Jennifer Walshe on Opera, Music Theater, and Collaboration: Interview by Elaine Fitz Gibbon

“Does Anybody Have A Map?”: The Impact of “Virtual Broadway” on Musical Theater Composition

In countries with a high level of urbanised multiculturalism and migration density, such as Netherlands and Germany, new forms of music theatre are emerging that include different communities and social groups. One such development is and music theatre produced for, by and with people from communities with a migration background.1Certainly, has a long tradition of representing the Turk (more precisely, Ottoman) and other related Eastern identities on stage, in so-called Turkenopern2 (or operas) mostly with exotic/Orientalist and racist undertones. The genre was often exercised to expose and, thereby, to reconfirm values. Musically, term a la Turca came to denote a wrong-note-style, bending or breaking established rules in classical music, thereby questioning those same values in listening experience. With presence of artists with an ethnically background in a second and third generation after arrival of guest worker generation, genre of Turkish opera is taking new forms, meanings and expressions, as well as audiences. Remarkably, this newly emerging body of work-which I describe as post-migrant after a successful coining by Shermin Langhoff3 in Berlin scene- represents first involvement that any of themselves have had with either content of Turkish opera or its production process. This causes us to question counteractive and, perhaps, self-orientalising tendencies of operatic past, tendencies which need historicising.Central to my argument is how music works as point of access to and vehicle of social history in these performances, negotiating socio-cultural issues, among others, of cultural memory, tradition and experience of modern subjectivity as constitutive of postmigrant identity in twenty-first century. Through adaptation of music theatre conventions such as those of opera, with its specific history in Western Europe, these performances are also produced for local audience members with help of more institutionalised music theatre ensembles and production houses. The production of these works often fulfil demand to be pedagogical and reflective of cultural diversity as well as engender cultural and political education in widest sense, involving larger audiences and generations. Therefore, historical contextualisation of this new trend needs to encompass a heterogeneous group of listeners in auditorium. This would need to take account of current individual listening experiences within a larger framework of emancipation processes of post-migration and multiculturality, which also necessitate a broader concept of aurality.I will be referring to two productions as illustrations of this trend, both produced in 2010: Lege Wieg / Bo§ Be§ik, produced by Korean composer Seung-Ah Oh and Dutch director Cilia Hogerzeil in Netherlands, and Tango Turk, produced by composer Sinem Altan (from Ankara) and Dutch director Lotte De Beer in Germany. The former is a new production in post-Wagnerian vein by a Dutch small-scale music theatre company in Dordrecht, Hollands Diep, in collaboration with VocaalLAB in Zaandam (both are production houses for experimental music theatre, subsidised by Netherlands Fund for Performing Arts, also known as NFPK+). The production came about after a series of workshops with and Dutch women from community in Dordrecht, who formed chorus in performance. The was staged at Het Energiehuis in Dordrecht, which is a former power plant on an old industrial site in city. The latter, on other hand, is a post-dramatic music (or even musical) theatre piece staged in Neukollner Oper in Berlin, which is situated in centre of a highly concentrated multicultural part of city. Both performances blur traditional boundaries between music theatre and today, whilst incorporating and European musical cultures. …

Name: Claudia Hansen Main Subject: T.I.M.E. Research Coaches: Ines van der Scheer and Arnold Marinissen Title of Research: What is Music Theater? (A definition by a staging musician.) Research Question: What is the difference between Music Theater – the modern performance art form and sub-genre of Music Theater – and other hybrid art forms that include musical and theatrical elements grouped under the hypernym ‘Music Theater’? And, is it possible to construct a definition for Music Theater? Research Process: I used the word ‘music theater’ to describe the hypernym and the word ‘Music Theater’ to describe the subgenre. First, I researched the history and the evolution of the tendencies in Music Theater as hypernym genre and made a historical overview from the beginning of Music Theater up until the emergence of the subgenre ‘Music Theater’. I focused on the development of Music Theater as a subgenre. In order to find out what the essence of Music Theater is, I analyzed the three major components of Music Theater. I made an overview of challenges that a creator faces in Music Theater and proposed several solutions, which are based on reasoning and existing performances. I tried to see as many performances as possible, which in the widest sense could be considered to be Music Theater, in order to get a wide overview of present day streams and chose six performances that in my opinion are perfect examples to illustrate my concept of Music Theater, and analyzed the various components of these works (such as music, visuals and text) in detail. Finally, I worked towards a new definition of Music Theater. Summary of Results: Music Theater is a heterogeneous but symbiotic performance genre, which is constructed with a multitude of art forms. The name might suggest that the main focus lies on music and theater. However, any existing art form can be included. The art forms can be divided into three major categories called components: music, theater and visuals. Each art form is equally important as Music Theater is based on the structural equality of voices. Music Theater is constructed by first distilling four innate languages out of the art forms and then applying them to either the same art form or inducing them into another art form: musical language, verbal language, body language and visual language. Each language element has a valuable existence of its own and is an autonomous element of the performance that adds a particular atmosphere to the whole picture. The languages are either layered in the performance or the aspects of the performance, such as the protagonists (human or material) or the art forms themselves. Music Theater is a performance genre that rather focuses on the impact that it has on the audience than on the compositional art forms. It is outcome-based and not medium-based. This creates space for each audience member to have a completely personal experience and interpretation of the Music Theater performance.

In general, despite the grandiose epochal historical upheavals in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, nevertheless, music theatre found itself in quite favorable conditions with a flexible cultural policy, with an inherent openness to new national phenomena. The circumstances were other in Ukrainian music and theatre art. This is especially noticeable where the policy of ideological centrism and the totalitarian control dominated too much in music with the imposing on composers such the creative method as socialist realism. So every experienced researcher is well aware of the standpoint of the aesthetics of socialist realism in the mid-20th century with ideological accusations of the ideas of bourgeois music culture of Western Europe. Thus, until recently, it was not possible to consider in details the issue of international contiguities between Ukrainian music Avant-garde of the 1900s and European musical theatre in Expressionism trends due to ideological restrictions in scientific research. The relevance of the study. In contemporary musicologists thinking there remains the problem of an insufficient of overcoming the inertia of post-socialist ideological dogmas in as consequences from the previous period of Ukrainian music historiography. The problem of the lack of deep study and reassessment of the music-art processes taking place in the Ukrainian music Avant-garde theatre at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries continues to exist. The purpose of the paper is desire to grow the researching interest to international contiguities between traditions of Ukrainian music-and-drama theatre, in particular, thanks to Borys Lyatoshinskiy’s art creativity, and European music expressionism by A. Schoenberg and A. Berg. It examines the influence of the musical-theoretical views of representatives of the New (Second) Viennese School (Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg) on Ukrainian drama theatre (“Berezil” by Les' Kurbas) through the music activities of Borys Lyatoshinskiy as the representative of Ukrainian Avant-garde of the first quarter of the 1900s. The research methodology included: methods of biographical analysis (in the case of studying the creativity of personalities such as Arnold Schoenberg, Borys Lyatoshinskiy, Les' Kurbas), comparative studies (in analysis between the intercultural national Ukrainian music theatre and traditions expressionism by New-Viennese), and critical thinking methods (in the reassessment of the meanings of the aesthetics standpoints of previous era).

Contents: Introduction Part I Terms and Topics: Resfacta and Cantare Super Librum, Margaret Bent On compositional process in the 15th century, Bonnie J. Blackburn On diminution and proportion in 15th-century music theory, Ruth I. DeFord Is mode real? Pietro Aron, the octenary system, and polyphony, Harold Powers Renaissance modal theory: theoretical, compositional, and editorial perspectives, Cristle Collins Judd. Part II Influences and Authorities: Renaissance music theory as literature: on reading the Proportionale Musices of Iohannes Tinctoris, Ronald Woodley Aristoxenus redeemed in the Renaissance, Claude V. Palisca Modes and planetary song: the musical alliance of ethics and cosmology, Gary Tomlinson Defending the Dodecachordon: ideological currents in Glareana (TM)s modal theory, Sarah Fuller Heinrich Glarean reading and editing Boethius, Inga Mai Groote. Part III Life and Works of Individual Theorists: The tradition and science: the Istitutioni harmoniche of Gioseffo Zarlino, Paolo da Col Introduction, Maria R. Maniates. Part IV National Traditions and Dissemination: Lute tablature instructions in Italy: a survey of the regole from 1507 to 1759, Dinko Fabris Deutsche Musiktheorie im 16.Jahrundert: Geistes- und institutionsgeschichtliche Grundlagen, Klaus Wolfgang NiemA ller You can tell a book by its cover: reflections on format in English music 'theory', Jessie Ann Owens La diffusion de textes thA(c)oriques franA ais A la renaissance, Philippe Vendrix Music and music theory in the universities of Central Europe during the 15th century, Tom R. Ward The dissemination and use of European music books in early modern Asia, David R.M. Irving Name index.

