Videos by Jelena Novak
Interconnecting the perspectives of visual art, technology and opera, Post-Opera explored the cha... more Interconnecting the perspectives of visual art, technology and opera, Post-Opera explored the changing relationship between the human body and the voice today. For this cross-disciplinary project guest curator Kris Dittel and musicologist Jelena Novak initiated a collaboration between TENT and V2_Lab for the Unstable Media and Operadagen Rotterdam.
19.04.-30.06.2019.
Rotterdam 15 views
In the last decade or so visual artists have paid more and more attention to the voice. According... more In the last decade or so visual artists have paid more and more attention to the voice. Accordingly, an increasing number of art works have emerged that take opera as their principal subject matter. At the same time several existing operas have been presented in a visual arts context. Both these tendencies have assigned fresh meanings to the genre of (post)opera in contemporary Western society.
I will discuss the staging of Einstein on the Beach (1976) by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson as an installation authored by Berthold Schneider and Veronika Witte (2001, 2005), Opera for a Small Room by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2005), Sirens Taken for Wonders (2009) by Paul Elliman and The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures (2012) by Marguerite Humeau.
Strategies of ‘going beyond itself’ prompt discussion about the state of contemporary opera while inviting definitions of what is undeniably operatic once opera has been installed as its own signifier. 84 views
Videos by Jelena Novak
Transmedia Arts seminar, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University, 2022
This roundtable brings together a diverse group of opera practitioners and scholars focusing on t... more This roundtable brings together a diverse group of opera practitioners and scholars focusing on the transmedia flow of opera in the twenty-first century. The global pandemic offered an opportunity for opera to spearhead innovative transmedia storytelling formats that move fluidly across media boundaries, artistic genres, and geographical borders. Long considered innovative storytelling formats, site-specificity, VR, and video games have influenced opera in multi-faceted ways, transporting audiences into an “otherworld.” Recently, we have witnessed a shift towards site-specific reimagination of repertory opera (Twilight: Gods by Lyric Opera of Chicago and Michigan Opera Theater), gamification of opera (Yuval Sharon’s Die Walküre Act III, White Snake Projects’ PermaDeath, Death by Life), and a radical re-conception of opera as observed in VR – and zoom – operas (On Site Opera’s Lesson Plan, Kamala Sankaram’s Parksville Murders, all decisions will be made by consensus). Engaging with transmedia aesthetics through the lens of cross-border exchanges, transnational co-productions, and co-creations will offer deeper insights into the distributed mode of creative agency in our contemporary scene today which ventures away from a hegemonic framework. In doing so, we aim to contribute to new transmedia frameworks in situating opera studies today. Scrutinizing the media integrated into the live productions will lead outwards to a critical issue concerning media as place-making, as well as the intermedial affinities between opera and other remotely delivered compositions in the here-and-now.
Books by Jelena Novak
Operofilia, 2018
SADRŽAJ
UVOD: HIC SUNT DRACONES / 11
I DEO - POSTOPERA: OKO AJNŠTAJNA NA PLAŽI / 15
Postope... more SADRŽAJ
UVOD: HIC SUNT DRACONES / 11
I DEO - POSTOPERA: OKO AJNŠTAJNA NA PLAŽI / 15
Postopera / 16
Ajnštajn na amsterdamskoj plaži / 18
Satjagraha ples / 22
Laboratorija Ajnštajnalija / 24
O operi i cirkusu / 43
II DEO - OPERA KAO INSTITUCIONALIZOVANJE SNA / 47
Telo/glas / 48
Čovek koji je pobrkao svoju ženu sa šeširom / 50
Vivije: opera o kompozitoru / 53
Politička ekonomija opere / 57
Ekonomija operske traume / 59
O postoperskoj izvesnosti / 68
III DEO - INSTALIRANJE OPERSKOG / 75
Opersko (operatic), predlog za definisanje pojma / 76
Pozorište sveta / 78
Opera Forward 2018 / 83
Opera izvan sebe / 85
Fantomske mašine / 92
IV DEO - REALISTIČNO PEVANJE / 99
Kapitalistički realizam / 100
Donald i Hilari kao operski junaci / 101
Opera Forward 2017 / 103
O operskoj (ne)podobnosti / 106
Atomsko pitanje / 108
Opera i ideologija masovne kulture / 110
Opera nakon televizije / 119
V DEO – UGLAZBLJENA MITOLOGIJA / 133
Diva/Divo / 133
Drvo koje cveta i zakoni operske ponude i potražnje / 138
Električne vavilonske orgulje / 141
Anti-diva / 144
Lisabonska priča i operska otkrića / 146
Šest perifernih priča oko opere: demitologizacija / 163
BIBLIOGRAFIJA / 171
Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body, 2015
The subject of this study is the operatic singing body and its reinvention in recent operatic wor... more The subject of this study is the operatic singing body and its reinvention in recent operatic works that I call postoperas. Both in opera studies and in the majority of operatic pieces the singing body is often taken for granted. My main argument is that the body-voice relationship establishes meanings produced by opera and that furthermore it becomes one of the major driving forces in recent opera. In my theoretical objects - La Belle et la Bête (P. Glass), Writing to Vermeer (L. Andriessen, P. Greenaway), Three Tales (S. Reich, B. Korot), One (M. van der Aa), Homeland (L. Anderson) and La Commedia (L. Andriessen, H. Hartley) - the relationship between the singing body and the voice becomes a site for creative exploration where the boundaries of the opera world are stretched. The reinvention of vocalic body there assumes the changes that came as the result of the impact of new media, a de-synchronization between image and sound, or a redefinition of body-voice-gender relationships.
