This is a valuable contribution to the field which poses the intriguing question (and more than adequately answers it) – what field? In four parts, with twenty-two chapters and three appendices, Salzman and Desi explore ‘new music theatre’ through a survey of twentieth-century socio-aesthetic practices, assessments of theoretical perspectives, and reasonably detailed analyses of work by numerous artists, ensembles and collaborators. Writing on specific performances in Europe, Canada and the United States, they demonstrate that the concept of ‘music theatre’ is problematic and wide-ranging. They also provide abundant examples of it as an evolving genre that is culturally pervasive even as it remains critically marginalized. Much of the book traces a ‘largely unwritten and shadowy history of “alternate opera”’ (p. 6) from the 1930s through to the present. This account credibly illuminates how new music theatre categorically differs from ‘legitimate’ opera, musicals and traditional or popular entertainment.

The study encompasses an extensive typology of performance from Wagnerian music drama to Brecht–Weill Musiktheater and works by Cage, Kagel, Glass-Wilson, Xenakis, Michael Nyman, Meredith Monk and Eric Salzman himself. With roots in Singspiel, lyric drama and non-Western singing, the new music theatre portrayed here is driven by ‘music, language, vocalization, and physical movement’ (p. 5). Its composers and performers are explicitly aware of the worldwide array of vocal styles and voicing techniques and the latest sound technologies, all of which they mix in their art. Like Laurie Anderson's work, productions of ‘new music theatre’ can be intimate and narrative, or, like Cage's Europeras, can comprise a myriad of events with voices, sound, music and performance. It can be an elaborate multimedia, technologically sophisticated spectacle, as in works by Heiner Goebbels; or have the minimalist aura of Steve Reich or John Adams's creations. It can derive from historic avant-garde influences, as in Giorgio Battiselli's constructions, or be site-specific and interactive, like Todd Machover's Brain Opera.

Responding to these variables, the authors view the genre as a ‘music-theater object’ (p. 316) that is a ‘complex intertwined artwork’ (p. 319) intentionally structured for divergent interpretations related to artistic, sociocultural and technological factors. Moreover, as they repeatedly emphasize, ‘new music theatre’ must be acknowledged as resulting from conspicuous, interdependent relationships among certain artists, collectives, presenting institutions, organizations and festivals, most of which are listed in the appendices. The authors underscore this with commentaries on creative practices, technological innovations and crucial financial support, beginning with the influential 1950s Darmstadt Summer Courses, which hosted Cage, Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and others. Equally significant was the establishment of IRCAM in Paris by Pierre Boulez (for research in electronic music) in 1969. Concurrently, and later, institutions such as London's Almeida Theatre, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the festivals at Avignon and the Munich Biennale, as well as the emergence of ‘downtown music’ in Manhattan and the Canadian ‘scéne québécoise’, provided environments for continuous production and variations.