OSHER AT JHU, COLUMBIA : WEDNESDAY AFTERNOONS, SEPTEMBER 18 TO DECEMBER 11, 2024
The performance group Eighth Blackbird

ARTIST BIOS        SYLLABUS (flat)     SYLLABUS (foldable)
CLASSES:    [1]    [2]    [3]    [4]    [5]    [6]    [7]    [8]    [9]    [10]    [11]    [12]

For most of my life, I have worked in opera, a remarkably complex medium that combines music, stagecraft, language, dance, and design. I have had some experience in each of these individually, but my real excitement as a director has always come in putting the elements together to make something new. Yet opera is not the only medium that combines music with visual or dramatic elements. There is incidental music for plays, and court masques, ballet, and modern dance. There is the explosion of popular entertainment from operetta and burlesque to the Broadway musical. There is the addition of theatrical elements to concert events, from chamber-scale experiments to stadium rock. And there are traditions in other countries such as Japan which began earlier and remain alive to this day. This course will attempt a roughly-historical sampling of the entire field.

As of now, the course is a work in progress. The topics listed under each heading below are only possibilities, and may change as I get into detailed preparation. Similarly, the sequence and titles of the later classes may change as the earlier ones fall into place. I will, however, try to keep this page up to date. As this course touches on so many topics, there are bound to be overlaps with some others I have given before, but I will keep duplications below 25% of the total. rb.

Some practical details: Click the links above for a printable syllabus; the "foldable" version will print out as a booklet on two-sided printers. I shall also produce weekly handouts in the same two formats; the RESOURCES link under each image will turn GOLD when these are ready. Immediately after each class, this same link will give access to all the images shown in the class, any texts quoted, my outline script, and all video and audio clips that are available.

A Video Preview of the class can be found HERE. The examples shown in the video are the triumphal march in Verdi's Aïda from the Verona Arena, Act II of Swan Lake from the Kirov Ballet in Saint Petersburg, Jenny Coulson singing the music-hall song "The boy I love is up in the gallery," a segment of Play by Alexander Ekman at the Paris Opera Ballet, part of a 2017 rock concert by Don Broco somewhere in England, and the ending of "My Shot" with Lin-Manuel Miranda and the original cast of Hamilton.

	September 18
The masque from The Tempest (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2016)	RESOURCES

1. Our Revels Now

The enchantment in Shakespeare’s Tempest begins with a song, “Full fathom five,” that an unseen Ariel sings to the shipwrecked prince Ferdinand, and it climaxes in a masque where three goddesses descend to celebrate his nuptials with a dance. Using various productions and adaptations of the play as an anchor, this introductory class sketches out the agenda for the entire course, as music and other theatrical elements combine. Because of its nature, the reuse of materials from other courses is considerably higher in this class than for any of the others.

	September 25
A scene from Japanese Noh Theater	RESOURCES

2. Asian Arts

The earliest Japanese Noh plays, a form of spiritual drama involving speaking, singing, and stylized movement, date from the 14th century. Kabuki, a more colorful form, grew up a couple of centuries later; it is even more highly ritualized and its choreographed gestures approach dance. Bunraku, or puppet theater, arose two centuries later still. Looking at these (and other non-European traditions) makes us question assumptions we may make when the only culture we know is our own.

	October 2
A modern production of Hildegard von Bingen's Ordo Virtutum	RESOURCES

3. European Evolution

This class develops the theme of the previous one by tracing the origin of music drama in Western cultures, whether in the Greek theater or Christian church. Although very few authentic materials survive, we will look at the use of music and dancing in classical drama, because so much later renaissance music was based on what they thought was ancient practice. We are on stronger ground with music of the middle ages, with sacred drama of various kinds, miracle plays and moralities, and secular music for court performance.

	October 9
Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo	RESOURCES

4. Music of the Courts

From the renaissance through the baroque, the great courts of Europe saw the flowering of the musical arts in ways unheard of before. We'll get masques, dances, and vocal spectacles designed not only to entertain but to celebrate princely virtues. We'll meet a queen who toured her country with an entourage of poets, playwrights, and musicians; a king who danced; and a group of courtier-philosophers who invented that little thing called opera.

