It is almost impossible to overstate how keenly this book, or, at any rate, a book like it, has been awaited within the field. Implausible as it may sound, there has been no authoritative text on the vast area variously called ‘experimental music theatre’ or, as it is here, ‘the new music theatre’. There has been no shortage of detailed studies of individual pieces, the work of this or that composer or director, accounts of specific theoretical positions or aesthetic precepts, or drafts for a theory or history of the genre (if indeed it is a genre), but so far no one has made a serious attempt to pull the different strands together. Such an undertaking would involve proposing a definition of the genre that would serve to distinguish between what is and what is not a piece of new music theatre, developing a classification that would differentiate between different types, establishing a theory that would enable the analysis of case studies, and sketching a history of the genre. This is a daunting task, to be sure: a true child of avant-garde experimentation, the new music theatre almost made a point of not following accepted traditions, of not fitting into existing institutions, and of avoiding the apparatus of genre formation, with its associated canons, audience expectations, and so on. It seems forever in between, settling in the interstitial spaces between art forms and genres, drawing almost indiscriminately from otherwise distinct lineages, such as the more experimental forms of opera, avant-garde theatre, happenings, and performance art, and, in recent times, digital media. Likewise, contributions to the theoretical discourses surrounding the phenomenon have come from such diverse fields as musicology and opera studies, theatre and performance studies, art history, and media studies. While it is unrealistic to expect any scholar to be equally knowledgeable about these different traditions and conversant in these diverse discourses, the charting of some kind of common ground would clearly be desirable in order at least to improve the communication between scholars from different disciplinary traditions. In other words, what is needed is clarity and, to an extent, a simple review of the work that has already been undertaken by scholars and practitioners who may be unaware of each other and whose work, for that reason, is rather scattered and disparate. Above all, then, a book in this area should provide a clear terminological and theoretical framework that can serve as a secure foundation for future work.

So, does the book meet these expectations? Yes and no. To start with the positives, between them, the two authors have an admirable overview and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre. It is always tempting to look for oversights and omissions in books like this, and surely there must be some, but I have yet to notice any significant ones. On the contrary, there are many new names to discover, and others who have tended to be overlooked are given proper recognition. For instance, I was intrigued to read about Tom Johnson's many music-theatrical creations (129–32), and it gives me personal satisfaction that Mauricio Kagel finally receives the recognition that he deserves as one of the most influential founding fathers of the genre (passim). In this respect the pairing of an American with a Continental European (Austrian) author has clearly paid off: this is the most balanced and even-handed appreciation of the formative contributions from both sides of the pond that I have read. Although this is not an intentional focus of the book, it is instructive to read how the two traditions have variously complemented or influenced one another, the latter often in the form of Bloomian ‘creative misreadings’Footnote ¹ whereby the aesthetic concepts underpinning the practice in question are only partially understood or even ignored, but their adaptation within a different context produces all the more interesting results (Kagel's reception of Cage would be a case in point).

Perhaps less felicitously, both authors are primarily composers, though both have experience as producers and organizers. As a consequence, although they consider forms of director-driven and -devised theatre, they seem most comfortable with relatively traditional models centred on the combination of a musical score, a text, and the singing voice. Note, for instance, that Christoph Marthaler's work is considered to be ‘close to music theater’ (260). It is difficult to see why it is not music theatre, and the authors do not advance a definition that would be rigorous enough to make this case. More by accident than by design – or so it would seem – the book thus treats the new music theatre as a musical more than as a theatrical genre. This isn't wrong, of course, but it highlights the need for a systematic approach that would differentiate more clearly between different types of music theatre, and – to pick up on the Marthaler example – non-music theatre.

