Musicality in Theatre

Music as Model, Method and Metaphor in Theatre-Making

David Roesner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317091325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

As the complicated relationship between music and theatre has evolved and changed in the modern and postmodern periods, music has continued to be immensely influential in key developments of theatrical practices. In this study of musicality in the theatre, David Roesner offers a revised view of the nature of the relationship. The new perspective results from two shifts in focus: on the one hand, Roesner concentrates in particular on theatre-making - that is the creation processes of theatre - and on the other, he traces a notion of 'musicality' in the historical and contemporary discourses as driver of theatrical innovation and aesthetic dispositif, focusing on musical qualities, metaphors and principles derived from a wide range of genres.

Roesner looks in particular at the ways in which those who attempted to experiment with, advance or even revolutionize theatre often sought to use and integrate a sense of musicality in training and directing processes and in performances. His study reveals both the continuous changes in the understanding of music as model, method and metaphor for the theatre and how different notions of music had a vital impact on theatrical innovation in the past 150 years. Musicality thus becomes a complementary concept to theatricality, helping to highlight what is germane to an art form as well as to explain its traction in other art forms and areas of life. The theoretical scope of the book is developed from a wide range of case studies, some of which are re-readings of the classics of theatre history (Appia, Meyerhold, Artaud, Beckett), while others introduce or rediscover less-discussed practitioners such as Joe Chaikin, Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Thalheimer and Karin Beier.

Chapter 1

Appia – Musicality and the ‘Inner Essence’

For any discussion of musicality in the theatre of modernism and after, the writings of Swiss designer and theatre practitioner Adolphe Appia (1862–1928) are an obvious and inevitable place to start. Not only has he discussed the relationship of music and theatrical performance in great detail, but he has also had an astonishingly broad influence on theatre-makers to this day. One of his biographers, Richard Beacham, credits him with ‘fundamentally advanc[ing] the art of theatre’.¹

My interest in Appia is a selective one: as with all of the practitioners I will discuss in this book, I do not attempt to represent their work, thoughts and achievements fully and completely, but concentrate on the questions at hand: what role, judging by their processes and/or theoretical suggestions, does musicality play in their theatre practice? What notions of music do they employ? What impact does the aesthetic dispositif of musicality have on the theatre and its development in each case?

Many of the key analogies, aims and claims employed and invoked towards a musicality of theatre have roots in Appia’s thinking, even though his theoretical edifice, which is strongly influenced by Richard Wagner’s word-tone drama, seems to focus on the development of what we might now call music-theatre.² As I will argue towards the end of this chapter, however, many of his key ideas about the relationship of music, musicality and theatre have also influenced the dramatic theatre in particular, advancing theatre design, playing a seminal role in the development of the director and leaving a strong mark on aspects of actor training.

I avoid approaching Appia (or any other of the theatre-makers in this book) from the Gesamtkunstwerk angle – the (problematic) one-word summary of Wagner’s most influential legacy. Apart from the fact that Appia disliked the term, as his very highly developed sense of a hierarchy of the arts in the theatre did not sit well with the synthetic ambitions associated with Wagner’s thrust, my focus in the study is very different: while the idea of the total work of art promotes the amalgamation of the arts, the ‘integration of all arts in one work’ or the ‘universal-poetic fusion of all genres’,³ my interest is more specifically in the development (often the reform) of theatre as a distinct art form and a selective cluster of genres within the performing arts in general through analogies, metaphors or actual techniques from music.

I will thus look at Appia’s writings in two sections, first exploring the philosophical, aesthetic and transcendental⁴ claims he makes for the role of music in the ‘theatre of the future’⁵ and second the role of musicality in the concrete reforms he suggested. In a third step I will discuss the impact of both on the actor and director and conclude with a discussion on how and why Appia’s theories can be and have been applied to dramatic theatre. It is worth pausing briefly on the distinction between ‘music’ and ‘musicality’, since Appia, in contrast to other, later theoretical stances, does almost always mean ‘actual’⁶ music in a more conventional sense and only occasionally hints at the wider use of music not as a sonic actuality but as an idea and aesthetic potential. I distinguish the two pragmatically and heuristically: using ‘music’ where an intentionally created and crafted sound event is concerned, and ‘musicality’ when entering the realm of the analogy, the transference of musical principles, aesthetics or effects onto other aspects of theatrical performance and process.