	October 16
An open-air production of The Beggar's Opera	RESOURCES

5. Not Always Serious

In the 1720s, when Italian opera was all the rage in London, Handel was the reigning composer and the kind of opera he produced was known as opera seria, literally serious opera. Exploring high-minded themes from classical history or mythology, these provided a series of show-stopping arias for the imported singers who were the main attraction. It would not be long before an English-language parody, The Beggar's Opera, featuring highwaymen and whores, would enjoy even greater success. Meanwhile in Italy, comic interludes such as Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona were sneaking in between the acts of the serious operas. And again, it was only a matter of time before these took off as a genre of their own: opera buffa, or comic opera.

	October 23
Daria Khokhlova and Denis Medvedev in La Sylphide (Bolshoi Ballet)	RESOURCES

6. On Point

The first half of the 19th Century saw the rise of both bel canto opera and romantic ballet, typically featuring those charismatic but vulnerable heroines that provided showcases for the small number of artists riding the crest of the new cult of the primadonna or prima ballerina. In this class, we will concentrate on ballet, following it from its beginnings to the great Tchaikovsky works at the end of the century.

	October 30
Verdi's Aïda at the Metropolitan Opera	RESOURCES

7. An Extravagant Art Form

Even with straight plays, the theaters of the mid-nineteenth century began to rival each other in the magnificence of their productions, which might include large casts of extras, elaborate scenic effects, music, and dance. But for sheer spectacle, nothing came close to grand opera, which was a fusion of all the arts. Wagner called it Gesamtkunstwerk (together-art-work), implying a focus on ends other than mere entertainment. But other composers, nothing daunted, filled the great opera houses of Europe and America with works whose crowd-pleasing attraction has continued to this day.

	November 6
City Varieties Music Hall, Leeds	RESOURCES

8. Whitechapel and West End

A tour through London theatre in the late Victorian period. Parallel with grand opera at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, the new Savoy Theatre was presenting the hugely successful operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. Elsewhere in the West End, you might find everything from elaborate Shakespeare productions to that peculiarly English form, the pantomime. And moving east into the less affluent areas, you would find sensational melodramas and of course variety shows, known in Britain as Music Hall.

	November 13
A scene from West Side Story	RESOURCES

9. Immigrant Broadway

A significant number of Broadway composers were either first-generation immigrants (such as Rudolf Friml, Victor Herbert, Kurt Weill, and Irving Berlin) or born into immigrant families (Jerome Kern, the Gershwins, Lorenz Hart, and Leonard Bernstein). Moreover, a large number of their works are about the immigrant experience (think Weill's Street Scene and Bernstein's West Side Story). This gives us a lens through which to view the evolution from European operetta to the American musical.

	Novmber 20
Patricia Kopatchinskaja in Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire	RESOURCES

10. In Smaller Packets

The groundbreaking ballets that Igor Stravinsky wrote for Serge Diaghilev before WW1—Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring—were all comparatively short, despite the huge orchestral forces they required. His next dramatic work, however, The Soldier's Tale, written during the War, pulled way back, calling only for 12 instru­ment­alists, 2 reciters, and 2 dancers. A few years earlier, Arnold Schoenberg had created Pierrot Lunaire for female voice and 8 instruments. Thereafter, much of the most interesting 20th-century music and dance would come in small packages, often with unusual forces and abandoning conventional narrative.

	December 4
Mötley Crüe concert	RESOURCES

11. So Bigger's Better?

The last quarter of the 20th century saw a reaction against the economy of scale discussed in the previous class, as many promoters returned to the 19th-century embrace of spectacle. The Met commissioned a series of elaborate productions of standard operas by Franco Zeffirelli and others. Broadway blockbusters like Les Miserables and The Lion King recouped huge budgets with record-breaking runs. The human performers in Cirque du Soleil ceded the spotlight to the technology that surrounded them. And no success in popular music would be complete without nationwide arena tours replete with pyrotechnics and light shows.

	December 11
Alexander Ekman's Play at the Paris Opera Ballet	RESOURCES

12. Outside the Box

As of now, I don't know exactly what will go into this class, except that everything will come from our own century and stretch the normal boundaries between genres. Almost certainly I'll include one of the extraordinary creations by choreographer Alexander Ekman, performed by ballet companies but looking nothing like Swan Lake: perhaps Play as illustrated above, or the Nordic fertility rituals of his totally non-Shakespearean Midsummer Night's Dream. Stay tuned!

 
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