Books by Paul Schleuse
This edition will present the first three books of three-voice canzonettas by Bolognese composer... more This edition will present the first three books of three-voice canzonettas by Bolognese composer, author, and theorist Adriano Banchieri (1568-1634). The music is all unavailable in critical editions, and only one of the books has ever been published in score. With this publication all of Banchieri’s completely extant three-voice canzonettas will be available to scholars and performers. These three books are particularly relevant to reevaluating Banchieri’s place as a follower of Orazio Vecchi (1550-1605), whose L’Amfiparnaso (1597) is a model Banchieri’s second through fifth canzonetta books. The inaccessibility of these works, and of their predecessor, Banchieri’s first book, has made a thorough understanding of this relationship difficult. Finally, this edition will endeavor to present the works with the novel visual elements of the original partbooks intact; these sometimes include textual argomenti and woodcut illustrations before each piece.
Banchieri’s Canzonette a tre voci (Venice: Amadino, 1597) does not carry a formal designation of “libro primo,” but the title-page does include a subtitle, Hora prima di recreatione, which implies the books’ place at the beginning of a series. This title also conveys the priority Banchieri placed on recreational singing—music making for the pleasure of the singers, not for a separate audience—that is also hinted at in his prefaces to La pazzia senile and Il studio dilettevole, though in later books he describes alternate performance practices that imply an audience. While the canzonettas of the 1597 book are not linked by narrative as those of the later books are, they carry genre labels and other rubrics that define certain imagined contexts for each song. This book has never been published in score.
La pazzia senile, which carries the additional phrase “libbro secondo” on its title page, is the first of four canzonetta books that Banchieri modelled on Vecchi’s L’Amfiparnaso, designating each song as a scene within a three-act structure imitating the plot of stereotypical commedia dell’arte play. The work was published in two forms. The first edition from 1598 has recently been edited by Renzo Bez (Florence: Forni, 2003). Bancheiri published a substantially revised and expanded edition (“Revisti, aggiunti, et di nuovo ristampati”) in 1599, and this edition was the basis for several subsequent reprints. A 1607 reprint was the basis for the 1960 edition by Bonaventura Somma, which adds extensive editorial markings for dynamics and articulation, and provides no critical report (see attached sample page). Also, the 1599 edition includes woodcut illustrations at the head of most of the pieces, and no edition of the work (including Bez’s of the 1598 version) reproduces these images. This edition will do so, replicating as closely as possible the visual experience of reading the original partbooks.
Banchieri’s Studio dilettevole (1600) is more explicitly based on L’Amfiparnaso, as Banchieri acknowledges in the preface. He adapts his sung texts closely from equivalent scenes in Vecchi’s work, though he leaves out some plot elements and adds others, as he had done in La pazzia senile. He also borrows some musical elements from L’Amfiparnaso, to the extent that transforming five-voice works to a three-voice texture allows this. The two lower parts, long thought to be lost, were identified in the Rouen municipal library in the 1970s. The unique surviving copy of the top part, in Bologna, is missing two folios, but as Gianmario Merizzi showed in 2005, the missing music can be recovered from a 1624 print, D.O.M.A. Exercitatio musica (Magdeburg, 1624). Despite these discoveries, no complete edition of Studio dilettevole has yet appeared.
Banchieri’s fourth book of canzonettas, titled Metamorfosi musicale, is available in a critical edition by Joseph Vecchi (Bologna, 1963). Of the fifth, Prudenza giovenile, only one partbook survives, and the unique set of parts for a sixth book, Tirsi, Fili, e Clori (1614) was destroyed in World War II. My edition will therefore make all of Banchieri’s surviving canzonetta books available to modern readers and performers.
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In Italy during the late cinquecento, printed music could be found not only in the homes of the w... more In Italy during the late cinquecento, printed music could be found not only in the homes of the wealthy or the music professional, but also in lay homes, courts, and academies. No longer confined to the salons of the elite, music took on the role of social play and recreation. Paul Schleuse examines these new musical forms through a study of the music books of Italian priest, poet, and composer, Orazio Vecchi. Composed for minor patrons and the wider music-buying public, Vecchi's madrigals took as their subjects game-playing, drinking, hunting, battles, and the life of the street. Schleuse looks at how music and game-playing allowed singers and performers to play the roles of exemplary pastoral characters and also comic, foreign, and "rustic" others in ways that defined and ultimately reinforced social norms of the times. His findings reposition Orazio Vecchi as one of the most innovative composers of the late 16th century.
