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Publication
Pastiching as Artistic Research: Ifigenia/Ipermestra (Brussels, 2006)
Journal Contribution - Journal Article
On 6 December 2006, students of the Royal Conservatoire of
Brussels performed two one-act pasticci arranged by the author of
this article: Ifigenia and Ipermestra. Assembled as experiments in the
young discipline of artistic research in music, both ‘cut & paste’ operas
offered opportunities to explore issues of music-dramatic syntax in
opera seria. In this article, I explain how individual arias and recitatives
were combined into two meta-compositions that sometimes respected,
and sometimes overrode eighteenth-century generic conventions.
By revisiting the scores, libretti, archives and first-hand memories
pertaining to this venture, I will show that ‘pastiching’ (pasticciare) is
more than a historical form; it is a transhistorical method, involving a
broad network of agencies, operators, and stakeholders whose strategies
can be artistic and non-artistic, convergent and divergent. Pastiching
does not necessarily result in ‘works’, fixed in time and space, but
rather produces meta-compositional assemblages, the transience and
formal instability of which provide opportunities to showcase neglected
repertoire and tackle outdated musical ontologies.
Journal: Musicology Today
ISSN: 1734-1663
Issue: 2353-5733
Volume: 18
Pages: 149-159
Publication year:2021
Keywords:opera seria, pasticcio, artistic research
Authors:International
Accessibility:Open