Musicology, Ethnomusicology, and Theory

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1807/123938

Musicology at the University of Toronto comprises a community of scholars and teachers known for strengths in an impressive range of subject areas including medieval studies, opera studies, dance, eighteenth and nineteenth-century music studies, popular music, discourses of music with science and health, and music technology and sound studies. The Faculty of Music is also home to the Institute for Music in Canada and the Centre for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Music.

Ethnomusicology, the study of music as culture, aims at understanding how music from around the world works, why it exists, what it means, and how it reflects, references, and inflects our human condition. Ethnomusicologists come from, draw upon, and contribute to a variety of disciplines: music, cultural anthropology, folklore, performance studies, dance, cultural studies, gender studies, ethnic studies, area studies, and other fields in the humanities and social sciences.

Music Theory is the study of musical structure. We learn how music in historic and contemporary styles is constructed; how to deconstruct it through analysis and analytical modeling; and how to understand it through hermeneutic and historically informed interpretation. The Music Theory faculty at the University of Toronto features scholars and pedagogues with a variety of backgrounds and specializations, with a focus on music from the early nineteenth century until today.

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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Madame Mariquita, the French Fokine
(Society of Dance History Scholars, 2009-06) Gutsche-Miller, Sarah
Parisian Music-Hall Ballet through the Eyes of its Critics
(Edinburgh University Press, 2018) Gutsche-Miller, Sarah
In the 1890s, Paris's three pre-eminent music halls – the Folies-Bergère, the Olympia, and the Casino de Paris – staged ballets on a nightly basis alongside circus acts and song-and-dance routines. As music-hall ballet librettos and scores show, these productions were closely related to ballets staged by the Paris Opéra, with similar large-scale structures, scene and dance types, and dramatic, choreographic, and musical conventions. What music-hall ballets looked like, however, is less clear: they have left few visual traces, and virtually no prose descriptions of choreography or staging. The one plentiful source of information is press reviews, but relying on reviews poses many problems for the historian. Critics’ various culturally situated viewpoints and interpretations may be used to create a composite picture of what might have been happening on stage, but they can also leave us with a hazy understanding of the genre. This paper examines the multiple and sometimes contradictory critical responses to 1890s music-hall ballets both to highlight what effect such contradictions might have on our perception of music-hall ballet (in particular as art or salacious spectacle) and to call attention to the problems inherent in using the press as a documentary source.
Madame Mariquita, Greek Dance, and French Ballet Modernism
(Cambridge University Press, 2022) Gutsche-Miller, Sarah
This article seeks to correct prevailing narratives of French ballet modernism, which exclude one of its earliest and most significant choreographers, Madame Mariquita. Although long overshadowed by the Diaghilev enterprise and by dancers such as Isadora Duncan, Mariquita's experiments with creating dances that drew on ancient Greek imagery while ballet mistress at the Paris Opéra-Comique in the early 1900s were central to ballet culture in France at a pivotal moment in dance history. This article discusses Mariquita's nascent ballet modernism through her choreography of Greek dances as well as her engagement with early twentieth-century French dance and broader cultural trends.
Liberated Women and Travesty Fetishes: Conflicting Representations of Gender in Parisian Fin-de-Siècle Music-Hall Ballet
(Edinburgh University Press, 2017) Gutsche-Miller, Sarah
This article explores the multiple and often contradictory representations of women in Parisian music-hall ballets staged at the turn of the twentieth century as reflections of shifting conceptions of women’s social roles in fin-de-siècle France. Music-hall ballets mirrored both the broadening of gender norms and the societal fears which accompanied these changing social mores; they helped reinforce shifting perceptions of women while simultaneously undermining them. Created at a rate of six or seven per year for fun-loving socialites, music-hall productions were as up-to-date as they were ephemeral, serving as an unusually direct theatrical barometer of middle- and upper-class Parisians’ tastes and values.
The Limitations of the Archive: Lost Ballet Histories and the Case of Madame Mariquita
(Edinburgh University Press, 2020) Gutsche-Miller, Sarah
Dance historians have long relied on institutional archives when reconstructing the past. Yet archives are notoriously incomplete and biased, promoting certain voices and leaving others out. This article offers a case study of what is lost when we look only at official archives. My focus is on turn-of-the-twentieth-century Paris, a time and place long thought to have been devoid of creative ballet choreography. I begin with a brief inventory of the state archives and compare those records to information recovered from the press, then demonstrate how different historical narratives can be constructed when comparing these two documentary sources. I conclude with an example of how fragmentary archives can skew history through a case study of Madame Mariquita, a once celebrated choreographer who has been left out of canonic history.
Ballet Fit for a National Theater? Carré, the Critics, and Le Cygne at the Opéra-Comique
(University of California Press, 2021) Gutsche-Miller, Sarah
When Albert Carré became the director of the Paris Opéra-Comique in 1898, he did so with the goal of rejuvenating French lyric theater. He also took possession of a national institution in a state of flux. The Opéra-Comique had a new hall and a new mandate, and it had recently become the focus of debates in the press about what role the city’s second national lyric theater should play in French culture. Although debates initially revolved around opera, Carré’s plans for renewal included ballet, not seen at the Opéra-Comique for over a century. This article discusses the role ballet played in promoting Carré’s artistic objectives. At first glance the theater’s repertoire appears to be at odds with Carré’s progressive ideals. The Opéra-Comique staged only one innovative ballet, Le Cygne (1899)—a pop-culture-inflected mythological parody by Catulle Mendès, Charles Lecocq, and Madame Mariquita. Carré then turned to staging old-fashioned pantomime-ballets, confining innovative dances to divertissements in operas. The reasons for Carré’s repertoire decisions can, I argue, be found in the reception of Le Cygne. Carré’s initial ballet was highly contested, and critics’ arguments mirrored ongoing press debates about ballet’s value and place in French culture. I contend that Carré’s initial modernist ballet, and his shift to mixing conventional pantomime-ballets with modern opera divertissements in response to the contentious reception of Le Cygne, were part of a calculated attempt to establish the Opéra-Comique as an emblematic French national theater that was simultaneously a museum and a progressive space for modern innovation.

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