Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature: Opera, Orchestra, Phonograph, Film
Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, around December 1910, human character changed. Aesthetic Technologies addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the new century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumas—cultural, social, and personal—associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the development of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back.
1121447084
Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature: Opera, Orchestra, Phonograph, Film
Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, around December 1910, human character changed. Aesthetic Technologies addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the new century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumas—cultural, social, and personal—associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the development of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back.
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Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature: Opera, Orchestra, Phonograph, Film

Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature: Opera, Orchestra, Phonograph, Film

by Richard Leppert
Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature: Opera, Orchestra, Phonograph, Film

Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature: Opera, Orchestra, Phonograph, Film

by Richard Leppert

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Overview

Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, around December 1910, human character changed. Aesthetic Technologies addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the new century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumas—cultural, social, and personal—associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the development of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780520962521
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication date: 10/06/2015
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 348
File size: 46 MB
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About the Author

Richard Leppert is Regents Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of many books, including The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body and Art and the Committed Eye; he is also the editor of Adorno’s Essays on Music and coeditor of Beyond the Soundtrack.

 

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Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature

Opera ? Orchestra ? Phonograph ? Film


By Richard Leppert

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96252-1



CHAPTER 1

THE CIVILIZING PROCESS


Music and the Aesthetics of Time-Space Relations in The Girl of the Golden West


There are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection; when the air, the heavenly bodies and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "NATURE" (1836)


GETTING CIVILIZED/GOING NATURAL

In 1907 Puccini made the first of two visits to New York, to supervise the first performances of Manon Lescaut and Madame Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera. He was also in search of a subject for his next project. Accordingly, while in the city, and despite his very limited English, he attended numerous plays, including three by David Belasco, whose Madame Butterfly he had seen staged in London in 1900. One of the Belasco productions caught his eye, The Girl of the Golden West, which is the general subject of this chapter. In particular, I am interested in exploring some of the ways that Belasco's play and Puccini's opera invest in modernist ideologies governing what Norbert Elias called the civilizing process. To get at the issue, I take a concentrated look at how both Belasco and Puccini envisioned time-space relations, with specific regard to how each understood their characters' place in history (hence time), place (hence space), and, above all, nature, which I want to consider as both a problem for, and opportunity within, the civilizing process.

Belasco's play and Puccini's opera are situated within California's Sierra Nevada, perhaps the most dramatic landscape in the American West. The setting more or less constitutes a character in its own right, one of overwhelming power that shapes both action and people. Nature, that is, is the organizing metaphor of both the play and the opera — and as Michel de Certeau remind us, metaphors "are spatial trajectories." Both works, literally and figuratively, are also travel stories: literally so, to the extent that the characters are very much on the move, having traveled across the seas and the continent to get to California to participate in the gold rush; and figuratively in that the characters journey toward moral redemption — though redemption is more a fundamental trope in Puccini's opera than in Belasco's play. The Sierra Nevada for Belasco and Puccini alike is a material site, inhabitable. It is likewise a psychic site, existing within the realm of the imagination as an ethereal reality.

In late-nineteenth-century America, no landscape received greater attention than the West, particularly the mountain West of the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. The California mountains especially claimed a central place in the American imaginary, not least because of the imposing challenge to cross them to get to the promised land. The fate of the Donner Party during the winter of 1846–47, whose history quickly passed into legend, drove home the point. The gold rush, which quickly followed the discovery of gold in January 1848 at Sutter's Mill, fully established the Sierra Nevada in the forefront of national consciousness, creating new western mythologies fueled by the promise of fortunes literally waiting to be scooped up from the gravels of the American River.

The actual mountains and their unimaginably gigantic trees produced particular awe (fig. 4), with Yosemite (early on known as Yo-Semite) serving as the focal point of the larger whole. Indeed, the mountain West's visual splendors seemed to defy the human imagination, though hardly for want of trying to come to terms with them. In 1864, Lincoln designated Yosemite as a wilderness preserve, the nation's first; it was made a national park in 1890. In the decades that followed, Yosemite was endlessly written about, painted, photographed, and of course visited as a major tourist attraction. Currier and Ives produced lithographs marking a sense of Yosemite's spatial vastness, just as photographers produced stereographs of views carefully selected to exploit the three-dimensional effects of the medium — a kind of vicarious substitute for the reactions of awe commonly experienced by visitors. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Yosemite took on greater significance as a site of healing and reconciliation — a park in place of a battlefield, in the parlance of Frederick Law Olmsted. The writings of John Muir (1838–1914) in particular best expressed the spiritual impact of the Yosemite landscape.