Reviewed by: Music Theory and Analysis (MTA) International Journal of the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theoryed. by Pieter Bergé, Steven Vande Moortele, and Nathan J. Martin Matthew Bribitzer-Stull Music Theory and Analysis (MTA) International Journal of the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory. Edited by Pieter Bergé, Steven Vande Moortele, and Nathan J. Martin. Published bi-annually. Vol 1, Issue 1(September 2014). ISSN: 2295-5917 (print) / ISSN: 2295-5925 (online). Print-only subscriptions are not offered. Pricing varies based on institutional or individual subscriptions and discounts are available for members of the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory and for literary agents. Inquiries or submissions: Music Theory & Analysis, Leuven University Press, Minderbroedersstraat 4, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. Email: mta@lup.be. As a music theorist writing a review for a journal read largely by music librarians, I fear abrogating the first dictum of all effective communication: know your audience. For that reason, I will strive to avoid analytic jargon and theoretic hypothesizing as much as possible, viciously redacting terms like Auskompenierung, “Klumpenhouwer Networks,” and “medial caesura,” wherever I might be tempted to use them, in favor of articulating how the first issue of the Music Theory and Analysis International Journal of the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory(herein MTA) fits into the larger universe of English-language music-theory journals and—most importantly—whether or not it is the best interests of inquiring music librarians to scrape together the dregs of the acquisition budget to subscribe to yet another specialist publication. I suspect if you have made it this far into my review, then you might be wondering, “Is the successor to the Dutch Journal of Music Theory( Tijdschrift voor Muzietheorie) worth purchasing?” My answer, in a word, is “yes.” “Yes,” that is, if your library serves any population of faculty, students, musicians, or community members with an interest (professional or otherwise) in music theory and analysis. While any self-respecting music library will carry top-tier titles like Music Theory Spectrum, The Journal of Music Theory, and Music Theory Analysis, musicologists in general (and music theorists, specifically) publish analytic work in a wide variety of places. Those same populations often seek to read the work of their peers (and assign it to their students), so it’s important to know which journals will deliver the most bang for the buck. Simply put, I expect MTAto provide a good return on investment. First, the preliminaries. This is a peer-reviewed journal with an international editorship, advisory board, list of contributors, and intended audience. Its focus—music theory and analysis—is evident in the title. Unlike many other similar journals, however, MTAattempts something novel: fostering discussion and interaction between scholars and musicians working both in North America and in Europe. Said discussion and interaction is long overdue, for ever since the middle of the twentieth century North America and England (and, one might mention, Finland) adopted Viennese theorist Heinrich Schenker as the flag-bearer for tonal analysis, while Germany remained wedded to the writings of its native son, Hugo Riemann, and other countries like France and Italy reworked time-honored traditions based on practical methods like partimenti. In short, the present day bears witness to a Tower-of-Babel situation in the field, with scholars interested in the same body of musical works often unable or unwilling to understand and value what one another is doing when it comes to theory and analysis. Delving deeper, how does MTApropose to rectify the current state of affairs? Is simply juxtaposing work by scholars trained in different traditions enough to stimulate real dialogue and interaction? Juxtaposition is a starting point, and there have [End Page 196]been plenty of anthologies including works by a variety of scholars publishing on a topic of similar interest that do just that. It seems, however, that this has not been enough to stimulate lasting engagement between diverse approaches. Thus, it is heartening to see that MTA’s editorial board includes well-known scholars from the US, Canada, England, and mainland Europe, many of whom—like Alexander Rehding, John Koslovsky, and Christian Thorau—have established international reputations. More important, the editors of...

Review| December 01 2022 Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music from Earth, by Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music from Earth, by Daniel K. L.Chua and AlexanderRehding. New York: Zone Books, 2021. 271 pp. Neil Lerner Neil Lerner NEIL LERNER’s research and writing involves music in screen media, which includes film music, television music, and video game music. A former editor of the journal American Music and founding editor of the Routledge Music and Screen Media Series, he has also edited Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear (Routledge, 2010) and coedited The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (2016), Music in Video Games: Studying Play (Routledge, 2014), and Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music (Routledge, 2006). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2022) 75 (3): 624–628. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2022.75.3.624 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Neil Lerner; Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music from Earth, by Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2022; 75 (3): 624–628. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2022.75.3.624 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search Of the humanly created objects we have managed to propel far away from our pale blue dot of a planet, none have traveled further than the two Voyager spacecraft probes that were launched in 1977. In addition to their scientific instruments, each probe was fitted with a gold-plated copper record, thirty centimeters in diameter, that was inscribed with instructions for playback by a stylus that was tucked behind it. Prepared over six weeks by a team led by Carl Sagan, the records were intended to introduce humanity to extraterrestrial beings. They contained audio recordings of human greetings in fifty-five languages, thirty-five sounds from the planet, and ninety minutes of music that foregrounded a number of European and US styles while also including a representative sampling from around the globe. There were also 115 sonified images depicting human activity and written introductions from US congresspersons and President Jimmy Carter. Cast into... You do not currently have access to this content.

Closed Quotient and Spectral Measures of Female Adolescent Singers in Different Singing Styles

SummaryBased on research identifying relations between math and music, we aimed to identify the group of cognitive and affective factors related to math and music theory that best explained undergraduate music theory achievement. Using dominance analysis, we predicted the music theory course grades of 230 undergraduate music majors. Potential predictors were narrowed from measures of knowledge, aptitude, experience, confidence, and anxiety in both music theory and math as well as spatial skills and reading test scores. Results suggested that ACT math scores and music theory confidence were important predictors for Music Theories I and II grades. Music Theory I was also predicted by aptitude‐based music theory skills, and Music Theory II was also predicted by math course experience. These findings provide evidence for a relation between math and music theory and support the use of several readily available measures for college‐level music instructors to identify students who may struggle in music theory.

Documentary qualities in the art of music are among of the bright, interesting and little researched phenomena of modernity. Having been generated in the sphere of cinema and drama theater, the present tendency also became circulated in the sphere of musical theater. The introduction of documentary innovative materials – verbal and audio – into the artistic context of works written in the opera genre substantially transformed the traditional structure of musical performance. The article ascertains that the source of such types of experimental attempts was the elaboration of the avant-garde dramatic theater, whose producers made broad use of the techniques of performative art. This became the artistic orientation for documentary musical theater. Analysis of the stage endeavors of theatrical producers Erwin Piscator, Giorgio Strehler, Andrei Serban and Peter Sellars has made it possible to bring to light the vectors of impact of avant-garde theater on the musical documentary theater, which broadly applied the principles of performativity. Accentuation is made of the role of contemporary computer technologies, which gave the opportunities to producers and composers to obtain an instrumentarium that is broad in its artistic resources and inclination towards synthesis, to realize the performative forms of presentation of musical theater. The new features include minimalistic scenography, political allusions, the extension of time and space, and special forms of interaction with the audience. Their appropriation by musical documentary theater proves the force of impact of avant-garde artistic practices, which have greatly transformed opera traditions.

The combination of scenic action and music, called "musical theatre", corresponds to a technique previously used in the History of Music by composers such as Satie and Debussy. In turn, the concept of "instrumental theatre" emerges as a concept where musicians assume the role of actors while playing. In this field, Mauricio Kagel assumes himself as one of the composers who most explored the aspects of staging allied to musical performance, attributing to the interpreter also actor functions, such as: adopting certain facial expressions while playing, entering the stage in a particular way, interact physically with other artists, among others. The research method used in this article it was based on analysis and performance of the work Episoden Figuren, through the audition, experience and observation with others interpreters and musicians and colleting relevant literature to understand the composer points of view.

