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Professeur invitéSarah Collins
Sarah Collins participe au programme Professeur invité de l'EHESS sur invitation d' Esteban Buch. Elle donnera quatre conférences en janvier 2024.
Sarah Collins (University of Western Australia) is a cultural historian who has published widely on the relationship between music and literary aesthetics and broader intellectual and political currents in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, she is the author of Lateness and Modernism: Untimely Ideas about Music, Literature and Politics in Interwar Britain (Cambridge UP, 2019), and The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott (Boydell, 2013); editor of Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject (Cambridge UP, 2019); and co-editor with Paul Watt and Michael Allis of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford UP, 2020). She is currently Chair of Research and Deputy Head of School at the Conservatorium of Music, University of Western Australia. She is President of the Musicological Society of Australia, co-editor of Music & Letters (OUP), and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Sarah has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and Durham University, and has received competitive research funding from a range of sources including the British Academy, the Australian Research Council, and the European Commission.
CONFÉRENCES
Sound and Shadows: Papageno on the Assembly Line
Dans le cadre du séminaire Etudes sonores et musicales, un état de l'art coordonné par Esteban Buch (CRAL/EHESS)
- Vendredi 12 janvier 2024, de 16h30 à 18h30 - Campus Condorcet, Centre des Colloques (Salle 3.06), Place du Front populaire, 93322 Aubervilliers
Abstract :
The figure of Papageno in Mozart and Schikaneder’s Die Zauberflöte has been cast in scholarship as both a natural man nature and an automaton—both self-determining (in the sense of following his own logic of pleasure rather than moral duty) and wholly determined (because in his absence of self-reflection he merely plays out what is given in him by nature). He is thereby a character that emblemizes the convergence between autonomy and automation. My analysis will focus on a remediated version of the operatic figure in Lotte Reiniger’s 1935 short silhouette puppet animation ‘Papageno’. This version offers an especially fecund opportunity for interpretation within the context of ‘operatic mimesis’. Not only are shadows and puppets preeminent mimetic tropes, Reiniger’s ‘Papageno’ evinces a heightened degree of mirroring.
The appearance of these preoccupations is further strengthened by Reiniger’s personal association with prominent figures in modernist theatre, avant-garde film and documentary making in the 1930s (such as Bertolt Brecht and Walter Ruttmann). Reiniger also used of a range of cognate stylistic devices, such as the distinction that she creates between shadows and silhouettes, her interest in the formal characteristics of the epic, and her interest in characters who metamorphosise between human, animal, and object form.
This lecture positions Reiniger’s ‘Papageno’ in relation to contemporaneous discussions about labour automation and about animation or movement as a defining feature of living things. Both of these spheres of discovery involved the measurement of bodily movement with the use of the very same new film technologies that were used in silhouette animation. The lecture will show that discussions of how movement and change in the body could be captured (on film) and replicated (by machines or animated figures) generated alternative models of agency.
Bodies Decontextualised: Faust, Opera, and Performativity
Dans le cadre du séminaire du CRAL coordonné par Tiphaine Samoyault (CRAL/EHESS) et Yolaine Escande (CRAL/CNRS)
- Mardi 16 janvier 2024 - 12h15 à 14h - En mode hybride, présentiel au 54 Boulevard Raspail, Paris 6ème, salle B 2-18 (2e étage, bâtiment B) ou en visio conférence.
Abstract :
It has long been claimed that opera can give expression to the uneasy relationship between the body and the voice. Operatic voices seem to exceed the capacity of the bodies that produce them in a way that conveys a sense of mechanisation or limited agency, inviting metaphorical comparisons to marionettes. Yet recent studies of gesture have suggested that bodies are not simply passively inscribed with meaning but that they also mediate the process of inscription. Investigating the implications of this claim for opera, this lecture discusses two recent essays by Judith Butler, in which she draws from Walter Benjamin's account of gesture in Brecht's epic theatre to argue for the performative power of incomplete or decontextualised bodily actions. It then traces this idea to a moment in epic theatre's own prehistory, focusing on Ferruccio Busoni's opera Doktor Faust. The lecture makes both a theoretical point and an historical claim: it highlights how bodies and words that are decontextualised can perform a critical function despite not enjoying the usual citational supports necessary for a speech act; and it argues that Busoni's Doktor Faust and his theory of opera were a part of the intellectual prehistory to Butler's conceptualisation of bodily performativity.