The American West had its dystopian realities, of course, as the fate of Custer demonstrated to a shocked nation in 1876, the news reaching the East, ironically, during the July 4 centennial celebrations. But the promise of American singularity on the whole played well against inconvenient arguments to the contrary, as the reception history of Frederick Jackson Turner's famous paper read to the American Historical Association in Chicago in 1893, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," makes clear. "American social development," Turner wrote, "has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West."


The sublime drama of Turner's Great West was ably captured by painters, among whom Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) had few equals, though his fame was short lived and his critics, from the start, many. From his hand came monumental imaginings of a western Eden. As with Belasco and Puccini, three tropes in particular organize Bierstadt's visionary representations: monumentality, unimaginably vast space (the effect of both often amplified by the enormous size of some of his canvases, the largest being nine and a half feet high and fifteen feet wide), and light (figs. 5 and 6). These tropes served as metaphors for the untrammeled purity of a world in a state of nature and as signs of nature's redemptive agency for man after the fall from grace. In nationalist terms, Bierstadt's images visually certified claims to the mythologies of American singularity. Here was a landscape at once aged and yet at the seeming moment of its creation, a visible sign of the "divine endorsement of American progress."

The West did not actually look like what Bierstadt painted, not least on account of the multiple perspectives encompassed in his canvases, a visually jarring effect that invites the eye to search out a compositional unity that does not in fact exist (a fact that sorely irritated his contemporaneous critics, who regarded the violation of convention as mere incompetence). But whatever his shortcomings as a painter, Bierstadt pedagogically led viewers toward a particular way of seeing the western mountains. In the words of Lee Clark Mitchell, Bierstadt "imagined the West as a dramatic (and therefore moral) terrain rather than a geographical one." His vision was of a spectacular and visually magnetic western sublime, whose results he put on display in exhibition galleries in the East and also made available in mass-produced prints.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas points out that societies are imagined to have form, boundaries, and margins; in short, they have structure. But where society's energy concentrates is "in its margins and unstructured areas," precisely where "any structure of ideas is vulnerable." It is this vulnerability that Belasco and Puccini confront via the liminal terrain of the American West, specifically the imagined boundaries separating civilization from its absence, and culture from nature. Both men perceived the West as a space defined by its relation to time — historical time and the now-time of early-twentieth-century modernity. Time — like nature, like space — as the product of history, is "a social institution." Elias marks modern time as "the symbol of an inescapable and all-embracing compulsion." Time in modernity has a life of its own; it reaches beyond our capacity to control it. Belasco and Puccini confronted modernity, despite the conservatism and even regression evident in their work. Their West was at once in the past, as a narrative of the gold rush, and a present, the literal reality of two worlds in stark opposition: the East of frenetic, ultra-modern Midtown, and a West whose wildness was by then in actuality already well tamed apart from a few sanctioned sites set aside as national parks for eternal preservation, in regard to which Michael Johnson marks what he terms "postfrontier anxiety": "A manifold phenomenon, it involved as well remorse, envy of forefathers, doubts about the nation's democratic spirit and masculinity, misgivings about the future of industrial civilization — but most strongly that nostalgia for a return to nature. And nature meant, eminently, the West, a place now conquered, much of its wildness lost and gone forever."

Modernism, Stuart Hall has suggested, is "modernity experienced as trouble." Belasco and Puccini were reluctant, conflicted modernists, both romanticists at heart yet well aware of the new cultural world as articulated by Virginia Woolf. Modernist Belasco virtually fetishized electricity for what it offered the theater; modernist Puccini, who collected fast cars and speedboats, experimented with post-Romantic sonorities learned from Debussy and Strauss. Belasco left California for New York as a young man and rarely returned to his wild western roots; Puccini, whose life as an opera composer demanded endless journeys to urban centers, could never get back to his country estate fast enough to keep him happy. Both men, in their lives and in their work, were deeply ambivalent about modernity — an ambivalence that was manifested in the internal contradictions marking their respective settings of The Girl of the Golden West.

