Month: February 22, 2013

Nationalistic international opera.

I went to the New Orleans Opera to see The Barber of Seville this past fall and one thing in particular struck me: we sang the national anthem before the performance began.

I’ve never been to the New Orleans Opera, in fact I’ve only been to The Met once and the San Francisco Opera once, even though I’ve seen over a hundred operas on video. (They’re just too damn expensive for my poor soul and I’d rather dish out the money only if it’s a new opera, a rare creature these days.) At the other two performances, the national anthem was not played, though, and I assume it normally isn’t. I don’t know why, but it struck me as a bit odd to use it for such a European art form. I mean, we were all there to see an Italian opera. Nationalism is nothing new to opera, but I don’t think it’s ever been done in this way. It usually involves developing a style distinct from that of the operas composed in other countries, or simply using the language of one’s own country.

This might not be obvious to people who don’t listen to opera, but it was historically not composed in one’s native language. Italians had such a stranglehold on the form for so long that Mozart, for instance, wrote most of his operas to Italian language librettos, even if they were premiered in Vienna. It makes me wonder what audiences did to cope back then. Today, if you go to see an opera, you’ll be given supertitles somewhere so you can still understand what the singers are saying but I don’t think this technology existed in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This almost seems like it could explain why opera librettos are often so ridiculously bad: no one really cared about the story. For instance, Anthony Tommasini, writing about seeing Renata Tebaldi performing La Bohème in his youth says:

I had only the vaguest idea of what the opera was about. But listening to her uncannily sumptuous singing, I was overcome with indefinable feelings of longing, sadness, bliss and loss.

Before supertitles, people could enjoy opera purely for the music. Maybe this is part of the reason composers always get top billing in operas while the librettists are often so overlooked that only hardcore fans even know who they are. By contrast, musicals often give equal billing to the composer and the the writer (just look at Rodgers and Hammerstein or even teams that put together psuedo-musicals like Arthur and Sullivan). The difference between musicals and operas here is musicals are usually adapted to the language of their audience. Les Misérables was originally in French but it’s known in England and the US in English. In fact, it’s known in a number of languages as is made obvious by this special performance:

To my understanding, translation of operas is extremely rare, although The Met has begun doing it for works like Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The difficulty lies in how intertwined the words and music become in opera, as attested to in the linked to New York Times article. Translations of writing are difficult enough, let alone singing. There’s also the issue of how absurdly conservative opera audiences are (attested by the fact that there are many many opera houses who put on season after season of works all dated before 1900).

The extent to which this is about nationalism might be questionable, though. The premier of Wagner’s Lohengrin in Italy was actually performed in Italian, for instance. Of all people, Wagner, the pillar and effective founder of German opera, was performed in Italian while he was still alive. I’m fairly certain that he approved and wanted this to happen more often, too. I can’t find it now but I recall a tweet by @CosimaWagner that claimed Wagner expected his operas to be translated. Yet, Wagner was about as nationalistic as composers come.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I think my whole point is that this is simply an unusual way of asserting one’s nationality. I understand it for baseball games, it would even make sense to me if they were performing an American opera, but it’s just an unusual coupling with Rossini. Although this wouldn’t be the first time the United States National Anthem has found its way into an opera. I’ll leave you with American music in Italian by Giacomo Puccini, sung beautifully by a Swede:

Boys have penises, girls have vaginas.

Apparently, CocoRosie discovered Antony Hegarty long before I did. Besides possessing a unique and powerful voice, Hegarty is widely known for being transgender. This term, in itself, is rather confusing. In Hegarty’s case, he’s biologically male and seems to have no intention of changing that but many people (or at least that’s my impression) who consider themselves transgender have a desire to change their biological sex. This has always been odd to me but not due to the reasons people tend to find it odd (disgust, mainly) but because it’s difficult for me to understand why someone who doesn’t believe in the confines of gender labels would have such strong feelings about what their genitalia looks like.

The basic idea, for those who don’t have friends steeped in human sexuality studies, is that sex is what you’re biologically born with, meaning which genitalia you have, but gender is defined by your culture and, I suppose, the role you play when interacting with others in your culture. For instance, maybe you’re born with a female genitalia but all your interests and mannerisms fit into the mold of the prototypical male in your culture. Your sex may be female, but your gender could then be considered male.

This is exactly what’s interesting to me about sex changes, though. If the hypothetical person I’m speaking of feels their gender is male, they may choose to make their sex match their gender. Why make such an extreme change when gender is simply an ephemeral quality anyway? This sounds strange, to me, because you could become part of a different culture and find that your gender suddenly matches your sex without physically changing anything. For instance, Conrad Phillip Kottak claims that in Brazil transsexuals (at least, biological males who live as females) are seen essentially the same as biological females that identify as female (Anthropology, 13th ed.). In fact, I recently had a conversation with a guy whose part Brazilian (close enough that he visits occasionally and speaks Portuguese) and he claimed that cheap “female” prostitutes in Brazil are often biologically male and yet their clients are often heterosexual males (in gender and biology) that simply don’t care about the genitalia of the prostitute. It seems that someone from my culture in the US, for instance, who is born with the sex of a female but identifies as male would be completely accepted as is in Brazil. Maybe this has something to do with why Hegarty doesn’t feel a need to change his sex either, because he may have become involved in a subculture that accepts his sex/gender combination as perfectly normal.

