 2. as michael earley noticed: “the laptop is the new keyboard, sound maker, orchestra, canvas and film studio—often in the hands of and under the direct musical-authorial-directorial control of a single artist.” [19] upload, an opera created by michel van der aa (composer and multimedia artist) for the 2021 bregenz festival (with its film version being screened by medici.tv and streamed by the dutch national opera), demonstrates this in the most obvious way. as a talking head reminds the audience during the play, “the human mind is the last analog device in the digital world.”  [20] social dementia combined with the desire to live forever are questioned in this innovative work. our “analog devices” seem to have insufficient memory to keep alive memories of our ancestors, and michel van der aa examines other options we may have. this opera explores the possibility of “uploading” thoughts and memories in order to achieve an eternal digital consciousness after death. aside from the libretto’s original topic, the opera is innovative in its technical aspects, too. the video projections used on stage are diverse: one screen shows to the audience the practical side and the process of “uploading,” while the other live motion-captured projection represents the digital avatar of the character who “uploaded” his thoughts and memories. mixed reality was also used by van der aa in his vr installation eight. even though eight is more of a unique mixture of musical theater, visual art, and virtual reality than strictly opera, nevertheless it deserves to be mentioned here since such experiments putting together operatic style of music with new technologies paved the way for their usage on the opera stages. today, even the term “opera” is constantly reexamined, sometimes denied, and reappropriated by artists for other purposes. in 2015, the opéra national de paris developed a third, virtual/digital stage in addition to its two existing ones at the palais garnier and the opéra bastille. this free platform, called 3e scène, was launched with the idea of attracting new audiences, especially young people, and getting them interested in opera and ballet. internet is a public place, a collective meeting place, a place for expression and creation. … in this new space, the paris opera intends to continue its dialogue with the public and also to make new friends. 3e scène opens wide its doors to visual artists, filmmakers, composers, photographers, choreographers, writers, and invites them to come and create original works relating to the paris opera. the relationship between the opera and the works created may be forthright, robust, subliminal, drawn-out, extended or even distended. but above all we want the artists to make the opera their own, to draw on its resources, roam within its walls and meet its talents in order to reveal places, colours, history, questions and people through creation. this 3e scène has neither equal nor model. open to the world, it invents a space where tradition, creation and new technology unite as symbols of modernity.[21] although the works presented were not full operas and could not be defined as web operas, 3e scène represented a new interpretation of opera on the internet. in 2017, 3e scène organized its first festival at the gaîté lyrique, [22] and for the 2019–2020 season the famous french youtuber jhon rachid was invited to perform on the digital platform yet, not every story has a happy ending: as of 2022, the website for 3e scène has vanished from the opéra de paris online presence and has since been replaced by a far more traditional pay-on-demand platform called “l’opéra chez soi.” the interest in attracting new audiences to opera (and who hopefully will keep coming back to it), and the desire to find and create new forms within the operatic genre have given rise to many novelties by changing our perception of opera and by making it closer to modern, “digital” sensibilities. perhaps one of the greatest achievements in connecting the internet and opera has been the foundation of web opera as a new genre with a great potential, even though it remains to be seen which direction it will take and how it will evolve. time will show whether the creation of web operas was simply a marketing strategy to attract new audiences or whether it will give birth to artworks that will change the operatic genre and its stakes for generations to come. as vlado kotnik affirms, “the production of opera has never been about performing a musical work on stage only, but also about performing a highly contested social arena.”  [23] the social arena has drastically changed during the last decade, especially during and after the pandemic, and has been mostly transferred to the realm of social media. how did this shift influence the operatic world? what are the advantages and disadvantages of social media? and, can they be treated as tools on the operatic stage? i talked about this and many other topics with american soprano julia bullock, whose voice is being heard and spread actively on social media; with one of the greatest stage directors of our time romeo castellucci, whose views on internet and the relocation of live shows to the digital screen are much less optimistic or positive; and with the french dramaturg simon hatab, who collaborated to the very special production of jean-philippe rameau’s opéra-ballet les indes galantes directed by clément cogitore at the opéra de paris in 2019. creating opera for the web: au web ce soir – ursule 1.1 and actéon caroline mounier-vehier * “half play, half musical performance,”  [24] “cyber-theater,”  [25] “cyber-show for web-spectators,”  [26] “webcam show … mini-opera,”  [27] or simply “opera for the internet.”  [28] the expressions used by journalists to describe au web ce soir – ursule 1.1, a show conceived and staged by benjamin lazar in collaboration with composer morgan jourdain and musical director geoffroy jourdain, are varied. the stage director speaks of “live theater on the internet”  [29] and evokes “a new theatrical object, which will be a kind of small opera.”  [30] performed only once on april 29, 2010, at 9pm live on the website of the théâtre de cornouaille (www.theatre-cornouaille.fr), ursule 1.1 was an early example of a performance created for an online audience. ten years later, in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, lazar and jourdain joined forces with director corentin leconte for a new video project, at the crossroads of theater, music, and cinema: charpentier’s actéon , this time more soberly described as a “film in sequence shot,”  [31] “film,”  [32] or “filmopera.”  [33] filmed on december 6, 2020, at the théâtre du châtelet in paris, the film was broadcasted on arte.tv from the 16th of february, 2021. as film-spectacles, conceived for online broadcasting, rather than filmed spectacles, ursule 1.1 and actéon possess several common points which tend to make them similar and at the same time invite to try to define a new spectacular genre of which they would be the first examples. their respective characteristics will be studied here in this sense. in a broader sense, both these works demonstrate benjamin lazar’s reflections on the reciprocal relations and influences between stage and video mediums. whether it be performances that include video art, recordings of performances, filmed shows, or video shows such as ursule 1.1. and actéon, the stage director questions the possible interactions between film and live performance. he explores, with his collaborators, the capacity of video to appropriate the intensity of the stage and its relationship to the present. [34] it will thus also be a question of asking to what extent these two performances studied are representative of this approach and can contribute to a redefinition of the contemporary scene by means of the media available on internet. in 2010, for his arrival as associate artist at the théâtre de cornouaille, lazar proposed a show conceived for the web: ursule 1.1, performed live on the internet by a soprano, claire lefilliâtre, a bass-baritone, lisandro abadie, a pianist, aurélien richard, and a women’s choir, mixing professional choristers from the opus 104 choir, and amateur choristers from the pôle voix choir of the maison pour tous ergué-armel. we meet ursula, a young breton woman of our time, who takes advantage of the communication space offered by the internet to tell us her story. dismayed by the mockery of her name, ursula takes refuge in a library, where she discovers by chance the story of another ursula, more precisely saint ursula, in the golden legend by jacobus de voragine. this is the beginning of the show as a mise en abyme, the story of saint ursula: the departure from cornouailles and the pilgrimage to rome, in company of eleven thousand virgins, the confrontation with the huns on the way back, the refusal to renounce the catholic faith, and the death as a martyr. ursula’s project is to gather around her as many young girls as her patron saint: the internet could thus become the equivalent of saint ursula’s cloak, a magical garment under which her companions could shelter and protect themselves. three narratives are thus interwoven: first, a presentation of ursula the narrator and of her own project; then, the story of ursula the character (as told by ursula the narrator); finally, the story of saint ursula (recounted, or dreamt of, by ursula the character). the three stories together conclude at the end of the show: while saint ursula falls under the arrows of the king of the huns, ursula (character, but also narrator) herself faints and technicians appear in the camera field to help her. after a blackout, ursula (narrator), alone on stage, gets up and walks towards the camera to introduce the credits. at the beginning of the video of ursule 1.1, five slides follow one another to introduce the show and present the rules of a game that the director and his team have adopted. these rules contribute in defining the characteristics of the new spectacular object proposed: they indicate the chosen media, its specifications, and the constraints imposed to adapt to it. broadcasted only on the internet and filmed with a fixed camera, the performance takes the form of an amateur video filmed by ursula with her webcam. the form coincides with the content, it corresponds to the announced situation: ursula is an internet user addressing other internet users. the choice of the fixed camera is also thought to be in reference to the films by georges méliès and to the early days of cinema, as benjamin lazar points out: “the difference with another online performance, such as may be practiced for opera or theater, is that the stage frame will also be the camera frame, according to a device that may evoke méliès’s camera, namely a fixed frame without zoom, posed as a spectator’s eye.” [35] the camera frame functions as a stage frame. the point of view is not constructed thanks to the movement of the camera around the filmed object, but rather it is necessary to bring in or out of the camera field what should or should not be filmed. entering the camera field becomes the equivalent of entering the stage, while the off-screen becomes the equivalent of the backstage. the camera itself occupies a place as static as that of a spectator sitting in a theater. for the director, this characteristic makes it possible to distinguish ursule 1.1 from other forms of online performances. indeed, in the case of a re-run on the internet, on television, or at a movie theater of a show conceived for and represented in an opera house, the spectators are offered the broadcast of a show performed in another place, in the presence of other spectators. even if these initiatives tend to give them the impression that they are attending the performance, they are only external witnesses. what they see is not the performance itself, but a trace of the performance, which also carries a point of view—that which is imposed by the camera. in the case of ursule 1.1, the performance is available exclusively online. all the spectators of ursule 1.1 see and hear the same thing, at the same time, no matter where they are. moreover, the choice of a fixed camera offers a point of view which corresponds to the so-called “eye of the prince,” the place in a typical italian opera house from which the optical effect of the decor in perspective is best appreciated. the modernity of the use of the internet is thus part of a tradition—i.e., that of the characteristic conception of the stage as a “tableau.”  [36] as with italian theaters before the introduction of darkening the auditorium, [37] the question of the attention of the spectators nevertheless arises—another constraint associated with performances on internet is indeed the ease by which spectators can be distracted, or even abandon the proposed experience. it contributes in justifying the choice of a short format (forty-eight minutes)—i.e., between “the web format” (videos of a few minutes) and “the theater format” (performances of about an hour and a half to two hours), in order to be “in a good in-between time to invite an internet user to follow the proposal from one end to the other,” explains lazar. [38] but the work must also be interesting, even fascinating, as the show humorously suggests during a hypnosis scene: ursula presents the camera with a spiral printed in black on a white wheel, which rotates while she waves her hands in the direction of the spectators, in order to hypnotize them and keep them on the web at her side, as she introduces the story of saint ursula. music can be an asset in this process. thus, the composer morgan jourdain wished to contribute, with the music, to awaken and keep the attention of the audience: “it is necessary to find … in my music … something which allows the spectator, the listener, to capture the attention, so we will be closer to a music one could say charming, charmer.”  [39] we find here a founding principle of opera: the enchantment of music is associated with the wonder of images. jourdain adds: “we will try to use the singing in its simplest relationship, in its orpheus way, … to tell a story and attract the spectators and the spectator’s attention during the time of the performance.”  [40] this reference to orpheus is interesting for two reasons. on the one hand, orpheus is a poet capable, through his musical talent, of obtaining from the god of the underworld the resurrection of his beloved eurydice. on the other hand, he is an emblematic character for opera since the beginning of the genre, at the dawn of the seventeenth century. this reference thus contributes to the inscription of web opera into the tradition of western opera. however, in the case of an internet performance, the music must enchant through the mediation of the screen and despite the physical absence of the performers. jourdain has therefore composed a music that mixes elements of scholarly and popular music, with particular tunes reminiscent of nursery rhymes, which are at the same time catchy, playful, and easy to memorize. the music creates a link with the spectators, beyond the screen. like ursule 1.1, actéon is a short opera, lasting about forty minutes, with solo and choral parts performed by the singers of les cris de paris, directed by geoffroy jourdain. the notable difference is that this is not a contemporary creation composed for the project, but rather an old work: a pastoral by marc-antoine charpentier which premiered in 1684. the story is inspired by ovid’s metamorphoses: the hunter actaeon sees diana bathing with her nymphs, but the goddess discovers him and, irritated, turns him into a stag, so that her own dogs chase and kill him. for this new filmed work, the rules of the game are no longer the same as for ursule 1.1. this time, the film is not broadcast live, but deferred after post-production work. however, the director did not give up the idea of finding, within the framework of the shooting, a form of urgency specific to live performance. after several work sessions hosted by different festivals, a few days of rehearsals took place at the théâtre du châtelet, where the film was shot in one day. another complementary process is the use of the sequence shot. the film is in fact composed of two long sequence shots, between which the passage is constituted by actaeon’s gaze: the camera embodies a gaze—form and content, once again, coincide. the sequence shot consists of a single shot covering several locations in the same place, in this case the théâtre du châtelet. it implies a precise preparation and a strong concentration on behalf of the performers; any error can lead to having to start the whole shot again. indeed, if it is possible to work on sound in post-production, the images will not be able to give rise to the same editing work as a scene filmed in several sequences. filming in sequence thus makes it possible to create a tension that reminds the performers of a public, live performance. fig. 3. marc-antoine charpentier, actéon, directed by benjamin lazar, still photo. © camera lucida productions. one of the challenges of the work carried out on both ursule 1.1 and actéon is to rediscover certain characteristics of the live performance through the filmed object; in particular, a relationship to the present that gives the interpretation a different intensity from that of a film shoot. it is not a question of trying to reproduce through film a situation and effects identical to those of a theatrical or operatic performance, but of taking into account the specificities of each mode of representation, whether staged or cinematographic, in order to propose a work of transposition—what benjamin lazar calls “transpos[ing] the necessity of the present, which is specific to live performance.”  [41] the stage director and his team thought about how to arouse a different quality of emotion in the performers than in the movies, one that could evoke that of the stage performance and touch, even surprise, the audience. the shooting conditions are particularly important from this point of view. shooting live or in conditions close to live due to time constraints or technical challenges, favors awareness of the present and intense concentration, as the director explains: the technical challenge of the sequence shot is also close to the live performance: it is now or never, as much for the performers as for the technicians. the balance is perilous, the concentration must be at its highest. it’s a challenge that federates a great deal of common energy.[42] the goal is to put together working conditions that allow performers to bring out a kind of energy close to the one implicit in a stage performance. however, in contrast to a live performance, the film-spectacle does not bring practitioners and spectators to the same place at the same time. even in the case of a live broadcast, as with ursule 1.1, the latter are brought together by being online and sharing the same experience which may or may not be simultaneous, but which allows them to be together virtually. there is therefore no more interaction between them during the performance than in the case of a digital rerun. paradoxically, the same digital screen that should bring artists and audiences together creates a medial screen and, in so doing, separates them. the question of the relationship between practitioners and spectators is crucial to understand the experience of those who perform and those who attend the performance. in fact, in order to find conditions of play close to that of a live performance, lazar has reflected on how to integrate spectators. for ursule 1.1, different possibilities were considered before the performance to find, through the internet, a substitute for physical interaction, whether it was a button to applaud by “accumulating claps,”  [43] a forum-like platform for written comments, or an online chat. as none of these possibilities could replace the presence of spectators in the theater, a compromise solution was chosen, with a few spectators physically present in the theater, on the shooting site. fig. 4. marc-antoine charpentier, actéon, directed by benjamin lazar, still photo. © camera lucida productions. but if performers benefit from the gaze and presence of spectators, only a few of the latter are allowed near the stage. certainly, the digital broadcast, live or deferred, allows to reach a number of spectators much more significant than the number possible during a live performance. for example, the théâtre de cornouaille, where ursule 1.1 was filmed, can accommodate 697 spectators in its main auditorium and 145 in the atelier. with 5,773 live spectators, ursule 1.1 has gathered in one go the equivalent of more than eight performances at full capacity. such an approach also allows for a wider distribution of the show, which can be accessed worldwide, regardless of location (as long as its inhabitants have internet access) and sanitary restrictions, particularly during the covid-19 pandemic. however, for most of the attendees, the distance imposed by the screen is irreducible. interpretation undoubtedly benefits from the presence of the audience closer to the performers, but audiences who discover the performance on a screen have a very different experience from that of a live performance. their absence from the auditorium does not only result in their physical separation from the practitioners—their place within a community of spectators becomes virtual, too. attending a performance is a social activity and the interaction specific to the performance includes the interaction between different spectators of the same performance. is knowing or assuming that other spectators are attending the same performance at the same time, but in other places, enough to give the feeling of being part of a community of spectators? does it allow for the sharing that is part of the common experience that a live performance represents? in other words, is attending a performance on a screen, via internet, still a collective experience? here again, suggestions were made for ursule 1.1—e.g., the possibility of sitting together in the foyer of the theater or recreating a small community of spectators at home by inviting friends and relatives. [44] an alternative solution was proposed for actéon, shot and broadcast during a period of restricted contacts and many cancelled performances due to the covid-19 pandemic. like ursule 1.1, actéon was shot in a theater. however, the theater, in this case the théâtre du châtelet, was featured in the film itself, and a member of the audience in the theater was played by the actress judith chemla. the mise en abyme of the filmed performance favors identification in those attending remotely, who are invited to recognize the elements of an opera performance in the object offered to them. we also find in the two films the technique of direct address to the camera, but in two different ways: whereas ursula (narrator, then character) addresses the viewers to invite them to discover her story, like an internet user calling out other internet users within the same community, the spectator embodied by judith chemla initially addresses actaeon himself. the film viewers are thus invited to a particular empathy towards a character to whom they can relate by the look. at the same time, they can recognize themselves in the character of the spectator, who is a figure of spectator within the work itself: her listening, her attention, her reactions are all clues that guide the listening, the attention, and the reactions of the audience behind the screen. failing to recreate through the screen a community and, more broadly, an encounter in the present between artists and spectators, the film plays with the codes of live performance to accompany the audience in its discovery of the work and invite it to join the (virtual) space of the performance. despite their numerous points in common, ursule 1.1 and actéon do not correspond to one and the same proposition of a new genre, be it web opera or filmopera. their peculiar modes of transmission—the first live, the second pre-recorded—change the conditions of reception and thus contribute to their differentiation. they are also different from other proposals that have emerged in recent years, such as le mystère de l’écureuil bleu, a comic opera by marc-olivier dupin and ivan grinberg created for the web in 2016 at the initiative of the opéra comique, which was at the time under renovation. albeit initially conceived as a “web-opéra,” le mystère de l’écureuil bleu was eventually staged at the salle favart in february 2018.[45] ursule 1.1 and actéon, on the other hand, are not meant to be performed on stage. these two film-spectacles remain hybrid objects, experiments that use the internet to think differently about the relationship between video and live performance. without denying the fundamental difference between a work created and presented at a distance, on a screen, and a performance that implies a simultaneous presence of the performers and the audience, these works nevertheless attempt to transpose into film a relationship with the present that only a stage performance allows. in doing so, they invite us to rethink video art practices and perhaps even to renew them. (translated by sofija perović) “transposing the necessity of the present.” an interview with benjamin lazar, conducted by caroline mounier-vehier on september 23, 2022. after discovering baroque declamation and gestures with eugène green, in addition to training at the école claude mathieu, french actor and director benjamin lazar became known to the public with the resounding success of his staging of le bourgeois gentilhomme by molière and jean-baptiste lully (which has been on tour from 2004 to 2012). a sought-after performer for the baroque stage, he is also interested in a variety of repertoires, from stefano landi to karlheinz stockhausen, and has collaborated to a variety of contemporary creations (oscar strasnoy’s cachafaz, 2010; ma mère musicienne with vincent manac’h in 2012, among others). in 2010, he joined forces with composer morgan jourdain and conductor geoffroy jourdain for an original production: au web ce soir – ursule 1.1, a web opera filmed and broadcast live from the théâtre de cornouaille. ten years later, during the covid-19 pandemic, lazar and jourdain planned another show for the web: charpentier’s actéon, a film-opera recorded on december 6, 2020, at the théâtre du châtelet and broadcast on arte concert in 2021 (see the previous section of this forum).the interview presented here is based on this new spectacular object to reflect more broadly on the relationship between video and live performance in the work of benjamin lazar. caroline mounier-vehier: for several years now, you have been working with video: video recordings or films of shows, but also videos that become material for the stage work or even videos that are themselves performances. what is the difference between preparing a recording of a performance, the transmission of a work, and conceiving a video that is the work itself? benjamin lazar: the filming of le bourgeois gentilhomme was directed by martin fraudreau, [46] who also made a beautiful “behind the scenes” documentary. [47] i then began a collaboration over several years with corentin leconte for pantagruel, [48] pelléas et mélisande, [49] phaëton, [50] among others. the progress of the cameras and the care of the director sylvain séchet allowed us to capture l’autre monde ou les états et empires de la lune, [51] a show entirely by candlelight, without any electrical reinforcement. we wanted to go further and make the recording of a second work. we had the time and the means for traviata – vous méritez un avenir meilleur. [52] the show premiered at the théâtre des bouffes du nord in 2016. we wanted to impart the feeling of intimacy offered by the configuration of the bouffes du nord: the absence of the orchestra seats allows the actors to come forward and enter the great cauldron of the hall, to be with the spectators. in this intimacy, the spectators create their own film, they are their own camera, they choose details, move from one to another and write their own show. in order to create this feeling of intimacy in the film, corentin leconte felt that it was necessary to transpose it and impart a personal gesture on the work. in this case, we chose a completely scripted sequence shot, with a few technical interruptions, while leaving the possibility for chance to create happy additions to the shot. this onboard camera also allowed us to give a documentary quality to the images, reinforcing the impression of recounting the story of la traviata as well as the relationship that the singers and instrumentalists have with the music. we organized a performance with invited spectators who knew they were going to attend a shooting. their presence was important because it contributed to the energy of a performance. we were thus in a kind of in-between world between the shooting and the performance, with a very particular atmosphere, which also creates a particular emotion. i think that the presence of the public contributed to the emotion that we feel in the actors to which the film testifies. we then completed the film with more traditional shots, again during a public performance. the cameras were unified, creating a slight instability on the fixed cameras that can be typical of a documentary in situ. this effect of reality also seemed interesting to us in relation to the history of this opera, which is the first to have been inspired by a recent news item, for six years separate the death of marie duplessis from verdi’s opera. cmv: in 2020, the covid-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of many shows. it was at this time that you directed the film actéon , which had the peculiarity of not being a classic recording, but rather a video object in its own right, this time dissociated from any public performance. was the process similar to imagining a film for a show based on a live performance project? bl: a creation is always the result of a desire and circumstances. this time, the proposal came from geoffroy jourdain, who directs the ensemble les cris de paris. geoffroy was the musical director of au web ce soir – ursule 1.1, [53] the first video object created for the internet that i had proposed when i first arrived as associate artist at the théâtre de cornouailles. we were eager to do it again for a long time, but it’s not easy to find the finance for this type of project that doesn’t fit into any box. in 2020, when all the theaters were closed because of the pandemic, jean-stéphane michaud, producer at camera lucida productions, received many requests for filming. he was looking for a different format and geoffroy jourdain told him about our desire to do a live filmed work again. we proposed to replace the cancelled performances of les cris de paris with a film project associated with the théâtre du châtelet. we were able to work in different places, each time proposing a session open to the public, which allowed us to arrive with many working hypotheses at the châtelet, where we rehearsed for a few days before filming the sequence shot in one day. cmv: in 2010, ursule 1.1 was an original work, with music composed by morgan jourdain. in 2020, you filmed an old play: actéon , [54] a pastoral by marc-antoine charpentier created in 1684. why this choice? bl: it is a work that suited les cris de paris very well, with both magnificent choral parts and the possibility for the choristers to become soloists at certain moments. it is also a short work, whose form corresponds well to the sequence shot since everything happens without interruption, from the arrival of the troop of hunters in the forest to the death of actaeon. we have the impression of following a cinematic sequence with simultaneous events: the hunters who leave with actaeon on one side, diana at the bath on the other side, and then the two spaces that come together with the meeting between diana and actaeon. it was therefore ideal for this type of shooting. the project evolved again afterwards. while for ursule 1.1 we had given a live online meeting, for actéon we shot in sequence and did a post-production work before the broadcast on arte. in both cases, it is not a question of an adapted stage project, but of an object designed specifically for the camera. for actéon, adeline caron conceived a scenography that was not made to be seen by an audience, but to be filmed by the camera, which gave us the possibility to work in a more metonymic way. for example, the scene of the nymphs bathing with diana is represented with three aquariums in which the singers plunge their hands. with sylvain séchet’s lights, the crane camera coming closer to the faces filmed behind the aquarium, the spectator is in the water, a process that joins the way the imagination works in the theater. it’s a place where you can make people dream with little: aquariums, a painting that travels, things that we don’t allow ourselves as much in the cinema where there is often a demand for reality. cmv: even if your actéon is conceived as a video object, certain elements of your staging remind us that it is a work written for the stage, such as the presence of a spectator played by judith chemla. bl: during the open rehearsals, we realized that telling the story of this metamorphosis the first time would relieve the audience of the effort of recalling a myth that they would only vaguely know. the difficulty of seventeenth-century language and the spread of the story required a concentration that could have weakened the emotions. what is interesting is to see how the composer revisits a common place, but for that to happen, the place must first be common. in open rehearsals, i told the story beforehand. for the film, i wanted to write a prologue and we added a spectator, but a very involved spectator since she addresses the camera as if the spectator were actaeon. the prologue has a preparatory narrative function and establishes a certain relationship with the camera from the beginning of the film. the idea is to create an equivalence between the hunter actaeon, condemned to death for what he has seen, and the camera, also a hunter of images, showing that there can be a danger in wanting to look, both for actaeon and for the viewer. i also wanted the film to end as it had begun, with a camera perspective. we can thus say that the spectator, played by judith chemla, has forcefully projected herself into the story, so much so that she has metamorphosed herself into a new diana. cmv: the character of the spectator is even more interesting because she has a relay function for the spectators who watch the film: she accompanies them in the work and thus allows to reduce the distance that the screen implies. bl: that is why this address was important. judith chemla has such grace and emotional involvement that her character goes beyond the mere convention of the story. this is also what allows us to transpose the necessity of the present, which is specific to live performance. cmv: as in traviata – vous méritez un avenir meilleur , would one of the important aspects of the film for you to be to find a form of intensity proper to the scenic, public representation? bl: the situation is not exactly that of a public performance, but it is not only a shooting either, due to the presence of an audience or a single spectator. the technical challenge of the sequence shot is also close to the live performance: it is now or never, as much for the performers as for the technicians. the balance is perilous, the concentration must be at its highest. it’s a challenge that federates a great deal of common energy. cmv: to what extent are ursule 1.1 and actéon related? bl: ursule 1.1 is a bit like actéon’s big sister. it is almost the same object, but with different productions. we drew a certain number of ideas from ursule 1.1, which was already a work combining music and theater. we also find the same need for concentration. the big difference is that for ursule 1.1 we chose a fixed camera, like georges méliès’s. the camera does not move, it is the objects that move relative to it, with rolling sets, scale effects, objects of different sizes. for example, to represent a sea voyage, a small boat was placed in the foreground, in front of the camera, and the actors in the background on rolling platforms pulled by technicians. for actéon, on the other hand, we used two types of cameras. the first was an on-board camera with an operator who first followed the spectator, then became the eye of actaeon, and then followed actaeon transformed into a stag as he made his way around the stage of the théâtre du châtelet. the second camera was a telescopic crane operated by three technicians. it was like a bunraku puppet, with the main cameraman, who focuses, and two assistants. at the moment, the term “in-between world” is dear to me because it is the title of a project i am working on—these films are proposals that float between several genres, between several worlds. it is always interesting when a work is not completely assignable to one genre or another. cmv: have these experiences with video changed your stage work and more generally your relationship to the stage? bl: it’s quite different to think for the camera or for the stage. the image filmed on stage should not be a validation of reality. when it intervenes in a performance, it must be necessary. for phaéton by lully, for example, i worked with yann chapotel. we wanted to tell the power of the show and the show of power in phaéton thanks to the video. to show how phaeton’s race and the great chaconne of act iii testify to the characters’ desire to make a spectacle of their power, yann produced a sequence of military parades that he set to the rhythm of lully’s chaconne in such a way as to gradually create an abstract kaleidoscope. at the end of the show, phaeton’s race was also associated with filmed images, but with reading keys: phaeton was compared to a pyromaniac child, who plays with matches. usually, when i feel the need, i introduce filmed images or video art into my shows, always remaining attentive to the ways in which the technology is used: what interests me is to find a form and a content that make this use necessary, so that it does not extinguish the subject. perhaps the fact that i have shot recordings or filmed objects such as ursule 1.1 and actéon makes me want to continue the experience. i have worked on several occasions with the filmmaker joseph paris, a true poet of the image and of editing, who manages to create an extremely strong dreamlike impression in his films. these images have a life of their own, you feel their materiality and their presence assert themselves at the same time as the things filmed—exactly as actors are, in the same presence, themselves and the character. we recently created a new show, la chambre de maldoror, at the théâtre des 13 vents in montpellier.[55] cmv: when you stage filmed objects, a director accompanies you. do you plan to make films yourself or is it the work in pairs that interests you the most? bl: everything is open. i like collaborations, but maybe at some point i’ll move on to co-directing or directing. when i work with directors, they make a lot of suggestions. we talk about shot values and intentions, we look at the cut together, but they have a fundamental creative part because they know the necessities and the placement of the cameras, technical aspects for which i have intuitions but do not control. in the creative process of actéon, another important stakeholder was the draughtsman benoît guillaume, who made sketches and helped make a storyboard from photos that i took to prepare the shots. i am interested in cinema, but more recently i wanted to share with the public the particular concentration that filming creates and the reflections that filmed projects engender. in my project l’entremonde – including the associated workshops conducted with, among others, the composer pedro garcia-velasquez and the directors and actresses jessica dalle and alix mercier [56] – i experiment with a public of all ages and backgrounds a creative process based on a three-dimensional recording technique, binaural recording. this allows me to explore the notions of image and inner cinema, through the accumulation and solicitation of images in contact with other images, of works of art. if i say the word forest to you, for example, you will search your memory for a certain number of images with which to compose a chimerical forest. in the workshop, we share what this word evokes in us: for some it will be the smell of wet leaves in autumn, others will have more sonic references, others still will think of light. soliciting inner images is universal, but each person does it in a different way according to his or her background. today there are new tools to produce fiction and images, but it is crucial to maintain our ability to create and share inner images. this is even more important at a time when, with the development of the so-called metaverse, they would like to make us to believe that we are only waiting to escape into ready-made inner films, a ready-made clothing for imagination. it is not a question of rejecting these technologies in a backward-looking way, but of being attentive to protect our inner images in front of what looks like an attempt at annexation. what we put into shape in the workshops is in line with what i think in general of the image in theater—a thought that i share, i believe, with set designer adeline caron, with whom i have been working for twenty years: the image must always contain enough gaps and absences to arouse a desire for completeness in the spectators, so that they can project their memories and desires onto it. there are quite concrete procedures to achieve this, formal and structural answers that are diverse and always to be sought, to be renewed. there is no single recipe. for a long time, i used darkness to leave space in the image—and i still use it, because we imagine what we don’t see. but i also know that sometimes a full fire can be full of mystery. caroline mounier-vehier received her ph.d. in theatre studies from the université sorbonne nouvelle – paris 3 in 2020. since her dissertation, entitled la scène lyrique baroque au xxie siècle: pratiques d'atelier et (re)création contemporaine [baroque musical theatre in the 21st century: workshop practices and contemporary (re)creation], she has been studying the conditions of production, interpretation, and reception of early music performances on the contemporary stage. she has published several papers and given numerous talks on the subject. caroline is also active as an orchestra manager and concert organizer. romeo castellucci in conversation with sofija perović [57] romeo castellucci is an italian stage director, a lighting and costume designer, and a visual artist known all over the world for his theatrical language based on the totality of the arts. besides being one of the most sought after and esteemed directors of our time, castellucci is also a published author of more than dozen books and theoretical essays on stage directing. castellucci’s work is characterized by strong images created of the primacy traditionally afforded to the dramaturgy and the text, exploring instead other means of stage expression such as music, painting, architecture, among others. he is regularly invited to work in the most prestigious international theaters, opera houses, and festivals on all the continents. sofija perović: at the heart of your productions, regardless of genre or venue, whether it is opera or spoken theater, baroque, romantic or contemporary music, we can always recognize the human being, its condition, humanity, and humanness. from your point of view, as an artist who actively questions the human condition in his works, what role do you see for the internet in its future? is the internet a tool which could contribute to cutting back alienation among people, or is it putting in danger the very essence of human beings by changing and challenging the codes of communication? romeo castellucci: i’m not so confident in such a way of communicating because i think that mostly it is a matter of social control, and not only social control, but much more. in my opinion, it is the control that goes into the intimacy of people. i have to say that it is useless to fight against the internet. it exists, but i try to keep myself apart from this kind of illness, because the internet is a way to communicate with other people through an architecture built by somebody else. the idea of internet communication is such that communication is under control in the architecture. we have the impression of being free, but it is a cage, and we like this cage. in my opinion, it is a form of slavery—a soft slavery, an invisible slavery, but still a slavery. especially since it concerns the intimacy of each of us. there is a metaphysical side in communication. on the other hand, art should be a switch of this forced communication. we are obliged to communicate in this architecture, and i believe that art is first of all an experience. in my opinion, art should be an experience, and in the communication which passes through the internet there is no experience. we only exchange the same words. the word on the internet is a circular word that has nothing to do with me, it is totally detached from experience. however, i am not the right person to talk about that, as it would be more suitable for a sociologist—and i am not a sociologist, i am not a professor, nor a specialist of these things. on the other hand, i fight communication. art is a fight against communication, in my opinion—it is always personal. on a stage there is nothing to communicate; it is rather a revelation that we receive on a stage, a revelation that is also outside language and that is also why our body, the body of the spectator, is present. without me (spectator), the show does not exist, because it comes from me, i am half of what i’m seeing. it is an encounter. theater is the art of contact, it is based on the reciprocal presence between what happens on stage and me sitting in the theater, of my body meeting another unknown body. obviously the internet is not like that, it is a fiction that is atrocious. i don’t want to be the enemy of the internet; if it exists, it means that there are reasons for its existence. i don’t want to make a criticism of the internet as such, but as a way of communicating it is disturbing. sp: how do you feel about the online broadcasting of your work? and what future do you predict for newly emerged genres such as web opera or zoom opera? rc: no, that doesn’t make any sense. sometimes i do the work at the opera and there is a video documentary that is programmed by channels like arte, for example, but that’s not theater, it’s a documentary, so to say. it’s a totally distant experience. one has the impression of what it might look like in reality, but it is not the thing. the thing is an encounter, the thing is an act of presence, which is increasingly rare today. i can accept it as a documentary, but that’s not what theater is. during the pandemic, we did theater broadcasts, but it’s a stupidity, it’s an inherent contradiction. when we enter a theater, we are in danger. when we watch something at home, we are protected and that prevents the theater experience, in my opinion. it’s just my opinion. sp: we’ve already had the opportunity to see the use of artificial intelligence in opera, the posthuman condition of the likes of avatars replacing singers or dancers. how do you feel about that? is it something we might expect to see in your future work? rc: in my opinion, if there is no original idea behind the use of new technologies, it is nothing more than a gimmick—and there are a lot of gimmicks out there. there is nothing extraordinary about it, it is a normality, it is not surprising. i am surprised by original ideas. here, everything is predictable and that disappoints me. i don’t believe in these new forms; i don’t have that kind of optimism when it comes to new technologies. new technology is, by definition, always boring because it is predictable, at least to me. in theater, the most impressive is the anthropological discovery of the individual as an abyss. most of the time, when you don’t know what to do, you fill the space up with new technology which is like a gadget, in my opinion—again, it’s very personal. i’ve never been surprised by new technologies in theater, with robots, etc.