<p> Daniel Cat&aacute;n's opera <i>Il Postino</i> was primarily inspired by Chilean author Antonio Skarmeta's 1985 novel <i> Ardiente Paciencia,</i> the 1994 Italian-language film <i>Il Postino </i>, and the poetry of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. The opera <i> Il Postino</i> was prepared and given its world premiere in Los Angeles in 2010. This initial premiere was followed by national premieres of the same production in Austria, France, Chile, and still to come, Spain in July 2013. Cat&aacute;n's sudden death in April2011 prior to the opera's opening in Paris stunned music lovers worldwide. Now recognized as his final complete opera, <i> Il Postino</i> represents the pinnacle of his effort to add Spanish-language opera to the international canon. This project report explores the reception of <i>Il Postino</i> both prior to and in the wake of Cat&aacute;n's death, introduces themes emphasized in the work, and offers observations on performance interpretation informed by the original production.</p>

<p> <i>One Hundred Forty-Six</i> is a music and dance theater production portraying an artistic memorial to the victims, tragedy, and progress of the historical Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of March 25, 1911. The music, composed by Elizabeth L. Kowalski, was scored for string quartet with added electronics. Images and sounds of textile factory work and the events of the fire and memorial are communicated throughout the music. The score is accompanied here by a written document explaining the work. <i>One Hundred Forty-Six </i> has an approximate duration of 45 minutes. The premiere was held in the UNCG Dance Theater on March 30, 2012, shortly after the 101^st anniversary of the fire.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Harvard University, 2007. / (UMI)AAI3265119. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-05, Section: A, page: 1729. Adviser: Mario Davidovsky.

<p> Robert Wilson has been a major figure on the international arts scene for close to half a century. Whether re-imagining canonic works of theater, staging operas, crafting newly-conceived multimedial productions, or advising Lady Gaga's performance at the 2013 MI 'V Awards, his instantly recognizable visual style has led his work to be called a "theater of images." Indeed, the world of Wilson scholarship has always been image-centered, at the expense of other key elements of the director's theatrical imagination&mdash;especially music and sound. Both of the latter, however, have long played a crucial role in Wilson's work. Though he is best known, in musical circles, for <i> Einstein on the Beach</i> (the opera he created in 1976 with Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs), Wilson has collaborated with musicians from the highest echelons of both popular and classical music. Furthermore, over the last several decades, he has developed a palette of sonic techniques in his theatrical productions that are no less recognizable than his stage designs.</p><p> This dissertation offers the first in-depth analysis of sound and music in Wilson's theatrical productions. Through analyses of live performances, production paratexts (including criticism and programs), archival materials, and conversations with Wilson and his collaborators, it harnesses Wilson's audio-visual language to develop an interdisciplinary framework for understanding sonic media in a theatrical context. Approaching "sound" as a broad concept that encompasses all elements of a production designed to be heard&mdash;music and songs, spoken text, and sound effects&mdash;I focus on Wilson's theatrical productions where these sonic elements exist in a state of parity. Since live performances provide the bedrock of my analyses, the methodological roots of this dissertation lie in the performance-based scholarship of opera and theater studies. These fields are brought into extensive dialogue with literature, visual art, architecture, performance studies, semiotics, and sociology, as well as interdisciplinary discourses such as media and sound studies. Wilson actively avoids sounds that "illustrate" his visuals, and images that "decorate" sounds, and through this assemblage of theoretical perspectives I demonstrate that neither his images nor his sounds can be adequately understood without the other.</p><p> My starting point is Wilson's oft-stated belief that properly structured images may help us "hear better," and that carefully deployed sounds may similarly help an audience "see better." Following the introduction, which surveys the existing literature on Wilson's work and establishes the aims, claims, and methodology of the dissertation, the first chapter examines this idea as both aesthetic tenet and practical directive. Chapter One also provides a brief overview of Wilson's history as a theater practitioner and consumer, and outlines the many influences on his current work. Chapter Two, the first of four analytic chapters, considers a sound that we are acculturated to filter out while listening: the crackling of a record. It examines how this sound, elevated to a level of sonic prominence, creates ambiguity about a sound's source while engaging the divergent performance histories of a particular song (the "Moritat" from <i> Die Dreigroschenoper</i>) and the space of its performance. Chapter Three explores Wilson's frequent use of sounds to represent objects which are not present onstage&mdash;specifically coins and doors. Built on a foundation of semiotic theory, this chapter crafts a new understanding of audio-visual communication in the theater through recourse to scholarship on sound, gesture, and architecture. Chapter Four adopts the concept of framing (as employed in art history and literary theory), and uses it to excavate how incidental music may enable material from "inside" the performance (characters, music) to intersect and interact with material from "outside" the performance (the audience, the auditorium). In particular, it considers how music creates a time and space where characters may step out of the narrative frame while still remaining inside the diegesis. Finally, Chapter Five focuses on Wilson's production <i>Lulu</i>, examining how interpolated songs (by Lou Reed) disrupt the teleological flow of a canonical story by engaging intertextual experiences and forging new musical memories within the space of the production. </p><p> Like performance itself, music and sound are ephemeral. As scholarship expands to engage live performance as an object of study, this dissertation offers a methodology for incorporating sonic elements into this vital scholarly discourse. By unstopping our ears, I propose, we stand not only to deepen our understanding of an enigmatic artist, but also to expand the horizons of theater scholarship, cross discursive boundaries, and holistically engage multimedial forms of expression in theater, opera, and art.</p><p>

