Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Part one Legacies
- Part two Trends
- Part three Topographies
- Part four Directions
- 14 Music theatre since the 1960s
- 15 Minimalist opera
- 16 Opera and film
- 17 Popular musical theatre (and film)
- 18 Opera in the marketplace
- 19 Technology and interpretation: aspects of ‘modernism’
- Works cited
- General index
- Index of operas
15 - Minimalist opera
from Part four - Directions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Part one Legacies
- Part two Trends
- Part three Topographies
- Part four Directions
- 14 Music theatre since the 1960s
- 15 Minimalist opera
- 16 Opera and film
- 17 Popular musical theatre (and film)
- 18 Opera in the marketplace
- 19 Technology and interpretation: aspects of ‘modernism’
- Works cited
- General index
- Index of operas
Summary
Emerging from and ultimately belonging to the stage, minimalist music is an offshoot of avant-garde New York theatre. The style has been traditionally associated with American pop culture and African and south Asian music, but just as important are the early minimalist composers' connections with the innovative theatrical figures of downtown Manhattan in the 1960s. Indeed, musical minimalism and American theatre served to define each other at critical points in both their histories.
Before the 1970s, the signal innovations in American music and theatre certainly did not take place in the opera houses. But the minimalists have shown an extraordinary creative interest in music drama and other large-scale theatrical endeavours. The story of this operatic renovation really begins in the late 1950s and 1960s, when Philip Glass and fellow opera composer Meredith Monk were students in New York. The theatres of lower Manhattan were seething with revolutionary change at that time. Pioneering among non-narrative collaboratives in the city was the Living Theatre, founded in 1947 by anarchist free spirits Julian Beck and Judith Malina.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera , pp. 244 - 266Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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