—it’s always, “so what?” to me, the idea is fundamental. if someone has an idea with technology, then it works—but it is rare. sp: your latest production at the festival d’aix-en-provence, a staging ofgustav mahler’s resurrection symphony, is advertised as a “striking meditation on the exhaustion and disappearance of all things—and takes up in a spectacular way the question of the aftermath: the question of a hypothetical renewal.” unfortunately, i didn’t have the chance to see it live, i only saw it on the internet. rc: ah, that is not the same thing. i admit it, it was a totally anti-television piece. it was important for the festival to have a document, but it was totally another experience because the hard core of the show was the voids. there was no one there for twenty minutes, and on tv such voids are not possible. when there were holes in the ground, that was the show and there was nobody. and on television that is not possible. on the other hand, i consider it as a documentary—it is not at all the experience that one can have in real time and place. sp: yes, there was this screen between me as a spectator and the real experience. however, watching it on the screen i was impressed, if that is the word that can be used here, by stunning similarities between the images that i saw there and those that we see in the media today [i.e., the war in ukraine]. and i read that you mentioned on more occasions that you conceived those images more than a year ago, so they were purely coincidental. rc: yes, that was an awful coincidence, it wasn’t wanted, and it was too late to change the show. show…it’s not even a show. i was disturbed by this coincidence. i had a doubt whether it was legitimate to show images like that in a moment when there was the same thing going on in real life. i trembled. in the end, we decided with the festival to keep the project as it is, but with a note from me saying that i was sorry by the coincidence that was beyond me. sp: in a symbolic way, even the place in which this production was presented got its “resurrection,” from being a vandalized and abandoned building to the place that gave birth to an artistic spectacle of the highest quality. can that coincidence bring any hope for our world today, knowing that everything has its end and a new beginning, or is it just illustrating the tragic circle of never-ending violence and destruction? rc: hm… both. when they offered me to work on mahler’s resurrection, they thought of hope. the hope after covid-19. we were going out again, etc., but i didn’t believe in this kind of optimism. i did not feel that there was a resurrection happening. on the other hand, the word resurrection was the most difficult to interpret. it is literally a resurrection, but a completely human one, so it was necessary to take the anonymous bodies, probably assassinated, out of the ground in order to restore their dignity. so, it was a totally human pietas with bodies coming out of the ground not for a metaphysical resurrection but for a human resurrection. it was not optimistic, but there was a confidence in humanity. however, it is true that it all goes through the image of violence, because violence caused the existence of this mass grave. that was my interpretation of the word resurrection. but it’s true that there was also a resurrection of the place, of the stadium, because it was a dead place. so, there was this double aspect of the word resurrection, a word which is very powerful and very loaded with meaning in our christian tradition, which is obvious in mahler’s music; so, it was also a question of giving space to mahler’s music, and that’s why there was almost nothing to see. after the first chord, it was a question of getting a lot of bodies out of the ground, but there were no particular events, it was not a show, it was not a ballet, it was a moment of contemplation and of listening, deep listening to the music. we don’t see it in the arte documentary, but it was important to have half an hour where there was the earth with the emptied holes, e basta (and nothing else). the idea was for the holes in the ground to be like the sepulcher of christ; there was also a reference to the christian resurrection, but through these gestures with the bodies, with the corpses, it became not a spiritual thing, but rather a heavy thing and at the same time very much human. figg. 5 and 6. romeo castellucci, resurrection, aix-en-provence festival. photo credit: monika rittershaus. sp: since this production was really anchored in the space where it was presented, would you consider producing it in another place? rc: yes, there are plans to do it again in another place. i think it’s hard to find a place like this one, but there are possibilities to do it again. sp: during an interview from ten years ago, [58] you said that in the theater we are hostages or prisoners of the author. do you still feel that way? and since you are also active on operatic stages lately, where the author of the text is but one of the many personalities involved, does the presence of more than one author make you feel as a double prisoner, or is it liberating in some way? rc: in the theater that depends on the attitude that one has as a stage director. when we work in a repertory theater, we fall into a faithful attitude, an attitude of respect towards the text, and it is that illustrative, respectful attitude which prevents the imagination and constitutes a cage. in any case, there must be a limit: freedom does not exist in the creation. we need limits. in my opinion, it is a fight that we have with the limits. in combat, it’s good to have boundaries, but outside of an illustrative attitude that’s flat and superficial. it’s about working with the author, but it’s also about a fight to give life back (through our body) to this piece, to this music. obviously, in opera the already given structure is even stronger, in particular the structure of the tone, because everything is given—music is a temporal meter one cannot escape, not even from rhythm. personally, there are authors, composers, with whom i cannot work. we resonate aesthetically with certain things and certain names, but it is really a question of entering, imagining, and seeing the same object from our own point of view. the view goes beyond that of repertoire, of habit. we must seek to change the angle of view of the same object. it’s true that the music is a very strong constraint—a very, very strong one. sp: as a spectator, i found the video in your production of orfeo ed euridice most striking, [59] and since there was a direct communication between the stage and the hospital i perceived the video on stage as a usage of the internet in the sense of an online communication between the singers in the opera house and a participant in the hospital who played the role of euridice, rather than cinematic use of the video on stage. what was your intention behind it? rc: it’s true that there was a real-time connection. it was like a ring. els was in contact with us in the opera house through headphones. she was listening to the music in real time, and we were watching her listening to us, so it was really a kind of ring. but it wasn’t through the internet, it was broadcast live by a camera connected to an antenna, a signal in the opera house. every evening, there was the same course in time. the cameraman was in contact with us in the opera house, listening to the music to respect the musical time, to speed up, or to slow down when necessary. the gaze was orfeo’s gaze. the camera was orfeo’s eye. it wasn’t really the internet, it was more of a cinematic language, but it wasn’t even cinema because we used sequence shooting—there was no editing. the shooting was done without any interruption and it was also dangerous if there was, for example, an accident on the road—everything was really fragile and i think that fragility was a strong element in this project. sp: if i may say you used technology in this production in an absolutely unpredictable way and you’ve created something really revolutionary. rc: well, i don’t know about that, but there was a subject in there much stronger than the technology we used. in my opinion, technology must be a tool that needs to become transparent. i’m disturbed when i watch technology-heavy shows, it’s not interesting in my opinion. in this case, it’s true that we used very sophisticated technology, but that was not our focus. the presence of els was the real thing. sp: media often describes your work as shocking. personally, i haven’t found any of your works shocking nor do i believe that it was your goal or intention, i find it each time deeply moving and truthful, but it is possible that the truth nowadays comes as or seems shocking and that we got very much accustomed to the untruth. do you believe that it is still possible to shock today’s theater audiences by means of stage imagery? rc: i don’t know if the word shock is the right word, but i understand what you mean, and i think so. i think we have to… we have to shake the spectator’s body, yes. it becomes more and more difficult, but i think it’s necessary and it’s the right place to do it. we can even use the word scandal, which is a marvelous word, a greek word. it is necessary to be disturbed in a certain way, but apart from provocation. provocation belongs to advertising and the media, which must be provocative all the time—so, that’s not a provocation at all because it is still predictable. the shock is to be surprised, to be touched in the intimacy. that is the shock in my opinion. shock is something that forces you to change your point of view, to reconfigure your view of things—i find that interesting and almost essential. sp: we are living in an era of fake news when all sorts of information are one click away, but we are doubting everything, maybe even more than ever. we doubt even what we see with our own eyes. how do you inform yourself and what are your points of reference? rc: precisely, it is difficult because most of the time the news is biased. the source of information is always one sided. it is a power. information is a power, but also a disease. i seek to interpret with my conscience. i distrust all the information. i think there is always something that is twisted. i try to find a balance between several sources. when it comes to something important—like war, for example—you have to be wary of the source. you always have to look and try to have a context for the important things. you also need to see what is important in your life. normally, information is not necessary, but there are things which are necessary in order to have a conscience. one has to be intelligent, sensitive, and attentive, and even cautious about conformism and homogenization. but i say this as a citizen and not as an artist. simon hatab in conversation with sofija perović simon hatab is a dramaturg for theater and opera. he works with directors clément cogitore and bintou dembélé (les indes galantes at the opéra national de paris), silvia costa (julie at the opéra national de lorraine, l’arche de noé at the opéra national de lyon), maëlle dequiedt (trust—karaoké panoramique and i wish i was at the théâtre de la cité internationale, stabat mater at the théâtre des bouffes du nord), lisaboa houbrechts (médée at the comédie-française), tiago rodrigues (tristan und isolde at the opéra national de lorraine), émilie rousset (playlist politique at the théâtre de la bastille), marie-eve signeyrole (nabucco at the opéra de lille, la damnation de faust at the staatsoper hannover, don giovanni at the opéra national du rhin). he collaborates with the opéra national de lorraine (matthieu dussouillez) and conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de paris (émilie delorme). he co-directed with maëlle dequiedt the short films i’m off to work i have posted on the fridge all the instructions on how to make a revolution and histoire du bouc. with photographer elisa haberer, he wrote la quadrature d’une ville (les cahiers de corée, 2017). he contributes to the magazines europe (issue “l’opéra aujourd’hui”), alternatives théâtrales (issue “opera and ecologies”), and bande à part; he also contributed to the dictionnaire roland barthes (honoré champion) and to the magazine fumigène – littérature de rue. with judith le blanc, he coordinated an issue of the magazine théâtre/public devoted to musical theater. he is a member of the research group “histoire des arts et des représentations” at the université paris nanterre, where he has given a series of courses dedicated to dramaturgy. he is also an associate artist of the program performing utopia at king’s college london. sp: being a dramaturg in opera is a relatively new position. you have worked both as an independent dramaturg and as part of the artistic direction team in an opera house. based on your experience, how would you define the work of a dramaturg? sh: i don’t believe that dramaturgy in theater and opera is such a new function, but i have noticed that in recent years it has developed in france, particularly under the impetus of dramaturgy courses set up by institutions such as the école du théâtre national de strasbourg or the université paris nanterre. dramaturgy is divided into two complementary fields: production dramaturgy, where we work on the shows, and publishing dramaturgy, where we are focused on theater programs, the editorial policy of an institution, meeting with the public, and everything that promotes a link between the stage and the audience. of course, there is a link between the two since the dramaturg of a show is well placed to contribute to the theater program or to make introductions to the audience before a performance. sp: what does your work on the shows consist of? are you a dramatic advisor to the directors? sh: i do not consider myself as the dramatic advisor of the artists with whom i work because that would imply that i have an ascendancy over them, which is not the case. i see myself more as a craftsman who (re)searches with the director and the artistic team, at the table and on the stage. i don’t think that the dramaturg is a scholar with knowledge that gives him or her an expertise. certainly, there is a part of research which aims at making links, creating connections, working on the resonance of the spectacle. but it seems to me that dramaturgy is also based on forgetting. for example, if i am a dramaturg of don giovanni, perhaps i have a certain version of the character, but it is likely that the director has a completely different one. i must hear and follow them in this vision. that’s why forgetting is important. when i start working on a project or when i arrive at a rehearsal, i must try to forget, to unlearn everything i believe i know to listen to what this strange creature that is forming on the stage—which is the show in the making—has to say to me. sp: you say you are (re)searching with the stage director, but also with the rest of the artistic team. who are the persons you are collaborating with? sh: my privileged interlocutor is the stage director, but the collective dimension is very important. if the role of the dramaturgy is to conceive the show, that is not the prerogative of the dramaturg alone. the director, of course, but also the other members of the artistic team (scenographer, costume designer, lighting designer, among others) make the dramaturgy in the sense that they all participate in thinking the show. on the stage, there is as much meaning in a costume or in a lighting variation as there is in a monologue. the fact that the dramaturgy belongs to everyone makes christoph marthaler say that the dramaturg is “a king without a kingdom.” i think this is a beautiful idea and perhaps i can propose another one: i believe that dramaturgy is a kingdom, but an invisible one. and in greek mythology the invisible is the other name for the kingdom of the dead. so, it makes me think of heiner müller, who says that theater is a dialogue with the dead. i imagine that there is also some of that in the dramaturgy… sp: since the purpose of this forum is to examine the use of the internet in all its forms in opera productions today, and to try to understand the new ways of using it on stage and also behind it, could you tell us what is the role that internet plays in the day-to-day work of a dramaturg in a theater or opera production? sh: the aforementioned dialogue with the artistic team is established from the first intuitions of the show and continues until the final stages of the production, lasting from several months to several years. this dialogue needs a support, a place to develop. there are of course workshops that bring together the entire artistic team in the same room, around a table or in a rehearsal room. but between these workshops, the dialogue continues by email or telephone. these times of remote discussions are part of a different temporality because these are the ideas that we can think about for a long time, that we can let settle. settling seems to me very important in an original production. in addition to these exchanges, we work a lot with shared files. each of us can put down inspirations and materials for the show, for the scenography, the costumes, the lights… when we form an artistic team for a show, we all start with different languages, imaginations, backgrounds that are our own. each of us keeps his or her singularity but we also must build a common territory to find each other, to get along, to understand each other and to create the project. these shared files are a way to give substance to this attempt to build a common space. sp: in what measure are you using internet in your research? sh: we use internet to do the research and to share it with others. i think that this common space that we build should not only be intellectual but rather sensitive: it can be a text but also music, a painting, an installation, an extract from movies or tv shows… sp: has the covid-19 pandemic, which forced us to discover the advantages of working remotely, influenced the way you interact with members of the team for the piece you are working on, and how important it is for you to have a direct contact with your colleagues in the preparatory phases of a show? sh: i don’t really know how to answer that question. in the professional world, i see that zoom has made it possible to handle certain meetings remotely that used to take place in person, and that’s a good thing for the planet… at the same time, we don’t dialogue in quite the same way remotely as around a table. i also have the impression that projects start existing once we meet. sp: could you tell us about your experience working as a dramaturg for les indes galantes at the opéra bastille? this production was somewhat revolutionary in the sense that it brought hip-hop and krumping dance to the stage of the opéra national de paris, an institution that has played such an important role in the history of dance and is still a stronghold of the tradition of classical ballet. sh: having worked on this project for almost three years, i can’t judge whether it was a revolutionary production. i would not be very objective. moreover, in one of her interviews, bintou dembélé recalls that hip-hop had already been represented on the bastille stage, notably during a show where her brother performed. what seemed new to me in les indes galantes was the part that these dances took in the dramaturgy, their capacity to carry stories, to dialogue, to interact with the vision of the world created in the libretto. my job, together with katherina lindekens who was the other dramaturg of the production, was to accompany the project from the very beginning to its creation. this meant having many coffees with clément and bintou, participating in workshops, following rehearsals, having coffees again… maintaining this continuous dialogue from the beginning to the end. one of the original features of the production was, of course, the importance of dance, and bintou and clément made sure that the dance rehearsals didn’t just start at the time of the production rehearsals (i.e., six weeks before the premiere) but more than a year and a half before it. the dance was a truly important component of the show, it carried a lot of the dramaturgy. i could compare this to another show that was created in 2016 at the paris opera: così fan tutte, directed by anne teresa de keersmaeker. there too, the dance was so important that rehearsals with the dancers had to start very early. these are two cases in which the opéra’s production machine has managed to adapt in order to create such unusual shows. sp: this project started well before the premiere at the opéra bastille: the short film to the tune of “forêts paisibles” was presented on 3e scène and went viral on the internet, attracting the attention of a much wider audience than the usual one of the opéra de paris… sh: it is true that the origins of this show are to be found in the short film that clément made on an excerpt from les indes galantes, choreographed by bintou, grichka, and brahim rachiki for 3e scène, the now-dismantled digital stage of the paris opera. the director of the opéra at that time, stéphane lissner, saw it and, i imagine, found that there was a powerful relationship between the music, the images, and the dance, which encouraged him to entrust clément and bintou with the entire work. we are thus in an original case where it is a film which generated an opera rather than vice versa… a few in the audience had already seen the short film before attending the show, as the video had become viral. it is said that it inspired other dancers to choreograph and dance to excerpts from baroque music. it has almost become a pop culture object. sp: what do you think was the impact of this popularization of an eighteenth-century piece of music to the younger generations who had the opportunity to discover it in a space and culture they understood and knew (internet and hip-hop)? did this contribute to the democratization of the operatic genre in paris/france or were there still limitations that could not be overcome? and what was the role of internet in all this? sh: has the show contributed to the democratization of opera? it is difficult for me to answer this question. we work on shows but, in the end, we don’t own the effects they produce. some time ago, i read a book by the musicologist sylvie pébrier, reinventing music. [60] in this book, she defends the idea that the crisis affecting culture today is first and foremost a crisis of narratives. i imagine that everything that can contribute to putting the narratives on stage a little more in phase with the narratives of those who have not had a voice until now is good to take. in a way, this is what les indes galantes does: through the vision of clément and bintou, the dancers’ bodies carry the krumping, voguing, electro… political stories that have often been erased or hidden. but democratizing opera is not just an aesthetic question. there are other issues in opera’s accessibility, such as the price of seats in certain institutions, or the symbolic capital it represents, which can be intimidating for certain audiences. when we work in dramaturgy, we work in the field of representations, on the symbolic significance of works and performances. but to make things evolve, these symbolic acts must be articulated with political acts for which they cannot substitute. sp: france has a highly developed dance tradition to which les indes galantes belongs. what i found particularly innovative in this production was the introduction of another dance tradition that comes from a different country and continent—hip-hop. to your knowledge, how important was the role of the internet in the introduction and development of the hip-hop scene in france? sh: i am not a dance specialist; all i know about the subject comes from my exchanges with the dancers and conversations that i had with the choreographer bintou dembélé during rehearsals, and which continued afterwards. hip-hop culture arrived in france at the end of the 1970s and first spread through television and vhs imported from the united states. as for the role of internet, which has now taken over from vhs in the dissemination of these dances, it has allowed dancers to train by freely viewing videos. it has made the boundaries between styles much more porous. this was evident when talking to the dancers: some claimed to be of several styles, others did not want to label their dance. in les indes galantes, the dances that we gather under the label “hip-hop” are in reality multiple: there is the k.r.u.m.p., the electro, the vogue, the popping, the gliding, the waacking, the b-boying… each one carries a political history. for example, the k.r.u.m.p. was born in the wake of the 1992 los angeles riots, following the beating of rodney king by police officers. that’s why, in the production, these dances show political stories through gesture. for me it is at this level, in this taking of space, that the dramaturgy of the show was played out, more than in the fiction—in the very movements of the bodies. i believe that it was a radically different project from the role assigned to dance in the opera-ballet you mentioned, since the aim of this dance was originally to entertain—i.e., to divert attention in order to establish the authority of the king. here, conversely, what the dance carries is essential: it carries stories and lives. it opens a space of protest and resistance. sp: the fact that this production of an opera-ballet was directed by clément cogitore—known to the public as a film director, even if he did not necessarily want to include video in his staging—made it possible to bring together cinema and its aesthetic with opera, ballet, and classical/baroque music. sh: today, opera faces a strong challenge to reinvent itself by inviting new directors from prose theater, cinema, or the visual arts… this was the case for clément, for whom les indes galantes was a first attempt at staging an opera. when directors start working in opera productions, it happens that they are overwhelmed by the production machine which does not allow them the freedom they have, for example, in theater. opera is sometimes a bit like cronus devouring his children. i believe that clément was very conscious of these risks and that he arrived very prepared. throughout the creative process, he attended many performances to understand the possibilities of this strange art form that is opera. before we met, he had conducted an in-depth study of the work. he would come up with very strong intuitions, often visual, such as: “in this scene there will be a merry-go-round.” as a dramaturg, our job is to think about the meaning, or meanings. so, when a director comes up with strong images that you can tell are deep insights, it is a gift: it’s thrilling to have to think, to decipher strong images step by step, especially when they resist. i think that clément gave himself to this project. we were also supported by the opéra’s various teams, who were committed to the success of this unusual project: we found solutions together to every technical problem, as if this project had to be done at all costs. you are right to say that, from the start, it was clear to clément that he would not use video. this may seem paradoxical knowing his artistic background, but i think it was a very accurate intuition: when artists from another field come to opera, something breaks down, decomposes, and it has to be recomposed in another way; they have to try to find their aesthetics again, but with other means, the scenic means that are specific to theater and that are not those of video-making. for clément, i imagine that this radical choice was a way of not cheating, of taking this question head on. in short, there was a lot of preparation for this project, regular workshops punctuated the preparation phase. i remember my girlfriend telling me: “you’re still in a workshop on les indes galantes? but what do you still have to prepare? are you writing the reviews of the show?” sp: how did the aftermath of les indes galantes go? sh: i think that after the show we wanted to move on, to turn a page. perhaps it was also a way of letting the public take possession of this object that we had created, of letting other people than ourselves think about it. a show does not stop at the curtain call. if it has marked us, then a few hours, a few minutes, a few seconds can continue to play again within us long afterwards. sp: did the documentary released two years later in theaters—directed by philippe béziat, who followed the creation process—allow you to dive back into it? sh: i didn’t go see it. philippe spent a lot of time with us, so i imagine he had a lot of material… but putting on a show is a very intense collective adventure: it’s like a few weeks of our lives that go up in flames. so, it’s hard to get back into it two years later. sp: could you tell us about your future projects and your current collaborations with clément cogitore and bintou dembélé after les indes galantes? sh: after les indes galantes, i continued to work together with clément and the rest of the team. we are currently preparing two operas: one for paris and the other for antwerp/ghent, but i believe these are projects that have not yet been announced, so, unfortunately, i can’t say more about them in order not to spoil. after les indes i also continued to dialog with bintou, notably when she was in residence at villa medici and then in chicago. i wrote her portrait for théâtre/public and took part in an extensive interview she gave for the same magazine, with christian biet and marine roussillon. [61] this long-term dialog brought me a lot: in addition to her political questions, i was trying to understand how one could conceive a dramaturgy that would not pass through words but through body, movement, and gesture. she sometimes contacts me to write her biography. i’m not talking about writing her life in 500 pages… i’m talking about the little biographies that are inserted in the press kits. it seems anecdotal, but i think it’s very important: for years, the story of these dances has been told by others, and there’s something very important at stake in having it told by those who carry them. so, reading her bio again is the most useful and concrete thing i do for her. there is also the conductor—leonardo garcía alarcón—with whom i currently have the pleasure of working on an opera with the choreographer sidi larbi cherkaoui for the grand théâtre de genève. leonardo has been very important in les indes galantes: he is a conductor who is able to put himself entirely at the service of projects in which he believes. he has been a great supporter of les indes galantes, which would not have been possible without him. he is a precious partner in dialog. sp: three years later, what do you take from les indes galantes? sh: many of the questions that continue to accompany me in dramaturgy were already there at the time of les indes galantes: what does it mean to flabbergast the audience? by representing violence, do we perpetuate it? to what extent do the stories we tell belong to us? can we tell a story? les indes galantes was also a symbolic production for me because, right after, i left the paris opera where i had worked for more than ten years. i had been lucky enough to grow up in this opera house, to learn my craft from incredible artists and people. so now i wanted to accompany a new generation of artists, in theater and opera, to take care of the future. fig. 7. les indes galantes by clément cogitore, opéra national de paris youtube channel, still photo from video. julia bullock in conversation with sofija perović fig. 8. julia bullock and roderick williams in michel van der aa’s upload, dutch national opera. photo credit: marco borggreve. despite her young age, the acclaimed american soprano julia bullock has already worked on many groundbreaking and innovative projects, but probably the most striking one was sharing the stage with an actual avatar in michel van der aa’s opera upload. bullock belongs to the generation of new operatic stars reachable on social media, where it is possible to follow their activities and “stay in touch” over the internet. we met—quite symbolically, but also practically, being on different continents at the time—on zoom on august 12, 2022, to talk about internet and its application on contemporary operatic stages and beyond. sofija perović: you are quite active on social media and generally on internet. i have reached you through facebook for this interview and you have kindly replied to me. i also noticed that you are engaged and very generous with sharing the work of your colleagues, supporting and praising them on social media. you are not only using internet as a platform for your personal work and art, but you are also socially engaged and responsive to your fans and followers. how do you see the role of internet in the creation of the image of a new operatic star, someone who is not entirely distant anymore and not a “mythical,” unreachable creature, but rather someone who has a closer personal relationship with her audience? julia bullock: yes, well, part of it is just because i enjoy interacting with individuals who come to performances or who are interested in the arts and it’s just a way to stay engaged. it’s also a way, as you mentioned, for me to share what some of my colleagues are working on and things that are really exciting to me. i think the internet, like any form of technology, is just an additional tool that can be used to connect people. so, i’m thinking of radio broadcasts, or when television became really popular and people had these amazing variety shows… this is just another platform which is more direct and allows people to connect on either a very intimate level or just with the fun casual exchange. so, i really value social media platforms, especially more recently when covid-19 and the struggles with the pandemic hit, when people were feeling very much separated from each other—it’s been such a tremendous tool. but i kind of go in and out of phases of utilizing social media. just think of youtube—i’ve been grateful that i’ve had access to so many different performances and so many different people across the globe because of the internet, and for a variety of reasons. sp: since you mentioned youtube, i had the opportunity to watch there a recording of the masterclass you previously held on zoom, and i must say that i was amazed to see how it worked so well for the participants who were in another city or in another state, and also for the singers all over the world who could rewatch it later on. i know it was organized under the particular circumstances of the covid-19 pandemic, but do you see this as a possibility in the future as well? or was it just a one time for you? how do you feel about those online masterclasses? jb: i’ve taught a fair amount online over zoom or skype. skype actually seems to work really well, at least for me, as a teaching platform because i’m able to look at the singer and also to look at their scores while they’re working. and yes, i’m totally open to continuing working in a virtual space. i have also taken lessons virtually, so i think a lot can be transmitted even over an iphone. i’ve only conducted these masterclasses, i haven’t sung in them, but it is just a way for people who otherwise would not be able to gather together; and also, i do think that even just a sound or, you know, talking through ideas, all of that is still really valid in a virtual session. so, those have been valuable tools. sp: from your point of view, is the internet a place to redefine operatic codes and create a new atmosphere, to change the way things work or used to work in opera for its creators, interpreters, and audiences? jb: i don’t know if it can be used to redefine—maybe with intimacy and direct exchange… i mean, the internet was there for us, or i think developed for us, to help us connecting with each other. ideally, right? so, maybe the formality of codes of operatic spaces is starting to shift a bit, but only because i honestly don’t really know how much that kind of formality was sustainable anyway, as people everywhere are looking for legitimate connections with each other, connections that are not postured nor protected by any kind of artifice. we are seeking out ways, various ways to communicate and this kind of immediacy of seeing somebody on a live screen that’s not prerecorded is amazing—truly like a very intimate thing. and i can just think about it, even when i’m recording a song. i did a few recordings with my husband early on during the pandemic, just him and i and the piano, but i just imagined somebody’s face, a loved one or a friend or somebody in the audience directly on the other side of the screen, just sitting, you know, two feet from me. that kind of intimate exchange is not something that we get very often in the concert hall, even though the intensity of it can be very vivid in a live performance where there’s a big stage and more separation. so, i don’t know if it is changing codes, i think it’s just allowing people to open up the landscape for however people want to make and share music, or art in general. sp: you had the opportunity to perform in michel van der aa’s opera upload , which deals with a truly innovative subject for an opera. at the same time, though, the subject of accumulated online experience and its possible preservation for future generations is no longer fiction or a distant idea; with the development of ai, virtual reality, the metaverse, and so on, this subject is becoming very reachable in the near future. would you like to tell us a little bit about how it felt being on stage with the avatar of your colleague? jb: honestly, a little frustrating at the start of rehearsing when we were putting the show together, because it was during the height of the pandemic and roderick [williams] and i were not able to be close to each other because this was before vaccinations or anything, so the reality of being separated and isolated was palpable and i think it did influence our creative process. it was also a little bit overwhelming because the avatar was so large and it was constantly shape-shifting, and sometimes was at a height of 5, 10 meters above me. usually, when you are on stage, you’re interacting with other people and maybe there is someone moving set pieces, there are some props, etc., but in this instance there was nothing other than myself and moving of a few screens. there was no tactile interaction between anybody on stage, there was nobody performing, which again was very much a reflection of art at the time, a reflection of what was going on in the world. and getting all the technology together was a slow process as well. michel, the composer and director and writer and visionary for the piece, together with his team were still figuring out what the avatar was going to look like at different points over the course of the opera. so, it was also very time consuming, there was a lot of waiting around and watching them fiddle with, pushing various buttons and things. but those were also the moments when roderick and i were able to talk and just connect as people. so, just looking back on it now, i really valued that time. it’s been a couple years now and it was a unique process, and, as with every new opera or every new piece that i perform, there’s something to be learned. i think i learned to be much more patient and then also just to find, again, this kind of legitimate ways to connect because the usual ways through which you would learn to come to a relationship with somebody you were working with weren’t possible—so, it was cool. and when we got into the groove of the performances, i was so happy with how streamlined the entire piece was; and i think the filming is kind of one experience, but the live performance was really stunning. it was one of the most spectacular, extraordinary visual experiences that i have seen on an opera stage, and even just as a performer, i know that the impact of it is amazing and sleek. yes, i think sleek is the word i would use to describe it: stimulating and sleek. sp: it sounds very exciting from what you’ve just described, and i must say that it seems a little like a movie filming, with all the waiting in between takes… jb: yes, it definitely was like that. sp: when you were approached for the first time to work on this new work, did you have any reservations, or did you accept the challenge right away? jb: i did accept it. part of it was because michel and i had a really nice conversation a few years before he began, and he told me about the idea of the project and that it was about human relationship; he said that, obviously, the technical side of it is increasingly incorporated into the piece, but that what he was really looking to highlight were the complexities between such relationships, so i didn’t hesitate for one second. also, i had looked at a couple of other works by michel, just on video, and his aesthetic was so stunning that i didn’t hesitate to take on the piece. [1]  a party line was a multiparty line or a shared service line used to provide telephone service. these lines were often the only available ones and they had a discount over an individual service. since lines were shared, when one user was on the phone, other(s) couldn’t make a connection, but they could hear the