Professor: Pierpaolo Polzonetti (ppolzonetti@ucdavis.edu)
Office hours: TBA or by appointment (MUS 132 or zoom)

Prerequisites: open to graduate students in Music, Performance Studies, Theater and Dance, Cultural Studies; advanced undergraduate students may enroll with consent of instructor

Course Description and Objectives: This graduate seminar focuses on text and interaction in music and drama both in composition, performance, and consumption. Our approach to opera will take into account the interaction among music, texts, visual elements and movement, as well as how texts and performances are affected by changing practices and by changing social and political contexts, including recent movements such as Me Too and Black Lives Matter. To do so, we will examine music and music-drama beyond the written texts, to include staging action and bodies, as well as performance space and rituals of consumption. Our objectives are to develop methods of analysis and transcription of action and movement in opera, as well as practices of criticism and interpretation grounded in textual and contextual analysis.