A New Book Series

Opera Lab:
Explorations in History, Technology, and Performance

From the start, opera has served as a laboratory where forms of expression and modes of representation have been tested and refined. This series seeks to explore the laboratory’s work, examining its historical, technological, and performative forms. The tiered boxes and red-and-gold décor of the traditional opera house powerfully evoke the operatic experience, but opera has always traveled--between cities and across borders, into piazzas and movie theaters, onto YouTube--acquiring new forms and meanings in each new location. Sometimes consumed in marathon sessions or on pilgrimages to Bayreuth or Santa Fe or Glyndebourne, opera has an equally vital presence in the pamphlets that championed star singers, in sheet music that gathers the “gems” of this or that performance, and in compilations of high notes and imagined competitions by virtual consumers. The Opera Lab series embraces this vitality, complexity, and unpredictability, showcasing the full potential of contemporary writing on opera. The series editors are as interested in innovative approaches to the history of opera as in studies of new works and productions, mediations and conditions of performance. They seek work from both emerging and established scholars, and are open to adventurous research monographs, synthetic studies, and speculative engagements.