The Submerged Subject of Video-Opera: Fausto Romitelli’s An Index of Metals
2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/oq/kbx028
ISSN1476-2870
Autores Tópico(s)Music Technology and Sound Studies
ResumoOpera in the present can be said to exhibit two tendencies: “radical” restagings and remediations propose new configurations of music, bodies, voices, and scenography, while the institution itself nonetheless relies largely on historically constituted subjects and inherited emotional frameworks for continued sustenance (consider, for example, Lyric Opera of Chicago’s recent advertising campaign: “Long live passion”).1 A contemporary intermedial work such as the 2003 “video-opera” An Index of Metals—created by the late Fausto Romitelli with music and video collaborators Paolo Pachini and Leonardo Romoli, and poet Kenka Lèkovich—might seem to reflect these tendencies: it emphatically foregrounds video and voice, and plays on the audience’s expectations for an emotional profundity that never quite materializes or, rather, is strangely unmoored from a clearly defined subject. Indeed, there is no apparent plot in this “opera” and no dramatis personae. Furthermore, any sense of dramatic development detected in the three “songs” comprising the work is ultimately offset by the increasingly effaced subjecthood expressed therein. In this and many other ways, Romitelli, Pacchini, and Lèkovich play with surface and depth: for most of the fifty-minute work, a video screen slides over various metallic substances; the single vocalist at the center of the “opera” remains off-stage and off-screen, projecting her voice at times through an electric megaphone; and the work’s opening moments contrast Spectralist-inspired sonorities with rock album samples.
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