Congratulations to our MPhil student Xuezi Xu, who has won a Royal Musical Association prize for her research on Olga Neuwirth’s opera Orlando, a 2019 adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel. The RMA citation reads: ‘Xuezi Xu (University of Cambridge) has won the Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle Student Paper Prize. This prize is awarded annually by the editors of the Royal Music Association Research Chronicle (RMARC), in collaboration with the RMA Research Students’ Conference, held each January.
Entitled “Vocalizing Fluidity: Gender In-Between and Deleuzian Becoming in Olga Neuwirth’s Orlando (2019)”, Xu’s paper explores the ways in which Neuwirth constructs Orlando’s gender as fluid and in a state of ‘in-betweenness’. The editors were impressed by the adroit elegance with which Xu combines gender and opera studies, close analytical reading, and philosophical concepts to offer an intricate and nuanced reading of this contemporary opera.’