For the majority of summers between 1917 and 1925, May Valentine presented popular operas to receptive audiences on the chautauqua circuits, conducting and managing her own operatic troupe for the Redpath Chautauqua Bureau from 1923 to 1925. During this time, Valentine produced and conducted “light opera”—English-language operettas such as DeKoven’s Robin Hood, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado and The Gondoliers, Oscar Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier, and Michael William Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl—throughout much of the United States to chautauqua’s demanding, predominantly rural crowds. That her company maintained relative operational autonomy, saw steady ticket revenues and an enthusiastic press reception, and garnered regular appearances in period entertainment magazines while on the summer circuits suggests that Valentine was a successful conductor and impresario. A case study of the May Valentine Opera Company, this thesis explores processes associated with the chautauqua-based dissemination of opera in order to address broader operatic tastes of the 1910s and 1920s in the United States. The capitalist enterprise of the chautauqua circuits proved to be an ideal outlet for the large-scale dissemination of a vernacular operatic repertoire. Throughout her career, Valentine expressed her egalitarian vision for opera in the United States and, with tour stops in upwards of forty-seven states, furthered her cause through the day-to-day operations of a touring, commercial troupe. Valentine’s public persona as a female operatic conductor further inspired a press reception that often focused on her position as a harbinger of the period’s increased attention to female participation in public music making. The chautauqua-circuit career of May Valentine represents not only a now-forgotten continuation of touring English-language opera, but an early twentieth-century operatic phenomenon propagated by standardized chautauqua-circuit business practices, both grounded in and promoted with period ideals of social edification and cultural egalitarianism.

See also: Acoustics in architectural design : an annotated bibliography on architectural acoustics. / When Redpath Hall, originally designed and built as a library reading room, was converted into a multi-purpose auditorium, it soon became evident that the Hall was deficient, in several respects, in its new role. The multipurpose hall is, by design, a compromise, designed to provide reasonable hearing conditions for a multiplicity of instrumental and vocal performances, without favoring or overly impairing any particular type of performance. Redpath Hall possesses a relatively long reverberation time, decidedly beneficial for the appreciation of some musical performances, such as organ recitals, chamber music, choral performances, string quartet, etc., but at the same time, noticeably detrimental for other performances; those instruments that excell with a long reverberation time, tend to mask other instruments, resulting in a definite orchestral imbalance, particularly noticeable in remote seats; quick passages of solo instruments are blurred; the spoken word is not intelligible. [...]

This study compares a collection of decontextualized objects in McGill's Redpath Museum with contemporary historical accounts to see what congruencies can be established between them. It focuses on 125 artifacts gathered in the New Hebrides by a Nova Scotian missionary living on Erromanga between 1872 and 1913. These objects have never been studied before. Collected ethnographic objects are usually studied as they are found in the museum or as they might have been in the field--the movement from one place to the other is not considered significant. Critical consideration of the collecting process imparts information about the manufacture and use of objects, offers insights regarding the relation between local and introduced material culture, and reveals the historically contingent, intercultural relations that made collecting possible. It also exposes the foreign, local, cultural, and individual influences at work when certain items were selected, while others were left behind.

Thesis (M.Sc.). / Written for the School of Computer Science. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2007/08/30). Includes bibliographical references.

See also: Acoustics in architectural design : an annotated bibliography on architectural acoustics.

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