20190327_Music_The_Sounds_Asia_Madama_Butterfly_How_Puccini_Composed_Difference

Location

Room 11.01 RRST
Room 11.01, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Date

Mar 27 2019

Time

5:00 pm

Labels

Department of Music

Department of Music

The Sounds of Asia in Madama Butterfly or
How Puccini Composed Difference

 

Speaker: Judy Tsou (University of Washington)

 

Date: 27 March, 2019 (Wednesday)
Time: 5:00pm
Venue: Seminar Room 11.01, 11/F Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

 

Abstract:

Giacomo Puccini employed the Orientalist toolkit of his predecessors in composing the sounds of Asia in many parts of his 1904 opera, Madama Butterfly. He appropriated existing Asian folk melodies, and he composed a sonic Asia using iconic Asian instruments such as the gong and bells. However, I argue that Puccini also used what Italians at the time considered foreign, such as atonal music and 20th century harmonies to denote exotic Asia. In this talk, I will discuss the 19th century Italian ideology of the exotic Asia and how Puccini’s music reflected this ideology in his Orientalist tinte, especially in his portrayal of
the heroine, Cio-cio San in Madama Butterfly.

 

About the Speaker:

Judy Tsou is Music Librarian Emerita, and Affiliate Assistant Professor of Music History at the University of Washington. Her research interests include the intersection of gender and race in opera and musical theater, rights for online-only music, and digital and paper music archives. She has published in both music librarianship and musicology, including “Ether Today, Gone Tomorrow: 21st Century Sound Recording Collections in Crisis” (MLA Notes, 2016), “An Archive and a Collection of Rare Music Scores: The William Crawford III Collections” (MLA Notes, 2017), and “Composing Racial Difference in Madama Butterfly,” in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She has also edited over 200 articles for the second edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music. Her honors include the Susan Kopelman Award for best feminist editing for Cecilia Reclaimed in 1994, two Papakhian Special Achievement Awards from the Music Library Association: first, in 2013, for merging the Music Library Association and US Branch of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML-US), and second, for her initiatives in diversity and inclusion in 2018. The Society for American Music awarded her their Distinguished Service Citation in 2017, and the American Musicological Society inducted her as an Honorary Member, also in 2017. She was a fellow at the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. She has
been active in various scholarly societies including the AMS, where she is currently serving as vice-president. She was the first Asian-American to serve as President of the Society for American Music, and the President of the IAML-US. She also served on various editorial boards: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for American Music, and a founding editorial board member of Woman and Music.

All welcome. First come, first served.
For enquiry, please contact the Department of Music at 3917-7045 or music@hku.hk

Go to Top