Places, Spaces, and Soundscapes

Like any good farce, the 1983 comedy Trading Places opens with an overture. In this case, it is the overture to Mozart’s opera, The Marriage of Figaro—slightly amended, yet still recognizable. Mozart’s overture accompanies the opening credits of the film, which feature an extended montage of a waking city.

Intentional Inauthenticity: Performing Disabled Bodies, Disabled Bodies Performing

By: Andrew Dell’Antonio (University of Texas at Austin) // Operatic bodies, like the sounds they dramatize, are generally meant to be beautiful. But like other cultural forms, opera is also used to explore society's concern with the abnormal, its fear of and fascination with bodies that deviate from a culturally framed “ordinary.” Music-and-disability scholar Blake …