Please join the Theater and Performance Studies Workshop
Wednesday, December 4th, 4:30 – 6:00p when
Catrin Dowd
PhD Student Music and Theater & Performance Studies, University of Chicago
Presents:
“Paying Attention to the Men behind the Curtain:
Sonic (un)veiling in Decca Records’ “Golden” Ring”
Wednesday, November 20th
4:30 – 6:00 PM
Logan Center 603
There will not be a pre-circulated reading for this workshop.
This event is free and open to the public and light refreshments will be served. We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible to persons with disabilities. Please direct any questions and concerns to the workshop coordinators, Arianna Gass (ariannagass@uchicago.edu) and Eva Pensis (pensis@uchicago.edu).
Bio:
Catrin Dowd is a double bassist and second-year PhD student in Music and Theater & Performance Studies at the University of Chicago.
Abstract:
If Richard Wagner never broadcast his operas over the recently-invented phone or phonograph, he was drawn to the possibilities. Anxiety about the use of carnivalesque “costume and grease paint” in Parsifal famously prompted him to declare, “after having invented the invisible orchestra I would like to create the invisible theater.” Almost ninety years later (1958–1964), John Culshaw of Decca Reccords would bring Wagner into such a space, producing the first complete recording of the Ring cycle with Georg Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic in what he called a “theater of the mind.” The project began as the ultimate exercise in acousmatic sound: hiding sweating, singing, and staging under the dust cover of a turntable. But by focusing on phonographic sound effects and stereophonic spatialization, Culshaw also brought out the very aspects of Wagner’s score that — as Arman Schwartz suggests— verismo composers had translated into “specifically aural realism.” The BBC’s Golden Ring documentary further positioned Culshaw’s Götterdämmerung on an “aurally realistic” audio-visual continuum between acousmatic background tracks and diegetic songs, instruments, conversations, and noises. Set in post-war urban Vienna, starring a British war veteran and a Hungarian exiled Jew, and featuring a somewhat-self-congratulatory expose of backstage technological labor, this documentary Ring was neither entirely acousmatic nor particularly Wagnerian. By sharing the process of interpreting Wagner in the studio, Culshaw ultimately encouraged audience members and future directors to re-interpret Wagner themselves.