Belasco and Puccini both addressed the cultural displacements of modernity; both looked back in time to a defining phenomenon of modernity, the American westward expansion and the formation of an imagined sublime. They envisioned a paradise, but a modern one in which presence is already marked by the promise of absence and expulsion. Nevertheless, their narratives staged reconciliations, however momentary, of subject to object, man to woman, and culture to nature. Each sought to bind what Adorno called nature's wound, though in the end the wound continued to bleed, which is precisely what guarantees their work a degree of historical, modernist authenticity.


The Girl of the Golden West was something of a cultural phenomenon in the early years of the twentieth century. The play itself was highly successful in the years following its 1905 opening (fig. 7). In 1911, Belasco produced a novel based on his play, a year following the première of Puccini's opera (fig. 8). The book remained in print for some years thereafter and was reissued again in 2007. Its first printing included four colored illustrations of important scenes; later printings replaced the illustrations with stills from a now-lost film of the same title released in 1923 (fig. 9). In fact, between 1915 and 1938 four American feature films followed in the wake of Belasco's play. The first, in five reels, shot in eight days in California in 1915, was by Cecil B. DeMille, then working in only his second year as a director. The 1923 silent in seven reels, directed by Edwin Carewe, starred popular actress Sylvia Breamer; and this film was remade in 1930 with sound, in ten reels, with Ann Harding in the title role (fig. 10). The 1923 film had a popular-music spin-off, a tune called "The Girl of the Olden West" (fig. 11), its cover sheet reproducing Breamer's face hovering over a mountainous landscape. Other music publishers readily cashed in with songs whose titles closely approximated the title of Belasco's play (figs. 12 and 13). The 1938 film was a Nelson Eddy–Jeanette MacDonald musical, the score by Sigmund Romberg. (There were other gold rush films throughout this period, Chaplin's 1925 film concerning the Yukon Klondike narrative being the best known.) In sum, The Girl of the Golden West spawned an opera, a novel, pop tunes, songs and song recordings, and four films (five, if you count a 1943 Italian version). It gave its name to a country music duo, the Girls of the Golden West, Dolly and Millie Good, who achieved considerable fame in the 1930s. The Girl of the Golden West was also the subject of souvenir ephemera, including postcards and stereographs (fig. 14), souvenir-type paintings, cigarette-pack insert advertising (figs. 15 and 16), an inscribed ceramic vase in the shape of the Girl's bonneted head, and even a decorated metal fruit tin — objects that crop up from time to time on eBay. In brief — and this is my point — the subject touched something of a collective cultural nerve.


BELASCO

David Belasco (1853–1931), born in San Francisco to immigrant parents, was involved in the theater throughout his childhood in the West. By the time he moved to New York in 1884, he was already widely experienced as an actor, prompter, and stage manager. In New York, where he remained until his death, he made his reputation as a producer, director, and playwright.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature by Richard Leppert. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
List of Musical Examples
Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I. MODERNITY AND OPERA; NATURE AND REDEMPTION
1. The Civilizing Process: Music and the Aesthetics of Time-Space Relations in The Girl of the Golden West
2. Opera, Aesthetic Violence, and the Imposition of Modernity: Fitzcarraldo

PART II. VOICING SUBJECTIVITY
EXCURSUS: OPERA, MONUMENTALITY, AND LOOKING AT LOOKING
3. Caruso, Phonography, and Operatic Fidelities: Regimes of Musical Listening, 1904–1929
4. Aesthetic Meanderings of the Sonic Psyche: Three Operas, Two Notes, and One Ending at the Boundary of the Great Divide

PART III. MODERNITY, NATURE, AND DYSTOPIA
EXCURSUS: NATURAL BEAUTY / ART BEAUTY
5. Sound, Subjectivity, and Death: Days of Heaven (promesse du bonheur)

Conclusion: Acoustic Invocations of Crisis and Hope
Appendix: Chapter 5 Tables
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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