A plainspoken tragedy : the construction of two simultaneous tourist gazes in the Passion genre
Creators: name: Shank, Joshua, 1980-
Publisher: name: The University of Texas at Austin
Year: 2020
Subjects: Passion
Passion genre
Craig Hella Johnson
David Lang
Considering Matthew Shepard
Matthew Shepard
Tourist gaze
Tourism studies
Saint Matthew Passion
Little match girl Passion
Homophobia
LGBT
Gazing
John Urry
Musical Passion

description: The dramatic narrative of a Passion revolves around a central suffering figure who is worthy of pity and sorrow at the sight of the injustices visited upon them. From the outset of the genre until the late twentieth century when composers began composing Passions which did not use the Gospels as their basis, this central figure was the character of Jesus Christ. The narrative of the genre is fleshed out by secondary characters who either actively encourage the wrongs inflicted upon the central figure or do not attempt to stop them. Due to the fact that a Passion is a non-staged work, the dramatic action is described to the audience by an omniscient Narrator Voice (the Evangelist in traditional Passions). Audience members are also projected into the narrative itself by the use of a literary device, which is here termed “the Open Window.” This is the literary device used by the librettist which puts the audience member in the role of a watcher of the action, while simultaneously withholding her agency to prevent the suffering in the story. The window to the suffering figure’s predicament is open for the audience member to surveil the scene, but she has decided, for whatever reason(s), to remain silent by voluntarily gazing through the Open Window, a device she knows will remove her agency to act. The act of gazing is socially-constructed seeing. A person gazing at something is taking in what they see through a set prejudices, desires, past experiences, and thought processes. Gazing is culturally bound and anchored in the material world of places, things, people, and objects surrounding the person who is gazing, that at which they are gazing, and the various motivations behind that act. It manifests through the critical ways in which the individual engaged in the act of gazing interacts with the physical or imagined world they are gazing at. While film theorist Laura Mulvey’s concept of the Male Gaze is the most well-known example of this, British sociologist John Urry theorizes that there is a particular category of this act which is present in touristic situations: the Tourist Gaze. It occurs in settings in which an individual is gazing at a particular scene in order to imbue it with personal meaning. To see the Eiffel Tower on the Champs de Mar is to experience the constructed understanding of “Frenchness.” To visit Ellis Island in New York Harbor is, in the mind of a tourist, to experience a version of what it must have been like for immigrants to come to the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Similarly, in the Passion genre, to imagine the violent scene of the Crucifixion is to be reminded of Christ’s sacrifice for the human race and one’s own possible culpability because of original sin. This document contends that the tourist gaze is a central element to the Passion genre, and it will examine the ways in which composers of Passions use two versions of it simultaneously: the Primary and the Imagined. The Primary Tourist Gaze occurs when an audience member journeys from her normal routine of home and work to a place where a Passion is being presented. There she gazes on the assemblage of musicians performing the work, her fellow audience members, as well as the architectural facets of the performance space. The Imagined Tourist Gaze occurs because of the combination of the dramatic elements of the Passion genre itself and how they present the story to the audience member. These elements consist of the Narrator Voice, the poetic voice that narrates the action of the story (often with dispassionate, plainspoken dialogue) without taking part in it. In many Passions this character is commonly known as the Evangelist. Inside the narrative of the story is the central character, here referred to as the Suffering Figure (Jesus, in traditional Passions), and the secondary characters who actively participate in the narrative of the story, the Participants. The combination of these three elements with the Open Window places the audience member touristically at in the physical place where the passion narrative takes place. This study will first explore the history of the Passion. Much ink has been spilled with regard to the study of these works so, with deference to those previous studies, this document will not engage with older, established works such as the Bach Passions or Krzysztof Penderecki’s St. Luke Passion other than to construct an overall understanding of where more recent Passions place themselves in the historical genre as a whole. Next, Urry’s concept of the tourist gaze will be examined and its presence in the Passion genre investigated. Then, by analyzing examples of modern-day Passion settings by two American composers, David Lang’s the little match girl passion (2007) and Craig Hella Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shepard (2015), this paper will demonstrate how the Passion genre uses this specific category of gazing. Through analyses of these two pieces, a further understanding will be gained of how the elements of the Passion genre actively create the tourist gaze to engender sympathy for the Suffering Figure and craft a work which is meant to create a cathartic experience for the listener