I dissect the singing body as an object of what Žižek names ‘the naïve ideological consciousness’, set of rules, protocols, effects, strategies that are embedded in a reality in which they intervene, in what appears to be a quasi-intuitive way, due to the fact that they are not theorized. That dissection pulls out the singing body from its invisible/inaudible status, and shows how it acts within the world of opera, what interventions it makes, and how it constitutes opera’s meanings.
Introduction, Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama, 2019
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s most celebrated collaboration was premiered at the Avignon Festi... more Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s most celebrated collaboration was premiered at the Avignon Festival in France in 1976. During its initial European tour, the Metropolitan Opera premiere and revivals in 1984 and 1992, Einstein evinced diametrically opposed reactions from audiences and critics. Embedding repetitive structural principles in a spectacle reflecting the late-capitalist media age, the work problematized commonly held assumptions about opera, music, theater, and
dance. Today, Einstein is well on its way to becoming a canonized avant-garde work, widely acknowledged as a profoundly significant moment in the history of opera or musical theater, whichever of these terms is considered more fitting, but apparently not – after all – repeatable, at least not in such a way that continuity between this work and what followed in the history of the genre would have seemed unavoidable: the result of a linear progression from one stylistic development to the next.
Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama, edited by Jelena Novak and John Richardson, Routledge , 2019
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s most celebrated collaboration, the landmark opera Einstein on th... more Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s most celebrated collaboration, the landmark opera Einstein on the Beach, had its premiere at the Avignon Festival in 1976. During its initial European tour, Metropolitan Opera premiere, and revivals in 1984 and 1992, Einstein provoked opposed reactions from both audiences and critics. Today, Einstein is well on the way itself to becoming a canonized avant-garde work, and it is widely acknowledged as a profoundly significant moment in the history of opera or musical theater. Einstein created waves that for many years crashed against the shores of traditional thinking concerning the nature and creative potential of audiovisual expression. Reaching beyond opera, its influence was felt in audiovisual culture in general: in contemporary avant-garde music, performance art, avant-garde cinema, popular film, popular music, advertising, dance, theater, and many other expressive, commercial, and cultural spheres. Inspired by the 2012–2015 series of performances that re-contextualized this unique work as part of the present-day nexus of theoretical, political, and social concerns, the editors and contributors of this book take these new performances as a pretext for far-reaching interdisciplinary reflection and dialogue. Essays range from those that focus on the human scale and agencies involved in productions to the mechanical and post-human character of the opera’s expressive substance. A further valuable dimension is the inclusion of material taken from several recent interviews with creative collaborators Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, and Lucinda Childs, each of these sections comprising knee plays, or short intermezzo sections resembling those found in the opera Einstein on the Beach itself. The book additionally features a foreword written by the influential musicologist and cultural theorist Susan McClary and an interview with film and theater luminary Peter Greenaway, as well as a short chapter of reminiscences written by the singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega.
ISBN 9781472473707
Why Wild analyses?
Wild analyses is a metaphor for developing one of the most fashionable problem... more Why Wild analyses?
Wild analyses is a metaphor for developing one of the most fashionable problems of musicology today – question of its borders and ‘mixture’ with other disciplines. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote La Pensée Sauvage (Paris, Plon, 1962) claiming that the wild thought isn’t the thought of the savages, but unrestrained, vigorous, ‘untamed’ thought of huge ambition, analytic and synthetic at the same tame, strongly orientated towards analyses.
Ivan Colovic, Serbian cultural theorist, also problematized theoretically the term wild in his book Divlja knjizevnost (Wild Literature, ethno-linguistic studies of para-literature, Belgrade, Nolit, 1984). For him, wild literature denotes “texts in which the same means, procedures and forms are used like in literary works, but do not belong (or problematizes its belonging, remark by J.N.) to the world of literature”.
Leaning on those two concepts of wild as a metaphor – the term which on one side signifies aiming towards endless re-examining, and on the other shows functioning on the edge/border of the world of established institutions - wild analyses in musicology constantly initiates and produces questions and gives open answers about possibilities of formalist, structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to music and uncertainties produced by confronting these paradigms. As such, wild analyses functions in a broader frame, within the culture studies, often signified as new musicology.
Criterion according to which analyzed works are chosen, is, up to some point, the result of personal taste of the author, but it also represents an attempt to discus some of the significant points on the ‘map’ of the 20th century music – from the experimentalism of John Cage, minimalism of Philip Glass, European answers to minimalism created by Louis Andriessen and Arvo Pärt, dodecaphonic music by Anton Webern, deconstructivism of Luciano Berio and neoclassicism of Francis Poulenc.
Tutti i diritti riservati. Nessuna parte di questo libro può essere riprodotta o trasmessa in qua... more Tutti i diritti riservati. Nessuna parte di questo libro può essere riprodotta o trasmessa in qualsiasi forma e con qualsiasi mezzo elettronico, chimico o meccanico, copie fotostatiche incluse, né con sistemi di archiviazione e ricerca delle informazioni, senza autorizzazione scritta da parte dei proprietari del Copyright.
Istorija umetnosti u Srbiji XX vek (History of Arts in Serbia - 20th century)
Journal articles and book chapters by Jelena Novak
Savremena srpska muzička scena, 2024
Children [Deca] an opera in 17 songs, based on the novel of the same name by Milena Marković, wi... more Children [Deca] an opera in 17 songs, based on the novel of the same name by Milena Marković, with music and stage direction by Irena Popović, had its world premiere on October 8, 2022 at the National Theater in Belgrade. The performance of the opera involved fourteen actors, three trained singers, an ensemble and the children’s Choir of Hope [Hor Nade], which includes children from the margins, led and accompanied by Biljana Simenović on the ukulele. The authors team consists of Irena Popović, music and stage direction; Dimitrije Kokanov, libretto and dramaturgy; Jelena Novak, musical dramaturgy; Igor Koruga, choreography and Selena Orb, costumes. The opera Children was commissioned by the National Theater in Belgrade.
Popović spoke about the upheavals that this work brought to the domestic
opera scene: it is an opera in which singing is out of tune; an opera based on a novel for which many have questioned whether it is a novel at all, because it is a work in verse; an opera in which there are no characters or linear narrative; an opera in which the ’musicians are pulled out of the hole’ and made visible – which alludes to the presence of musicians on the opera stage and their occasional participation in the dramatic, not only musical performance; and an opera in which there is no scenography. The question was often heard: is it really an opera? It is a piece that played with various operatic conventions. In this text, we write about decisions that were made by the members of the author’s team while showing relationships between various texts in the piece in the process of
creating the work. One of the stereotypes of conventional opera is a female singing figure who, guided by the inertia of the enthroned author, composer, man, dies on the stage or is annihilated on it in all kinds of ways. The opera Children questions this stereotype, showing that a different vision of opera is necessary and possible.
Sound Stage Screen 4/1, 2024
I discuss the reworking of demarcation line between human and animal through the vocal sphere ref... more I discuss the reworking of demarcation line between human and animal through the vocal sphere referring to a dog as an ‘animal of interest’. Both in contemporary visual art, music and opera I notice number of recent examples where the figure/construct/representation of the dog and dog-human relation served as the central motor of the piece. Thus I focus on representations of humans that ‘go out of themselves’, acquiring animal characteristics. I am especially intrigued of how this ‘going out of human’ reflects on the voice, if there is something that could be called animal/dog voice and what would be its characteristics.
