MUSIC PRODUCTION I

The course is part of the Master’s Degree Program in Economics and Management of Arts and Cultural Activities and aims to provide a general framework for music production by focusing on opera and music theatre from a historical perspective.

Students will be able to contextualize the phenomenon of the operatic production system at a sociological level, thus situating it in the specific historical reality, and to reflect critically on the processes of creation as well as on the role of its agents: composer, librettist, impresario, publisher, singers, directors, patrons, etc. Students will also acquire specific terminology related to opera production and organization and develop good knowledge of critical texts and reference bibliography; they will be able to formulate research hypotheses through individual and / or group presentations, as well as interact with the teacher and experts in the field. Particular attention will be paid to opera and music theater in Venice and to experiments in the context of the Biennale music festival.

No prerequisites or basic knowledge in music are required. Interest in the subject matter and motivation in learning are the fundamental prerequisite to attend the course.

The course will provide a solid introduction to music production focusing on opera and music theatre. The first part will present a general historical overview from the rise of opera to the present day, while the second will deal with significant cases studies in the context of the Biennale music festival: the organizational, financial and artistic complexity behind the composition and staging of work for experimental music theatre.

B. L. Glixon, J. E. Glixto, .Inventing the business of opera: the impresario and his world in seventeenth-century Venice, Oxford : Oxford University Press 2006.
F. Nicolodi, Opera production from Italian Unification to the present, in Opera Production and Its Resources, ed. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 165–228).
H. Boyd-Bennett, Opera in Postwar Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2018.
B. Farnsworth, Curating Contemporary Music Festivals: A New Perspective on Music's Mediation (Bielefeld: Transcript 2020).

Further critical bibliography will be given during the course.

The final grade comes from the sum of two components:
1. Active and regular participation in the classes
2. Oral presentation of a personal elaboration of the proposed contents.

Students attending less than the 70% of the module and non-attending students are expected to prepare a specific programme. Please contact the teacher to receive more information.

The first part includes lectures. The second part will be in seminar form with short individual or group presentations and collective discussion. There will be interventions and testimonies from experts and artists.

English

oral

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Human capital, health, education" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development