We all know what early music is supposed to sound like – or at least we have good reasons to think we do. The modern performance tradition has established a remarkably resilient sonic imaginary that can be indexed as easily as by calling to mind a hooded monk bathed in ethereal light or one of Botticelli’s beflowered maidens. Chapter 16 connects performance instructions from a little-known musical edition of the 1840s with prevailing performance norms today, arguing that we moderns have tended to conceal the musical poetics described in this book by neglecting documentary evidence about tempo, acoustics, timbre, and the somewhat slipperier “intensity.” However scary, resetting our esthetic compasses and engaging more empathetically with the past can have the side benefit of making our present-day sounds more inviting and more inclusive. The book concludes by offering a path out of elitism, anachronism, and inhibition and toward full-blooded engagement.

On the standard “Wollheimian” reading of Collingwood’s aesthetics, Collingwood held that something is art in the true sense of the word when it involves an act of “expression” – understood in a particular way – on the part of the artist, and that artworks in all art-forms are “ideal” entities that, while externalizable, exist first and foremost in the mind of the expressive artist. I begin by providing a fuller account of the Wollheimian reading. I then survey challenges to and defenses of this reading, identifying residual difficulties confronting anyone who seeks to defend Collingwood. I attempt to resolve these difficulties by developing the idea that we take at face value Collingwood’s (overlooked) claim that the work of art is identical to the expressive activity of the artist rather than being identical to the expressive product of that activity, reading this claim in light of Collingwood’s talk about the painter as one who “paints imaginatively.”

Yasser Khan reminds us that race, simply put, is made. It is the consequence of painstaking and deliberate work, whether in the meticulous anthropological taxonomies offered by Kant and Blumenbach, or in the line of poetry, or, as Khan argues, in the representation of racial differences on the Romantic-era stage. Drawing on the notion of “racecraft,” which “foregrounds racism as a reality that produces ‘race’ to rationalize the dispossession of wealth, power, and rights,” Khan shows how stagecraft in John Fawcett’s Obi; or Three-Finger’d Jack (1800) establishes the terms by which racialized subjects come to be understood as fundamentally exploitable.

Cristina De Simone catapults the collection into a twentieth century of avant-garde experimentation and the radical revision of what might constitute theatre. Focusing on the post-war period, De Simone describes how ‘action poetry’ and ‘performance poetry’, inspired by the historical avant-garde of the start of the century, positioned orality, namely the physical act of utterance, centre-stage. Artists including Artaud; non-professional actors such as Colette Thomas with whom he worked; movements such as the Lettrists founded by Isidore Isou; and events such as the Domaine Poétique evenings staged by poets such as Bernard Heidsieck, Henri Chopin, François Dufrêne and Brion Gysin had, until the 2010s, been relegated to historical oblivion. Now rehabilitated, they are considered, argues De Simone, as foundational figures and moments in modern and contemporary research-led experimental performance into the voice, the body and language.

This chapter provides an overview of folk and multicultural festivals in Australia, especially as to how these events have been important to the creation and celebration of community identity since the 1950s. It begins with a brief outline and critique of the policies that have shaped modern Australia as a culturally diverse nation and the role of festivals as a vehicle for representing ethnic identity, inclusivity and tolerance. This discussion also considers the contentious positioning of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures as part of a broader notion of diversity, as well as debates raised by a focus on the performance of ethnic identity that emphasises authentic practice and devalues cross-cultural collaboration. This is followed by a discussion of the origins of an Australian folk culture in British folk music traditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the revivalist folk movement of the 1960s. The final section outlines the development of national folk festivals as events representing an authentic Australian folklore and culture that, like multicultural festivals, offer insight into the problematic relationships between place, community, belonging and the national space.

This chapter outlines a novel, rigorous method for studying literary recordings, which can support a paradigm shift in the study of literature as performance. The method incorporates leading-edge, open-source digital tools for analyzing speech patterns in recordings, and an ethically grounded approach to analysis, with attention to the neuroscience of speech perception, implicit bias in listening, and relevant theories of sound studies and voice studies. It also includes an overview of our own work on poetry recordings and of related developments in digital voice studies, and speculates about future directions for this research.

This chapter examines the role of voices in Japanese anime with limited visible movement from the angle of a recording practice called afureko (“after recording”). Through a comparison of the recording script and the film script with the final anime version, it analyzes how the voice actors communicate the emotions and thoughts of the characters while synchronizing with the images. As a result, it becomes clear to what extent voice acting is informed by the punctuation and the ellipses indicated in the recording script. The particularities of voice acting and voice actors’ identification with characters are investigated in reference to the theory of acting published by voice actor Ichirō Nagai in 1981.

