Alternatives to grand opera and popular musical go back at least as far as Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, early Stravinsky, and Kurt Weill as well as the Broadway and off-Broadway theater operas of the '30s and '40s, and the modernist experiments of the '60s. Yet this long and continuing history, with its complex ideas and philosophy as well as musical and theatrical achievements, has never been properly sorted out. This book is the first comprehensive attempt in English to cover a still-emerging art form in its widest range. It provides a wealth of examples and descriptions, not only of the works themselves, but of the concepts, ideas, and trends that have gone into the evolution of what may be the most central performance art form of the post-modern world. The first two sections of the book deal with Music in Music Theater (including the many new and various uses of the human voice) and Theater in Music Theater (including culture, text, visual strategies, and the multiple new concepts of space). The third section covers European and American music theaters in their various histories and manifestations, with chapters on the more innovative wing of popular music theater, extended voice, and the influence of new media. The fourth part of the book discusses criticism and analysis, improvisation, the issues surrounding pop and high art, and the crucial questions about the audience for music theater. An appendix includes a music-theater bibliography and information about some of the principal venues for the art form.
This chapter discusses the close identification of language and music, song, and speech. It considers how singing styles and vocal techniques have evolved over the years with many new developments in the 20th and 21st centuries, many of them coming out of popular, folk, and experimental music; and the importance of the influence of the all-pervasive microphone (as “loudspeaker culture” edges out “acoustic culture”). It shows that non-operatic singing styles and the development of extended and experimental vocal techniques and styles are important features of new music theater.
This chapter discusses Songspiel and vaudeville, show music, and other popular musical theater forms; Kurt Weill in Europe and Kurt Weill in America; “theater opera” on Broadway in the 1930s and '40s starting with the Thomson/Stein 4 Saints in 3 Acts and continuing with the work of Weill, Gershwin, Britten, Menotti, Rodgers & Hart and Rodgers & Hammerstein. The American works of Weill are discussed including Love Life and the so-called concept musical with its long range influence on Blitzstein, Bernstein, William Bolcom, Anthony Davis, and others, including many pop and jazz musicians. The Kurt Weill influence was brought back to Europe by Robert Wilson and Tom Waits in their Black Rider. Limited European influence can also be traced in the work of East German composers, Henze, the Vienna group around Kurt Schwertsik and HK Gruber, Heiner Goebbels, and Christoph Marthaler.
This chapter discusses certain forms of music theater, particularly in the United States and in France dominated by stage directors or choreographers acting as auteurs (rather than composers). It considers how much experimental theater has evolved towards the condition of music theater over the years; the term melodrama — originally a spoken or declaimed theater accompanied by continuous music — and many modern examples found in the work of Schoenberg, Cage and others; and other forms of in-between art involving jazz, percussion, and noise.
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