In Search of Opera by Carolyn Abbate
This work considers the nature of operatic performance, and the accoustic images of performance present in operas. It aims to break down barriers between an experience of music that can be passionate and intuitive, and an intellectual engagement with music as a complicated aesthetic phenomenon.
Anyone who believes in opera as an essential human experience will warm to this book, a must-have if you believe that this bizarre art form has something more to sing about than the trillings of bejewelled prima donnas and the positively necrophiliac yearning for the presence of long dead musician-- Keith Warner BBC Music Magazine Ten years after her much-praised Unsung Voices, Carolyn Abbate has produced another important literary investigation into opera. What sets it apart from the burgeoning canon on the same subject is the sensitivity of its writer to opera's contrasts and contradictions. Her abstract imagination and focused, economic style are able to express what she calls the connection between opera's 'metaphysical flight and the fall to earth'... Through the pieces themselves, we get a picture of intersecting relationships--between composer and performer, sound and body, story and symbol...Many of the most problematic aspects of opera are explored through the pieces themselves, and her transparency of style allows the reader to continue thinking long after the discussion is over. As with all the best books, I am left applying Abbate's process and themes to many other pieces and in many other contexts long after I have finished reading. -- Julia Hollander Opera Now [A] penetrating probe into the body of opera, and a new response to that abiding awareness ... that the 'science' of musicology itself is a 'machine' which ought to make mere human beings as uneasy about its uncanny propensity to disrupt and disturb as operatic characters can be in face of the unknown or the inhuman... In Search of Opera is a text whose tissue of messages is well worth the closest attention. -- Arnold Whittall Musical Times In Search of Opera is one of the most important and exciting considerations of the ontology of the operatic work to date. Its main accomplishment is extraordinary, opening up an entirely new approach to thinking about how musical works resonate, one that can be applied not just to the operatic medium, but to the western art music tradition as a whole. This book will be of interest, therefore, not only to students of opera, but to anyone who has ever thought about what it is to listen, to compose, to perform. -- Hilary Poriss Notes
Carolyn Abbate is professor of Music at Princeton University. She is the author of Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton), which will appear in French as Voix hors-chant (Editions Klincksieck), and translator of Jean-Jacques Nattiez's Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (Princeton) and Vladimir Jankelevitch's Music and the Ineffable (Princeton, forthcoming).
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780691090030 |
| ISBN 10 | 0691090033 |
| Title | In Search of Opera |
| Author | Carolyn Abbate |
| Series | Princeton Studies In Opera |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Princeton University Press |
| Year published | 2001-11-11 |
| Number of pages | 312 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |