3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Creators of musical works have been continually drawn towards the idea of the “other,” wanting to represent on the stage characters that they perceive as culturally different or outside the norms of their own society. This course focuses on musical works for the stage that contain representations of the “other,” examining how text, music, and staging all work in different ways to exoticize certain characters. Works discussed will include Rameau’s Les Indes galantes (1735), Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (1791), Bizet’s Carmen (1875), Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885), and Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957), as well as more recent adaptations of these works such as Carmen Jones (1943), Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001), and the upcoming new West Side Story film (2021). We will address the historical contexts of these works, not to excuse them for their stereotyping practices, but to learn the social, economic, and aesthetic contexts that contributed to their original receptions. In addition, we will examine our own responses to these pieces and discuss the ethics of performing these works today.