Traces of Performance: Opera, Music Theatre, and Theatre Music in the Long 19^th Century

International Symposium, Sibelius Academy, Helsinki.

Organizers: The project called The Finnish Opera Company (1873-79) from a Micro-historical Perspective: Performance Practices, Multiple Narrations, and Polyphony of Voices (Academy of Finland), the project Opera on the Move (NOS-HS), and the University of the Arts Helsinki (Sibelius Academy/DocMus)

Keynote speakers: Hilary Poriss (Northeastern University) and Göran Gademan (The Göteborg Opera).

This conference focuses on how scholars might study musical performances in theatre spaces dating from the past, whether opera, ballet, other forms of music theatre or music incorporated into spoken theatre. What traces have such performances left? What can we make of such traces?

Obviously, performances of the past cannot be conjured up in the present. Yet this does not mean that scholars today should consider once lively performance traditions to be completely inaccessible and closed to research. The temporal distance poses a challenge for researching historical performance cultures, a topic still in need of methodological development, and for recognizing the potential to expand its empirical territory into the 'dark ages' - before the invention of the gramophone and film. Moreover, there are many other kinds of traces that performances have left, which are accessible and relevant to scholarship: scores and parts (sometimes with performance markings), music manuscripts, mise-en-scène plans, newspaper announcements, reviews and interviews, photographs, personal and business letters, diaries, and archival material from music theatres and theatre managers.