Staging Listening in
Burmese Opera (1875–1922)

Cultural life at the royal courts of nineteenth-century Burma (today Myanmar) was fundamentally shaped by opera performances. Initially penned and produced by the court's own librettists and musicians, Burmese opera continued to flourish even after the court was abolished by the British colonisers in 1885. While music was transmitted by way of performance, the opera libretti, which were eventually published in print, constitute an important source for this performance tradition.

The present project will, for the time, examine the musical aspects of a corpus of Burmese opera libretti (1872–1922) kept in the British Library. Its analytical point of departure are specific scenes in the printed libretti, where the dramatic characters listen to, comment on, and even direct the musical accompaniment.

These scenes harbour significant information about the otherwise aurally transmitted music. But they also raise a number of conceptual questions: How are we to judge comments on music made by fictional characters? What does it mean if characters listen to a musical sound that is otherwise situated outside their fictional world? What kind of listening are we dealing with here? How does such a listening, one that reaches into the here and now of the audience space, challenges an idea of the listening subject as the source and centre of auditory experience? To query the libretti for such questions, a media-rich online database will be created in collaboration with the British Library.