This brings me to a more general question, namely the type of reader to whom this book is addressed. This remains a bit of a mystery. The text is clearly not a scholarly publication: there are hardly any references, which is quite irritating, given that the authors tend to make rather grand claims that one would like to be able to follow up. Similarly the authors studiously avoid heavy jargon or complex theorizing. While that may be welcome, the downside is that the intellectual level of the theoretical discourse is below the standard one has come to expect in neighbouring fields such as musicology and opera studies, not to mention theatre and performance studies. On the other hand, the book is not practical enough to be of much use to practitioners. Given the frequent unsubstantiated claims and general lack of references, the work cannot even be recommended as a textbook for undergraduate courses. It is unclear whether the shortage of references is down to the authors or to the publisher's attempt to target the book at a less specialized readership: at any rate it provides a poor example of academic practice.

The book consists of four main parts: ‘Music in Music Theater’ (13–55), ‘Theater in Music Theater’ (59–115), ‘Putting It All Together: La Mise en Scène’ (119–306), and ‘After the Show: Taking It Apart’ (309–75). Interspersed are what are called ‘entr’actes': aperçus and observations on such topics as the Indian theatre form Kathakali or the narrative account of a première of an avant-garde piece that attracted no paying audience (these tended to be my favourites). This overall form suggests a rigorous structure that isn't really there, however: there is no clear outline or argumentative thread. While the first two parts seem to deal with the basic elements of music theatre – with sub-chapters on ‘The Voice’, ‘The Music’, ‘Text’, ‘Space’, and so on – things fall apart in the chapter ostensibly devoted to putting them together (Part iii): this starts off by exploring different national traditions (useful, but why here and what has this got to do with ‘mise en scène’?), before dealing with ‘Extended Voice’ (why is this not part of ‘The Voice’ in the first part?) and ‘New Media and Music Theatre’. Part iv, finally, consists of ‘Toward a Theory of the New Music Theater’, ‘Notation versus Improvisation?’, ‘Popular or High Art?’, and ‘Is Anyone Listening?’. These are all relevant topics, but what is the overall rationale here, and why, once again, is the question of notation not explored in the two opening parts? At the end, no theoretical or historical account of the new music theatre worthy of the name emerges, so that, sadly, the whole is less than the sum of its rather disparate parts.

Particularly in the earlier sections, there are rather too many potted histories: time and again, the authors seem to feel an urge to go back to the beginning. For instance, ‘The origins of music (including rhythmic signalling and dance movement) almost certainly derive from sexual display and communication’ (13–14). These historical summaries are so condensed – e.g., two pages for ‘Musical forms in the opera between 1600 and 1900’ (32–4) – and at the same time make so few assumptions that they tend to read rather strangely:

This is not a bad explanation of ‘harmonic tonality’, but it rather emphasizes my earlier point about the book's intended audience: either the readers already understand the concept, in which case this explanation is less than useful, or they don't, in which case they will be more confused than before.

What is lacking are extended analyses of seminal pieces: it is only through the in-depth study of carefully chosen works that the nature of the genre and its workings can be uncovered and the theoretical apparatus – if there is one – tested. Instead, particularly in Part iii, there are lots of little snippets and catalogues of names and pieces. Take this example:

This is quite acceptable as a dictionary entry, but what really is the function of such passages in a book such as this? There are countless similar paragraphs that serve as distractions from what is surely the more urgent imperative – to advance an argument or hypothesis that might bring us closer to understanding the elusive nature of the new music theatre. The tautological repetition of ‘melodramatic’, incidentally, is not untypical; there are more examples of this, such as ‘the influence of amplified pop music has been a major negative influence’ (23) and ‘the evolution of the classical and romantic orchestra continued to evolve’ (34).

