Klarinet Archive - Posting 000678.txt from 1998/12

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] Bible and music - changed question
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1998 21:29:09 -0500

James Rosen wrote,
>> I am taking a Bible as Literature course. For an individual project, I am
planning on analyzing the Bible's effect on music (from Verdi to Lloyd Weber).
[another posting}
>>Now . . . I have expanded, and will include both sections of the Bible. A
friend of mine is working specifically on Oratorii, so I have to keep their
use to a minimum. The question I hope to answer is: How does the society in
which a composer is writing effect his use of the Bible in text. >>

As a graduate teaching assistant, I taught a section of upper division "Bible
as Literature" in the English Department of the University of California at
Davis, in the academic year 1972-1973. I believe you said in one of your
postings that you're supposed to write fifteen pages. My strongest
recommendation is that you narrow that enormous topic. Otherwise, with only
fifteen pages to do the job, you're likely to end up with a long list of
compositions and few broad generalizations. In my day, that was a C paper.
(With grade inflation, it might rate a B today.) Your prof wants to see you
reason, think, not parrot back some research anybody could do with half an
hour in _Grove's Dictionary_, so why not make a detailed comparison of just
two or three works, one or two old ones and a modern one, on the same Biblical
theme? That way, you can devote less of your space to superfical plot summary
and so forth, and more of it to analyzing the writers' use of the Biblical
material and to putting the compositions in their historical contexts.

For instance, you might choose the story of Moses. You could compare, say,
Rossini's opera, "Moses in Egypt," as first produced in Italy in 1818, with
Mark Gustavson's suggestion, Schoenberg's "Moses und Aron," and then compare
them both with the new cartoon musical, "The Prince of Egypt." That's not a
facetious suggestion. That's exactly the topic I'd choose if I had to do that
assignment right now. It's a subject that's manageable in fifteen pages and
just wild enough to wake up a TA with a bad cold, a bad romance, a paper of
his or her own due in two days and twenty essays to grade, most of them badly
written and deadly boring. If you have the library resources, you might even
be able to compare the original version of Rossini's opera with the first
North American production, in New York in 1860.

You could do the same type of comparison on many other big themes in the
Bible, such as the story of creation in Genesis. Or, holy cow, you could
compare some of the irreverent 19th century Romantic music based on the "Day
of Wrath" with the early liturgical versions.

Good luck!

Lelia
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"It is much harder to write a good libretto than a beautiful play."
-- Richard Strauss, letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 1908.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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