The Department of Music invites you to the research presentations of our Music History and Culture faculty, Prof. Aaron Ziegel and Prof. Sam Baltimore.
Prof. Ziegel and Prof. Baltimore will give papers in the annual national meeting of the American Musicological Society in Milwaukee, WI, and will offer a preview of their papers on Tuesday, November 4, 2014, at 4:00, in the Center for the Arts, room 3078. Please join us and support the research of our faculty.
Paper abstracts:
The Politics of International Opera Production: Arthur Nevin’s Poia in Berlin, 1910 Aaron Ziegel
On 23 April 1910, American composer Arthur Nevin’s opera Poia premiered at the Berlin Royal Opera House and ignited a riotously antagonistic response from some members of the audience. For reasons more political than musical, these Berlin performances of an American work unleashed a barrage of anti-U.S. anger, rumors, false accusations, and critical hostility in the German newspapers. This case study traces the unfolding of this little-known operatic scandal – what one writer at the time described as “the first telling shot in what may become … one of the greatest wars in the history of music” – as it seeks to assess the roots of the German critics’ discontent and examine the American press’s nationalistic response.
Ashman’s Aladdin Archive: Queer Orientalism in the Disney Renaissance
Sam Baltimore
Disney’s Aladdin (1992), recently reinvented as a stage musical, encapsulates the fraught intersection of camouflaged gay desire, childlike moral simplicity, and obfuscating orientalism that marks much of musical comedy on film and stage. Through an examination of Howard Ashman’s early scripts and song lyrics, various press clippings, and the Disney corporation’s publicity materials, all held in the Howard Ashman Papers at the Library of Congress, and through analysis of the final film and stage shows themselves, this essay uncovers messages of queer celebration and liberation often underlying children’s musical comedies, usually in tension with the commercial aims of these comedies’ producers. At the same time, it demonstrates a troubling use of orientalist imagery, somewhat muted in the final film from Ashman’s original concepts, as a veil for gay desire, a trope with a long history in queer art and music, particularly the twentieth-century American musical comedy.
