Two New Books

In the recent two years I have kept quite busy with two editing projects, which have now both been published, which I am very excited about. While they are clearly distinct from each other and from the monograph I am currently writing, there are of course overlaps and possible dialogues between all three.
On a pragmatic level these (temporal) overlaps – finishing two books simultaneously, while trying to start a third – have sometimes been tiring. Different layouts and referencing rules had to applied and kept separate and deadlines happened to coincide more and more.
But in the end for me the resonances between the different projects have been quite stimulating and I hope that they find an interested and critical readership.

The first book,
Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance, edited by Lynne Kendrick and David Roesner (Newcastle 2011) came out at the end of last year and started from a conference at Central School of Speech and Drama in April 2009 conceived by Ross Brown. Lynne Kendrick (also from CSSD) and I then were entrusted with developing a book concept on the basis of this new term, theatre noise, and collected and commissioned eighteen chapters for the now finished volume. This is what it says on the cover:

This book is a timely contribution to the emerging field of the aurality of theatre and looks in particular at the interrogation and problematisation of theatre sound(s). Both approaches are represented in the idea of ‘noise’ which we understand both as a concrete sonic entity and a metaphor or theoretical (sometimes even ideological) thrust. Theatre provides a unique habitat for noise. It is a place where friction can be thematised, explored playfully, even indulged in: friction between signal and receiver, between sound and meaning, between eye and ear, between silence and utterance, between hearing and listening. In an aesthetic world dominated by aesthetic redundancy and ‘aerodynamic’ signs, theatre noise recalls the aesthetic and political power of the grain of performance.
‘Theatre noise’ is a new term which captures a contemporary, agitatory acoustic aesthetic. It expresses the innate theatricality of sound design and performance, articulates the reach of auditory spaces, the art of vocality, the complexity of acts of audience, the political in produced noises. Indeed, one of the key contentions of this book is that noise, in most cases, is to be understood as a plural, as a composite of different noises, as layers or waves of noises. Facing a plethora of possible noises in performance and theatre we sought to collocate a wide range of notions of and approaches to ‘noise’ in this book – by no means an exhaustive list of possible readings and understandings, but a starting point from which scholarship, like sound, could travel in many directions.


And Nicholas Till, Professor of Opera and Music Theatre at Sussex University, very kindly commented: “‘Are we currently discovering sound?’ asks Patrice Pavis in the Preface to this book. And reading the essays in the book is indeed to make a voyage of discovery into aspects of theatrical experience and practice hitherto unaccountably muffled from our attention. The whole book offers rich proof of the rewards of the ‘acoustic turn’ in contemporary theory.”

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The second book came out of an AHRC network project, conducted by Matthias Rebstock, Professor for 'scenic music' at the University of Hildesheim, Germany, and me. It is an attempt to map a field we called 'Composed Theatre' by looking at it historically, analytically, as discourse and as a creative process, involving composers, directors, and scholars. The book combines, unites and confronts those different voices:

Composed Theatre. Aesthetics, Practices, Processes, edited by Matthias Rebstock und David Roesner (Bristol 2012). This book gives extensive coverage of a growing field of theatre, which is characterized by applying musical and compositional approaches to the creation of theatrical performances. The contributions to this book seek to establish and closely investigate this field, ranging from focused reports by seminal artists and in-depth portraits of their working methods to academic essays contextualizing the aesthetics, practices and processes in questions.
This book looks at Composed Theatre in a unique way by focusing on the creative process, as it is not primarily the aesthetics or the audiences that characterize the field, but the compositional thinking at play in its creation. Since Composed Theatre is often highly self-reflexive, the authors also explore how it is calling into question fundamental certainties about musical composition, dramaturgy and music-theatrical production. 

Comments on either book are welcome!