In the first section of the text, I briefly discuss the VR opera "Songs for a Passerby" (2023) by director Celine Daemen and writer Olivier Herter, where a digital dog, with its full range of vocal sounds, guides the listening spectator through the piece. I continue to the example of a feral child raised by dogs and performance-art pieces by Oleg Kulik, where the artist embodies a dog. Eventually, I arrive at the analysis of the representation of the dog/animal vocal figure in operas by Alexander Raskatov: “A Dog’s Heart” (2008-9) based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1925 novel of the same name and “Animal Farm” (2023) based on the George Orvell’s 1945 timeless classic. I am especially interested in the vocal perspective of 'The Posthuman as Becoming-animal' in light of Rosi Braidotti's commentary on it. I also refer to the philosophy of human-animal issues discussed by Oxana Timofeeva.
And why dogs? In her book on posthuman, Braidotti reminds us of Deleuze's classification of animals into three groups: those we watch television with, those we eat, and those we are scared of. This ubiquity of dogs in the human world places the figure of the dog in the spotlight, particularly concerning the realm of vocal sphere. Dog figures in above mentioned pieces acquire voices to express their identity and perform it in new relationality with all human and non-human people.
Sound Stage Screen journal, 2024
Performance review: phone booth opera Things I Didn’t Dare to Say, and It’s Too Late Now. World p... more Performance review: phone booth opera Things I Didn’t Dare to Say, and It’s Too Late Now. World premiere: 1st December 2023, Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, Vilnius
Radio Beograd Treći program, 2024
Pre desetak godina upoznala sam kompozitora Ivu Maleca u hrvatskom gradu Rijeci. Razgovarali smo ... more Pre desetak godina upoznala sam kompozitora Ivu Maleca u hrvatskom gradu Rijeci. Razgovarali smo o našim muzičkim interesovanjima i delovalo je da među njima ima odveć malo poklapanja. U nekom trenutku, komentarišući moje istraživanje opere, Malec je izgovorio nešto što je imalo, otprilike, ovaj smisao (parafraziram): "Mislim da je prošlo vreme pevanja o stvarima. To je zastarelo! Zašto bi neko o nečemu pevao?" Ovo uznemirujuće pitanje mi je do danas ostalo u sećanju. Dakle, zašto bismo uopšte pevali, a naročito, zašto bismo o bilo čemu danas komponovali operu? Šta se i zašto zaista menja kada o nečemu pevamo, u poređenju sa situacijom kada o tome samo govorimo? Ovo Malecovo pitanje ja vidim kao žižekovsko. Ono je neka vrsta "pitanja prošivenog boda" koje ne zahteva samo odgovor, već i promenu koordinata čitavog polja značenja na koje se odnosi.
Opera and Film in the Loop: Persona Speaking, Persona Singing. A Conversation with composer Keeril Makan
The Opera Quarterly, 2024
Two women, Ms. X and Ms. Y, unexpectedly encounter each other in a restaurant on Christmas Eve. W... more Two women, Ms. X and Ms. Y, unexpectedly encounter each other in a restaurant on Christmas Eve. While Ms. X, who is busy shopping for her family's presents, engages in a continuous monologue, Ms. Y remains silent. Immersed in illustrated magazines, Ms. Y responds solely through facial expressions and body language. The narrative takes a turn as it unfolds while Ms. X reveals her husband's affair with Ms. Y. Initially, it seems that the married woman is imparting a lesson to her single rival, yet the overpowering silence from the other side complicates the dynamic. Strindberg demonstrates that, regardless of her societal standing, security, and authority, the married woman emerges as vulnerable and hysterical. The torrent of her passionate words rebounds against the wall of silence projected firmly from the other side. However, the disturbing hegemonic gaze of the same invisible, absent, “beloved man” governs them both. This encapsulates the essence of August Strindberg's short play The Stronger (1889).
The Sound of Žižek, 2023
Opera may not be Žižek's central intellectual interest, but it is never far from his theoretical ... more Opera may not be Žižek's central intellectual interest, but it is never far from his theoretical purview. He is especially engaged by the music dramas of Richard Wagner, and when he writes or speaks about opera he invariably uses Wagner as his main theoretical focus. However, it is in more recent operas that I see several instances of real synergy with the thought of Žižek.
