"Theater als Musik" now available as iBook

For a while now my first monograph from 2003, Theater als Musik (Theatre as music), has been out of print, but I still got the odd request from students and colleagues who are interested in having a look at it. I have uploaded the PDF files to the research repository of the University of Exeter (and they are still there), but since the book makes frequent use of video clips and sound samples, and provides musical transcripts etc., I always thought that a kind of ebook / hypertext would be a better solution.




So after quite a bit of tweaking (and updating the text here and there), you can now download it in this new iBook format! And it's free! So do have a look, and perhaps leave a review or comment.


You can search for it through your iBook app or through iTunes. Here is a link.

I'm afraid, however, it is still all in German...


In many ways, it is the predecessor to the book I'm currently writing: it focuses on contemporary directors Christoph Marthaler, Einar Schleef and – probably best known of the three – Robert Wilson, and looks at their productions from a musical point of view, whereas in my current project, I go back in history and consider working and creation processes more strongly than the resulting performances. Anyway, I hope the digital version will be useful.

Workshop in Hamburg

For the past four days I have been watching two shows a night from the next generation of directors from most German speaking conservatories which teach directing, as well as some international additions from Denmark and the Netherlands. As different as the productions are, in their subjects, working methods, acting styles and directorial signatures, a strong use of music is almost ubiquitous.
In my workshop during the Körber Studio Junge Regie, however, I tried to emphasise a notion of musicality which has little to do with how much music was used in a production.
I sought at first to map the field briefly, trying to tease out some of the core aspects of musicality (how it may provide a different perspective on the materiality of theatre, a disposition to 'attunement' of the sense to rhythm, timbre, sound qualities, formal relationships etc. of theatrical events, a different working process and, perhaps, as a result, a different aesthetics.
One interesting interjection by a participant gave me food for thought in particular: he would sometimes warn actors "now you are just singing!" when they started loosing the actual sense of what they were saying. It hadn't really occurred to me that the strategy used by the likes of Artaud, Gertrude Stein, Robert Wilson etc etc. to de-sematise language order to increase our appreciation for its sonic and rhythmic qualities could of course, in different contexts, backfire and become an escape, a formal ornamentation of language stripping it of its actual meaning.
It does emphasise the point that there isn't one single recipe of musicality that always 'works', but that different contexts, aesthetics, individuals and materials require different kinds of musicality.
Another interesting conversation (amongst many!) was about, whether my book would also include the perspective of the audience. Surely it wouldn't be enough to talk about intentions, strategies, process and manifestos; I would also need to investigate how musicality was received, how it might depend on personal factors and preferences, even the position of audience members in the auditorium etc. All this is true and would desirable, but it is for many reasons more than I can possibly cover at the moment, even if I had a time machine and could fly back to 1920s Russia, for example, to interview Meyerhold's audiences.

What I found really rewarding about the workshop and some of the brief talks and reactions I had with and from participants was the impression, that some of this was actually genuinely useful for them. I am the last person to say the research always has to immediately demonstrate it use and impact - a lot of the greatest inventions came out of pure and uncalculating curiosity - but I do believe that ideally theory, experiment, and creative practice engage in a cyclical interplay in which one challenges and enriches the other.