Date/Time
Date(s) - 31 Jan 2014
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Location
Dodge Hall
Category(ies) No Categories
On Friday, January 31 at 4 pm, in 622 Dodge Hall (Columbia University), Huub van der Linden of University College Roosevelt (Middelburg, The Netherlands) and the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies will speak on “Listening to Italian oratorio around 1700: Circulations, contexts, and comparisons.”
During the decades around 1700, the genre of oratorio witnessed a peak of interest in Italy, becoming the most widely performed form of musical drama. Oratorio performances were a musical presence not only in cities but also in smaller towns and villages, and they took place in a range of different sites – ranging from lay oratories, to churches, to aristocratic palaces, to college theatres – and different performance contexts. The librettos and music of these works circulated via different channels throughout Italy, and to some extent beyond, and many works stayed on the repertoire for two decades or longer. By not only looking at the rewriting of librettos and at different musical settings of the same text, but by also comparing how the same works were often performed in widely different contexts, and how this in turn would have shaped different audiences’ perceptions, I argue that the case of Italian oratorio provides an unparalleled opportunity to show on the level of a concrete historical setting the—usually largely theoretical—notion that context shapes musical meaning.
The presentation will be followed by a reception.