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Yayoi Uno Everett — Irna Priore Music and Culture Lecture Series
February 5, 2021 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Virtual Event
Lectures in Spring 2021 will be held online via Zoom. All lectures are free and open to the public. Please pre-register using the link below. This year’s Series will participate in the UNCG theme She Can, We Can and features research about women, gender, and/or civil rights.
Presented by the School of Music, and Musicology/Ethnomusicology and Music Theory Areas. For further information contact Joan Titus.
REGISTRATIONSHE CAN, WE CANPRIORE LECTURE SERIES
“Kaija Saariaho and Peter Sellars’s Only the Sound Remains (2016): Transcoding the Aesthetics of Noh Drama”
Saariaho and Sellars’s Only the Sound Remains (2016): Transcoding the aesthetics of Noh drama
Only the Sound Remains (2016) is the third opera produced in collaboration between Peter Sellars and Kaija Saariaho. Sellars famously described Noh drama as a theatre in which “everything is slowed down to a pace where we can feel what is going on at each moment” and shares his thoughts behind linking two otherwise separate plays in the making of this opera as follows. Tsunemasa (Always Strong) is about night, a favorite of the Emperor who played the lute, who killed someone in war and then was killed. He is a restless spirit, who appears during a service conducted by the monk Gyōkei, then disappears into the night in flame. Hagoromo (the Feather Mantle) is about a fisherman at dawn, who sees a cloak hanging from a pine. He agrees to return it to the Tennin (celestial maiden) if she performs the sacred dance of heaven. Considering the opera as a transcultural adaptation of Noh drama, this presentation explores three main questions. How does Sellars reimagine the illusory world of Noh drama into a contemporary opera and infuse it with familiar archetypes from western mythology? How does Saariaho’s music salvage characteristics central to the music of Noh drama and transcodethem into her own musico-dramatic aesthetics? Finally, given David Levin’s claim that contemporary opera is “a site where the operatic text competeswith the performance text” (2007: xviii), how does one account for “the tension between sight and sound” (McClary 2019: 136) that lies at the heart of this collaboration?
Yayoi Uno Everett is a native of Yokohama, Japan, and joins the faculty at UIC as Professor of Music. She has previously taught at Emory University (2000-14), University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (1999-2000), and the University of Colorado at Boulder (1994-98). Her research focuses on the analysis of postwar art music, film, and opera from the perspectives of semiotics, multimedia theories, cultural studies, and East Asian aesthetics. Her publications include monographs entitled Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Operas (Indiana University Press, 2015) and The Music of Louis Andriessen (Cambridge University Press, 2006), a co-edited volume Locating East Asia in Western Music, and various peer-reviewed articles on music by Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, Louis Andriessen, György Ligeti, Elliott Carter, Toru Takemitsu, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Chou-Wen Chung, Lei Liang, and Kyong Mee Choi. During 2015-16, she has been invited to give lectures at Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison as well as teach a graduate seminar at the University of Chicago.
Everett served as the Associate Editor of Music Theory Spectrum (2015-18). She served as President for Music Theory Southeast (2010-12) and as member/chair for Society of Music Theory’s Executive Board, Publication Subvention, and Diversity committees (1998-2009). She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University, the Japan Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, Asian Council, and the National Endowment for Humanities. She holds a PhD in Music Theory from the Eastman School of Music, MA in Music Theory from Stony Brook University, and BA in Piano Performance from Lewis & Clark College.
Everett is hosting a virtual conference on October 3 and October 10, 2020 featuring presentations by fifteen scholars whose essays on contemporary opera will be published in a collection of essays entitled Opera in Flux: Staging, Identity, Narrative (University of Michigan Press, Forthcoming). The event is sponsored by UIC’s Creative Activity Award. Our contributors offer expertise in interpretation of contemporary opera from a multitude of perspectives, including musicology, theatre studies, gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, composition, music theory, ethnography, and performance studies.
Irna Priore (1963–2014) was a beloved colleague, and associate professor of music theory in the UNCG School of Music. In addition to being a flutist, she was a scholar, teacher, and mentor in music studies, and contributed publications on Luciano Berio, Darmstadt, post-1945 theory, and Brazilian popular music. Her legacy of generosity, strength, and brilliance continues through her family, friends, colleagues, and students; this series is dedicated to her and celebrates her memory.