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Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Articles by Paul Schleuse
The Journal of Musicology, 2012
Musical histories before the twentieth century consistently described Orazio Vecchi's L'Amfiparna... more Musical histories before the twentieth century consistently described Orazio Vecchi's L'Amfiparnaso (published in 1597) as an early or nascent form of opera, despite the composer's explanation that the work is an aural spectacle, not a visual one. Later scholars have persisted in viewing L'Amfiparnaso as a fundamentally theatrical work (in a notional genre called madrigal comedy), designed for quasi-dramatic performance before a listening audience. A close reading of this historiography, along with a partial reconstruction of the membership and movements of the Gelosi and Uniti theater companies in the 1590s, disproves the widely held assumption that L'Amfiparnaso was composed and performed in 1594, and suggests that its characters' names refer to specific actors who performed with the Uniti in Bologna in 1595 and 1596. This new account of the book's origin opens it up to interpretation as a recreational collection of musical imitations of theatre, rather than as an incomplete “script” for a novel kind of dramatic performance.
Through its diverse musical styles and poetic registers (Vecchi penned both the poems and the music), as well as its unusual custom-made woodcut illustrations, L'Amfiparnaso presents scenes whose range defies cinquecento theatrical convention. Urban comic dialogues share the imagined stage with tragicomic monologues, idiosyncratic musical dialogues are found alongside serious madrigals, and the woodcuts depict both characteristic comic and pastoral stage settings. As a whole, then, L'Amfiparnaso represents—in Vecchi's words—“almost all the actions of the private man.” This emphasis on variety locates the book firmly within the poetic sphere of Vecchi's other large-scale collections, Selva di varia ricreatione (1590) and Convito musicale (1597), and adds special resonance to his claim that those seeking “a complete tale” in L'Amfiparnaso will find it only “in the mind.”
Keywords:L'Amfiparnaso, commedia dell'arte, madrigal comedy, musical poetics, Orazio Vecchi
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Book Chapters by Paul Schleuse
in _Playing with Boundaries: Sexualities, Textualities, Art and Music in Early Modern Italy_, edited by Melanie Marshall, Catherine McIver, and Linda Carroll. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, May 2014
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in Theatro dell'udito, Theatro del mondo: Atti del convegno internazionale, nel IV centenario della morte di Orazio Vecchi,, 2010
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Conference Presentations by Paul Schleuse
Between 1598 and 1607 Banchieri modelled four books of three-voice canzonettas on Orazio Vecchi’s... more Between 1598 and 1607 Banchieri modelled four books of three-voice canzonettas on Orazio Vecchi’s L’Amfiparnaso (1597), a collection of five-voice pieces loosely conveying a theatrical plot. Though Banchieri’s books are superficially similar, each draws different elements from L’Amfiparnaso, and presents a distinct variation of a commedia dell’arte-style play. Banchieri’s means and motives for this continuous reinvention reveal a steady demand in early-modern Italy for innovative recreational polyphony, one that prized theatrical references but did not require constant novelty.
Banchieri described recreational singers enjoying the first of these books, La pazzia senile (1598, rev. 1599) in the preface to the second, Il studio dilettevole (1600). This book adapts texts directly from L’Amfiparnaso, and was produced—Banchieri reports—for small groups of singers who lacked the numbers to perform the original. In these books and in Metamorfosi musicale (1601) and La prudenza giovenile (1607) Banchieri rang the changes on a conventional love triangle, only varying character names, subplots, and comic lazzi. He also deployed idiosyncratic techniques for differentiating characters in dialogue through contrasting dynamics, textures, or use of falsetto—termed alla bastarda in the Banchieri’s terminology. The extensive reprint history of these books—eight in all by 1628—confirms the popularity of Banchieri’s formula.
