Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition
Charles Dill
One of the foremost composers of the French Baroque operatic tradition, Rameau is often cited for his struggle to steer lyric tragedy away from its strict Lullian form, inspired by spoken tragedy, and toward a more expressive musical style. In this fresh exploration of Rameau's compositional aesthetic, Charles Dill depicts a much more complicated figure: one obsessed with tradition, music theory, his own creative instincts, and the public's expectations of his music. Dill examines the ways Rameau mediated among these often competing values and how he interacted with his critics and with the public. The result is a sophisticated rethinking of Rameau as a musical innovator.
In his compositions, Rameau tried to highlight music's potential for dramatic meanings. But his listeners, who understood lyric tragedy to be a poetic rather than musical genre, were generally frustrated by these attempts. In fact, some described Rameau's music as monstrous--using an image of deformity to represent the failure of reason and communication. Dill shows how Rameau answered his critics with rational, theoretical arguments about the role of music in lyric tragedy. At the same time, however, the composer sought to placate his audiences by substantially revising his musical texts in later performances, sometimes abandoning his most creative ideas.
Monstrous Opera illuminates the complexity of Rameau's vision, revealing not only the tensions within the music but also the conflicting desires that drove the man--himself caricatured by his contemporaries as a monster.
Charles Dill is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Princeton Studies in Opera: Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, Editors
JUNE 240 pages
22 music examples 6 x 9
0-691-04443-0 Cloth
$39.95S
Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians
A world-renowned scholar of plainchant, Kenneth Levy has spent a
portion of his career investigating the nature and ramifications of this
repertory's shift from an oral tradition to the written versions dating
to the tenth century. In Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians, which
represents the culmination of his research, Levy seeks to change
long-held perceptions about ceratin crucial stages of the evolution and
dissemination of the old corpus of plainchant--most notably the
assumption that such a large and complex repertory could have become and
remained fixed for over a century while still an oral tradition. Levy
protrays the promulgation of an authoritative body of plainchant during
the reign of Charlemagne by clearly differentiating between actual
evidence, hypotheses, and received ideas.
How many traditions of oral chant existed before the tenth century?
Among the variations noted in written chant, can one point to a single
version as being older or more authentic than the others? What
precursors might there have been to the notational system used in all the
surviving manuscripts, where the notational system seems fully formed and
mature? In answering questions that have long vexed scholars of
Gregorian chant's early history, Levy offers fresh explanations of such
topics as the origin of Latin neumes, the shifting relationships between
memory and early notations, and the puzzling differences among the first
surviving neume-species from the tenth century, which have until now
impeded a critical restoration of the Carolingian musical forms.
Kenneth Levy is a Scheide Professor of Music History Emeritus at
Princeton University. He is well known for his work in medieval music,
particularly Byzantine and Latin plainchant. He is the author of
Music: A Listener's Introduction.
MARCH 296 pages
Kenneth Levy
28 halftones 36 line illus.
2 tables 6 x 9
0-691-01733-6 Cloth
$49.50S