Articles and Essays by David Gutkin
Opera Quarterly, 2024
fperformance þ theory þ historyg the operaquarterl y volume 39/number 3-4/summer-autumn 2023 Expe... more fperformance þ theory þ historyg the operaquarterl y volume 39/number 3-4/summer-autumn 2023 Experiments in Opera Today: Opera and Multidisciplinary Art after 2000 d a v i d g u t k i n a n d h e a t h e r w i e b e
Tempo , 2022
Eight 'listening sketches' form the basis of an interview with experimental vocalist and composer... more Eight 'listening sketches' form the basis of an interview with experimental vocalist and composer Joan La Barbara. The conversation, a retrospective of La Barbara's compositions, is divided into four sections: Early experiments; Multi-track works; Words; New and recent workspandemic times.
Detroit Opera , 2022
Program note/essay for Detroit Opera's new production of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X -- h... more Program note/essay for Detroit Opera's new production of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X -- https://detroitopera.org/anthony-daviss-x/
Journal of the American Musicological Society , 2019
H. Lawrence Freeman’s “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan’s Broa... more H. Lawrence Freeman’s “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan’s Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman’s lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcil- able figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman’s inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the com- plex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman’s aesthetic mani- festos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman’s jazz opera Ameri- can Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.
Perspectives of New Music, Volume 50, Winter/Summer 2012
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Notation in Creative Processes (edited volume), 2015
Current Musicology
222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA, 01923. This consent does not extend to other kinds of copying, s... more 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA, 01923. This consent does not extend to other kinds of copying, such as copying for promotional purposes or for creating new collective works.
On 26 and 27 June 2015, the life and work of composer H. Lawrence Freeman gained an audience and ... more On 26 and 27 June 2015, the life and work of composer H. Lawrence Freeman gained an audience and context. Columbia University hosted a performance of Freeman's 1914 opera Voodoo, the first production since its 1928 debut, and an interdisciplinary conference, " Restaging the Harlem Renaissance: New Views on Performing Arts in Black Manhattan. " The events took place one week after the Charleston Church Massacre, where nine members of Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church were shot and killed during prayer service by a self-proclaimed white supremacist. This act of anti-black terror—too similar to those enacted during the early twentieth century—lent the reviving and reconsideration of Freeman's work a weighty sense of timeliness. The engagement with Freeman's life and music that weekend offered original insight into black expressive culture during and before the Harlem Renaissance. We hope it may also have served to ignite scholarly interest in the composer and lead to more performances of his operas. This edition of the American Music Review offers context for Freeman's contributions by featuring selected papers from the conference's " Harlem Renaissance Opera " panel.
Books by David Gutkin
Colloquium and Conference Presentations by David Gutkin
http://societyoffellows.columbia.edu/events/jazz-opera-and-the-signifier/
Clause 12 of the produ... more http://societyoffellows.columbia.edu/events/jazz-opera-and-the-signifier/
Clause 12 of the production contract for Anthony Davis’s 1986 opera, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, reads: “The word ‘jazz’ should not be used in any connection with this piece, including Anthony Davis’s biography.” Although vehemently opposing the classification of his work as jazz, Davis simultaneously sought to position the “jazz tradition” as the central impetus for the creation of that perennially elusive form: “American opera.” To comprehend this apparent contradiction, this talk traces intersections between jazz and opera through three case studies. The first considers the unperformed Wagnerian “jazz opera” American Romance (1924-1929) by H. Lawrence Freeman, founder of the Harlem-based Negro Grand Opera Company. The second concerns Sam Rivers and the Harlem Opera Society’s Black Arts Movement-inspired “jazz improvisational operas” of the 1960s and 1970s. The final case study returns to Anthony Davis’s X. Building on the earlier analyses, Gutkin reformulates the problem of “jazz” in the work—and interpret its racial significance—in terms of a longstanding ambiguity in opera concerning the representation of music within an already musical form.
http://societyoffellows.columbia.edu/events/universal-history-posthistory-and-globality-in-robert... more http://societyoffellows.columbia.edu/events/universal-history-posthistory-and-globality-in-robert-wilsons-the-civil-wars/
Billed as an “international opera,” the CIVIL warS was a massive collaborative project organized by avant-garde director Robert Wilson involving dozens of theater artists, composers, and writers from three continents. Following its development in segments in Tokyo, Cologne, Rome, Marseilles, Rotterdam, and Seattle, the 12-hour spectacle, intended to encompass the totality of human history, was to be assembled as a whole at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. But this grand production never happened: Wilson could not raise the requisite $2-3 million and the Olympic Committee canceled the performance. This talk picks up the fragments that remain of the CIVIL warS fiasco—a trail of paper, video footage, and audio recordings spread across the world—and argues that despite, or even because, of its failure, the work might help us grasp elusive relationships between aesthetics, economics, and historiography in the early 1980s.
http://www.american-music.org/conferences/Montreal2017/
This paper argues that the reception of ... more http://www.american-music.org/conferences/Montreal2017/
This paper argues that the reception of H. Lawrence Freeman’s little known opera Voodoo (premiered 1928) bespeaks competing, racially-charged values underpinning the idea of “the modern.” Taking this reception history as a jumping-off point, I then turn to key moments in Freeman’s long career as composer of Afro-Wagnerian music drama, jazz opera, and musical comedy in order to further explore pluralities lodged within the idea of modernity itself. I conclude with an analysis of Freeman’s American Romance, which features “jazz” as both a leitmotiv symbolizing white, decadent ultra-modernity as well as a sound heard over the airwaves signifying black musical achievement.