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Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach (1976) is usually understood either as an ... more Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach (1976) is usually understood either as an abstract spectacle or as a non-narrative portrait of Albert Einstein. References to Einstein’s life and work populate the opera, but the creators typically characterize it as abstract or semiotically open: Wilson says that audiences “don’t have to understand anything,” and Glass has written, “we didn’t need to tell an Einstein story because everyone . . . brought their own story with them.” Yet the range of pos- sible meanings in Einstein is expanded by casting, staging, and music that emphasize differences of age, gender, and race.
The four speaking roles in Einstein embody alterity: a white woman, an African-American woman, an elderly African-American man, and a white ten-year-old boy. These identities were retained in the casts of revivals in 1984, 1992, and 2012. In particular, the racial contrast between the two women, highlighted by their parallel staging in the Knee Plays, could be read as intrinsic rather than incidental only when the roles’ creators were recast with black and white actors in 2012. In the last Knee Play their racial contrast stands in for gender as they embody the (heterosexual) lovers described in the final monologue. Racial and gender contrasts are aligned earlier in the opera also, both in Wilson’s staging and in musical solos that foreground feminine vocality (“Aria”) and jazz-inflected improvisation (“Building”) against Glass’s more neutral style elsewhere.
However, documentation of the opera’s development from 1974 to 1976 reveals that many of these elements emerged late in the creative process and were inspired or contributed by cast members themselves. Drawing on materials in the Wilson Archive and elsewhere, this paper traces the accretion of racial and gendered signi- fiers in Einstein before the premiere and in later revivals. Rather than a circumscribed interpretation of the opera, this meta-reading shows how markers of alterity hold the fields of potential meaning open. The historicization of Einstein on the Beach as a revivable work makes such readings available in ways that can only now be explored.
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In a 1966 article Louise George Clubb described a set of woodcut illustrations that appeared in V... more In a 1966 article Louise George Clubb described a set of woodcut illustrations that appeared in Venetian play prints of 1591 and 1592 by Cristoforo Casteletti, Sforza Oddi, and Curzio Gonzaga. Clubb identified twenty-nine images depicting various combinations of comic characters, and proposed that the set was probably used elsewhere. As I will show, these woodcuts did in fact reappear almost a decade later in Adriano Banchieri’s music books Pazzia senile (1598) and Metamorfosi musicale (1601). These books were in many respects modelled on Orazio Vecchi’s L’Amfiparnaso (1597), including their musical imitations of comic scenes and their use of woodcut illustrations at the head of some pieces. However, while Vecchi’s custom-made woodcuts depict every scene in careful detail, Banchieri’s recycled images are more generic and correspond only loosely to the narrative. Banchieri’s illustrations all appeared in the 1591-2 plays except for one that is probably a thirtieth member of the original set, and another that is crudely copied from the image appearing over the prologue to L’Amfiparnaso. I argue that Vecchi’s and Banchieri’s differing uses of imagery reflect distinct poetic goals and intended performance practices for books that have historically been grouped together under the problematic label “madrigal comedy”.
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Digital Projects by Paul Schleuse
Preliminary website to launch January, 2016
Emiliano Ricciardi — project director
Anthony Newco... more Preliminary website to launch January, 2016
Emiliano Ricciardi — project director
Anthony Newcomb, Seth Coluzzi, Paul Schleuse, Catherine Deutsch — editorial board
Mauro Calcagno, Giuseppe Gerbino, Massimo Ossi, Franco Piperno, Jesse Rodin, Emilio Russo — advisory board
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Papers by Paul Schleuse
In Italy during the late cinquecento, printed music could be found not only in the homes of the w... more In Italy during the late cinquecento, printed music could be found not only in the homes of the wealthy or the music professional, but also in lay homes, courts, and academies. No longer confined to the salons of the elite, music took on the role of social play and recreation. Paul Schleuse examines these new musical forms through a study of the music books of Italian priest, poet, and composer, Orazio Vecchi. Composed for minor patrons and the wider music-buying public, Vecchi's madrigals took as their subjects game-playing, drinking, hunting, battles, and the life of the street. Schleuse looks at how music and game-playing allowed singers and performers to play the roles of exemplary pastoral characters and also comic, foreign, and "rustic" others in ways that defined and ultimately reinforced social norms of the times. His findings reposition Orazio Vecchi as one of the most innovative composers of the late 16th century.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, 157 Supplement
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Renaissance Quarterly
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Mediaevalia
Volume introduction
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Books by Paul Schleuse
Banchieri’s Canzonette a tre voci (Venice: Amadino, 1597) does not carry a formal designation of “libro primo,” but the title-page does include a subtitle, Hora prima di recreatione, which implies the books’ place at the beginning of a series. This title also conveys the priority Banchieri placed on recreational singing—music making for the pleasure of the singers, not for a separate audience—that is also hinted at in his prefaces to La pazzia senile and Il studio dilettevole, though in later books he describes alternate performance practices that imply an audience. While the canzonettas of the 1597 book are not linked by narrative as those of the later books are, they carry genre labels and other rubrics that define certain imagined contexts for each song. This book has never been published in score.
