Browsing by Author "Harter, Deborah"

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    Deep Song: The Historical and Musical Contexts of Osvaldo Golijov's Ayre
    (2013-12-06) Hauschildt, Craig; Bailey, Walter B.; Brown, Richard; Harter, Deborah; Lavenda, Richard
    Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960) composed Ayre, a song cycle for soprano and large ensemble, in 2004. On the larger thematic level, it explores the history of the conflicts among Christians, Jews, and Muslims—as well as their similarities—to reflect more broadly on the contemporary relationship between Israel and Palestine. To accomplish his goal, Golijov utilizes folk music and poetry from Andalusia, Morocco, Sardinia, and Lebanon as well as poetry by Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian poet. Golijov also interweaves the unique talents of specific musicians into the score, which thus becomes a vehicle to showcase the virtuosity of soprano Dawn Upshaw, who premiered and recorded the work, and Golijov’s hand-selected ensemble of instrumentalists, known as the Andalucian Dogs. Like Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs (1964), which served as Golijov’s model, Ayre is constructed using significant amounts of preexisting material. In addition, it incorporates substantial contributions from its original performers. This study examines Golijov’s own contributions and those provided by others to identify more clearly Golijov’s role as composer. It also places Golijov’s work in the broad historical context of twentieth-century music, taking into account the unique relationship between the composer and performer in the world of jazz and the many classical composers who have incorporated elements of folk and popular music into their art music. Additionally, it examines the music of select classical and popular composers—Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, and Gil Evans—to understand the censure that has often accompanied the appropriation of music from outside one’s normative style. The study concludes that Golijov, like many other postmodern composers, is not composing in reaction to the complexity and intellectualism of mid-century modernism, but rather he is composing in the manner of composers from the past who reverentially appropriated materials from a wide variety of musical traditions. Thus, even though Golijov relies on a significant amount of pre-existing material to construct Ayre, the work is ultimately a result of his own creative energy.
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    Du poetique au politique: Transfiguration esthetique et depassement chez Baudelaire, Prevert et Cesaire
    (2010) Van de Wiele, Aurelie; Aresu, Bernard; Harter, Deborah
    This study focuses on how the works of Charles Baudelaire, Jacques Prevert and Aime Cesaire respond to misery and existential anguish in the context of the shift to modernity, and particularly through the changes that modernity brings to philosophical discourses on the human and social condition. I argue that all three writers, although in different ways, explore the qualities of a particular perception of the world as a response to human alienation and social agony. This perception, based on "aesthetic transfiguration," goes beyond the appearance and usefulness of things to capture the aesthetic and metaphorical value of the world around us. I suggest that this vision, to varying degrees and with varying success, makes possible a certain relief from a social world of discontent for those able to achieve it; it also represents the first step toward a more political and collective reaction toward social and human dissatisfaction. My dissertation brings together the works of three very different poets, unveils the evolution of the role of literature in the past two centuries and serves, finally, to illuminate the concept of modernity.
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    The social relations of a basic life science laboratory and its heterotopic milieu
    (2015-12-03) Chryssikos, Timothy James; Faubion, James; Georges, Eugenia; Harter, Deborah
    The social relations of a “basic” life science laboratory, its relations to the other life sciences, to the physical sciences, to clinical medicine, and to the economic imperatives of the present era are examined. This work attends to some of the "day to day" activities of this group as it transitioned to a state-of-the-art, architecturally “open” and strategically situated research facility designed to enhance "unplanned" interactions among its variously trained occupants. These activities are situated within a broader discussion of this laboratory's primary disciplinary influences and the specific epistemic contests in which it was primarily invested. A theorization of these relations is carefully distinguished from prior approaches in "science studies" and elsewhere, thereby providing a new framework for analyzing inter-scientific relations.
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    The mirrored stage: Representations of the actress in nineteenth-century France and beyond
    (2005) Bailar, Melissa; Harter, Deborah
    As the central figures in a booming theater industry, actresses in nineteenth-century France were granted the resources and freedoms to forge a powerful if unsuspectingly subversive voice. Comediennes were adulated as talented and beautiful women bringing fame and fortune to the stages of Paris yet were also legally and socially marginalized because of lingering Rousseauean conceptions of female performers as deceptive prostitutes. From this position outside mainstream society, the power of actresses to challenge norms from both on and off the stage went largely unrecognized. They had a profound effect on other women of the time who were as riveted as the men by the audacious personal lives, unconventional manners, independence, and difference of these new stars. Actresses' ability to convincingly adopt one role and then another and to juxtapose conflicting personas undermined the concept that certain attributes belong exclusively to a specific gender, class, or age. With the growing success of the French theater industry, portrayals of actresses seemed to be everywhere---in the memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt and other celebrated performers, in the journals of the Goncourt brothers, in the photographs of Nadar, and in the literary works of such authors as Ajalbert, Balzac, Baudelaire, Champsaur, Leroux, Maupassant, Merimee, Nerval, Rodenbach, Villiers, and Zola. Attempts to portray their identities accurately, however, whether in fiction or in life, were continually betrayed by the many, often contradictory roles they played. Revealing little about the actresses who were their ostensible subjects, these representations reveal much, on the other hand, about the fears and desires of the writers: if the actress provided for many a convenient blank screen onto which one could project one's fantasies, she also functioned as a mirror (perhaps as a Lacanian mirror) that revealed hidden societal truths and exerted a profound influence over broader conceptions of identity. Whether consciously or not, the nineteenth-century French actress raised critical questions of identity and representation, questions that continue to be explored in the highly conscious work of contemporary feminist filmmakers.