APPLETON, WIS. — Music historian Susan McClary presents “The Dragon Cart: The Femme-Fatale in 17th-Century French Opera” Wednesday, April 16 at 6 p.m. in Lawrence University’s Harper Hall. A reception with the speaker will follow the presentation, which is free and open to the public.
McClary, professor of musicology at UCLA, will discuss two operas — Jean-Baptiste Lully’s “Armide” and Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s “Medee” — in which sorceresses literally fly away at the end of the work, rather than be held accountable by society for their crimes. The talk will examine the conditions that allowed those works to defy the usual narrative and ideological conventions of the time, where plot tensions typically were resolved and the social order was restored.
A scholar of cultural criticism and critical theory of music, McClary has written widely on feminism and gender issues. In her 1991 book “Feminine Endings,” she examines cultural constructions of gender, sexuality and the body in musical works ranging from early 17th-century opera to the songs of Madonna. She also is the author of “Conventional Wisdom,” an exploration of the ways shared musical practices transmit social knowledge.
McClary, who earned her Ph.D. at Harvard University, was a 1995 recipient of the prestigious $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius grant” and is a former chair of the board of directors for the American Council of Learned Societies.
Her appearance is supported by the William A. Chaney Lectureship in the Humanities.