La pazzia senile, which carries the additional phrase “libbro secondo” on its title page, is the first of four canzonetta books that Banchieri modelled on Vecchi’s L’Amfiparnaso, designating each song as a scene within a three-act structure imitating the plot of stereotypical commedia dell’arte play. The work was published in two forms. The first edition from 1598 has recently been edited by Renzo Bez (Florence: Forni, 2003). Bancheiri published a substantially revised and expanded edition (“Revisti, aggiunti, et di nuovo ristampati”) in 1599, and this edition was the basis for several subsequent reprints. A 1607 reprint was the basis for the 1960 edition by Bonaventura Somma, which adds extensive editorial markings for dynamics and articulation, and provides no critical report (see attached sample page). Also, the 1599 edition includes woodcut illustrations at the head of most of the pieces, and no edition of the work (including Bez’s of the 1598 version) reproduces these images. This edition will do so, replicating as closely as possible the visual experience of reading the original partbooks.
Banchieri’s Studio dilettevole (1600) is more explicitly based on L’Amfiparnaso, as Banchieri acknowledges in the preface. He adapts his sung texts closely from equivalent scenes in Vecchi’s work, though he leaves out some plot elements and adds others, as he had done in La pazzia senile. He also borrows some musical elements from L’Amfiparnaso, to the extent that transforming five-voice works to a three-voice texture allows this. The two lower parts, long thought to be lost, were identified in the Rouen municipal library in the 1970s. The unique surviving copy of the top part, in Bologna, is missing two folios, but as Gianmario Merizzi showed in 2005, the missing music can be recovered from a 1624 print, D.O.M.A. Exercitatio musica (Magdeburg, 1624). Despite these discoveries, no complete edition of Studio dilettevole has yet appeared.
Banchieri’s fourth book of canzonettas, titled Metamorfosi musicale, is available in a critical edition by Joseph Vecchi (Bologna, 1963). Of the fifth, Prudenza giovenile, only one partbook survives, and the unique set of parts for a sixth book, Tirsi, Fili, e Clori (1614) was destroyed in World War II. My edition will therefore make all of Banchieri’s surviving canzonetta books available to modern readers and performers.
Articles by Paul Schleuse
Through its diverse musical styles and poetic registers (Vecchi penned both the poems and the music), as well as its unusual custom-made woodcut illustrations, L'Amfiparnaso presents scenes whose range defies cinquecento theatrical convention. Urban comic dialogues share the imagined stage with tragicomic monologues, idiosyncratic musical dialogues are found alongside serious madrigals, and the woodcuts depict both characteristic comic and pastoral stage settings. As a whole, then, L'Amfiparnaso represents—in Vecchi's words—“almost all the actions of the private man.” This emphasis on variety locates the book firmly within the poetic sphere of Vecchi's other large-scale collections, Selva di varia ricreatione (1590) and Convito musicale (1597), and adds special resonance to his claim that those seeking “a complete tale” in L'Amfiparnaso will find it only “in the mind.”
