Overview

Singing in Signs: New Semiotic Explorations of Opera offers a bold and refreshing assessment of the state of opera study as seen through the lens of semiotics. At its core, the volume responds to Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker's Analyzing Opera, utilizing a semiotic framework to embrace opera on its own terms and engage all of its constituent elements in interpretation. Chapters in this collection resurrect the larger sense of serious operatic study as a multi-faceted, interpretive discipline, no longer in isolation. Contributors pay particular attention to the musical, dramatic, cultural, and performative in opera and how these modes can create an intertext that informs interpretation. Combining traditional and emerging methodologies, Singing in Signs engages composer-constructed and work-specific music-semiotic systems, broader socio-cultural music codes, and narrative strategies, with implications for performance and staging practices today.

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9780190620653

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Reviews

This is a wide-ranging, well-conceived and well-executed contribution -- an Analyzing Opera for our time -- integrating analyses of the complex web of features that is opera with recent advances in musical semiotics, musical meaning and interpretation, hermeneutics, cultural studies, and other approaches. Decker and Shaftel have assembled an all-star list of authors to produce a timely, welcome, and highly recommended addition to the field. -- Andrew Davis, Dean of the Katherine G. McGovern College of the Arts and Cullen Foundation Endowed Chair, University of Houston

Author Information

Gregory J. Decker is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Bowling Green State University. He holds the M.M. and Ph.D. in music theory from Florida State University and was the winner of the National Opera Association's biennial dissertation prize in 2013. His research focuses broadly on the semiotics of musical topics and other music-cultural associations in texted music from Italian madrigals to Baroque opera seria to Broadway musicals. He has presented research at numerous regional, national, and international meetings, including the Society for Music Theory National Meeting, the Semiotic Society of America, the American Handel Society, and the Nordic Musicological Congress, among others. His publications can be found in Music Theory Online, The Opera Journal, Int�gral, and the collected volume A Cole Porter Companion (2016). At BGSU, he regularly teaches core undergraduate music theory and aural skills courses and graduate seminars in semiotics, musical topics, and Schenkerian analysis. He also serves as the coordinator of music theory. Matthew R. Shaftel is Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Ohio University. He has previously served as Dean of the Westminster College of the Arts and the Grammy Award-winning Westminster Choir College. Shaftel also served as Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs at Florida State University, where he led the development of a signature general-education program, Liberal Studies for the 21st Century. He received three degrees from Yale University. Highly active as a teacher, scholar, and musician, he has published numerous articles and books, including a textbook published by Oxford University Press. His award-winning volume on Cole Porter, co-edited with Susan Weiss and Don Randel, was released in 2016.

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