After the Greeks, others who understood theatre as a type of music...

Even narrowing the topic of this book to the evolution of theatre as a type of music, the subject often felt overwhelmingly large! But this idea that theatre developed out of a marriage between music, idea and mimesis did not come to me in some fantastical dream. It's an idea that's been around for a long time, but one that we as composers and designers (and even directors and actors!) too often lose "sight" of (pun intended). In chapter seven, I acknowledged one of my first encounters with this idea in Adolphe Appia's Music and the Art of Theatre. Wagner maintained similar ideas, which sadly did not make it into the book (we had to stop at the Greeks!), saying in reference to theatre: "...into whatsoever alliance music may enter, it never ceases to be the highest, most redeeming art. (Gutman, Robert W. Richard Wagner: the Man, His Mind, and His Music. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, Inc., 1968).

My friend José Manuel Conejo recently sent me a couple of quotes from David Roesner's 2014 book Musicality in Theatre (ISBN 9781138248380) referencing Vsevolod Meyerhold's conception of theatre that speak directly to the heart of the question in Music as a Chariot:

"Finally, I will come back to the notion of 'theatricality' and its connection to 'musicality' in this particular period of theatre, investigating more closely why the attempt to reorient the theatre towards its 'essence' seems to take the route through another art form: music....(for example) Meyerhold's full list of all the scenes, with the name of the scene on the left hand and the musical character and tempo on the right, described in the conventional Italian terms developed in classical music, such as Andante, Allegro grazioso, Lento, Scherzando, Adagio, or Tempo di Valse."

Shortly after publishiing Music as a Chariot, I developed a similar analysis method for gaining a better understanding of the "musicality of a play", which I called "Pulse and Dynamics Analysis", which I presented at the 2019 Prague Quadrennial. You can download the excel spreadsheet here: https://8255ae31-fc56-44a3-a50f-e0be5b24ab46.usrfiles.com/ugd/8255ae_28c25172e7634f5ebfcaede15c120c87.xlsx.

Many thanks to José for sending these quotes to our blog.