Keywords:L'Amfiparnaso, commedia dell'arte, madrigal comedy, musical poetics, Orazio Vecchi
Book Chapters by Paul Schleuse
Conference Presentations by Paul Schleuse
Banchieri described recreational singers enjoying the first of these books, La pazzia senile (1598, rev. 1599) in the preface to the second, Il studio dilettevole (1600). This book adapts texts directly from L’Amfiparnaso, and was produced—Banchieri reports—for small groups of singers who lacked the numbers to perform the original. In these books and in Metamorfosi musicale (1601) and La prudenza giovenile (1607) Banchieri rang the changes on a conventional love triangle, only varying character names, subplots, and comic lazzi. He also deployed idiosyncratic techniques for differentiating characters in dialogue through contrasting dynamics, textures, or use of falsetto—termed alla bastarda in the Banchieri’s terminology. The extensive reprint history of these books—eight in all by 1628—confirms the popularity of Banchieri’s formula.
The four speaking roles in Einstein embody alterity: a white woman, an African-American woman, an elderly African-American man, and a white ten-year-old boy. These identities were retained in the casts of revivals in 1984, 1992, and 2012. In particular, the racial contrast between the two women, highlighted by their parallel staging in the Knee Plays, could be read as intrinsic rather than incidental only when the roles’ creators were recast with black and white actors in 2012. In the last Knee Play their racial contrast stands in for gender as they embody the (heterosexual) lovers described in the final monologue. Racial and gender contrasts are aligned earlier in the opera also, both in Wilson’s staging and in musical solos that foreground feminine vocality (“Aria”) and jazz-inflected improvisation (“Building”) against Glass’s more neutral style elsewhere.
However, documentation of the opera’s development from 1974 to 1976 reveals that many of these elements emerged late in the creative process and were inspired or contributed by cast members themselves. Drawing on materials in the Wilson Archive and elsewhere, this paper traces the accretion of racial and gendered signi- fiers in Einstein before the premiere and in later revivals. Rather than a circumscribed interpretation of the opera, this meta-reading shows how markers of alterity hold the fields of potential meaning open. The historicization of Einstein on the Beach as a revivable work makes such readings available in ways that can only now be explored.
Digital Projects by Paul Schleuse
Emiliano Ricciardi — project director
Anthony Newcomb, Seth Coluzzi, Paul Schleuse, Catherine Deutsch — editorial board
Mauro Calcagno, Giuseppe Gerbino, Massimo Ossi, Franco Piperno, Jesse Rodin, Emilio Russo — advisory board
Papers by Paul Schleuse
Banchieri’s Canzonette a tre voci (Venice: Amadino, 1597) does not carry a formal designation of “libro primo,” but the title-page does include a subtitle, Hora prima di recreatione, which implies the books’ place at the beginning of a series. This title also conveys the priority Banchieri placed on recreational singing—music making for the pleasure of the singers, not for a separate audience—that is also hinted at in his prefaces to La pazzia senile and Il studio dilettevole, though in later books he describes alternate performance practices that imply an audience. While the canzonettas of the 1597 book are not linked by narrative as those of the later books are, they carry genre labels and other rubrics that define certain imagined contexts for each song. This book has never been published in score.
La pazzia senile, which carries the additional phrase “libbro secondo” on its title page, is the first of four canzonetta books that Banchieri modelled on Vecchi’s L’Amfiparnaso, designating each song as a scene within a three-act structure imitating the plot of stereotypical commedia dell’arte play. The work was published in two forms. The first edition from 1598 has recently been edited by Renzo Bez (Florence: Forni, 2003). Bancheiri published a substantially revised and expanded edition (“Revisti, aggiunti, et di nuovo ristampati”) in 1599, and this edition was the basis for several subsequent reprints. A 1607 reprint was the basis for the 1960 edition by Bonaventura Somma, which adds extensive editorial markings for dynamics and articulation, and provides no critical report (see attached sample page). Also, the 1599 edition includes woodcut illustrations at the head of most of the pieces, and no edition of the work (including Bez’s of the 1598 version) reproduces these images. This edition will do so, replicating as closely as possible the visual experience of reading the original partbooks.
