The Melodramatic Moment: Music and Theatrical Culture, 1790-1820
- Submitting institution
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University of Durham
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 102713
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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10.7208/chicago/9780226563091.001.0001
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- ISBN
- 9780226543659
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226563091.001.0001
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This is a book-length study and Hambridge has contributed significantly to the whole work as editor as well as co-writing the opening chapter, which sets an intellectual agenda for the field. The project extended over a four-year period, including the commissioning of chapters, work-in-progress and performance workshops, a public conference, and other processes through which contributions from both musicology and theatre studies are combined into a coherent whole.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Having identified a scholarly need to historicise understandings of melodrama and its transnational status around 1800, the editors of this volume – sharing the labour 50/50 – stimulated research that otherwise would not have taken place in this way. They recruited contributors through a combination of invitations and a call for papers, and then jointly managed a process of cross-fertilisation and feedback between them through a public conference and workshop in March 2014. Contributors submitted chapter drafts for group discussion, and participated in performance-based research that enabled all authors to engage with melodrama’s multimedia nature: literary scholars who could not read music, for example, came to understand the musical conventions of the genre. The editors thus ensured that the volume is genuinely interdisciplinary, rather than simply collecting together contributions from disciplinary specialists: theatre scholars were encouraged to engage with musical discourse and practices for the first time; musicologists likewise received feedback from those with expertise in literary traditions and historical acting practices. In the volume itself, the editors’ joint manifesto and method is set out in the opening chapter: they outline a method informed by the circulation and adaptation of theatrical texts and personnel in order to illuminate the ‘historical interdependence’ of traditions previously considered distinct; they call for a ‘genre-sensitive history’ that engages with the specificity of contemporary understandings of melodrama; and they propose a ‘focus on melodrama music [that] allows alternative readings of expressive culture in general’, foregoing the usual divisions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ operative in much musicological and literary scholarship. This opening chapter, whose ramifications extend beyond the period and genre under consideration, also includes original historical research by Hambridge on genre discourses and melodrama circulation and reception in Berlin and Paris.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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