Heft 10

Oper_Musik_Theater

August 2021

ISSN 2191-253X

by Stefan Drees

Seit geraumer Zeit lässt sich in der Neue-Musik-Szene ein verstärktes Interesse an den Bedingungen und Möglichkeiten musiktheatraler Ausdrucksformen erkennen, dem auf musik- und theaterwissenschaftlicher Seite eine intensivierte theoretische Auseinandersetzung entspricht.

by Hauke Berheide & Amy Stebbins

In this article, German composer Hauke Berheide and US-American director/librettist Amy Stebbins propose an aesthetics of ‘ambivalent engagement’ as a conceptual framework for constructing narratives in contemporary opera and seek to demonstrate opera’s unique potential to address present-day issues.

by Elisabeth van Treeck & Sid Wolters-Tiedge

The tenth issue of ACT–Journal for Music and Performance is dedicated to current trends in contemporary western opera and music theatre. What does it actually mean to compose or create an opera or music theatre nowadays? What structures, forms, and aesthetics can we observe? Can we possibly describe some sort of general tendencies within these many different aesthetic forms of expression? And how can we grasp all of this from a scholarly perspective?

by David Roesner

Attending the theatre – be it to see drama, music-theatre, dance or any other mode of performance – we enter into a complex and ‘messy’ process of making sense of what we see, hear, feel and think. "Sensemaking" (Weick) is not offered as a new method of performance analysis per se but suggested as an overall way of looking at, thinking about, and accounting for how we attend the theatre.

by Rasmus Nordholt-Frieling

Der Beitrag geht der Frage der Musikalität theatraler Gefüge nach. Musikalität soll als eine spezifische, sich historisch verändernde relationale Bezogenheit begriffen werden, die der Denk- und Beschreibbar-Machung auch nicht vornehmlich klanglicher Praktiken dienen kann. 

by James Maher

Ritualised music theatre emerged from the music theatre developments of the 1960s. According to the musicologist Anthony Sheppard (2001), within ritualised music theatre, composers draw upon materials derived from specific "cultural, ritual or religious sources" and adapt them compositionally within dramaturgical narratives.

by Litha Efthymiou & Martin Scheuregger

A common feature of contemporary music theatre is that it is situated across various disciplinary boundaries, often leading to a complex layering of music with other artistic forms, such as theatre, text, film, and movement. In some cases, such interdisciplinarity has led creators to explore spaces beyond traditional theatrical settings, such that performance location becomes an important and intrinsic feature of a work’s multimodal fabric.

by Jane Forner

This article argues that operatic attention to myth has evolved in new directions in recent years, in counterpoint to a trend for representing recent historical and celebrity narratives on stage. I analyze Péter Eötvös’s opera Paradise Reloaded (Lilith) as an example of composers engaging ‘distant pasts’ as a vehicle to interrogate political presents.

by Carmen Noheda

This study discusses the creative process of La ciudad de las mentiras (City of Lies), music theatre co-authored by the composer Elena Mendoza and the stage director Matthias Rebstock. In 2017, Gerard Mortier commissioned City of Lies as the first work of music theatre that the Teatro Real in Madrid would premiere in its 200-year history.