We’re pleased to announce the next presenter for the Music History/Theory Workshop on February 7, 3:00pm [NOTE THE EARLIER TIME!], in the library seminar room, JRL 264. Seth Brodsky, Assistant Professor of Music and the Humanities in the College at the University of Chicago, will be presenting an article titled “Britten as Another: Six Notes on a Mystic Writing Pad.” This article will be appearing in Continuum’s Great Shakespeareans series. The pre-circulated article is available here–for the password please email marycaldwell@uchicago.edu or aasheehy@uchicago.edu or look in the announcement email.
Seth Brodsky: “Britten as Another: Six Notes on a Mystic Writing Pad”
This text grew out of the material I presented in my talk here at University of Chicago last January. But the essay is substantially larger in scope and so I hope it will offer some new food for thought. It comprises a chapter I recently completed for Vol. 11 of Continuum’s Great Shakespeareans series. The series treats “the most important figures in our understanding of Shakespeare’s afterlives”; this particular volume, edited by Daniel Albright, is dedicated to composers in particular (Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, and Britten).
The essay is ostensibly about Britten’s setting of another author’s text, specifically Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But it is also a larger inquiry into some of the more idiosyncratic ways one’s “own” text may set the texts of other others. Though I was certainly interested in Britten’s relationship to Shakespeare, I decided to use that relationship as a ground on which to figure Britten’s relationship to other others, in particular the many composers, works, and musical passages which, “in the name” of Shakespeare and “under the name” of Britten, flourish and circulate within Britten’s opera. Among other things the essay is an attempt, however limited, towards an intertextual ars magis subtilior—an attempt to take into account the possibility and meaning of unconscious as well as conscious intertexts (who constitutes the writing and listening subject, who the other?); to problematize the limit designating “intra-opus” and “inter-opus” revision (where does the act of rewriting cease, once the “inside” and “outside” of the opera are put in question?); to question the un- or underspoken laws and ethics regulating successful or adequate appropriation; and to ask what kinds of roles the author’s and listener’s memory play in the constitution and interpretation of intertexts. While the subject of inquiry in this essay is limited, I hope the discussion will allow room for recontextualization—especially within the frame of current digital approaches to intertextual situations (the encroaching of Pandoran algorithms upon rapidly growing archives and the art of “sweding” films, to name just two).
There will be two formal respondents at this workshop: Marcy Pierson and Dan Wang.
Those needing additional assistance to attend this event should contact one of the graduate coordinators, Mary Caldwell(marycaldwell@uchicago.edu) or August Sheehy (aasheehy@uchicago.edu)