Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-Garde and Postdramatic Theatre by Ovadija Mladen;
Author:Ovadija, Mladen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
THE ART OF NOISES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY MUSIC AND PERFORMANCE ART
The exploration of the âunsynthesizable complexity of sound as artistic material, which was started by Russolo, changed the contemporary approach to the relationship between music and the performing arts. Erik Salzman and Thomas Desi, in their 2008 book The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body, proposed an alternative to the customary critical treatment of opera and musical comedy. For them, the most recent music theatre âcame to designate a kind of instrumental or instrumental/vocal avant-garde performance associated with composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagelâ¦[It] is music driven (i.e., decisively linked to musical timing and organization) where, at the very least, music, language, vocalization, and physical movement exist, interact, or stand side by side, in some kind of equality.â36 No longer a music drama that by means of music enhances a dramaturgy of plot and character, a new music theatre encompasses all elements of stage and performance. Their reasoning is similar to Hans-Thies Lehmann's call for a postdramatic theatre that operates with a stage/scene dynamic (in the case of music theatre primarily defined by sound) as a substitute for dramatic (or operatic) development. The postdramatic and new music theatre intentionally blur the distinction between dramaticity (a way of setting up a conflict) and theatricality (a manner of using the stage), following the trend that Patrice Pavis has recognized as a legacy of the avant-garde.
The new music theatre created in the tradition of Russolo, Varèse, and Cage takes all existing sound as musical. It counts on sound as an element of stage performance and cherishes the achievements of the historical avant-garde's sound poetry and de-semiotization of words. To illustrate this trend, Salzman and Desi discuss the arbitrary word play in Wilson and Glass's Einstein on the Beach and the oral rendition of language as pure sound in Kurt Schwitters's Ursonate. The authors also find many features of the new music theatre in the works of Christoph Marthaler, Heiner Goebbels, Jan Fabre, and other proponents of a postdramatic mise en scène, musicalization, and the aural â not necessarily only musical â structure of theatre. Clearly, Salzman and Desi's ideas go far beyond the subject matter of musicals and operas, and converge with the conceptualization of aurality in postdramatic theatre.
Russolo's revolutionary creation of noise-music continued in a series of avant-garde endeavours in the field of mechanical sound and machine music. Charles Bérard's Symphonie des forces mécaniques (1908), however, was composed before Russolo first addressed the musicalization of noise. It was a piece that combined sounds of engines, whistles, sirens, and electrical rings together with music from traditional instruments. Bérard later conceived a system of recorded noises and participated in the orchestration of sound for the Parisian performance of L'Angoisse des machines by Futurist Ruggero Vasari.
The machine music and noise vocalizations that were part of Italian synthetic theatre took on a different form in the Futurist and leftist avant-garde works of Russia. In the 1920s, Nikolai Foregger explored an original system of physical movement at his Moscow Theatre Workshop, Mastfor.
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