Saturday, December 04, 2004
Is anybody listening to the music?
A new kind of music-theatre scholar
By Robert Everett-Green
"In Mozart's The Magic Flute, a gang of bad guys are so enthralled by the sound of magic bells that they forget all about the mischief they had planned. That never happens to the new, cross-disciplinary kind of music-theatre scholar, who tends to avoid the music altogether. ...
"They do it because musicologists have let them. The sad fact is that the people in the best position to write about meaning in music theatre have mostly spent the past few decades avoiding the social or political meaning of anything. Their reward is to find their turf overrun by non-music scholars armed with the notion that everything is a 'text' for cultural analysis."
¶ 12/04/2004 05:24:00 AM
A new kind of music-theatre scholar
By Robert Everett-Green
"In Mozart's The Magic Flute, a gang of bad guys are so enthralled by the sound of magic bells that they forget all about the mischief they had planned. That never happens to the new, cross-disciplinary kind of music-theatre scholar, who tends to avoid the music altogether. ...
"They do it because musicologists have let them. The sad fact is that the people in the best position to write about meaning in music theatre have mostly spent the past few decades avoiding the social or political meaning of anything. Their reward is to find their turf overrun by non-music scholars armed with the notion that everything is a 'text' for cultural analysis."
¶ 12/04/2004 05:24:00 AM