The chapter looks at a substantial number of texts outside the boundaries usually placed in Byzantine Studies through conventional taxonomic categories such as genre or antithetic pairs like learned versus vernacular language. Four larger themes are used to explore this varied textual production and offer a proposal for understanding its basic socio-cultural and aesthetic functions for its immediate recipients and later readers. The four themes discussed are education and literature, patronage and literary production, rhetoric and genre in prose and poetry, narrative art from the enormous to the small. Despite the strong presence of ‘Hellenic’ subjects, Komnenian literature owes more to its own dynamism (deriving from a reformed teacherly practice in the schools) than to the imitation of ancient models. At the same time, the role of the patrons in promoting literary production shapes much of both learned and vernacular literary experimentation, while religious literature generously defined is strongly involved in an ongoing experimentation with form and content. Finally, the chapter asks whether any form of change can be traced within the literary production of the Komnenian era.

This chapter explores the rationales of the paratexts accompanying John Tzetzes’ commentary on Hermogenes in the bespoke copy contained in the Vossianus Gr. Q1. Besides clarifying the circumstances prompting that specific copy of the commentary, these paratexts scaffold Tzetzes’ authorial agency as well as his social role in a cultural economy based on patronage. The chapter also shows how they speak to the way Tzetzes exploits the inherent ambiguities of language and tradition, by looking at them as examples of enacted ἀμφοτερογλωσσία, resting on dialectic.

The didactic poems of Niketas of Herakleia chiefly concern grammar and are written in various metres, all of them accentual, even including hymnographic metres. Rather than being mere reformulations of existing grammatical knowledge, the poems urge us to consider questions related to contemporary teaching practices. How does verse help to transmit knowledge, and which roles do accentual rhythm and musical heirmos play in this process? Issues of performance, audience and patronage are of undeniable importance for this question. The poems reflect a lively (sometimes unruly) classroom situation and an equally lively competition between teachers in Constantinople. Especially Niketas’ remarks on schedography reflect this competitive teaching field. Thus, the poems of this versatile author may explain why grammar became in the twelfth century an object to be reflected upon, reformulated, debated and even aestheticized. The chapter also situates Niketas in the literary tradition of didactic poetry. How does he, as a poet, at the same time represent himself as an able teacher and expert? And how does he combine poetic form and avowedly dry subject matter?

When attention is paid to the ways characters perform and are performed in anime narratives, it becomes apparent that there are certain regularly utilized approaches to the character acting widespread in anime’s animation. Two of the most prominent modes of performance have been called embodied acting and figurative acting. Each uses distinct techniques to act out a specific character’s personality and, in the process, imply different notions of selfhood. This chapter examines the specific utilization of embodied and figurative acting in Yūri!!! on Ice and how these interrelated modes of performance dovetail with the narrative. Through its balancing of embodied and figurative modes of performance, the anime moves between an individualized self whose interior is expressed externally and an open acknowledgment of the interrelation of external others in the performance of self and gender.

The chapter looks at twelfth-century Byzantine poetry in the context of the milieu in which most Byzantine literature was initially published: the social gatherings known as theatra in which writers performed their compositions before an invited audience, usually presided over by an aristocratic patron. Poetry was particularly suited to such ‘theatre’ performance, and theatra flourished in the twelfth century as never before. This chapter illustrates the dramatic subject matter, style and narrative technique of much twelfth-century verse composition, with particular attention to three texts: a ceremonial poem by Theodore Prodromos, Constantine Manasses’ Synoptic Chronicle and Constantine Stilbes’ lament on a devastating urban fire in 1197. The discussion then turns turns to the question of how far the ‘theatrical turn’ of twelfth-century Byzantine literature, in both poetry and prose, had the potential to develop into real theatre. The contention here is that Byzantine writers perfected the art of purely verbal dramatic representation as a conscious substitute for reviving the institution of ancient theatre in material form.

Schubert’s twenty-eight ballads provide an unusual perspective on his approach to writing for the piano for several reasons. First, the role of improvisation within balladeering was much more pronounced, traces of which remain within Schubert’s published works. Second, the piano was used to provide more explicit scene-setting, through the use of scenic effects, than is generally the case in Schubert’s other Lieder. Third, the ballads allow for the re-examination of narrative processes within nineteenth-century Lieder – in other words, how songs told stories.This chapter focuses on three ballads that show Schubert adopting different approaches to rendering poetic imagery in musical terms. It begins with his 1815 settings of Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Der Taucher’, D77, and Ludwig Heinrich Christoph Hölty’s ‘Die Nonne’, D212, considering their use of elaborate ‘Schauder’ or ‘shudder’ effects, which now tend to be dismissed as hackneyed but might instead be considered to offer access to often-overlooked aspects of early nineteenth-century performance culture. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, and of Schubert’s career, comes his simple strophic setting of Gottfried Herder’s ‘Edward’, D923 (1827). Concepts and practices of the ballad shifted over the course of Schubert’s career and would continue to do so for subsequent generations.