The frequency of imagination : auditory distress and aurality in contemporary music theatre (original) (raw)
2021
Sloboda and Juslin (2010: 74) describe emotions as ‘relatively brief, intense, and rapidly changing responses to potentially important events’. However, when observing music theatre performance, it can be difficult for audiences to assimilate their emotional responses in the moment. These emotions may be subjective depending on individuals’ history and past experiences. This research aims to explore how orchestration can help direct audiences towards the composer’s desired emotional responses or how it can be left deliberately ambiguous allowing the audience to decide on the emotion for themselves. This body of research aims to investigate the psychology of music and music theatre separately and then will bring the two disciplines together in an effort to elucidate the emotional psychological impact of orchestration aesthetics within the music theatre art form. This report explores current literature and demonstrates gaps in the field and how further research would benefit the development of new music theatre and work. It will also aim to understand whether certain musical aesthetics might be off-putting or alienating to audiences, creating an emotional barrier to understanding, and preventing engagement. The report concludes that there is a need for more academic attention and a clearer understanding as to what artists can do to fully engage audiences and safeguard the art form for the future. Since the 1960s, music theatre has become a vehicle for expressionism, experimentalism and politicalism. This research project aims to take a step towards elucidating the connections between instrumental and orchestration choices made by music theatre composers and the effects they have on a modern audience, to identify key indexes which may indicate the art form’s failure to capture audience imaginations. A mixed methods approach was selected for this research, drawing inspiration from social science experiments, psychological experiments and previous musical experiments such as those carried out by Tim Coker in 2005/2006. By taking these methods and expanding upon them, it will be easier to develop an understanding of the state of the art, audience perception of the artform and their emotional responses. This research has so far demonstrated that audiences have a decent perception of instrumentation in music theatre, but this is mostly demonstrated when their attention is brought to it. Further research is required to fully understand how instrumentation and emotion are linked on an emotional-psychological level.
'Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves'
2015
The question of attention in theatre remains relatively unexplored. In redressing this, Theatre and Aural Attention investigates what it is to attend theatre by means of listening. Focussing on four core aural phenomena in theatre - noise, designed sound, silence, and immersion - George Home-Cook concludes that theatrical listening involves paying attention to atmospheres. Such matters are examined as they have arisen in some of the most sophisticated works of theatre sound design of recent years, including Sound & Fury's Kursk, Romeo Castellucci's Purgatorio, Complicite's Shun-kin and Robert Lepage's Lipsynch. In suggesting how theatre works to direct the audience's aural attention, the book also carries out an important enquiry into radio drama (Beckett's All That Fall, Embers, and Pinter's A Slight Ache). This ground-breaking study will be of interest to drama students, sound theorists, practitioner-researchers, performance philosophers, and to anyone curious to explore what it means to attend theatre.
Creating for the Stage and Other Spaces: Questioning Practices and Theories, 2021
The article focusses on the concept of music performativity in reference to works of three European composers and theatre directors: Georges Aperghis, Niels Rønsholdt and Wojtek Blecharz. All are representatives of ‘the new music theatre’ which can be defined by the negation of traditional opera and musical (Salzman, Desi, 2008). In opposition to the constant and unchanging hierarchy of devices presented in traditional opera, the new model of music performance is based on questioning established patterns and perpetual testing of new solutions in the field of shaping the relationship between music and other spheres of performance. The composing and staging strategies of Georges Aperghis, Niels Rønsholdt and Wojtek Blecharz consistently develop the concept of music performativity which evokes the idea of Fluxus „visual music” – music which is not only „to be heard” but also „to be seen”. Aperghis creates a type of automated theatre, where electronic devices cooperate with actors and their voices, creating a new model of „musical assemblage”. Niels Rønsholdt specialises in chamber operas and music installations in which viewers are meant to be active participants, not only observers. Theatrical projects of Wojtek Blecharz explore the relationship between body and sound in a wide and multi-level way, paying attention to the audience’s experience. The main purpose of the article is to show the process of sound autonomisation as well as to present various models of music performativity in contemporary European theatre. Simultaneously, the author intends to retrace the aesthetic influences, affinities and oppositions between these three examples of experimental music theatre.
