Music Lecture: Alessandra Campana (Tufts University): "Aurality of the Long Take"

Alessandra Campana is Associate Professor of Music at Tufts University. She has published on Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, Bellini in Cambridge Opera Journal, Mozart Jahrbuch, Studi Verdiani, and The Opera Quarterly. Author of "Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy" (CUP, 2015), she is currently writing a book on the aesthetics of sound-image synchronization in film and video, entitled "Aural Anamorphosis and Sound Clues." This lecture examines long takes, those uncommonly protracted stretches of uncut film that have been celebrated, imitated and collected since film's beginnings as markers of virtuosic cinematography and of directorial style. This paper will reopen the matter of the long take in terms of aurality: the space defined by the camera is also always a place of sound, which establishes precise economies of hearing and seeing. Campana was an Associate Research Scholar at Columbia University Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in Fall 2013 and a Faculty Fellow of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts in 2014-15. She is a member of the editorial team of The Opera Quarterly and Co-Chair of the Opera Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Centre at Harvard.