Thom Andrewes

This dissertation attempts a critique of music’s potential for critique, focusing in particular on the extent to which music can make a critical intervention within an ‘extra-musical’, socio-political situation. I begin by outlining some of the ways in which political music has attempted such an intervention over the last century, focusing on three musical ‘affordances’ which can be used to argue both for music’s political potential and its essentially apolitical nature. I aim to show that it is always possible to ‘listen in spite of’ any political content, as a result of a self-definition of ‘the music itself’, which necessitated the turn to ‘immanent critique’ by the ‘critical composition’ movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s. By identifying certain transcendent criteria within this musical auto-critique, I suggest that this approach also artificially limits the critical potential of music, through the affirmation of an uncritiqued definition of ‘music’ through which its auto-critique remains possible. Instead, I propose an alternative model of musical critique which acknowledges and makes use of these limitations, which can be related to what Harry Lehmann has called ‘critical modernism’. While still limited, this model is more reflexive and more adaptable than some of the previous strategies of musical critique.

Thom Andrewes attempts to survey London's highly fragmented new music theatre landscape as it developed through the first two decades of the 21st century. The author argues that, while the term »music theatre« lacks a strong disciplinary orbit in the UK, equivalent trends have nevertheless emerged across a number of discrete disciplinary terrains in response to the same socio-economic factors of austerity and neoliberalism. Surveying each disciplinary context in turn, the chapter outlines the collapse of mid-scale opera production and the rise of flexibility, transparency and immediacy as creative and aesthetic principles. The author draws on interviews with artists and producers associated with three key music theatre »nodes« - Tête à Tête Festival, Battersea Arts Centre and London Contemporary Music Festival - whose production practices and curatorial projects have helped determine the emergence of trends such as gig theatre, composer-performer collectives and gallery opera. Stressing the comparative centrality of pop music and Live Art to the UK's music and theatre discourses, the survey concludes by highlighting the importance of a context-specific understanding of »music theatre«.

In this book chapter, I attempt to survey London’s highly fragmented new music theatre landscape as it developed through the first two decades of the 21st century. I argue that, while the term ‘music theatre’ lacks a strong disciplinary orbit in the UK, equivalent trends have nevertheless emerged across a number of discrete disciplinary terrains (opera, contemporary theatre, new music, visual art, dance, cabaret, Live Art), in response to the same socio-economic factors of austerity and neoliberalism. Surveying each disciplinary context in turn, I outline the collapse of mid-scale opera production since the '90s, and the simultaneous rise of flexibility, transparency and immediacy as creative and aesthetic principles. The chapter draws on interviews with artists and producers associated with three key music theatre ‘nodes’—Tête à Tête Festival, Battersea Arts Centre and London Contemporary Music Festival—whose production practices and curatorial projects have helped determine the emergence of trends such as gig theatre, composer-performer collectives and gallery opera. Stressing the comparative centrality of pop music and Live Art to the UK’s music and theatre discourses, the survey concludes by highlighting the importance of a context-specific understanding of ‘music theatre’, which asks 'What do we mean by "music"?' and 'What do we mean by "theatre"?'.

Underpinning this essay is my assertion that Beyoncé’s Lemonade is the most perfect example of political music that I know. I believe that, unlike more ‘generic’ political music, Lemonade revealed itself to be the ideal tool for a targeted intervention into a very specific terrain of struggle, so as to transform that terrain permanently. I discuss this idea in terms of Alain Badiou’s notion of the Event, arguing that the terrain on which ‘the Lemonade Event’ occurred was none other than that of music discourse itself, as a domain within the public sphere more generally.

The bulk of the essay constitutes a thematic review of the online discourse surrounding Lemonade—as led and curated by black female commentators, critics and academics—on the premise that writing about a musical phenomenon involves making a decision regarding what that phenomenon ‘is’. I attempt to demonstrate the political stakes of such a decision, both for the minoritarian group excluded from full membership of a ‘universal’ public sphere (i.e., black women) and for the class of professional critics whose claim to authority relies on the concealment of such a decision.

I conclude by arguing that Lemonade facilitates the strategic construction of a meta-discourse, equating music writing with public speech more generally. The legitimisation of this discourse allowed black female writers to lay claim to the centre of the public sphere, and thus—via the construction of Beyoncé as star, artist and individual—to the ‘universal’ category of generic, rational human subject, from which black women are routinely excluded.

This document brings together three essays that I published on my blog the biting point in 2016, on the subject of music and theatre.

The first essay confronts the unstable and dissatisfactory category of 'music theatre', via a book review of Eric Salzman and Thomas Desi's The New Music Theatre (2008). Through the course of the next two essays, I then attempt to reconstruct a sturdier definition of music theatre, on the basis of newly posited definitions of 'music' and 'theatre', inspired by Richard Schechner and Alain Badiou. My listener-oriented definition of 'music' relies on a concept derived from theatre: becoming-music as a dramaturgy of sound. This means that both 'theatre' and 'music' are defined according to the same basic operation—presentation-as-world—yet, while the 'world' of theatre is always mimetic, the 'world' of music-qua-music is always exceptional to the 'real' world. Thus, the operation of theatre can be considered a solution to the impossibility of musical reality: music theatre is the 'presentation-as-world' of the musically possible.

The picture of 'music theatre' that emerges from this framework is a very broad one, which necessarily includes all live musical performance. In the third essay, I outline a theory of musical genre that differentiates between the various aesthetic criteria that arbitrate within this wide field, making different demands of different performances on the basis of different genres. At the heart of this theory is a notion, borrowed from Schechner and Victor Turner, of music theatre as ritual. The result is a quasi-anthropological survey of genre rituals (from pop and jazz, to opera and experimental music) as they relate to the 'worlds' of music and theatre, the modality of music's 'appearance' within the fictional world presented, and the 'aesth-ethic' criteria of success within each ritual performance.