AMSGNY Meetings

Beverly Jerrold’s recent publications include: Equal Temperament before 1800: The Ear versus Numbers (Brepols), forthcoming. Disinformation in Mass Media: Gluck, Piccinni and the Journal de Paris, RMA Monographs (Routledge, 2021). The Complexities of Early Instrumentation: Winds and Brass (Brepols, 2015). Music Performance Issues: 1600-1900 (Pendragon, 2016). ‘Tempo Fluctuation and Sensibility in Early Music’, Sound Studies Review (Brepols), forthcoming. “The 19 th -century piano and finger-strengthening devices,” The Musical Times 162/1956 (2021): 21-39. “Pascal Boyer: A Pioneer in Journalistic Music Criticism,” Fontes Artis Musicae 65/3 (2018): 146-56. “Quantz and Agricola: A Literary Collaboration,” Acta Musicologica 88 (2016/2): 127-42.

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Formidably Fearsome Females and the Grotesque in Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland

Unsuk Chin’s opera Alice in Wonderland, adapted from Lewis Carroll’s novel, is full of enigmas, absurdity, and nonsense. One striking contradiction is the abundant physical and verbal violence despite the apparent fairy-tale context. This is most evident in the portrayals of women characters—Alice, the Queen, and the Cook—who, whether carelessly or enthusiastically, constantly threaten and persecute others around them. Scholars have noted this point as inherent in the original novel, which reflects British imperialist approach to their Victorian colonies. Just as the imperialist perceives the colonial Other as primitive, exotic, and dangerous, the monstrously matriarchal social order of Wonderland is a fantasy of transgression against the ideals of British society and culture.

The paper focuses on this seeming contradiction between the idealized maternal womanhood and the violent matriarchy enacted among the opera’s female characters. For this purpose, I tap into the aesthetic concept of the “grotesque”—meaning a departure from norms, conventions, and familiarity—to illuminate how these formidably fearsome females are made so distinctively daunting in the opera’s libretto. Specifically, I investigate how Chin and her co-librettist, David Henry Hwang, built and intensified the grotesque elements of the female characters, with an emphasis on Scene 2 (Pool of Tears; A Caucus-Race and A Long Tale), Scene 4 (Pig and Pepper), and Scene 6 (The Queen’s Croquet-Ground). This exploration bares the harsh points of the characters’ enigmatic words and actions beyond a simplified social understanding of the children’s book context, thereby adding nuance to the opera’s multiple interpretational layers.

 Ji Yeon Lee is an assistant professor of music theory at the University of Houston. She received her PhD from CUNY Graduate Center. She has published articles and book chapters on Wagner, verismo opera, and Korean composer Unsuk Chin.

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“Entrapped in Darkness”: Musical and Dramatic Representations of Blindness in Tchaikovsky’s Opera Iolanta

 Regardless of directorial approach—that is, whether it is a traditional or a contemporary staging—productions of Tchaikovsky’s last opera Iolanta recreate the cultural myths and stereotypes assigned to blindness. The blind Iolanta is represented either as a sweet, innocent girl, whose blindness desexualizes her and renders her incapable of performing basic tasks, or as a saintly sage, whose blindness confers a wisdom and inner vision beyond that of her unimpaired counterparts, or as a mentally disabled, unstable woman, whose blindness makes her both mad and cognitively impaired. 

Tchaikovsky’s opera, both its libretto and its music, embodies and amplifies these conventional, ableist tropes for the representation of blindness. The opera prescribes these tropes in a literal and unquestioning way, determining thereby ableist stagings of Iolanta. Besides discussing those rather negative patterns of representing blindness, I offer ideas for rereading Iolanta and address certain episodes in the opera from which a counter-narrative and an alternative, more realistic staging of blindness might be developed. 

My discussion is informed by the interdisciplinary approach offered by the subfield of music and disability studies. Most blindness-related work in this subfield has focused on  blind composers and performers. I intend to shift the focus from blind musicians to the musical representations of blindness.

Nafset Chenib is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Nafset’s research interests include intersection between music and disability, particularly representations of blindness in the 19th century opera. She is also an accomplished opera and classical singer whose notable achievements include headlining the 2014 Winter Paralympic Games alongside José Carreras and collaborations with prominent orchestras such as Vladimir Spivakov’s Moscow Virtuosi, Svetlanov State Symphony Orchestra, and Bolshoi Theater's Chamber Orchestra. She has been the first blind performer to sing Iolanta in a staging. She obtained her Master of Music degree, with distinction, from the Moscow’s Victor Popov Academy of Choral Arts, and completed the Professional Studies program in classical voice, also with distinction, at Manhattan School of Music. She is a recipient of the MSM Pablo Casals award for music accomplishment and human endeavor.