Skip to main content
University of California Press

Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770-1830

by Ellen Lockhart (Author)
Hardcover eBook
Price: $65.00 / £55.00
Publication Date: Sep 2017
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 232
ISBN: 9780520284432
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 21 music ex, 10 b/w
Endowments:
Request an Exam or Desk Copy(opens in new window)RightsLink(opens in new window)Read an Excerpt(opens in new window)
Recommend to your Library (PDF)(opens in new window)Rights and Permissions

About the Book

This path-breaking study of stage works in Italian musical performances reconsiders a crucial period of music history. Through an interdisciplinary examination of the statue animated by music, Ellen Lockhart deftly shows how Enlightenment ideas influenced Italian theater and music, and vice versa. As Lockhart reveals, the animated statue became a fundamental figure within aesthetic theory and musical practice during the years spanning 1770–1830. Taking as its point of departure a repertoire of Italian ballets, melodramas, and operas from this period, Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy traces its core ideas between science, philosophy, theories of language, itinerant performance traditions, the epistemology of sensing, and music criticism.

About the Author

Ellen Lockhart is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Toronto. She has coedited, with James Davies, Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789–1851, and her critical edition of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West is forthcoming.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. Dancing Statues
2. Pimmalione
3. Defining Italy in Haunted Rome
4. Partial Animacy and Blind Listening in Napoleonic Italy
5. Giuditta Pasta and the History of Musical Electrification
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index

Reviews

"As with any scholarship that treats its material with sensitivity and thoroughness, here the subject justifies itself and the reader is motivated to keep reading—both within the book and without. That, after all, is perhaps the highest praise one could offer any new work, particularly one that disentangles such a beautiful can of worms."
— European History Quarterly
"Deftly traversing a wide range of sources, Lockhart shows how the animated statue ties together a rich late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century world of musical theater, aesthetic theory, nationhood fantasies, sciences of the body, and notions of self. . . . by the end, one is left wondering not what animation and plasticity have to do with music, nor in what respect late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Italy matters to broader music historical developments, but how we ever thought we could understand this period or the longer history of aesthetics without attending to the statue that comes to life. Like the ruin pictured on its cover, this work seems destined to endure.”
— Journal of the American Musicological Society
“This very innovative study illuminates such central categories of musical thought and practice as voice, gesture, performance, and the work. It will be read with much interest and pleasure not only by musicologists, but also by historians of dance, science, aesthetics, and philosophy, and by anybody who cares about the connections between music and the human body.”—Emanuele Senici, author of Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera

“This is an intelligent and beautifully written book. Ellen Lockhart clears a path through a brambled Italian landscape, long neglected by history, to the toppled figure of the animated statue. Galatea is restored to her pedestal, and forgotten strands in the aesthetic and philosophic thought of the Italian Enlightenment are disentangled. The Galatean narrative of becoming-through-sensing turns out to be foundational to the very emergence of aesthetic theory across Europe, in ways that have striking implications for the history of both vocal and instrumental music. You’ll want to stop and stay awhile.”—James Q. Davies, author of Romantic Anatomies of Performance