New Sound International Journal for Music vol62 no 2, 2023
The twenty-first century saw an abrupt and remarkable resurgence of activity in the contemporary ... more The twenty-first century saw an abrupt and remarkable resurgence of activity in the contemporary opera scene in Serbia. In this essay I construct a 'map' that affords a glimpse into different tendencies, styles, and approaches to opera by contemporary artists who live and work in Serbia, as well as by artists who live beyond Serbia's borders but remain connected to its cultural space through education, language, and the experience of living and/or working there during some period of their lives. I offer a brief outline of developments within each of the following three groups of pieces: 1. reinventing tradition: folklore and beyond; 2. postmodernist strategies: challenging the voices of conventional opera; 3. conceptual and experimental approaches to opera.
Sound, Stage Screen Journal, 2022
The father, without his daughter's knowledge, and unable to bear the emptiness caused by the loss... more The father, without his daughter's knowledge, and unable to bear the emptiness caused by the loss of his wife, decided to end his biological life and continue his existence in digital form. In a special clinic, he scheduled the process of uploading, which meant transferring his entire physical and mental being into a computer file. In the father's understanding of the world, everything remains the same even though his body no longer exists. However, his rejection of the body still led to some fractures, and especially in his relationship with his daughter. This is a brief plot summary of the film opera Upload (2020), composed and directed by Michel van der Aa. In The Book of Water (2022) by the same author, however, there is no science fiction context, only “rain [--] pouring down”. The Book of Water is based on the novel Man in the Holocene (1979) by Max Frisch. The erosion of the mind (dementia) in the case of The Book of Water takes place in parallel with the erosion of the planet and the climate. In both operas there is a pre-condition of sorrow, depression, loss and melancholy.
The world we live in has changed. The notion of liveness still constantly evolves even as the mode of re/mediation changes. We all learn the new rules and adapt as we evolve. Both Upload and The Book of Water are about loss – loss as a learning process. They are about how we learn to lose (father, memory, home, body, planet) while at the same time entering new worlds. Fractalization of life, its transmission to all kinds of screens acting together and performing togetherness on our behalf, is actually the central theme of both pieces.
Sound, Stage, Screen journal 1/2, 2021
Marina Abramović is a conceptual and performance artist with a particular interest in the relatio... more Marina Abramović is a conceptual and performance artist with a particular interest in the relationship between the artist and the audience. She is especially interested in exploring the extreme limits of her (the artist's) body. In recent years, she has nurtured these interests by restaging some of her earlier works of performance art. To chart some of the more important stages of her career I single out a few key works. In Rhythm 0 (1974) Abramović stood silent and motionless for six hours in a gallery in Naples, while members of the audience were allowed to do to her whatever they wanted, having at their disposal seventy-two objects. The Great Wall Walk (1988) was performed with her then partner Ulay; they walked for ninety days from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, and when they finally met, they ended their relationship and said goodbye to each other. Balkan Baroque (1997) reflected on the horrors and tragedies unfolding in post-Yugoslavia. In The Artist is Present (2010) Marina sat motionless in a chair at the MOMA (New York) for ninety days, eight to ten hours per day, gazing into the eyes of members of the audience who took turns sitting in front of her one by one.
In "7 Deaths of Maria Callas" Abramović used operatic music by five his-torical composers of the Western canon: Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Georges Bizet. One living com-poser, Marko Nikodijević, was invited to assemble all these separate strands into a single fabric. Nikodijević wrote the Introduction, then a kind of ep-ilogue “The Eighth Death,” and also some interludes conceived as “cloud musics,” as he calls them, which were incorporated between the arias.
The conversation transcribed here took place via Zoom on October 15, 2020, as the first talk in the Resvés Ópera Series of Conversations organized by CESEM, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.
