Date/Time:
Date(s) - 04/08/2016
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Location:
Rm. 3491 (Large Seminar Rm.), Graduate Center
About:
All live performances are unrepeatable and ephemeral. Even when video recorded, the visceral sensations and energy flows in the auditorium belong to the moment. What, then, can we recover of lived experiences generated over four decades ago? With this talk, Professor Guy demonstrates the research involved in recovering not only the details of how Beverly Sills’ performed Donizetti’s opera Anna Bolena (one of Sills’ roles for which no video recording exists), but also a sense of how her performance was experienced by those in attendance. Guy draws on bootleg audio recordings, Sills’ annotated personal score, written accounts of the opera in rehearsal and performance, photos, and interviews with audience members. For some people, aspects of a performance persist as vivid memories throughout their lives. These memories, along with tangible sources, are vital to Guy’s musicological forensic work.
Nancy Guy is an ethnomusicologist and an associate professor of music at the University of California, San Diego. Over her career, Guy’s research interests have been primarily focused on theatrical performance, with political drama and music’s role in political contestations falling within this purview. Her latest book, The Magic of Beverly Sills was published by the University of Illinois Press in November 2015. Prior to her Sills work, Guy’s research focused on the musics of Taiwan and China. Her book Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan (University of Illinois Press, 2005) won the ASCAP Béla Bartók Award for Excellence in Ethnomusicology and it was also named an “Outstanding Academic Title for 2006” by Choice, the review magazine of the Association for College and Research Libraries. Her article, “Flowing Down Taiwan’s Tamsui River: Towards an Ecomusicology of the Environmental Imagination” (Ethnomusicology 2009) has become a foundational reading in the burgeoning subfield of ecomusicology.
Category(ies)
