17522

Noise, Politics, and Media: Current Trends in Contemporary Music Theatre (with excursion)

João Cardante Romão

Kommentar

This seminar is organized around the Münchener Biennale - Festival für Neues Musiktheater, which we will attend from June 4-8. In addition to seeing many of the new productions being premiered at the festival, we will have the opportunity to interact with dramaturges, composers, musicians, and festival curators at a series of events organized by the festival especially for us and other university classes from all across the German-speaking countries. In the six weeks leading up to the excursion, we will discuss some of the most significant literature on music theater and study some of the best-known pieces in the genre, from the instrumental theater of Mauricio Kagel or Carola Bauckholt to the visible music of Dieter Schnebel or the political theater of Luigi Nono, to name just a few. We will also explore some examples of other contemporary approaches to music theater that use adapted musical instruments or live electronics generated by artificial intelligence, or that address current political issues in our society, such as climate change, patriarchy, and colonialism. Music theater as a genre or concept emerged on the artistic scene after 1945 with the promise of being a space for experimentation within the scenic arts, as a reaction to the operatic canon that still largely dominates the programming of opera houses across Europe. Defining what new music theater is might be tricky. Hermann Danuser, for example, proposed the term "Scenic Composition" (1984), which only gained some traction in German-speaking musicology, which used it as an umbrella term for a particular manifestation of music theater that emerged from the avant-garde artistic experiments of the 1960s, such as Fluxus and the Theater of the Absurd. Recently, Matthias Rebstock, who notes the more nuanced manifestations of contemporary music theater beyond the German context, has stated that "contemporary, independent music theater is nothing less than a kaleidoscope of highly diverse forms and approaches.” (2020: 17). In this seminar, we will explore many of these approaches and focus on the challenges that music theater poses to preconceived notions of music by thinking about the role of noise in music composition and dramaturgy, as well as broader processes that value interdisciplinary and intermediality, collective artistic production, and artists' political engagement and positioning. Schließen