Annelies Andries | Utrecht University (original) (raw)
Annelies’s major research interests are opera and other music theatre genres in the long nineteenth century (1789-1914); staging and performance practice; politics, militarism and war; music, medicine and trauma; and gender studies.
Her research explores how European music cultures developed in the wake of nineteenth-century military conflicts. She interrogates the intersections between music and war from the perspectives of translation and performances studies, trauma studies, and transnational dissemination.
During the 2023-2024 academic year, she is a Junior Humboldt Fellow at the University of Bayreuth, where she is starting the project ‘Oper übersetzt: Vom Text zur Bühne,’ which takes a cultural historical and performative approach to German translations of French opera in Bavaria during the Napoleonic Wars. Together with Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild (Vienna), she leads an international study group on Music, Sound, and Trauma, which was launched after their conference ‘Music/Sound through the Lens of Trauma’ organised at Utrecht University (July 2022) with the support of the Hofvijverkring. In 2019-2021, she collaborated with Clare Siviter (Bristol) on a project entitled ‘Theatre on the move in times of conflict, 1750-1850’, supported among others by a British Academy\Leverhulme Small Research Grant. The project started off with a conference at Magdalen College (18th–19th September 2019) and a guest-edited journal issue with selected papers for the Journal of War & Culture Studies was published in April 2021.
She has presented her work at major international conferences and articles have been published in various edited volumes, with Cambridge Opera Journal, and French Historical Studies, among others. She is also preparing a book about elite identity formation in operatic culture during Napoleon I's reign, 1799-1815.
Annelies received a B.M. in vocal performance from the Antwerp Conservatory and then went on to study musicology at the Catholic University of Leuven and the Humboldt University in Berlin. She completed her dissertation, 'Modernizing Spectacle: The Opéra in Napoleon's Paris', at Yale University. Her archival research was funded through grants from the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, the American Musicological Society, and the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies; and she is an honorary fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation. From 2018 until 2021, she was a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalen College (University of Oxford).
She has also participated as a flutist, singer, and musicological advisor in practice-based and historical reconstruction projects of Napoleonic theatrical and musical repertoire.
During the 2010-2011 season, Annelies was an assistant dramaturge at Opera Flanders, where she collaborated on the productions of Rossini’s 'Semiramide' and Monteverdi’s 'Il ritorno d’Ulisse' in particular. She continues to engage with the operatic performance world as a freelance writer of program notes.
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Publications by Annelies Andries
French Historical Studies 45/2, 2022
Vooys, 2021
In post-Revolutionary France, wars were fought, both near and far. This also found its way into t... more In post-Revolutionary France, wars were fought, both near and far. This also found its way into the cultural landscape: belliphonic sounds, such as battle cries, did not only reverberate in the streets, but also on the stage. This article examines the musical representation of wars in French operas around 1800. Conventions for opera and theatre music developed as a result of listening practices fed by war culture, medical views on music and militaristic ideologies that prevailed after the Revolution. By outlining these war-related ways of listening, I show how theatre music could become a carrier of militaristic attitudes and ideologies.
Journal of War and Culture Studies, 2021
We are at war', the French president, Emmanuel Macron repeated six times in a martial tone during... more We are at war', the French president, Emmanuel Macron repeated six times in a martial tone during a speech on 16 March 2020, calling for a 'general mobilization' (Pietralunga & Lemarié, 2020). In the face of the Covid-19 crisis, Macron and other political leaders resorted to wartime rhetoric to justify their governments' drastic emergency measures. This was a problematic move, since this was not a war in any conventional sense of the word; citizens were not called to leave their homes and families to go fight for their country but they were ordered to stay home, to avoid gatherings and travel in order to minimize physical interaction. Using a rhetoric of 'total war' has become a popular stratagem of world leaders during the pandemic when seeking their populations' compliance with the imposed measures. After all, an important characteristic of the concept 'total war' is that it entails 'the complete mobilization of a society's resources to achieve the absolute destruction of an enemy' (Bell, 2007: 7). With a highly contagious virus as the enemy, it meant that theatres and concert venues around the world were to close their doors and cancel all performances for the foreseeable future. Many artists started to advocate for the arts, framing their efforts in reference to this crisis: theatre, opera, and music were championed especially for their supposed potential to offer comfort and distraction. For instance, Joyce DiDonato and Piotr Beczała organized a house concert performing selections from the cancelled Metropolitan Opera production of Jules Massenet's Werther (1887). The plot of Goethe's 1774 novel, on which this opera was based, had first caused furore on stages across Europe around 1800 during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (Cristea, 1971). Over two centuries later, the plot was rehearsed against a new background of crisis, with DiDonato stating that they performed 'at this moment of huge uncertainty' with 'the intention of remembering that there is beauty in the world, there is
Cambridge Opera Journal, 2019
This article argues that the early nineteenth century was a critical period in the development of... more This article argues that the early nineteenth century was a critical period in the development of operatic aesthetics in France: fuelled by post-Revolutionary notions about theatre’s importance in processes of nation-building, the Opéra sought to strengthen its reputation as the ‘Académie that unites all the arts’. The intertwinement of this aesthetic and political aim is conspicuous in the production of Jean-François Le Sueur’s Ossian ou les bardes (1804), loosely based on James Macpherson’s Ossianic ‘translations’. The work’s meticulous coordination of the arts sought to bring third-century bardic society back to life and make audiences feel part of this long-forgotten, supposedly ‘historical’ and French, past. Thus, this article points to the Opéra’s intensifying interaction with nationalism and genealogical historiography around 1800 as it sought to define its role as a national theatre. It also challenges the common scholarly notion that the Opéra’s productions served primarily to aggrandise Napoleon.
