Date/Time
Fri, Mar 7, 2025
4:00 pm EST - 5:30 pm EST
The operas of Pietro Metastasio were a cornerstone of Galant musical culture. Scores of composers produced many hundreds of musical settings of his beloved libretti throughout the eighteenth century, generating an immense body of musical work whose dialogic links cut across received stylistic and aesthetic fault lines. But despite renewed musicological interest in opera seria and analytical interest in Galant music in recent decades, music theoretical work on Metastasio remains scarce. In this panel, Matthew Boyle, Nathaniel Mitchell, and Paul Sherrill explore what music theory can reveal about and learn from Metastasian opera.
In the first paper, Sherrill investigates a distinctively Metastasian rhetorical gesture surrounding premature cadences, arguing for the inseparability of usage-based meaning from questions of categorization and syntax. In the second presentation, Boyle theorizes irritation as an attention-grabbing device in and beyond eighteenth-century opera, one whose power rested fundamentally on undercutting and manipulating Metastasian norms. Finally, Mitchell uses norms of text shuffling (or poetic “transposition”) to illustrate the fundamental entanglement of musical and poetic syntax in Metastasian opera, arguing that those entanglements expose new ways of developing and extending central modes of music-analytical thought to multimedia contexts.
Together, these three papers position Metastasian opera at the center of eighteenth-century musical theorization, showing the many ways that the Metastasian tradition might revolutionize our understandings of form, meaning, and multimedia syntax.
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Bios
Matthew Boyle is is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Oregon State University. His research examines the expressive uses of musical conventions in Italian-language opera. His current projects include articles on pleasure and irritation in the operas of Gioachino Rossini, the analysis of recitative, and musical form in early two-tempo arias. He is published or forthcoming in the Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum, Music Theory Online, Indiana Theory Review, and an edited collection published by Peeters.
Nathaniel Mitchell is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Wesleyan University whose research explores the cognitive foundations of musical creativity in such diverse genres as eighteenth-century opera, bluegrass, and video games. He received his Ph.D. in Music from Princeton University, where his dissertation on musical form in eighteenth-century opera was awarded the Holmes / D’Accone dissertation fellowship from the American Musicological Society. In 2023, his article “The Volta: A Galant Gesture of Culmination” was awarded the Roland Jackson prize by the American Musicological Society. Additional research has appeared in Music Theory Online, the Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory, SMT-V, and SMT-Pod. Dr. Mitchell also holds a B.M. in Piano Performance and Music Theory from Furman University, as well as an M.M. in Music Theory from Indiana University.
Paul Sherrill is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Utah. His research interests range from mathematical models of scale structure to the relationships between convention, usage, and meaning in eighteenth-century Italian opera from perspectives informed by schema theory, the new Formenlehre, and music semiotics.