Music

In 'Sospirare, Tremare, Piangere': Conventions of the Body in Italian Opera, 1810-1860, Melina Esse, a candidate for the Ph.D. in Music, takes up an investigation of representations of the physical in early nineteenth-century opera, arguing that opera’s preoccupation with the suffering female body is the result of complex interactions between gender, nationalism, and romanticism in early ottocento Italy.

As a Townsend Fellow in 2002-2003, Holly Watkins, a student in the Department of Music, will work on a dissertation titled The Concept of Depth in German Musical Thought, 1800-1950, a history of the music-analytical notion of structural depth.

While she has particular interests in discourses of nationalism in relation to symphonic music, Camille Peters comes to Berkeley with a strong background in cultural studies, media studies, film theory, and ethnographic methodology.

In India in the English Musical Imagination c. 1890-1939, A. Nalini Gwynne, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Music, explores the idea of cultural exchange within the British-India colonial encounter, with particular attention to the vast cultural debt to India owed by English music from the last period of empire.

During her year as a Townsend Fellow, Kate Van Orden, Assistant Professor in Music, will work on a project entitled "Music and Military Virtue in Early Modern France." Van Orden argues that in the period of her research music was used as an instrument of the king in a civilizing process aimed largely at bringing the unruly nobless d’epée under control.

A candidate for the Ph.D. in Music, Beth Levy examines American Music and the Idea of the American West, 1895-1945. The dissertation offers a historical perspective on the mythology of the American West through a detailed examination of its influences on American musical life during the first half of the twentieth century.

Mary Ann Smart, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music, will work during her year as a Townsend Fellow on a book entitled Mimomania: The Gestural Language of 19th-Century Opera. Professor Smart defines “gestural music” as music that “says something already visible,” imitating the movements of characters on stage or using an “identifying theme” to call attention to their entrances.

Leslie Sprout, a candidate for the Ph.D. in the History and Literature program in the Department of Music, is writing a dissertation entitled New Music and State Support for the Arts in France, 1938- 1945.