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UP IN ARMS: CONDUCTING …(IPHIGENIA)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 January 2024
Extract
The opera begins with a burst of applause as the conductor enters the pit. He bends, bowing to the audience, then turns, lifts his arms, and the music begins. From here, for the remainder of the performance, we can barely see him (although one of us will turn around in the third act to watch him on the video screens that hang behind us). Or, the opera begins before that with an usher in the audience, asking people what they know of the myth, and warning them that this story will not end well.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Ramus , Volume 52 , Special Issue 1: Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding's …(Iphigenia): Interdisciplinary Approaches , June 2023 , pp. 69 - 73
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1. See Telò, Best, Porter, this issue.
2. The men have a ‘Monty Python’ effect that can be painful to watch. See Butler, this issue, who summarizes them thus ‘I am I am I am. I march I march I march. I grunt I grunt I grunt’—‘a drumbeat of masculinity’ that Butler rightly criticizes for being too monolithic. As Chinen (2021) writes in a review, ‘The chest-thumping machismo of the Grecian soldiers in …(Iphigenia), while overplayed for satirical effect, was also something that took spalding aback. “I didn't realize that men took up so much space in this opera”, she says. “And that's so crazy; I wrote it like that! But I didn't know this until I was sitting in the audience watching the parts of the show that I'm not in. And I was like, ‘Oh my god. What is this?’” She laughs. “But actually, the music has this virility and relentlessness that feels closer to how I perceived these myths when I was first reading them.”’ See further Stovall (2022). Kheshti (this issue) discusses these bodies as ‘hyperbolic displays of white masculinity that can only be interpreted as parody, further drawing attention to the uncomfortable presence of Blackness, relegated as it is to the subterranean orchestra pit in Act I and to the signifier of spalding's body in Act III.’
3. Walecki (2021).
4. See esp. Stephenson, Griffith, this issue.
5. Their arms sometimes resemble the branches of trees. Examples can be found in BroadStage (2022), starting at 45s.
6. Walecki (2021).
7. Walecki (2021).
8. See especially Stovall (2022); Griffith, Stephenson, Flynn, Telò, this issue.
9. See n.2, above.
10. For examples see BroadStage (2022) at 1m 43s.
11. spalding (2018), track 9.