Kristi Brown-Montesano
Dr. Kristi Brown-Montesano approaches graduate seminars, adult-education classes, podcasts, and pre-concert lectures with the same philosophy: that offering context—rigorously researched, provocative, and humanistic—empowers listeners and musicians to make their own meaningful connections to classical music. As a faculty member at the Colburn School Conservatory of Music from 2003–22, she served as Chair of Music History and helped shape the degree programs of the institution. Today, Brown-Montesano is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. She is also a busy public scholar who collaborates with many of Southern California’s most distinguished musical organizations, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, La Jolla Music Society, and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County.
A respected opera scholar, Brown-Montesano broke new critical ground with her book Understanding the Women of Mozart’s Operas (University of California Press, 2007), re-evaluating source materials as well as common reception assumptions about the female roles in the Da Ponte operas and The Magic Flute. The book’s feminist lens has attracted a growing audience of readers interested in the ethics of opera culture and production, prompting a new paperback edition in 2021. As an Affiliated Scholar with the Los Angeles Opera, Dr. Brown-Montesano collaborates regularly on a variety of educational initiatives, from pre-performance talks and podcasts to free community courses and “Opera for Educators” seminars.
While opera holds a special place in her scholarly work, Brown-Montesano has presented and published essays on a wide variety of topics including the use of classical concert music in film and television, music’s role in the original Sherlock Holmes stories and later adaptations, and popular reception of J.S. Bach in postwar America from Glenn Gould to the Golden Record to Hannibal Lecter.
A respected opera scholar, Brown-Montesano broke new critical ground with her book Understanding the Women of Mozart’s Operas (University of California Press, 2007), re-evaluating source materials as well as common reception assumptions about the female roles in the Da Ponte operas and The Magic Flute. The book’s feminist lens has attracted a growing audience of readers interested in the ethics of opera culture and production, prompting a new paperback edition in 2021. As an Affiliated Scholar with the Los Angeles Opera, Dr. Brown-Montesano collaborates regularly on a variety of educational initiatives, from pre-performance talks and podcasts to free community courses and “Opera for Educators” seminars.
While opera holds a special place in her scholarly work, Brown-Montesano has presented and published essays on a wide variety of topics including the use of classical concert music in film and television, music’s role in the original Sherlock Holmes stories and later adaptations, and popular reception of J.S. Bach in postwar America from Glenn Gould to the Golden Record to Hannibal Lecter.
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Books by Kristi Brown-Montesano
This investigation considers significant events of the postwar period that likely played a role in the evolution of the Lecterian Bach: 1) The modernist turn in Bach reception, performance practice, and recording in the United States between 1945–1968, including how the sensational albums of Glenn Gould and Wendy Carlos reflected postwar technological optimism and also renewed appreciation for Bach’s “intellectual” creative language; 2) The twentieth-century cinematic association between Bach’s music and destructive drives, particularly as redefined from the early 1970s via the use of Variation 25 in "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1972) and "The Terminal Man" (1974), films that frame technology in more morally ambivalent terms as a lethal tool of human will to power and scientific overreach; and 3) The postwar boom in computer science and the significance of Bach’s music to related discourses such as the development of artificial intelligence. All of these threads intersect with a phenomenon of modern, industrialized American culture that Mark Seltzer describes as “techno-primitive,” an integration of the life process and machine process “such that the call of the wild represents not the antidote to machine culture but its realization.” As a super-human genius who kills like a machine, Lecter undeniably represents the techno-primitive, but his cultured intellectualism (including his love of Bach’s music) taps into postwar popular understanding of the composer’s work as the highest expression of musical logic, ideally suited to the technological age.
Brown-Montesano views each character as the subject of a story, not merely the object of a hero’s narrative or the stock figure of convention. From amiable Zerlina, to the awesome Queen of the Night, to calculating Despina, all of Mozart’s women have something unique to say. These readings also tackle provocative social, political, and cultural issues, which are used in the operas to define positive and negative images of femininity: revenge, power, seduction, resistance, autonomy, sacrifice, faithfulness, class, maternity, and sisterhood. Keenly aware of the historical gap between the origins of these works and contemporary culture, Brown-Montesano discusses how attitudes about such concepts—past and current—influence our appreciation of these fascinating representations of women.
