Touch-less: Wearable music and the score-theatre

Abstract

Abstract This article reflects on the idea of the music score as a wearable theatrical prop, an idea able both to envisage theatrical gestures as the outgrowth of music notation and epitomize the intangibility of music by means of ‘ostented’ dramaturgical objects. Through an exploration of Touch-less: Wearable Graphic Scores for One Acting Singer, a self-composed work, this article discusses the compositional and aesthetic processes that emerge from the combination of a graphically notated score and the idea of wearable-score-prop within the framework of new music theatre, a combination that eventually leads toward an appreciation of the score-theatre. The discussion takes into consideration relevant examples and concepts put forward by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel and Sylvano Bussotti. Similarly, it proposes connections between the idea of score-prop and the aesthetic properties of the calligram.