PARSE journal n. 13 (2), 2021
The title of this article carries an inherent contradiction. How could something so elusive, and ... more The title of this article carries an inherent contradiction. How could something so elusive, and most of all, invisible, as the voice, be exhibited? Despite the availability of recording technologies for over a century, the voice still conveys the impossibility of being caught in place and time. It was this contradiction that the exhibition Post-Opera (TENT, V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, Operadagen Rotterdam, 2019) worked with, in order to show the affect of the singing voice, the bodies they emit it, and challenge the socio-cultural frame that influence the perception of who can have a voice and what is considered a voice. In the Western world, the notion of "having a voice" is commonly associated with the right to have a vote, to have a voice in society, often expressed in individualised and humanistic terms. Critics of humanism, and in particular critical posthumanists, have already pointed out the non-neutrality and inherent privileges the term carries, with its underlying connection to white, patriarchal, anthropocentric and colonial meanings. Instead of this rather Eurocentric conception of the voice, Post-Opera demonstrated a disconnect between this view and brought forth a proposition where singing machines, mechanisms, beasts, animals and other "others" joined in a collective form of vocal expression. They sung beyond opera and at the same time beyond human. This way Post-Opera proposed a different ontological understanding of voices and their potentialities, as well as the variety of ways voices are let to be heard.This text reflects on the ways in which the exhibition and surrounding programme materialised on the intersections of visual art and postdramatic opera, while confronting voice studies and theories of critical posthumanism in order to posit the voice beyond its humanist license.
Uploads
Videos by Jelena Novak
The talk was recorded in 2007 at Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon and it was included in opera's DVD.
https://www.azguime.net/discography-blog/2018/9/6/remix-ensemble-miguel-azguime-derrire-son-double-rt2hp-l33ye-r2csw-xanfg
19.04.-30.06.2019.
Rotterdam
I will discuss the staging of Einstein on the Beach (1976) by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson as an installation authored by Berthold Schneider and Veronika Witte (2001, 2005), Opera for a Small Room by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2005), Sirens Taken for Wonders (2009) by Paul Elliman and The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures (2012) by Marguerite Humeau.
Strategies of ‘going beyond itself’ prompt discussion about the state of contemporary opera while inviting definitions of what is undeniably operatic once opera has been installed as its own signifier.
Videos by Jelena Novak
Books by Jelena Novak
UVOD: HIC SUNT DRACONES / 11
I DEO - POSTOPERA: OKO AJNŠTAJNA NA PLAŽI / 15
Postopera / 16
Ajnštajn na amsterdamskoj plaži / 18
Satjagraha ples / 22
Laboratorija Ajnštajnalija / 24
O operi i cirkusu / 43
II DEO - OPERA KAO INSTITUCIONALIZOVANJE SNA / 47
Telo/glas / 48
Čovek koji je pobrkao svoju ženu sa šeširom / 50
Vivije: opera o kompozitoru / 53
Politička ekonomija opere / 57
Ekonomija operske traume / 59
O postoperskoj izvesnosti / 68
III DEO - INSTALIRANJE OPERSKOG / 75
Opersko (operatic), predlog za definisanje pojma / 76
Pozorište sveta / 78
Opera Forward 2018 / 83
Opera izvan sebe / 85
Fantomske mašine / 92
IV DEO - REALISTIČNO PEVANJE / 99
Kapitalistički realizam / 100
Donald i Hilari kao operski junaci / 101
Opera Forward 2017 / 103
O operskoj (ne)podobnosti / 106
Atomsko pitanje / 108
Opera i ideologija masovne kulture / 110
Opera nakon televizije / 119
V DEO – UGLAZBLJENA MITOLOGIJA / 133
Diva/Divo / 133
Drvo koje cveta i zakoni operske ponude i potražnje / 138
Električne vavilonske orgulje / 141
Anti-diva / 144
Lisabonska priča i operska otkrića / 146
Šest perifernih priča oko opere: demitologizacija / 163
BIBLIOGRAFIJA / 171
I dissect the singing body as an object of what Žižek names ‘the naïve ideological consciousness’, set of rules, protocols, effects, strategies that are embedded in a reality in which they intervene, in what appears to be a quasi-intuitive way, due to the fact that they are not theorized. That dissection pulls out the singing body from its invisible/inaudible status, and shows how it acts within the world of opera, what interventions it makes, and how it constitutes opera’s meanings.
dance. Today, Einstein is well on its way to becoming a canonized avant-garde work, widely acknowledged as a profoundly significant moment in the history of opera or musical theater, whichever of these terms is considered more fitting, but apparently not – after all – repeatable, at least not in such a way that continuity between this work and what followed in the history of the genre would have seemed unavoidable: the result of a linear progression from one stylistic development to the next.
ISBN 9781472473707
Wild analyses is a metaphor for developing one of the most fashionable problems of musicology today – question of its borders and ‘mixture’ with other disciplines. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote La Pensée Sauvage (Paris, Plon, 1962) claiming that the wild thought isn’t the thought of the savages, but unrestrained, vigorous, ‘untamed’ thought of huge ambition, analytic and synthetic at the same tame, strongly orientated towards analyses.
