Music and the Melodramatic Aesthetic

Research Context:
Jacqueline Waeber has recently pointed to melodrama's ambiguous status as a) technical process, b) dramatic genre and c) aesthetic (En musique dans le texte, Paris, 2005). Early nineteenth-century stage melodramas communicated pathos, high emotion and moral polarisation through physical gesture, mise en scène and music as well as spoken dialogue. This project seeks to establish more clearly music's position in the conjunction of Waeber's categories, and to trace its evolving role, in relation to gesture and mise en scène, in the melodramatic aesthetic of opera and early silent film. Critical engagement with the music will enable us to test the coherence of the term 'melodramatic aesthetic' as a label in a more rigorously interdisciplinary manner than has been attempted until now.

Studies of melodrama on stage and screen have been dominated by literature, drama and film scholars - including Peter Brooks (1976) and more recently Ben Singer (2001) and (as editors of volumes) Jacky Bratton (1994), Michael Hays (1996) and Kerry Powell (2004). The few scholars who have written about music - in these volumes and elsewhere - include David Mayer, Michael Pisani, George Taylor and Nicole Wild, who have taken the first - essential - step of describing and reconstructing a variety of scores. However, there has been little attempt to move beyond this and theorise melodrama's musical language and aesthetic, or situate it in a broader musico-dramatic context.

Musicologists have preferred to examine melodrama's influence on the musico-dramatic language of Romantic opera - notably Emilio Sala (1995) and Mary Ann Smart (2004). Waeber's pioneering book, however, focuses on melodrama as a technical process, and a symposium she has organised for the 2007 International Musicological Society conference has attracted European and American scholars (including Hibberd) seeking to examine the stage genre itself, and its broader aesthetic, from a musicological perspective.

This project aims to advance thinking on the melodramatic aesthetic in the following ways:
a) move beyond Brooks's literary 'idea' and build on recent work by analysing melodrama as a performance process, and as an aesthetic category, in which music has a crucial role
b) reveal ways in which meanings can be constructed, and notions of pleasure uncovered, through the interrelationship of speech, gesture, image and music in scenes of high emotion and moral conflict
c) trace this interrelationship through theatre, opera and film to genres of the late twentieth century, in order to establish the extent to which the melodramatic aesthetic is a meaningful label beyond the nineteenth century.
Music will be the central focus of the project, as it is the element of melodrama that has received least attention, a situation that has led to a misconception of the genre's aesthetic. This intellectual framework will determine the activities of the project during the funded period, and will form the basis of the proposed outputs.

Potential Applications and Benefits:
The project will support research by:
Promoting dialogue between academics (including research students) and practitioners from different disciplines and institutions
Dovetailing with an ongoing AHRC-funded project at Nottingham
Providing channels for communicating the research to both academic and non-academic audiences
Producing materials that will support future research and teaching

In addition:
Interactive website, to include video clips of the workshops (to be archived on the University's server)
Archived DVDs of edited footage from the workshops for use in future research and teaching
Edited volume from the conference (Hibberd and Smith) to be submitted to Ashgate's interdisciplinary series Studies in European Cultural Transmission (2009-10)
Monograph (Hibberd): The Melodramatic Aesthetic:From Stage to Screen (2009-10) Conference papers, articles, (Hibberd, Robinson, Smith, Marsh)