On 'Skin Deep', collaboration and identity: … and he said, “Well, let’s make it pink!”

Presented at RMA study day 'IMAGE, MUSIC, IDENTITY: Constructing and Experiencing Identities through Music within Visual Culture', on 6 June 2009 at the University of Nottingham.  Also presented at the University of Leeds School of Music Postgraduate Study Day, 20 May 2009.

With links to the collaborative partnership between Opera North and the University of Leeds (DARE), my paper touches on the identity of my project (within the schools of PCI and Music) and of interdisciplinary opera studies in the 21st century, and deals with the conception, realisation and reception of the new operetta, 'Skin Deep', by David Sawer and Armando Iannucci.
          Using 'Skin Deep' as a case study, this paper focuses on the ideal of ‘synergy’, whereby the created elements of libretto, music and visual production are made to come together and to form a work which is a cohesive whole and which adds up, in artistic terms, to more than the sum of its parts.  I will comment on the degree of success of 'Skin Deep' and its attempt at synergy, making reference to interviews with composer, librettist and others, to press reviews and to audience response.  Within this context of synergetic aspiration, I look also at the labelling and identity of 'Skin Deep' as ‘operetta’, the lineage of and reasoning for this assumed name.
          Finally I will compare issues of visual and musical production and the differing audience identity and reception in Leeds and on tour in Salford, through observation, media coverage and audience questionnaires from both venues

Shades of grey: suspense, subjectivity and the soundtrack in Hitchcock's 'Notorious'

in Cooper, Fox & Sapiro (eds) 'Cinemusic? Constructing the Film Score' (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008)

The articulation of virginity in the medieval chanson de nonne

Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 133/2 (November, 2008), 159 - 188

The chanson de nonne presents stereotypical images of young women whose bodies and voices are trapped within the confines of a nunnery. Close examination of the architectural
metaphors used to describe virginity and chastity in the Middle Ages allows comparisons to be made between the structures – metaphorical, musical and textual – that held fictitious nuns within the frame of the clerical imagination at the centre of thirteenth-century motet production.