Gregory Camp

The academic assessment of the products of the Walt Disney Company is usually highly negative, drawing out their sexist, racist, and mercenary factors. Although such views are not easily denied, their strong ideology often hides how Disney texts actually operate and how their audiences interact with them. This article explores how recorded music is used in the Disney theme parks to condition audience response, finding a middle ground between an ideological view, exploring the part music plays in social control, and a hermeneutic view, seeing how music functions in articulating and enhancing the experiences in which Disney's guests participate. Disney's Imagineers draw on the language of film music to create a wide variety of narrative musical spaces that give guests the impression that they navigate through these carefully staged narratives as protagonists. Film-musicological models show that guests are encouraged to feel that they control the respective spaces, although filtering the model through critical theory will demonstrate that the spaces can actually be seen as controlling them. While critical theory and structuralist hermeneutics might seem at first like strange bedfellows, analyses of both the narratives themselves and of their social effects can usefully reflect each other, together providing a more nuanced view of Walt Disney World's experiential texts than has been presented either in the academy or by Disney itself. We are in 1940s Hollywood and the hotel band is playing from the garden on the other side of the grounds. A group of unknowing guests approaches the popular hotel. They fill the elevator to begin a tour of the extravagant building, but things quickly begin to go wrong. The band can no longer be heard; instead, eerie music coming from an unseen source begins to gain prominence. It is in a minor key and features a repeated motive produced by an electric guitar against thickening orchestral textures as the suspense mounts. Nearby, a motley crew of space explorers takes a trip through the far reaches of the galaxy to full orchestral accompaniment (although there isn't actually an orchestra present on board the spaceship). Not far from there, a family dressed in shorts and t-shirts happily takes pictures in the snow, accompanied by jaunty Christmas music. These experiences might sound like they take place in a local multiplex cursed with poor soundproofing, but the varied soundscapes are not happening in films at all. We are not watching stories about these people; we are these people: the hotel guests, the space explorers, and the happy family. We are at the Disney's Hollywood Studios theme park in Florida at the height of the Christmas season; we are surrounded by music, and there isn't a cola-stained cinema seat in sight. A visitor at any of the Disney parks will find it impossible to avoid music. It could be argued that Walt Disney World in Florida is itself the most complex musical text in history: a forty-square-mile space in which everything has a score. The little academic work that has been done on music in the theme parks, however, has focused on its role in helping guests (Disney-speak for customers) identify with Disney products intertextually and nostalgically, rather than analyzing in detail

The architecture of opera houses and the disposition of their internal space plays an important role in audience response, a role hitherto neglected in opera studies in favour of abstracted sonic aspects. This article is an examination of the spaces in which three very different professional European productions of Claudio Monteverdi’s 1643 opera L’incoronazione di Poppea took place, seen within a few months of each other in 2010: Pier Luigi Pizzi’s production at the Teatro Real in Madrid; Robert Carsen’s at Glyndebourne; and Dietrich Hilsdorf’s at the Cologne Opera. I first explore the relation of the audience to the stage due to the presence or absence of a proscenium arch. Both Glyndebourne and Madrid’s Teatro Real are proscenium theatres, though the Madrid production attempted to erase the proscenium through the layout of the stage and the orchestra. The Cologne production was held not in a purpose-built theatre but in the central hall of a former corporate headquarters, a proscenium-less space with the audience seated on two sides of a traverse stage. These layouts had different effects on the performances and on the audience’s response to them, affording different opportunities to their directors and different processes of audience engagement. I then compare the present-day audience’s spatial experience of this opera with the way its seventeenth-century audiences may have experienced it, arguing that the changes in theatre architecture over the centuries have a significant (and overlooked) impact on our results in creating historically informed operatic performances. This examination of the affordances offered by space open up the genre of opera to a wider potential range of musicological and sociological research.

Over the past hundred years, the operas of Claudio Monteverdi have become iconic symbols of the early music movement and have entered the canon of so-called great operas. The conventional explanation for their iconicity is that they are historically important works, the first to fully realise the potential of the operatic genre, and that they speak to us and relate to contemporary concerns. These definitions, though, are contingent on surrounding socio-cultural factors. Rather than trying to explain their immanent and autonomous greatness, this thesis examines how Monteverdi’s operas have actually been received and performed on stage, going beyond mere description and providing a deeper analysis of the political, cultural, and social contexts of their performative instances. There is no single explanation for why performers and scholars have so frequently engaged with Monteverdi’s operas, but it is clear that Monteverdi opera is now, as it was in the seventeenth century, a fluid entity. In the current stage of what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid modernity’ this fluidity and lack of single answers is particularly apparent in operatic performance. But where Bauman sees liquid life as a negative and troubling state, this thesis will show that, at least regarding early opera, not having one answer leads to great invention and thoughtful engagement with the contexts of the past and present.
The thesis consists of five case studies, each examining in detail one particular issue brought up by the early opera revival. First, an examination of Monteverdi’s place in the earliest stages of the revival in the first half of the twentieth century challenges the view of the early music movement as primarily antiquarian. The thesis demonstrates the revival’s highly politicised underpinnings in France, Germany, and Italy and the varied effect politics had on how and why Monteverdi’s operas were performed in those countries. Next, audio and video evidence is used to investigate three aspects of modern Monteverdi performance in more depth, examining how stage directors have placed notions of community on stage in their interpretations of L’Orfeo, how stage and music directors have reshaped Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria for widely varying dramaturgical and musical ends, and how singers have interpreted the role of Ottavia in L’incoronazione di Poppea vocally and dramatically. Finally, I examine three recent productions of L’incoronazione di Poppea from the perspective of a participant observer, focusing on how the opera functions in the real space of an opera house, and how the presence of performance is conveyed in early opera today through the use of directorial attitudes, space, and the staging of gender relations.
This wide-ranging thesis demonstrates that the concept of a ‘Monteverdi opera’ is fundamentally fluid. This fluidity involves not only the texts themselves (cuts, rearrangements, transpositions, orchestrations, etc.) but also their medium (the stage, film, recording), their ideologies (nationalistic, fascist, communitarian), and their performances (in various singing and playing styles). While a large amount of valuable and rigorous work has been done in studying the early music movement, few of these studies find a significant place for early opera, and few recognise the basic fluidity and cultural contingency of performance and reception. This thesis hopes to correct those omissions, and to show how this fluidity manifests itself in the modern production of Monteverdi’s operas.