Mixing Methods, Modeling Tradition: Nello Santi and Turandot’s Riddles
Tradition, especially as it pertains to performance, is central in the operatic world. Even so, long-standing score- and text-based methods of analyzing it often have an occlusive effect. Discussions and analyses of traditions are frequently criticism-based, resulting in a rich diversity of understandings, but inevitably limiting the concreteness with which scholars, performers, or consumers might engage them. Performance analysis thus currently lacks a means of empirically reifying and objectively studying a performance tradition and the persons most responsible for shaping it, whether in opera or in another genre. A review of prescient literature, coupled with elementary number theory, establishes three primary factors contributing to any individual’s prominence in such a context: frequency of appearance, emphatic distinction, and consistency of practice. For Turandot’s “Riddle Scene” at the Metropolitan Opera, conductor Nello Santi meets all three criteria, making this context a fruitful test case for bridging the extant theoretical and empirical divide.
This paper draws links between theoretical or subjective views of tradition and empirical techniques for understanding them. Using a semantic analysis as a framing device, this paper asserts tradition as perceptual, and resulting from performance. Clarifying its chief characteristics as behavioral principles facilitates data-driven and digitally-constructed models of tradition and its evolution. Beyond drawing theoretical links, this paper also aims to establish a manner of inquiry that provides a statistical basis for interrogating tradition.
Analysis of the musical minutiae in these performances reveals Santi’s remarkable consistency despite changing singers over his eleven seasons on the podium, attesting to his influence on the opera’s performance history, and in turn, how audiences perceived it. This paper uses beat-to-beat tempo relationships in each of five Santi-led performances, thereby revealing their musical pacing, tempo hierarchy, and temporal-textual emphases. Comparing tempo in Santi’s performances and against those of the Met’s other Turandot conductors establishes the strength of similarity between his performances and others, clearly separating his version from theirs. Moreover, network analysis demonstrates that the performances he led have higher degrees of cohesion with each other than most other combinations of recorded performances, and occupy a central role in Turandot’s presence on the United States’ pre-eminent opera stage.
This test case shows how Santi’s conducting both markedly altered and moderated what had previously been significantly divergent swings in Turandot’s performance history at the Metropolitan Opera, further illuminating the significance of performers’ onstage or on-podium practices. Furthermore, vector analysis of tempo curves facilitates the construction of data-based models of tradition, allowing a variety of empirical analyses thereof. The methodology supporting these findings represents the flexibility and applicability of a mixed methods approach for examining the traditions connecting operatic performance and consumer perception thereof within and across disparate geo-political or chronological contexts.
Tradition, especially as it pertains to performance, is central in the operatic world. Even so, long-standing score- and text-based methods of analyzing it often have an occlusive effect. Discussions and analyses of traditions are frequently criticism-based, resulting in a rich diversity of understandings, but inevitably limiting the concreteness with which scholars, performers, or consumers might engage them. Performance analysis thus currently lacks a means of empirically reifying and objectively studying a performance tradition and the persons most responsible for shaping it, whether in opera or in another genre. A review of prescient literature, coupled with elementary number theory, establishes three primary factors contributing to any individual’s prominence in such a context: frequency of appearance, emphatic distinction, and consistency of practice. For Turandot’s “Riddle Scene” at the Metropolitan Opera, conductor Nello Santi meets all three criteria, making this context a fruitful test case for bridging the extant theoretical and empirical divide.
This paper draws links between theoretical or subjective views of tradition and empirical techniques for understanding them. Using a semantic analysis as a framing device, this paper asserts tradition as perceptual, and resulting from performance. Clarifying its chief characteristics as behavioral principles facilitates data-driven and digitally-constructed models of tradition and its evolution. Beyond drawing theoretical links, this paper also aims to establish a manner of inquiry that provides a statistical basis for interrogating tradition.
Analysis of the musical minutiae in these performances reveals Santi’s remarkable consistency despite changing singers over his eleven seasons on the podium, attesting to his influence on the opera’s performance history, and in turn, how audiences perceived it. This paper uses beat-to-beat tempo relationships in each of five Santi-led performances, thereby revealing their musical pacing, tempo hierarchy, and temporal-textual emphases. Comparing tempo in Santi’s performances and against those of the Met’s other Turandot conductors establishes the strength of similarity between his performances and others, clearly separating his version from theirs. Moreover, network analysis demonstrates that the performances he led have higher degrees of cohesion with each other than most other combinations of recorded performances, and occupy a central role in Turandot’s presence on the United States’ pre-eminent opera stage.
This test case shows how Santi’s conducting both markedly altered and moderated what had previously been significantly divergent swings in Turandot’s performance history at the Metropolitan Opera, further illuminating the significance of performers’ onstage or on-podium practices. Furthermore, vector analysis of tempo curves facilitates the construction of data-based models of tradition, allowing a variety of empirical analyses thereof. The methodology supporting these findings represents the flexibility and applicability of a mixed methods approach for examining the traditions connecting operatic performance and consumer perception thereof within and across disparate geo-political or chronological contexts.