http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/bernardo-porta\_(Dizionario-Biografico)/
Reviews by Annelies Andries
New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century, 2021
Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 2021
Eighteenth-Century Music 16, 2019
H-France Review 19 , 2019
Die Tonkunst: Magazin für klassische Musik und Musikwissenschaft 13, 2019
https://www.bsecs.org.uk/criticks-reviews/looking-at-and-listening-to-the-land-without-music/
Talks by Annelies Andries
While Napoleon’s feared cavalry galloped towards the battlefields, a different set of riders trav... more While Napoleon’s feared cavalry galloped towards the battlefields, a different set of riders traversed the Empire: the Franconis’ equestrian circus. In Paris, the Franconis made furore with their large-scale patriotic
spectacles, unique for featuring multiple horses. During the summer, they toured the départements to entertain local audiences with dressage shows.
Though largely overlooked in scholarship, this paper argues that these tours were crucial to disseminating the militarism sustaining the Napoleonic war effort to peripheral regions such as present-day Belgium. Because the shows presented short scenes based on French historical and military heritage in which the much-admired horses moved in perfect synchrony with the music, they helped build a public image of French (military) prowess and discipline. While not invariably winning the audience’s support for Napoleon’s imperial project, the Franconis were vital in fostering a widespread enthusiasm for military display and for turning war into a mass spectacle in the nineteenth century.
The Crimean War (1853-1856) was one of the first military conflicts to be documented by the media... more The Crimean War (1853-1856) was one of the first military conflicts to be documented by the media in “real time.” Thanks to the electric telegraph, war reports reached audiences at a breakneck tempo; meanwhile, as war journalism and photography emerged, more “accurate” accounts of the circumstances at the front became available. Competing to profit from this conflict, popular theatres promised the most up-to-date, war-inspired pieces, relentlessly announcing amended plots and spectacular effects that reflected the latest developments.
This paper focuses on the sensational equestrian entertainments at the Parisian hippodromes and Astley’s amphitheater in London. These venues staged re-enactments of major battles—such as the Siege of Silistria (1854) and Sebastopol (1855)—featuring hosts of cavalry and infantry, real cannons, and dazzling scenery. But, instead of focusing on all this visual splendor, I explore the use of music in these works. Surviving evidence suggests that music was used as a forceful tool of continuity, resisting how the textual and visual imaginary of war was unceasingly refashioned by the new technologies of war journalism. French and British marching tunes like André Grétry’s “La victoire est à nous” (1783) were exploited for their decades-old associations with bravery, exceptionalism, and patriotism. As such, these tunes were deployed to sublimate the gruesomeness of war (omnipresent in contemporary war photographs) by broadcasting narratives of military heroism that traversed ages and empires. Because of its insistence on mapping the past onto the present, the music became crucial to the “making of modern wartime” (Favret, 2010), a development predicated on collapsing the temporal and geographic boundaries between wartime experiences. Furthermore, the marches’s ability to rouse crowds was crucial to turning militarism into a modern mass culture.
By highlighting the significance and omnipresence of military music in mass entertainments, this paper broadens recent scholarly considerations on music in militarism. These equestrian entertainments exemplify how military music, because of its tradition-bound practice, symbolic meaning, and pervasive presence in society, was – and to a certain extent continues to be – an especially potent tool in promoting (trans)national cultures of war and in the emergence of war as a mass experience.
The decades straddling 1800 saw a profusion of violent conflicts in Europe, considered by some hi... more The decades straddling 1800 saw a profusion of violent conflicts in Europe, considered by some historians as the first ‘Total War’ (Bell 2007). This socio-political situation tends to be linked to changes in theatre culture, especially the increasing presence of battle scenes and cataclysmic finales. One opera that supports this link is Bernardo Porta’s Les Horaces (1800), which featured a live-action battle scene staging the legendary fight between the Horatii and Curiatii. Yet, such scenes were not greeted with universal acclaim, quite the opposite. Critics strongly disapproved; they not only preferred battle narration over its presentation (as in Antonio Salieri’s 1786 Les Horaces), but specifically protested the absence of music. According to one critic, this battle ‘inspired horror rather than sorrow; it […] needs the support of a piece of music or at least a drumroll’.
This critic’s comment serves as a starting point to exploring the centrality given to sound and music in dealing with war experiences, and in particular in reframing war’s horrors into stories of tragic heroism. Firstly, I will address contemporary philosophical, medical and aesthetic literature on the senses and how hearing and seeing were given different roles in the regeneration of society at large and the healing of war illnesses more specifically. Secondly, I will consider how such discourses interacted with actual musical practices by drawing on military manuals, personal diaries and newspaper accounts. From these documents, it appears that military music and battle sounds were at the heart of the military’s cults of heroism as featured in enlisting events, actual battles, campaign reports, artistic re-imaginations, and so on. This talk will address some of the question arising from music/sound’s omnipresence in war and cultural expressions linked to it; it will investigate music/sound’s facility navigating between the reality and fictionality of war, between giving orders and providing emotive framing, and in making war into a mass experience.
French Historical Studies 45/2, 2022
Vooys, 2021
In post-Revolutionary France, wars were fought, both near and far. This also found its way into t... more In post-Revolutionary France, wars were fought, both near and far. This also found its way into the cultural landscape: belliphonic sounds, such as battle cries, did not only reverberate in the streets, but also on the stage. This article examines the musical representation of wars in French operas around 1800. Conventions for opera and theatre music developed as a result of listening practices fed by war culture, medical views on music and militaristic ideologies that prevailed after the Revolution. By outlining these war-related ways of listening, I show how theatre music could become a carrier of militaristic attitudes and ideologies.
Journal of War and Culture Studies, 2021
We are at war', the French president, Emmanuel Macron repeated six times in a martial tone during... more We are at war', the French president, Emmanuel Macron repeated six times in a martial tone during a speech on 16 March 2020, calling for a 'general mobilization' (Pietralunga & Lemarié, 2020). In the face of the Covid-19 crisis, Macron and other political leaders resorted to wartime rhetoric to justify their governments' drastic emergency measures. This was a problematic move, since this was not a war in any conventional sense of the word; citizens were not called to leave their homes and families to go fight for their country but they were ordered to stay home, to avoid gatherings and travel in order to minimize physical interaction. Using a rhetoric of 'total war' has become a popular stratagem of world leaders during the pandemic when seeking their populations' compliance with the imposed measures. After all, an important characteristic of the concept 'total war' is that it entails 'the complete mobilization of a society's resources to achieve the absolute destruction of an enemy' (Bell, 2007: 7). With a highly contagious virus as the enemy, it meant that theatres and concert venues around the world were to close their doors and cancel all performances for the foreseeable future. Many artists started to advocate for the arts, framing their efforts in reference to this crisis: theatre, opera, and music were championed especially for their supposed potential to offer comfort and distraction. For instance, Joyce DiDonato and Piotr Beczała organized a house concert performing selections from the cancelled Metropolitan Opera production of Jules Massenet's Werther (1887). The plot of Goethe's 1774 novel, on which this opera was based, had first caused furore on stages across Europe around 1800 during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (Cristea, 1971). Over two centuries later, the plot was rehearsed against a new background of crisis, with DiDonato stating that they performed 'at this moment of huge uncertainty' with 'the intention of remembering that there is beauty in the world, there is
Cambridge Opera Journal, 2019
This article argues that the early nineteenth century was a critical period in the development of... more This article argues that the early nineteenth century was a critical period in the development of operatic aesthetics in France: fuelled by post-Revolutionary notions about theatre’s importance in processes of nation-building, the Opéra sought to strengthen its reputation as the ‘Académie that unites all the arts’. The intertwinement of this aesthetic and political aim is conspicuous in the production of Jean-François Le Sueur’s Ossian ou les bardes (1804), loosely based on James Macpherson’s Ossianic ‘translations’. The work’s meticulous coordination of the arts sought to bring third-century bardic society back to life and make audiences feel part of this long-forgotten, supposedly ‘historical’ and French, past. Thus, this article points to the Opéra’s intensifying interaction with nationalism and genealogical historiography around 1800 as it sought to define its role as a national theatre. It also challenges the common scholarly notion that the Opéra’s productions served primarily to aggrandise Napoleon.
http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/bernardo-porta\_(Dizionario-Biografico)/
New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century, 2021
Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 2021
Eighteenth-Century Music 16, 2019
H-France Review 19 , 2019
Die Tonkunst: Magazin für klassische Musik und Musikwissenschaft 13, 2019
https://www.bsecs.org.uk/criticks-reviews/looking-at-and-listening-to-the-land-without-music/
While Napoleon’s feared cavalry galloped towards the battlefields, a different set of riders trav... more While Napoleon’s feared cavalry galloped towards the battlefields, a different set of riders traversed the Empire: the Franconis’ equestrian circus. In Paris, the Franconis made furore with their large-scale patriotic
spectacles, unique for featuring multiple horses. During the summer, they toured the départements to entertain local audiences with dressage shows.
Though largely overlooked in scholarship, this paper argues that these tours were crucial to disseminating the militarism sustaining the Napoleonic war effort to peripheral regions such as present-day Belgium. Because the shows presented short scenes based on French historical and military heritage in which the much-admired horses moved in perfect synchrony with the music, they helped build a public image of French (military) prowess and discipline. While not invariably winning the audience’s support for Napoleon’s imperial project, the Franconis were vital in fostering a widespread enthusiasm for military display and for turning war into a mass spectacle in the nineteenth century.
The Crimean War (1853-1856) was one of the first military conflicts to be documented by the media... more The Crimean War (1853-1856) was one of the first military conflicts to be documented by the media in “real time.” Thanks to the electric telegraph, war reports reached audiences at a breakneck tempo; meanwhile, as war journalism and photography emerged, more “accurate” accounts of the circumstances at the front became available. Competing to profit from this conflict, popular theatres promised the most up-to-date, war-inspired pieces, relentlessly announcing amended plots and spectacular effects that reflected the latest developments.
This paper focuses on the sensational equestrian entertainments at the Parisian hippodromes and Astley’s amphitheater in London. These venues staged re-enactments of major battles—such as the Siege of Silistria (1854) and Sebastopol (1855)—featuring hosts of cavalry and infantry, real cannons, and dazzling scenery. But, instead of focusing on all this visual splendor, I explore the use of music in these works. Surviving evidence suggests that music was used as a forceful tool of continuity, resisting how the textual and visual imaginary of war was unceasingly refashioned by the new technologies of war journalism. French and British marching tunes like André Grétry’s “La victoire est à nous” (1783) were exploited for their decades-old associations with bravery, exceptionalism, and patriotism. As such, these tunes were deployed to sublimate the gruesomeness of war (omnipresent in contemporary war photographs) by broadcasting narratives of military heroism that traversed ages and empires. Because of its insistence on mapping the past onto the present, the music became crucial to the “making of modern wartime” (Favret, 2010), a development predicated on collapsing the temporal and geographic boundaries between wartime experiences. Furthermore, the marches’s ability to rouse crowds was crucial to turning militarism into a modern mass culture.
By highlighting the significance and omnipresence of military music in mass entertainments, this paper broadens recent scholarly considerations on music in militarism. These equestrian entertainments exemplify how military music, because of its tradition-bound practice, symbolic meaning, and pervasive presence in society, was – and to a certain extent continues to be – an especially potent tool in promoting (trans)national cultures of war and in the emergence of war as a mass experience.
