Complete Opera Research Articles

Zora D. by Isidora Zebeljan: Towards the new opera

Zora D. by Isidora Zebeljan: Towards the new opera

OPERA – A New Approach to Robot Programming

This paper presents a new, graphical approach to the definition of complex robot program structures, based on a task description by means of flowcharts. Thus the PC-based OPERA system relieves the user as far as possible from learning a programming language and simplifies a better structuring of robot programs. Parameters for statements and procedure calls are defined within dialog boxes. As the program code is generated automatically, different robot languages are no problem for the user. Based on this approach OPERA offers various functions to add user defined procedure libraries as well as new robot control statements. New functions can be integrated like standard statements. They are graphically represented by user defined icons and even new dialog boxes can be included. Features for debugging and the generation of application specific user interfaces complete OPERA to a structure oriented programming tool, addressing the needs of end users as well as those of application specialists.

The complete operas of Richard Wagner

Wagner's operas can be counted among the most important works of art of the nineteenth century. But Wagner was a composer around whom violent artistic, political, and literary controversies raged during his lifetime. Even today, Wagner's music seems to arouse either adulation or antipathy. In The Complete Operas of Richard Wagner, as in the first four volumes of his famous series on the great opera composers, Charles Osborne first describes the composer's life at the time he wrote each opera, thus providing a biographical thread which runs through the book; follows it with a thorough examination of the libretto and its sources; and lastly tells the story of the opera, which he links to the major musical features. This book is, in effect, a musical biography of Wagner, tracing his development from his first complete opera, Die Feen, to his last, Parsifal. It serves as an invaluable guide to the often perplexing Wagner oeuvre both for the regular opera-goer and the armchair listener.

Wagner's Individual Sketches for Parsifal

Wagner's compositional procedure, as shown by surviving sketch material, has been widely discussed, firstly in the pioneering work of Otto Strobel, and more recently by Curt von Westemhagen, Robert Bailey and John Deathridge. Detailed studies of this type concern Rienzi, Siegfrieds Tod, Der Ring and the first act of Tristan. Discussions of sketches for Parsifal, however, have either been restricted to arguments of nomenclature or to a general description of their nature rather than their content; that is, we are merely made aware of the fact that there are two musical drafts of the complete opera, to use Strobel's terminology, the ‘composition sketch’ and the ‘orchestral sketch’, the first being written in pencil on two instrumental staves under a vocal line, and the second more detailed version being in ink with the instrumental parts now on up to four or five staves, and the vocal parts on as many as two to three staves. This apparent neglect seems even more curious when one discovers the wealth and nature of the sketch material that survives for Parsifal.

Towards a Reassessment of the Ethnomusicologist's Role in Research

E thnomusicology may or may not be, as Mantle Hood's wag allegedly observed, what ethnomusicologists do, but it cannot be done without them. The aim of this essay is to examine the concept of the ethnomusicologist implied in certain theories of research method, to investigate the theoretical implications of alternative concepts, and to propose a research model which allows for Blum's contention that ethnomusicologist, like any of his informants, has lived through a specific 'learning process', during which he is subject to particular social (1975:208-9) which lead to adoption of one course of action, one set of interests, or one theory in preference to another. My concern with research doubtless arises from the personal of 11 years continuous experience in third-world countries, where the potential disappearance of traditional music induces a drive towards preservation and provides the opportunity for observation of musical activity impossible at a western university. Orientation inevitably moves from the study of music as sound to investigation of man as music-maker, while the opportunity to watch embryo ethnomusicologists in action increases awareness of both performers and scholars as human beings. This opportunity is, however, subject to constraints of situation. In formulating his theoretical position, the transplanted scholar finds himself caught between an academic colonialism which endowed third-world university libraries with Kobb6's Complete Opera Book and Hegel's Aesthetics and an inverted post-independence anti-colonialism embodied in all (48) volumes of the works of Lenin. If the resulting environmental have led to the incursion of philosophy into ethnomusicology, the end-product should be judged by its value as a contribution to ethnomusicological theory. Full investigation of the phenomenon of constraint implies the construction of a schema such as the following triad:

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Journal Article REVIEWS OF BOOKS Get access The Complete Operas of Verdi. By Charles Osborne. pp. 485. ( Gollancz, London, 1969, £3 3s.) J. W. K. J. W. K. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Music and Letters, Volume LI, Issue 1, January 1970, Pages 69–72, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/LI.1.69 Published: 01 January 1970

Opera in Miniature: Growth of an English Genre

The only permanent opera houses in England are both in London. This is perhaps the main reason why, since the war, the operatic life of this country has been characterised by the appearance of tiny companies dedicated to performing opera in what novelists of the last century would have called “reduced circumstances.” It is the nature of the reduction in each case that distinguishes one little group from another: it can mean complete opera in concert performance; truncated opera in stage performance; excerpted opera, and opera designedly miniature in its creation. In no instance are the functions of the leading London-based companies precisely duplicated.