Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater / Edition 1

by W. Anthony Sheppard

Overview

W. Anthony Sheppard considers a wide-ranging constellation of important musical works in this fascinating exploration of ritualized performance in twentieth-century music. Revealing Masks uncovers the range of political, didactic, and aesthetic intents that inspired the creators of modernist music theater. Sheppard is especially interested in the use of the "exotic" in techniques of masking and stylization, identifying Japanese Noh, medieval Christian drama, and ancient Greek theater as the most prominent exotic models for the creation of "total theater."

Drawing on an extraordinarily diverse—and in some instances, little-known—range of music theater pieces, Sheppard cites the work of Igor Stravinsky, Benjamin Britten, Arthur Honegger, Peter Maxwell Davies, Harry Partch, and Leonard Bernstein, as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Madonna. Artists in literature, theater, and dance—such as William Butler Yeats, Paul Claudel, Bertolt Brecht, Isadora Duncan, Ida Rubenstein, and Edward Gordon Craig—also play a significant role in this study.

Sheppard poses challenging questions that will interest readers beyond those in the field of music scholarship. For example, what is the effect on the audience and the performers of depersonalizing ritual elements? Does borrowing from foreign cultures inevitably amount to a kind of predatory appropriation? Revealing Masks shows that compositional concerns and cultural themes manifested in music theater are central to the history of twentieth-century Euro-American music, drama, and dance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520223028
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	02/01/2001
Series:	California Studies in 20th-Century Music , #1
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	365
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)
Lexile:	1560L (what's this?)

About the Author

W. Anthony Sheppard is Assistant Professor of Music at Williams College.

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	ix
	Preface	xi
Part I	Introduction: Drawing Connections in the Margins
1	Defining Music Theater	3
2	The Multiplicity of the Exotic	10
3	Ritual and Performance	15
Part II	Borrowed Masks: Greek, Japanese, and Medieval
4	The Masks of Modernism	25
5	Freedom in a Tunic versus Frieze-Dried Classicism: Hellenism in Modernist Performance	42
6	The Uses of Noh	72
7	Medievalism and the French Modernist Stage	96
Part III	The Mysteries of British Music Theater; or, Dressing up for Church
8	The Audience as Congregation	115
9	Britten's Parables	126
10	Later British Mysteries	155
Part IV	The Varieties of Ritual Expression and Criticism in American Music Theater
11	Orientalists and a Crusader	169
12	Partch's Vision of "Integrated Corporeal Theater" and "Latter-Day Rituals"	180
13	Bitter Rituals for a Lost Nation: Partch and Bernstein	204
14	God in Popular Music(al) Theater	231
Part V	Conclusion: Removing the Masks
15	Masking the Human and the Misogyny of Masks	243
16	Music Theater Now	252
	Appendix	263
	Notes	269
	Selected Bibliography	323
	Index	339