đź“… Date: Fridays, January 31, 2025
đź•’ Start Time: 4:00 PM
đź“Ť Location: Harkness Chapel, Classroom
👥 Who: Free – open to the public
Our weekly Friday afternoon colloquia feature current research presentations by distinguished visiting scholars, as well as by our own faculty and graduate students in musicology, historical performance practice, and music education.
Following each session, receptions offer a valuable opportunity for social interaction, helping to foster a strong sense of community, camaraderie, and mutual support within the department.
About the Talk
“Metamorphosis, Metalepsis, and Metaopera: Hidden Intertextualities in Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Pigmalion”
In 1751, Jean-Philippe Rameau famously wept after an eruption of public adulation for his one-act ballet Pigmalion. The ballet became one of the most performed French stage works of the eighteenth century and it remains one of Rameau’s most popular theatrical pieces today. In this paper, I reveal that the score contains pervasive intertextualities—most previously unrecognized—that Rameau, for multiple reasons, cleverly hid and never discussed.
The talk focuses on four types of intertextuality. Across the score, Rameau incorporates intricately recomposed music from Michel de La Barre’s opera-ballet Le Triomphe des arts (1700). He also employs unprecedented motivic/thematic transformation, including in the overture, which I argue is the first French overture to feature the music of an individual character. In addition, Rameau metaleptically weaves self-references into the score, including allusions to his opera Hippolyte et Aricie that connect Pygmalion to the incestuous Phèdre. These allusions likely invoke the interpretive tradition—dating back to Montaigne—that warned against loving one’s own art and characterized Pygmalion’s desire for his statue as akin to desire for one’s own child. Finally, I discuss the work as a singular example of metaopera and situate it within the pasticcio and parody trends of the period.
About the Speaker
Devin Burke is an associate professor of music history at the University of Louisville. His work has appeared in Early Music and in the Oxford Handbook of Disability Studies, and he is the creator of the Music History Globetrotting Project. Dr. Burke’s current book project reassesses the impact of the myth of Pygmalion on aesthetic discourse and musical/genre innovations in eighteenth-century France. He is also preparing a new anthology of musical treatments of the myth in conjunction with this project.
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