Papers Presented
- Nov. 1994 Presenter, Convegno internationale di studi su Puccini nel 70o anniversario della morte, Lucca, Italy. Topic: “Tristano, Tosca. (e Torchi).” [This paper explores the motivic parallelisms and large-scale structural design of Tosca, in relation to a statement by Puccini’s contemporary, Luigi Torchi.]
- Nov. 1994 Presenter, 17th Society for Music Theory National Annual Meeting, Tallahassee, Florida. Topic: “Il segreto della forma di Giacomo Puccini.” [This was the first paper on Puccini presented at a national meeting of the Society for Music Theory. The paper discusses motivic expansions and Wagnerian influences in several operas by Puccini, and the development of new techniques for opera analysis.]
- Nov. 1995 Presenter, 18th Society for Music Theory National Annual Meeting, New York City. Topic: “Remote regions and Puccini's motivic territory.” [This paper explores motivic development and parallelisms in three Puccini operas in relation to Arnold Schönberg’s concept of tonal regions.]
- Feb. 1996 Session chair and presenter, “Puccini, youth to maturity: from Edgar to La bohème,” Teatro Regio, Turin, Italy. Topic: “Prime versioni del libretto de La bohème alla Casa Giacosa.” [In this paper, newly discovered sketches of the libretto for La bohème are presented.]
- Sept. 1996 Invited speaker, Boston Lyric Opera, with Phyllis Curtain. Topic: Puccini’s Tosca. [This talk discussed the historical figures from whom the dramatic characters were developed.]
- Oct. 1997 Presenter, New England Chapter, American Musicological Society. Topic: “Scenes Unseen from La Bohème.” [This is a study of libretto drafts for La bohème in light of text-music relations and compositional process.]
- 1998-2001 Guest lecturer, Harvard University, in Lewis Lockwood's course, Opera: Perspectives in Music and Drama.
- 1999-2008 Invited speaker, New York City Opera. Topics: Puccini’s La bohème, Il trittico, Turandot, and Verdi’s Rigoletto.
- June 2000 Presenter, international conference, Tosca 2000, Teatro dell’Opera, Rome, Italy. Topic: “Tosca Act II and the secret identity of F#” [Discussed are large-scale motivic expansions in Act II of Tosca, and their relationship to the dramatic structure and to the overall musical design of the opera.]
- March 2003 Invited speaker, course AT MUSIC 150 Lively Arts (Arts Appreciation class), Prof. John Jenkins, University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
- Jan. 2003 Presenter, 2003 Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities, Honolulu. Topic: “The Shawshank Redemption, The Marriage of Figaro and Trading Places” [This paper deals with the use of music from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro in two films, relating the issues of social equality evoked by the films to the musico-dramatic structure of the opera.]
- May 2004 Pre-concert lecturer, Springfield Symphony, Springfield, Massachusetts. Topic: Puccini’s Tosca.
- March 2005 Invited speaker, University of Connecticut-Storrs. Topic: “The Naked Pitch-class and Musical Fan Dancing.” [This lecture examines the seemingly anomalous use of a single pitch class in extremely tense operatic moments, thus contrasting the usual associations of consonant unisons and octaves with “rest” and “resolution.” Using three examples, from Puccini’s La Bohème, Strauss’s Salome and Berg’s Wozzeck, an explanation is proposed relating to the Freudian concepts of primary and secondary process thinking.] paper
- April 2005 Presenter, New England Conference of Music Theorists, Amherst, MA. Topic: “Guida e Conseguente: Padre Martini and Francesco Galeazzi on Fugue” [This paper entails a comparison of these near contemporaries' writings on fugue, presented as a fictitious master-student dialogue.]
- March 2006 Presenter, Fourth International Schenker Symposium, Mannes College of Music, New York City. Topic: “Men who love too much: Operatic Heroes and the Metric and Tonal Disturbances that Follow them.” [This is a discussion of arias sung by the operatic characters Cherubino (Mozart), Orlando (Handel) and Jack Rance (Puccini), in which metric and tonal anomalies mirror emotional states.]
- April 2007 Panel member, Boston University Musicology Colloquium: “Staging Bohème: The Practice of History,” panel discussion with Alessandra Campana (Tufts) and Sharon Daniels (BU). [This paper focuses on issues of realism in opera in general and in La bohème in particular.] [poster]
- March 2008 Invited speaker, Symposium on Puccini’s Turandot, Lowell House Opera, Harvard University, in honor of the 150th anniversary of Puccini’s birth. http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/lho. [I discussed the creation of the opera, and its musical content.]
- April 2008 Organizer and presenter, interdisciplinary conference Opera and Society, Boston University. Topic: “In his shoes: the Marriage of Figaro and the Movies.” [This presentation examines Enlightenment influences on Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and how those are also seen in modern cinema that employs passages of his score.] http://www.operaandsociety.org/podcast.html
- Nov. 2008 Panelist, American Musicological Society and Society for Music Theory Joint National Annual Meeting, Nashville, TN. Panel title: “Puccini the Modernist?” [The presentation invokes the theories of Puccini’s contemporary, Domenico Alaleona, and his interpretation of symmetrical structures as tonal or atonal: examples from each of Puccini’s operas are provided.]
- Nov. 2008 Presenter, American Musicological Society and Society for Music Theory Joint National Annual Meeting, Nashville, TN. Topic: “Puccini and Early Film.” [The techniques of silent film can provide cognates for some of Puccini’s innovative musical techniques, although he developed them first. The importance of cinema in Puccini’s life is also discussed.]
- June 2009 Invited speaker, University of Rome - Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy. Topic: Opera analysis. [This presentation deals with hermeneutic interpretations of tonal and rhythmic gestures as an element of opera analysis.]