conversation of the other user(s). [2]  anna schürmer, “the extensions of opera: radio, internet, and immersion,” contemporary music review 41, no. 4 (2022): 401. [3]  schürmer, 402. [4]  “tod machover—opera of the future,” people, mit media lab website, accessed february 23, 2023. [5]  béatrice picon-vallin, “ne pas faire semblant d’oublier momentanément la souffrance, la perte, le sentiment de l’imperfection, toutes nos peurs…,” interview with dmitri tcherniakov in isabelle moindrot and alain perroux, ed., le théâtre à l’opéra, la voix au théâtre, special issue of alternatives théâtrales 113/114 (july 2012), 40. my translation. [6]  interview with romeo castellucci, this forum, below. [7]  tereza havelková, opera as hypermedium: meaning-making, immediacy, and the politics of perception (new york: oxford university press, 2021), 99. [8]  thomas edison, preface to william kennedy dickson and antonia dickson, history of the kinetograph, kinetoscope, and kinetophonograph (1895; repr., new york: arno, 1970), [4]. [9]  “web opera,” omf website, reframe, accessed february 1, 2023. [10] “you are here,” online presentation, reframe, accessed february 1, 2023. [11]  “omnivore,” official website, accessed february 1, 2023. [12]  “mini-web opera: rur,” omf, reframe, accessed february 1, 2023. [13]  “the mystery of the blue squirrel,” opéra comique website, accessed february 1, 2023. [14]  opéra comique—page officielle, “webopéra à partir de 8 ans,” facebook, february 21, 2016. my translation. [15]  see opéra comique, “webopéra à partir de 8 ans.” [16]  martin schneidel, “verdi on the web,” trans. claire mcbride, cafébabel, february 7, 2007. [17]  the web opera, official website, accessed february 1, 2023. [18]  “about operavision,” operavision website, accessed february 1, 2023. [19]  michael earley, “after the twilight of the gods: opera experiments, new media and the opera of the future,” in opera in the media age: essays on art, technology and popular culture, ed. paul fryer (jefferson: mcfarland, 2014), 237. [20]  kurt gottschalk, “michel van der aa’s upload questions the meaning of life… and of opera,” bachtrack, march 24, 2022. [21]  “manifesto,” 3e scène, opéra de paris website, discontinued, accessed february 1, 2023, through internet archive. [22]  “la gaîté lyrique, a cultural establishment of the ville de paris, is both a space and a medium that puts the spotlight on post-internet cultures. it’s the place where these artistic practices, born on or transformed by the internet, are showcased but also imagined, created, experimented and transmitted. a space of discovery, la gaîté lyrique aims to understand our era and its relationship to virtuality, while also being a place of creativity, sharing and celebration.” we are la gaîté—the project, la gaîté lyrique official website, accessed february 1, 2023. [23]  vlado kotnik, “the adaptability of opera: when different social agents come to common ground,” international review of the aesthetics and sociology of music 44, no. 2 (2013): 303. *  english translations from french quotes are by the translator of the article, sofija perović. [24]  julie koch, “au web ce soir, le théâtre des planches à la toile,” la croix, april 23, 2010. [25]  marie-laure combes, “le théâtre en live depuis votre canapé,” europe 1, april 28, 2010. [26]  “au web ce soir – ursule 1.1, un cyber-spectacle pour web-spectateurs,” rtl info, april 27, 2010. [27]  “opéra. ursule, un spectacle webcam décalé,” le télégramme, may 3, 2010. [28]  “théâtre de cornouaille. rendez-vous avec ursule sur le web ce soir,” le télégramme, april 29, 2010. [29]  koch, “au web ce soir.” [30]  benjamin lazar, marion boudier, and florent siaud, “dramaturgie et mise en scène des classiques,” agôn, dramaturgie des arts de la scene (2009). [31]  “actéon,” les cris de paris official website, accessed february 1, 2023. [32]  renaud machart, “actéon, sur arte.tv: un petit opéra de charpentier repensé au long d’un plan-séquence,” le monde, february 22, 2021. [33]  “actéon,” théâtre du châtelet official website, accessed february 1, 2023. this is also the expression used by sofija perović in her article “métamorphoses du chasseur chassé—actéon, filmopéra,” alternatives théâtrales, online blog, september 23, 2021. [34]  see the next section of this forum “transposing the necessity of the present,” an interview with benjamin lazar conducted by caroline mounier-vehier. [35]  lazar, boudier, and siaud, “dramaturgie et mise en scène des classiques.” [36]  see emmanuelle hénin, ut pictura theatrum. théâtre et peinture de la renaissance italienne au classicism français (geneva: droz, 2003); jean-louis haquette and emmanuelle hénin, eds., la scène comme tableau (poitiers: la licorne, 2004). [37]  see anne surgers, l’automne de l’imagination. splendeurs et misères de la représentation (bern: peter lang, 2012), in particular “le divorce entre scène et salle: un modèle qui sépare,” 256–71. [38]  benjamin lazar, “entre le théâtre et le cinema,” presentation of au web ce soir for europe1.fr, dailymotion, posted april 28, 2010. [39]  “au web ce soir,” video interview conducted by emmanuelle giuliani and julie koch with morgan jourdain and benjamin lazar for la croix, dailymotion, posted april 22, 2010. [40]  “au web ce soir,” video interview. [41]  see the next section of this forum “transposing the necessity of the present.” [42]  “transposing the necessity of the present,” interview. [43]  expression used by benjamin lazar in the video interview conducted by emmanuelle giuliani and julie koch with morgan jourdain and benjamin lazar, presented in koch, “au web ce soir.” [44]  combes, “le théâtre en live depuis votre canapé.” in particular, the journalist reports the following remarks by benjamin lazar: “we suggest inviting friends to your home to create a true moment of conviviality.” [45]  see cathy dogon, “web-opéra: le mystère de l’écureuil bleu,” france 3 online, february 19, 2016, updated june 11, 2020; benoît fauchet, “le mystère de l’écureuil bleu: baptême public d’un web opéra,” diapason, february 24, 2018. [46]  molière and jean-baptiste lully, le bourgeois gentilhomme, musical direction vincent dumestre (le poème harmonique), staging benjamin lazar, paris, théâtre du trianon, 2004. videorecording directed by martin fraudreau, france, alpha classics alpha700, 2005, dvd. [47]  martin fraudreau, dir., les enfants de molière et lully, france, alpha productions and amiral lda, 2005, video. [48]  pantagruel, concept benjamin lazar and olivier martin-salvan based on the novel by françois rabelais, quimper, théâtre de cornouaille – scène nationale de quimper, 2013. [49]  claude debussy, pelléas et mélisande, musical direction maxime pascal (malmö opera choir and orchestra), staging benjamin lazar, malmö (sweden), malmö opera, 2016. videorecording directed by corentin leconte, bel air classics bac144, 2017, dvd. [50]  jean-baptiste lully, phaëton, musical direction vincent dumestre (musicæterna and le poème harmonique), staging benjamin lazar, perm (russia), 2018. videorecording directed by corentin leconte, château de versailles spectacles cvs015, 2019, dvd. [51]  l’autre monde ou les estats et empires de la lune, based on the novel by savinien de cyrano de bergerac, staging benjamin lazar, musical concept by florence bolton and benjamin perrot (la rêveuse), arques-la-bataille, académie bach, 2005. videorecording directed by corentin leconte, paris, l’autre monde, 2013, dvd. [52]  traviata – vous méritez un avenir meilleur, concept benjamin lazar, florent hubert and judith chemla after la traviata by giuseppe verdi and la dame aux camélias by alexandre dumas fils, staging benjamin lazar, arrangement and musical direction florent hubert and paul escobar, paris, théâtre des bouffes du nord, 2016. videorecording directed by corentin leconte, bel air classics bac156, 2019, dvd. [53]  see the previous section of this forum, “creating opera for the web.” [54]  see the previous section of this forum, “creating opera for the web.”. [55]  la chambre de maldoror, based on les chants de maldoror by the count of lautréamont, directed and performed by benjamin lazar, montpellier, théâtre des 13 vents centre dramatique national, january 24–27, 2023. [56] a video presentation of the l’entremonde project is available online on the official website of the théâtre de l’incrédule, benjamin lazar’s company. [57]  the conversation transcribed here took place via zoom on september 9, 2022. [58]  borka g. trebješanin, “volim da gledaocu serviram probleme,” interview with romeo castellucci, politika, september 10, 2012. [59]  romeo castellucci has staged gluck’s opera orfeo ed euridice for the 2013/2014 season at the théâtre royal de la monnaie in brussels, a season devoted to the theme of “rebellion.” the rebellion is one of the most important aspects of the myth of orpheus—rebellion against the death and against athe cruel destiny. for this most original production, castellucci took the ancient myth and interpolated it with the real-life story of a young woman, identified only as els, who lives in brussels’ hospital in a coma—her body completely paralyzed except for her eyes and eyelids—and who played the role of euridice. els is in a type of coma in which the patient is aware of the surroundings, but is unable to react—a state that is still poorly understood and is the subject of research in neurology. the idea of featuring a real person in a coma is daring, especially since it is not a video, but a live projection from the hospital, where els is listening to the performance of the opera from la monnaie, while an on-site film crew transmits the images of the hospital room, filmed live to the audience in the opera house. [60]  sylvie pébrier, réinventer la musique dans ses institutions, ses politiques, ses récits (château-gontier: aedam musicae, 2021). [61]  christian biet, simon hatab, and marine roussillon, “extension du domaine de la danse: entretien avec bintou dembélé,” théâtre/public, no. 236 (july-september 2020). × forum contents priest, introduction sounding digital consciousness: robin fox & chamber made’s diaspora. robin fox and tamara saulwick interviewed by priest hope, opera activism: speechless—an animated notation opera for every musician sergeant, performing installations: an interview with kathy hinde charles, elements of performativity in the works of kosugi takehisa and kazakura shō gibbons, from notes and correspondences regarding buster, initiating bros footnotes forum sound theaters of the 21st century: material functions and voltaic performativities edited by gail priest sound stage screen, vol. 1, issue 2 (fall 2021), pp. 125–194, issn 2784-8949. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. © 2021 gail priest. doi: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss16639. madeleine flynn, georgina darvidis, erkki veltheim, performance of diaspora by robin fox (chamber made production, 2019) photo credit: pia johnson. it could be argued that the practices discussed in this forum under the suggested term “sound theater” could just as easily be called music theater. whether a work is considered sound theater or music theater will of course depend on where you stand in the debate on sonic art as a form different to music. while there is a significant overlap, i also believe that the practice of sonic art revolves around sounding and listening as critical and reflexive activities, [1] whereas music is concerned with structural elements of harmony, melody and metric rhythm and the calibration of these within established, predominantly historical structures. [2] put simply, it is the intention, both in terms of the sounding and listening, that differs between sonic art and music. the works that i am keen to explore here grow out of the culture and practice of sonic art, rather than that of music (or the culture of theater with its emphasis on performative gesture for that matter). if this work may be allowed an alternative categorization, i am proposing sound theater as an overarching notion—and electronic sound theater for works critically engaging technology, which is mainly the focus here. in 2019, in what now seems like a mythical time of uninterrupted artistic activity and unfettered mobility, i had the good fortune to travel to several festivals, and also experienced a generous (by sydney standards) selection of touring international artists. this exposed me to a range of works that started me thinking about how electronic sound was manifesting differently in the second and third decade of the twenty-first century. i also had the honor of being commissioned to make my own large-scale performance work that developed in a way unlike any i had made previously. [3] i was struck by how these performances, rooted in experimental electronic sound practices, are becoming more performative via their materials, and their digital-mechanical hybrid methods of activation. these activations provide the “sonoturgical” arcs that drive the theatricality, without additional or imposed performative constructs. the introduction to this forum will survey some of these intriguing performances providing a context for the following invited contributions that explore a number of projects and practices in more depth. ironically, much of my current academic argument is against taxonomic mapping, so the purpose of grouping together the practices discussed here is not so much out of a desire to pin down and define, to corral these artists in a paddock of my own fencing. rather, it is my intention here to explore a range of practices that engage sonic material performativities in a way that has an intriguing lineage and opens new possibilities for further exploration, particularly as mediating technologies become more mobile and malleable. however, the influence of avant-garde music performances—e.g., fluxus events, or the music theater of heiner goebbels—will not be ignored, rather reconsidered through this focus on sounding, listening, and materials. attempting not to impose an externally manufactured category, the essays that comprise this forum for the most part feature “accounts” in which the artists discuss their own practices. their intentions and preoccupations, expressed in their own words, create resonances and dissonances that may reinforce or dispute the forum’s themes. this focus on experience and practice enacts my commitment to what i have termed a “tomographic approach,” in which the embodied, embedded experience of a sonic art event, expressed through “slices” from the inside, informs and enriches the commentary. [4] in this i am influenced by the epistemological approach of situated and partial knowledges as proposed by donna haraway in which the embodied, sited, and experiential is transparently acknowledged in the discussion, rather than writing from a pretense of unlocatable objectivity. [5] this knowledge is inevitably incomplete and partial, which should not be seen as a problem rather an opening—an invitation—an opportunity for connection with other specific and partial knowledges. it is in this spirit of offering partial knowledges for connection with others that this forum also has a distinctly australian flavor. then and now my sound practice began in the early 2000s, when, in sydney at least, what marked the live experimental audio scene was its indifference (often to the point of disdain) towards performativity. populated by people using small electrical devices, mixing boards, and laptops, any gesture that shifted beyond a flick of a finger seemed quite extreme. i entered this culture after ten years in the contemporary performance scene that had been riding high on postmodern waves of parody and camp, with a preference for physical over textual forms. the fact that there was an audience for the quiet, contemplative, and visually minimal came as a shock and relief to me. it is in this respect that i refer not just to a practice of experimental electronic sonic art but to a culture as well. there were a handful of wildly and willfully performative artists, often in the noise genre growing out of post-punk and industrial scenes (see the description of lucas abela’s performance below), but still the performative language was predominantly drawn from the gestures of playing and an energetic summoning from the sound rather than an additional aesthetically calculated language. as the next two decades of the century have come and gone, so too have the participants of this scene. interestingly, this move towards material performativities appears within the practices of both the handful of remaining mature artists, and the next generation. caleb kelly, one of the key curators, event producers, and academic commentators within the early 2000s suggests that this shift is a response to “digital fatigue.” he explains that there is: a longing, from the artists, for a physical connection with the materials of their work. in the 2000s, the prevalence of digital production technologies, especially within the digital studio, led to a schism between artists and their materials, one that has only been further widened through developments in the complexity of digital processes. … thus, makers have become estranged from the means of their practices. [6] sound and materials—particularly in relation to gallery arts, but also associated live performances—is very clearly the area of expertise of kelly. he founded the sound and materials research group at the university of new south wales, now known as sound, energies and environments. [7] for the purposes of this forum i will differentiate my interests by focusing specifically on how the “material turn” within sonic art manifests firstly in audio performances—gigs and concerts—and secondly, how some of these presentations are moving decidedly into the theatrical context, challenging what constitutes “performance” in this milieu. sonic actions peter blamey is a leading australian artist, active since the 1990s. while the presence of performative materials has become more explicit over the years, it is not so much a change in modus operandi but the result of the development and refinement of conceptual preoccupations and creative motivations. blamey began his engagement with music in the 1980s and 1990s as a drummer in bands. the shift towards sound happened through a keen interest in guitar and microphone feedback. [8] since then blamey’s work has maintained a focus on flows of energies manifested as sound. there is a certain respect and agency given to these energies so that he does not tame them, rather he creates conditions and situations that encourage them into existence and transformation. this is evident in his early 2000s experiments with mixing-desk feedback, a minimalist process with the potential of maximal sound, in which a mixing desk’s various outputs are fed back into its inputs creating its own feedback loop, modulated through adjustments of volumes and frequencies. developing from this are his explorations in what he calls “open electronics,” feedback systems using discarded motherboards. these manifest as both installations as well as a performance series titled forage. blamey places clouds of copper wire onto an assortment of scavenged motherboards connected to small battery-powered amplifiers, gently nudging them into different configurations, the interaction resulting in fields of fascinating hum and buzz. blamey describes these works: the title relates both to foraging in streets and laneways for the computer components used, and to the way in which the performances involve a “foraging” for the signals coursing chaotically through this lively but unstable electrical environment. [9] blamey’s work actively engages in reuse and recycling as a critique of capital-driven technological obsolescence. his use of photovoltaic (solar) panels in systems of contingent energy scavenging also attests to his environmental concerns. it is the gestures involved in activating these materials in ways that manifest sound that make blamey’s work uniquely performative. in his invisible residue performances, blamey sonifies (via solar panels) the infrared signal of remote controls from long discarded equipment, performing with the signature sounds that each creates. [10] along with the engaging and strangely rhythmic sounds, the all-too-familiar gesture of pointing the remote control creates a curious choreography that encourages critical reflection on this action, and its reinforcement of sedentary leisure, particular to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. peter blamey, double partial eclipse, mca art bar (2014) photo credit: jenn brewer. double partial eclipse (2014) involves two small photovoltaic panels that blamey holds in varying proximities to a lightbulb, the resulting current running to ebows placed on an electric guitar. [11] blamey “plays” the guitar by modulating the flow of energy to the ebow via distance and angle. blamey’s measured and sustained gesture creates a mesmerizing performativity, as he seemingly plays the light and air. [12] in a recent performance configuration, rare earth orbits, he uses spinning rare earth magnets and their closeness to electromagnetic coils to create a basic oscillating voltage, which is then amplified. [13] to generate the spinning he uses a hand clamp, a fishing reel, and a foot-pump activated air vent. the differently scaled actions are focused and minimal in range, with the intensity required to generate what he calls “‘handmade’ electrical activity” undeniably rigorous and full of intent that renders them highly performative. [14] however, blamey’s intention is not to invent innovative performance modes but to find ways in which the processes or flows of relations between materials and sounds can become evident to an audience. he tries to create situations in which sonic transductions and amplifications of materials reveal the interactions of their energetic flows. blamey’s focus on obsolete, discarded technology not only engages with the immediate materiality of these objects, but also with “broader ideas relating to electricity, the history of technological artefacts, ecology and experimental practices in the arts.” [15] this affirms kelly’s belief that a focus on materials allows for an expansion out from simply the phenomenal experience of sound to allow for more contextual critique. [16] as a contrasting example, for the last decade or so lucas abela (australia) has played amplified shards of glass. pressing his mouth to the glass he blows, slurps, and sings, with changes in the “embrasure,” in combination with effects pedals, creating dynamic noise assaults. inevitably the glass breaks, and abela is not afraid to slice his face and lips as he continues. [17] this is undoubtedly a dramatic performance, but one i would argue still comes from an integrated engagement with materials and their sound potentials and the inherent performativity involved in exploring this. kate carr at les instants chavirés (paris, october 2019) photo credit: david lantran. elements of material performativity are also finding their way into many artists’ practices who were previously more laptop-based. australian artist now based in the uk, kate carr’s foundational work is in field recording and minimal sampled instruments. recently she has been integrating “a scientific rocker, a spinning beaker, wind up birds and suspended tape loops.” [18] working through these material processes, she says, offers a “transparent liveness” explaining that “the risk of failure and malfunction they incorporate and the capacity to physically improvise with things ‘at hand’” offer her a spontaneity that she found lacking when only using a laptop and controller. the integration of these live elements is not new and remarkable in itself—this is what instruments offer—but it is the manner in which the exploration of the sonic potentials within materials are defining the scope and gesture—and are being allowed their own performativity—that is an interesting development within the experimental audio scene. i doubt that any of these artists would consider their practices within the conceptual framework of sound theater; however, aspects of their work illustrate the integrated relationship of material and its activation that results in a sounding performativity. it is when this same approach to performative materials is scaled up within theatrical contexts that i believe we approach a mode of sound theater that has different motivations and asks for different listening intentions than music theater, with its origins in notated scores and (often but not always) narrative constructions. sound theaters, i propose, are developing from the culture and practice of experimental audio in which the performance gestures and modes required to activate the sounding potential of materials, both acoustically and via technological manipulations, are inextricably entwined, providing the structure of the composition and the performance—of the performative composition. sonic theaters the seeds of this forum were planted when i saw diaspora (2019), created by robin fox with co-collaborators erkki veltheim and tamara saulwick, a “science fiction revelation” based on the first chapter of greg egan’s book of the same name. [19] fox is internationally renowned for his audiovisual work using lasers. these concert pieces are undeniably theatrical, but diaspora marks a significant framing shift to the constructs of theater, working with an overarching (albeit non-textual) narrative. however, the work maintains the conceptual ethos of electronic noise music, and the performative structure and arc of the work are driven by fox’s synesthetic audiovisuality. in diaspora, the performative material is voltage itself. an essay featuring interviews with fox and dramaturg/performance-maker saulwick, exploring the motivations and making of diaspora, opens our selection of essays. another significant australian work premiering in 2019 was speechless, a “wordless, animated notation opera” by cat hope. [20] hope’s artistic preoccupations revolve around bass frequencies, noise, and graphic notation. in speechless she uses theforgotten children: national inquiry into children in immigration detention report from the australian human rights commission (2014) as the unspoken “libretto.” [21] as well as informing the overall themes and message of the work, hope used the material elements of the report—colors, infographics, and children’s illustrations—as inspiration for the graphic score that is presented in the decibel scoreplayer app. [22] the work is scored for an orchestra comprising only bass instruments, and four female vocalists from vastly different genres ranging from death metal to opera, who perform the textless piece. in the second essay of this forum, hope describes the intentions and processes of creating this remarkable work, which she herself describes as an opera but may also be productively discussed through the figure of sound theater. hope’s work, while fitting comfortably within the “new music” classification, also embodies an ethos born of noise, pushing way beyond the sonorities and the notation of most contemporary classical music. the expanded sound world released through the scored translation of the materials of this devastating report actively mobilize the greater cultural, contextual, and political resonances, aligning this project with the critical reflexivities of sonic art. although it certainly could be argued that speak percussion, under the artistic direction of eugene ughetti, come from a contemporary classical music lineage, rendering them well-suited to the term music theater, i would argue that their commitment to explorations of sonority, integration of technology, and adventurous collaborations exemplifies electronic sound theater. ambitious works such as transducer (2013), co-composed by ughetti and robin fox, focusing on the materialities of the microphone and speaker; [23] or polar force (2018), a collaboration with renowned sound artist/field recordist philip samartzis, exploring the sonic potentials of ice, [24] are examples of the kind of material performativities that create sound theater. also notable are the solo works of matthias schack-arnott (a former artistic associate of speak percussion), such as anicca (2016) and everywhen (2019), that are based on the interaction of the performer and complex kinetic mechanisms. [25] this results in hybrid, embodied event structures in which the action, materials, and soundings are fully integrated. eugene ughetti and matthias schack-arnott during a performance of polar force (speak percussion, 2018) photo credit: bryony jackson. while i have been concentrating on australian works, this tendency to explore sound theaters is evident internationally, particularly at sonica, a biennial festival presented by cryptic in glasgow (uk). a highlight of the 2019 edition was spacetime helix (2012) by italian artist michela pelusio. [26] pelusio’s “optoacoustic instrument” is a single cable, attached at floor and ceiling, activated to create a spinning standing wave, which with the help of strobe lighting creates a dynamically changing helix. the acoustic sounds of the mechanism, and its electromagnetic signals, are processed to create the tensile escalating soundscape drawn directly from this awe-inspiring demonstration of split, bent, and blended light. another highlight, offering a completely different aesthetic, was argentinian artist nicolás varchausky’s mesa de dinero/money desk (2018). [27] using modified money counters and scanners, he amplifies the actions of counting his artist fee. working with both the aesthetics of the sound of the machines and the functional clarity of the task-based actions, varchausky sonifies the materiality of money, and the immateriality of the global currency markets in a way that allows the materials to “become” both performers and activists, again exemplifying kelly’s notion of the political potential of material sound. kathy hinde is a cryptic artist, presenting many major works within multiple sonica festivals. in 2015 i experienced tipping point (2014), a breathtaking installation that can also be played live, a hybrid format that allows materials to express themselves independently and become performative instruments. [28] in the third essay hinde talks with matthew sergeant about her workspiano migrations (2010), tipping point and twittering machines (2019), that exemplify the way in which she approaches the manipulation of materials so as to engage with their non-anthropogenic contingencies. in this hinde critically connects our material discussions with current theories of object-oriented ontologies and agential realism. theatrical soundings branch nebula (led by co-artistic directors lee wilson and mirabelle wouters, with visual artist mickie quick and sound designer phil downing as frequent collaborators) presents physical theater works that openly exploit the material performativity of sound. in wilson’s virtuosic solo performance piece high performance packing tape (2018), real-time audio processing sonically elevates the humble materials of office stationery misused as circus apparatus. [29] in crush (2020), the sonic integration intensifies with several sections driven by audio activations. an enormous sculptural lattice of pvc piping turns into a ructious aeolian organ with the assistance of an industrial vacuum cleaner. a searing dronescape is created when the performers attempt to drag heavy guitar amps by amplified wires, the physical and sonic tension responding in direct relation. branch nebula allows the theatrically sonic to be an integral structural and dramaturgical element of their work, thus rendering their practice truly interdisciplinary. mirabelle wouters during a performance of crush (branch nebula, sydney opera house, 2020) photo credit: prudence upton. it is in this context of theater—one which pays exceptional attention to the integration of sound’s own theatricality—that this forum features an essay by composer/sound designer scott gibbons, a regular collaborator of italian theater director romeo castellucci and his company societas. he shares his process notes and musings on developing the sound world for the company’s recent project, buster. we are privileged to learn of gibbons’s material experimentations and manipulations as well as some new strategies required for collaborating remotely in global pandemic conditions. sonic thingness i can date the initiating spark behind this forum further back to 1998, when i had the pleasure of seeing heiner goebbels’s black on white (originally created in 1996 as schwarz auf weiss) at the adelaide festival. i recall the moment when a musician from the ensemble modern put on a kettle to make a cup of tea. as they waited, they ignited a tea bag, its flaming convection sending it aloft. this magical flight was accompanied by the kettle’s whistle; goebbels says this is “a c major triad, which first the flute player and finally the whole orchestra play along with.” [30] by inserting this simple domestic action (among many others) into the orchestral context, goebbels intended “to create an un-hierarchical balance in the world of sounds.” [31] however, in the process of introducing the sounding functions of objects, he realized that they, in fact, began to exert power over the musicians. discussing the presence of these material situations in his early works, he says: the presence of things might not yet act as a major character of the works in total, but the things rather show up, they capture the space, they conquer more and more the performances and the compositions, they choreograph the words, the movements and actions. the more they insist on their being, the more they call for respect, for their own timing. [32] in stifters dinge (2007) goebbels finally allows the objects full reign with the piece featuring no (visible) human agents, only five pianos, mechanical devices, as well as recreated elements such as rain, fog, and ice. goebbels describes the effect of the integration of sounding “things” on an audience: it demonstrates a different way of experiencing, or even confronting, the way we perceive the sounds of things on a day to day basis. it gives us a bigger freedom for our imagination and also it avoids this enormous reflex we have to upload things with an anthropomorphic center. those sounds also avoid the reflex to mirror ourselves, to identify ourselves with what we see and hear. sounds of the things do not allow an easy identification. and that is what i basically try to work on: not to work on a direct encounter with somebody we can recognize, but rather on an indirect encounter with alterity. [33] in a 2011 lecture goebbels also references this alterity suggesting that his use of objects and processes has the intention to destabilize the audience’s sense of self-identity, offering an “insecure confrontation with a mediated third … the other.” [34] once again, we see how an engagement with the material soundings as performative events can lead to contemplations of political and philosophical context, beyond the sensorial pleasures of sonority. while goebbels’s reputation as the master of “music theater” may seem to undermine my argument for sound theater as something apart, [35] i would propose that considering the work of goebbels through the proposed premise of a sound theater that focuses on material behaviors and their sonic consequences allows for an enhanced appreciation of his practice. sonic flux the focus on materials, objects, and their activation as functions and tasks also brings fluxus events (influenced by avant-garde cagean practices) into focus. douglas kahn describes the shift in the way sound is considered in fluxus: the historically earlier question of what sounds? receded in fluxus and was replaced with questions such as whether sounds? or where are sounds in time and space, in relation to the objects and actions that produce them? [36] kahn highlights the “incidentalness” in the way in which sounds were, or in fact were not generated. in something like george brecht's’ incidental music (1961), fulfilling the task takes precedence over generating a sound. [37] similarly in shiomi mieko’s boundary music (1963), the artist calls for the action of making “the faintest possible sound to a boundary condition whether the sound is given birth to as a sound or not.” [38] however, ultimately kahn is critical of how sounds are still musicalized within the fluxus mode: from the standpoint of an artistic practice of sound, in which all the material attributes of a sound, including the materiality of its signification, are taken into account, musicalization is a reductive operation, a limited response to the potential of the material. [39] here kahn provides us with the language with which to argue for a sound theater practice. the practices of material sound performance explored above are not simply musicalizing the sonic consequences of material interactions but are attempting to engage more fully with the cultural contexts this material sounding implies and activates. the engagement in the event of material sounding was not confined purely to american and european explorations, as evidenced by japanese artist shiomi’s text score cited above. for this forum, it is through the collaborative work of artist-composer kosugi takehisa and performer kazakura shō that this era and aspects of performative sound materials will be further explored. christophe charles, a japanese-based artist and academic, had the privilege of working with kazakura. his detailed historical research includes excerpts from a personal interview with kosugi and original translations that allow the artists’ significant presences to be felt. what is revealed is a fascinating approach that focuses on how these artists—one from music, one from theater—created a collaborative practice through a shared engagement with the materiality of space, time, and the unseen/unheard flows of energies. the influence of artists such as kosugi and kazakura can be experienced in the performative material soundings of contemporary japanese artists, such as asuna and his mesmeric durational drone piece 100 keyboards (2014), [40] and the sublime sonic kinetic scrapyard of umeda tetsuya’s things that don’t know/ringo (2017), [41] which also initiated my thinking around material sound performativities and sound theaters. [42] sound-/music theaters — together apart aspects of avant-garde music, fluxus, and music theater works (such as those by heiner goebbels) all potentially exert a “musical” influence on the projects discussed here. however, i also hope to have revealed how these projects engage a performativity that moves beyond and away from the structures of music to that of material sounding. a key part of this is an emphasis on sonorities that arise from gesture as functional task creating an integrated performance-sound structure. also pertinent is an intention to create contexts in which listening engages with both the phenomenal sound, but also opens up historical, political, and contextual understandings. i am the first to admit that i have not made a watertight defense. however, what i hope i have done, in both this introduction and the selection of invited essays, is to present a number of connected perspectives, drawn from experience, that allow for a productive consideration of the practice of sound theaters. inevitably, just as no one has yet managed to clearly extract sonic art from music, sound theater also cannot, nor should be, completely extracted. rather, the two might be considered through karen barad’s proposal of a cut or separation that is, within one move, both “together-apart,” a proposal, based on quantum field theory, that defies binaries and allows for people, thoughts, situations, and things to contain itself and other as separate continuities. [43] i leave you to consider the possibility of “sound-/music theaters,” existing, both together and apart, with the specificities to be considered contingently, intentionally, and contextually. gail priest sounding digital consciousness: robin fox & chamber made’s diaspora robin fox and tamara saulwick interviewed by gail priest diaspora trailer (2019) from chamber made on vimeo. robin fox’s diaspora (2019) is a hybrid audiovisual event shaped by a “narrative” of sorts that transforms the live electronic music gig or concert format into that of a theatrical experience in a way that might be described as electronic sound theater. [44] in the following essay, fragments from interviews conducted with the project’s lead creator robin fox, and co-director/dramaturg tamara saulwick, are presented as input and stimuli, in an attempt to grow and develop this notion, or this consciousness, of electronic sound theater, in a manner that is not dissimilar to the coming to consciousness of the entity that is the protagonist in this impressive work. georgina darvidis, performance of diaspora by robin fox (chamber made production, 2019) photo credit: pia johnson. origin stories it was while experiencing a performance of diaspora in 2019 that i began to develop this impression that there is an evolving practice of electronic sound theater that might be productively considered as not entirely the same as music theater. as discussed in the forum introduction, the theatrical outcome of these works is surprising due to the composer-creators’ practices focusing on digital, and frequently non-gestural forms of experimental electronic music and sound art. fox’s background incorporates both composition (he has a phd from monash university) and he has worked as a composer and sound designer for dance; however, considering the nature of his practice, which is intensively electronic, noise-based, and non-figurative, the move to instigating his own complete theater work might seem surprising. since the late 1990s, fox worked extensively on laptop to create live processing systems, including a well-renowned collaboration with anthony pateras. he made a significant move towards the visual in the early 2000s via experiments with a cathode-ray oscilloscope, [45] feeding it sculpted noise and projecting the corresponding patterns via live video. this developed into his experiments with lasers. using a similar process of translating audio voltage to visualized oscillation (and sometimes vice versa), fox projects the lasers outwards into a smoke-filled auditorium, carving the space into three-dimensional geometric landscapes of tone and noise, in which both sound and image are manifestations of what fox describes as shared voltage. these projects have become increasingly ambitious, starting with a basic green laser and then moving to the colorful spectacle of rgb. fox produces works for both standard concert formats and large-scale site-specific performances, such as aqua luma (2021), taking place in the cataract gorge in launceston, tasmania; or sun super night sky (2020), a laser installation with streamable soundtrack for the brisbane city skyline. while fox’s audiovisual works are presented in electronic music and sound art festivals, he has also worked in theater, particularly as a composer, sound, and lighting designer for contemporary dance works. very early on in his career he was involved with chamber made, then known as chamber made opera. fox: the first large work that i made when i was still at university, studying composition, was with chamber made. it was a bizarre revisioning of the narcissus and echo myth that i wrote for four turntables, double basses, and operatic voices… [mauricio] kagel’s staatstheater really had a big impact on me when i was a student and so these early pieces of mine were very much of that nature. they were based in sound and rooted in sound, but the intent was operatic and theatrical in a kind of oblique way. [46] when fox was approached by violinist-composer erkki veltheim (then an associate artist at chamber made) to create a work, he decided to attempt a science fiction opera based on the first chapter of greg egan’s novel diaspora. fox: one thing that i’d often joked about with opera is: “why haven’t we ever had a science fiction opera?” … once it occurred to me that i wanted to make a science fiction opera, i knew exactly what i wanted it to be—a rendering of the first chapter of diaspora. … i just loved the description [it gives] of the birth of a digital consciousness—which i had to go to great pains to distinguish from an artificial intelligence. it has this incredible, quasi-mathematical computer “programmery” but also very dna-driven description of the birth of this life form … it is incredibly evocative and incredibly musical, actually. … [it] suggested all kinds of musicality. tamara saulwick, the co-director, dramaturg, and current artistic director of chamber made, makes performance works that are inextricably entwined with sound and sound technologies. saulwick: i came into sound surreptitiously. i was working just with recorded voices … documentary materials or first-hand accounts … so first of all, they became