Flora Willson | Telephone lines, the New York subway and operatic culture in the 1890s.

Event details

Speaker: Flora Willson (King's College London)

Date: Thursday 30 March 2023

Time: 5.15 - 6.45pm.  

Venue: Alison House, Atrium (G10)

Abstract

This is a talk about cultural connectedness in the 1890s. More than a century before what media scholar José van Dijck identifies as our own “culture of connectivity”, urban life in the West was closely entangled with infrastructural networks: of transit, media and communication. Those networks characterise “modernity” in the West in countless cultural histories. My focus, however, is on opera—an artform that rarely features in those histories. At the same time, such “offstage” phenomena have rarely been granted more than a cameo in opera history. The result of these disconnects is a cultural history inattentive to sound and its meanings; and an understanding of opera that has long overlooked the material, infrastructural foundations of the artform’s epistemologies.

I’ll present two case studies, rooted in two connected cities. First, I’ll examine the Théâtrophone—one of the world’s first electrical broadcasting networks, established in 1889—and its imbrication of operatic performance within Paris’s urban fabric. Second, I’ll turn to New York to trace the connections latent in the Metropolitan Opera’s elite social network and to scrutinise the changing position of the Met on Manhattan’s urban grid. In both cases, I want to address the ways in which any operatic connectivity also entails friction, that productive, problematic co-mingling of possibility and restriction that anthropologist Anna Tsing calls “the grip of the encounter”. I’ll argue that it is precisely in such frictions that opera’s meaningful purchase on urban life might be felt most strongly.

Biography

Flora Willson is a musicologist, writer and broadcaster. She is a senior lecturer in the Music department at King’s College London, where she mainly teaches the cultural history of 19th-century Western art music. Her research focuses on the place of opera in 19th-century urban life and she has published in journals including 19th-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music & Letters, and Opera Quarterly as well as in various edited volumes. She is currently completing a book titled Operatic Infrastructures: Forgotten Materialities in 1890s London, Paris and New York, while starting a new project about the cultural politics of opera on the edges of Europe. Flora also writes about classical music for the Guardian, writes programme notes and presents live events for various major UK arts venues and appears regularly on BBC Radio 3 and Royal Opera House Live cinema relays.