Enjoying the Operatic Voice: A Neuropsychoanalytic Exploration of the Operatic Reception Experience

There has been a long-standing and mutually-informing association between psychoanalysis, literature and the arts. Surprisingly, given the oral/aural basis of the ?talking cure?, music has largely been overlooked by psychoanalysis. Notably, neuroscientific research investigating music reception and production has been steadily increasing in range and scope over the years. However, in order to avoid confounding factors, empirical studies have focused primarily on non-vocal music. Remarkably, operatic vocal music has not featured prominently in either field. Yet the multi-dimensional, multi-layered nature of opera, which fuses together a number of different arts, would appear to provide fertile soil for both disciplines.
This book aims to fill that gap, providing a stepping stone for further research. It leverages the individual strengths of psychoanalysis and neuroscience both separately and jointly as the inter-discipline of neuropsychoanalysis. By combining various theories of mind with knowledge about music processing in the brain, this book comprehensively examines the operatic reception experience, providing an account in subjective as well as objective terms. It explores the bittersweet enjoyment of operatic vocal music, which can literally move an operaphile to tears. The explanation for this may be found in a number of subjective dynamics that are unique to the reception of opera, rather than in any distinct objective neural processes, which are common to the reception of all music. These subjective dynamics, which are recruited during neural processing, are triggered by the equally unique features of the operatic voice, in combination with a number of auxiliary elements that are specific to opera. This book will be of interest to academics in a broad range of science and arts disciplines related to music perception and performance, such as music psychology and operatic performance. It may also appeal to passionate operaphiles who wish to understand what drives their addiction!

CONTENIDO:

Acknowledgements
Foreword by Alexander Carpenter

Overture
1 Setting the scene
2 A (very) concise history of opera
3 The historical tension between words and music in opera ? Prima la musica o le parole?
4 The ?layers? of opera
5 Feminism, queer theory, gender and opera
6 Opera at the nexus of psychoanalysis and the neurosciences (neuropsychoanalysis)

- Part I - Psychoanalysis
7 Opera and psychoanalysis
8 Applying psychoanalysis to music ? some considerations
9 The voice and the gaze
10 The big ?O? in opera
11 Symbolic, Imaginary and Real
12 The operatic voice and the fetish
13 The transitional experience of opera

- Part II - Neuroscience
14 Music and (neuro)science
15 The origins of music and singing
16 Music: culture, society, language and memory
17 The overlap between the neural processing of music and language
18 How music is processed in the brain and enjoyed
19 The music and emotion debate
20 Music, emotion, gender and sexuality

- Part III - Neuropsychoanalysis
21 The duet between psychoanalysis and neuroscience
22 What is the origin and nature of the powerful emotional response that is evoked in some listeners by the operatic voice?
23 Does enjoyment of the operatic voice have something erotic about it?
24 The reception of the operatic voice: from the neural processing of acoustic input to the subjective experience of vocal jouissance ? a theoretical formulation
25 Grand finale

References
Index