Approaches Towards Elucidating Emotional Responses to Music Theatre
The Open Review , 2022
As a result of recent publications in the field of music theatre there has been a resurgence of interest in this highly misunderstood art form. This paper discusses the methodology and results from an online survey which investigated emotional responses to orchestration1 and instrumental aesthetics in contemporary music theatre. This report summarises the current literature, demonstrates gaps in the field, and suggests how further research may benefit the development of new music theatre. The research tests the hypothesis that music theatre is accidentally alienating to non-familiar audiences because of its complex musical language and perceived associations with opera and the ever-popular Broadway/West End musical. Since the 1960s, music theatre has been used to express artistic experimentalism in music performance. This paper aims to elucidate the connections between the instrumental and orchestration choices made by music theatre composers and the effects they have on a modern audience to identify key indexes which may indicate the art form’s failure to capture audience imaginations or to engage audiences emotionally. This research indicates that audiences generally have a good perception of instrumentation in music theatre. There is also evidence to support the hypothesis that there is a connection between lack of aesthetic appreciation (the admiration of beauty in art) and negative emotional response. However there remains a gap in our understanding of the abstract nature of music theatre, which some audience members struggle to comprehend or engage with emotionally.
Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance, 2019
Sound affects bodies for sound is contagious. Sound’s affective capacities to manipulate bodies is sonic power for in this politics of frequency, sound can be employed to regulate listening bodies and dictate reception. Affective frequencies – their infectious and contagious qualities – are the concern of this chapter which will examine the ways in which sounds are vibrational affects employed in performances as sonic power to, intentionally or otherwise, dramaturgically or incidentally, infect bodies to ‘act’, to move and to dictate expressions of vitality. In musical theatre and intercultural theatre, music and sound are primary actants and fundamental dramaturgical devices integral to the performance modes and to the production of meaning. Critically comparing a musical adaptation and an intercultural variation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the chapter will also explore how affective frequencies move receiving bodies and effect an experiential disruption of signification vis-à-vis an interpretation of Shakespeare’s play.
2017
Sound perception plays an important role in the individuation process, both in the womb and as the sense most directly linked to the speech act. The presence of mechanized noise in urban environments has been criticized both by ecological modernists and adherents of information theory’s emphasis on clear signals and the elimination of noise. This essay rejects these forms of utopianism, as they do not address the quotidian reality of the individual dealing with human resource enforced employee efficiency. Instead a form of individuation enacted by the speech act in a group setting is embraced as an aesthetic form enhanced by the technological sublime, where the presence of noise is a catalyst for remapping quotidian behaviour.
2009
The paper focuses on the element of sound design in theatre and seeks to explore how the concept of theatre itself might get reconfigured through contemporary experiments in sound-centric performance. Sound & Fury is a London-based theatre group that works on ‘developing the sound space of theatre and presenting the audience with new ways of experiencing performance and stories by heightening the aural sense’. (Sound & Fury Website) Through an analysis of their sound-centric performances like War Music and Watery part of the World, the paper addresses the question of whether theatre can exist as an aural experience and whether there can exist a theatre of sounds. By analysing the work of Indian theatre director B.V. Karanth, the paper also seeks to explore the concept of a sound-centric language in theatre. While sound has been an integral constituent of the experience of theatre, it has been peripheral and subordinate to the text, body and spectacle in theatre. While numerous exper...
Pulse, 2022
Performative methodology of the House of Extreme Music Theater led by Croatian, Zagreb-based performing artists Damir Bartol Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo is largely based on the creation, recycling and abundant use of sound objects, deconstruction of voice and text, and collaborations with alternative rock and noise musicians and multimedia artists. But precisely because of its apparently chaotic, noisy manifestation, it is easy to miss the structure and concept that is undoubtedly in the background of every performance. If we take into account the predominance of music and noise in such an open model in terms of genre, it would be appropriate to try to define theoretical and methodological guidelines for its description, which this article will try to do. Observing the work of House of Extreme Music Theater, the following questions arise: How does its “noisy” poetics affect the definition of genre and analytical approaches to it, and, conversely, how does the chosen genre framework affect the status of noise that is produced in the performances of this “theater”? In this sense, the article will refer to the previous theoretical reflections on the House of Extreme Music Theater genre coordinates while trying to expand them with the concepts of independent auditory semiotics and musicalization, closely related to the notion of postdramatic theater as proposed by Hans-Thies Lehmann. Finally, the analysis of the music theater performance Schachtophonia Accenni for Kamov will try to show how the broad and permeable postdramatic determinant shapes the interpretation of noise in theater or noise as theater.
