Digital Commons Network^™

Horned & Hidden Child: The Minotaur & Modern Opera, Mikeila Ashley Mcqueston

Masters Theses

Picture a world in which stories never die. Just down the street is the Halfway House for the Mythically Challenged, where fairytale creatures learn how to prepare for job-interviews. This is the world of Pasiphae, a beautiful sorceress, queen, and former wife of the ancient King Minos. After millennia on her own, she enlists the help of her Greek Chorus to rescue her children from their respective prisons – first Ariadne from the island Naxos, and now the Minotaur from Daedalus’ labyrinth. Horned & Hidden Child is a contemporary opera with music by Mikeila McQueston and libretto by Nicole Yackley. …

The Cunning Little Vixen: A Folktale Illustrated On Stage, Mikayla Reid

Masters Theses

This thesis paper reflects upon the costume design process taken by Mikayla Reid to explore how color choice and application within designs can help create storybook characters off the page and onto the stage. This concept is explored through the costume designs for the opera The Cunning Little Vixen, a production theoretically staged at the Alice Busch Opera Theater for the Glimmerglass Festival in New York. The paper discusses Reid’s attempt to create designs that still feel like watercolor illustrations, even when realized in physical garments. It follows her process as she tests different dye techniques in search for what …

Performer Wellness And Applied Stage Practices Curriculum: Preparing The Undergraduate Vocal Performance Major For An Opera Career, Gabriel J. Kirby

Masters Theses

Within higher education, the goal is to prepare students to enter the workforce with the knowledge and abilities to meet or exceed the chosen occupation’s requirements and expectations. To achieve these requisites, schools create curricula comprising key information for several fields and concentrations while abiding by the regulations enforced by both their school boards and accreditation organizations. Students can apply for a job knowing that their degree holds value. Many institutions continually revise degrees to curricula to inspire the next generation in the workforce. The purpose of this curriculum project is to advocate for expanded curriculum considerations that include acting …

Mothers Who Live: Gender Subversion And Resilience In Leoš Janáček’S Jenůfa, Megan Lynne Whiteman

Masters Theses

Leoš Janáček’s opera Jenůfa, which premiered in 1904, takes place in a secluded Moravian village and details the story of two women, Jenůfa and Kostelnička. They are intertwined through an act of infanticide, family dynamics, and gender expectations. Recognized as the first Czech naturalist dramatist, Gabriela Preissová wrote the Czech realist play, Její pastorkyňa [Her Stepdaughter] (1890), which provided prose for the opera. Tragedies often occur in Jenůfa due to women defying social norms and the problems that arise as a result of their actions. The gender transgressions of Jenůfa and Kostelnička—actions that deviate from gender expectations …

Meter In French And Italian Opera, 1809–1859, Nicholas Shea

Masters Theses

Current and historical methods of metric analysis often assume that the first beat of a metric group is stronger than the second. This, however, is not the case in all repertoires. For example, a study by William Rothstein (2011) demonstrates that Verdi’s midcentury operas often place emphasis on even-numbered beats. This paper shows this metric trend to be even more prevalent in a corpus of 208 nineteenth-century operatic excerpts, (1809-1859).

I present a formal model that classifies phrases according to anacrusis length and prosodic accent, showing where large-scale metric accents fall within a phrase. This model produces three metric types …

Unmasking Wagner's Grail: Homoeroticism, Androgyny, And Anxiety In Parsifal, Tyler Cole Mitchell

Masters Theses

Most readings of Wagner’s final music drama Parsifal seek to illumine a clandestine presentation of Wagner’s racist doctrine or make sense of a less-shrouded but still ambiguous panegyric to Christianity. However, little scholarly material addresses Wagner’s provocative account of sensuality and homoeroticism in this Bühnenweihfestspiel [Stage Consecration Festival Play]. This thesis explores desire and homosexuality within the drama and considers how and why Wagner masks these themes through the opaque mythos of religion, race, and community. Parsifal was partly informed by Wagner’s own complex neuroses: his sexual anxieties and scandals, amalgam of German philosophies, and confusion concerning Germanness. As filtered …