Musicologist and dance historian Samuel N. Dorf reflects on the role or purpose of the pre-performance lecture, especially at a time when tragedy extends outside the theatre into the local community.

This paper maps Isadora Duncan’s navigation of public and private venues, audiences, and receptions of “Greek” dances from her early career in Paris. I explore Duncan’s relationship with Paris’ lesbian communities and the proliferation of ancient Greek dance in both private and public venues. Through comparisons to her contemporaries I contend…[Read more]

This essay explores the conflicting trends of tradition and
modernism, unity and independence in Parisian musical and
dance culture in the late 1920s through an analysis of Maurice
Emmanuel’s (1863-1938) aesthetics of contemporary and
ancient Greek music and dance. It begins by outlining and
critiquing Emmanuel’s relevant scholarly con…[Read more]

This paper explores the simultaneous eroticization and exoticization of Ancient Greece in the choreography of Madame Mariquita (1830-1922) for the Opéra and the commodification of this exotic ancient Greek eroticism in the popular fashion and music press in fin-de-siècle Paris. Building on work by art historian, Nancy Troy, and musicologist Mary D…[Read more]

Encyclopedia entry
https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/satie-erik-alfred-leslie-1866-1925
DOI: 10.4324/9781135000356-REM40

Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois was active from 1920 to 1925. It was the chief artistic rival to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and de Maré was often referred to as the Swedish Serge Diaghilev. With Jean Börlin as chief choreographer, the company created twenty-four ballets in collaboration with prominent modern artists and composers, includi…[Read more]

Talk on Beyoncé’s Lemonade and ANOHNI’s Hopelessness

The following contributions are cited separately in RILM: John T. HAMILTON, Così fan tutti i compositori: The Cephalus-Procris myth and the birth of romantic opera in Hoffmann’s Aurora (RILM 2013-12919); Julia RANDEL, Un-voicing Orpheus: The powers of music in Stravinsky and Balanchine’s ‘Greek’ ballets (RILM 2013-12920).

Eva Palmer-Sikelianos (1874–1952), along with her husband, the poet Angehlos Sikelianos,
founded the first modern Delphic Festival in 1927 in an effort to revive the Ancient Greek rites that
took place on that spot over 2,500 years before. She invited “overseers of culture” from around
the globe to convene in the holy city of Delphi for a reena…[Read more]

In arguing that underneath the placid, ‘stripped-down’ style of Socrate there lurks a hidden violence, this essay does not focus on Satie’s compositional process, documented in his notebooks; instead, it examines Socrate’s performance history and the creation of the work’s libretto, which the composer completed before sketching his musical ideas.…[Read more]

Sappho’s oeuvre exists in tantalizing fragments providing fodder for generations of interpreters to reimagine her life and poetry in myriad ways. The paper looks at three Parisian fantasies of Sappho: Charles Gounod’s first opera Sapho (1851 and 1884), Charles Cuvillier’s operetta Sapphô (1912), and the Sapphic music and dramatic activities held i…[Read more]

Book review of Reviewed Works: Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella”: A Facsimile of the Sources and Sketches by Maureen A. Carr; The Wendy Hilton Dance & Music Series 12 by Millicent Hodson