Maria Callas's Lyric and Coloratura Arias
Maria Callas's Lyric and Coloratura Arias

Author: Ginger Dellenbaugh

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1501379046

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More than 40 years after her death, the legend of Maria Callas, “La Divina Assoluta,” remains unsurpassed. Much has been written about her sensational opera career and fraught private life, from her definitive mastery of iconic opera roles to her love affairs and tantrums. The prototype for the 20th century celebrity diva, Callas emblematizes the cliche of tormented talent – genius in the ring with catastrophe. Her extraordinary voice, in particular, has become an object of cult-like adoration and cultural significance almost with a life of its own: as fetish object, as sophisticated sonic signifier, and most recently, as the lifeblood for a Callas hologram. Such adoration is not without consequences. When Callas is transformed into a vessel for such transcendent magic, it overshadows what is perhaps her most superhuman ability – the masterful technique she deployed to shape and craft her astounding instrument. Singing bodies are working bodies, enacting an intimate and complex form of artistic labor and cultural signification. Using one of Callas's first recital recordings from 1954, this book envisions each aria as a lens to examine various aspects of vocalization and cultural reception of the feminized voice in both classical and pop culture, from Homer's Sirens to Star Trek. With references to works by Marina Abramovic, Charles Baudelaire, Michel Chion, Wayne Koestenbaum, Greil Marcus, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, as well as films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jonathan Demme, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, each chapter explores phenomena unique to the singing voice, including the operatic screaming point, the politics of listening, and the singing simulacrum.

Vincenzo Bellini on Stage and Screen, 1935-2020
Vincenzo Bellini on Stage and Screen, 1935-2020

Author: Emilio Sala

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-10-31

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1501391208

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Vincenzo Bellini on Stage and Screen, 1935–2020 offers nine case studies of the history of Vincenzo Bellini's operas on stage, on screen, and in sound, video and performance art. This investigation begins in 1935, the hundredth anniversary of the composer's death and the year when his first biopic was released, and ends in 2020, when performance artist Marina Abramovic's 'opera project' 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, whose final scene is accompanied by Bellini's famous aria 'Casta Diva,' was premiered. In Part One, several recent productions of La sonnambula, Norma and I Puritani are discussed from different perspectives, but the common focus is on the possible meanings of these works for contemporary spectators. Part Two, centered on cinema, includes chapters on biopics of Bellini that make extensive use of his music, as well as on the presence of this music in soundtracks of films from the last half century. Part Three turns to other media or mixtures of stage and screen, and focuses on Bellini in sound and video art of the last few decades, on YouTube and its fandom, and on 7 Deaths of Maria Callas. The volume offers an expansive view of the many ways in which Bellini's operas have been visualized and conceptualized over the past century, and of what they may have meant, and may still mean, for twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture.

Maria Callas's Lyric and Coloratura Arias
Maria Callas's Lyric and Coloratura Arias

Author: Ginger Dellenbaugh

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 1501379038

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More than 40 years after her death, the legend of Maria Callas, “La Divina Assoluta,” remains unsurpassed. Much has been written about her sensational opera career and fraught private life, from her definitive mastery of iconic opera roles to her love affairs and tantrums. The prototype for the 20th century celebrity diva, Callas emblematizes the cliche of tormented talent – genius in the ring with catastrophe. Her extraordinary voice, in particular, has become an object of cult-like adoration and cultural significance almost with a life of its own: as fetish object, as sophisticated sonic signifier, and most recently, as the lifeblood for a Callas hologram. Such adoration is not without consequences. When Callas is transformed into a vessel for such transcendent magic, it overshadows what is perhaps her most superhuman ability – the masterful technique she deployed to shape and craft her astounding instrument. Singing bodies are working bodies, enacting an intimate and complex form of artistic labor and cultural signification. Using one of Callas's first recital recordings from 1954, this book envisions each aria as a lens to examine various aspects of vocalization and cultural reception of the feminized voice in both classical and pop culture, from Homer's Sirens to Star Trek. With references to works by Marina Abramovic, Charles Baudelaire, Michel Chion, Wayne Koestenbaum, Greil Marcus, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, as well as films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jonathan Demme, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, each chapter explores phenomena unique to the singing voice, including the operatic screaming point, the politics of listening, and the singing simulacrum.

Depeche Mode's 101
Depeche Mode's 101

Author: Mary Valle

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-05-30

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13: 1501390333

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Depeche Mode's 101 is, at first glance, a curious thing: a live double-album by a synth band. A recording of its “Concert for the Masses,” 101 marks the moment when doomy, cultish, electronic Depeche Mode, despite low American album sales and a lack of critical acclaim, declared they had arrived and ascended to the rare air of stadium rock. On June 18, 1988, 65,000 screaming, singing Southern Californians flocked to Pasadena's Rose Bowl to celebrate DM's coronation. The concert also revealed the power of Southern California radio station and event host KROQ, which had turned Los Angeles into DM's American stronghold through years of fervent airplay. KROQ's innovative format, which brought “new music” to its avid listeners, soon spread across the country, leading to the explosion of alternative rock in the 1990s. Eight years after its founding in Basildon, Essex, Depeche Mode, rooted in 1970s Krautrock, combined old-fashioned touring, well-crafted songs, and the steadfast support of KROQ to dominate Southern California, the United States, and then the world, kicking open the doors for the likes of Nirvana in the process. 101 is the hidden-in-plain-sight hinge of modern music history.

