Martha Feldman, photo credit Valerie Booth O.
Martha Feldman, Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music and the College, was recently highlighted in Classical Voice North America for her presentation at the American Musicological Society (AMS) annual meeting.
In Nancy Malitz's article "Chi-cago, Chi-cago, That Musicological Town: Let Me Show You Around," she details AMS's event (hosted in Chicago this year), describing the more than 1700 historians, theorists, composers, and musicians that gathered for four days of presentations on topics ranging from Twenty Years of Battlestar Galactica to Handel’s Cosmopolitanism.
Among this wide variety of sessions, Malitz praises Martha Feldman's presentation Callas Athena: Greekness, Rebetiko, and the Unsentimental as a highlight of the weekend. Read an excerpt of the article below.
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"Among the most engaging and provocative musicological presentations at the convention, the one that lingers strongest in memory is this brilliant analysis: Callas Athena: Greekness, Rebetiko, and the Unsentimental, by the University of Chicago scholar and cultural historian Martha Feldman. Consistent with her career-long enthusiasm for expressive dimensions of the human voice that go well beyond the usual operatic style, Feldman characterized Maria Callas as one who brandished her late-career imperfect voice as a choice fundamentally consistent with the tough, unsentimental rebetiko music of Callas’ upbringing in the middle-class neighborhoods of Athens and New York. (The use of “Callas Athena,” channeling the warrior Pallas Athena, is of course intended.)
Feldman, a past AMS president, has taught at the University of Chicago since 1990, where she is a Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor and also co-editor of the essay collection The Voice as Something More, which is supplemented by audio and video clips sampling an astonishing range of vocal expression. My advice is to peruse the remarkable music clips that Feldman and co-editor Judith T. Zeitlin have assembled, featuring vocal modernisms by others that include wounded voices, scream lines, speech-song, and voice-gap crack breaks.
As for the new Callas movie, watch it if you wish, recalling the diva’s voice for all that it was, including its latter-day unreliability in the danger zones. Feldman relayed conductor Nicola Rescigno’s claim that he urged Callas not to risk trying to sing the high pianissimo at the end of Tosca when it became a problem late in her career, and Callas’ rebetiko-like refusal in character: “I crack every night, but I’m dying, and that is the way it is going to be.” (For a sense of the rebetiko culture, catch this excellent UNESCO video shared via YouTube.)"
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Read the full article by Nancy Malitz here.