Articles and Papers by Kristi Brown-Montesano
Such re-visioning is especially urgent with Don Giovanni which, right up to present day, has had a difficult time shaking a critical orthodoxy dating back to the nineteenth century: namely, that the title character is heroic or at least sympathetic.
My purpose in this study will be to conduct a deeper investigation—a diagnostic differential, so to speak—into the musical Dr. House, identifying intertextual connections to the Sherlock Holmes stories, but also exploring how the audio-visual medium and the considerable musical talents of the show’s star, Hugh Laurie, tremendously enhance the dramatic force of the character. The show’s creators consistently featured musical references—musicians, instruments, trivia—in scripts, and smoothly incorporated Laurie’s musicianship into the storytelling. As a result, House’s musicality is not just more believable, but Laurie’s onscreen performances offer a compelling mode for understanding the character more deeply. I will explore the revelatory aspects of House’s musicking with reference to a variety of scenes throughout the series, but most fully in the final section of this essay with a detailed analysis of the music-themed episode, “Half-Wit.”
Papers by Kristi Brown-Montesano
This investigation considers significant events of the postwar period that likely played a role in the evolution of the Lecterian Bach: 1) The modernist turn in Bach reception, performance practice, and recording in the United States between 1945–1968, including how the sensational albums of Glenn Gould and Wendy Carlos reflected postwar technological optimism and also renewed appreciation for Bach’s “intellectual” creative language; 2) The twentieth-century cinematic association between Bach’s music and destructive drives, particularly as redefined from the early 1970s via the use of Variation 25 in "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1972) and "The Terminal Man" (1974), films that frame technology in more morally ambivalent terms as a lethal tool of human will to power and scientific overreach; and 3) The postwar boom in computer science and the significance of Bach’s music to related discourses such as the development of artificial intelligence. All of these threads intersect with a phenomenon of modern, industrialized American culture that Mark Seltzer describes as “techno-primitive,” an integration of the life process and machine process “such that the call of the wild represents not the antidote to machine culture but its realization.” As a super-human genius who kills like a machine, Lecter undeniably represents the techno-primitive, but his cultured intellectualism (including his love of Bach’s music) taps into postwar popular understanding of the composer’s work as the highest expression of musical logic, ideally suited to the technological age.
Brown-Montesano views each character as the subject of a story, not merely the object of a hero’s narrative or the stock figure of convention. From amiable Zerlina, to the awesome Queen of the Night, to calculating Despina, all of Mozart’s women have something unique to say. These readings also tackle provocative social, political, and cultural issues, which are used in the operas to define positive and negative images of femininity: revenge, power, seduction, resistance, autonomy, sacrifice, faithfulness, class, maternity, and sisterhood. Keenly aware of the historical gap between the origins of these works and contemporary culture, Brown-Montesano discusses how attitudes about such concepts—past and current—influence our appreciation of these fascinating representations of women.
Such re-visioning is especially urgent with Don Giovanni which, right up to present day, has had a difficult time shaking a critical orthodoxy dating back to the nineteenth century: namely, that the title character is heroic or at least sympathetic.
My purpose in this study will be to conduct a deeper investigation—a diagnostic differential, so to speak—into the musical Dr. House, identifying intertextual connections to the Sherlock Holmes stories, but also exploring how the audio-visual medium and the considerable musical talents of the show’s star, Hugh Laurie, tremendously enhance the dramatic force of the character. The show’s creators consistently featured musical references—musicians, instruments, trivia—in scripts, and smoothly incorporated Laurie’s musicianship into the storytelling. As a result, House’s musicality is not just more believable, but Laurie’s onscreen performances offer a compelling mode for understanding the character more deeply. I will explore the revelatory aspects of House’s musicking with reference to a variety of scenes throughout the series, but most fully in the final section of this essay with a detailed analysis of the music-themed episode, “Half-Wit.”