ABSTRACT

Between 1955 and 1975 music theatre became a central preoccupation for European composers digesting the consequences of the revolutionary experiments in musical language that followed the end of the Second World War. The ‘new music theatre’ wrought multiple, significant transformations, serving as a crucible for the experimental rethinking of theatrical traditions, artistic genres, the conventions of performance, and the composer’s relation to society. This volume brings together leading specialists from across Europe to offer a new appraisal of the genre. It is structured according to six themes that investigate: the relation of new music theatre to earlier and contemporaneous theories of drama; the use of new technologies; the relation of new music theatre to progressive politics; the role of new venues and environments; the advancement of new conceptions of the performer; and the challenges that new music theatre lays down for music analysis. Contributing authors address canonical works by composers such as Berio, Birtwistle, Henze, Kagel, Ligeti, Nono, and Zimmermann, but also expand the field to figures and artistic developments not regularly represented in existing music histories. Particular attention is given to new music theatre as a site of intense exchange – between practitioners of different art forms, across national borders, and with diverse mediating institutions.

chapter |11 pages

Introduction

Why ‘new music theatre’ now?

part I|63 pages

Between the avant-gardes

chapter 1|18 pages

The definition of a new performance code

From the avant-garde to ‘new theatre’

chapter 2|19 pages

Total theatre and music theatre

Tracing influences from pre- to post-war avant-gardes

chapter 3|24 pages

Theatre as problem

Modern drama and its influence in Ligeti, Pousseur and Berio

part II|49 pages

Expansions of technology

chapter 4|22 pages

Audio-visual collisions

Moving image technology and the Laterna Magika aesthetic in new music theatre

chapter 5|25 pages

Composing new media

Magnetic tape technology in new music theatre, c. 1950–1970

part III|48 pages

The critique of established power

chapter 6|24 pages

Guerrilla in the polder

Music-theatrical protests in the Low Countries, 1968–1969

chapter 7|22 pages

René Leibowitz’s Todos caerán

Grand opéra as (critique of) new music theatre

part IV|50 pages

New venues and environments

part V|45 pages

Reconceiving the performer

chapter 10|28 pages

Reconceptualising the performer in new music theatre

Collaborations with actors, mimes and musicians

chapter 11|15 pages

Embodied commitments

Solo performance and the making of new music theatre

part VI|48 pages

Analysing new music theatre

chapter 13|25 pages

Analysing new music theatre

Theme and variations (from a multimedia perspective)