I guess, in a way, this is a discrepancy in definition. It’s actually difficult to write about this topic because I feel like I have to constantly specify if I’m talking about sex or gender because we link these two so closely that there aren’t separate words for male sex and male gender, etc (that I know of). It’s so confusing to me that I don’t even know what someone means when they say they feel as if they were born as a male in a female’s body, a description I’ve read a lot when learning about sex changes. Does this really mean anything when talking about such a transient idea? It’s like there’s some sort of psuedo-Whorfian thing going on here where even transgender people end up with confused ideas because of the terminology available to them. If your culture uses the same terms when speaking about gender and sex, are you more likely to want a sex change when your sex and gender don’t match up with cultural expectations? I bet there are studies on this that I will never have enough time to read so anyone in the know should comment and clear the matter up.

Update: Coincidentally, today my Japanese professor asked us what gender/sex we’d want to be reincarnated as. We’re gonna have a discussion next week; maybe I’ll post about it.

How models work.

I was reading this article a couple weeks ago and seeing yet another prediction of sea level rise that goes beyond IPCC expectations reminded me of my family. Well, mainly my dad and my cousin-in-law, who both asserted their denial of climate change to me a couple years ago based on the idea that models are completely meaningless. I didn’t know as much about how models are put together at the time as I’ve never needed to know, so I understand what their confusion was about (although I was particularly shocked about my cousin-in-law as I’ve always seen him as a really smart dude [not that my dad’s stupid, but he’s not really into science]).

So their idea was that scientific models are like like model airplanes, essentially. They’re just programs that someone puts together with whatever information they and constraints that they want and some nutjobs take it as fact. They could put anything they want in these models, they just get tailored to whatever outcome these “scientists” want to see. If this were the case, clearly, models would suck. Scientific models are not model airplanes, though.

Scientific modeling involves taking two or more known pieces of information, first of all, and drawing a line between them. This idea was best impressed upon me when I took an astronomy class (I don’t even know if linguistics really uses modeling; maybe historical linguistics? Someone tell me). Models are constantly used in astronomy, particularly cosmology, because it involves changes over enormous amounts of time and areas that stretch enormous distances in every direction. So basically, an astronomer can take a point in the past which is widely understood, documented, and even observed (ya know looking into space is looking back in time, right?), then take a point closer to the present that is equally understood, documented, and observed, and attempt to figure out how to get from one point to the other. This involves building a model filled with theories that could possibly explain how this change occurred. That’s the model airplane part of this, in a way, but even the steps taken so far involve known information that’s difficult to debate and usually theories that have be refined over long periods of time. The next step is what makes scientific models much different from model airplanes, though: every bit of observed information that can be obtained that falls between the two end points of this model get injected into the model to see if it still works.

Imagine you’re doing a connect-the-dots puzzle and there are all sorts of ways you can connect some of these dots but when you try out some of the paths you end up skipping over dots that you need to include so you know that path wasn’t the way to go. It’s just like that. The dots are all the empirically understood bits of information and the lines you draw are the theories that you hope explain the relationships between these dots. So, when a climate expert predicts that the ice on Greenland is melting very quickly and they base this on a model they created, that means it’s also based on mounds of empirical evidence that was injected into that model to ensure that it’s as accurate as possible. These things are never perfect, as no science is perfect, but they’re far from being the same as the hobby your weird uncle partakes in.

There could actually be a linguistic issue involved in this whole misunderstanding. To laymen, “model” involves designs and, possibly, a sense of creativity. Science, on the other hand, I’d wager doesn’t evoke the idea of creativity for most people at all (it is creative, though, they just like to test their creative ideas afterward). What you end up with is something that appears to be trying to prove how a complex system works using painting. Maybe this is also an instance of nerdview, where the disparity between the needs of those involved in a field to refer to complex ideas quickly and easily and the needs of your average Joe who doesn’t know what those complex ideas are to begin with is just exceptionally great. Have you ever tried to read a peer-reviewed study on the minutiae of a subject you’ve never really studied before? It’s difficult. Every two sentences or so usually require a trip to Wikipedia to keep up. For the researchers involved, though, they need these technical terms to avoid having to use extremely long descriptions of phenomena that all their peers should be aware of anyway. Maybe the failure with “model,” in this case, is that they chose a rather common word. It could help to call this something stranger, maybe a connectogram… or something.

This difference in needs also reminds me of the Japanese kanji debate that I’ve written about before. It’s all about the target audience I guess.

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