Working with the canon in major Music History courses: confronting issues of empire and gender in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Here, students were charged with justifying why or why not Butterfly should continue to be produced, and how they would produce it. Jasmine Mack, who granted permission to share her video for pedagogy purposes, was really creative with it, and dug deeply into context within and beyond the readings. Clips that she uses are from a production by Pacific Opera, which has the Japanese characters sing in Japanese and the Americans in English.

Poster presentation, “Women and Power in Mozart’s Operas,” for the Pedagogy Caucus on Teaching the Eighteenth Century: A Poster Session, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Denver, CO, March 20, 2019. Quotations illustrate how my courses convey the relevance of these canonic works, for which we focus on close reading of the music and text in light of the history of women and power. We trace demeaning moments alongside humanizing ones just as Enlightenment progress was not made in a straight line. Likewise, we do not live in a completely changed context, and to view 18th-century works from a morally superior perch only adds to the gulf between them and our students. There was plenty of moral repugnance to go around in the 1700s: