Brad Carlton Sisk
About
As a scholar, director, performer and teacher, Brad Carlton Sisk's background and career straddle continents and disciplines. The throughline of his historically-informed practitioner research is his abiding ambition to restore neglected stage works to the attention of scholars and audiences through exacting scholarship, historically-informed editions, and world-premiere stagings which honour the intersectional significance of the social and sexual politics ritually encoded into the performative event. Sisk uses interdisciplinary research and applied musicology to convey multivocal findings, with particular emphasis on the embodied savoir-faire that can be gleaned from manuscript sources, in order to provide insights for interdisciplinary dialogue and cooperation between researchers and performers. Ultimately, he seeks to facilitate the transition of performing arts heritage "from the page to the stage", in order to stress the event-oriented, collaborative, multi-authorial and dynamic nature of performance repertoires.
These professional objectives brought him from the U.S. to Italy, where he completed a Master’s degree in Musicologia e beni culturali (with a focus on Baroque-era repertoires) and where he has conducted extensive practice-based research for over a decade. As part of his graduate-level studies, he conducted in-depth analyses of scores held in Venetian archives, leading to his rediscovery of neglected operas with a daring sexual politics that became the basis of his Master’s thesis on cross-gender casting in the Venetian baroque, a performing edition of Marc’Antonio Ziani’s L’Alcibiade (portions of which he staged in Paris in 2019), and his forthcoming critical edition of Antonio Cesti’s Artaxerse. In building on this performance-based research, he was recently awarded a post-degree grant by Erasmus’s “Working with Music” project to study and transcribe manuscripts of 18th-century operas and intermezzi comici by J.A. Hasse and G.A. Ristori now held in the Saxon State and University Library (SLUB) archives in Dresden. Meanwhile, he has been invited to present guest lectures at such research institutions as the International Musicological Society, Freie Universität (Berlin), the Accademia Petrarca di Lettere Arti e Scienze (Arezzo), the Fondazione Cini (Venice), and the Palazzetto Bru-Zane – Centre de musique romantique française.
His teaching activities have included instruction in stage interpretation, which he has taught in the voice department of the Accademia Lirica Internazionale in Padua and in the acting school of the Venice-based “Duse's Blush” theatre company, which specializes in feminist and socially-themed repertoires and for which he directed revival productions of works by Amelia Pincherle Rosselli and Natalia Ginzburg.
At NTNU, his research into the ways in which performers and patrons influenced the heterodox dramaturgical forms and dénouements of 18th-century opera have converged onto the figure of Giovanni Maria Orlandini, an epochal composer for the Baroque stage who collaborated with the most renowned celebrity performers of the day. Despite the historical importance and upcoming 350th anniversary of Orlandini, whose operas the prominent 18th-century critic Charles Burney described as “more dramatic and elegant than those of any master in the Italian school, anterior to Hasse and Vinci”, a single-author monograph on the composer is still lacking. Sisk's study of Orlandini's works stresses the impact of female, gender-nonconforming and LGBTQI+ collaborators (i.e. patrons, impresarios, performers, choreographer-composers, and set and costume designers) on this performer-centric repertoire, its often unconventionally tragic musical dramaturgy, and the political dimentions of the performative event itself (e.g., lavish spectacles at which the King of Denmark-Norway visiting Italy on a grand tour, the exiled Jacobite pretender to the British throne, the libertine and anti-clerical Grand Duke of Tuscany, the Queen consort of Sardinia, or a preeminent Venetian oligarch might be the guest of honour). Moreover, Sisk will mount reconstructed performances of the finales of selected Orlandini operas to study how their music provided opportunities for stage action, gesture, and vocal embellishments that catered to the vocal, histrionic, and somatic profiles of specific celebrity performers.
The supervisors of Sisk's research at NTNU are professors Melania Bucciarelli, Reinhard Strohm, and Francesco Giuntini – leading experts on early 18th-century opera generally and on Orlandini and his tragic operas specifically. Sisk is a member of the NTNU-based "Women, Opera and the Public Stage" (WoVen) and "Literary and Cultural Eighteenth-Century Studies" (LACES) research groups. He has also engaged with the research schools TBLR (Text, Image, Sound, Space) and GRS (Grieg Research School) to present his preliminary findings.
Competencies
- Baroque performance and stage genres
- Italian school of vocalism
- celebrity studies
- early music semiography and paleography
- ecdotics
- embodiment and biopower
- feminist and queer theory
- gender and sexuality studies
- gender/genre spectra
- historical musicology
- history and historiography of music drama
- musical dramaturgy
- opera studies
- performance studies and aesthetics
- performativity and nonconformity
- period acting
- practice theory and human agency
- practitioner research
- prosody in vocal compositions
- sovereign power and biopolitics
- stage direction
Research
In my research at NTNU, I explore the intersections of "genere" (the Italian word for both "gender" and "genre") in Italian music drama of the long 18th century, with particular focus on the seria repertoire of Giuseppe Maria Orlandini as a case study. Of all early 18th-century composers of Italian opera, Orlandini collaborated with perhaps the greatest variety of celebrity singers and, not coincidentally, his operas feature particular variety in their musical-dramaturgical (re)solutions. I therefore research the heterodox dénouements of his operas as a microcosm of 18th-century music drama's multivocal mediation between (1) the agency and embodied competencies of the celebrity performer, (2) gender/genre conventions and trangressions on- and off-stage, and (3) the demands of political and economic power. In this way, we can gain a deeper understanding of the true contours of the genre and how they were shaped in collaboration with women and gender-nonconforming performers.
Publications
2024
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Bucciarelli, Melania;
Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2024)
Ann Hallenberg. 'Che cosa son le donne...'.
Introduction, musical or theatrical programme
2023
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Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2023)
Giornata transdisciplinare di teatro, musica & arte dedicata alla figura di Annibal Caro.
Performing Arts
2021
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Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2021)
"Anni, non so ben dire": The 25-Year Trend of the "Tenore che fa da Vecchia" on the Seventeenth-Century Venetian Stage.
Conservatorio di Verona
Masters thesis
2019
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Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2019)
L'Alcibiade (modern-day world-premiere revival).
Performing Arts
-
Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2019)
Un curioso accidente.
Performing Arts
2018
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Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2018)
Terzetto spezzato.
Performing Arts
2017
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Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2017)
Come and Go.
Performing Arts
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Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2017)
Il lamento della ninfa.
Performing Arts
2016
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Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2016)
"L'idea fissa" (modern-day world-premiere revival).
Performing Arts
-
Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2016)
Sogno in due tempi.
Performing Arts
2015
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Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2015)
A View from the Bridge.
Performing Arts
-
Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2015)
Oltre Parisotti: Verso una revisione dei criteri per la selezione e l'applicazione delle arie antiche a fini didattici e interpretativi.
Conservatorio di Castelfranco Veneto
Thesis at a second degree level
Artistic productions
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Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2023)
Giornata transdisciplinare di teatro, musica & arte dedicata alla figura di Annibal Caro.
Performing Arts
-
Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2019)
L'Alcibiade (modern-day world-premiere revival).
Performing Arts
-
Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2019)
Un curioso accidente.
Performing Arts
-
Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2018)
Terzetto spezzato.
Performing Arts
-
Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2017)
Come and Go.
Performing Arts
-
Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2017)
Il lamento della ninfa.
Performing Arts
-
Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2016)
"L'idea fissa" (modern-day world-premiere revival).
Performing Arts
-
Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2016)
Sogno in due tempi.
Performing Arts
-
Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2015)
A View from the Bridge.
Performing Arts
Part of book/report
-
Bucciarelli, Melania;
Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2024)
Ann Hallenberg. 'Che cosa son le donne...'.
Introduction, musical or theatrical programme
Report
-
Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2021)
"Anni, non so ben dire": The 25-Year Trend of the "Tenore che fa da Vecchia" on the Seventeenth-Century Venetian Stage.
Conservatorio di Verona
Masters thesis
-
Sisk, Brad Carlton.
(2015)
Oltre Parisotti: Verso una revisione dei criteri per la selezione e l'applicazione delle arie antiche a fini didattici e interpretativi.