Ivan Colovic, Serbian cultural theorist, also problematized theoretically the term wild in his book Divlja knjizevnost (Wild Literature, ethno-linguistic studies of para-literature, Belgrade, Nolit, 1984). For him, wild literature denotes “texts in which the same means, procedures and forms are used like in literary works, but do not belong (or problematizes its belonging, remark by J.N.) to the world of literature”.
Leaning on those two concepts of wild as a metaphor – the term which on one side signifies aiming towards endless re-examining, and on the other shows functioning on the edge/border of the world of established institutions - wild analyses in musicology constantly initiates and produces questions and gives open answers about possibilities of formalist, structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to music and uncertainties produced by confronting these paradigms. As such, wild analyses functions in a broader frame, within the culture studies, often signified as new musicology.
Criterion according to which analyzed works are chosen, is, up to some point, the result of personal taste of the author, but it also represents an attempt to discus some of the significant points on the ‘map’ of the 20th century music – from the experimentalism of John Cage, minimalism of Philip Glass, European answers to minimalism created by Louis Andriessen and Arvo Pärt, dodecaphonic music by Anton Webern, deconstructivism of Luciano Berio and neoclassicism of Francis Poulenc.
Journal articles and book chapters by Jelena Novak
Popović spoke about the upheavals that this work brought to the domestic
opera scene: it is an opera in which singing is out of tune; an opera based on a novel for which many have questioned whether it is a novel at all, because it is a work in verse; an opera in which there are no characters or linear narrative; an opera in which the ’musicians are pulled out of the hole’ and made visible – which alludes to the presence of musicians on the opera stage and their occasional participation in the dramatic, not only musical performance; and an opera in which there is no scenography. The question was often heard: is it really an opera? It is a piece that played with various operatic conventions. In this text, we write about decisions that were made by the members of the author’s team while showing relationships between various texts in the piece in the process of
creating the work. One of the stereotypes of conventional opera is a female singing figure who, guided by the inertia of the enthroned author, composer, man, dies on the stage or is annihilated on it in all kinds of ways. The opera Children questions this stereotype, showing that a different vision of opera is necessary and possible.
In the first section of the text, I briefly discuss the VR opera "Songs for a Passerby" (2023) by director Celine Daemen and writer Olivier Herter, where a digital dog, with its full range of vocal sounds, guides the listening spectator through the piece. I continue to the example of a feral child raised by dogs and performance-art pieces by Oleg Kulik, where the artist embodies a dog. Eventually, I arrive at the analysis of the representation of the dog/animal vocal figure in operas by Alexander Raskatov: “A Dog’s Heart” (2008-9) based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1925 novel of the same name and “Animal Farm” (2023) based on the George Orvell’s 1945 timeless classic. I am especially interested in the vocal perspective of 'The Posthuman as Becoming-animal' in light of Rosi Braidotti's commentary on it. I also refer to the philosophy of human-animal issues discussed by Oxana Timofeeva.
And why dogs? In her book on posthuman, Braidotti reminds us of Deleuze's classification of animals into three groups: those we watch television with, those we eat, and those we are scared of. This ubiquity of dogs in the human world places the figure of the dog in the spotlight, particularly concerning the realm of vocal sphere. Dog figures in above mentioned pieces acquire voices to express their identity and perform it in new relationality with all human and non-human people.
The world we live in has changed. The notion of liveness still constantly evolves even as the mode of re/mediation changes. We all learn the new rules and adapt as we evolve. Both Upload and The Book of Water are about loss – loss as a learning process. They are about how we learn to lose (father, memory, home, body, planet) while at the same time entering new worlds. Fractalization of life, its transmission to all kinds of screens acting together and performing togetherness on our behalf, is actually the central theme of both pieces.
In "7 Deaths of Maria Callas" Abramović used operatic music by five his-torical composers of the Western canon: Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Georges Bizet. One living com-poser, Marko Nikodijević, was invited to assemble all these separate strands into a single fabric. Nikodijević wrote the Introduction, then a kind of ep-ilogue “The Eighth Death,” and also some interludes conceived as “cloud musics,” as he calls them, which were incorporated between the arias.
The conversation transcribed here took place via Zoom on October 15, 2020, as the first talk in the Resvés Ópera Series of Conversations organized by CESEM, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.