Prof. Richard Kaye
Associate Professor of English at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center
Scholar in Residence for ERC’s 2012-13 seminar series

James Melo
ERC Musicologist and Senior Editor at RILM Abstracts of Music Literature,
CUNY Graduate Center

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Our mind is an abyss which delights in depths profound… We love mystery, under whatever form it comes (Honoré de Balzac)

Monsters, ERC’s 2012-13 series of theatrical concerts, brings masterpieces of music and literature to bear on our perpetual fascination with the mysterious, the uncanny, and the supernatural. To accompany the concerts, a series of three interrelated seminars will discuss the myriad ways in which Romantic music and literature have unveiled the fantastic side of reality and given shape to dreams and nightmares. Three iconic literary works, which collectively embody the definitive renditions of some of the most enduring archetypes in Western culture, are at the center of both the theatrical concerts and their related seminars: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886); Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Romantic music, with its blend of descriptive, programmatic, and experimental techniques, responded strongly to the suggestive power of the supernatural. The seminars will provide a multidisciplinary context for these works, bringing together psychoanalytic, symbolic, and mythological approaches to an interpretation of their enduring grip on our imagination. Each of the seminars will focus on a topic that is distinctive to each of these literary works, tracing the evolution of their embodied myths and archetypes and their representation in Romantic music and literature. ERC welcomes Prof. Richard Kaye, Associate Professor of English at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center, as the scholar in residence for the series. He has been involved in various projects with all three literary works, and will interpret these masterpieces from a variety of perspectives drawn from literary criticism, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis. James Melo, ERC’s musicologist, will address the influence of the supernatural in Romantic music and the compositional and aesthetic strategies through which composers attempted to represent the unrepresentable.

For details on each seminar, click below:

30 November 2012: Split Seconds: The Doppelganger in Music and Literature—“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”

4 February 2013: Night Chills: The Uncanny in Music and Literature—“Dracula”

15 April 2013: Suffocating Fantasies: Dreams and Nightmares in Music and Literature—“Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus”

SUGGESTED READINGS

The works listed below pertain to the seminar series as a whole and should be viewed as complementary to one another. They have been selected with the aim of providing a unifying perspective on the three literary works that are the focus of ERC’s Monsters.

THE LITERARY WORKS

n Robert Louis Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories, edited and introduced by Robert Mighall (Penguin Classics, 2003). Includes an essay by Henry James on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and one by G.K. Chesterton on Stevenson.

n Bram Stoker. Dracula (Oxford World’s Classics, 2011). The introduction by Roger Luckhurst provides a multilayered interpretation of vampire mythology.

n Mary Shelley. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (Oxford World’s Classics, 2009). Presents the original 1818 text of the novel and includes an essay that contextualizes Shelley’s work within materialistic and philosophical trends of the early 19^th century.

BIOGRAPHIES

n Claire Harman. Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (Harper, 2005). A comprehensive study of Stevenson’s literary persona.

n Lisa Hopkins. Bram Stoker: A Literary Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). A short but substantial introduction to the career of Bram Stoker and the process leading to the writing of Dracula.

n Miranda Seymour. Mary Shelley (Grove Press, 2000). Still regarded as the definitive biography of Mary Shelley.

THE CRITICAL LITERATURE

n Nicola Brown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell (eds.). The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge University Press, 2004). A fascinating collection of essays covering all aspects of the representation of the supernatural in Victorian literature, arts, and culture.

n Carl Dahlhaus. Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press, 1985). A classic study of the representational aspects of music.

n Sigmund Freud. The Uncanny, trans. by David McLintock (Penguin Classics, 2003). A reference work that remains indispensable as an account of the experience of the uncanny.

n Sigmund Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. by James Strachey (Basic Books, 2010; first published in 1953, in collaboration with Anna Freud). The most complete English version of this seminal work.

n Michael Leslie Klein. Intertextuality in Western Art Music (Indiana University Press, 2004). Includes an important chapter on the depiction of the supernatural in Romantic music.

n Karl Miller. Doubles: Studies in Literary History (Oxford University Press, 1985). A wide-ranging, multidisciplinary, superbly readable study of the depiction of the “Other” in literature. A classic.

n Caroline Joan Picart and John Edgar Browning (eds.). Speaking of Monsters: A Teratological Anthology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). A rich, multidisciplinary collection of essays on the philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic aspects of the supernatural, from ancient cultures to the modern age.

n Charles Rosen. The Romantic Generation (Harvard University Press, 1998). Still one of the best overviews of Romantic music.

n Elton Edward Smith. The Haunted Mind: The Supernatural in Victorian Literature (Scarecrow Press, 1999). Includes chapters on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Undead, Frankenstein, and other iconic characters.

n Leo Treitler. Reflections on Musical Meaning and its Representation (Indiana University Press, 2011). Includes chapters on the relationship between music and archetypes, music and metaphor, and music and duality.

In addition to the writings suggested above, the bibliographies that accompany the recommended editions of the literary works are models of focused research and scholarship.

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SPEAKERS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Richard Kaye, Associate Professor of English at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of The Flirt’s Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction (Virginia, 2002) and the forthcoming Voluptuous Immobility: St. Sebastian and the Decadent Imagination (Columbia); He is editing a collection of essays on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; He has published articles on Thackeray, the Brontës, Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens; His essays and reviews have appeared in Studies in English Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Arizona Quarterly, The Wallace Stevens Journal, College Literature, Postmodern Culture, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Review, and The Village Voice. In 2002-2003 he was the recipient of an Andrew H. Mellon Faculty Fellowship. Prof. Kaye has been involved with all three literary classics that form the core of ERC’s theatrical concerts Monsters. In 2007 he was a consultant on the BBC documentary Ian Rankin Presents: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, filmed in Edinburgh, Scotland. Some years ago, he wrote an audiobook version of Frankenstein, narrated by Julian Sands. Two years ago he introduced a reading of Dracula starring Eric Bogosian at the New Group Theater in New York. His areas of interest include Victorian Literature and Culture, the History of the Novel, Literature of the Fin de Siècle, Modernism, World War I Literature, Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, and Visual Culture.

James Melo has written extensively for scholarly journals and music magazines in Brazil, Uruguay, Austria, and the United States, and has been invited to participate as a panel discussant in conferences in Indiana, New York, and Canada. He has written program notes for several concerts at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and for over 60 recordings on the Chesky, Naxos, Paulus, and Musikus labels, among others. He is the New York correspondent for the magazine Sinfónica in Uruguay, reviewer of music iconography for the journal Music in Art, and senior editor at RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale) at CUNY. In March 2005, he chaired a session in the conference Music’s Intellectual History, organized by the Barry Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation (CUNY), and presented a paper on the history of musicological research in Brazil. He received a grant from the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, where he conducted research on the manuscripts of Anton Webern. Mr. Melo is the program annotator for the recording of Villa-Lobos’s complete piano music and Camargo Guarnieri’s complete piano concertos on Naxos. He has written program notes for all of ERC’s original productions and authored several scripts. In 2006, Mr. Melo began collaborating with the Montréal Chamber Music Festival as musicologist and program notes writer. In March 2008 he chaired a session on music iconography in Brazil and Portugal in the conference Music, Body, and Stage: The Iconography of Music Theater and Opera at CUNY Graduate Center.