- Jan. 2010 Invited speaker, Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, The Metropolitan Opera. Topic: Opera analysis. [The topic involved the relationship of analysis to performance for singers, especially in regard to understanding musical organization and illustration.]
- Feb. 2010 Invited lecturer, on Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, William Waters’s Comparative Literature class, CAS XL320 “Death in Venice,” Boston University. [The topic was the structure of Wagner’s opera, its deliberate suppression of tonal resolution, as a cognate for sexual desire.] [This lecture will be repeated in Spring 2012.]
- March 2010 Invited speaker, Boston University Alumni Association. Topic: “Action Fragmented: Silent-Film Techniques and the Music of Puccini.” [The fragmented quality of Puccini’s scores was shocking in its time. As a moment-by-moment depiction of the drama, his music shares much with the new narrative techniques of silent film, which were also considered disturbingly fragmentary during the same era.]
- April 2010 Invited speaker, Hartt Music Theory Forum, Hartt School of Music. Topic: “Mozart and Musical Mad Men.” [Mozart’s letter to his father regarding his musical depiction of Osmin in The Abduction from the Seraglio is the basis for this exploration of other male “mad scenes.”] Archive Listing
- Nov. 2010 Panelist, Round-table discussion with John Conklin on Puccini’s Tosca, Boston University Opera Institute. [The effects of political and social issues on stage and cinematic interpretations of Tosca are discussed.]
- Oct. 2010 Invited speaker, Boston Lyric Opera at the Boston Public Library. Topic: “The Twists and Trysts of Tosca.” [An exploration of the dramatic reversals that provide Tosca (and the play from which it was derived) with excitement and sexual frissons. A bawdy note left by Puccini in one of his sketches is discussed.]
- Dec. 2010 Organizer and chair, round-table discussion entitled “La Fanciulla del West: a Century of Puccini's Girl of the Golden West” Italian Cultural Institute, New York. [The presentation focused on the cultural and historical importance of the world premiere of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West to the international reputation of The Metropolitan Opera, New York and the United States.]
- Dec. 2010 Organizer and speaker at symposium Fanciulla 100: Celebrating Puccini, co-hosted by the Howard Gotlieb Archival Center and the College of Fine Arts. Topic: “The Rhythms of Fanciulla.” [The focus in this talk is the elaborate rhythmic and metrical development in this opera, and its derivation from Native American and other sources; featured is a previously unpublished autograph rhythmic sketch.] Program 1 / Program 2
- Feb. 2011 Invited lecturer, on Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini for Richard Bunbury’s History and Literature of Music II (CFA MU222 A1), Boston University. [For this musicology survey class, the presentation highlights the basic elements of bel canto with examples from several operas.]
- April 2011 Member, plenary session panel, “Approaches to Opera Analysis,” New England Conference of Music Theorists, Brandeis University, with William Rothstein (CUNY), Peter Westergaard (Princeton), and Matthew Shaftel (Florida State). [My theories of opera analysis are presented, especially in regard to exploring the compositional process.]
- April 2011 Invited speaker, interdisciplinary conference, Pride, Envy, Greed: from Cain to Present. James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Va. Topic: “Tosca’s Fatal Flaw.” [This paper discusses the drama La Tosca, on which the opera was based, and its roots in Greek tragedy; further, the symmetry of the musical structure derives in part from that as well.]
- May 2011 Invited speaker, “Puccini e Lucca nel Mondo” sponsored by the Dante Alighieri Society, The Boston Chapter of the Associazione Lucchesi nel Mondo and the Fondazione Giacomo Puccini. [Puccini’s innovative musical techniques are discussed in relation to contemporary artistic trends.]
- Sept. 2011 Presenter and session chair (“Schenker”), VII European Music Analysis Conference, Rome, Italy. Topic: “Ariadne’s threads: Puccini and Cinema.”
- Feb. 2012 Invited lecturer, on Verdi for Richard Bunbury’s History and Literature of Music II (CFA MU222 A1), Boston University. [For this musicology survey class, the presentation discusses the evolution of Verdi’s style and his role as Italian patriot.]
- Sept. 2012 Presenter and session chair (“Presentazione: The Art of Partimento di Giorgio Sanguinetti”) IX Convegno di Analisi e Teoria Musicale, Gruppo Analisi e Teoria Musicale, Rimini, Italy. Topic: “La Turandot di Puccini: una sintesi di tonalità e atonalità.” [A close reading of Puccini’s harmonic techniques in his final, unfinished opera Turandot, and how sketch studies can help reconstruct his compositional process.]
- March 2013 Presenter, Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, annual meeting, Fresno, CA. Topic: “Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West and the Rhythms of the New World.”
- April 2013 Presenter, New England Conference of Music Theorists, annual meeting, Tufts University. Topic: “Puccini: Honorary German?” [Puccini was never admitted to the German Heinrich Schenker’s Pantheon of great composers, as was Chopin, who gained entrance because his works were directly indebted to “Germanity.” Despite the “outer,” however, Puccini’s “inner” Italian schemata are actually closely related to Schenker’s structural models.] full program
- October 2013 Organizer and Presenter, Wagner In Context conference [see Conference page]
- March 2014 Invited panelist, film screening and discussion of Wagner’s Jews, a film by Hilan Warshaw, Hebrew College, Newton, MA. flyer
- March 2014 Session chair, New England Conference of Music Theorists, annual meeting, Connecticut College, Session: “Schemes and Archetypes.”
- April 2015 Session chair, Music Theory Society of New York State, annual meeting, Binghamton, NY, Session: “Form in Opera.”
- Nov. 2015 Presenter and session organizer, Society for Music Theory, national meeting, St. Louis, Topic: “Stormy Weather: Issues of Form, Deformation and Continuity in Opera Analysis.”