Jackman Humanities Institute Working Group
Research Assistant 2019—2020
“Imagining a Music-Theatre Curriculum in North America”
Organized by Dr. Nikki Cesare Schotzko and Dr. Aiyun Huang
From Drs. Cesare Schotzko and Huang:
A collaboration between the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies (CDTPS) and the Faculty of Music (FoM), this working group brings together scholars, composers, and practitioners whose interests in the fields of music, theatre, performance, and sound converge at the point of music-theatre. Our methodology is focused toward two goals: 1) to familiarize ourselves with the current scholarly and artistic output of music-theatre in the Americas and how it is developing concurrently to that in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia; and, 2) to begin collectively to generate a five-year plan for developing a centre for music-theatre at the University of Toronto–a collaboration between the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Faculty of Music, as well as with all three UofT campuses.
Music-theatre constitutes, at its simplest, “a type of performance in which theatrical actions are created by music making.” In music-theatre performance, as distinct from musical theatre, opera, or sound art, “the physical and gestural elements inherent in the music making are the action, and there is no (actual or virtual) separation between stage and instrumental ensemble, nor are there dramatic roles” (Heile 2016). First categorized in the 1960s, though drawing on performance practice at least as early as Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, music-theatre has accrued a steadfast, if limited, scholarly following— while, conversely, the actual material theorists take up as music-theatre is rarely considered such by its composers and practitioners. Furthermore, those composers regularly cited as developing the genre not only maintain a fairly homogeneous demographic—John Cage, Julio Estrada, Luciano Berio, Mauricio Kagel, Heinner Goebbels, and so on—but also, with the exception of Cage (US) and Estrada (MX), are rarely from North America. That there are thriving indie opera, sound art, and emerging music-theatre communities throughout Canada, the US, and Mexico, makes this especially unsatisfying.
Despite music-theatre being an active genre in North America, there has yet to be a University program dedicated to its academic and performance study—even though there are several in Europe, including, most prevalently, the University of the Arts Bern. This interdisciplinary working group capitalizes on the University of Toronto’s extensive existing resources across multiple programs–CDTPS, the FoM, UTM, and UTSC– to bring together scholars and practitioners to trace the evolution of music theatre in North America, and to generate a long-term plan to establish the University of Toronto as a collaborative centre, whether curricular or departmental, for contemporary music-theatre.