Emotions induced by operatic music: Psychophysiological effects of music, plot, and acting
Brain and Cognition, 2011
Operatic music involves both singing and acting (as well as rich audiovisual background arising from the orchestra and elaborate scenery and costumes) that multiply the mechanisms by which emotions are induced in listeners. The present study investigated the effects of music, plot, and acting performance on emotions induced by opera. There were three experimental conditions: (1) participants listened to a musically complex and dramatically coherent excerpt from Tosca; (2) they read a summary of the plot and listened to the same musical excerpt again; and (3) they re-listened to music while they watched the subtitled film of this acting performance. In addition, a control condition was included, in which an independent sample of participants succesively listened three times to the same musical excerpt. We measured subjective changes using both dimensional, and specific music-induced emotion questionnaires. Cardiovascular, electrodermal, and respiratory responses were also recorded, and the participants kept track of their musical chills. Music listening alone elicited positive emotion and autonomic arousal, seen in faster heart rate, but slower respiration rate and reduced skin conductance. Knowing the (sad) plot while listening to the music a second time reduced positive emotions (peacefulness, joyful activation), and increased negative ones (sadness), while high autonomic arousal was maintained. Watching the acting performance increased emotional arousal and changed its valence again (from less positive/sad to transcendent), in the context of continued high autonomic arousal. The repeated exposure to music did not by itself induce this pattern of modifications. These results indicate that the multiple musical and dramatic means involved in operatic performance specifically contribute to the genesis of musicinduced emotions and their physiological correlates.
Any strictly linear history of visual music might lead to nothing more than the claim that, for instance, in the age of digital media "music and visual art truly are united, not only by the experiencing subject, the viewer/listener, but by the artist. They are created out of the same stuff, bits of electronic information, infinitely interchangeable." 1 Yet, this conclusion only leaves us guessing at the possible effects of such a decisive level of sophistication. A single word-i.e. "united"-gives a clue that this new step belongs to a philosophy that is deeply rooted in the utopian dream of visual music. Sometimes crossing paths with the exigencies of a relational aesthetic, the current developments of "visual music" have reactivated historical and critical discussions on the relationships between sound and vision, while the contribution of kinetic arts in this domain have been largely excluded from the recent studies devoted to the topic. 2 In this recent context, many among the numerous visual jockeys involved in the creation of complex audiovisual performances pursue the prospect of a "[complete] integration of the space with sounds, vision, and smell, so that the audience comes into a totally new place." 3 To some extent, Judith Zilczer's historical investigation of visual music indicates a clear continuation between early discussions in this domain and its most recent developments, when she argues that "[in] the ensuing debates during the 19th century over absolute music versus "program" music (which conveys narrative, pictorial, or poetic ideas), it was primarily the liberating quality of pure music that intrigued visual artists." 4 Recently, Marcella Lista concisely recapitulated the interests at play in the Wagnerian search for a synthesis of the arts as it would, consequentially, motivate the passage to abstraction: "The total artwork as Wagner formulated it […] involved a double utopian dimension: on the one hand, the totalization of the arts, stated as 'the artwork of the future'-an endlessly perfectible ideal projected in a coming time; on the other hand, the coming together of all the arts reflecting the profound unity of life. The vocation of the Gesamtkunstwerk depended then on the action exerted on the beholder to ingrain inside the very aesthetic experience the seeds of the progress necessary to the society to come." 5 Jeremy Strick, "Visual Music," in Kerry Brougher, Olivia Mattis, Jeremy Strick, Ari Wiseman (eds.), Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music since 1900. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; London: Thames & Hudson, 005, page 0. In the same vein, see Barbara Kienscherf, "From the 'Ocular Harpsichord' to the Sonchromatoscope: The Idea of Colour Music and Attempts to Realize it," in Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris (eds.), Summer of Love/Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s. Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 005, page 97: "What Alexander Scriabin could only dream of was the technically unproblematic and effective realization of his Utopian visions. Today, this kind of vision can easily be put into practice using computers and ultramodern technology. […] Thus, the idea of colour music continues to live on and the dream of audiovisual art seems by no means over." Notably: Centre Pompidou (ed.), Sons & Lumières: Une histoire du son dans l'art du XXe siècle. Paris: Centre Pompidou, 004, and Brougher, Mattis, Strick, Wiseman, Visual Music: Synaesthesia in the Arts since 1900, 005. 3 Stanzacrew quoted in Michael Faulkner/D-FUSE (eds.), Vj: Audiovisual Art + Vj Culture. London: King, 006, page . Others artists think of "[inventing] 'sensible light' […] nothing that you have to look at. […] It will be surrounding rhythmic light playing with the shape of the bodies." Such ideal of a fusional and almost dissolving phenomenon is sometimes expressed in the idea that "[space] and audience are, literally, live bodies you can pass through with your words and energy." At times, again, the integration of the human component is envisaged within the design of "a visual ambience, a large inflatable space, screened with videos of an electronic mandala on the outside, where people can get in, relax, and immerse themselves in music and images." Quotes: ibid. 4 Judith Zilczer, "Music for the Eyes: Abstract Painting and Light Art," in Brougher, Mattis, Strick, Wiseman, Visual Music: Synaesthesia in the Arts since 1900, 005, page 6.