useful in terms of constructing content; then, i became increasingly interested in the materiality of sound, the quality of those recorded things, and the detritus within the recordings—and that became part of the language of the work. i was working on some solo material, and i’d become very interested in this intersection between live and pre-recorded—video and audio, actually. i was really interested in this slippage between the mediated and the live body and voice. working between recording and liveness is a really fertile space that continues to fascinate me. … i’ve [also] been living with a musician [peter knight, currently artistic director of the australian art orchestra] for the last twenty years—surrounded by a lot of music, sounds, doing a lot of listening and a lot of talking [about sound]. [47] saulwick and knight have collaborated on several of her solo performance projects, including pin drop (2010–14), which uses recorded interviews and foley techniques to explore the role of listening within fear; [48] and endings (2015–18), with songwriter paddy mann, using mobile record players and reel-to-reel devices to create the sound character of the work. [49] given fox’s established audiovisual language, saulwick saw that her role in diaspora “was to facilitate the work coming into being … trying to support robin, but also the whole group to make [the work] the most ‘itself.’” it is also interesting to note the origins and progression of the company chamber made. it was formed in 1988 by stage director douglas horton to create original chamber opera works. composer david young became artistic director in 2009, and grew the reputation of the company by creating intriguing, opera-in-miniature works, often in private houses, site-specific locations, and expanding into new media and digital realms. tim stitz took over in 2013 and moved the company to a model that drew on creative input from associate artists, of which saulwick was one. saulwick moved into the artistic director role in 2018. in 2017, the “opera” part of the title was retired to reflect the contemporary focus on interdisciplinary works that explore the relationship between performance, sound, and music. composing consciousness georgina darvidis, erkki veltheim, performance of diaspora by robin fox (chamber made production, 2019) – photo credit: pia johnson. the sound, structure, and scenography of diaspora comes from the audiovisual compositional interpretation of the birth of the digital consciousness as described in egan’s text, but with no narrative-based dialogue. (several of the pieces involve lyrics but these texts operate as part of the sonic fabric rather than as narration.) saulwick describes the compositional process: saulwick: erkki and robin quite literally translated what they saw as this kind of arc of development within the writing. they had musical motifs that had direct correlations to ideas in the text, and it was done in a series of parts. one of the reasons why i think robin always thought that it would be a good source, is that in many ways the language translates very readily to a compositional format, because [it] talks about building layers and complications of theme. fox explains the choice of instruments and palette of the composition: fox: i’m fixated with modular synthesizers, so i wanted to make [them] a big [feature of the composition]. [50] i also wanted to use the electronic instruments as props so that the machines are part of the ethos of the work. but i also really wanted to work with musicians … electronic instruments lend themselves to this kind of automated delivery rather than human gestural delivery. i’ve always had [an] issue with electronic instruments not vibrating. you don’t have the appropriate proprioceptive feedback from a vibrating body. it’s really the sound system that’s your instrument in that sense. it’s not the computer or the software, it’s the speaker that’s the vibrating thing in the room. working with erkki, i was going to be working with violin, so i liked the juxtaposition of that. working with modular synths [but] then also with the most iconic, conservative, orchestral instrument family. the violin is such an iconic reference point for all kinds of music; it encapsulates that high/low culture that we really exploited in the work as well. […] robin fox, madeleine flynn, erkki veltheim, georgina darvidis, performance of diaspora by robin fox (chamber made production, 2019) photo credit: pia johnson. i wanted to work with great musicians. madeleine flynn is a great musician [pianist] and so the ondes martenot made really good sense there as an electronic instrument that embodied that theremin like quality. [51] then the idea of having a voice [georgie darvidis] … a human voice that would sit alongside the very inhuman construct of a lot of the other aspects of the work. … it did come from this electronic premise, but there was so much of it that wasn’t electronic by design … i wanted performers to be on stage … i didn’t want to do a sound design that supported the theatrical action or even a sound design that supported a sort of visual installation. tamara and i would often have these dramaturgical conversations where my position would be: “this is a gig”—a gig in this kind of bizarre set. … there were set pieces, but there was a lot of flexibility in the way [ diaspora] was played. i wanted to keep that musicality about the work. i think that’s part of my problem with some of these other things that i work on, in contemporary dance, where you have to nail everything down. i deliver the soundtrack in this electronic form, design a sound system and then it’s cued the same way every night. it’s a show and that’s a great way to work, but it’s also not very musical. so i did very much have in my mind that idea of this music-driven theater; the music, and the way we composed the music, was really at the core of each section of the work. … even though it did have theatrical or narrative qualities at times, all of the ideas came from the sound and the generation of the sound, and what we were trying to do with the music, not just sonically, but linguistically … to me music is incredibly linguistic … [i mean in] that kind of punch card way that notation has of turning [sound] into a sentence structure and a grammatical structure. you have a form so that then, in the same way you would construct a sentence, you construct a phrase, and then you construct a paragraph. i’m always interested in the intersection points between that kind of linguistic approach to music and then sound as another thing which doesn’t have that linguistic intent. georgina darvidis, erkki veltheim, performance of diaspora by robin fox (chamber made production, 2019) photo credit: pia johnson. a key instance within the performance that plays with this musical linguistics is the section that sounds like an interbreeding of a bach partita and country and western hoedown featuring virtuosic performances by veltheim, darvidis, and flynn. for fox and veltheim, this piece of very strange composition exemplifies the issue that arises around the cultural context of data that is too easily lost in machine learning: fox: the idea behind that was trying to make music that an artificial intelligence (even though we weren’t looking at ai particularly) might make. what would an artificial intelligence make if it could make music and why? and because artificial intelligence is algorithm-based, based on data input it seemed logical that it would analyze a bach violin partita and then analyze a hoedown and realize that structurally they were almost identical, then just put those two things together, because it doesn’t have any cultural baggage. it doesn’t realize that they actually represent two very different paradigms in terms of music and how we appreciate it as human beings, and in our human cultures. so, i like the idea that in a science fiction world there is no delineation between those … those forms. [52] in another section, darvidis sings a version of “somewhere over the rainbow” that is digitally diced, spliced, and fragmented almost beyond recognition, yet—for a human audience that understands cultural contexts—resonates with the bittersweet longing to be elsewhere and other. these unfamiliar familiarities are even more curious as they emerge from an extended meditative opening sequence (sustained for over twenty minutes) of undulating sine tones and sub frequencies that—along with the accompanying laser light translations carving the smoke-filled air—render the space thick with affective vibration. fox talks about wanting to play with the balance of these linguistically music and abstract sonic elements: fox: it’s very difficult to present something that’s non-linguistic sonically and have it appreciated without a linguistic lens. i think people still want music and resolution; you know, tonic to dominant resolution—the psychoanalytic safety of all of those structures. … so, i think with this work there are sections where i just wanted it to sit for a while in places that were very strange and not be concerned about where they were going. for me, this extended opening illustrates how this performance operates on a sonic art sense of time, one that allows for a more ambient and patient extrapolation, rather than musical and theatrical time that often progresses through the accumulation of actions and established moments. i asked saulwick how she worked with these different time structures: saulwick: i think of [diaspora] as an expanded concert. the opening sequence was a long sustain. i felt like my job was going “okay, how can we shape the unfolding of visuals—stage lighting and video materials—to meet that tempo?” in terms of the audience experience, it was very physical, like you were in a big bath of sound … [with the] massive subs under the seating, the sine tones were kind of actually waving through you physically. i think that places people in time in a different way. they can really settle into it. visualizing conception perhaps what makes diaspora seem so remarkable as a performance work is the fact that the composition is, from inception, audiovisual. there is never the sense that the visuals are accompanying the sound—they generate each other, converging to activate the space creating the performativity. as well as fox’s lasers that manifest the full-bodied vibrational sound as three-dimensional wave geometries, exquisite video projections, created by nick roux, hang suspended in air, the holographic illusion created by an enormous pepper’s ghost. [53] a meteorite emerges out of the depths of the space, making its way towards us. it almost imperceptibly transforms into a brain, an eye, multiple eyes, limbs. fragmented body parts grow before us, eventually perfectly transposed over the live body of darvidis, marking the artificial consciousness finding its form. georgina darvidis, performance of diaspora by robin fox (chamber made production, 2019) photo credit: pia johnson. saulwick: we had this completely separate development, which was around staging the body in relation to the hologram and what the visual language might start to be. …with the pepper’s ghost it becomes a set of pragmatic decisions: how to work with the architecture that the holograph projection surface offers you … there was some level of dramaturgy [around the body] being behind that structure and then revealing the live body at a certain point; breaking through to the foreground space and then being sucked back into the nether space … the live body, the digitized body, and the interrelationship between them. it could be seen as potentially disappointing that the final digital consciousness takes a human form—is this the anthropocentric limit of our imagination? will we always try to make our technology in our image? however, this is true to egan’s text, in which the artificial consciousness has a choice of avatars but is eventually drawn to a human shape gleaned from its library of images. the work’s visual narrative guides us through this process of becoming, making us aware that what is being created is porous, contingent, and includes the potential of so much more. in the same way that the composition shifts from linguistically musical to sonic, the visual language also shifts between figurative to abstract. the piece concludes with a spectacular explosion of light and sound (referencing the carving of a meteor in egan’s text), in which fox’s stadium concert pieces create the template, celebrating the bursting into sentience of this new consciousness. it’s an unabashedly, uncritical, and joyous celebration of a new digital, post-human life. while there may be causes for concern over the consequences of our increased transformation into digital life forms, they are left for others to argue. in diaspora, the integration of the body within the digital entity attempts a hopeful trajectory that the notion of the corporeal will remain a component of an expanded consciousness. one of the burning issues of digital consciousness construction and substrate mind independence is around how a brain in a vat can sense its environment and replicate the kinesthetic knowledge this generates. in diaspora, there seems to be the suggestion that corporeality remains significant (even if in some emulated form). conclusion: linguistic slippage evident in the artists’ own words and histories is the slippage between considerations of music and sound. as proposed in the forum’s introduction, it is naive to think that sound theater is a completely separate activity to music theater. there is no damage done in thinking diaspora a work of music theater, framed by music’s attendant “linguistic” qualities, as fox terms it. however, it is also interesting and productive to consider the work’s origins in the non-musical, non-linguistic pursuits of sound and audiovisuality, and how this changes the compositional process; how audiovisual affect becomes narrative protagonist, suggesting a different form of performativity; and how this may mark a shift in “consciousness,” from music theater to electronic sound theater. gail priest lives on the land of the darug and gundungurra people now known as katoomba (australia). her practice encompasses performance, recording, installation, curation, and writing. she has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally presenting work in the uk, iceland, france, germany, italy, slovenia, norway, hong kong, and japan. originally trained in theater, she has worked as a sound designer/composer collaborating with independent directors and choreographers. also instigating her own sound theater work she has created one thing follows another, in collaboration with choreographer jane mckernan, an exploration of fluxus strategies in the twenty-first century; and we are oscillators, in collaboration with designer thomas burless, exploring vocal cymatics, both works presented by performance space, sydney. she has written extensively about sound and media art and was associate editor/online producer for the australian arts magazine realtime (2003–2015). she was also the editor of the book experimental music: audio explorations in australia (unsw press, 2009). she is nearing completion of a phd at the university of technology, sydney, exploring ficto-critical writing strategies in digital sound studies. opera activism: speechless—an animated notation opera for every musician cat hope speechless teaser with directors commentary from tura new music on vimeo. this article outlines the creative development of the opera speechless (2017–19), composed and directed by cat hope. [54] at the conclusion of an evolving process of research, composition, workshopping, technical development design, and directorial concepts, the work was premiered at the perth festival in february 2019, performed by four solo vocalists, the australian bass orchestra, and a mix of community choirs. the opera is a personal artistic response to global human refugee issues and is based on the 2014 australian human rights commission report the forgotten children. [55] this article explores the connections between the music, score, and production design of the premiere from the creator’s perspective. karina utomo, performance of speechless by cat hope (tura new music production, perth festival, 2019) photo credit: rachael barrett. pluralizing form speechless is undoubtedly an experimental opera in its sound world and presentation realm, yet it is structured quite conventionally as it pertains to the opera genre—it has an overture, three acts, and an interlude. each act consists of operatic formulas, such as arias, recitatives, and choruses. a range of traditional compositional techniques (such as theme, variation, development, repetition, retrograde, and inversion of material) are used throughout. binary and ternary structures appear. the range of intensities of the music create the dramatic sound world you expect from the form. that is where the links to convention cease. while the opera is sung, no words are used. the opera is designed to be performed by musicians from a wide range of music styles, not just classical or rock artists. the orchestra and choir are built from musicians in the city where it is performed and is composed, using color graphic notation that facilitates this polystylistic involvement. the four soloists are also required to be from different musical styles; and in the case of the premiere, there was a death metal singer, karina utomo; an exploratory vocalist, sage pbbbt; an opera singer, judith dodsworth; and opera/cabaret singer caitlin cassidy. the chorus was built from several community choirs and a public call, while the orchestra involved musicians from classical, jazz, rock, and folk styles. the australian bass orchestra, for which the opera is written, is in fact a “mythical company” that only exists as a manifesto outlining a group of musicians who only play pitches below c4. any musician can participate—as long as they can play these notes on the lower end of the spectrum —and the bass orchestra is named after the country where it comes together. the score captures this focus by specifying groups of low brass, low winds, low strings, piano, harp, electronics, percussion, and electric bass guitars. animated graphic scoring speechless (2019) (score only) from cat hope on vimeo. the score uses color graphic notation created digitally to develop image files to be read by performers in motion. [56] the score images outline all the instrumental parts but can be separated out as a series of layers, with each part highlighted for that group. the score is read as a “screen score,” presented to musicians in the decibel scoreplayer, an ipad application that animates the score image, by moving it across a “playhead” indicating the moment of performance. the application is developed by the decibel new music ensemble, a group of musicians, composers, and programmers based in australia. the musical director of the perth premiere, aaron wyatt, is the programmer of this application and performing member of the ensemble, and i am the artistic director of and performer in the ensemble. the decibel scoreplayer application coordinates the networked reading of predominately graphically notated scores in rehearsal and performance. it features scrolling and “tracking” modes for score reading, as well as a range of other features such as the ability to annotate the score or change the part view without interrupting the progress of the score in motion. having the music director so involved with the software ensured that any developments or changes to the application could be made during the development phase to accommodate the scale and unique requirements of the work and the processes around it—and this is what happened. during this project, it became clear that the automated score delivery system did not replace the need for a conductor, who provided reinforcement for the orchestra and gestural memory aids for the soloists and choir, who had memorized the score. the app also enabled the incorporation of the production cues for stage management, sound, and light. also, a new way of quickly uploading changes to the score to multiple ipads was developed to facilitate the early workshops where the composer was working with all the musicians. the tablets are connected over a local network, which, when connected to a server, was also used to upload new and corrected versions of the score during the development workshops. artistic activism speechless is my personal response to global human refugee issues, it does not at any time attempt to speak on behalf of refugees themselves. i felt very saddened by, and helpless in the face of, australia’s response to refugees arriving in australia. this is my attempt to respond to this key issue and encourage others to do the same, making the project a kind of artistic activism. [57] the report that the opera is based on, the forgotten children by the 2014 australian human rights commission (see supra), is a key document in the public learning about the treatment of refugees in australia, particularly significant because it was rejected in the australian parliament as “biased” when presented by the head of the ahrc, gillian triggs. as a result, people still languish in detention today, seven years after this report was issued. speechless by cat hope (tura new music production, perth festival, 2019) photo credit: frances andrijich. the opera is very literally based on this report: the graphs in it are used as sources for musical “themes,” the color scheme of the report’s layout is used to describe parts for the choir, while the color scheme of the children’s drawings featured in the report are used to signal parts in the orchestra. the colors were sampled from the digital document and added to a “palette” used for all color decisions in the score. further, the drawings and graphs in the report are engaged as core score material, manipulated, and transformed into images readable as music. it is almost a reversal of the libretto: the musicians “read” the report, while the singers do not use words: the libretto is effectively the score. the opera is designed to create and continue an emotional engagement with the australian refugee issue and the politics surrounding it, for the musicians that participate and the audiences that experience it. it aims to create empathy for and sympathy with the issue, and hopefully spur people on to action to confront these issues. this was facilitated during the premiere season by providing platforms for refugee advocates before and after shows in talks, stalls, collections, and other opportunities. direction and design i directed the premiere, as i had a clear vision where the score, and thus the report, was clearly linked to all production decisions leading to its theatrical representation. i didn’t want a narrative for the opera—that would be a story that wasn’t mine to tell. instead, the work consisted of a range of performance art actions, where the brief for the production team was “installation” and “performance art” rather than “theater” and “opera”—an installation approach to scenography. the themes for the design all link to the compositional processes and concept drawn from information in the report: shelter, connection, severance, joining, commonality, belonging/not belonging, following, isolation, memory, ephemera, long time passing, identity, missing parts, being trapped, and, of course, speechlessness (language and being heard). sage pbbbt, performance of speechless by cat hope (tura new music production, perth festival, 2019) photo credit: toni wilkinson. i prepared for the direction and blocking of the show by reading film theory, robert wilson’s writing about “silent opera,” [58] and watching romeo castellucci’s theatrical productions. i particularly enjoyed werner herzog’s series of books scenarios, which feature the free-flowing narratives he used as the basis of his films. [59] i set about writing my own scenarios for speechless, which i remained quite faithful to in the end production. i plotted the action against the score, letting the music drive the decision-making process at every step of the way, and providing time frames for various settings. the way that my linear approach to graphic notation unfolds through time was very useful for plotting stage “action” through time as well. the music remained the driver for every aspect of the production design, and this helped me avoid didacticism as much as possible, retaining the abstract qualities i appreciate so much in music itself. judith dodsworth, performance of speechless by cat hope (tura new music production, perth festival, 2019) photo credit: frances andrijich. i chose to work with alex mcquire, a young fashion graduate, on designing the set and costume as one, where performers interact with their surrounds as extensions of their costumes, and vice versa. the stage design featured long reams of fabric hanging from above that the performers would engage with and transform into various objects as the work progressed. performers would turn these large fabric pieces into costumes of various scales, backpacks, and pillows. these large fabric reams were intended as surreal surrogate flags—symbolic links to nationhood. their scale and lack of symbols made them a kind of fictional, nondescript flag, but they still held the intention to describe a belonging of the past and of a potential future. the colors of these flags were selected from the children’s drawings in the report, according to the same color scheme used for the orchestral parts, as a way to link the set to the score and, thus, the music to the set. each vocal soloist is ascribed a flag color, but that was not necessarily the color of their part in the score, further complicating this notation of “belonging.” the flags were over fifteen meters long, and their bright, solid block colors cascaded down from the roof space onto a black carpeted stage—the carpet being the type found in government offices. also inspired by the waiting rooms in government offices were the audience seats. these were placed “in the round,” on the edge of the carpet that defined the stage area, with the orchestra at one end. the choristers were placed among the audience, dressed simply. i ascribed directorial approaches for each flag color: formality (blue), surreal occurrences (red), dramatic tendencies (green), and emotional responses (pink). three of the four flags were made of tent fabric, which made its own sound when handled, resembling some of the extended vocal sounds made by the soloists. the pink fabric was the exception. it was a sensuous jersey type; soft, stretchy, pliable, and silent. during the performance, the blue, red, and pink fabrics were pulled down from their flag-like hanging position, each in different ways, at a different pace, and for a different purpose. the red was fashioned by the soloists into an extended, oversized backpack the length of one performer, who trailed it around behind them for most of the show. the blue length was folded by the soloist ensemble using formal flag folding techniques, accompanied by a recitative, and attached to that performer in a way resembling a japanese obi, as an extension of her existing costume from the same fabric. the pink flag was dramatically and quickly whipped away at the beginning of a loud, screeching solo, then gathered up into a kind of portable, cushioning backpack. the green flag was different from the others, in that it had the arms of used clothes sewn into it, referencing the 2001 “children overboard affair”—a political controversy where australian government ministers falsely accused seafaring asylum seekers of throwing children into the sea to secure passage. this flag was stored under the conductor’s podium until the soloists ritualistically drew it out, collectively fashioning it into a spectacular and elaborate gown, beautifully designed by assistant director rakini devi for the only opera singer. this aimed to highlight the extra attention given to the opera art form at the expense of others, whilst linking to the theme of the work. these different engagements with the flags were the focus for the majority of action that took place on stage throughout. the space was hung with vertical led lights, referencing the bars found in many of the children’s drawings from the report, in association with other top-down lighting that was plotted to unfold as very slowly moving washes that transitioned across the space, bathing it in red, to moments where the light responds to the music and soloists voices (designed by matthew adey with andre vanderwert). the choir, divided into four musical parts, each aligned with one of the soloists, interacts largely with the soloists both musically and in terms of action. the choir moves as a whole at certain points, en masse, referencing what was known as donald trump’s caravan “invasion,” a group of over four thousand migrants travelling across mexico toward the united states in 2018. at one point in the opera, the choir and soloists lie on the floor in the dark, as the room sings with feedback scored for the interlude. they lie with nothing for comfort, only to arise and begin their wander again. affective frequencies the music focuses on very low sound worlds across both high and low volumes. this low sound can create vibrations in the room and listeners themselves, shown to produce more emotional responses. drones and long, sliding tones are the predominate features that replace melody and tonal harmony, facilitated by my personal notation approach that eschews traditional notation design. the range of pitches (below c4) is decided by the players themselves, but my composition prescribes the way these pitches relate to each other. each group of instruments (e.g., low brass) forms a microtonal cluster, represented by a singular color. the work features improvisational moments for the soloists and various members of the orchestra, inviting them to strike out from the larger group and showcase their unique style. while the audience cannot see the notation, there is a strong connection between color and sound throughout this production, not in any synesthetic sense, but more as a way to connect and express the material from its source. the diverse range of musical styles creates a unique sound imprint that generates a sound world difficult to categorize, and the critical review and audience surveys demonstrated that the work did elicit emotional responses and a heightened motivation to act in empathy with those seeking better lives through asylum. the audience and media review responses to the premiere season were overwhelmingly positive, with sold out houses over a six-show season. the scoring technique enabled a more open participation for musicians from a wide range of stylistic backgrounds, but also facilitated the unique qualities of the work, such as the focus on long form, drone like sound, extended glissandi, extended techniques, and sections of free improvisation. it enabled the linking of sound, light, and other stage management cues into the musical score and thus the conductor’s involvement, resulting in these aligning very precisely with the musical material. it also drove and enabled the high level of abstraction that is at the core of this composition and its production design. further reading crotty, joel, and cat hope. “speechless: an operatic response to human rights abuses in twenty-first century australia.” in opera, emotion, and the antipodes volume ii: applied perspectives: compositions and performances , edited by jane w. davidson, michael halliwell and stephanie rocke, 75–89. london: routledge, 2020. hope, cat. “the future is graphic: animated notation for contemporary practice.” organised sound 25, no. 2 (2020): 187–97. —. “infrasonic music.” leonardo music journal 19 (2009): 51–56. —, and lindsay vickery. “the aesthetics of the screen-score.” in proceedings of createworld 2010, edited by michael docherty, 48–57. brisbane: apple university consortium, 2011. —, aaron wyatt, and daniel thorpe. “scoring an animated notationopera—the decibel score player and the role of the digital copyist in speechless.” in proceedings of the fourth international conference on technologies for music notation and representation–tenor ’18 , edited by sandeep bhagwati and jean bresson, 193–200. montreal: concordia university, 2018. james, stuart, and lindsay vickery. “representations of decay in the works of cat hope.” tempo 73, no. 287 (2019): 18–32. mcauliffe, sam, and cat hope. “revealing sonic wisdom in the works of cat hope.” organised sound 25, no. 3 (2020): 327–32. milligan, kate b. “identity and the abstract self in cat hope’s speechless.” tempo 73, no. 290 (2019): 13–24. cat hope is a composer, sound artist, performer, songwriter, and noise artist. she is a classically trained flautist, self-taught vocalist, experimental bassist, and is the director of decibel new music ensemble. her music is conceptually driven, using animated graphic scores, acoustic/electronic combinations and score reading technologies. her music has been discussed in books such as hidden alliances (schimana, 2019), sonic writing (magnusson, 2019), loading the silence (kouvaras, 2013), women of note (appleby, 2012), sounding postmodernism (bennett, 2008) as well as periodicals such as gramophone, the wire, limelight, and neue zeitschrift für musik. in 2011 and 2014 she won the award for excellence in experimental music at the australian art music awards, and her opera speechless won the best new dramatic work category in 2020. her music has been played around the world, and she is a professor of music at monash university, melbourne, australia. performing installations: an interview with kathy hinde matthew sergeant kathy hinde, performance of twittering machines live av (2019) photo credit: ashutosh gupta. kathy hinde was the winner of the sound art category at the 2020 ivors composer awards, taking the prize for her live work twittering machines (2019). [60] hinde’s output is broad. her work includes gallery installations, public participatory projects, and sound walks, as well as work that fuses all these elements and more. twittering machines — live av is her first self-contained performance work, although for many years she has repurposed her more sculptural installation works as instruments with which she performs. it was this interrelation of installation and performance that i wanted to pick at as i met with kathy (remotely) during the uk’s third national lockdown in spring 2021. kathy hinde: the performance version of twittering machines grew from an installation of mine of the same name—along with the necessity to respond to an invitation to perform without being able to “ship” an installation. i had been experimenting with various different “tabletop” sound making set-ups for years, and so this performance grew from these previous experiments—so in this case it did evolve substantially from the original installation work. hinde’s practice of repurposing her instruments began with piano migrations in 2010, which presents videos of birds projected onto the strings of a physical piano. the videos appear to interact with the strings of the instrument through twangs and strums produced by computer-controlled tappers and exciters, seemingly bringing the instrument to life. a later piece, tipping point (2014), presents six pairs of connected water jars hung from mechanical arms, controlled by motors to oscillate like seesaws. as the water self-levels across the moving jars, it serves as a mechanism for tuning audio feedback. hinde: i first started thinking about my installations as instruments i could perform with live after i’d created piano migrations. despite the main body of the piece being a dismantled piano with all the regular “playing” mechanisms removed, it was only when the work was finished that i realized i could still “play” it [through software]. when i later embarked on the creation of tipping point, i then had the premeditated intent to design an installation that could also be the site for live performance. in fact, tipping point started a trajectory of work that i feel slips between “sound sculpture” and “invented musical instrument.” there is therefore a clear connecting thread of performativity across hinde’s work. even when installed, hinde’s works never simply are, they do. when the artist is not performing, tipping point sways in a slow dance. and while we are aware of motors whirring under computer control, it also appears as if the water is singing. this dialogue with the performative properties of her materials is something she continually acknowledges in our conversation. hinde: tipping point looks quite “precise” and “designed”, but the way it works is actually quite emergent. the work is all about audio feedback. i don’t “make” the sound, but instead set up the conditions from which sound can emerge through resonant frequencies. [in performance] i can shift the glass vessels to change the water levels, but i then have to listen closely to wait and find out what my adjustments have changed, and then respond back. it’s a balancing act—a dialogue—and in this way it relates to the physicality of sound and how it behaves in space. i can’t control it fully and precisely. from this perspective, i was keen to understand more about hinde’s relationship with her materials. given that sound always seems to lie within the core of her audiovisual interdisciplinarity, it was perhaps unsurprising that, when the topic of materiality is broached, she is first keen to talk of the materiality of sound itself. hinde: one vivid listening experience was on a residency in bavaria in 2014. i was exchanging “quiet environmental sound recordings” with sound artist tony whitehead. tony sent me a beautiful recording of a leaf, gently, and only slightly, moving in the wind. it was very quiet, yet evocative. i was listening on headphones whilst reading indoors. the window was slightly open and when i listened to the leaf moving in the wind, i became aware of a slight cool breeze on my cheek. i listened to the recording for a second time … and, yet again, i became aware of the breeze on my cheek. it was somehow spontaneous and intuitive; which got me thinking. through listening, i seem to have started to have more of a multisensory experience—and engaged in “touch.” tipping point by kathy hinde (2014) photo credit: kathy hinde. the sense of tactility with which hinde describes materials permeates our conversation. when hinde mentions the materials with which she is working, it is never far abstracted from her sense of physical contact with them. at this point my mind wanders back to the whirring motors that lie behind the slow liquid dances of tipping point. a digital/technological presence permeates much of hinde’s work. her live performances frequently combine live digital manipulation, analog records, and objects motor-manipulated via a computer. her installations are often controlled through max patches. i wondered how this tactility might apply to these domains. hinde: i perform live with piano migrations, as a duo with matt [olden]. i do this by choosing different videos of birds to project onto the piano—and this can produce surprising responses. through the max patch, i can control the sensitivity of the translation into physical “twangs”— and i can also control the speed of the movie and the “repeat rate” of the “twang”. so, i place the video on the piano and then respond and shape how it responds by listening and observing. so, again, it’s something i don’t have complete control over—even more so than tipping point perhaps. hinde has collaborated with olden for over a decade, beginning with piano migrations in 2010. hinde: i work on the overall “system” for a piece and what part the max patch plays within it, but collaborator matt olden actually programs the max patches and i’m not as intimately involved in this. the fact i don’t make the max patches myself probably does make a difference conceptually for me, especially in comparison to my soldered circuit boards and machined, mechanical parts piano migrations by kathy hinde (2010) photo credit: kathy hinde. it’s interesting that i don’t make my own software in this respect. i suppose it’s quite hard for me to consider how a max patch might have [the same] material qualities as my soldered circuits. i’m quite attached to my laptop. i don’t like being without it. but i’d say that matt olden’s computer is an extension of his mind and body in quite a different way. in that way, the max patch doesn’t present the same kind of discursive materiality for me—but that is different for matt, he is his machine. hinde’s description of olden’s laptop as a quasi-prosthesis to his body (in a way hers is not) is beguiling. it seems hinde identifies the same tactility in olden’s relationship to code as her own relationship with, say, welded steel. in this creative partnership tactility still seems to function as a form of common currency. such conversation reveals an underlying dialogic quality to the performative aspects of her work in this regard, with words like “listening” and “responding” frequently reappearing. i was interested as to whether she saw her materials as a form of collaborative co-author or co-agent in this regard, to which she responded by discussing her recent audiovisual piece river traces 1 (2020), her first work with 16mm film. [61] hinde: i spent a lot of time recording and listening to the river—running my hands in the water, exploring the textures of the plant life, mosses, and rocks through touch. i started to make photogram 16mm films with river materials—(my first photogram film)—and i found it so very tactile. this film-making process felt like a very intimate encounter with both the material qualities of the river and with the process of making an analogue film in this way. what i discovered through these experiments is that film is sensitive. it collaborates. it responds back and improvises. there is a high possibility that what you set out to do will come out “differently.” “so, your materials are a collaborator in this sense?” i asked her outright. her answer surprised me. hinde: actually, i’m not sure that “collaboration” is the right word in this context. the reason i’m not one hundred percent comfortable with it, is that … how can the river actively take part? and how can this be an equitable collaboration? i think that the term “collaboration” was a useful conceptual tool when approaching my creative processes with the river. i enjoy thinking about it as a collaboration, which gave rise to subtle shifts in my approach and perception. but my reservations are to do with the fact that the river does not actively give me permission. my premeditated approach—that i intend to consciously leave space for the river to “do its own thing”—gives some agency to the river, but i am not able to sense the “intention” of the river or find a way to hand the same amount of agency that i have over to the river. i asked her to elaborate further. hinde: in working on piano migrations, i filmed the birds in situ. it is their movements that play the piano, so maybe i am in some kind of collaboration with them. i’d like to place myself in that situation, but then, i haven’t asked them. i’m uncomfortable with saying the birds are (or any other materials/nonhuman others) authors—not because i want to “claim the credit,” but it seems somehow wrong to bring these beautiful creatures into our systems of “ownership” and “authorship.” for me, both of these terms lead to notions of “hierarchy” and “capital.” this is where i struggle and problematize this idea of assigning nonhuman others as “authors” or “collaborators.” kathy hinde, still from river traces (1) (2020). while aspects of hinde’s thought do engage with the kind of active agential materialities so popular amongst artists and critical theorists at the present time, [62] hinde’s perspective forces us to question the transmissibility of terms in these fluidic domains. given that birds—or indeed rivers—have no means to express a permission to participate, there are implicit hierarchies of power activated here, a potential “cashing in” of an agency that has not itself been freely granted. hinde: i’m aware of some rivers being granted “human status” in order for them to “deserve” more protection from human damage than others, which seems so anthropocentric. of course i want these rivers to be protected, but the fact that it seems to be necessary to anthropomorphize them in order for this to happen doesn’t make any attempt to dismantle hierarchies between humans and non-humans. instead of collaboration, then, hinde—through her work discussed here—is creating non-hierarchical meeting points between herself, the nonhuman world, and her audience. with such thoughts in mind, i was interested in returning to her live work in twittering machines – live av. hinde: my performances within installations are like a cross-fade between installation