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Articles and Essays by David Gutkin
Books by David Gutkin
Colloquium and Conference Presentations by David Gutkin
Clause 12 of the production contract for Anthony Davis’s 1986 opera, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, reads: “The word ‘jazz’ should not be used in any connection with this piece, including Anthony Davis’s biography.” Although vehemently opposing the classification of his work as jazz, Davis simultaneously sought to position the “jazz tradition” as the central impetus for the creation of that perennially elusive form: “American opera.” To comprehend this apparent contradiction, this talk traces intersections between jazz and opera through three case studies. The first considers the unperformed Wagnerian “jazz opera” American Romance (1924-1929) by H. Lawrence Freeman, founder of the Harlem-based Negro Grand Opera Company. The second concerns Sam Rivers and the Harlem Opera Society’s Black Arts Movement-inspired “jazz improvisational operas” of the 1960s and 1970s. The final case study returns to Anthony Davis’s X. Building on the earlier analyses, Gutkin reformulates the problem of “jazz” in the work—and interpret its racial significance—in terms of a longstanding ambiguity in opera concerning the representation of music within an already musical form.
Billed as an “international opera,” the CIVIL warS was a massive collaborative project organized by avant-garde director Robert Wilson involving dozens of theater artists, composers, and writers from three continents. Following its development in segments in Tokyo, Cologne, Rome, Marseilles, Rotterdam, and Seattle, the 12-hour spectacle, intended to encompass the totality of human history, was to be assembled as a whole at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. But this grand production never happened: Wilson could not raise the requisite $2-3 million and the Olympic Committee canceled the performance. This talk picks up the fragments that remain of the CIVIL warS fiasco—a trail of paper, video footage, and audio recordings spread across the world—and argues that despite, or even because, of its failure, the work might help us grasp elusive relationships between aesthetics, economics, and historiography in the early 1980s.
This paper argues that the reception of H. Lawrence Freeman’s little known opera Voodoo (premiered 1928) bespeaks competing, racially-charged values underpinning the idea of “the modern.” Taking this reception history as a jumping-off point, I then turn to key moments in Freeman’s long career as composer of Afro-Wagnerian music drama, jazz opera, and musical comedy in order to further explore pluralities lodged within the idea of modernity itself. I conclude with an analysis of Freeman’s American Romance, which features “jazz” as both a leitmotiv symbolizing white, decadent ultra-modernity as well as a sound heard over the airwaves signifying black musical achievement.
Clause 12 of the production contract for Anthony Davis’s 1986 opera, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, reads: “The word ‘jazz’ should not be used in any connection with this piece, including Anthony Davis’s biography.” Although vehemently opposing the classification of his work as jazz, Davis simultaneously sought to position the “jazz tradition” as the central impetus for the creation of that perennially elusive form: “American opera.” To comprehend this apparent contradiction, this talk traces intersections between jazz and opera through three case studies. The first considers the unperformed Wagnerian “jazz opera” American Romance (1924-1929) by H. Lawrence Freeman, founder of the Harlem-based Negro Grand Opera Company. The second concerns Sam Rivers and the Harlem Opera Society’s Black Arts Movement-inspired “jazz improvisational operas” of the 1960s and 1970s. The final case study returns to Anthony Davis’s X. Building on the earlier analyses, Gutkin reformulates the problem of “jazz” in the work—and interpret its racial significance—in terms of a longstanding ambiguity in opera concerning the representation of music within an already musical form.
Billed as an “international opera,” the CIVIL warS was a massive collaborative project organized by avant-garde director Robert Wilson involving dozens of theater artists, composers, and writers from three continents. Following its development in segments in Tokyo, Cologne, Rome, Marseilles, Rotterdam, and Seattle, the 12-hour spectacle, intended to encompass the totality of human history, was to be assembled as a whole at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. But this grand production never happened: Wilson could not raise the requisite $2-3 million and the Olympic Committee canceled the performance. This talk picks up the fragments that remain of the CIVIL warS fiasco—a trail of paper, video footage, and audio recordings spread across the world—and argues that despite, or even because, of its failure, the work might help us grasp elusive relationships between aesthetics, economics, and historiography in the early 1980s.
This paper argues that the reception of H. Lawrence Freeman’s little known opera Voodoo (premiered 1928) bespeaks competing, racially-charged values underpinning the idea of “the modern.” Taking this reception history as a jumping-off point, I then turn to key moments in Freeman’s long career as composer of Afro-Wagnerian music drama, jazz opera, and musical comedy in order to further explore pluralities lodged within the idea of modernity itself. I conclude with an analysis of Freeman’s American Romance, which features “jazz” as both a leitmotiv symbolizing white, decadent ultra-modernity as well as a sound heard over the airwaves signifying black musical achievement.