Visible Music: Theatricality in / and Musicality
摘要
This chapter articulates visible music as a historical and analytical frame for theatrimusical practices. It demonstrates how concert and composed-theatre practices render music seen and theatricality heard, thereby modelling theatrimusicality as kinesic, proxemic and scenographic organisation of sound. The chapter considers John Cage’s Water Walk, reading its object choreography and television staging as a composition for theatricality in which the performance of visible action becomes an orchestration of sighted sound. The mise-en-scène is thus not supplemental but constitutive of the work’s sonic sense and one that demands spectaural attention. The chapter also examines Mauricio Kagel’s Match and Zwei-Mann-Orchester to probe kinesic musicality—how inter-bodily play, instrument use and proxemics compose the theatrimusical. Following Kagel, the works of the MozART Group are analysed. In the MozART Group’s performances, humour, gesture and virtuosity reframe concert deportment and listener expectation while intertextuality, juxtaposition and pastiche demarcate a musicality that is reflexively theatrical. Collectively, these case studies theorise musicking as theatrimusical doing that invites spectaural attention and where musical meaning is apprehended through, and as, theatricality. The chapter thus exemplifies how avant-garde and contemporary music performances instantiate the politics and poetics of seeing music and listening to theatre.