Act – Musik & Performance is an international and interdisciplinary publication intended to provide a platform for essays, reviews and columns at the intersection of the disciplines of musicology, theatre studies, dance studies and media studies. Act places particular value on methodological plurality and on supporting young academics.   

Heft 10

Oper_Musik_Theater

August 2021

ISSN 2191-253X

Inventur. Annäherung an zeitgenössische Musiktheaterkonzeptionen für Opernbühne und Konzertsaal

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.

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Ambivalent Engagement: contemporary opera between populism and the postmodern

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.

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Opera_Music_Theatre 2020

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?

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Making Sense of Performance. A New Approach to Performance Analysis

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.

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Synthesizer, Resonanz, Modulation: Auf dem Weg zur musikalischen Schicht des Theaters

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. 

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Practicing Between Categories: A Hermeneutics of Ritual-like New Music

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.

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Audience Perception in Experiential Embodied Music Theatre: A Practice-based Case Study

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.

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“Hinter den Spiegeln warten nur Spiegel”: Myth, Dystopia, and Utopia in Peter Eötvös’s Paradise Reloaded (Lilith)

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.

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Elena Mendoza and Matthias Rebstock’s La ciudad de las mentiras: Fiction as polyphony

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.

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