Philosophical and Ideological Aspects

Appia published his first major treatise Die Musik und die Inscenierung [Music and the Art of Theatre] in 1899, precisely and significantly on the brink between the two centuries. As we will see, his thinking is still clearly rooted in the nineteenth century and the influence music had for the arts then. Music historian Hans Merian wrote in 1902 that music was not only the ‘leading art of the nineteenth century, but some of its essence penetrated other artistic genres as well. We could, therefore, call the nineteenth century the musical century’.⁷ A hundred years later, Uta Grund still calls ‘musicalization […] a further paradigm […] which decidedly influenced the aesthetics around 1900’.⁸ From within this context, however, Appia laid the ground for many consequential developments of the theatre of the twentieth and even twenty-first centuries.

Inner Essence [Das innere Wesen]

One of the key claims Appia makes is indebted to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer – Appia uses a quotation from him as a motto for Music and the Art of Theatre and refers to it again later in his essay ‘Theatrical Production and its Prospects for the Future’ (1921):

Schopenhauer writes that music does not express the phenomenon, but only the inner essence of the phenomenon; therefore it expresses nothing related to the story, geography, social conditions, and customs; no actual objects of any sort.⁹

Music, in other words, is the means by which the dramatist presents

not just the external effects of emotions, the outward appearance of dramatic life; but, using these emotions themselves, the dramatic life in its fullest reality, as we can know it only at the most profound level of our being.¹⁰

Appia talks symbolically about the ‘hidden world of our inner life’,¹¹ which needs to be expressed in art: ‘this life cannot be expressed except through music, and music can express only that life’.¹² Appia combines these metaphysical claims with quite concrete assertions that music allows the playwright/composer to control the theatrical form, the mise en scene,¹³ and does so essentially by shaping time and rhythm. Music, then, solves Appia’s problem of finding ‘a principle, deriving directly from the drama’s original conception […] to prescribe the mise-en-scène’.¹⁴

This proves to be a recurring motif for Appia: music as a vehicle or guarantor for something transcendental, something that cannot be put into words. As Bowman puts it, paraphrasing Schopenhauer: ‘Music thus has the power to communicate the incommunicable, to penetrate the rational veil of representation and appearances – to give us insight into truths more profound than reason can ever grasp.’¹⁵ Again, this applies on two levels: metaphysically, music captures what Appia calls an ‘inner life’ and unlocks theatre’s potential to express this, but it also communicates, more pragmatically, essential aspects of staging, which seem to be incommunicable by conventional, linguistic means. If reaching for and conveying an ‘inner essence’ through music is Appia’s philosophical credo, the aesthetic ‘mantra’ and one of the central artistic aims associated with music in his writings is that of the unity of the artwork.

Unity and Order

The idea of unity and order is inherently connected to his suggestion to make music the predominant expressive force of the word-tone drama. He credits music with providing a sense of unity in a number of ways. First, by controlling the translation of the playwright’s intentions onto the stage much more reliably than mere words could do. Since words are not prescriptive enough with regard to timing and rhythm, music unifies the various means of expression under the will of the individual artist: the playwright and composer. It thus helps to transcend the ‘division of labour’¹⁶ and the individualism of the actor and welds together the different layers and aspects of the work. Music facilitates what all art needs, according to Appia: ‘a harmonious relationship between feeling and form, an ideal balance between the ideas which the artist desires to express, and the means he has for expressing them … .’¹⁷ Appia is acutely aware that this harmony is more difficult to achieve in drama than in any other art form: ‘The more types of media required for the realization of any work of art, the more elusive is this harmony.’¹⁸ Music, for Appia, is not only uniquely suitable for bringing the many disparate elements of theatre together harmoniously; its unifying effect also extends, secondly, to the audience’s reception, he argues. Music ‘joins them together as a single entity’¹⁹ and facilitates their need to ‘escape from themselves in order to rediscover themselves’.²⁰

Appia clearly makes a strong case that music renders the sum of all theatrical expression greater than its parts. His claim that music is the ‘foundation’, on which theatre can be expressive to all of our senses, is a particular take on the perceptive qualities that the musicality dispositif affords:²¹ providing access to a higher reality of the artwork, an essence of it. Appia is indebted here to the music aesthetical topos of romanticism, according to which music ‘while not allowing us to grasp, to appropriate the eternal which transcends [our] sensual perception, lets [us] glimpse it, experience and feel it’.²² The reference to Schopenhauer, the romantic period’s foremost philosopher when it comes to music, is thus unsurprising.

It is worth noting this understanding of music, since subsequent prac...