I had particularly high hopes for the chapter ‘Toward a Theory of the New Music Theater’ (309–41) since, as I pointed out above, such a theory strikes me as urgently needed. Unfortunately, this is one of the weakest sections in the book. It is not even clear what this is really a theory of, since the approach, perspective, and theoretical stance remain nebulous. Again, the authors succumb to their urge to begin at the very beginning:

Shortly after this, in a rare citation (the cod biology above, like many similar passages, is unreferenced), they introduce Peter Kivy. Kivy is an eminent aesthetician of course, but is an analytic philosopher, who, to my knowledge, has never ventured beyond nineteenth-century music. Can this really be a suitable basis for the theory of the new music theatre? As the authors aver, ‘[Kivy's theory] shows us that most of the mystery about traditional opera and music theatre comes from the way both try to connect two different syntaxes: text and music’ (312). In contrast to this, many theorists of the new music theatre actually argue that it is, in Hans-Thies Lehmann's terminology, ‘postdramatic’Footnote ² and that it challenges precisely the logocentricity of traditional forms such as opera. But even opera studies, not to mention the analysis of musical multimedia,Footnote ³ have progressed far beyond the kind of rudimentary ‘text-and-music’ criticism proposed here.

The whole section is so basic and at the same time so confused that it is quite unclear what it is really about. What seems to occupy the authors most is textual meaning – something that most theorists would regard as marginalized in experimental music theatre. But what is even more problematic is the way that textual meaning is approached, which betrays no awareness of any hermeneutic or other interpretative tradition in the humanities. Thus we read: ‘Often the meaning of an art work lies in the models that the artist, consciously or not, makes reference to and not in what the actual composition shows. […] The essence of the art lies in the differences between the model and the final text while the “meaning” remains in the model’ (314). I have no idea what ‘model’ means in this context and how the meaning can be said to reside therein, but what troubles me here is the pre-theoretical intentionalism underpinning, or rather undermining, the thinking. This comes to the fore in a later passage: ‘It is in the difference between the intended message and the spectator's understanding of it that things go wrong. “What did the artist want to tell us?” we ask’ (323).

No, we don't; at least I don't. Trying to locate ‘meaning’ in the figure of the author and thereby literally claiming ‘authority’ for an interpretation is something that the humanities gave up on some decades ago – and for very good reason.Footnote ⁴ We are on our own in our attempts to make sense of what is presented to us, and there is no ultimate authority to which we can turn and which can enlighten us about what all this ‘really’ means. More importantly, is it the point of the new music theatre to ‘tell’ us anything? Combining sounds, texts, objects, people, and movements in a space doesn't seem a very efficient way of ‘getting a message across’. Isn't ‘seeing–hearing’ music theatre more about aesthetic experience – sensual, visceral, bodily experience – than cognitive understanding, and shouldn't it really be regarded as a liberation from narrowly textual meaning, rather than something that is reducible to it? To be sure, its analysis requires a conscious stocktaking of what ‘has been happening’, but let's start with a clear, and perhaps a thick, description of what is going on,Footnote ⁵ rather than jumping straight to what it might mean or ‘what the author wants to tell us’. In other words, what is needed is a methodology for (performance) analysis and, only at a second remove, interpretation. That is why most current theorists tend to stress the performative dimension of the new music theatre more than its semiotic dimension.Footnote ⁶

Part of the problem is the authors' constant attempt to re-invent the wheel, as if there were no existing approaches to studying and analysing music theatre (not to mention ‘meaning’ more generally). Yet all the foundations are in place: performance studies as practised by Richard Schechner and Philip Auslander, among others; the theory of post-dramatic theatre as proposed by Hans-Thies Lehmann; theatre semiotics as advanced by Erika Fischer-Lichte and Patrice Pavis; the list goes on.Footnote ⁷ Some of these publications are even listed in the bibliography, but it's unclear what influence they had on the final product (again, the absence of citations doesn't help). Granted, not all these authors have written on the new music theatre, so their approaches would have to be adapted; they would also have to be synthesized as well as, arguably, at times simplified to reach the wider audience that seems to have been intended here. Yet there is no need in any case for the theoretical and methodological solipsism that is practised here and that seriously hampers the book. Ultimately, what is needed is music theatre studies as an interdisciplinary field. Admittedly, no single book can establish such a field on its own, but any foundational study of the new music theatre should contribute to its constitution. This one, sadly, doesn't.