Temporalities in Music Theater

Temporal structures and forces have yet to be meaningfully addressed by scholars of music theatrical genres. However, given music’s and drama’s fundamental and compelling temporal dimensions, as well as the current burgeoning of scholarship on time and temporality in adjacent disciplines, we see opera as a particularly fruitful and multi-layered site of temporal inquiry. How are various temporally inflected psychological phenomena such as memory, nostalgia, anticipation and apprehension composed, staged and understood in opera? How do narrative pacing devices such as acceleration and delay, expansion and condensation, duplication and recurrence, flashback and “flash forward” function within the conventions of music drama genres in various historical and cultural contexts? In particular, how can we grasp the overlapping temporalities, the relations of convergence and divergence between represented time and time of representation, between present and evoked time, between time of speech, action, affect and music, between time and tempo that are essentially different and more complex in music theater than elsewhere?

Though Carl Dahlhaus made the claim over thirty years ago that “the distinction between real and expanded time manifested in the difference between recitative and aria is by no means sufficient to take account of the infinite gradations in the musical-dramatic reality” (1981), few opera scholars have pursued this area of investigation in depth. In this study group, we invite researchers in music drama to contemplate the rich topic of time from a variety of angles. Indeed, we want to explore how perspectives drawn from music theory and musicology—but also from the rich body of work on temporality in literature, linguistics, cultural history, comparative studies, film studies, gender studies, performance studies, and other disciplines—can inform our understanding of the unique ways in which music theater organizes and reveals time.

Laura Moeckli (CH), Kunio Hara (US), Colleen Renihan (CA)

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