LIBRARY NOTES
 
The Center for Contemporary Opera
Prima le Parole (First the Words)
Sunday, November 8, 2009 at 7:00 PM
Members' Room; $10 in advance/$15 at the door
Readings of New Libretti by Terry Quinn and Dr. Carol Gilligan
Based on the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne
With comments by Brenda Wineapple
The Century for Contemporary Opera presents the Prima le Parole series to give lovers of opera and literature a first glimpse of exciting new works, and their writers a first hearing of their text. This 90-minute presentation offers non-musical readings from new opera libretti by noted playwright Terry Quinn and by well-known feminist, ethicist, and psychologist Dr. Carol Gilligan. Each libretto is based on a work by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Brenda Wineapple, author of Hawthorne: A Life, will provide context and commentary.
Light refreshments will be served.
The Center for Contemporary Opera is a performing arts organization devoted to the development and production of new opera and music theater works and, working with a community of artists and a committed public, to the development and encouragement of a new operatic and music-theater culture in this country. Now in its 27th season, it has presented forty-seven operas and music-theater works in complete productions, workshops, or readings, including thirteen premieres.
Terry Quinn's plays include Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Friendship and the Feud. His fiction, biography, and poetry have been published on four continents by Little, Brown, St. Martin's Press, Allen & Unwin, and The Paris Review, among others. His dramas and comedies have been produced in London, Cambridge, Paris, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna and Moscow, as well as on Off Broadway, in regional theaters throughout America and on National Public Radio. As an opera and art song librettist, Mr. Quinn has had world premiere performances at Amsterdam?s Concertgebouw and at the 92nd Street Y's Kaufmann Concert Hall in New York City. He has also composed the score and written the book and lyrics for three music theater works produced in New York, Savannah and Washington, D.C.
Carol Gilligan's landmark book
In A Different Voice (1982) is described by Harvard University Press as "the little book that started a revolution." Dr. Gilligan initiated the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and Girls' Development and co-authored or edited 5 books with her students, including
Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development, a 1992 New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her 2002 book
The Birth of Pleasure was hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as "a thrilling new paradigm," and her first novel,
Kyra, was published by Random House in 2008. Her play The Scarlet Letter, coauthored with Jonathan Gilligan, was presented as part of the 2007 WomenCenterStage festival in New York City. Dr. Gilligan was a member of the Harvard faculty for over 30 years and in 1997 became Harvard's first professor of Gender Studies. She has received many awards and fellowships and was named by Time Magazine as one of the 25 most influential Americans.
Brenda Wineapple's books include
White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
Hawthorne: A Life (winner of the Ambassador Award of the English-Speaking Union for Best Biography of 2003 and the Julia Howe Award of the Boston Book Club), as well as
Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein and
Genet: A Biography of Janet Flanner. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in many publications, among them The American Scholar, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus, Poetry, and The Nation. A Guggenheim fellow, a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and twice a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, she teaches at Columbia University and The New School.
This event is generously supported by the Estate of Marian O. Naumburg.
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