Drawing attention to the significant: exploring the functions of music in The Overcoat (1998)

Abstract

The Overcoat (1998) is a music theatre piece created by The Clod Ensemble and based on a short story by Nikolai Gogol. Peter Brooks refers to Gogol as one of a group of social melodramatists whose works include a dual engagement with the representation of man's social existence, the way he lives in the ordinary, and with the moral drama implicated by and in his existence (Brooks 1976: 22). Brooks speaks of encounters that matter and drawing attention to the significant. This article explores how music is used to draw attention to the significant in this work in order to highlight some of the functions of music in a work of music theatre. The aim of the authors of The Overcoat was to create a piece in which music and drama are integrated. This can be seen in the atmospheric creation of mood, the pacing of scenes, the depiction of characters through thematic development and culturally recognizable musical signifiers and genres. The effect of all these is that characterizations created visually are fleshed out through illustrative music, actions are supported by programmatic music. However, it is the presentation of contrapuntal imagery that allows narrative voices to be read; the moments of unexpected dissonance or counterpoint between image and sound, or of intra-textual reference, create moments of black comedy and the moments of greatest significance that are most open to interpretation.