Conservatorio di Castelfranco Veneto
Thesis at a second degree level
Outreach
2024
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Academic lectureSisk, Brad Carlton. (2024) A Fate Worse than Death? Banishment, Political Tragedy, and the 'Addio Roma' Topos in the Venetian Collaborations of Bordoni and Orlandini. Melania Bucciarelli Women, Opera and the Public Stage in Eighteenth-Century Venice: International Conference , NTNU, Trondheim 2024-04-11 - 2024-04-13
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Academic lectureSisk, Brad Carlton. (2024) The Pleasures of Emotional Pain in the Opera Seria Peroratio. Wolfgang Hottner, Peter Svare Valeur, Knut Ove Eliassen, Svein Halvard Jørgensen "Ending, closing, quitting/stopping…and continuing. Aesthetic, artistic, and literary practices of finalization." (TBLR Norwegian Researcher Training School) , Humboldt-Universität, Berlin 2024-05-22 - 2024-05-24
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Academic lectureSisk, Brad Carlton. (2024) La nuda vita nel "genere" dell'opera seria: Personaggi di donne castigate dall'antica Roma (Placidia, Berenice e Ottavia) nei repertori paralleli della Tilla e della Bordoni. Roberta Albano, Melania Bucciarelli, Antonio Caroccia, Cecilia Casorati, Teresa Chirico, Émilie Corswarem, Alessandro Di Profio, Cristina Fernandes, Roberto Giuliani Roma: Crocevia delle arti tra Seicento e Novecento , Conservatorio Santa Cecilia di Roma 2024-05-14 - 2024-05-16
2023
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Academic lectureSisk, Brad Carlton. (2023) Unweaving Seria Narratives: Towards Updated Ontologies of Opera Seria "Scioglimenti". Knut Ove Eliassen, Linda Hamrin Nesby, and Nora Simonhjell "Narratives: The story of how a literary concept grew interdisciplinary", PhD Research Seminar of the "Text, Image, Sound, Space" (TBLR) Researcher Training School , Centre Universitaire de Norvège à Paris – CUNP 2023-11-22 - 2023-11-24
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Academic lectureSisk, Brad Carlton. (2023) "Li Balli sono d'Invenzione di Madama Susanna Dentis": Opera Seria Case Studies for “Hacking” Male Spaces and Feminizing the Canon, the Curriculum, and Authorship Categories. Grieg Research School Interdisciplinary Music Study "Music in Action" , Digital-first event hosted by the University of Agder 2023-11-28 - 2023-11-30
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Academic lectureSisk, Brad Carlton. (2023) L’Artaxerse e gli sviluppi del linguaggio drammaturgico-musicale dell’ultimo Cesti. Lorenzo Bianconi and Cecilia Luzzi “Gloria e splendore delle scene secolari”: Pietro Antonio Cesti nel IV centenario della nascita (Arezzo, 1623). Convegno internazionale di studi , Accademia Petrarca di Lettere, Arti e Scienze – Arezzo 2023-10-11 - 2023-10-12
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Academic lectureSisk, Brad Carlton. (2023) «A genio di questa regolerà il Dramma». L'ultima parola delle Prime Donne del Teatro Sant'Angelo (1700-1720). Melania Bucciarelli, Reinhard Strohm, and Giada Viviani Il teatro Sant’Angelo ai tempi di Vivaldi (1700—1740): Convegno Internazionale di studi , Fondazione Cini, Venice 2023-11-16 - 2023-11-18
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Academic lectureSisk, Brad Carlton. (2023) Getting in the Last Word: Diva-Driven Dramaturgy at the Teatro Sant'Angelo (1700-1721). Paul Goring, Melania Bucciarelli, Johanne Slettvoll Kristiansen, Marius Warholm Haugen Literary and Cultural Eighteenth-Century Studies (LACES) seminar: Spotlight on "Women, Opera and the Public Stage in Eighteenth-Century Venice (WoVen)" research project , NTNU, Trondheim 2023-10-27 - 2023-10-27
2022
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LectureSisk, Brad Carlton. (2022) "Les Abencérages" di Cherubini: Un'opera pro o contro Napoleone?. Centre de musique romantique française "The Sound of the Empire" (lecture series) , Palazzetto Bru-Zane – Venice 2022-12-06 - 2022-12-06
2018
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Academic lectureSisk, Brad Carlton. (2018) Stanislavski for... Singers? A Comparative Analysis of Stanislavskian and Rival Approaches to Operatic Staging. Tatiana Korneeva "Italian Opera On Stage from Monteverdi to Verdi" (course code: PS17522) , Freie Universität, Berlin 2018-11-29 - 2018-11-29
2012
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Academic lectureSisk, Brad Carlton. (2012) "O Pioneers": European (Im)migrants who Standardized U.S. Operatic Traditions and Singing Techniques in the Late Nineteenth Century". IMS study group R.I.I.A. (Rapporti Italo-Ibero-Americani) 19th Congress of the International Musicological Society , Università "La Sapienza", Rome 2012-07-01 - 2012-07-07