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WiSe 23/24: Absurd Music: Music Theatre around 1960

João Cardante Romão

Kommentar

The Twentieth Century has been accurately described as the “Age of Extremes” (Hobsbawm 1994). One of the main reasons for such consideration is certainly the overwhelming depth of violence and destruction that people experienced during this period. Two world wars, the rise of fascisms and the Holocaust, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are only a few of the most widely known examples of what must have felt like a “long historical moment of perpetually imminent mass violence and fatality” (Steege 2020: 337). Such zeitgeist considerations will be our compass as we approach the kinds of artistic practices and aesthetics that we will focus on in this seminar. These can be broadly understood under the umbrella term “anti-art.” To some artists, particularly in Central Europe and North America, questioning the meaning of art in society and expressing non-sense or irrationality seemed the most natural reaction to the destruction provoked by modern capitalist societies. Artistic movements like Dadaism or Fluxus, just to mention two of the most widespread anti-art movements, emerged as reactions to such “spirit of the time,” as artists such as André Breton or John Cage reject concepts such as logic, reason, or aestheticism and embraced the aesthetics of the artistic process over the (finished) work of art. The art is often interdisciplinary and collaborative, drawing on collages and challenging notions of authorship and authority.

In this seminar, our focus will be on a few case studies that draw on one of the many aesthetics influenced by such anti-art movements, the theater of the absurd. The case studies are chosen to show how absurdist concepts and practices have been received by composers. In this sense, we will analyze strategies for representing the meaningless existence of humanity or the absurdity of the routinization of everyday life that have been developed by composers and other artists. Examples include a comparison of John Cage's Theatre Piece No. 1 (1952) with Karlheinz Stockhausen's Originale (1960), an analysis and comparison of Samuel Beckett's Quadrat I+II (1980) with Mauricio Kagel's pas de cinq (1965) and Staatstheater (1967-70), and an analysis of György Kurtág's operatic interpretation of Samuel Beckett's Fin de partie (2018).

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