Giving Mozart his lingua franca: A quest for meaning in the Da Ponte operas

Caldwell, Stephen Rodney

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/118234 Copy

Description

Title

Giving Mozart his lingua franca: A quest for meaning in the Da Ponte operas

Author(s)

Caldwell, Stephen Rodney

Issue Date

2023

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Fieldsteel, Eli

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Fieldsteel, Eli

Committee Member(s)

• Taube, Emeritus Heinrich
• Downie, J. Stephen
• Taylor, Stephen
• Carrillo, Carlos

Department of Study

School of Music

Discipline

Music

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

A.Mus.D. (doctoral)

Keyword(s)

• WA Mozart
• Lorenzo Da Ponte
• Classical opera
• multivalent analysis
• feature extraction
• topic theory
• tonal planning
• cognitive perception

Language

en

Abstract

This thesis presents a multivalent analysis of musical meaning in relation to the three Mozart-Da Ponte operas: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. To engage the question of musical meaning in as many respects as possible, a broad and interdisciplinary approach across various fields—music theory, musicology, aesthetics, psychology, and computer science—is designed to acknowledge the myriad domains in which music exists and potentially transmits some form of meaning. Opera complicates the extramusical and intramusical aspects of music through multiple creators (at least composer and librettist) and conduits (music, plot, text, and staging) borne from, and speaking to, a particular social context; which when taken together, create a vast sea of potential meanings. The written, musical score is thus not a whole and bounded object to be attended by conventional theory alone, for the social meanings it may impart reside at least partially in the audience, or social context, which not only births, but beholds its progeny. Engaging the listener’s domain raises notions of perception and experience which yet further complicate meaning. The tacit belief in not only the primacy, but wholeness of the intramusical, cannot be allowed to persist; for in assuming each interdisciplinary perspective, corresponding meanings are allowed to emerge, leading repeatedly to the conclusion that each is but a mere reading of infinite meaning. The lack of macro-level, comparative analysis between the Mozart-Da Ponte operas in their entirety is a striking gap in existing scholarship which the present study seeks to address. The profoundly macro scope which this entails is facilitated by computational means; specifically, low-level feature extraction, which instantiates a digital domain amenable to comparative analysis. In relation to the segments extant in disparate domains—and especially, that of tonal planning—peaks in extracted features can be seen to act as structural articulations at the macro level.

Type of Resource

• text
• still image

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Stephen Rodney Caldwell

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