Date: Thursday 05 November 2026
Time: 16.00 to 17.30
Location: Boydell Recital Room, Top Floor, House 5, Department of Music, Trinity College Dublin.
Admission is free and all welcome.
Title: Rethinking Early Dramma in Musica: What Makes Absence Present?
Abstract
Standard accounts of opera’s origins present a progression from sacre rappresentazioni and courtly festival through the Florentine Camerata, the development of the basso continuo, and the first operatic experiment. While such narratives answer questions of chronology and causation – the classic questions of when, who, what, and why – in this paper I propose a different question: how is it that at the end of a performance, with the stage empty, we still experience the presence of absent personae and events? Although the material vehicle disappears in the performance itself, the personae it has made present continue to persist in experience. Starting from the ephemerality of music as an object, I ask what makes possible this transition from the evanescent artwork to the presence of the persona after the performance. What is it that converts the disappearance of the vehicle into the presence of a figure, once the stage is empty?
I argue that Aristotle’s concept of phantasia provides a way of understanding this process. As the faculty that presents images without the immediacy of sensory contact and as a motion caused by perception that both influences and is influenced by action, phantasia allows this conversion. By exploring first how phantasia is at work outside dramma in musica, I will examine opera as a distinctive practice in which vision and hearing work through the singing voice to render absent personae present. Ultimately, dramma in musica appears as a practice defined by the imaginative faculty through which absence becomes presence.
Bio
Antonio Cascelli is a musicologist and performer specialising in piano accompaniment. His main research interest is in the history of music theory, with particular focus on analysis, theory, metaphor and performance.
Antonio studied piano in Rome with the pianist Elena Matteucci, member of the acclaimed Italian Quartetto Michelangelo and obtained the Piano Diploma in 1990. He gained his degree in Literature and Philosophy at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” in 1997. In 1998 he started studying at the University of Southampton, where he first gained a Masters in Musicology with a dissertation on Claudio Monteverdi, and subsequently completed a PhD on Schenker’s unpublished analyses of the music of Chopin. During his PhD Antonio was awarded a grant from the University of Southampton and from the journal Music Analysis to pursue further PhD research at the New York Public Library.
Before joining the National University of Ireland, Maynooth in September 2008 as Lecturer in Performance Studies, Antonio worked part-time at the University of Southampton (2004-06), where he also held an Early Career Teaching Fellowship in 2006-07. In 2007-08 he held a post as Lecturer in Music at the University of Hull. He taught Baroque, Classical and Romantic music history, as well as modules on music analysis, harmony and counterpoint, Schenkerian analysis and ensemble performance.
Antonio collaborates with Radio Vaticana in Rome, Italy, for which he has recorded programmes on Schenkerian Analysis, English Art Songs, the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, and Chopin.
For more information about this event or the Trinity Seminar in Musicology Series please email Dr Nicole Grimes at Nicole.Grimes@tcd.ie.