Voices of Nothing: Aesthetics of Corruption in Music and Language Público
Kingston, Andrew (Fall 2019)
Abstract
This project explores how discourses of decadence and corruption manifest in the history and aesthetics of opera. In doing so, it examines various philosophical claims about the purity of operatic expressiveness, and analyzes how such claims of purity are produced alongside aesthetic figures of corruption to which they are inextricably bound. These figures of corruption are analyzed in relation to the concept of a vox nihili—a typographical term naming a printer’s error mistakenly assumed to be meaningful. Using this term as a metaphor, this dissertation shows how theories of pure operatic expression are similarly perverted by the contingent effects of non-expressive structures that they are unable to eliminate—and thus how the supposed purity of the operatic voice gives way to a “voice of nothing.” From this perspective, Chapter 1 examines Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s debates with Jean-Philippe Rameau in the eighteenth century, in which Rousseau developed arguments about the corruption of modern operatic expressiveness. Chapter 2 addresses similar ideas of corruption and expression in the nineteenth-century confrontation between the German composer Richard Wagner and the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, reading these two artists in relationship to writing by Jacques Derrida. Chapters 3 and 4 then discuss how the philosophical questions outlined in the project’s first half are addressed in works by two twentieth-century composers—Arnold Schoenberg and Claude Vivier, respectively. Chapter 3 thus analyzes Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron and its dramatization of the corruption of a divine “idea,” and Chapter 4 examines how two operatic works by Vivier dramatize moments of loss and death drawn from his own biography. Over these four chapters, the dissertation demonstrates how figures of aesthetic corruption persist throughout the history of opera, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth; it also considers how such figures begin to take on moral and political dimensions.
Table of Contents
Introduction. Vox Nihili 1
[0.] Prelude: An Operatic Fable 1
1. Vox Nihili 6
2. Neither / Nor 7
3. Method (Envenomation) 12
4. A Note on “Aesthetics” and “Corruption” 16
Chapter 1. Rousseau, Rameau, and the Paradoxes of Articulation 21
1. Reason and Rhetoric 25
2. Corpse sonore 31
3. From Lettre to Essai 44
4. The Problem of the Cry 63
5. Articulimitation 70
6. The Obligation of Passion 78
Chapter 2. Infidelities: Mallarmé’s Vagues Nerfs 82
1. “décadence inaugurale” 82
2. On Necessity (a Gloss on Oper und Drama) 86
—Remark 1. Programme and Analysis 97
—Remark 2. Three Figures of Dance 101
3. Baudelaire’s Synaesthetics 108
4. Mallarmé’s Rêverie 113
—Remark 3. Effects on the Nerves 122
5. L’Écriture et le théâtre 126
6. Pantomime(sis) 136
7. Choreographies 145
8. “hyménographies” 151
9. Μοῖραι Moiré: Wagner’s Shroud and Other Fabrications 159
10. Mallarmé on the Programme 184
Chapter 3. Schoenberg and the Compromised Land 188
1. “es soll nicht sein.” 188
2. Idea and Expression 194
3. Moses und Aron 205
4. Mosaic Tables 214
5. Inaudible 228
6. Depthless 232
7. Vox Clamantis 235
Chapter 4. Vivier and the Loss of Origin 243
1. L’abandon d’enfant 246
2. Kopernikus 257
3. Lonely Child 266
4. Sexuality and Absence 273
Postscript. 280
Works Cited. 282
About this Dissertation
| School | |
|---|---|
| Department | |
| Degree | |
| Submission | |
| Language |
|
| Research Field | |
| Palabra Clave | |
| Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor | |
| Committee Members |
Primary PDF
| Thumbnail | Title | Date Uploaded | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Voices of Nothing: Aesthetics of Corruption in Music and Language () | 2019-11-08 12:43:33 -0500 |
|
Supplemental Files
| Thumbnail | Title | Date Uploaded | Actions |
|---|