The Department of Music is pleased to announce the publication of Screening the Operatic Stage: Television and Beyond by Professor Christopher Morris. Released as part of the groundbreaking Opera Lab series of the University of Chicago Press, Screening the Operatic Stage is the first book-length exploration of the conventions, aesthetics and technologies that have brought staged opera to screen since the middle of the last century.
Foregrounding the potential for a playful exchange and self-awareness between stage and screen, Morris uses the conceptual tools of media theory to understand the historical and contemporary screen cultures that have transmitted the opera house into living rooms, onto desktops and portable devices, and across networks of cinemas. If these screen cultures reveal how inherently 'technological' opera is as a medium, they also highlight a deep suspicion among opera producers and audiences toward the intervention of media technology. Ultimately, Screening the Operatic Stage shows how the conventions of televisual representation employed in opera have masked the mediating effects of technology in the name of fidelity to live performance.
Further details can be found at The University of Chicago Press.