Dreaming in Ensemble
Dreaming in Ensemble

Author: Lucy Caplan

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2025

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0674268512

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Lucy Caplan explores the flourishing of Black composers, performers, and critics of opera in America during the early twentieth century. Working outside mainstream opera houses, these artists fostered countercultural forms of expression that reimagined opera as a medium of Black aesthetic and political creativity.

Madvillain's Madvillainy
Madvillain's Madvillainy

Author: Will Hagle

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2023-03-09

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 1501389246

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This book celebrates Madvillainy as a representation of two genius musical minds melding to form one revered supervillain. A product of circumstance, the album came together soon after MF DOOM's resurgence and Madlib's reluctant return from avant-garde jazz to hip-hop. Written from the alternating perspectives of three fake music journalist superheroes-featuring interviews with Wildchild, M.E.D., Walasia, Daedelus, Stones Throw execs, and many other real individuals involved with the album's creation-this book blends fiction and non-fiction to celebrate Madvillainy not just as an album, but as a folkloric artifact. It is one specific retelling of a story which, like Madvillain's music, continues to spawn infinite legends.

Dolly Parton's White Limozeen
Dolly Parton's White Limozeen

Author: Steacy Easton

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-09-19

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 1501390414

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A discussion of White Limozeen, from Dolly's self-fashioning to a rigorous critique of her genre. White Limozeen (1989) was a commercial recovery after Dolly Parton's first major failure two years previously with the release of Rainbow. This book is a case study in how an album is sold and a persona constructed. The album had a complex relationship to the country music genre at a time when the genre was in the middle of major sonic and cultural shifts, and it represents how country music saw itself. This question of identity was especially relevant since White Limozeen was produced by Ricky Skaggs, the bluegrass prodigy who was in the middle of his own genre-widening experiments. The album reflects dense and complex production, shredding ideas of purity, studio craft, slickness, and authenticity. In it, Dolly seems to be imagining the limits of her own personae - the country girl, the blonde burlesque, the pop legend, the gospel singer. To study this album is to investigate Dolly's calculated role in fashioning her image into the icon she is today.

Various Artists' Red Hot + Blue
Various Artists' Red Hot + Blue

Author: John S. Garrison

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-09-19

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13:

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Red Hot + Blue is a meditation on music's capacity to find us, transform us, and help us make sense of our historical moment. Blending memoir and cultural history, Garrison recalls his coming out at the height of the AIDS crisis alongside the music industry's first major response to the epidemic. In 1990, a groundbreaking effort by musical artists sought to combat the silence and stigma about the disease. The resulting tribute album to legendary composer Cole Porter was evocatively titled Red Hot + Blue, capturing both the joy and melancholy that accompany love during turbulent times. It re-imagined those iconic songs - including “Don't Fence Me In,” “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “Night and Day” - not just to celebrate the composer but also to offer a shared vision for survival. In this book, Garrison reflects on his own life story through the lens of Porter's life and music to illuminate the emotional landscape we all navigate in the search for love. Red Hot + Blue returns us to the early 1990s to reveal how the love songs of the past can be revived to speak to new audiences in times of need. The book is the portrait of an album, a pandemic, and a young gay man's coming of age in the era of both.

Britney Spears's Blackout
Britney Spears's Blackout

Author: Natasha Lasky

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2022-09-22

Total Pages: 135

ISBN-13: 1501377604

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Britney Spears barely survived 2007. She divorced her husband, lost custody of her kids, went to rehab, shaved her head and assaulted a paparazzo. In the midst of her public breakdown, she managed to record an album, Blackout. Critics thought it spelled the end for Britney Spears' career. But Blackout turned out to be one of the most influential albums of the aughts. It not only brought glitchy digital noise and dubstep into the Top 40, but also transformed Britney into a new kind of pop star, one who shrugged off mainstream ubiquity for the devotion of smaller groups of fans who worshipped her idiosyncratic sound. This book returns to the grimy clubs and paparazzi hangouts of LA in the 2000s as well as the blogs and forums of the early internet to show how Blackout was a crucial hinge between twentieth and twenty-first-century pop.

Modest Mouse’s The Moon & Antarctica
Modest Mouse’s The Moon & Antarctica

Author: Zachary Petit

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-10-17

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13:

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In 1999, Modest Mouse struck out for Chicago to record their major-label debut for Epic Records. Amid indie circle cries of “sellouts,” a largely untested producer, and a half-built studio, the trio recorded the instrumental basics of The Moon & Antarctica ... and then singer/songwriter Isaac Brock got his face smashed by a hooligan in a park. With barely any vocals recorded, Brock emerged from the hospital with his jaw completely wired shut, and returned to a mostly empty studio. And there, on a diet of painkillers, in a neighborhood that wanted to purge the band from its borders, a creative alchemy took place that would redefine Modest Mouse and indie rock at large. The fact that the band finished the album at all is surprising. The fact that it is now considered by critics as “hands-down one of the greatest records ever made” (NME) is perhaps an utter miracle. The Moon & Antarctica is an album so strange and enigmatic, from those sweet opening notes, to the plunging depths of the middle, to the shocking, furious end, that you almost hesitate to listen to it again for fear of it losing its chaotic magic. But then you do, and you discover all-new sounds-a lost harmonic here, a stray percussion element there, a fresh interpretation of a lyric that leaves you thunderstruck. And that ever-looming question, years on: How the hell did Modest Mouse pull this off?!