(Dis-)Orienting Sounds - Machtkritische Perspektiven auf populäre Musik, 2019
Established methods of pop music analysis distinguish between musical texts and contexts. They usually employ a two-step model in which musical sounds and cultural contexts are analyzed separate from each other. I argue that this dichotomy is flawed because it fails to account for important aspects of media use and listening. Media technologies and listening practices are constitutive elements of pop music culture, but they did not find their way into epistemologies of music analysis. I therefore suggest that popular music should be analyzed as arrangements of heterogeneous elements or media »dispositifs” which define a specific listening situation. The media dispositif is useful in identifying interrelationships between technologies, listening practices, modes of subjectivity, and sonic configurations that unfold in particular times and social settings. It does not detach musical sounds from their contexts but rather analyses them as a grid of technological and cultural compounds. The essay closes with two examples: 1. I contrast two media dispositifs of the early twentieth century, US-American musical theater and radio and 2. I compare the bass cultures of disco and club sounds with the treble cultures of portable devices. In doing so, I demonstrate how the concept of the media dispositif is helpful in delineating historical trajectories and social differences of sound aesthetics and listening cultures.
Music-theatre: creation, performance and processes of the development of creativity1
The creative act, the performance and the different processes of the development of creativity, involve different procedures in which various techniques, codes, conventions, challenges, risks, subjectivities and the public are combined (Becker,1984). However, creativity implies and is based, among other things, on knowledge, control of materials and ideas, divergent thought and the search for new insights and senses, be it real or imaginary (Koskoff, 2001; Swanwick, 2001). Within this context, the present paper intends to, on one hand, look into the processes of the development of creativity and performance, based on the analysis and interpretation of the work which I am currently developing at the “Music-theatre Seminar”, in the ambit of teacher training. On the other hand, it intends to defend the notion that the processes used in performance, creation and development of creativity are decisive for both the individual and collective construction of identity, artistic development a...
Cloth Ears at Work: Aural Elements in the Theatre Plays of Tom Stoppard
2015
I am immensely grateful to Professor Juan Christian Pellicer for his advice, patience and ceaseless good humour. It has been an honour having him as my supervisor. As with any endeavour, this thesis is the culmination of many hours spent in the presence of a marvellous array of inquiring minds. The guidance and wise words of family, friends, fellow students and the many teachers who have inspired me during my time at the University of Oslo have helped me along the way. To all those who have contributed to my being able to achieve this result (ingen nevnt, ingen glemt), my heartfelt appreciation. Finally, I would especially like to acknowledge and thank my husband, Jan Roar Mietinen, for convincing me to take the career path which led to this thesis. His love and unfailing encouragement made it possible. IV
Explaining Musical Imagination
2014
Contemporary psychology of music approaches musical imagination in terms of either cognitive system’s specific (voluntary, involuntary or anticipatory) behavior or capacity. Musical imagination-as-behaviour allows us, for example, to consciously experience the phenomenon of “musical earworms” (e.g., Beaman & Williams, 2010). However, we do not have to be conscious of the workings of musical imagination-as-capacity (e.g., to form mental representations of music). It would be however quite reasonable to assume that this capacity is the result of the existence and activities between more basic sub-capacities organized together in such a way that they result in experiential manifestations of musical imagination. The study of imagination-ascapacity has, in fact, a long-standing philosophical tradition (Schlutz, 2009). Various philosophers proposed that a distinct role of imagination-as-capacity in cognitive processing is to organize, identify or interpret sensory information in order to ...
Pulse, 2022
Performative methodology of the House of Extreme Music Theater led by Croatian, Zagreb-based performing artists Damir Bartol Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo is largely based on the creation, recycling and abundant use of sound objects, deconstruction of voice and text, and collaborations with alternative rock and noise musicians and multimedia artists. But precisely because of its apparently chaotic, noisy manifestation, it is easy to miss the structure and concept that is undoubtedly in the background of every performance. If we take into account the predominance of music and noise in such an open model in terms of genre, it would be appropriate to try to define theoretical and methodological guidelines for its description, which this article will try to do. Observing the work of House of Extreme Music Theater, the following questions arise: How does its "noisy" poetics affect the definition of genre and analytical approaches to it, and, 1 Anamarija Žugić Borić is a PhD student at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb, where, in addition to studying digitization of performing arts and digital humanities in general, she explores music in theater and performing arts at the intersection of semiotic and musicological approaches. conversely, how does the chosen genre framework affect the status of noise that is produced in the performances of this "theater"? In this sense, the article will refer to the previous theoretical reflections on the House of Extreme Music Theater genre coordinates while trying to expand them with the concepts of independent auditory semiotics and musicalization, closely related to the notion of postdramatic theater as proposed by Hans-Thies Lehmann. Finally, the analysis of the music theater performance Schachtophonia Accenni for Kamov will try to show how the broad and permeable postdramatic determinant shapes the interpretation of noise in theater or noise as theater.