Stone as Witness: Mute Speech, Don Juan, and the Ear of the Future
Dans le cadre du séminaire de Barbara Carnevali (CESPRA) L’individualisme esthétique : de Rousseau à Foucault
- Vendredi 19 janvier 2024, de 14h30 à 16h30 - Campus Condorcet, Bâtiment EHESS (Salle 50), 2, cours des Humanités, 93322 Aubervilliers
Abstract:
The depiction of stones that speak has long been used as a literary and philosophical device to reflect upon the limitations of human language (i.e. language as a petrification of thought and action). Jacques Rancière has describe stone’s capacity to bear witness as a form of ‘mute speech’, noting how ‘any stone can also be language’, as a part of the ‘testimony that mute things bear to mankind’s activity’.
In exploring the character of this form of testimony, and asking how we hear it, this lecture examines the function of the Stone Guest in the legend of Don Juan, across Molière and Pushkin’s theatrical versions, a short film version by Marina Fomenko, and Mozart and Da Ponte’s operatic version, so revered by Kierkegaard and others. The character of the Stone Guest is often seen as casting judgement against the aesthetic mode of life, yet the power of the character lies not in his ghostly humanity or sense of retribution, but in his stoniness—his capacity to bear witness, just as a stone monument bears witness or commemorates a past trauma. In a number of versions of the Don Juan story, the Stone Guest is announced by approaching footsteps or knocking. This acousmatic device mirrors the uncanny separation of sound and source in opera—the way in which music mediates between the conflicting imperatives of language and the corporeal or material aspects of the singing voice, lending opera its vaunted mechanical qualities. Using stones that speak as a heuristic, the lecture draws together ideas about the limitations of language and the mechanical qualities of opera in order to excavate the auditory affordances of the stone’s form of testimony, in all its inorganic liveliness.
The Ear of the Liberal Body: Liberalism, Pleasure, and the Power of Sound’
Dans le cadre du séminaire Etudes sonores et musicales, un état de l'art coordonné par Esteban Buch (CRAL/EHESS)
- Vendredi 19 janvier 2024, de 16h30 à 18h30 - Campus Condorcet, Centre des Colloques (Salle 3.06), Place du Front populaire, 93322 Aubervilliers
Abstract
This lecture explores the late-Victorian conceptualization of the human ear as a bodily organ that is uniquely receptive to aesthetic form; crucial to establishing our sense of reality; and regulative in the sense of generating feeling and emotion that shapes moral and economic behaviour. More than simply showing how ideas about the ear and writings about sound and music merely reflected contemporaneous discourse in psychology, moral philosophy, and political economics that were so much a part of liberal thinking at this time, I would like to suggest the ways in which the sense of hearing (including both the organ of the ear, the practices of listening, and the cultural objects ‘consumed’ via the ear) may have informed and shaped these discourses in quite foundational ways.
The lecture will focus on locating the work of psychical researcher and musical thinker Edmund Gurney (whose essays in the liberal press appeared directly alongside essays by Alexander Bain, William James, and others) in relation to his close set of colleagues, particularly Henry Sidgwick, George Eliot, and William James. I will trace how Gurney’s ideas about the ear, listening, and sound and music, filtered through or interacted with the thinking of these figures as they wrote on questions of ultimate value, contingency, pleasure and pain, and the role of aesthetic pleasure in balancing individual and collective interests. The lecture attempts to engage with a discursive interface in the liberal tradition that is not primarily concerned with or embedded in textual practices.