This article presents historical reflections on relations between music theory and musicology in Norway. More specifically, it asks two questions: What roles has music theory played in musicology in Norway (i.e., as part of musicology education and research)? To what extent has music theory been considered as musicology in Norway (i.e., existing as a distinct subdiscipline of research)? Taking these questions as its point of departure, the article presents the first discussion of the broad intertwining of the histories of music theory and musicology in Norway. It argues that there long has been a shared (regulative) music theory discourse between conservatory education and university musicology education. The picture is more complex regarding music theory in/as musicology research. Music theory in Norway has existed uneasily between being an established practical-pedagogical field (in both conservatory and university contexts) and having a somewhat unclear position within musicology research. There are, however, recent tendencies that indicate a stronger focus on music theory research in Norway, including closer contact with the established international (primarily Anglo-American) field of academic music theory.

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the creation and dissemination of access to musical theatre through digital technologies, including the internet, social media, streaming services, and satellite radio, has amplified the perception that Broadway and its audiences’ experiences of its content are more mediated than ever before. While this digital mass mediation of musical theatre has expanded the genre’s reach and audiences’ experiences of it in a contemporary media landscape, this digital revolution is just the latest in a continuum of the relationship between new media technologies and musical theatre. As with the introduction of previous technologies, rather than diminishing the aura of these shows as singular, ephemeral events, digital mediation has increased audience engagement and created experiences to which audiences can return to again and again. In this chapter, I offer an overview of mediated experiences across a variety of technologies in musical theatre in order to demonstrate the ways in which these media continue to inform how audiences understand and interact with musical theatre in live performance and through mediated experiences. Ultimately, in looking at how musical theatre has been influenced by media technologies, I explore the questions of what counts as musical theatre and where, with respect to its technologies, musical theatre is.

Music theory has acquired a unique position in between many fields, most notably composition, historical and systematic musicology and music pedagogy. Motivated by the topic “music theory and interdisciplinarity”, this essay explores the fields spanned by today’s music theory in seven short chapters. The first chapter describes changes of the discipline in German-speaking countries since the 1960s and its development from a simple synonym of practical harmony and a propedeutic means for music analysis to a postmodern, rich and scholarly ambitous field that can hardly be reduced to a common denominator. In the second chapter the author, drawing on Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, argues that music theory should not limit itself to purely “technical” issues, but must also address emotional or expectational realms of musical meaning. The third chapter further explores this point by discussing the opposition between musical theory and practice, suggesting that music theory indeed has the potential to let these two poles stimulate one another. The same is true for the often debated divide between “artistic” and “scholarly” aspects of music theory, explored in the fourth chapter: They are not mutually exclusive, but rather always have influenced each other, as evidenced by eighteenth-century treatises. Exchange with related disciplines such as music psychology has increased since the 1960s, as chapter five summarizes, although the relationship between music theory and musicology sometimes remains problematic. In the sixth chapter, a short analytical approach to four examples from the standard repertoire (Schubert, Bach, Brahms, Mozart) attempt to demonstrate the potential of specifically music-theoretical viewpoints. The final section advocates the strengthening of a specific profile for music theory: The liberation from dogmatic thought and systematic rigour should not lead us to overstretch music-theoretical questions.

The ultimate act of musical creation is the auditory-mental activity by which alone a musical identity is brought into being, in the only way in which, epistemically speaking, it has being: as a consciously experienced determinate feel; that is, as an awareness-state of the whole perceptual consciousness of some one experiencing person, an awareness-state which is cognized by that person as a distinct experienced-sound entity within a certain range of such entities, and which is retrievable in principle and therefore in principle -though not necessarily in practice intersubjectively sharable. Hence 'musical properties' can be identified as consequential resultants of the interactions of acoustic signals with temporally bounded acts of attribution, extending from the attribution to a given acousticalsignal-span of the 'property' of being music, which in turn evokes an embedded set of dispositions to attribute to that acoustical-signal-span characteristics within a certain determinate range. Such music-attributive acts may be either consciously volitional or functionally autonomic. In either case, the configurations of the psycho-energetic attributing process, by which alone the stimuli made available by raw acoustic signals are transformed into experienced-music entities,. are the most intelligible denotata of such a [verbal] concept as 'music theory' Each such 'music theory', like each music-entity created by its operation, is, by this description, explicitly