Opera binds music and humanities

Opera binds music and humanities
New class combines Italian language, literature and opera

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News Staff

Who knew that something said in passing could inspire a new class at Rice University?

When a music student mentioned continuing his Italian studies to Edward Anderson, lecturer in Italian and classical studies, Anderson talked with him about doing independent study. While that idea would have met one student’s needs, Anderson saw the opportunity to do more to bring the humanities and music together at Rice.

COURTESY PHOTO

The students of ITAL 249 celebrate the end of a successful semester with Anderson. Anderson said he has reviewed their final papers and is optimistic about his students’ academic and career prospects.

So, with the support and encouragement from Gary Wihl, dean of Humanities, Robert Yekovich, dean of the Shepherd School of Music, and Deborah Nelson-Campbell, director of the Center for the Study of Language, Anderson turned a conversation into a course.

Designed in response to but not exclusively for music majors, “Special Topics in Italian Language, Literature and Music” was offered by the School of Humanities this fall. The class explored, translated and analyzed complex Italian texts written between 1300 and 1850 by authors such as Petrarca, Bembo, Ariosto, and Lorenzo Da Ponte.

“We thought it would be beneficial to our students to have a course where they could continue to study Italian in relation to what interested them,” Anderson said. “Many of the texts we used were relevant to what they were doing as opera singers.”

Because his students were required to have only one year of university-level Italian language training, it was unique that Anderson had them working on such advanced texts. Usually students wouldn’t work with such texts until their fourth or fifth semester.

“Working with these texts is very challenging,” Anderson said. “But it is such a great way to build the students’ confidence in their own language skills and cultural knowledge. They now have a deeper knowledge of the music they are working with and a richer understanding of the culture.”

The course was set up to meet once a week for two hours of discussion about selected readings and topics. The students completed a number of different writing assignments in Italian that involved exercises aimed at developing fluency with the indicative, conditional and subjunctive modes. Anderson said through a rigorous writing schedule, they developed an ability to compose increasingly elegant arguments in Italian.

”I believe that the only thing standing in the way of our students working through advanced and difficult texts is our not asking them,” Anderson said. “It was that notion that this material was over their heads. It was my job to challenge them, and my students rose to that challenge.”

Anderson said that not only can understanding the Italian texts empower students, but it can also give them advantages later in their careers and as American opera singers in Europe. Many American-trained singers are technically advanced but lack some of the artistic expression that comes from more fully understanding the literary and linguistic contexts of the musical poetry they are singing.

“In this class they learned more than how to decipher their texts,” Anderson said. “They learned about the context — why things were written, why the author chose a certain expression.”

Anderson, currently in Rome this winter break to further his research on the Renaissance epic and musical drama, is also exploring links on behalf of Rice students to study Italian language and music in Italy during the summer.