Pieter Verstraete
Abstract
(for the IFTR/FIRT Music Theatre Working Group, 14-17 July 2009, Lisbon: Music Theatre Research Status Quo: Paradigms and New Perspectives)
The complex developments of contemporary music theatre make it significant to look at how this continuously redefining and ‘becoming’ art form addresses present-day audiences, specifically in what it does to the listener. In my PhD research (defended in June 2009), I offer a conceptual framework for the analysis of music theatre that addresses the listener by offering an excess of intensities and potential meanings through music. I argue that this excess produces an effect of ‘auditory distress’ on the listener, which gives rise to a conceptual basis for a new approach to music theatre.
In the present paper, I explain and elaborate on the main thesis of this newly
developed approach: Sound – including music or any other sound experience
in the theatre –produces a level of auditory distress. This distress calls
for a response in the listener with which she or he tries to control the auditory
distress. I argue that this reaction forms the basis of each auditory perception.
In the listener’s response, then, processes of signification (like narrativisation)
play a considerable role. As such, perception and signification cannot be understood
as separate from each other. I propose therefore to carefully investigate the
responses of the listener to auditory distress in different music theatre performances.
Among those responses, I deduce three specific types: the modes of listening,
narrativisation and auditory imagination. Once a response is established and
conceptualised, I focus specifically at how this response contributes to meaningful
listening experiences in the theatre. I thereby assert that the listener’s
response is key to an understanding of what is at stake in these music theatre
performances, in particular in the ways they produce meaning.
My hypothesis that auditory distress always plays a significant role in how
we experience music theatre (or any operatic form for that matter) also sheds
light on the tradition of music theatre. Traditional opera or music drama, especially
in the vein of Wagner’s model of the Gesamtkunstwerk, was construed in
such a way that it did not confront the listener with an awareness of the distress
created by the music. Rather, the listener’s auditory experience was supporting
a narrative, a dramatic action, a sense of coherency or synthesis between the
different elements, etc. which would channel the distress and make it unperceived
as such. The music theatre I discuss in this paper particularly disrupts the
evident mechanisms that would compensate the auditory distress. In this way,
this music theatre highlights particular qualities in the sound or music that
cause awareness for the distress in listening. This awareness, in turn, gives
rise to a mode of relating and positioning of the spectator as listening subject.
I will support these claims by means of a case study of The Wooster Group’s
recent music drama interpretation of Francesco Cavalli’s La Didone (2007-2009),
in which the disturbing qualities of sound are highlighted through juxtaposition
and excess.
Pieter Verstraete holds a PhD in Theatre Studies
from the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. His
research employs an interdisciplinary approach to investigate theories of sound,
the act of listening and aurality in relation to contemporary music theatre.
He has published articles on theatre, music theatre, opera, installation art
and interactive dance in journals, such as De Scène, Urbanmag, E-View,
Etcetera, De Theatermaker, and in books, such as Theater & Technologie
(Theater Instituut Nederland, 2006), Performing the Matrix (Epodium,
2008) and Sonic Mediations (Cambridge
Scholars Press, 2008). His newest book, The Frequency of
Imagination (see cover image above) has just been published and can be
purchased through the author (pieter_verstraete at hotmail.com).
(published here with kind permission of the author)
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Texte und Kommentare zum Labor 2009 werden hier veröffentlicht
Texts and commentaries on the 2009 lab and related research subjects will be published here.