The decades straddling 1800 saw a profusion of violent conflicts in Europe, considered by some hi... more The decades straddling 1800 saw a profusion of violent conflicts in Europe, considered by some historians as the first ‘Total War’ (Bell 2007). This socio-political situation tends to be linked to changes in theatre culture, especially the increasing presence of battle scenes and cataclysmic finales. One opera that supports this link is Bernardo Porta’s Les Horaces (1800), which featured a live-action battle scene staging the legendary fight between the Horatii and Curiatii. Yet, such scenes were not greeted with universal acclaim, quite the opposite. Critics strongly disapproved; they not only preferred battle narration over its presentation (as in Antonio Salieri’s 1786 Les Horaces), but specifically protested the absence of music. According to one critic, this battle ‘inspired horror rather than sorrow; it […] needs the support of a piece of music or at least a drumroll’.
This critic’s comment serves as a starting point to exploring the centrality given to sound and music in dealing with war experiences, and in particular in reframing war’s horrors into stories of tragic heroism. Firstly, I will address contemporary philosophical, medical and aesthetic literature on the senses and how hearing and seeing were given different roles in the regeneration of society at large and the healing of war illnesses more specifically. Secondly, I will consider how such discourses interacted with actual musical practices by drawing on military manuals, personal diaries and newspaper accounts. From these documents, it appears that military music and battle sounds were at the heart of the military’s cults of heroism as featured in enlisting events, actual battles, campaign reports, artistic re-imaginations, and so on. This talk will address some of the question arising from music/sound’s omnipresence in war and cultural expressions linked to it; it will investigate music/sound’s facility navigating between the reality and fictionality of war, between giving orders and providing emotive framing, and in making war into a mass experience.
Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle
Hello. Hi, Jane, and hi, Lin. Welcome to this conversational review of Nina Eidsheim's book, The ... more Hello. Hi, Jane, and hi, Lin. Welcome to this conversational review of Nina Eidsheim's book, The Race of Sound. My name is Annelies and I'm going to open with a more general review of my thoughts on this book. In The Race of Sound, musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim aims to make the readers rethink the way they approach the naming of 'voice'. Whenever one hears a voice, she argues, one automatically asks the acousmatic question: 'Who is this?' (1). This question betrays the way we name a voice and understand it as an essentialized expression of a knowable individual. She perceives this activity of essentializing especially in relation to vocal timbre-a concept that she understands very broadly as encompassing all characteristics that allow us to distinguish between two sounds of the same 'pitch and loudness' (6). It is important to realize, according to Eidsheim, that equating timbre with specific essences is an act of interpretation on the part of the listener, rooted in collective and cultural assumptions. Thus, she seeks to dispel the common notions that voice is 1) singular, 2) innate and 3) that its source is in the singer (9). Instead, she puts the listener in the limelight. It is important to note that vocalists themselves also fall under the denominator 'listeners'. After all, vocalists listen to their own vocal production and interpret and adjust their production based on their own and others' cultural and collective perceptions about voice in general, and theirs in particular. Throughout the chapters of the book, Eidsheim deconstructs how and why listeners read voices as a reflection of essence with a particular attention to race (often in the intersection with gender). She discusses how hearing timbre as racial leads to constructions of imaginary identities that often deny singers agency. In chapter two, for instance, she proposes the concept of a phantom genealogy in which the voices of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Black opera singers were framed within a minstrelsy performance culture. Discussing Billie Holiday in chapter five, she highlights how her voice is interpreted as autobiographical, channeling ancestral history, and biologically determined (156)-all ways of interpreting that suggest Holiday's sound came naturally and that keep us from understanding Holiday's artistic skills in crafting her own sound. A theme that also regularly comes back is how listeners expect that a voice's timbre corresponds to its visual, bodily representation-if this is not the case, representations will be adjusted to fit the vocal timbre; in chapter four, she demonstrates how this is even true of voice-simulation technology such as the Vocaloid. Ultimately, Eidsheim proposes to shift our attention to the elements of entrainment, style and technique as an approach that puts the singers' artistry in creating their sounds centre stage. Yet, even in describing voice in these terms, Eidsheim warns against essentializing and champions the restoration of what she calls 'the multiplicity of the thick event' (5). In other words, a description is only one among multiple options for giving meaning to the voice; there is an infinity of options that do not exclude one another, but add to the thickness of the description. Highlighting only one or a few options creates a hierarchy revealing the micropolitics of listening-a micropolitics that has disadvantaged Black vocalists. Eidsheim's approach seeks to reveal the ideological discourses that underpin our conceptions of voice. In this respect, she wears her activist stance, namely, to counteract racist listening activities openly on her sleeve-this stance may be in part the reason behind the book's availability as an open access publication
Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022