Lancaster University

Graduate Student, Institute for the Contemporary Arts

Independent Researcher

Thesis Title: A Comparative Study of Words and Music in Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1947): Constructions of Gender and Sexuality

About

Philip has recently completed his fully-funded doctoral thesis at the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University (September 2011). His Ph.D explores word-music relations, via metaphors of gender and sexuality, in Francis Poulenc’s first opera: Les Mamelles de Tirésias.

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Ph.D Abstract

Writing in 2000, Daniel Albright argues that the opera Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1947) by Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) is an exemplar of surrealist ‘dissonance’ between words and music. Poulenc, Albright argues, consciously ‘violates’ the dramatic trajectory of the words by providing music which ‘disables’ the verbal systems of meaning which form the opera’s zany plot (Albright, 2000:300). This thesis provides a reading of the libretto and music of the opera via its important thematic notions of gender and sexuality to argue for a reassessment of Albright’s findings. By placing gender and sexuality as points of ‘enabling similarity’ between words and music after Nicholas Cook (1998: 70), an approach is found which is sensitive towards the verbal and musical developments of the plot in equal measure and also acknowledges that the syntactic/semantic production of meaning in music is based on different referential tropes from that of words.

Drawing on postmodern critiques of the human subject following Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick et al. in combination with a topical analysis of musical signifiers of gender and sexuality (which are identified via work by Susan McClary, Carolyn Abbate, and Michel Poizat among others), I find that both words and music work together to confuse and complicate the ‘feminine’, ‘masculine’, ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ identities of the characters in the opera. Interpretative readings are expanded by references to aspects of Poulenc’s biography and to the politically turbulent World War II and post-war environments in which the opera was composed (1938–1945) and premièred (1947). To conclude, four main attributes of the word–music relations in the opera which have been illuminated by the emphasis on gender and sexuality—primacy, layering, unravelling and parody—are identified.

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Philip's research interests include approaches to gender and sexuality in opera and French twentieth-century music (particularly in the stage works of ‘Les Six’). From 2007 to 2011, Philip lectured on theory, analysis, criticism, orchestration and conducting at Lancaster University. Philip has contributed also to NAGTY (National Academy for Gifted and Talent Youth) and to sessions on twentieth-century music and musicals for the Department of Continuing Education, Lancaster University. He is currently studying for a PGCE in Secondary Music Education at the University of Cumbria (2011-12).

Forthcoming publications include: a book chapter, Musique française, esthétique et identité en évolution : 1892-1992, ed. Pascal Terrien (Sampson: Delatour, Winter 2011) and an invited book review, ‘Sylvia Kahan’s In Search of New Scales: Prince Edmond de Polignac, Octatonic Explorer (Rochester: Univ. of Rochester Press, 2009)’ for Music and Letters. Philip is also preparing  an edited volume entitled Masculinity in Opera for Routledge, New York [projected March, 2014].

An avid conductor, Philip has studied with :

Dr Edward Venn (Lancaster University); Prof. Denis McCaldin (Halle, Royal Philharmonic, and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestras); Mark Heron (Nottingham Philharmonic, University of Manchester Symphony, and Liverpool Mozart Orchestras; conducting faculty at the Royal Northern College of Music) and Clark Rundell (Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic, the Hallé and the Philharmonia Orchestra; Head of Conducting at the Royal Northern College of Music).

Philip is a member of the Society of Musical Analysis and the Royal Musicological Association.