<p> <i>The Terrorist and the Whore</i> is a two-person musical theater composition written as an unfinished yet retrospective performance document of the relationship of Kahlil Sabbagh and Ginger Smith from 2002 to 2015. The purpose of this project is to submit six songs from the musical that challenge two stereotypes, gender stereotyping and ethnic typecasting, while lending insight into the process of creating and telling a story and composing music. The six musical pieces, "Each Other," "Three Little Minutes," "That Crazy Moon," "It's Like," "Side Job," "I Don't like You," are presented through a score and electronically produced soundtrack and are analyzed in both a theoretical sense as well as for background informational purposes. It is through the lens of the characters that they discover, through music, the deep internal dynamics of a relationship.</p>

<p>Self-referentiality plays an important, but often overlooked, role in the works of Richard Strauss. The broad category of self-reference includes works of metafiction, which literary critic Patricia Waugh has defined as fiction that &ldquo;self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality&rdquo; and &ldquo;explores the <i>theory </i> of writing fiction through the <i>practice</i> of writing fiction.&rdquo;¹ Additionally, Werner Wolf has conceptualized self-reference to include not only &ldquo;intra-systemic relationship(s),&rdquo; but also intertextual and intermedial references.² The relationships and references included in Wolf&rsquo;s conception of self-reference allow Strauss, his collaborators, and later interpreters to insert their own voices into operas and, arguably, even give themselves agency in the drama. This thesis examines this voice and agency in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of Strauss&rsquo;s aesthetics and those of his librettists and later interpreters with particular attention to three operas: <i>Ariadne auf Naxos</i> (the 1912 and 1916 versions), <i>Intermezzo</i> (1924), and <i> Capriccio</i> (1942). Additionally, I examine Christof Loy&rsquo;s 2011 production of <i>Die Frau ohne Schatten</i> (1919) as an example of complex layers self-reference added to a work by a later interpreter and as a suggestion for future avenues of research regarding operatic self-referentiality. </p><p> ¹Patricia Waugh, <i>Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction</i> (London: Methuen &amp; Company, 1984), 2. ²Werner Wolf, preface to <i>Self-Reference in Literature and Music</i>, ed. Walter Bernhart and Werner Wolf (Amsterdam: Rudopi, 2010), vii.</p>

<p> Monody in musical dramatic presentations emanates from an early Baroque opera genesis and exists in multiple forms in the musical theater of today. By examining the Baroque characteristics of monody within the opera genre, a direct comparison between Monteverdi's opera <i>Orfeo</i> (1607) and Sch&ouml;nberg's musical <i>Les Miserables</i> (1985) can be established. This correlation becomes pronounced upon the exploration of four specific examples: through the implementation of recitative and aria, the interdependent use of duet and chorus with the solo voice, the innovative incorporation of atypical tonalities within the melodic line, and the inventive application of instrumentation to enhance vocal expression in each work. Just as Monteverdi designed his recitative to express the emotion of the libretto, so Sch&ouml;nberg composes dynamic, emotional songs to enhance the epic story of <i>Les Miserables.</i> Though composed centuries apart, both works employ similar melodic, rhythmic, harmonic and orchestral constructs, confirming a similar genesis.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, November, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2005. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Dec. 3, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-03, Section: A, page: 0985. Chair: Eugene Chen Eoyang.

<p> Sound design is a comparatively young member of the theatrical design family. Computer technology for sound and music, much of which emerged over this past decade, continues to become cheaper and more widely available, making intricate sonic designs more accessible now than in the past for designers and theaters alike. While this is a big step for the art of sound design, the field is still adolescent in comparison to the scenic, costume, and lighting design fields. Sound design has become a regular part of the creation of modern theatre; that said, modern sound designers might collaborate with other theater professionals who trained without significant collaboration with or influence from sound designers and sound design. As such, collaborative practices between a sound designer and the rest of a theatrical team continue to develop. Through this thesis, I hope to provide a comprehensive snapshot of the role of sound design and sound designers in modern theatre, and to illuminate important strategies for successful collaboration between sound designers and a theatrical team.</p>