14 mei 2009

The Frequency of Imagination: Listening in Music Theatre

Pieter Verstraete will present the results of his PhD research, recently concluded under the auspices of the Theatre Department (UvA) and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. In this research, he investigates how ‘auditory distress’ forms a conceptual basis for analysing the ways listeners relate to sound in contemporary music theatre. Among these ways, he discusses modes of listening (attention), narrativisation and auditory imagination. He argues that the original distress, produced by an excess of intensity in listening, can be additionally heightened by the theatre’s context of visual deprivation. The deprivation, in turn, causes ‘acousmatic’ split-perceptions of sound, which, as a result of spatial juxtapositions or fragmentations (dissociations), may direct attention to the act of auditory perception and to the listener herself. In this way, unlike the dramatic traditions in theatre and opera, music theatre has the potential to make the listener aware of her position towards the distress – if it is not alleviated by the channelling perspectives proposed by the performance.

In this lecture, Verstraete will specifically discuss how the conceptual basis of auditory distress sheds light on the recent history of music theatre, which is in itself tainted by a crisis of self-definition and legitimisation in relation to the traditions of theatre and opera. Encouraged by his analysis of contemporary music theatre, he proposes that auditory distress is to be understood not so much as an aesthetic strategy but as the departure point of all auditory perception. Hence, Verstraete argues, music theatre engages in the present-day culture and politics of listening within the comprehensive though much contested space of aurality.