into live-ness, and back again. it has soft edges. twittering machines performance is a departure from this, it is a staged audiovisual performance lasting 30 minutes with a pa and an audience facing the stage. i enter the stage at a specific time to perform… then leave. it’s a gig with “hard edges.” this context puts me in quite a different state of mind, and i do get immensely nervous at the point just before i go on stage, because [the context] feels so different to performing within my own installations. my aim is to reach a state of “immersion” on stage and to find a way i can lose myself in it and become part of it. there is a lot happening “live” in twittering machines—enough that i can only just about manage, without it collapsing. again, there is the situation of not having full control over the whole thing, but initiating processes that create conditions for results to emerge. hinde’s central operands are still very much present here. there is indeterminacy and performativity, of course, but there is also that sense of touch—a meeting with her materials on equal terms. through twittering machines live av we see an offering of this non-hierarchical perspective outwards to her audience. hinde: ultimately this is why i make work—i want to create experiences for others that somehow embody and share these perspectives, and i would then hope that these subtle shifts in perspective can also be felt—and seep into other aspects of people’s lives. it’s a quiet and subtle form of activism. throughout our conversation, what becomes apparent to me is the extent to which hinde is perpetually facilitating equal points of meeting and contact between herself, her audience, and her materials. another form of touch, perhaps. and, maybe most importantly, her work renders visceral the permissibility of such equality within this encounter, all without retort to grand utopian idealism. that, maybe, is the ultimate doing that emerges here. matthew sergeant is a composer/researcher whose work is currently exploring ideas surrounding materials, materiality, and the relationships between human and nonhuman things. his creative work is frequently performed internationally, both throughout the europe, north, central, and south america, asia, and australasia. his music has been commissioned and/or performed by internationally acclaimed ensembles, including the london symphony orchestra (uk), the bbc concert orchestra (uk), the bbc singers (uk), cepromusic (mexico), the house of bedlam (uk), bcmg (uk), divertimento ensemble (italy), elision ensemble (australia), ensemble 10/10 (uk), ensemble plus-minus (uk), exaudi (uk) and the nieuw ensemble (netherlands), as well as numerous ongoing creative partnerships with emerging and established soloists. matthew’s research is widely published, and he is currently working on edited collections for boydell & brewer and cambridge scholars publishing. he is currently reader in music at bath spa university. elements of performativity in the works of kosugi takehisa and kazakura shō christophe charles kosugi takehisa and kazakura shō in front of kasuga villa, tsukahara pension, yufuin town, ōita prefecture, “music landscape (twelve-hours performance),” august 10–11, 1985. photographer unknown. courtesy of okamoto takako, the estate of takehisa kosugi / hear. presentation kosugi takehisa (1938–2018) was a pioneer of free improvised music and sound art in japan. he mainly used acoustic and electric violins, voice, homemade acoustic and electronic instruments, and light. he writes in 2014: the incidental or indeterminate nature of sounds has been one of the major characteristics of my music through improvisational performances and sound installations. in an attempt to transcend conventional musical concepts, i have been introducing electronic territory to my music including both audio frequency waves and non-audio frequency ones such as infrasonic, radio frequency, and light waves. [63] kazakura shō (1936–2007) was a japanese artist pioneering performance, or happening, as an art medium. having read works by luigi pirandello and anton chekhov, he began to do non-theatrical actions in a theatrical context in 1957. kazakura then became a member of the neo-dada organizers (1960–1963). nam june paik wrote that he “embodied the essence of dadaism.” [64] from that point on he produced objects, paintings, and films, while pursuing his performance work. kosugi says of kazakura, “while most artists have since withdrawn from performance, only kazakura continues to perform. this is very important when considering his art. his constant awareness of ‘time’ and ‘space’ makes it possible for him to create various forms of expression.” [65] kazakura and kosugi met in 1959. they became friends and continuously collaborated until the passing of kazakura in 2007. they have close ideas about art and music, space and time, and seem to share a particular interest in how the abandonment of conventional art and music habits are linked to the dadaist and buddhist idea of “dismantling the ego.” (zero) time from the end of the 1950s, the concepts of informel, futeikei (indeterminate form) or fukakutei (indefinite), implying that the form of the artwork continuously changes, were widely explored in visual and plastic arts. meanwhile, music was mostly conceived as a composition of self-consciously fixed sonic elements. kosugi and his peers thought that approaching music as “sound” could lead to freeing oneself from conventional musical ideas, and even freeing oneself from one’s ego. from around 1948, john cage had also been thinking about freeing music composition from the ego. however, kosugi was already interested in “moving toward a place where the ego could be released freely” before encountering cage’s music in 1962. [66] during his studies at tokyo university of the arts, he focused on improvisational music, and began to experiment with “accidental collisions of sounds, as well as the inclusion of everyday sounds.” [67] he would perform objets sonores—that is, improvised clusters of (non)simultaneous sounds: we wanted to produce spontaneous sounds, and our music was influenced by the changes in the movement of our own body or in the environment. … in fact, i was more interested in things that were constantly changing, than in something that was recorded and already finished. [68] in the process of including everyday sounds, kosugi and his group ongaku (1958–1961) began to use recorded sounds on tape as well. [69] however, kosugi was unhappy with the fact that once the sounds are recorded on tape, they are fixed and no longer allow for real-time creativity. [70] nam june paik fukuoka prize performance, kikyorai [return home], nhk fukuoka broadcasting station tv hall, 30 september, 1995, from right to left: nam june paik, kazakura shō (in the balloon), kosugi takehisa. photo ishimatsu takeo. © fukuoka prize committee. courtesy okamoto takako, the estate of takehisa kosugi / hear. improvisation implies “automatism, like the action painting of jackson pollock … at the moment of creating a sound the performer gets a very instantaneous approach at the same occurrence/events of sound.” the music is “coming from somewhere, not from me, but from outside myself.” [71] from a time perspective, kosugi further explains that he doesn’t need to make choices, because the music just appears as a very instantaneous event … this is not like measuring time, in the ordinary time scale, or conscious scale. … sometimes time stays there, doesn’t continue. this is strange to say, but in my consciousness, when i play, music sometimes stops and i just play spatially or timelessly. the performer does not feel time. the performer can stay at this stage, without time consciousness. [72] a close idea has been formulated by christian wolff about “zero time”: “‪the zero i take to mean no time at all, that is, no measurable time, that is, any time at all, which the performer takes as he will at each performance.” [73] john cage would explain it this way: “‘zero time’ exists when we don’t notice the passage of time, when we don’t measure it.” talking about 0’00” (1962), cage added: “i mean when i work on the piece … or ‘in’ that piece, i am indeed ‘in’ zero time. … i am no longer working towards an envisaged end, in line with the economy.” [74] and daniel charles explains: silence or absence prevents time from being taken as something already present or already there. time has to spring. in so far as it springs, it disappears into its own withdrawal. because of this withdrawal (or “withholding,” or “denial”) its very granting prevents us from basing our understanding of musical signification on any “constant presence,” or any “now-moment” which would require some calculus or measurement concerning a “temporal interval.” [75] music as space art playing “spatially or timelessly” implies that music is conceived not only as a time art, but also a space art. kosugi founded the taj mahal travellers group in 1969 and was a member until 1975. talking about their experiments, kosugi noticed that there were also conventions concerning the space where music happens, and those conventions needed to be questioned. a standardized hall may be designed to produce sound properly, but i feel that this standardization also binds the expression in a standardized way. … when the place changes, the experience changes … i had a concept called “picnic band,” where you go to a place, make sounds there, and stay in that space. … it’s like enjoying the space there, so i guess you could call it music in that sense, music in space. [76] this more physical point of view defines kosugi’s central idea of his catch wave. when he began to use an electric violin and a wireless transmitter for performances, he noticed that there was radio interference depending on where he was in the space. every subtle move of the devices would immediately become audible. this is a way to make people aware of the fact that they cannot hear. … this is a kind of “communication of dis-communication” … up until now, i’ve been emphasizing the positive, visible and audible parts, but i want to bring in the opposite, the inaudible and invisible parts. to put it simply, for example, john cage introduced the concept of “silence.” in that case, there is no sound, which means silence. if you think of sound as a positive, it is in a negative dimension, and the positive is utilized in contrast to the negative. in contrast, the positive is utilized, and the negative is implied. if we don’t open up our perceptions to that level, i don’t think we will be able to create a true inter-media or multi-media form of expression. nowadays, we talk about computers and multimedia, but that is actually the key point. if we don’t make use of the information that we can’t hear and can’t see, if we don’t make use of that information, i think the balance will collapse. i think there is a very basic balance between yin and yang. when you’re doing electronic music, the waveform goes back and forth between positive and negative. we receive the positive part, but there is also the negative support. i think that’s the key to dealing with things as art. [77] simplicity and multiplicity kazakura was born in ōita (kyushu) and came to study at musashino art university (tokyo) from 1956 to 1958. kosugi first met kazakura at the yomiuri independent exhibition in 1959. kosugi remembers that many young artists were unsatisfied with the conventions of painting and were looking for new forms. however, rather than taking a roundabout way of removing frames and opening up paintings, kazakura took “direct action” by directly attacking the contents of the tableau. in a venue littered with jumbled works of art, the empty frames left on the wall were somewhat symbolic, and kazakura’s dadaistic spirit of directly hitting the paintings themselves with an air gun was refreshing. [78] while kosugi was stimulated by visual and plastic arts, kazakura began to attend concerts by kosugi’s group ongaku. he thought that “there was a dada spirit in group ongaku, because they were betting on ‘time.’ … ‘time’ has become a theme for me since i started getting involved in group ongaku.” [79] invited by sakurai takami and his kyūshū-ha group, they travelled together to hakata, and kosugi witnessed there one of the first performances with a big advertising balloon (“ad-balloon”) during the “grand meeting of heroes”: [80] “the balloon and the performer, which had been separated until then, became one space in an instant. this subtraction of space is the quintessence of his performance of disappearing.” kosugi recalls: “rather than sound expression, i was more interested in art as a one-time event in space, connected with action and coincidence. i think kazakura probably started his event-like performance with the same idea.” [81] in 1956, kazakura began a series of performances which shine because of their simplicity, insisting on the fact that “it was important to do something that anyone could do”: [82] falling from a chair, or from a ladder, walking, dropping light bulbs on a canvas, etc. [83] he also staged more dangerous actions that not anyone could do: standing on his head, burning his chest with an iron (and almost fainting), entering a trunk (and almost dying by asphyxia), etc. his signature performance, which he did until the 2000s, uses, as mentioned, a large ad-balloon. he would, in most cases, inflate the balloon and enter it, sometimes taking with him sound devices like a harmonica, or a stick as an extension of his arms, and then move around not seeing but hearing the environment, until there was no air in the balloon anymore, getting out in time to avoid asphyxia. kazakura shō and christophe charles, closing performance of taikan-on [sound experience], neo dada “ichidanmen” (one section) exhibition, ōita, japan/compal hall, october 15, 1995. top left the black ad-balloon suspended from the ceiling; top right “portrait": kazakura shō after the performance; below kazakura shō performing in the balloon. photo credit: endō ritsuko. kazakura did a joint performance with kosugi in a large bright room of the pompidou center (paris) in 1986. [84] kazakura’s ad-balloon was first covered with newspaper. the balloon was then inflated with air, growing from under those newspapers. kazakura then entered the balloon and began to move around the space. the audience was sitting on the floor near the walls around the performance space. kosugi was using his electric violin with a wireless system, and moving through the middle of the space, while kazakura would move everywhere, including where the audience was sitting, most often with a comical effect. once the balloon was full of air, the newspapers had been dispersed on the floor. while playing the violin, kosugi would walk on the newspapers, and make all kinds of sounds. he believed objects can be used in a variety of manners: “if [an object] doesn’t have sound that’s ok too. … this is not only sound nor action oriented, it’s a combination of sound and action together.” [85] in other words, the sound is resulting from each action on each object. sound and action are both conceived as equally important. moreover, objects can have several functions at once. formerly, newspapers were not used as a sound device or a symbolic element, their use came from much more practical needs. kazakura said about his performances in the 1960s: “i often lay out newspapers on the floor. if the floor gets dirty, it’s no trouble to clean it up afterwards: you just rake up the newspaper and you’re done.” [86] similarly, instruments have several functions, too. kosugi remembers seeing a wounded piano when he visited kazakura’s home in 1985: this legless piano was used for a performance, and then as the parts were gradually used for other works, it was finally used up and disappeared. by using a piano which was made for music (a temporal art form) in an art context (a spatial art form), the medium of the piano itself crosses the boundaries of genres. like his balloon, the piano is used as a multidirectional potential. [87] improvisation and consciousness kazakura and kosugi also shared ideas about the “liveliness” of everyday life, and its “invisible essence.” kazakura says: i think that creativity is rooted in our daily lives, or rather, it is something that is taken out of our daily lives. that’s why i thought happenings would be closer to the essence of creativity, to extract the invisible essence of everyday life. … i had a clear idea that i wanted to bring out the essence of it, and it became clear to me that this creation could only be said if there was life. if there is no life, there is no creation, nothing at all. so i thought that the most accurate way to create was to be on the edge of life. that’s why challenging life is almost like committing suicide. … i don’t mean abandonment, i mean getting as close as possible. [88] nam june paik fukuoka prize performance, kikyorai [return home], nhk fukuoka broadcasting station tv hall, 30 september, 1995. from right to left: kosugi takehisa, kazakura shō, nam june paik, kuni chiya. photo ishimatsu takeo. © fukuoka prize committee. courtesy okamoto takako, the estate of takehisa kosugi / hear. for kosugi, “being on the edge” perhaps means constantly adapting to an environment that changes incessantly. in my 2015 interview with him in osaka, kosugi said: improvising is a means to catch what is appearing, to catch the vibrations of the universe, and to adapt to the changing environment. … in other words, when “i” am performing, it is not only “me” who is performing. the performance is not only my own, because i am catching the environment. because i am playing together with that environment, i am not just myself. … the idea of “dismantling the ego” is influenced by the specific concept of [the south indian improvised music] manodharma, which implies that the ego exists as a cosmic existence beyond oneself, and a musician becomes a receiver that catches that cosmic existence. improvisation reflects changes in time, or changes in season. music comes out through the connections between the immediate environment and what transcends the ego. it is not “my” music, but the music of a receiver that catches some presence in the universe, like a radio or a television. in short, a performance is something that catches the radio waves so that we can absorb them. [89] performing is not about what comes out from inside, but about catching it from outside and becoming oneself a filter, as transparent as possible. to what extent can one become selfless? tom johnson translates this idea as: “kosugi continues playing his violin, or perhaps allowing the violin to play him.” [90] even before john cage was attracted to eastern thought in the 1940s, some artists in the west were working in that direction: “dada was about deconstructing, or dismantling the self, and that is also what buddhism is all about, becoming selfless.” [91] the sound of the earth the economy of means implies that there is room for much to happen; 4’33” can be considered as minimal because there is minimal action, but at the same time it is maximal because of its inclusiveness of all sounds. in their performances and happenings, kosugi and kazakura reveal the vibrations and changes of the environment. we might also say that they make the environment vibrate by listening to it. kosugi remembers words by kazakura: “listen to the sound of the earth.” this could be taken to mean actually putting one’s ear to the ground and listening, but i think this means listening to sound not as an art created by human aesthetics and purpose, such as bach or the cello, but as a phenomenon in an unspecified and indeterminate world. it seems to me that kazakura is saying that performance and art are about catching the phenomena that exist on the earth, that is, in everyday space, while opening our perception in all directions. [92] kazakura, wrote a poetic text about “vision” and “time” for his retrospective exhibition at the ōita museum in 2002, which relates closely to the remarks by kosugi and is a fitting conclusion to this essay: time to know, tools and paths to know. the path is developed, time shrinks. the shrunken variant of time is negative time. tools left in space, forgotten paths and ditches. falling into the trenches of past cultures, digging holes, forgetting time. surveying, taking out only the intangible, the invisible. [93] christophe charles born 1964 in marseille (france), has been living in japan since 1987. he participated in a performance workshop by kosugi takehisa at les fêtes musicales de la sainte-baume (france) in 1979, and attended a joint performance by kosugi and kazakura shō at pompidou center (paris) in 1986. he has performed electronic music with kazakura eight times between 1992 and 1995 in europe and japan. charles wrote a phd dissertation about video art in japan (tsukuba university, 1996; inalco paris, 1997) and is now professor at the department of imaging arts and sciences, musashino art university, tokyo. from notes and correspondences regarding buster, initiating bros (a practice-based account of work with romeo castellucci and societas) scott gibbons the first notes from romeo [castellucci, director of societas] arrive regarding the place where the premier will be. we have been talking about a piece entitled bros, and romeo conducted a workshop on some of the themes just before the pandemic struck. i review videos of the workshop and am struck by how things have changed. the room was full of people working closely together, and not a mask in sight. it’s still too early for the normal venues to open safely, but there’s an outdoor space in brussels that is cleared for use by a limited number of spectators. a rather broad plaza in the open air. the city will be clearly visible all around, but at a distance. while we continue to develop bros, we will stage the work-in-progress as buster. [94] the piece calls for fifty local participants who will respond to orders given uniquely to each individual via in-ear monitors. they are not actors and will not know the commands beforehand. they are dressed like old-fashioned american police, as you would see in old black-and-white silent movies. workshop, cesena, march 2020. courtesy of societas. the city is female in character; however, the space where we will perform is male. (quite literally, as we will be directly in front of the federal police headquarters with a cathedral beside!) two machines, seemingly military tools, ominously scan the city. a kind of sonar or radar. a small wooden statue moves its arms, raises and lowers its head, and opens its mouth wide (like a scream). a god who commands. it is placed in front of the policemen who—with their backs to the public—are in adoration of the totem. romeo distributes a video demonstrating the actions of the idol; i will use this to create the sound while istvan [zimmermann, of plastikart studio] and paolo [cavagnolo] create the robotics. idol reference (video still). courtesy of societas. having just cleared the woods behind my house of some pernicious and invasive holly trees, i had quite a lot of wood to rub and scrape together to create a library of sounds for the statue. brought branches and sticks into the studio. these made good textures but were a bit too crisp. too snappy. went back out to collect some rotting branches that had fallen from an old oak tree. nice and spongey, sounds like wood but a little squishy. fleshy. after recording, had to clear the studio floor of worms and spiders. realized the idol’s neck needed a sound that was more stiff, though. pulled some anise from the refrigerator and tried bending a few stalks at a time—this was much more convincing. idol reference (video still). courtesy of societas. for the idol’s mouth, it needs a voice… i multi-tracked clacking wooden sticks in a sort of random percussion. strange. tried a deep demonic voice (layers of latin chant in reverse), vocoded with noise to remove the tonality, but the effect was… maybe a little obvious. tried time-stretching an infant’s voice from the library. crying, screaming. perfect! a little voice for a little body. granularly re-synthesized this to make it more abstract. now it seems to be the idea of a voice, not a specific voice. the other sounds will have to be carefully placed with eq, because this voice will be presented full-spectrum like a wall of noise. as the idol raises and lowers its arms, there should be a reaction from the space. tremolo of strings, deep male voices, a precise cacophony. each angle of the arms defined by its own narrow bandwidth (low to high). a video of the final machine going through its choreography matches up almost perfectly with the original reference video. i have to make only a few small adjustments. i can’t see the mouth when its head is hanging low, so i have to ask for another video just to verify the timing of that. i’m not certain yet what sound(s) will work best for the two machines that scan the city, so i plan to work primarily with automation of the effects and mixer, so i can test different sounds just by dropping them into the session. the automation will force everything to sync. romeo sends a video of the prototypes, and the effect is quite imposing. one machine has a long barrel on top, the other has a light that flashes. both rotate independently at different rates and directions. i try close-miking some drone motors, and fine-tune the pitch and frequencies so that there are musical harmonies between the two. it’s beautiful and even a little haunting, but the sound of the motors is too mechanical and not really organic. i tried synchronizing vocals (simple open vowels) with the light. for the other machine, the one that looks like a gun, i closely follow the video… when the barrel is scanning where the public will be, a deep scraping and grinding sound. when it points away from the public, reading the city, a sound reminiscent of sonar from a u-boat. alternately menacing and lonely. to mark the moments when the barrel starts and stops, i look for short bursts of animal sounds in my library: a panther hissing, a rattlesnake warning… sounds that bypass the brain and register directly into the spine. radar project automation. courtesy of scott gibbons and societas. it’s hard for me to see some details in the video though—i can’t tell if the light is flashing when the rotating arms are oriented sideways, for example. i can sense that the rotational speed ramps up and slows down, but it’s not clear where those exact moments of de/acceleration are. i ask the programmer paolo if he can give me some details, and he soon responds with a set of text files that capture the data at 29.97 hz (the sampling rate of the reference video) with an offer to interpolate the data to any rate i need. the files are a series of values, one per line, one file for each motor. i import the data to a spreadsheet and set up a new column to calculate the precise time for each change. it is impractically long; over seventeen thousand lines of data! since the tempo in my digital performer project is 120bpm for this scene, 8 hz would be a more practical sampling rate. paolo quickly sends me a new data set at that rate, and now i can reference that for accuracy to the nearest eighth note. i have to define the backdrop to all of these sound events. there will be the real din of the city, which is quite vital and essential, so i have to work with that without conflicting with it. i collect sirens, trains, buses, horns, pedestrians. there is a particular siren which is specific to belgium, so i make sure to use that. i discover that layering many, many, many car/truck/bus horns in harmony gives an effect like a giant organ. i make a quick demo of a crescendo with this effect and put that in reserve. it takes a while to assemble, but i want the sirens to turn into the voices of a woman crying, sobbing. the occasional honking horn makes a nice connection to the image of the gun, i think, which can perhaps be a tuba, or some kind of military shofar from the 1950s. a little tremolo and delay to give it some shimmer and musicality. left: radar motors data at 29.97hz. right: radar motors data at 8hz. courtesy of scott gibbons and societas. many small details require some simple foley. shortwave radio, an old telephone, magnesium camera flashbulbs… claudio [tortorici] is the sound tech on site, and he will have to experiment with the placement of these sounds in the actual space. i give him sound files that are as dry and neutral as possible. romeo sends some recordings from the site that need a little restoration work, these are nice little tasks that are welcome when i need a break from working on the heavier scenes. montage of radars. courtesy of societas. the company arrives in brussels to begin rehearsals. covid restrictions mean i’m not able to be present on-site, but we all have strong internet connections to share materials. i’m happy at least to be able to use the hardware and space in my studio to record, instead of being restricted to my laptop in a hotel room. romeo reports that the urban soundscape i had prepared sounds too authentic in the space. i prepare and send some variations using band-passed delays and time stretching to impart a more dream-like sensation of a memory of the city. i receive more videos of the machines once they’re installed on site and discover—with dismay—that the position of the radar gun varies enough to make my earlier approach inutile. even though the machines may begin from the exact same orientation, there is a gradual drift over time, and even halfway through the sequence they may all be pointing in completely different directions. i confirm with paolo that the commands sent to the motors only regulate the rotational speed. the machines would need to have positional sensors to follow the same path each time. this is possible in the future but not now. the premiere is only a few days away at this point, so i need to create something quickly that follows the movement, but not the direction. hmm. the sounds i used before won’t be effective anymore, so i need a fresh new palette. i want to tie back to the soundscape of the city, so maybe this radar machine can have a voice not unlike the car horns. tuba, alpenhorn, didgeridoo. in final cut i’ve created a montage of the machines going through their sequences simultaneously. while watching that, i record several passes of performances using horn patches. i identify and comp my favorite voices and moments, and then go back to automate the finer details. i really miss the threatening sensation when the machine’s “eye” looks across me, but this new approach has a cinematic quality which i think will be quite useful outside in the open, under the night sky. anyway, there’s no more time so it has to work for now. romeo reports that the idol sequence is generally working very well on site, except that it wants a climax. i remember the sound of the “organ crescendo” constructed with horns. that might work here… it was only sixty seconds long, though. i don’t feel that i have a proper sense of the passing of time from watching disjointed videos on my monitor, so i re-create longer and shorter variations and send them for testing in rehearsals. the evening of the debut arrives. by late morning on the west coast, i start to see some text messages coming in from brussels, all very happy and relieved. there is a sync problem with the radar machines, but otherwise everything is working well. despite the enthusiasm, i take this as very mixed news. i wonder if the arduino is playing back at 48 khz instead of 44.1 khz. it must be something simple like that. we have some time before the next phase—bros—to address the problem. anyway, much will assuredly need to change as we consider how to migrate from a large outdoor space back to an indoor space. i change the title of my to-do list, from “ buster | to do” to “bros | to do.” scott gibbons is an american-born composer and performer of electroacoustic music. his work is notable for its rigorous use of single and unexpected objects as sole instrumentation. for example, unheard: sonic arrangements from the microcosmos, which uses only sounds recorded at the molecular level; and music for the 120th anniversary of the eiffel tower which incorporated sounds of the tower itself played as percussion. his work with romeo castellucci and societas (genesi: from the museum of sleep, tragedia endogonidia, inferno) demonstrates an acute balance between delicacy and physicality, often focusing on frequencies that are at the outermost limits of human hearing. [1] in this i am guided by brandon labelle’s proposal that “sound art as a practice harnesses, describes, analyzes, performs, and interrogates the condition of sound and the processes by which it operates.” brandon labelle, background noise: perspectives on sound art (new york: continuum, 2006), ix. [2] of course, there has been a consistent effort, especially since john cage, to allow the extra-musical into music, however i would argue that discussion and analysis of the historical structures of “music” still dominate music discourse. rather than being considered a marginal aspect of music, i prefer to consider sonic art as related yet having concerns that extend beyond these structures—philosophical concerns with ontologies and epistemologies, subject-object relations, speculative realisms etc.; and psychological and scientific concerns with perception, cognition, and consciousness. these concerns can be applied to music, but they are not at the forefront of the discourse. [3] created in collaboration with designer/artisan thomas burless, a continuous self-vibrating region of intensities (retitled in 2021 as we are oscillators) is a performance installation environment featuring eight bespoke kinetic objects that explore the vibrations of the voice through cymatics (the morphogenetic effects of sound waves). excerpts can be viewed here. [4] gail priest, “the now of history: tomographic and ficto-critical approaches to writing about sonic art” (re:sound 2019, 8th international conference on media art, science, and technology, aalborg, denmark, 20–23 august, 2019). [5] donna haraway, “situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective,” feminist studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. [6] caleb kelly, “materials of sound: sound as (more than) sound,” journal of sonic studies 16 (2018). [7] kelly has edited two issues (16 and 18) on “materials of sound” for the journal of sound studies. his most recent curatorial ventures include materials, sounds + black mountain college (asheville, nc, june 7–august 31, 2019) and material sound touring australia (2020–23). [8] peter blamey, interview with gail priest for sounding the future, july 24, 2015. [9] blamey, “forage,” artist website, accessed june 7, 2021. [10] blamey, “invisible residue,” recorded in sydney, march–may, 2015, track 1 on invisible residue, sound recording released may 8, 2020. [11] an ebow (or e-bow, “electronic bow”) is a small device that can be placed on the strings of a guitar that through a magnetic drive field causes the string to vibrate creating continuous tones, amplified by the instrument’s pickup. [12] see blamey, double partial eclipse, performance for video presented as part of material sound at home (black mountain college museum + arts center, curated by caleb kelly), uploaded may 21, 2020. [13] see blamey, “rare earth orbits hand/clamp,” recorded january–march, 2020, track 2 of rare earth orbits, sound recording released may 3, 2020. [14] blamey, “rare earth orbits,” artist website, accessed june 7, 2021. [15] blamey, “selected motherboard works (2009–2014),” accessed june 7, 2021. [16] kelly, “materials of sound”. [17] “lucas ‘granpa’ abela live,” performance of the artist lucas abela (also known as justice yeldham) recorded live at cave12, geneva, february 21, 2016, uploaded on june 4, 2016. graphic content warning. [18] kate carr, email correspondence with the author, june 10, 2021. [19] greg egan, diaspora (london: millennium, 1997), 5–36. see “diaspora,” chamber made (website), accessed june 14, 2021. [20] cat hope, “speechless” artist website, accessed june 14, 2021. [21] australian human rights commission [ahrc], the forgotten children: national inquiry into children in immigration detention 2014 . [22] a network-synchronized scrolling score player created by decibel new music ensemble available as an ipad app. see the section “animated graphic scoring” in cat hope’s article further ahead for more discussion and examples. [23] speak percussion, transducer, video performance presented by arts centre, melbourne, sydney myer music bowl, august 1–2, 2014. [24] speak percussion, polar force, video teaser (excerpts) for the world premiere season at the arts centre, melbourne, november 24–december 1, 2018. [25] matthias schack-arnott, anicca, video excerpts from the premiere season, arts house “season 2,” 2016; and everywhen, video trailer with footage from the premiere season, melbourne international arts festival, 2019. [26] michela pelusio, spacetime helix, video excerpts, uploaded june 16, 2015; and “working on spacetime helix 2012,” work-in-progress footage, uploaded november 24, 2014. [27] nicolás varchausky, mesa de dinero [money desk], video excerpts from the performance at the collective exhibition “el centro en movimiento 2. máquinas e imaginarios” curated by rodrigo alonso, terraza de la sala sinfónica, cck centro cultural kirchner, buenos aires, february 24–25, 2018. [28] kathy hinde, tipping point, video excerpts from the installation at the 10th sound festival (aberdeen, uk), wooden barn, banchory, november 2–8, 2014. [29] branch nebula, high performance packing tape, video trailer, uploaded december 18, 2019. [30] heiner goebbels, “the sounds of things,” in sonic thinking: a media philosophical approach, ed. bernd herzogenrath (new york: bloomsbury, 2017), 93. [31] goebbels, “the sounds of things,” 92. [32] goebbels, 93. [33] goebbels, 96. [34] heiner goebbels, “the aesthetics of absence,” european graduate school video lectures, may 1, 2011, 33:56–34:04. [35] goebbels’s work is in the lineage of mauricio kagel’s stage pieces such as staatstheater (1971). while space does not allow further discussion, kagel will appear briefly in the following essay “sounding digital consciousness.” [36] douglas kahn, “the latest: fluxus and music [1993],” in sound, ed. caleb kelly (cambridge, ma: mit press, 2011), 33. [37] kahn, “the latest: fluxus and music,” 34. [38] shiomi mieko, quoted in kahn, 35. throughout this forum the japanese convention of placing the surname first is adopted. [39] kahn, 31. [40] asuna, 100 keyboards, video excerpts from the live installation of “asuna: one day exhibition” at the gallery kapo, kanazawa, july 2016. see also the full performance at the full of noises festival, barrow-in-furness, august 17–19, 2018. [41] umeda tetsuya, things that don’t know/ringo, excerpts and interview from the sapporo international art festival 2017, uploaded on december 28, 2017. [42] these are artist who toured australia thanks to the indefatigable efforts of artist-promoter lawrence english. [43] karen barad, “diffracting diffraction: cutting together-apart,” parallax 20, no. 3 (2014): 168–87. [44] diaspora premiered at the substation as part of the melbourne festival, october 3–6, 2019. concept, creation, composition, electronics, and lasers: robin fox; co-composer and violin: erkki veltheim ; dramaturg and co-direction: tamara saulwick; ondes musicales and moog synth: madeleine flynn ; vocals and theremin: georgina darvidis; video art and system design: nick roux; lighting design: amelia lever-davidson; costume design: shio otani. [45] a testing device that graphically displays voltages, allowing for measurement and analysis of waveforms and electromagnetic signal. [46] all quotes by robin fox are from his zoom interview with gail priest, april 29, 2021. [47] all quotes by tamara saulwick are from her zoom interview with gail priest, may 13, 2021. [48] a radio adaptation of pin drop made by tamara saulwick and peter knight for abc radio national (2013) can be listened to here. [49] a radio adaption of endings by tamara saulwick and peter knight, in consultation with miyuki jokiranta, made for abc radio national (2017) can be listened to here. saulwick’s most recent project, system_error (premiered on july 7, 2021 at arts house, melbourne), is a collaboration with sound artist/dancer alisdair macindoe, who has created a bespoke instrument from conductive electrical tape in which the performers’ bodies close the circuits to create audio. this, i would suggest, is a perfect candidate for electronic sound theater. [50] in 2016, fox and byron scullin co-founded the melbourne electronic sound studio (mess) which houses an astounding array of analogue modular synthesizers (many rare), available for members to use. [51] the ondes martenot is an early electronic instrument, patented in the same year as the theremin, played with keyboard and a ring that moves along a wire to create ethereal quivering tones. [52] botnik, a studio that specializes in machine-assisted entertainment remixes, fed a neural network a data diet of country and western songs resulting in the hilarious classic, “you can’t take my door.” [53] a theatrical device whereby a slanted transparent pane (glass or perspex) reflects an image, the source not seen by the audience, so that the reflection seems to hover in space. it is named after john henry pepper, the scientist who popularized it in the nineteenth century, although others also claim its invention. [54] a podcast featuring excerpts from the opera can be found here. [55] australian human rights commission [ahrc], the forgotten children: national inquiry into children in immigration detention 2014 . [56] the animated score can be viewed here. [57] see also stephen duncombe and steve lambert, “why artistic activism?” the center for artistic activism, april 9, 2018. [58] robert wilson, “robert wilson’s theatrical universe,” limelight, february 6, 2013. [59] werner herzog, scenarios, trans. martje herzog and alan greenberg (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2017). [60] developed at a cryptic cove park residency and premiered in august 2019 at mutek montréal, followed by the uk premiere in november 2019 at sonica glasgow . an excerpt of the work can be viewed here. [61] an excerpt of the work can be viewed here. [62] for example, jane bennett, graham harman, karen barad, tim ingold. [63] kosugi takehisa, “artist statement (2014),” foundation for contemporary arts. [64] nam june paik, “sekai de mottomo mumei na yūmeijin” [the world’s most obscure celebrity], in tokei no furiko, kazakura shō [clock pendulum, kazakura shō] (kagawa: sano garō, 1996), 8–9. translations are mine unless otherwise noted. see also akira suga, “nichijō no minaoshi” [reconsideration of the everyday), inneo dada japan 1958-1998 arata isozaki and the artists of the ‘white house’ (ōita city board of education, 1998), 150–59. the other members of neo-dada organizers agree that kazakura was their main source of information about dada and surrealism. [65] kosugi takehisa, “chikyū no oto wo kiku” [listen to the sound of the earth], in kazakura shō ten [shō kazakura exhibition], ed. kenji ogami (ōita: ōita art museum, 2002), 8–10. [66] kosugi takehisa, interview by christophe charles, hear office, ōsaka, november 26, 2015. [67] kosugi, interview. [68] kosugi, interview. [69] ongaku can be written using different characters so that it does not only mean music; see miki kaneda and tone yasunao, “the ‘john cage shock’ is a fiction! interview with tone yasunao, 1” post. notes on art in a global context, march 8, 2013. [70] see kawasaki kōji, “takehisa kosugi no ongaku” [the music of kosugi takehisa], in ongaku no pikunikku [music picnic] (ashiya city: ashiya city museum of art and history, 2017), 201–14. [71] john hudak, “fishing for sound: an interview with takehisa kosugi (1990),” in takehisa kosugi: interspersions, ed. rené block (berlin: daadgalerie, 1992), 7–12. [72] hudak, “fishing for sound,” 8. [73] christian wolff, “on form,” in ‪form—space, die reihe 7 (bryn mawr: theodore presser, 1965), 26–31. [74] john cage and daniel charles, for the birds (boston: marion boyars, 1981), 209. [75] daniel charles, “music and antimetaphor,” in musical signification: essays in the semiotic theory and analysis of music , ed. eero tarasti (berlin: de gruyter mouton, 1995), 27–42. [76] yamamoto atsuo, “interview with kosugi takehisa,” in takehisa kosugi: world of sound, new summer (ashiya city: ashiya city museum of art and history, 1996), 2–27. [77] atsuo, “interview with kosugi takehisa,” 16–17. [78] kosugi, “chikyū no oto wo kiku,” 9. [79] kikuhata mokuma, “kazakura shō taidan hapunā no kiseki” [a conversation with kazakura shō the locus of a happener], kikan 12 (1981): 5–32. [80] the event was held on november 15–16, 1962, at momoji beach, fukuoka. [81] kosugi, “chikyū no oto wo kiku,” 9. [82] kikuhata, “kazakura shō taidan hapunā no kiseki,” 18. [83] instead of walking forward, kazakura walked backward during aninstruction piece by kosugi: theatre music—keep walking intently, at the performance-event sweet 16, 1963, sōgetsu hall, tokyo. [84] the performance took place on december 12 and 19, 1986, during the exhibition japon des avant-gardes 1910–1970 (december 11, 1986—march 2, 1987). [85] hudak, “fishing for sound,” 9. [86] kikuhata, “kazakura shō taidan hapunā no kiseki,” 13. [87] kosugi, “chikyū no oto wo kiku,” 10. [88] kikuhata, “kazakura shō taidan hapunā no kiseki,” 24. [89] kosugi, interview by charles. [90] tom johnson, “takehisa kosugi and akio suzuki: stunning by coincidence,” village voice, april 23, 1979, 25. [91] kosugi, interview by charles. [92] kosugi, “chikyū no oto wo kiku,” 10. [93] kazakura, “mirukoto no oboegaki” [memorandum of seeing], in kazakura shō ten [shō kazakura exhibition], ed. kenji ogami (ōita: ōita art museum, 2002), 12–13. [94] buster, initiating bros premiered may 20–24, 2021, at the kunstenfestivaldesarts, brussels. reflections event or ephemeron? music’s sound, performance, and media a critical reflection on the thought of carolyn abbate martin scherzinger all hear the sound gladly, that rounds itself into a note. (johann wolfgang von goethe, west-östlicher divan) … if our ears were ten times more sensitive, we would hear matter roar—and presumably nothing else. (friedrich kittler, the truth of the technological world)1 mimesis awry “what does it mean to write about performed music? about an opera live and unfolding in time and not an operatic work? shouldn’t this be what we * this essay would not exist without the considerable benefits of interlocution. in particular, i would like to thank giorgio biancorosso, gianmario borio, alessandro cecchi, james currie, carlo lanfossi, and emilio sala for their engagement and encouragement in the writing of this text. i would also like to thank carolyn abbate, amy bauer, seth brodsky, amy cimini, michael gallope, stephen decatur smith, lydia goehr, berthold hoeckner, maryam moshaver, kelli moore, alexander rehding, holly watkins, emily white, and many others (too numerous to name), for their generous engagements with me over the years. the themes i raise here weighed upon our thinking particularly in the early years of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and are today marked by a certain nostalgia for the strident gaze toward the future we shared as young scholars at the dawn of a new era. this essay is dedicated to them all. one of the eight sections (“the privileged audility of performance”) of this essay appears in my “music’s techno-chronemics,” in investigating musical performance: theoretical models and intersections, ed. gianmario borio, alessandro cecchi, giovanni giuriati and marco lutzu (london: routledge, 2020), 69–88 and another section (“on the ethics of abstinence”) appears in “the ambiguous ethics of music’s ineffability: a brief reflection on the recent thought of michael gallope and carolyn abbate,” journal of the royal musical association 145, no. 1 (2020): 229–250, reproduced here with permission. 