Banchieri’s Studio dilettevole (1600) is more explicitly based on L’Amfiparnaso, as Banchieri acknowledges in the preface. He adapts his sung texts closely from equivalent scenes in Vecchi’s work, though he leaves out some plot elements and adds others, as he had done in La pazzia senile. He also borrows some musical elements from L’Amfiparnaso, to the extent that transforming five-voice works to a three-voice texture allows this. The two lower parts, long thought to be lost, were identified in the Rouen municipal library in the 1970s. The unique surviving copy of the top part, in Bologna, is missing two folios, but as Gianmario Merizzi showed in 2005, the missing music can be recovered from a 1624 print, D.O.M.A. Exercitatio musica (Magdeburg, 1624). Despite these discoveries, no complete edition of Studio dilettevole has yet appeared.
Banchieri’s fourth book of canzonettas, titled Metamorfosi musicale, is available in a critical edition by Joseph Vecchi (Bologna, 1963). Of the fifth, Prudenza giovenile, only one partbook survives, and the unique set of parts for a sixth book, Tirsi, Fili, e Clori (1614) was destroyed in World War II. My edition will therefore make all of Banchieri’s surviving canzonetta books available to modern readers and performers.
Through its diverse musical styles and poetic registers (Vecchi penned both the poems and the music), as well as its unusual custom-made woodcut illustrations, L'Amfiparnaso presents scenes whose range defies cinquecento theatrical convention. Urban comic dialogues share the imagined stage with tragicomic monologues, idiosyncratic musical dialogues are found alongside serious madrigals, and the woodcuts depict both characteristic comic and pastoral stage settings. As a whole, then, L'Amfiparnaso represents—in Vecchi's words—“almost all the actions of the private man.” This emphasis on variety locates the book firmly within the poetic sphere of Vecchi's other large-scale collections, Selva di varia ricreatione (1590) and Convito musicale (1597), and adds special resonance to his claim that those seeking “a complete tale” in L'Amfiparnaso will find it only “in the mind.”
Keywords:L'Amfiparnaso, commedia dell'arte, madrigal comedy, musical poetics, Orazio Vecchi
Banchieri described recreational singers enjoying the first of these books, La pazzia senile (1598, rev. 1599) in the preface to the second, Il studio dilettevole (1600). This book adapts texts directly from L’Amfiparnaso, and was produced—Banchieri reports—for small groups of singers who lacked the numbers to perform the original. In these books and in Metamorfosi musicale (1601) and La prudenza giovenile (1607) Banchieri rang the changes on a conventional love triangle, only varying character names, subplots, and comic lazzi. He also deployed idiosyncratic techniques for differentiating characters in dialogue through contrasting dynamics, textures, or use of falsetto—termed alla bastarda in the Banchieri’s terminology. The extensive reprint history of these books—eight in all by 1628—confirms the popularity of Banchieri’s formula.
The four speaking roles in Einstein embody alterity: a white woman, an African-American woman, an elderly African-American man, and a white ten-year-old boy. These identities were retained in the casts of revivals in 1984, 1992, and 2012. In particular, the racial contrast between the two women, highlighted by their parallel staging in the Knee Plays, could be read as intrinsic rather than incidental only when the roles’ creators were recast with black and white actors in 2012. In the last Knee Play their racial contrast stands in for gender as they embody the (heterosexual) lovers described in the final monologue. Racial and gender contrasts are aligned earlier in the opera also, both in Wilson’s staging and in musical solos that foreground feminine vocality (“Aria”) and jazz-inflected improvisation (“Building”) against Glass’s more neutral style elsewhere.
However, documentation of the opera’s development from 1974 to 1976 reveals that many of these elements emerged late in the creative process and were inspired or contributed by cast members themselves. Drawing on materials in the Wilson Archive and elsewhere, this paper traces the accretion of racial and gendered signi- fiers in Einstein before the premiere and in later revivals. Rather than a circumscribed interpretation of the opera, this meta-reading shows how markers of alterity hold the fields of potential meaning open. The historicization of Einstein on the Beach as a revivable work makes such readings available in ways that can only now be explored.
Emiliano Ricciardi — project director
Anthony Newcomb, Seth Coluzzi, Paul Schleuse, Catherine Deutsch — editorial board
Mauro Calcagno, Giuseppe Gerbino, Massimo Ossi, Franco Piperno, Jesse Rodin, Emilio Russo — advisory board