Conference Agenda

The gradual decline of the British Empire coincided with the expansion of British film industries from the late 1930s to the 1960s, including the involvement of many high-profile composers, orchestras and other music personnel. Along with some Hollywood releases, a significant number of British-produced narrative features from the time were based on specific imperial histories or on fictional works set in various African colonies. Not only did screenplays for these reflect British colonial interests and perspectives; more provocatively, they stereotypically depicted the Empire’s others through frames of fanaticism and/or primitivism, and across a range of contexts perpetuated offensive stereotypes of the African continent as both ‘dark’ and dangerous. These ideas were variously reinforced through musical tropes, notwithstanding some occasional or partial interruptions to these tendencies, such as those proposed by the on-screen and vocal presence of Paul Robeson for several mainstream titles.

In this paper I first outline and compare compositional responses to this corpus of adapted historical and/or fictional features in scores by Mischa Spoliansky (King Solomon’s Mines; Sanders of the River), Miklos Rózsa (The Four Feathers; Something of Value), Alan Rawsthorne (Ivory Hunter; West of Zanzibar) and William Alwyn (The Black Tent; Safari; Killers of Kilimanjaro). I then examine scores by John Barry and Frank Cordell for two 1960s films that memorialized historical defeats experienced by British colonizers in the nineteenth century. While Barry’s score for Zulu partially acknowledges an indigenous narrative perspective, I consider this to be largely exploitative, preceding later strategies that incorporated ‘world music’ into film soundtracks. Meanwhile, a close examination of Cordell’s sketches for Khartoum suggests highly stereotypical associations between the composer’s interpretation of an imperial-themed screenplay and his choice of instrumental resources and compositional techniques.

I conclude that throughout the mid twentieth century, composers contributed to and perpetuated dominant distinctions between colonizers, settlers, and indigenous populations in Empire-themed films set in the African continent. This was variously achieved by employing reductive pan-African and/or oriental tropes, musical allusions to the British Empire, limited incorporation of indigenous-derived musical ideas, and an overarching ‘sonic gaze’ on agents and subjects of empire.

How does contemporary opera function as activist art? On the eternal themes of music and politics, this paper offers a case study of ORFEAS2021, a Greek queer sci-fi video-opera that blends a dystopian, "retro-futurist," and posthumanist political imaginary with Orphic reinvention. My research situates the work at the intersection of what I argue are three significant themes in twenty-first-century opera: operas as critical activist interventions, new experiments in digital media and opera on/as film, and impulses to engage, once more, with mythology. Exploring the creators' recomposition of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, and the addition of a new Greek libretto, I propose that ORFEAS2021 offers a radical and necessary extension of the corpus of contemporary operatic reinterpretations of the Orpheus myth (e.g. Birtwistle’s Mask of Orpheus, 1986; Glass’s Orphée, 1993; Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice, 2020) through its focus on interrogating LGBTQ+ rights in Europe today. Dedicated to Zak Kostopoulos/Zackie Oh, an activist and drag performer murdered in Athens in 2018, ORFEAS2021 draws on a vast assembly of VR/AI, postmodernist techniques, and “retro-futurist” music-theatrical devices to project a powerful aesthetics of queer protest and resistance. In its relationship to its early modern musical source material, I also propose connections with notions of the queered operatic Baroque as explored in recent scholarship (e.g. Legrand 2013; Rogers 2019; Sheppard 2022). I further position ORFEAS2021 within the growing corpus of digital opera production, paying attention to recent shifts in works created expressly for online streaming. I suggest that ORFEAS2021 offers a complex but innovative collage of analog and digital technologies, incorporating “live” performance as well as electronically generated and manipulated sound, and pay attention to how the liberatory potential (as well as limitations) of digital creation function to aid the political project of the work.

Drawing on interviews with the creators and artists, and on my own perspectives from organizing the Toronto premiere screening of the film, I gather these strands of enquiry together to map out the varied “performance” contexts for ORFEAS2021, examining how each presentation across Greece, Europe, and North America has engaged local and transnational networks of queer activism.

Otto Preminger's noir masterpiece "Laura" (1944) occupies a prominent place in film-music studies. A prototype of the theme score, the soundtrack has also intrigued critics like Royal Brown and Kathryn Kalinak with its imaginative use of diegetic music. The border between source music and orchestral underscore proves unusually porous as David Raksin's ubiquitous title theme repeatedly migrates into gramophones or bistro bands. Yet Preminger manipulated the onscreen/offscreen dichotomy more broadly through his use of voiceover and recorded speech, conspiring with the music to create a dualistic sound world across which the erotic politics play out. At the heart of the struggle, in precarious control of the nondiegetic realm, is Waldo Lydecker.

Lydecker is as queer a character portrayal as the Hays Code allowed. Played by closeted actor Clifton Webb, Waldo is a prissy, venomous columnist and art collector who is first discovered nude in his bath and later has to be revived with smelling salts. Even his leitmotif is an exoticized version of the title theme. Predictably, he is also an obsessional killer who dies attempting to murder Laura. He cultivates a platonic relationship with Laura, molding her Pygmalion-like into a polished socialite while fending off hunks like detective Mark McPherson who would tempt her into a "disgustingly earthy relationship."

This paper argues that Preminger and Raksin used offscreen sound to represent the disembodied, aestheticized realm in which Waldo vainly seeks to confine his alter ego. The film begins by associating the title theme with Waldo's commissioned portrait of Laura, his art collecton, and his offscreen narration; the theme underscores his long voiceover account of how he fashioned Laura; and the film ends with his recorded broadcast on ideal love, playing as he seeks to punish Laura for surrendering to the "muscular and handsome" detective. By contrast, the diegetic embodiments of her theme, which vex Waldo, occur with men to whom the real Laura is attracted; and the orchestra strikingly falls silent when she first appears in the flesh and meets McPherson. Waldo emerges as a genuinely tragic figure in an erotic economy he can neither join nor control.