Conference Agenda

The origins of dramma in musica remain a staple among musicological narratives. At their core there is a trajectory of theatrical events which incorporate music: from ancient Greek to Roman times; from sacre rappresentazioni to courtly performances.

Departing from well-travelled paths, in a move similar to what Screen Genealogies does for film studies (Buckley, Campe, Casetti, 2019), this paper aims to rediscover dramma in musica in “places where we do not expect to find [it]” (p.10). As prefiguration of connections over time between music, images, and performance, at the crossroads between art-theory, rhetoric, and Counter-Reformation, three scenes emerge which refuse mere lineage and “easy shortcuts like family trees, while nevertheless preserving the idea of certain communality.”(p.29)

The starting scene is the paragone, the discourse that in sixteenth-century Italy brought together visual arts and music in which, as a prefiguration of what we experience in dramma in musica, the opposition between hearing and seeing collapses. Connected to this are the rhetorical terms that indicate a process of image-conjuring: energeia and ekphrasis. The ability to describe something as if it was happening in front of the listeners/readers becomes the core element in the development of a new dimension of spectatorship. Last, Carlo Borromeo’s sermon on the incredulity of St Thomas (1584), in which the author uses theatrical strategies to invite the audience to identify with the characters of the Gospel, offers interpretative cues to explore how a somaesthetic experience emerged in the Renaissance and became central in the experience of dramma in musica.

Drawing on Casetti’s Primal Screens (Screen genealogies, 2019), these three scenes, considered as ‘primal scenes of dramma in musica’, determine a “preposterous temporality in which a ‘pre-’ surfaces as an effect of a ‘post-’” (p.49). Whilst it is clear that these scenes are not ‘like dramma in musica’, they ‘did not cause it’, nor ‘did they lead to it’, they question it and highlight a series of practices that once absorbed into a “system foreign to their origin”, contribute to the materialisation of dramma in musica as a dispositive, an assemblage of objects, circumstances, needs, practices, actors and spectators.

In August 1785 in the Correspondance Littéraire, Baron von Grimm listed the five shows currently being performed at the Palais-Royal theaters, three of which starred singing marionettes: les Pygmées François, les Vrais Fantoccini Italiens, and les Petits Comédiens de S.A.S. Monseigneur le Comte de Beaujolais. These troupes featured silent figures (wooden puppets, or, in the case of the Beaujolais company, children) moving and gesturing on stage, voiced by singers performing unseen from the wings.

The singing voice in marionette opera mediates between objecthood and self and, in these specific troupes, complicates colonial fantasies of the pygmées. Parisian audiences might have encountered the word pygmée in natural history books on apes and Encyclopédie entries on far away peoples. All referencing the tiny creature of Homeric myth, these figures (the singing marionette, the ape, the foreigner) sat at the edge of Enlightenment conceptions of self that often hinged on a capacity to speak. Historians such as Silvia Sebastiani, Laura Brown, and Miriam Claude Meijer have shown that the study of apes captivated public imagination in the eighteenth century, shaping perceptions of sensibility, drawing comparison to feral children, and contributing to emerging distinctions between human and animal, self and Other.

This paper explores the perceived equivalence between marionettes, the pygmées, and the child writ large at the Palais-Royal, operating as diminutive ‘things’ that could be envoiced for entertainment. Marionette spectacles decouple voice from embodiment and unsettle the presumed unity of self latent in bourgeois drama, which roots sensibility within the body and equates interiority with vocal expression. I argue that these Palais-Royal troupes reveal a desire to test the limits of theatrical representation and portrayals of the self through re-embodied, singing voices.

This paper will present an analysis of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s entrée, Le Turc généreux from Les Indes galantes (1735) through a biopolitical approach to critical race history. Principally responding to Klotz’s (2013) theory of generalised exoticism in Les Indes galantes, I will argue that exoticized spectacle functions within Le Turc généreux as a technology of social death: the generous Turk’s enslaved Black Africans are dancing zombies. I aim, with this paper, to build on recent scholarly work which centres global music history and postcolonialism, in particular Bloechl (2008) and Irvine (2020). I will also draw on Maddock Dillon’s recent study of biopolitics in the plantationocene Caribbean (2019).

I begin by introducing the plot and characters of Le Turc généreux, before explaining the concept of Zombie Biopolitics, drawing on the naturalist Georges Buffon (1707-1788), and Madeleine Dobie’s work (2013) to demonstrate its relevance in a French context. I continue by analyzing the particular (i.e. non-generalised) exoticism of the danse des esclaves africains, demonstrating how its musical alterity serves as a biopolitical technology of colonialism. I support this analysis by considering contemporaneous French treatments of Black Africans in travel literature, medical literature, and colonial documents. I observe the instrumentalization of Aristotle’s concept of ‘natural’ slavery throughout French thought in this period, particularly that of Montesquieu (1689-1755), and how it was applied to the Atlantic Slave Trade. I note, too, the cycle of exchange between the colonies and the metropole in goods and ideas as argued by Dubois (2014), Lamotte (2021), and Burnard and Garrigus (2016). I suggest that danse des esclaves africains therefore represents an act of White world-building within a system of global colonial exchange.

Taking a broader view of the entrée, I discuss Rameau and Fuzelier’s portrayals of the titular ‘Generous Turk’ and the two principal European characters in comparison to the enslaved Africans, observing how they each relate to eighteenth-century operatic archetypes (Verba 2013). I conclude that the spectacle of ‘African’ dancing on the French stage functions as a technology of social death within a proto-scientific White Supremacist framework. I conclude that Le Turc généreux articulates a displaced colonial logic which foregrounds ‘natural’ Black enslavement in an Orientalized context.