1 both quotations are from friedrich a. kittler, the truth of the technological world: essays on the genealogy of presence, trans. erik butler (stanford: stanford university press, 2013), 170–171. sound stage screen, vol. 1, issue 1 (spring 2021), pp. 145–192. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. doi: 10.13130/sss15335. event or ephemeron?146 sound stage screen 2021/1 do, since we love music for its reality, for voices and sounds that linger long after they are no longer there? love is not based on great works as unperformed abstractions or even as subtended by an imagined or hypothetical performance.”2 these are the opening lines of carolyn abbate’s much-cited essay “music—drastic or gnostic?”. the essay, written almost two decades ago, is a fine-tuned elaboration of what can be described as a general turn to affect in the humanities at the turn of the century. in particular, abbate’s text functioned as a kind of clarion call to north american music scholarship: if lawrence kramer’s new musicology decentered music’s perceived formalism by way of hermeneutics in the 1990s, abbate’s text decentered both formalism and hermeneutics (newly allied in her analysis) by way of affect in the first decade of the twenty-first century. what follows is a granular reflection on some of the central claims in “music—drastic or gnostic?” as well as some of the argumentative maneuvers deployed to make them. this involves scrutiny not only of the tensions grounding the definitional reach of the terms of argument, but also of their influence on the dialectics of musical performance, the role of media and technology in human sonic experience, and, finally, the question concerning morals, ethics, and perhaps politics. i will conclude with three primary points. first, i will locate in abbate’s prescient text an unexpected gnostic-determinate thrust (or ontological commitment), awkwardly situated in the context of an argument about the drastic-indeterminate character of music (characterized by ontological withdrawal). second, i will show that, given the successful overcoming of this contradiction, the argument for the drastic is not properly allied with the ethical or political positions to which it lays claim. instead, the radically open-ended construal of drastic experience engages ethics and politics in a way that paradoxically forecloses its element of incipience and recalcitrance. third, although they specify their ethico-political commitments quite differently, i will show how then-contemporary texts addressing the concept of affect—in particular, those by hans ulrich gumbrecht—too bear the marks of a similar foreclosure. the uncanny return of unwanted fixed meanings, basic categories, and gnostic determinations in a philosophy oriented toward presence and drastic openness is symptomatic of a hyperbolic construal of the opposition between language and affect—held firmly in the inertial grip of a centuries-old western dialectic. 2 carolyn abbate, “music—drastic or gnostic?” critical inquiry 30, no. 3 (2004): 505, emphasis added. page numbers for references to this article will be given directly in the main text. 147scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 allow me a few scattered remarks about my approach to this critical reflection. against the reticence advanced as an ethical response to music’s drastic core (in abbate’s account), my approach is perhaps exaggeratedly loquacious. it is an attempt to track the nuance of abbate’s argument down to the letter, thereby consciously even bypassing its spirit from time to time. but mobilizing a mode of literalism (or what one might call affective aphasia) is one of the central points of this reflection. in other words, it refuses the unspecified spirit of the argument to act as a clandestine handhold for its deeper significance. this is an attempt, one might say, to sing to music’s drastic potential a tune of its own making—a case of mimesis awry, or even mimicry. in other words, what is most important about abbate’s essay is not necessarily the coherent philosophical picture it frames, but all manner of brilliant observation it proffers along the way. in the years following its publication, abbate’s essay was met with considerable (and often surprisingly) negative reaction. but the vivid reaction to the essay was itself symptomatic of a kind of fascinated protesting, as if to strike a nerve at the heart of an institutionalized inertia. in reality, the essay had a lasting impact on music studies; and to the extent it was not actually influential on them, the essay catalyzed (or at least prefigured) a host of new inquiries in the first two decades of the twenty-first century—the turn to musical performance, the turn to musical timbre, the turn to musical ineffability, and of course the turn to affect.3 one important critique to emerge in the context of contemporary affect theory today relates to the way the libidinal drives (of the drastic) are coopted in the context of advanced capitalism. the perceptual specificity of music’s drastic experience—and mutatis mutandis its autonomic affective intensity, pre-attentive timbre recognition, irreducible ineffability, etc.— about which visualizations and representations (from notations and transcriptions to cultural and social associations and qualia, by way of spectrum plots, temporal envelope outlines, and spectrograms) are ostensibly mute, is nonetheless increasingly mapped, measured, ordered, and predicted by new 3 the proliferation of music scholarship in these domains is far too innumerable to list here. for prominent interventions in the respective fields, consider borio et al., investigating musical performance; emily i. dolan and alexander rehding, eds., the oxford handbook of timbre (oxford: oxford university press, 2018), https://www.oxfordhandbooks. com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190637224; robert fink, melinda latour and zachary wallmark, eds., the relentless pursuit of tone: timbre in popular music (new york: oxford university press, 2018); and michael gallope, deep refrains: music, philosophy, and the ineffable (chicago: university of chicago press, 2017). https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190637224 https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190637224 event or ephemeron?148 sound stage screen 2021/1 statistical models for computing. one may speak here of the industrialized transmutation of music’s listening systems into reflex response systems today, a subject of considerable importance in an era of industrial populism. in short, the turn to performance, affect, timbre, and ineffability marks a decisively symptomatic turn away from the material infrastructures of contemporary digitality—characterized by discretization, abstraction, statistical and symbolic orders, and the modeling of formal systems directly. the disavowal of industrialized computation, however, is generally not the tenor of the critique of the drastic that emerged in musicology in the past decade; nor is it my aim explicitly to raise this important critique in the context of this essay. to my way of thinking, the (often dismissive) musicological criticism itself had implications for scholarship that sometimes absorbed the weakest elements of the argument and simultaneously missed the insights layered into the axioms, observations, and conclusions formulated in abbate’s essay. far from endorsing this chorus of critique, therefore, i hope to reveal some of the unintended consequences of thinking the drastic in music within abbate’s framework, and thereby marking more prominently the strains of insight that nonetheless persist therein. above all, i hope that, without losing its critical edge, this reflection may be regarded as genuinely responsive to the central challenges raised by abbate’s riveting ideas. since the publication of “music—drastic or gnostic?” abbate has considerably expanded her theoretical ambit, engaging questions concerning the ephemera of silent film, the curious metaphysics of mundane sound objects, and their relation to technological mediation.4 in other words, aspects of the critique to follow have to some extent been addressed in these later writings, even as one detects a capacious consistency of argument throughout this oeuvre. for example, while technological mediation is downplayed, practically be definition, in the experience of the drastic, it is acknowledged in these later texts—but then, crucially, also devalued. the discussion of ephemeral sound in “sound object lessons,” for example, allows us something resembling an archimedean point from which to break out of the grand tradition of technological determinism—an enchained narrative that “cites a device or technology and then sees its reflection in a musical work or technique.”5 while “sound object lessons” tends to acknowledge 4 see, for example, abbate’s “overlooking the ephemeral,” new literary history 48, no. 1 (2017): 75–102; and “sound object lessons,” journal of the american musicological society 69, no. 3 (2016): 793–829.  5 abbate, “sound object lessons,” 794. 149scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 the capacity of technologies to shape sound, these do not drive the startling “musicalizations” abbate seeks to retrieve.6 in other words, her basic philosophical position betrays a determined disinterest in non-sounding elements that may inhabit the phenomenological scene of listening. therefore, while operationally present, sound technologies ultimately subtend musicalization. instead of tracking the nuanced differences between abbate’s recent writings—the changing calibrations of the technology/music dialectic, for example—this essay explores the impulse to draw out the inherently sound-centered exposition of musical listening, most vividly experienced in the throes of live performance. notwithstanding a certain fatigue for the drastic, this essay attempts to outline the limits of thinking musical performance as drastic experience. technophobic transmissions of the drastic abbate’s opening lines again: “what does it mean to write about performed music? about an opera live and unfolding in time and not an operatic work? shouldn’t this be what we do, since we love music for its reality, for voices and sounds that linger long after they are no longer there? love is not based on great works as unperformed abstractions or even as subtended by an imagined or hypothetical performance.” within the simplicity of a handful of inquisitive questions, we find a language that—consciously, perhaps—performs a kind of trick. readers are presented less with a group of casually associated questions than with a questionable chain of casual associations. listed as if to bear elementary likeness, we find the concepts of performance (“performed music”) and liveness (“live and unfolding in time”) set alongside music’s realness (“its reality”), its sonorous dimensions (“voices and sounds”) and its sonorous persistence (“linger[ing] long after they are no longer there”). this set of sound-centric ideas is extended in the 6 abbate, “sound object lessons,” 797. abbate’s resolutely sound-centered analytics are perhaps the most influential uptake of her work in musicological writings in the wake of “music—drastic or gnostic?” for an excellent commentary on the turn to music as heard sound, for example, see suzanne g. cusick, “musicology, performativity, acoustemology,” in theorizing sound writing, ed. deborah kapchan (middletown: wesleyan university press, 2017), 25–45. in her analysis of the “human microphone” (which formed part of the expressive resistance of the occupy wall street movement), cusick, on the one hand, draws on abbate’s attention to the “physical reality of music-as-sound,” but mediates its hold on the listener, on the other hand, with reference to “nonmusical acoustic practice” (27, 40). event or ephemeron?150 sound stage screen 2021/1 next three sentences to include “actual performances,” “music that exists in time,” “the material acoustic phenomenon,” and the like. these are the ideas that come to define what abbate calls the drastic—an irreducible (yet largely overlooked) realm of musical experience. in contrast, we find terms like “unperformed abstractions,” “imagined or hypothetical performance,” “meanings or formal designs,” and “the abstraction of the work”—incapable of confronting music’s presence; preoccupied instead by “something else,” something “behind or beyond or next to” the actual music—congealing into an antipodal set (505). in short, performances are set against works; liveness against abstraction; sonorous presence against meaning and form; the drastic against the gnostic. the first, almost obligatory, point to make about these dichotomous sets is that some of the terms are burdened by internal contradiction. for example, liveness is an arguably unstable idea, paradoxically constituted in our times. phil auslander argues, for example, that liveness is often constituted in dissimulatory fashion—an auratic effect both logically and practically produced in contexts of saturated technical reproduction.7 second, the attempt to elide drastic experience with liveness specifies a relationship between auditor and event that is, in social practice, quite constrained. abbate resolutely stakes out the “material present event”—the “actual live performance (and not a recording, even of a live performance)”—as the central object of absorption and attention (506, emphasis added). on one occasion, if only to inoculate their evident power, musical recordings are faintly nudged toward the possibility of ushering drastic experience: “even recordings,” abbate writes, “as technologically constructed hyperperformances, which we can arrest and control, are not quite safe as long as they are raining sound down on our heads” (512). but does the affective intensity to which the drastic lays claim have a more privileged relation to live performance—in the strict sense of the term, entailing both the spatial co-presence and temporal simultaneity of auditor and performer—than it does to modalities of reproduced sound? the idea, of course, is hotly contested and in doubt. first, the idea is at variance with a widespread anthropological reality— the ubiquitous affective investments in streams of recorded music no less than music that possess no live counterpart at all. in the context of a world where representational technologies have overwhelmed presentational 7 philip auslander, liveness: performance in a mediatized culture (london: routledge, 1999). 151scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 ones, modes of contemporary affect can be shoehorned into the specificities of strictly live encounter only under considerable strain. the dominant mode of musical production, marketing, and engineering today cannot be divorced from the technological resources—computer-imaging methods, beat matching, sampling, studio looping, multi-tracking, mixing, overdubbing, vocoding, autotuning, etc.—that underwrite its “material acoustic” character. if the historical raison d’ être for sound recording was mimetic—a documentary impulse—its mid-century reality had shifted toward a constructive one. indeed, i would describe the history of representational technologies in terms of a great shift from representational fidelity (in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) to hyperfidelity (in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries). in the context of hyperfidelity, the musical copy is itself a surrogate-original (skeuomorphically called the master copy) while the live rendition of it is a subordinate reproduction, not infrequently aspiring to the condition of the official recording. this is not to say that figures of music’s ostensible loci will remain under the grip of this rubric in decades to come (especially as the financialized logics of digital musical streaming take increasing monopolistic hold), but that the figure of hyperfidelity still characterizes the dominant contemporary mode of musical consumption today. this leads to a second, more important, point concerning the role of technology in drastic musical experience. a host of twentieth-century composers and theorists—from pierre schaeffer, roland barthes, and gilles deleuze to helmut lachenmann, john oswald, and michel chion, to name only an obvious few—turned their attention to the question concerning the technologies of music’s non-gnostic components. what generally distinguishes these arguments from that found in abbate’s text is that they do not align contemporary modes of sonic presence most immediately with live performance, but rather with its antithesis—sound manipulation and reproduction. this reversal of fortune for technology is itself symptomatic of a paradoxical post-cold war shift in conceptualizing the affective dimension of music’s ineffability. schaeffer’s phenomenological reduction, for example, shares with abbate an effort to re-direct listening toward non-appropriated sound. in other words, his is an attempt to free auditory acts from the linguisticallymediated circuits of naturalized listening. for schaeffer, such listening involves what he calls écouter réduite (reduced or acousmatic) listening, which is distinct from ouïr (the inattentive audition associated with persistent soundscapes), comprendre (listening directed at the reception of languages and the extraction of messages), and écouter (listening directed at event or ephemeron?152 sound stage screen 2021/1 registering indices of objects and events in the world).8 acousmatic listening brackets sound from the communicative or indicative significations to which listening is all-too-easily enjoined, encountering sound instead as objets sonores. this is a kind of listening that leads “from pure ‘sound’ to pure ‘music,’” bringing to earshot declensions of sonorous potential— “previously unheard sounds, new timbres, dizzying modes of playing,” and so on—in short, a kind of drastic “listen[ing] with a new ear” (not to be equated with psychoanalytic listening, about which more below).9 despite an evident proximity of reduced listening to the drastic, however, schaeffer’s position vis-à-vis technology is diametrically opposed to that of abbate. for schaeffer, radio, phonography, and tape are the technological incarnations of pythagoras’ acousmatic ideal. far from lamenting the losses, schaeffer focuses on the perceptual affordances of new technologies, especially those of sound reproduction. schaeffer’s neo-benjaminian leanings, for example, lead him to construe repeat-listening as ushering “different perspectives” that reveal a “new aspect of the object”; indeed, repetition even has the effect of “exhausting th[e] curiosity” for indexical or linguistically-based hearing.10 for schaeffer, in short, new technologies are the assistive vehicle for the anti-gnostic “acousmatic state”; not its antithesis.11 the technocentric turn in twentieth century accounts of drastic musical experience, broadly construed, extends well beyond schaeffer’s treatise. even barthes’ famous notion of the voice’s grain, to which abbate’s writing owes a loose allegiance, actually echoes schaeffer’s notion of the grain, which he detects in the technological context of slowed-down tape recording. in schaeffer’s view, the slowed-down portion, “acting on the temporal structure of the sound like a magnifying glass, will have allowed us to distinguish certain details, of grain, for example, which our ear, alerted, informed, will also find in the second playing at normal speed.”12 in other words, tape recording is the technical support mechanism for a non-hermeneutic attentiveness to sound qua sound. the composer lachenmann expanded this technical insight into a compositional procedure—musique concrète instrumentale—which foregrounds listening to the way “materials and energies” are afforded (and undermined) by specific instrumental tech8 pierre schaeffer, treatise on musical objects: an essay across disciplines, trans. christine north and john dack (oakland: university of california press, 2017), 64–69. 9 schaeffer, 69. 10 schaeffer, 66. 11 schaeffer, 68. 12 schaeffer, 67, emphasis added. 153scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 nologies.13 likewise, the film theorist chion argues in the context of cinema that technical reproducibility is a necessary condition for “reduced” listening; a mode of listening that focuses on “traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning.”14 while chion’s reduced listening cannot be conflated with drastic listening, its embrace of the “inherent qualities of sounds” in real time, and especially its disavowal of the “sound’s cause or the comprehension of its meaning” is uncannily common to both.15 as it is with the object of drastic listening (music’s “material acoustic phenomenon”), reduced listening also involves an aspect of wildness, ephemerality, and caprice: “there is always something about sound that overwhelms and surprises us no matter what—especially when we refuse to lend it our conscious attention; and thus sound interferes with our perception, affects it.”16 in short, chion’s nonconscious, overwhelming, affected perception is the technophilic twin of abbate’s nonsignifying, unassured drastic experience. finally, deleuze and guattari, whose two-volume capitalism and schizophrenia lay the groundwork for brian massumi’s theory of affect in the early 2000s, likewise construe affect (or “desiring-production”) as an abstract machine, modeled on the musical synthesizer—a technology that could assemble and combine sonic elements outside of a priori nomenclatures.17 drawing on their reading of pierre boulez’s analytic writings, the philosophers claim that the “synthesizer places all of the parameters in continuous variation, gradually making ‘fundamentally heterogeneous elements end up turning into each other in some way.’ the moment this occurs there is a common matter. it is only at this point that one reaches the abstract machine.”18 in other words, desiring-production resists taxonomic organization and plugs instead into machinic assemblages: “philosophy is no longer synthetic judgment; it is like a thought synthesizer functioning to make thought travel, make it mobile, make it a force of the cosmos (in the same way as one makes sound travel).”19 these composers 13 helmut lachenmann, “musique concrète instrumentale,” slought, conversation with gene coleman, april 7, 2008, https://slought.org/resources/musique_concrete_instrumentale. 14 michel chion, audio-vision: sound on screen, ed. and trans. claudia gorbman (new york: columbia university press, 1994), 29. 15 chion, 31, 30. 16 chion, 33. 17 brian massumi, parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation (durham, nc: duke university press, 2002). 18 gilles deleuze and félix guattari, a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. brian massumi, (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1987), 109. 19 deleuze and guattari, 343. event or ephemeron?154 sound stage screen 2021/1 and philosophers of techno-presence amass new sound technologies— ranging from phonography, radio, tape, and telephone to musical instruments, auditory projection in cinema, and the sound synthesizer—as resistive forces to guard against our naturalized tendencies toward gnostic (indexical, formal, hermeneutic, etc.) musical engagement. for abbate, in contrast, technology itself is largely to be resisted; indeed, “the very fact of recording” comes into presence only as a “repeatable surrogate” (534). like musical works, recordings transform the event into a “souvenir” (513); an “artifact, handheld and under control” (534). placed alongside the work of schaeffer, barthes, lachenmann, chion, deleuze and guattari, and others, abbate’s construal of the drastic becomes a striking outlier. ostensibly caught up in the wild ephemerality of its “temporal wake” (511), we now find the drastic experience itself subject to the kind of “arrest and control” (however differently inflected) associated with the “hyperperformances” that abbate rejects (512). in short, for abbate, drastic listening can be secreted only within the confines of a single conduit for music’s mediatic transmission—the live event. of auditory relocations: lingering or loitering? but what of the chain of associations that characterizes the drastic auditory experience? what of the litany of terms accruing to it—performance (505), presence (512), strangeness (508), liveness (509), sonorousness (505), actuality (509), temporality (511), reality (505), materiality (510), acoustic phenomenality (505), physicality (510), ephemerality (513), opacity (510), capacity (to transfix, bewilder, etc.) (512), ineffability (521), sociality (514), carnality (529), and so on? what do we make of this capacious ballooning of characteristics within the narrowing contexts of music’s transmission? by what desire is more packed here into less? and by what inscription does drastic listening have the capacity to affect everything from love (505), fear (508), consolation (508) and peril (510) to wildness (512), desperation (510), exhaustion (533) and elation (533)? it is true that the expansive list of drastic attributes is occasionally moderated with reference to music’s patently banal dimensions. in fact, we find in the text two references to the drastic mundane. first, abbate’s momentary reflection on a piano accompaniment—“doing this really fast is fun or here comes a big jump” (511)—counts as an experience closer to the music’s “reality at hand” than the “bizarre” mental inquiries (511, 510)—the music’s “enlightenment subjectivity” (510), 155scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 for example, or the political order it reflects—that are associated with gnostic inquiry. second, we find a brief reference to music’s potentially “boring” effect on performers and listeners (513). some fast fun, a big jump—the quotidian, if drastic, experiences of a piano performance—and something boring—the uneventful, if drastic, experience of an event—basically sums up the dull side of the drastic, as it is represented in abbate’s text. for the most part, however, the drastic carries an exciting dionysian luster—it is unearthly (508), wild (509) and mysterious (513). even the reference to boredom is abbreviated in its fuller argumentative context—a solitary adjective in a long list of alluring effects, characterized by semantically unhinged intensities. here is the full sentence: “music’s effects upon performers and listeners can be devastating, physically brutal, mysterious, erotic, moving, boring, pleasing, enervating, or uncomfortable, generally embarrassing, subjective, and resistant to the gnostic” (513–514). in short, therefore, the drastic liberates the wildness of musical experience; while, against odds, the beleaguered gnostic tries to tame it—the gnostic tries “to domesticate what remains nonetheless wild” (508). what remains wild? what remains at all? i phrase these questions this way, because in abbate’s text, one answer to them can be detected in the space that opens in the immediate aftermath of our encounter with music. abbate repeatedly explores variations within these spaces of auditory relocation. in fact, therein lie the stakes of the expansive list of dionysian attributes of the drastic. let me explain. the uneasy affiliation of unlike terms in the list characterizing drastic experience is partnered with the uneasy non-affiliation of like terms accruing to both drastic and gnostic experience. on the one hand, for example, we are told we “love music for its reality”—specifically for those voices and sounds that “linger long after” they abate (505, emphasis added). on the other hand, abbate simultaneously insists that “real music is music that exists in time, the material acoustic phenomenon” alone (505); an experience “not enduring past the moment” (512, emphasis added). a few pages later the point is intensified when abbate strikes a vivid contrast between music’s vanishing temporality and its ex post facto interpretation: “in musical hermeneutics, … effects in the here and now are illicitly relocated to the beyond” (514, emphasis added). here, the attribute attendant to the hermeneutic act of relocating listening away from the here and now raises considerably the ethical stakes with which the essay began its polemic. the essay’s opening gambit about the limits of hermeneutics and formalism cohere largely around the principle of withdrawal. drawing on event or ephemeron?156 sound stage screen 2021/1 vladimir jankélévitch’s writings,20 abbate here argues that these musical engagements “encourage us to retreat from real music to the abstraction of the work and, furthermore, always to see … ‘something else,’ something behind or beyond or next to this mental object” (505, emphasis added). this is the kind of displacement (or relocation) emerging from a mode of refusal—the retreat from real music. the point is reiterated throughout the essay. for example, elsewhere abbate writes: “between the score as a script, the musical work as a virtual construct, and us, there lies a huge phenomenal explosion, a performance that demands effort and expense and recruits human participants, takes up time, and leaves people drained or tired or elated or relieved” (533). in other words, the refusal to put in the effort, pay the expense, take up the time, and so on, amounts to a kind of retreat from the present reality of musical performances. indeed, withdrawals such as these “lack that really big middle term, the elephant in the room,” which, summed up in the next sentence, amounts to “music’s exceptional phenomenal existence” (533). the point is that these acts of refusal and retreat are then amplified, by assertion alone, to constitute something forbidden, as if to be laundering meanings from murky origins. in less than ten pages, for example, we witness a retreat from something morphing into an illicit relocation therefrom—a metamorphosis that constitutes a particular rhetorical relocation all of its own (521). the fascinating thing about relocating the musical experience in the hermeneutic/formalist manner, however, is that it blocks a kind of affective becoming that, for abbate, remains central to musical experience. again, the logic of refusal underwrites this point. she writes: “retreating to the work displaces that experience, and dissecting the work’s technical features or saying what it represents reflects the wish not to be transported by the state that the performance has engendered in us” (505–506). here, a mode of gnostic repression obstructs a drastic experience—to be transported by sound—paradoxically wholly in keeping with romantic theories of music as processual becoming, the transfiguration of the commonplace, and so on. but, aside from archaic resonances, whence the overwhelming drastic transport? to wit, whence the long lingering in sonorities that are no longer there? what kinds of relocations are these—the transport, the lingering— that immunize them from their illicit fellow travelers? it appears that—in the wake of the vanishing presence of music’s phenomenal existence, its ef20 vladimir jankélévitch, music and the ineffable, trans. carolyn abbate (princeton: princeton university press, 2003). 157scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 fects in the “here and now” and no further or later—certain types of relocations are permitted, after all (514, emphasis added). but these are the movements of a policed relocation—movements along a particular, constrained path, steered precariously away from anything conceivably construed, in jankélévitch’s formulation, as “something else” (505). in other words, this is the “transport” that steers clear of the scylla and charybdis of anything that can be conceived as lying “behind or beyond or next to this mental object” (505). what to make of this mental object—this entity from whence music’s reality lovingly issues forth; from whence audibility receives a wink of recognition from unsullied phenomenal existence itself? is this the entity one is paradoxically compelled to describe as a dogmatic presentiment of real music’s mysterious a priori? lingering in the quiet wake of music’s drastic sounding thereby constitutes a mode of supra-audibility that breaks through the conventional barrier associated with the drastic event—fully respectful of music’s essential “disappear[ing]” act (513); “not enduring past the moment” (512); the “vanished live performances” (514) and so on. as it is with the implied wish to be transported, this lingering-type of engagement is the privileged supra-audible truth that paradoxically transcends the supra-audible “meanings” (509) “content” (516) “import” (518) “message” (521) and “social truth” (526) to which the ear seems all-too-gnostically enjoined. the latter contents and messages and truths are illicitly secreted out of enigma machines, cryptograms, seismographs, and so on (524–529), in a process that is broadly summed up as “clandestine mysticism” (513–534). as it is with money laundering, these accounts arrogate contents and messages and truths by hiding their obscure origins and routing them through all manner of supra-audible theoretical machinery—historical, formal, linguistic, social, economic and political. in other words, the hermeneutic and formalist “inscription devices” (514) and “enigma machine[s]” (524) are the illicit middlemen laundering meaning from musical sound—a process that works “as if by magic” (528). drastic engagement, in contrast, requires a radical de-signifying step, a shedding of devices and machines. following a long tradition of thinking sound outside of theory, abbate argues that, with the drastic, “there is no a priori theoretical armor” (510). this is a version of the drastic, in short, that is construed as supra-supra-audible. how, then, does one tie up abbate’s central reflections on the question concerning retrospective concern for musical experience? what persists beyond music’s definitional circumspection (or what i have described above as the real music’s mysterious a priori)? the answer is shoehorned into some event or ephemeron?158 sound stage screen 2021/1 version of the following formulation: the content of drastic transport and lingering must relocate listening licitly toward the absence of theoretical armor. ce n’est pas un a priori. licit relocation, in other words, takes the listener not next to, but simply to the elephant in the room; not to the mysticism of gnostic decipherment, but to the non-conceptual drastic music qua music. to be transported by music, in short, is to be taken not beyond, but to within music’s conceptual no-place—u-topia. spending-time in the wake of the vanishing live, in short, comes in two distinct forms: lingering and loitering. a maelstrom of questions arises at this juncture. first: when—in the wake of music’s vanishing present—we stick around longer than music’s actual sounding, are we experiencing a form of drastically (utopian) lingering or a form of gnostically (laundered) loitering? second: given the fact that a certain persistence in the vanishing present is common to both lingering and loitering, can the ontological inscription of music’s ephemerality alone secure an argument that elevates the drastic experience, by casting schopenhauerian shadows on the gnostic version of things? third: would such an argument both arrogate the powers of radical vanishing and disappearance in the context of emergence and appearance, and, furthermore—through its clandestine withholding in the context of the gnostic—asymmetrically so? finally: what can happen if, instead of listening within the horns of an asymmetric dilemma, we return musical experience to the crossroads of the drastic and the gnostic, if only to ponder the road not taken? the privileged audility of performance the gnostic seems to leave out the undomestic, untamed aspects of musical experience—its irreducible aural presence; its material sensual dimensions (triggering fear, peril, and much more) which leave listeners with no handhold in signification. james currie would, in a well-known essay written a few years later, describe music’s beriddling specificity as “the blank transformative hole” into which we fall in the moment of musical encounter.21 the drastic, in contrast, is characterized by examples of uncanny resemblances, experiential alchemies, cracked notes, hallucinations, and so on (more on these below). given that the gnostic attitude is “precluded” thereby, the drastic resides, above all, in performed music (abbate, 510). in other 21 james currie, “music after all,” journal of the american musicological society 62, no.1 (2009): 184. 159scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 words, it is at the site of performance that drastic experience is most vividly at play: “it is virtually impossible to sustain [gnostic speculations about subjectivity or politics] while playing or absorbed in listening to music that is materially present” (510). how do the examples of performance function as demonstrations of the drastic? abbate reflects on an occasion where she accompanies an aria from mozart’s idomeneo. as an experiment, she poses some distracting questions, while playing, grounded in speculations she had read about the monarchic regime and the enlightenment subjectivity said to be reflected in the music. she concludes that, interjected in media perficientur, these “consciously bizarre” mental inquiries could, finally, only be “dismissed as ludicrous” (510, 511). interestingly, while vividly upholding the difference between drastic and gnostic, abbate loosens the distinction between actual playing and absorbed listening in the over-arching context of performance, where one is undoubtedly “dealing with real music in real time” (511). this is the privileged site of audility—“the reality at hand”—which, practically by definition, sabotages the “metaphysical distance” required for gnostic arguments about politics, subjectivity, or any other modes of meaning-making or signification (511). abbate expands the argument against gnostic approaches to musical works by appealing to their affective value as well. in the throes of “real music in real time,” she writes, gnostic engagement is both “almost impossible” and “generally uninteresting” (511). a simple, practical fact hereby evolves into a judgment of value. to “depart mentally” (511) from music’s reality at hand is both not practical and largely less interesting. aside from the fact of its impracticality, why is the gnostic construed as less interesting at this point in the argument? the answer lies in the wild affective intensities associated with the drastic, and the narrowing affective reach of the gnostic: “listening as a phenomenon takes place under music’s thumb, and acoustic presence may transfix or bewilder; it frees the listener from the sanctioned neatness of the hermeneutic” (512). the drastic is liberating, in other words—it heralds states of wonder, astonishment, mystery, confusion and awe—and the gnostic is confining—it is neat and sanctioned (512) instead of wild and mysterious (513); it locks down meaning instead of leaving it open; it is a safer haven (512), instead of free (516) and exceptional (533) in its phenomenal existence; it traffics in abstractions under the aspect of eternity (512) instead of engaging the labor and carnality (514) of music’s vanishing liveness. the striking point about formalist and hermeneutic approaches, then, is not only that they have “little to do with real music” (512), but rather that event or ephemeron?160 sound stage screen 2021/1 they foreclose the wildness and mystery, the open-endedness and the freedom; the labor and the carnality of drastic experience. the alluring power of the drastic is such that it can traverse all manner of affect, at once ephemeral—bewildered, mysterious, fallen into silence, etc.—and embodied—physically brutal, erotic, carnal, etc. (510–513). the gnostic, in contrast, is atemporal and disembodied; punitive even—it repays “the freedom” of the drastic by trapping the “gift-giver in a cage” (517). none of these attributes of the drastic are objectionable as such, but their antithetical relation to hermeneutic and formal engagements, on the one hand, and musical performance, on the other, can be sustained only with difficulty. in fact, not infrequently, abbate’s text must bend curious and complex phenomena to the scriptural pattern of a dichotomous theoretical mold. for example, the assertion that homosexual subjectivity is somehow reflected in what susan mcclary calls the “enharmonic and oblique modulations” of musical sound can hardly be described as a gnostic attempt to “domesticate” drastic wildness (508, 510–511).22 in fact, abbate’s rhetorical maneuver gains traction here precisely from the seeming absurdity of mcclary’s statement—its risky wildness, its weirdness—made palpable in the paradoxical context of a banal performance (512). what we detect here is a drastic encounter unwittingly domesticated under the guidance of an instruction (“here comes a big jump,” 511), while the gnostic engagement escalates its claims (“narrative structures” of “gay writers and critics,” 511), well beyond the logic and grasp of its a priori instructional apparatus. abbate’s doubts about mcclary’s claims, at this argumentative juncture, have less to do with domesticating the drastic—the prison of sanctioned neatness; the entrapment of a gift-giver; and so on—and more to do with the unruly over-reach of their interpretive freedom—their illicit wildness. this is not simply to reactively endorse the validity of mcclary’s claims without scrutiny, but to demonstrate the way attributing privileged audility to performance creates the conditions for the undermining of abbate’s general argument. abbate claims that “during the experience of real music”—or, more precisely, in the context of actually “playing” it—“thoughts about what music signifies or about its formal features do not cross [her] mind” (511). gnostic considerations such as these appear as if in “the wrong moment,” departed from the “reality at hand” (511). this reality, however, is 22 the reference is to susan mcclary, “constructions of subjectivity in schubert’s music,” in queering the pitch: the new gay and lesbian musicology, ed. philip brett, elizabeth wood and gary c. thomas (new york: routledge, 1994), 223. 161scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 highly unstable, for it encompasses both the quotidian scan for directives from the score (or its mnemonic supplement)—“doing this really fast;” the “big jump” to come; etc.—and, by the next paragraph, the wildness of an “acoustic presence” that can “transfix or bewilder” (512). this juxtaposition of terms associated with the drastic serves to sharpen a distinction between, on the one hand, performing music and, on the other, listening to it (while not performing); a distinction that has been clandestinely elided here. are wholly different attentional regimes blended here in service of the drastic? how bewildered, for example, or how transfixed (or fearful, desperate, erotically aroused, uncomfortable, and so on) can one actually afford to be by the sounding passage under one’s musically-performing hands? the specificity of performance—its reality at hand—in fact demands that such wild affective intensities are kept at arms’ length. the successful execution of the big jump to come actually requires a narrowing of attention towards the physical task at hand and away from the allure of such drastic drift. to posit performance as the site of a privileged engagement with the drastic (in the full range and sense of the term) is paradoxically to simplify the complex audilities at play in any actual performance. there is, in other words, a strange dance between close listening and un-listening (engaging and suppressing real-time evaluations, alertness, affects, etc.) that characterizes actual musical performances and cannot be simply collated—under the paradoxical rubric of freedom (517), wildness (508–509) and openness (516)—to the drastic. for abbate, “while one is caught up in its temporal wake and its physical demands or effects,” the performer (at least in the context of live performance) cannot readily “depart mentally” from actual music (511). but from what event, precisely, can the performer not depart? by what inscription is the performer enjoined to remain? again, what exactly remains? does the idea of the work play no part in this remaining? what of the precarious devastation (513) and dread associated with the departures (511) pertaining to mismanaged performances? why are they dreadful and how is the dread overcome? what remaining features guide the dread and its overcoming? do all the “ formal features” associated with this site of remaining, for example, depart from the performer’s audility—to the extent that they do not even “cross [her] mind” (511)? how is derailment from the musical event at hand circumvented, if not by way of an appeal to at least some of these formal features some of the time—a specific affective rubric (bravura, say), or a guiding harmonic scheme, to offer an avenue out of a series of missed notes; or an internalized feel for specific metric coordinates, or a set of gestural event or ephemeron?162 sound stage screen 2021/1 rhythmic conventions, to offer an avenue out of a missed page turn, and the like? and what sense of “real music in real time” prohibits every audile departure (511)? what if sustaining the temporality of a distinct motor pattern entails ignoring the inherent pattern emerging from an interlocking situation? what if driving the melodic line towards an oblique modulation entails the momentary suppression of presently unfolding heterophonic details? what if the momentary cracking of the singer’s voice that one is accompanying must be suppressed in order successfully to execute a big leap that is lying in wait (beyond the moment of cracking)? are these not the necessary aspects of un-listening required for the proper functioning of both solo and ensemble work? indeed, are these not the small “reflective distance[s] or safer haven[s] from the presence of musical sound” (unilaterally associated by abbate with the gnostic) that are, in fact, the conditions for the possibility of music’s “proper object” (512, 513)? the point is that gnostic knowledge is not the only knowledge that takes temporary leave of music’s “proper object”—construed as its “ephemeral phenomenal being” alone (513). it is true that drastic and gnostic engagements differently mediate their comings-and-goings from actual performed music but neither can be immanently construed as either departed or remained; either relocated or located. the distinction between the drastic and gnostic cannot be sustained at this level of generality. abbate argues, in contrast, that the gnostic approach alone has “misplaced its proper object,” no less so when it treats performance as an “object awaiting decipherment” or as a “text subject to some analytical method yet to come” (513). abbate writes: “to treat them this way would be to transfer the professional deformations proper to hermeneutics to a phenomenon or event where those habits become alien and perhaps useless” (513). acts of decipherment and analysis, in other words, are habituated professional gestures that turn a deaf ear to performance—indeed, performance “is inaudible to both in practice” (513)—thereby relocating their findings to an irreducible outside, and hence without use. what do we make of this professional site of habituation, not infrequently associated with elitism (510, 516) in abbate’s text—and its peculiar uselessness (513)? for abbate, this elite site (for “privileged eyes only,” 528) is the clandestine mysticism deeply abstracted from actual performance, conceived (at this point of the argument) within the contours of an informal, but constitutive, gebrauchs-context. but, outside the logic and grasp of these elite habits, what exactly is properly useful to this musical reality at hand? in other words, what are the performers’ listening techniques, body habits, and trained reflexes that lie in wait for 163scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 the task at hand? we might frame the question thus: are these habits not ready to hand (zuhanden, to invoke martin heidegger’s formulation of such matters) for the performance’s reality at hand? if the drastic resides but in the flux and flow of actual performance, are its freedoms not endangered by the force of these useful habits? is the interface between the musical instrument and the human body not a fertile training ground for embodied comportment? are these behaviors not brought under the direction of both the instrument’s technical designs and (in the case of traditional european concert music at least) a host of additional mediatic inscription practices? abbate briefly acknowledges the performer’s “servitude, even automatism” (presumably to notational prescriptions) early in the argument (508), but, for the most part, the drastic is characterized by the dionysian attributes (ineffability, ephemerality, desperation, peril, and so on) already amply listed above. if performance were taken more seriously than it is in abbate’s text, one would necessarily encounter, in a not insignificant sense, entirely new mediations of body and affect. if this were the case, in other words, one would be compelled to characterize the drastic component of music in paradoxically antithetical terms: the drastic now as conformism to prescribed codes of technical conduct; as yielding to the regulatory forces that govern the mastery of a skill set; as cultivating the automation of a host of physical human actions, and the like. in short, in the performing body we bear witness not to wildness, mystery, openness, and subjectivity, but— at least in equal measure—to cultivation, repetition, discipline, technique, and interpellation. in short, what is useful to music’s reality at hand is a site par excellence of what could be called coiled-up dressage. the true drastic performance is noteworthy here not so much for its uncanny wildness and magic—its “strangeness” and “unearthly … qualities” (508)—but for its internalized familiarity, its disciplined domesticity? one is reminded of the parade of unremarkable stock gestures accompanying so much music and operatic performance.23 dare one be nudged even further here, and speak of the privileged audility of the performative formula, the commonplace, the cliché? 23 mary ann smart, “the manufacture of extravagant gesture: labour and emotion on the operatic stage,” (presentation for the seminar investigating musical performance: towards a conjunction of ethnographic and historiographic perspectives, fondazione giorgio cini, venice, july 9, 2016). see also smart’s mimomania: music and gesture in nineteenth-century opera (berkeley: university of california press, 2004). event or ephemeron?164 sound stage screen 2021/1 on the ethics of abstinence it is not without ambiguity that abbate suggests that due deference to the drastic may entail silence. on the one hand, she seeks to expand the limits of “remain[ing] mute” (513) in the experience of musical performance, while on the other hand, she resists the “loquacity” of music scholarship—a “professional deformation”—suggesting that, in the final analysis, this “might even mean falling silent” (510). mostly, however, the essay is a critical story about the gnostic arrogation of meanings and forms beyond its remit. hermeneutics and formalism summon authority by way of clandestine mysticism, an institutionally-sanctioned proffering of “messages,” “cultural facts,” “associations” and “constructed objects” across the terrain of music’s sounding (517). abbate, in contrast, calls for reticence, abeyance, abstinence (“leaving open or withdrawing,” 516), resisting the rush to meaning. given music’s subsistence in a state of “unresolved and subservient alterity” (524) it is frequently “used or exploited” to commercial ends, a temptation that responsible scholarship should resist (517). following jankélévitch, music’s very capacity for unleashing “potential meanings in high multiples” is therefore linked to an ethics of restraint; it is music’s “ineffability” and “mutability” that ultimately “frees us” (516). this is the freedom that should not be repaid by ensnaring the gift-giver in the cage of gnostic coercion. instead of “taking advantage of ” music—by pinning to it a determinate meaning or form—abbate advances “hesitating before articulating a terminus,” and “perhaps, drawing back” (517). we read repeatedly of the appropriate ethical stance toward music—characterized by “grace, humility, reticence,” and so on (529). in fact, the closing lesson of the essay elevates such withdrawal to a kind of principle, grounded in the acknowledgment that “our own labor is ephemeral as well and will not endure” (536). resisting the temptation to lay bare a “cryptic truth” concealed in the performance, and “accepting its mortality” instead, she writes, may itself amount to a “form of wisdom” (536). wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.24 what is fascinating about this kind of ethics of hesitation and humility, as it is described by abbate, is the way a gesture of abstaining—from coercion (535), authoritative conjuring (522), taking advantage (517), and so on— produces an ethical position that is as simple and eloquent as it is complex and incoherent. first, the simple of act of withdrawal recapitulates a kind 24 “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” ludwig wittgenstein, tractatus logico-philosophicus, trans. c.k. ogden (new york: cosimo, 2007), 108. 165scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 of postmodern hesitation in the experience of impossibility/undecidability. this is a curious return to a quasi-deconstructive emphasis on troubling the certainty of embedded significations, placing prevalent concept-metaphors under erasure, and so on. in fact, abbate regards postmodernism as soft hermeneutics—with “trickle-downs from skepticism”—substituting notions like “embedded or encoded” meaning for “trace or mark” of meaning (516). despite the softening of the metaphoric attribution of meaning, both, she argues, read cultural data as inscription. in other words, deconstruction is read here as a kind of cloaked gnostic operation. abbate also dismisses the deconstructive approach directly, associating it with masculinity, and by extension, with a differently formulated coercion that denies materiality and presence. she writes: adopting a deconstructive apparatus and scoffing at presence like a man can truly seem perverse when real music is at issue. unlike another aural phenomena [sic]—language or literature in oral form—real music does not propose a “simultaneity of sound and sense” that in thus positing a signifier and signified can itself be “convincingly deconstruct[ed].” real music is a temporal event with material presence that can be held by no hand.25 to buttress her anti-deconstructive claims, abbate recruits gumbrecht’s philosophical turn to presence. against the “metaphysical” project associated with the “insights of saussurean linguistics” (531), she advocates a discourse of “movement, immediacy, and violence” associated with events “born to presence.”26 meaning culture, she argues, is above all anathema to the presence of performed music. given gumbrecht’s argumentative centrality at this juncture, it is instructive to compare the ethics of his position with those of abbate. gumbrecht too takes great interest in the materiality of musical experience—“i can hear the tones of the oboe on my skin,” he asserts in the context of an example of the production of presence—but his ethics are in stark contrast to the reticence advocated by abbate.27 in gumbrecht’s 25 abbate, “music—drastic or gnostic?” 531. the quotations are from henry m. sayre, the object of performance: the american avant-garde since 1970 (chicago: the university of chicago press, 1989), 15. 26 the last two quotes, cited by abbate, are from hans ulrich gumbrecht, “form without matter vs. form as event,” mln 111, no. 3 (1996): 586–587. 27 hans ulrich gumbrecht, production of presence: what meaning cannot convey (stanford: stanford university press, 2004), 97. event or ephemeron?166 sound stage screen 2021/1 universe, there simply are no ethics to be found in moments of presence, deixis, or epiphany. he writes: “there is nothing edifying in such moments, no message, nothing that we could really learn from them,” which is why he refers to them as no more than “moments of intensity.”28 these moments depart from all scripting (“there is no reliable, no guaranteed way of producing moments of intensity”);29 they simply veer away from the taxonomies of signification, including ethical ones. in sum, there is simply no “convergence between aesthetic experience and ethical norms.”30 not only is presence empty of ethical content or significance, for gumbrecht, but—in stark contrast to the invitation to reticence or withdrawal— presence is actually perceived as a kind of brutal assault. indeed, the reason we should be drawn to presence at all, given its lack of edification, ethics, or meaning, is, for gumbrecht, something of an enigma: “how is it possible that we long for such moments of intensity although they have no edifying contents or effects to offer?”31 for gumbrecht, the fascination lies in the fact that they transcend the everyday—which is so “insuperably consciousness-centered … and perhaps even mediated by clouds and cushions of meaning.”32 it is this insight that leads gumbrecht to link moments of intensity and presence to power and violence—the violence of “blocking spaces with bodies”—which turns out to be “irresistibly fascinating for us.”33 for abbate, the gnostic impulse is the brutal play of authority—“taking advantage” of music’s indeterminacy, arrogating and foreclosing the drastic, and so on—but for gumbrecht, to momentarily transpose the dichotomous terms, it is in fact the drastic that arrogates and forecloses all remnants of the gnostic. it is presence that overwhelms us—“occupying and thus blocking our bodies”—producing a kind of drastic fascination with “losing control over oneself.”34 gumbrecht’s is a story of the assault of presence, not the assault on presence. finally, in a neo-schopenhauerian twist, gumbrecht actually describes the material assault of presence in terms that resist even a residual sense of reticence toward the gnostic impulse—the wisdom of the momentary or the ethics of withdrawal. for gumbrecht, instead, presence ultimately signals our 28 gumbrecht, 98. 29 gumbrecht, 99. 30 gumbrecht, 115. 31 gumbrecht, 99. 32 gumbrecht, 106. 33 gumbrecht, 114, 115. 34 gumbrecht, 115, 116. 167scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 desire for integration into the world of things; our desire to yield to an existential longing for “pre-conceptual thingness.”35 given abbate’s recruitment of gumbrecht to oust the masculinist impulse of deconstruction, it is perplexing to ponder the extreme difference in their respective ethical stances. again, for gumbrecht, the intensity of presence is violent and agnostic of all ethics, while for abbate the drastic is openended and grounds an ethics of humility and grace. gumbrecht’s position is consistent with his rejection of the linguistic turn in the humanities, while, confusingly, abbate’s position resonates with the very deconstructive paradigm it seeks to avert. symptomatically, we therefore witness an uneasy account of the role of so-called non-conscious embodiments in abbate’s text. for gumbrecht, the assaultive character of presence lies outside of all conscious intention. for abbate, the matter is more complicated. here we read that a scholarly appeal to non-conscious responses is a form of “clandestine mysticism” (517), attendant to a kind of romantic gnostic chicanery. taruskin’s assertion, for example, that composers respond to circumstances “below the threshold of their conscious intending” is denounced as “freudian romanticism,” in which political circumstances are mystically said to “speak directly through the unconscious to the musical imagination” (520).36 abbate allies this maneuver with a “rich history” that associates music with the unconscious, and the unconscious, in turn, with “occulted truth” (520, emphasis added). addressing the workings of clandestine mysticism directly, abbate detects how references to cryptic, non-conscious, oblique, hidden and secretive contents and meanings assist in paradoxically leveraging objectivist authority. she writes: there are the distinct verbal signatures produced by clandestine mysticism— music reveals things “below … conscious intending,” “deeply hidden things,” “secrets,” “genuine social knowledge.” words like code and cryptogram and decipher usher this chthonic discourse into broad daylight because hieroglyphs are at once material objects visible to the naked eye and the enigma these objects promise so persuasively as a hidden secret beyond their surface.37 35 gumbrecht, 118. 36 abbate is quoting from richard taruskin, defining russia musically: historical and hermeneutical essays (princeton: princeton university press, 1997), xxxi. 37 abbate, “music—drastic or gnostic?” 526. the quotations are from taruskin, defining russia musically, xxxi; theodor w. adorno, introduction to the sociology of music, trans. e. b. ashton (new york: the seabury press, 1976), 62; elizabeth wood, “lesbian fugue: ethel smyth’s contrapuntal arts,” in musicology and difference: gender and sexuality in music event or ephemeron?168 sound stage screen 2021/1 in other words, in a context where laundering meanings, forms, and contents functions as a cipher of a buried truth, the appeal to non-conscious operations stands as a useful alibi. the problem with this formulation is not only that it contradicts the dimension of gumbrecht’s argument upon which abbate relies, but that it also contradicts itself. music’s immediate aural presence is paradoxically construed as both event and ephemeron. on the one hand, its vanishing act—characterized as “not enduring past the moment” (512), “ephemeral phenomenal being” (513), “perpetually absent object” (514), “subject to instantaneous loss” (532), etc.—assures its fundamental resistance to gnostic over-reach. in other words, the atemporal character of gnostic investigation—“under the aspect of eternity” (512)—such as we find in formalism and hermeneutics is, practically by definition, a categorical distortion of music’s reality—a kind of “professional deformation” (510) or “illicit relocation” (521) to a fixed space outside the flow of time. it is this aspect of music’s ontological status—its ephemerality—to which abbate’s ethics most prominently respond. on the other hand, music’s irreducible presence—characterized as “physical force and sensual power” (509), “material presence and carnality” (529), “the event itself ” (532), “exceptional phenomenal existence” (533), etc.—assures its voluminous being-there for arresting embodiment. in other words, music’s almost ballistic materiality, in stark contrast to its ephemerality, endows it with the physical force of an external object.38 with this information about music’s ontological status in mind— its event-ness—abbate’s ethics take an interesting turn. far from being annexed by acts of gnostic arrogation, immediate aural presence now annexes the receptive body and even alters its state. in an act of drastic arrogation (momentarily in sync with gumbrecht’s conception of presence), it now “acts upon us and changes us” (532). what is troubling about this reversal of fortune for ethics as it is weighed upon by the event (instead of released by the ephemeron), is that it indulges, fleetingly but tellingly, the very clandestine mysticism once associated with the cryptographic sublime. let me explain. non-conscious sonorous objects now promise embodiments that are as much a “hidden secret beyond their surface” (526) as any gnostic seismograph (528). in other words, presscholarship, ed. ruth a. solie (berkeley: university of california press, 1993), 164–183: 164; susan mcclary, conventional wisdom: the content of musical form (berkeley: university of california press, 2000), 5. 38 currie’s gravitational metaphor of falling into a transformative gap is relevant here (currie, “music after all,” 184). 169scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 ence effects, like their gnostic arrogations, are “tandem flights” (531) toward a threshold below conscious intending (520): “when it is present, [music] can ban logos or move our bodies,” she writes, before adding “without our conscious will” (532, emphasis added). but whence this drastic unconscious? it is not only that drastic encounter now shares with gnostic interpretation the “freudian romanticism” abbate hopes to reject (520), but that this very mode of romanticism secures the principal ethical import of abbate’s position. how so? on close inspection, the simple ethics of withdrawal described above metamorphose, as abbate’s argument unfolds, into something new—an ethics of incorporation. far from mere schweigen (falling silent, leaving open, etc.) the ethics of the drastic in its material and carnal moment introduce a moral confrontation with alterity. the gnostic now forecloses the value of the quasi-ballistic force of the drastic—the “value,” that is, “both intellectually and morally, in encountering a present other at point-blank range” (532, emphasis added). this encounter with a present other expands into an ethics of the other that is given voice throughout the essay. recall, for example, the gnostic enjoinment to “articulat[e] a terminus, or [restrict] music to any determinate meaning within any declarative sentence” (517), to which abbate responds with an appeal to freedom. the appropriate engagement with this encounter involves “not taking advantage,” “hesitating,” and “drawing back” from the (gift-giving) musical configuration (517). anthropomorphism aside, abbate argues, this kind of abstinence resembles “an ethical position” (517). musical works are not living things, “but the way we cope with them may reflect choices about how to cope with real human others or how not to” (517). the point is that this ethical position recapitulates the clandestine mysticism of gnostic interpretation, which too operates on the logic of resemblance, reflection, and revelation. gnostic arrogation occurs when some configuration detected in beautiful sounds—an oblique enharmonic modulation, say—is said to resemble or reflect something alien to it—a certain subjectivity or political regime or so. by what inscription may the reticent attitude, hesitating before the call of (narcissistic?) gnostic reflection, come suddenly to reflect forms of social interaction (with real human others) after all (517)? by what clandestine metamorphosis did abstinence become a seismographic reflection of socially-mediated ethical encounter? or does the encounter with real human others at stake here operate more by way of non-reflective immediacy—at point-blank range, and so on? it is unclear. but perhaps this counter-point is overdrawn, for the reference to affirmative ethics in both cases quickly recedes as the essay resumes the task of event or ephemeron?170 sound stage screen 2021/1 raining down critique on the head of gnostic mysticism. toward the end of the argument, however, abbate actually ups the ante on this construal of ethics by spiritualizing the physicality of music in performance. following jankélévitch, she claims that music’s “physical action can engender spiritual conditions, grace, humility, reticence” (529). with reference to neoplatonic philosophy and apophatic theology, abbate articulates acts of “understatement and silence” to a kind of “social reality” with ethical implications (530). she advances the idea that “engagement with music [is] tantamount to an engagement with the phenomenal world and its inhabitants” (530). the encounter with the other that emerges, first, by way of point-blank immediacy and, second, by the logic of reflection, emerges in this third articulation by way of a grammar of equivalence. the ethical consequences of all three modalities of engagement seems to be the same. in a scenario where social engagement is considered as alike to musical engagement, for instance, we take away the following moral lesson: “playing or hearing music can produce a state where resisting the flaw of loquaciousness represents a moral ideal, marking human subjects who have been remade in an encounter with an other” (530, emphasis added). here we find—in the paradoxical name of an ethics of abstinence—a tangible encounter with a human/musical other that leaves on its subjects a kind of (deconstructive?) mark. is this a kind of soft hermeneutics redux? perhaps. the larger points, however, are, first, that these are clandestine rubrics—rubrics that deploy drastic musical encounter as a cipher for an ethics in the social world; and, second, that the fact that a diversity of rhetorical rubrics—reflection, immediacy, and equivalence— lead to the same goal in the context of the drastic encounter probably marks a site of desire—a wish for social relevance in the stark silence of withdrawal. in the final analysis, the ethics of drastic encounter, however tangibly arrested by presence, resemble less the agnosticism we find in the starkly unedifying productions of presence in gumbrecht’s formulation than they do the deconstructive abeyance we find in the thought of jacques derrida. deconstruction of course rejects the self-uttering claims of presence, and marks instead the differential mediations attendant to our very hold on presence. in abbate’s text, presence is at once embraced and denied the violence of such claims. far from the violence implied by gumbrecht’s arrested bodies, that is, presence in the context of the drastic is held at arm’s length, kept unsullied by gnostic determination, set free. herein lies one of the conundrums faced by simultaneously tethering presence to the event, on the one hand, and to the ephemeron, on the other. caught in the crosshairs of this riddle-like suspension, we now find a noteworthy reversal of fortune for ethics in the 171scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 context of theories of presence. of the strained claim to social relevance— gnostic abstinence in the face of drastic experience—one might say its value resides in the proximity of deconstruction. however, where a deconstructive operation such as différance nonetheless engages the nominal accretions and attendant effects of presence (via the internal structures of differing and deferring, etc.), the ethics of drastic encounter—at risk of ensnaring them in gnostic determination—disengages from them entirely. the political and social relevance of deconstruction is contested and in doubt, of course, even as derrida (in his final years) insisted on the importance of the decision in the experience of the undecidable.39 for the purposes of this argument, however, it is important to note, first, that abbate’s ethical abeyance is more allied with derrida’s deconstructive maneuvers than it is with gumbrecht’s story about presence; and, second, that even the (minimal) social relevance of deconstructive undecidability withers in the context of drastic withdrawal—its totalizing gnostic prohibition. this is the radical blank of the point-blank. technomystical repetitions suppose music really does know best (“the matrix of sounds explains the structures of power”) and gives access to otherwise lost information, revelations about humankind or its societies that no other art can transmit. suppose music has important secrets pouring from it and our enigma machine with the correct cylinder merely needs to be put in place; that is a tempting vision.40 these are the suppositions that modulate from abbate’s reflections on music’s radical openness toward a critique of technology—the machining of an enigma—in the context of drastic musical experience. by endowing a machine (with appropriately fitted cylinders) the power to decode a hermeneutically-slippery medium, gnostic knowledge takes on the character of decryption. abbate calls these machinations of the machine the “cryptographic sublime” (524). far from actually approaching the sublime, however, this knowledge amounts to little more than sonified fraud. for ab39 see, for example, jacques derrida’s politics of friendship, trans. george collins (london: verso, 2005). 40 abbate, “music—drastic or gnostic?” 524. the quotation in parentheses is abbate’s own translation of the blurb from the original dust jacket of jacques attali, bruits (paris: presses universitaires de france, 1977). event or ephemeron?172 sound stage screen 2021/1 bate, the symptomatic fallout from techno-trickery of this sort is twofold. first, real music is eroded, if not entirely eliminated, by the technological apparatus, and second, embezzled gnostic determinations are granted an aura of technical objectivity. first, on the loss of real music at the hands of technological intervention, abbate writes: “that technology, codes, inscription metaphors, and mechanisms flow into musical hermeneutics is not, however, just an entertaining foible. they represent the excluded presence of real music, the material and carnal as displaced onto technology” (527). theodor adorno’s seismograph and jacques attali’s magnetic tape constitute so much “technomysticism” to (fraudulently) spirit forth gnostic secrets as it spirits away drastic presence (527). left in the wake of music’s banished materiality and carnality, these technical decoding devices proffer a kind of fake presence—the “false eros and synthetic carnality” of a technological metaphor (529). under the spell of gnostic technomysticism, we are left with a music without music. this is a curious upshot for a position deeply immersed in music’s ephemerality—real music—“so personal, contingent, fugitive to understanding” (529, emphasis added). whence this fugitive? if music’s vanishing act entails its escape, even hiding, from all understanding, under what conditions can one posit a music with music—a music that will not betray the site of its hiding? the question arises: how, where, and when is banished sound—a particular instance of its disavowal—distinct from vanished sound—a general condition of its ephemerality? second, on the aura of technical objectivity in the context of gnostic fraud, abbate writes, “music qua machine traces what is there without subjective bias, thus when music and my argument run along the same lines my argument cannot be assailed” (529). in other words, the precarious hold on gnostic thought in the throes of drastic experience is pitted against the gnostic secrets that are paradoxically amplified by complex decoding machines and inscription devices. abbreviated in value—“a state of unresolved and subservient alterity” (524, emphasis added)—the drastic is left to linger in the confines (at best) of subjective bias, while—bolstered by the full audio-visual technological apparatus—the gnostic reigns supreme, “untranscendable” (527). abbate’s essay seeks to upend this hierarchized opposition, of course, by advancing a seemingly irreducible fact about listening— the de facto overwhelming character of its live presence. at one point in her experience of laurie anderson’s performance piece happiness on march 15, 2002, for example, abbate heard a devastating sound emerge from the clicking of teeth: “a loud boom with no reverberation” (533). the sound, 173scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 which triggered “real terror” (conjuring, as it did, “the sound of bodies hitting the ground from great heights”), leads abbate to reflect on the importance of what happened “at that moment;” the trigger that occurred in the “right now” (533–534, emphasis added). in contrast to the drastic experience elicited in this radically temporalized present, abbate examines the kinds of experience attendant to atemporal technologies of reproduction. she rhetorically asks: “the very fact of recording—as any future audience can experience this event that came into presence (to echo gumbrecht) only via its repeatable surrogate—does that not alter a basic alchemy, making the event an artifact, handheld and under control, encouraging distance and reflection?” (534). although abbate briefly acknowledges that both drastic and gnostic elements can “furnish a simultaneous ground under the sonic circus” (533)—indeed, it is this simultaneity that constitutes an alchemy—the true insight to which this kind of statement points is that the recording is, of itself, substitutive. in other words, the recording only implausibly approaches the radical presence of the event. it offers repetition for singularity, control for wildness, and distance and reflection for immersion and absorption in the actual event. interestingly, abbate’s skepticism toward reproducibility and repetition is, if not fully argued, repetitively asserted throughout the text. the example of an unrepeatable drastic encounter in 2002 thereby paradoxically repeats a central tenet of abbate’s text. as if under the guidance of the formal demands of a rondo, we read again a slightly varied version of what we read before. the “repeatable surrogate” that makes of an event an artifact, “handheld and under control,” imitatively echoes the point, made over twenty pages earlier, that recordings are “technologically constructed hyperperformances, which we can arrest and control” (512). this is the idea, as it were, that the essay arrests under its own “aspect of eternity” (512). even if repetition is the primary rhetorical vehicle for asserting the idea, we are warned once more of the technical conditions for placing the drastic fugitive under arrest—the drastic, in other words, as always-already arrested and controlled in contexts of technological repeatability. but therein lies a key aspect of the dialectics of repetition. “gnostic satisfactions can become pale,” we are told in connection with abbate’s riff against the technical reproduction of the drastic experience of anderson’s performance (534). but, as with walter benjamin’s aura, repetition can both wither (or render pale) and amplify (or brighten) the drastic experience. without rehearsing once more the valorization of reproduction technologies (phonography, radio, tape, etc.) we find in the writings schaeffer, chion and others, it is clear that repetition actually triggers drastic experience in event or ephemeron?174 sound stage screen 2021/1 abbate’s universe as well. after all, the alchemical amalgam—“live presence and secret knowledge” (534)—accruing to the moment of terror was itself “guided by earlier references to the world trade center’s destruction” (533). the troubling return to earlier references in the drastic moment here is not simply meant to rehearse that often-repeated insight that gnostic knowledge sponsors drastic experience. this truism constitutes the crux of karol berger’s insubstantial response to abbate’s challenging text. the takeaway of berger’s response can be summed up in a single sentence: “there is no such thing as pure experience, uncontaminated by interpretation.”41 while berger is attempting to demonstrate that musical perception is in fact subtended by a broader sphere of human experience, this kind of truism—a tautology in recoil from the drastic—can quickly organize itself into a system for containing the frictions of nature, history, and perception. indeed, it is the imposition that material presence brings to such conclusive organized systems to which theories of affect, the drastic, etc.—to their credit—attend. although it is inconsistently articulated, abbate’s appeal to unbidden materializations of presence—such as the “neurological misfire” in the context of a scene in an opera, for example (535)—bear witness to the challenge of frictional encounter. the closed-circuit production of meaning, in contrast, issues a new set of perils that cannot simply spirit away the impositions of tangible experience in its own systematic maelstrom of interpretation and mediation. what is troubling about abbate’s return to gnostic invocations—“earlier references to the world trade center’s destruction,” and so on—is distinct from this catch-all coign of vantage. there are two specific points to be made at this juncture. first, the reversion to the gnostic—the “secret knowledge of the hidden signified” (534)— which triggered the terror, was itself attributed to, first, a microphonic amplification of teeth clenching; and, second, a documentary recording by the naudet brothers of the 9/11 disaster. abbate adds, “no one who has seen the documentary forgets the sound [of bodies hitting the ground from great heights]” (534). of course, abbate concedes that this is a site of “hermeneutic alchemy” (535)—not an unfettered presence—but the matter is not settled by way of a simple acknowledgement. to begin with, all aspects of an elaborate argument about the clandestine operations of technomysticism are now placed under strain. how so? first, the gnostic signified that sets off the drastic intensity of terror is issued by way of the very seismographic 41 karol berger, “music according to don giovanni, or: should we get drastic?” journal of musicology 22, no. 3 (2005): 497. 175scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 technology that is construed as more than mere amplification, registering instead “imperceptible shifts below the threshold of perception” (528)—the “technomysticism” that rejects vulgar representation for “buried, underground, tectonic vastness,” inscription, and so on. second, the triggering is issued by way of the very technology of reproduction that is construed as the “repeatable surrogate” that alters drastic experience—brings it “under control,” solicits “distance and reflection,” and so on (534). but this is not all, for the particular terror it triggers falls, above all, under the aspect of eternity—“no one who has seen the documentary forgets the sound.” no one forgets. in other words, the drastic experience qua experience is here lodged firmly in the atemporal structure abbate once associated with gnostic investigations—“abstractions … under the aspect of eternity” (512)—and not, strictly speaking, in the ephemerality of the moment alone. the fact that there is no unforgetting the sound, as well as the fact that the recorded sound was repeated by other technological means, is structurally central to the experience. this is not the place to dissect the dialectics of trauma, but it remains evidently open to discussion whether what is at stake here is a species of repetition compulsion or, as maintained, simply held in the grip of a singular ephemeral event alone. the gnostic redux (of white elephants) the second problem attendant to abbate’s reversion to gnostic knowledge for leveraging examples of drastic encounter is more paradoxical still. take abbate’s experience of despair when ben heppner’s voice cracked on high notes early in the performance of die meistersinger at the met in 2001. while most of the singers belted forth in a kind of “psychotic … joll[iness],” abbate bore witness to the “raw courage and sangfroid” of a singer who refused to give up—“a unique human being in a singular place and time, falling from the high wire again and again” (535). abbate writes, “i was transfixed not by wagner’s opera but by heppner’s heroism … the singular demonstration of moral courage, which, indeed, produces knowledge of something fundamentally different and of a fundamentally different kind … drastic knowledge” (535). what is fascinating here is that abbate connects drastic knowledge with the question concerning morality. again, it would be an inadequate truism to simply point out that abbate’s intimate knowledge of the operatic work is the condition for the possibility of this drastic experience. indeed, given that heppner’s voice cracked in the first event or ephemeron?176 sound stage screen 2021/1 strophe of the preliminary version of the prize song, she made “a quick calculation that he had five more strophes in two full verses in the preliminary version,” not to mention the many versions of the song, still to come (535). of course the work-concept here circumscribes the event; it is the metaphysical a priori that is the condition for the possibility of this despairing experience, no less than the neurological misfire to come a few days later. but this insufficiently registers the challenge of abbate’s experience of the scenario at the met. neither will it do to simply point out that heppner’s morality is cut of a drastically different cloth from the ethics attendant to drastic experience, as it is understood by abbate. in other words, the moral courage of heppner’s plunging-forth can hardly be recreated under the rubric of an ethics of hesitation and withdrawal. but this is where abbate’s insight into the moment may actually provide a basis for revising her moreor-less deconstructive ethical stance, and, especially, for moderating the starkly agnostic one held by gumbrecht. heppner’s is the courage of persistence, not that of reticence. but the more vexing problem emerges when we consider these kinds of experience in relation to an aesthetic tradition that valorizes the unexpected in art—the aesthetics of radical becoming, innovation, and transformation; the transfiguration of the commonplace, and so on. the terror triggered by an alchemical blend of drastic and gnostic in laurie anderson’s performance of happiness, no less than the despair launched in the context of a quick calculation (and a subsequent neurological misfire) of ben heppner’s performances in a production of die meistersinger, are transmutations of this sort. in heppner’s case, a vocal misfire on the high notes a and g suddenly launched the real possibility of total embarrassment and scandal; and in anderson’s case, an echoless thud suddenly launched the listener into the horror of processing again an event of real death. without diminishing their intensity, these drastic experiences are wholly consistent with the romantic aesthetics of transfiguration—christian friedrich michaelis’s powerfully startling experience, edmund burke’s sublime suddenness, immanuel kant’s transcendence of empirical standards, and so on—updated here for the era of post-postmodernism. art becomes life. first a boom without reverb propels the listener into an unbearable confrontation with an actual scene of murderous death and, second, a vocal misfire catapults the living struggle of a great hero onto the opera stage. this crypto-romantic maneuver is not objectionable in itself, but it does raise a set of different questions, which, again, create the conditions for the undermining of large swaths of abbate’s general argument. 177scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 in what sense? first, recall the importance of the non-conceptual import of the drastic—its direct tethering to music qua music—the “elephant in the room” (533). how exactly do the examples provided by the specific experiences of performances by anderson and heppner tally with this aspiration toward registering affects and effects of music qua music? how responsive are these examples to qualities and problems peculiar to music? in both cases, the answer to this question is unsatisfactory. not only is heppner actually trying to hide and disguise his errors for most of the performance, but the cover-up actually registers the fact that the cracking high notes constitute the noise that undermines the music. of course, the possibility of a vocal misfire constitutes an element of opera’s considerable aesthetic pleasures, but, nonetheless, the drastic despair is located not in the music as much as in its ever-lurking noisy other. furthermore, the moral of heppner’s courage resides in his ability to continue in full knowledge of what happened and what awaits. this—the crux of the drastic despair—is not, however, peculiar to music. suppose a marathon runner leading the pack suddenly sprains an ankle a mile out from the finishing line, pushes through the pain, and despite competitors closing-in, persists to the end, victorious: is this drastic event not of the same species as that in december 2001 at the met? does this form of “drastic knowledge” not likewise register “a unique human being in a singular place and time,” “the singular demonstration of moral courage,” and so on (535)? but if a sporting event so easily recapitulates the affective crux of the musical one, does the precise modality of drastic despair experienced by abbate not equally bypass the elephant in the room, the phenomenal reality of music qua music? the same problem accrues to the example on march 15, 2002. suppose the smoke rising from the ash of a cigarette triggers unbidden images of the smoldering world trade center: does this not constitute a similar traumatic trigger to that experienced by clicking teeth? in fact, are traumatic flashbacks not, by definition, deeply unpredictable—seeking out capriciously dispersed outlets? as a trigger of this media-indifferent sort, is not the quest to unpack what is peculiar to the inherently sonic dimensions of that echoless resonance a troubled one? in short, has the elephant in the room—music qua music— become the white elephant once more? paradoxically, abbate’s demonstration of the drastic in these examples is at once too abstracted from the materiality of presence unique to music qua music (as shown above) and too immersed in the gnostic specificity of their actual musical workings. let me elaborate on the latter point. in connection with the heppner incident, abbate writes: “i was transfixed event or ephemeron?178 sound stage screen 2021/1 not by wagner’s opera but by heppner’s heroism … the singular demonstration of moral courage … [what] one could call … drastic knowledge” (535). abbate rehearses the fact the she is in fact well acquainted with the “literature on meistersinger,” with its “unspoken anti-semitic underside,” its problematic “reception history,” and even its own claims to a “nonsignifying discourse” that may give voice to “something appalling” (535–536). however, the drastic trigger that produced the despair and, later, the hallucination were set adrift from this entire corpus of hermeneutic knowledge no less than the formal qualities of the actual work. abbate’s experience emerged in a schism—“essentially, a split where the performance drowned out the work” (535)—whereby perception, ensnared in the immediacy of drastic presence, veered irredeemably away from the protocols of the opera itself. but is this in fact so? here is a basic (hermeneutic) outline of the opera: richard wagner’s die meistersinger is more or less a comedic musical drama about musical creativity and its relation to social reproduction. the masters’ guild of musicians in nürnberg is populated by, on the one hand, pedantic conservatives and, on the other, open-minded liberals. the central protagonist of the story, walther von stolzing (sung by heppner in the performances abbate attended), is not in the guild, but his superior musicianship is indisputable. unorthodox as they are, his musical gifts are matched only by his passion for eva, whose hand shall be received in marriage by the best singer in the midsummer song competition. in fact, the erotic striving associated with the prize is narratively allied with the passionate voicing associated with the song. despite a series of setbacks (hence the ongoing revisions of the prize song with its demanding high gs and as), walther is eventually able to harness (marry!) his creative penchant for rupturing established musical norms with the sanctioned musical forms established by the guild. walther endures numerous obstacles and struggles with the institutional politics around him, but he eventually wins the hand of eva. indeed, it is walther’s final prize song that ultimately exemplifies the appropriate integration of inspiration and form. with eva im paradies, one might ask, how is this unimaginable joy properly resonant with a case of drastic despair? in fact, by the time of the happy scene-change of act 3—“full of candy-store delights,” with its “sunny meadow,” and the chorus belting theme songs “at the top of its lungs” (535)— heppner’s rickety vocalizations (potentially careening toward a melodykilling quandary) seem to mark a stark disconnect between the signifying order and affective intensity. abbate’s uneasy feeling about the demeanor of the other performers onstage—which transformed into a psychotic jolliness 179scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 in the moment of heppner’s vocal misfire—now probably counts as a kind of premonition of the “optical hallucination, a genuine neurological misfire” that occurred three days later (535). this remarkable moment— abbate “saw stage figures not as they were, in technicolor germanic finery, but shrouded in black with white faces and tragic eyes under bright white lights” (535)—became a kind of unbidden neurological restaging of the second performance. officially, the meaning of abbate’s drastic encounter is that there is a fundamental asynchrony between drastic and gnostic orders; that the drastic attitude had prevailed against the hermeneutic pull of the gnostic. in abbate’s words: “the second performance would not have fractured had my experience of the first not been so radically attentive to what was taking place, so inattentive to wagner’s meistersinger and what its music means or conceals” (536). this is the official story. unofficially, however, the drastic affect of abbate’s hallucinatory restaging actually recapitulates the wholly gnostic central dialectic of die meistersinger’s narrative. as it is with the fictional walther von stolzing, the real ben heppner must now harness his “extraordinary raw courage and sangfroid” to overcome the odds of disrupting the musical forms to which his singing is socially and institutionally enjoined (535). the hallucination is an uncanny recapitulation in real life of the wahn that may ensue the entire operatic scene should our heroes’ (respective) moral courage fail them. it is not only that the musical work—the content of a romantic meisterwerk—makes an uncanny return in the event of a neurological misfire, but, more than that, it is that a nonconscious werktreue actually leaves an indelible mark on it. this story about affect—about the drastic encounter so “inattentive” to the gnostic—is nonconsciously, but tellingly, a story about a gnostic second coming. is this a paradoxical return—apparently caught in drastic throes of intensity—of the cultivated gnostic repressed? the point of this re-telling of an encounter so apparently personal and ephemeral is not to dismiss outright the claims of the drastic, but, far from it, to reposition the force of the drastic in a region unfamiliar, not only to its gnostic fellow traveler, but also to the experienced reality at hand. i want to draw attention to the curious imbrication of the obvious and the obscure in these drastic encounters. the experience of terror attendant to laurie anderson’s performance, too, is not a case of the off-script drastic as much as it bears the marks of the all-too-gnostic figure of the drastic. in other words, aside from the acknowledged alchemy, anderson’s 2002 performance piece was awash in anecdotes that referenced the destruction of the world trade towers in september 2001. these included direct referencevent or ephemeron?180 sound stage screen 2021/1 es—the way anderson had watched and listened to the towers being built over the years, a few blocks from her home, for example—and, perhaps more importantly, indirect ones, which, in their own way, illustrated traumatic reminders of the past event. for example, she recited a story of her rat terrier, lolabelle, out on a walk in the safe-seeming mountains of california shortly after 9/11. following an uneventful preamble where the narrator recollects little more than the character of the dog’s ambling and rambling, she suddenly notices a new expression on the dog’s face; one she had not seen before. this was the expression marking lolabelle’s realization, with large birds hovering over her, that she was prey; and that, furthermore, the once neutral sky had now been transformed into a menacing presence, as if there was something wrong with the air. it was the look on lolabelle’s face, in turn, that triggered for anderson an expression she had, in fact, seen before—the expression of her neighbors in new york city right after 9/11. this was the look that too marked the realization that danger could come from the air; and that, furthermore, from this menacing realization, there would be no turning back. having been primed with anecdotes such as this—not simply images of 9/11, but references to the uncanny mechanisms that trigger these images— the reaction of terror to the clicking of teeth is what one might describe as a case of getting it. this is not to say that the reaction simply makes sense, but that it is in keeping with the fundamental points of anderson’s performance. it is, as it were, an accurate response to contextual cues that cannot be subtracted from the scene. in other words, the drastic experience hereby appropriately recoups the gnostic dimensions of the work. the point could be amplified in the context of anderson’s observation in happiness that many of the horrifying images of the smoldering towers circulating on television at the time were mostly without accompanying sound. this led her to reflect on whether the microphones were shut off, or the cameras too far from the action, or whether the explosions and cries were simply unrecordable. in other words, the terrifying intensity of the event here obliterates an aspect of representability, leaving us with the repetitious dream-like silence of the television loops. anderson’s reflection on the event of 9/11 and its peculiar recording reveals a surreptitious linkage to abbate’s theory of the drastic itself, equally pitting representation and recording against the perplexing intensity of the actual event. but for the purposes of this argument, it suffices to note that the gnostic not only sponsors the drastic a priori, but that the gnostic here makes another uncanny return, a posteriori. while the event of the performance does not necessarily spell out gnostic scripts 181scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 of cultural data, the appropriately-immersed viewer is nonetheless held in the arms of their conditioning force. in other words, this is not a simple recapitulation of the clandestine cipher of the hermeneutic object that abbate carefully puts into question throughout the text, but rather its uncanny gnostic redux, coiled up within drastic experience. sound fraud: from illicit to complicit relocation if it is true, at least in some significant senses and cases, that the latent gnostic recurs at the core of the blatant drastic, it behooves us to consider more seriously—in the contexts of ethics and politics—the force of audile reflex and its habituation. one may speak here of the habitus of sensory experience, which regards drastic encounter not as the nonconscious, open-ended material experience of the ephemeral presence of a live event, as we find in abbate, but instead as the unconscious recurrence of cultivated assumptions, reflexes, instincts, habits, and techniques within that experience. what is fascinating about this reconfiguration of the drastic is the way music’s seemingly inherent ephemerality and ineffability falls prey not only to the gnostic determinations of hermeneutics and formalism, but also to the drastic overdeterminations of sensory habitūs. the gnostic redux can be characterized as the recurrence of a certain guiding foreknowledge in the context of variable reflexes of the body. in other words, the cultivation of body techniques is a partial condition for the possibility of their nonconscious drastic reflexes—again, the coiled drastic dressage. what do we make of those phenomena said to fall outside the logic and grasp of the gnostic? what dimensions of music, in particular—given the uncanny duplicitous layers of its cultivated entanglements—remain outside of the second enclosure of the gnostic? what remains of its dimensions of ephemerality and ineffability? is the event of music qua music—enveloped, as it were, by dual (and dueling) atemporal specters of temporal experience—therefore more ineffable still than the concept of the drastic can permit? or is music’s claimed or real ineffability—in a dialectical schulterschluss with its “broad shoulders”—in fact a useful alibi for disavowing its genuine capacity for social danger—manipulation, discrimination, fear and hatred-mongering, and so on (521, 523)? to situate this point in the context of the previous example, what if the resistance to gnostic error in the drastic experience of terror reveals itself rather as a resistance to its truth (or, at least, its accuracy)? event or ephemeron?182 sound stage screen 2021/1 for abbate, gnostic attributions in the context of music are dismissed tout court as so many forms of clandestine mysticism: “any argument that discovers legible meanings or significations within music is granting music certain grandiose powers” (517)—powers it simply does not possess, subsisting, as does music (after all), in a state of “unresolved and subservient alterity” (524). paradoxically, however, these powers accrue in inverse proportion to their legitimacy. furthermore, music’s “messages,” “cultural facts,” or “associations” also gain authority paradoxically because of their misplaced media-specificity; they become “more signally important, more persuasive—than the same cultural facts or associations or constructed objects as conveyed or released by any other media” (517, emphasis added). in other words, it is music’s very ineffability—its nonsignifying mediatic condition—that mystically intensifies the significations that are illicitly attributed to it. as it is with “film and advertising,” musical works are thus “conscripted” to be “used or exploited” by music scholarship in its gnostic moment (517). by decking out these messages, facts and associations with “acoustic aura and sonic gift wrap,” they become “less banal than they are by themselves”; in short, “the ordinary becomes a revelation” (518). interestingly, abbate connects this understanding of music’s revelatory force to the theoretical inclinations of nineteenth-century metaphysics, and its afterlife in twentieth-century psychoanalysis. nietzsche’s interest in listening to the musical aspect of language—“with the third ear”—for example, is a forerunner to the transverbal mode of listening—attentive to “phonic or musical element[s]”—that are said to register the unconscious (518).42 it is this alluring association—between music’s “pre-specular” character and what theodor reik calls the “substructures of the soul”—that abbate puts into question: “because the musical element is so open to interpretation, so unable to contest whatever supra-audible import it is assigned, conceptions about the psychic ill drawn from outside the musical domain become what the music is saying or revealing” (518). this is a fascinating paradox. music is construed here as a kind of whore for meaning—it is “so open to interpretation, so unable to contest”; it “unleashes potential meanings in high multiples”; it has “‘broad shoulders’ to bear whatever specific meaning we ascribe to it and ‘will never give us the lie,’” and so on—and, at the same 42 abbate refers to nieztsche’s expression in beyond good and evil, §246, as elaborated in the writings of theodor reik, listening with the third ear: the inner experience of a psychoanalyst (new york: farrar, straus, 1948) and roland barthes and roland havas, “listening,” in roland barthes, the responsibility of forms: critical essays on music, art, and representation, trans. richard howard (new york: hill and wang, 1985), 245–260. 183scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 time, the virgin of meaning—music’s “ineffability”; its “indeterminacy”; its “mutability”; its “freedom,” of which one should “not tak[e] advantage,” and so on (516–517). recall that the ethics of drastic encounter lies in a mode of abstinence: hesitating before the act of exploiting, using, or taking advantage of music. as a medium that is all-too-yielding, music becomes a fertile site for opportunistic fact-, meaning-, and truth-making. in other words, music’s very lack—resistant, that is, to the genuine art of encoding cultural phenomena—is constitutively linked to its excess—its abundant dissemination of coded phenomena, as diverse as they are implausible. on the one hand, abbate astutely identifies, and then beautifully articulates, the peculiar magic of this link, but, on the other hand, not enough surprise is expressed at the mechanism by which a transdiscursive experience actually amplifies the discourse it is erroneously said to encode. by what magical mechanism do the constructed significations—meanings, cultural phenomena, sublimated “truths”—metamorphose into significations that are actually “more authoritative,” “grandiose,” “revelatory,” “more securely affirmed when music is seen to express them,” or “made monumental and given aura by music” (517–520, emphasis added)? in other words, what is it about the acoustic aura and the sonic gift wrap that allures its beholder not only to take the hermeneutic bait, but to do so more affirmatively than its soundless counterpart? this increase in music’s signifying gravitas, paradoxically again, appears to be tethered to extra-musical media. in other words, music’s inherent aversion to encoding is actually marked by its ability to switch signification according to visual and verbal cues and contexts. in this sense, it is not absolute or autonomous, for abbate, but all-too-programmatic, all-too-heteronomous. she writes that “physical grounding and visual symbolism and verbal content change musical sounds by recommending how they are to be understood” (524, emphasis added). the paradox, then, is that music’s wild indeterminacy—its effortless facility for actually switching signification, under the weight, say, of “oculocentric and logocentric” inputs—is allied to its peculiar capacity for raising the ontological stakes of that signification—how it is to be understood (524). music’s evident facility for switching meaning, in short, secures an authoritative affirmation for when it does not. if gnostic arrogation puts the gift-giving bird in the cage, as it were—and, concomitantly, deconstruction attempts to set free a caged bird—then, in contrast to both, the drastic power of music is such that it holds the uncaged bird in the hand. the drastic, after all, is wild even at point-blank range. this is the manipulative magic not of baitand-switch, but of switch-and-bait. event or ephemeron?184 sound stage screen 2021/1 the problem with simply announcing the alchemical alliance between image/word and music/sound is that it passes over precisely the drastic aspect of music’s materiality that is the object of inquiry. not only do sonic gift wraps and acoustic auras rarely count as evidence in any fields outside of musicology and (to a lesser extent) music theory, but, as articulated above, the force of music’s interpretability seems to be leveraged by its drastic indeterminacy. what if, as announced above, the antithesis is true? what if the drastic is the site par excellence not of open-endedness but of nonconscious overdetermination? take the case of racism in sound: abbate is skeptical of claims that wagner’s anti-semitism can be sonically sublimated into musical works, for example, in spite of the composer’s ample attestations to that claim. abbate argues that wagner’s argument itself partakes of the clandestine mysticism associated with the hermeneutic process—he reads “certain formal conventions in music by mendelssohn and meyerbeer as ineradicable signs, and truths by the basketful are discovered embodied in musical configurations” (519). wagner’s hermeneutic maneuvering may attest to “truths” that amount to “anti-semitic slanders,” while those of commentators like richard eichenauer or richard taruskin actually attempt to expose for critical scrutiny such anti-semitism. for abbate, in contrast, both positions share a fundamental kinship—“the hermeneutic process is the same on both sides” (519). as it is with wagner’s riff on mendelssohn and meyerbeer, abbate contends, taruskin’s evidence of stravinsky’s anti-semitism seems “less mundane and more securely affirmed when music is seen to express [it]” (520). what is interesting about this methodological association between wagner and taruskin is that the outcomes of their thinking across the terrain of musical expression arguably lead to opposing moral positions. in fact, one consequence of this argument can be summed up in the following formulation: because of music’s drastic indeterminacy, its actual gnostic determinations are in fact morally variable as well. in gnostic mysticism, angels and devils may freely dwell. the key point is that, given the uncanny, but constitutive, link between drastic openness and an emboldened gnostic closure, the assertion of a moral position is ultimately determined not by music in its material presence, but by the contexts of its use alone. the trouble with this kind of analysis of the drastic in music is that its utilitarian consequences cannot be sustained in the context of reflex audibility. in other words, this construal of the drastic insufficiently grasps the force and inertia of certain gnostic intensities. abbate is skeptical of all claims that associate “music with the unconscious,” and, even more so, 185scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 “the unconscious with occulted truth” (520). the first tension here is that the drastic, defined as nonsignifying intensity, actually bears something of a resemblance to the variously construed concepts of the unconscious abbate seeks to critique. more importantly, however, the overarching skepticism toward the unconscious and its occulted truths does not sufficiently grasp the sonorous intensity that accrues to fixed gnostic commitments and reflexes of listening. at this point it is important to disentangle the gnostic handiwork of film, and particularly advertising, from that of music scholarship. these had been earlier affined in abbate’s text—“conscripted,” in her words, “for similar duties” (517). however, the actual mechanisms by which advertising, on the one hand, and scholarship, on the other, exploit music, can be lumped together only awkwardly. where branding, advertising, and propaganda actually deploy music’s drastic qualities—its nonsignifying, nonconscious sensuous immediacy—to clinch an association, to sell a product, or to induce a political commitment, gnostic scholarly inquiry (especially that wedded to the social contingency of things) actually de-emphasizes the sonorous presence—the seduction of the performance experience—in service of meaning. otherwise put, where advertising hitches a ride on them, musicology stops up its ears to drastic sonorities. the latter, after all, is the “antihedonist patholog[y]” of musicology, which refuses “encountering a present other at point-blank range” (532). the distinction is important because in sonic branding, advertising, and propaganda, the sensuous materiality of the music determines the value of its (commodified or political) sociological object, while in musicology, the sociological object determines and ultimately limits the value of the music’s sensuous materiality. without addressing the complex dialectics of mood and meaning here, one may conclude that, surface affinities aside, the gnostic equivalence between branding, advertising, and propaganda, on the one hand, and music scholarship, on the other, cannot be assumed. at the risk of igniting a stale debate about music’s meanings, it is clear that industry executives in sonic branding and advertising, no less than those in cinema and the music and gaming industries, do not share the view that music’s material presence and carnality is, at bottom, wholly ineffable. in the interests of brevity, a few brief examples will suffice. recording artist and video game composer, tom salta, experimented with using an orchestral work by ralph vaughan williams for the soundtrack of grand theft auto.43 43 tom salta, “the art of composing for video games” (keynote lecture, music and the moving image, new york, may 21, 2010). event or ephemeron?186 sound stage screen 2021/1 in salta’s view, straying so far from the stock sounds associated with the action of the game produced results as absurd and confusing as those of alien visual imagery. music’s shoulders in salta’s studio are not as broad as those found in abbate’s argument. concomitantly, the production of drastic presence is a central concern for commercial music engineers. these are the unique effects, alluring details, and expensive-sounding moments that characterize industrial song composition. john seabrook describes this practice in the context of commercial ballads: the money note is the moment in whitney houston’s version of the dolly parton song “i will always love you” at the beginning of the third rendition of the chorus: pause, drum beat, and then ‘iiiiiieeeeeeiiieeii will always love you.” it is the moment in the céline dion song from titanic, “my heart will go on”: the key change that begins the third verse, a note you can hear a hundred times and it still brings you up short in the supermarket and transports you … to a world of grand romantic gesture— “you’re here.”44 there is no doubt that these money notes (and even money silences!) are productions of presence that are overdetermined by cultural scripts, constructions, and conventions. however, they are not experienced as gnostic meanings, but rather as drastic intensities—a shiver down the spine, a widening of eyes, a tremor of the skin. herein lies the key paradox of the kinds of affective experience attendant to significant arenas of musical listening. drastic moments—deeply anchored in culturally-scripted techniques (from simple sonic effects to laundered money-notes)—are heard as immediate material acoustic phenomena. this is not a simple reconfiguration of abbate’s position for it adjusts the analytic gaze toward the obstinately a prioristic ear. abbate casts doubt upon the arts of reading racial characteristics from purely musical sounds, for example, because the reality of drastic experience is nonsignifying. when richard eichenauer “read[s] out of the disembodied lines of a musical work the face of a particular racial character,” abbate responds by mischievously associating this maneuver with wagner’s troubling grasp of music’s embodiments of racial characteristics (519).45 the problem with abbate’s construal 44 john seabrook, “the money note: can the record business survive?” new yorker, july 7, 2003, 45. 45 abbate is quoting richard eichenauer, musik und rasse (münchen: lehmann, 1932), 13 from the translation provided by leo treitler, “gender and other dualities of music history,” in solie, musicology and difference, 40. 187scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 is that racism requires, as a condition for its efficient ideological functioning, a nonsignifying substrate. in other words, sonic markers of race—vocal idiolects, for example, or musical tropes—are functional sites of autonomically experienced audile profiling. they play out in the ballpark of reflex— that which cannot not be experienced. while eichenauer’s account (or that of taruskin) may be overdrawn, abbate’s construal of the drastic, in vivid opposition to the gnostic, cannot spirit away the dialectics of the nonsignifying signifier. it is a mistake to place the problem of racism squarely in a field of gnostic representation. racism is infrequently the result of deliberative thought, but embedded instead in connotations and cues that operate surreptitiously. the music and the sounds people make can solicit judgments about them that are as instantaneous as they can be brutal. to simplify a little: the grain of african-american or mexican-american voices, for example, or, of the melodic traits of islamic calls to prayer, or even, of the rhythmic topoi and sharp-sounding harmonizations of african music, may in itself be a fully culturally-determined habitus—an ingrained grain—but, for better or worse, it is all-too-often experienced as nonconscious reflex for racialized apprehension.46 if the drastic component of this experience—nonsignifying, ineffable, etc.—amounts to (even if only on occasion) a sublimated cultural topos, then the act of withdrawal and abstinence risks becoming ideological—the mute witness to potential injustice and inequality. one of the primary modes of listening involves a deictic function—involuntary triggers of collateral meaning—which we find in schaeffer’s écouter, barthes’ alertness, chion’s indexical listening, and so on. although this mode of listening is construed as the least musical one in these writers, the paradox of presence in gumbrecht and abbate is that it partakes liberally of deixis. unless music is construed as absolutely autonomous of such listening, the repudiation of such collateral—pretending not to have what one in fact has—ushers the routine fraudulence of sonic dissimulation.47 46 there is a vast literature on the intersections of race, music, and sound, which cannot be listed here. a few instructive recent writings on vocal timbre include nina sun eidsheim’s the race of sound: listening, timbre, and vocality in african-american music (durham: duke university press, 2018), jennifer lynn stoever’s the sonic color line: race and the cultural politics of listening (new york: new york university press, 2016), and grant olwage’s “the class and colour of tone: an essay on the social history of vocal timbre,” ethnomusicology forum 13, no. 2 (2004): 203–226. see also music and the racial imagination, ed. ronald radano and philip v. bohlman (chicago: university of chicago press, 2000). 47 for schaeffer, barthes and chion, of course, the deictic function is cordoned off from other modes of listening—such as the musical écouter réduite, psychoanalytic listening, and reduced listening respectively. event or ephemeron?188 sound stage screen 2021/1 the trouble with apparently nonsignifying (high-speed) sonic embodiments of the drastic is that their exaggerated retreat from illicit relocation transforms what goes as the licit presence of drastic experience into a complicit gnostic one. to remain with the example discussed above, racism (no less than other forms of routine discrimination) requires, for its systematic production, a surreptitious disavowal of its own existence. this is not to say that all musical and sonic events are socially legible tout court, but to recognize that in practical contexts of prevailing intersubjective communication, it behooves us to grapple with those sonic markers—markers that identify, signify and discriminate (in all senses of these terms)—in whose sensuous grip we are reflexively engrossed. discussions of affect and presence in music might need to be released from the kantian idea that music amounts to no more than imaginative flight without conceptualization—a traditional position rehearsed here as the nonsignifying drastic—and tethered to the equally kantian idea that sound and music thereby freight signification without accountability. just because the meanings translocated by sound and music are rarely decipherable in easy correlationist terms (abbate’s critique accurately captures the excessive dependence on these terms in hermeneutics and formalism), does not mean that it is either entirely ineffable or ephemeral. in the silence of the drastic we find the reign of the gnostic. finally, the productive aspect of drastic experience—a subject that would require an essay unto itself—is, for similar reasons, equally spirited away within the organizing axioms of abbate’s account. as a final gesture toward the contours of such an inquiry, two brief examples will need to suffice. in a lone footnote, abbate makes an important nod towards elaine scarry’s argument that beauty does not, as claimed, distract us from the phenomenal world, but actually intensifies our awareness of it (532).48 although it is harnessed to buttress a claim against the hedonist rebuke mounted by gnostic scholarship, scarry’s point actually poses a challenge to abbate’s figure of the drastic, illuminating instead the clandestine gnostic entanglements—its capacity to intensify worldly engagement—of beauty. this is the antithesis of the racist reflex in sound, but the systematic tethering of drastic and gnostic is similar in both cases. likewise, legal scholars are beginning to argue that affect does not lie outside of legal interpretation and protocol, but may in fact be a necessary ingredient for its proper functioning. in the words of emily white: “the affective aspects play a role in 48 abbate’s reference is to elaine scarry, on beauty and being just (princeton: princeton university press, 1999), 58–68. 189scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 setting the emotion’s constituent desires for action. without the affective dimension, emotions might, counterintuitively, be less answerable to their own distinctive built-in rationales.”49 affect, in other words, operates not as an exterior element, but as a constitutively linked catalyst for sharpening gnostic rationales. the drastic encounter hones in on the gnostic collateral. for white, these affectively-refocused rationales actually scale to judicial interpretations of the values of human dignity itself. in contrast, the ethics of drastic withdrawal—which register the other only as (point) blank presence—risks serving as an ideological alibi for freighted meaning, effectively beating a retreat from holding the habituated reflex to account. abstinence and withdrawal tarry here with refusal and denial. where the drastic is understood as constitutively exclusive of the gnostic, we find the embodied reflex in medio musicorum posing as irreducible presence. it is this radically inarticulate reflex, now reducible to a network of neurons mapped by sensors on networked subjects—symbolic orders without accountability par excellence—that is readied for statistical expropriation in an era of industrialized computation. separated by a chasm between music’s material event and its ineffable ephemeron, the drastic functions like software itself—executing effects without explanation, accomplishments without understanding, realizations without representations. but that is another story… 49 emily kidd white, “a study of the role of emotion in judicial interpretations of the legal value of human dignity claims” (phd diss., new york university school of law, 2017), 45. event or ephemeron?190 sound stage screen 2021/1 works cited abbate, carolyn. “music—drastic or gnostic?” critical inquiry 30, no. 3 (2004): 505– 536. ———. “overlooking the ephemeral.” new literary history 48, no. 1 (2017): 75–102. ———. “sound object lessons.” journal of the american musicological society 69, no. 3 (2016): 793–829. auslander, philip. liveness: performance in a mediatized culture. new york: routledge, 1999. barthes, roland. the responsibility of forms: critical essays on music, art, and representation. translated by richard howard. new york: hill and wang, 1985. berger, karol. “music according to don giovanni, or: should we get drastic?” journal of musicology 22, no. 3 (2005): 490–501. borio, gianmario, alessandro cecchi, giovanni giuriati and marco lutzu, eds. investigating musical performance: theoretical models and intersections. london: routledge, 2020. chion, michel. audio-vision: sound on screen. edited and translated by claudia gorbman. new york: columbia university press, 1994. currie, james. “music after all.” journal of the american musicological society 62, no.1 (spring 2009): 145–203. cusick, suzanne g. “musicology, performativity, acoustemology.” in theorizing sound writing, edited by deborah kapchan, 25–45. middletown: wesleyan university press, 2017. deleuze, gilles, and félix guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. translated by brian massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1987. derrida, jacques. the politics of friendship. translated by george collins. london: verso, 2006. dolan, emily i., and alexander rehding, eds. the oxford handbook of timbre. oxford: oxford university press, 2018–. https:// www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190637224. eidsheim, nina sun. the race of sound: listening, timbre, and vocality in african-american music. durham: duke university press, 2018. fink, robert, melinda latour and zachary wallmark, eds. the relentless pursuit of tone: timbre in popular music. new york: oxford university press, 2018. gallope, michael. deep refrains: music, philosophy, and the ineffable. chicago: university of chicago press, 2017. gumbrecht, hans ulrich. “form without matter vs. form as event.” mln 111, no. 3 (1996): 578–592. ———. production of presence: what meaning cannot convey. stanford: stanford university press, 2004. jankélévitch, vladimir. music and the ineffable. translated by carolyn abbate. princeton: princeton university press, 2003. kittler, friedrich a. the truth of the technological world: essays on the genealogy of presence. translated by erik butler. stanford: stanford university press, 2013. lachenmann, helmut. “musique concrète instrumentale.” slought. conversation with gene coleman. april 7, 2008. https:// slought.org/resources/musique_concrete_ instrumentale. massumi, brian. parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. durham, nc: https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190637224 https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190637224 https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190637224 https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190637224 http://slought.org/resources/musique_concrete_instrumentale http://slought.org/resources/musique_concrete_instrumentale 191scherzinger sound stage screen 2021/1 duke university press, 2002. mcclary, susan. “constructions of subjectivity in schubert’s music.” in queering the pitch: the new gay and lesbian musicology, edited by philip brett, elizabeth wood and gary c. thomas, 205–233. new york: routledge, 1994. olwage, grant. “the class and colour of tone: an essay on the social history of vocal timbre.” ethnomusicology forum 13, no. 2 (2004): 203–226. radano, ronald, and philip v. bohlman, eds. music and the racial imagination. chicago: university of chicago press, 2000. reik, theodor. listening with the third ear: the inner experience of a psychoanalyst. new york: farrar, straus, 1948. salta, tom. “the art of composing for video games.” keynote lecture, music and the moving image, new york, may 21, 2010. scarry, elaine. on beauty and being just. princeton: princeton university press, 1999. schaeffer, pierre. treatise on musical objects: an essay across disciplines. translated by christine north and john dack. oakland: university of california press, 2017. seabrook, john. “the money note: can the record business survive?” new yorker, july 7, 2003, 42–55. smart, mary ann. “the manufacture of extravagant gesture: labour and emotion on the operatic stage.” presentation at the seminar investigating musical performance: towards a conjunction of ethnographic and historiographic perspectives, fondazione giorgio cini, venice, july 9, 2016. ———. mimomania: music and gesture in nineteenth-century opera. berkeley: university of california press, 2004. solie, ruth a., ed. musicology and difference: gender and sexuality in music scholarship. berkeley: university of california press, 1993. stoever, jennifer lynn. the sonic color line: race and the cultural politics of listening. new york: new york university press, 2016. taruskin, richard. defining russia musically: historical and hermeneutical essays. princeton: princeton university press, 1997. white, emily kidd. “a study of the role of emotion in judicial interpretations of the legal value of human dignity claims.” phd diss., new york university school of law, 2017. wittgenstein, ludwig. tractatus logico-philosophicus. translated by c.k. ogden. new york: cosimo, 2007. event or ephemeron?192 sound stage screen 2021/1 abstract the study of music’s production, reproduction, and circulation is today suspended between two ruling paradigms—the methodological inclinations of musicology, on the one hand, and ethnomusicology, on the other. if the central referents for musicology (and especially its technical support system, music theory) exaggerate the importance of fixed texts (archival documents, audiovisual media, technical inscriptions, musical scores, recordings and transcriptions, the organology of instrumentaria, etc.), their antithesis—the central referents for ethnomusicology—exaggerate the value of dynamic contexts (social processes, cultural practices, affect flows, conventions, interactions, agents and networks, etc.). this essay turns toward an intermediary point of focus—the role of performance itself as an opening into reflections on music qua music. in particular, this essay engages the challenges posed by a prominent theorist of sound, media, and performance, carolyn abbate, and the conception of the “drastic” in music. written almost two decades ago, at a time when the humanities underwent an ostensible turn to affect, abbate’s essay “music—drastic or gnostic?” detects in music scholarship an abundant engagement with music’s texts and contexts, and a simultaneous aversion toward music’s phenomenal reality, exemplified by its live performance. in “music—drastic or gnostic?” abbate redresses the imbalance and offers avenues for addressing music’s material, embodied, and even spiritual presence. the essay is notable for catalyzing a series of shifts in music studies in the decades after its publication. my counter-argument is organized around four primary themes. first, it considers the precise performative modalities of music’s mediatic transmission for drastic listening. second, it outlines the entangled moral and ethical operations that are freighted by drastic encounter of musical performance. third, it assesses the affordances and limits of rejecting music’s technological reproducibility. and fourth, it detects an uncanny return of the gnostic repressed at the core of drastic experience in real time. the conclusion of the essay demonstrates music’s paradoxical ontological status as both event and ephemeron, arguing that the drastic must be reconceived to genuinely acknowledge the sonorous presence of its socio-political collateral. the primary working example for the essay’s conclusion addresses the question of race and music. its critical impulse notwithstanding, this essay also attempts to highlight the insights of abbate’s account of musical performance and the inadequacy of the largely negative reaction to it. martin scherzinger is a composer and associate professor of media studies at new york university. he works on sound, music, media, and politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. primary areas include the musical and choreographic traditions of europe, africa, and america as well as global biographies of sound and other ephemera circulating in geographically-remote regions. scherzinger’s research includes the examination of links between political economy and digital sound technologies, intellectual property law in diverse sociotechnical environments, relations between aesthetics and censorship, sensory limits of mass-mediated music, mathematical geometries of musical time, histories of sound in philosophy, and the politics of biotechnification. 