Theatre Journal

Theatre Journal 54.4 (2002) 664-665

Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater. By W. Anthony Sheppard. California Studies in Twentieth-Century Music, no. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; pp. xv + 350. $45.00 cloth.

The term "music theater" has traditionally performed the difficult task of designating a wide range of genres that do not fit standard definitions of either opera or musical theatre. Recent critical attention distinguishes the development of music theatre in the 1960s and early 1970s as an independent category of experimental staged works, thereby aligning the efforts of individual composers with the British, German, and American avant-garde. W. Anthony Sheppard's authoritative study of this twentieth-century phenomenon extends the historical treatment of the genre and he compellingly argues for a more flexible notion of music theatre. He contends that "music theater was a vital modernist genre" and that "the compositional concerns and cultural themes manifested in these works were fundamental to the history of twentieth-century Euro-American music, drama, and dance" (xi-xii). In this provocative work, Sheppard's interdisciplinary approach invites consideration beyond music scholarship and is certain to stimulate further exploration into this neglected area of musical performance.

Sheppard concentrates on investigating intersections between modernism and exoticism, identifying Japanese nô, medieval Christian drama, and ancient Greek theatre as three recurrent models of exotic influence. He pursues connections among the diversity of aesthetic, didactic, political, and social concerns in twentieth-century formulations of music theatre that he finds were "very often inspired by exotic models valued for integrating the arts in forms of total theater, for their disciplined and detached performance style, and for their ritual status and function" (xi). Pushing beyond representative "archetypes" (4), Sheppard considers less visible works by Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Honegger, Benjamin Britten, Peter Maxwell Davies, Harry Partch, and Leonard Bernstein. He further engages the concept of music theatre by examining interactions among dancers, playwrights, producers, and composers: examples include works by Isadora Duncan, Ida Rubinstein, Paul Claudel, W. B. Yeats, Bertolt Brecht, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Madonna. In doing so, Sheppard addresses the multiplicity of ways "the creation of ritualistic music theater entailed inventing new symbolic systems, styles, and structures of movement, dramatic text, and music" (21).

The book is divided into five parts. Part I, "Introduction: Drawing Connections to the Margins," and Part V, "Conclusion: Removing the Masks," bookend individual studies of modernist performance aesthetics in Europe (Part II), Great Britain (Part III), and America (Part IV). Early chapters establish vantage points from which Sheppard carves out a conceptual basis that he applies to later discussions. The "exotic" is broadly conceived as an encounter or reaction with the unfamiliar, and an "exotic model" is "one that an individual composer, dramatist, or choreographer considers to be beyond the boundaries of his or her culture" (11). Sheppard directs his focus "on those performative signs borrowed or developed in modernist music theater that indicate ritual intent in order to discover why ritual function and status was so pervasively desired and what social function these 'rituals' were intended to serve" (17). The use of masks and "masking" underscore the "modernist propensity to transform and transcend the human in the arts" (25). Masks, Sheppard observes, provide a double assault on reality, often deindividualizing the actor or disguising vocal subjectivity "to suggest an extrahuman vocal identity; thus the mask functions doubly in aural perception as it does in the visual dimension" (32).

Throughout, Revealing Masks amplifies processes of appropriation, absorption, and transformation of exotic religious or theatrical models in order to access the broader implications in which performer, audience, and social codes were reconceptualized into communal signifying systems. Chapters eight and nine explore Benjamin Britten's Church Parables (Noye's Fludde, 1958; Curlew River, 1964; The Burning Fiery Furnace, 1968; The Prodigal Son, 1968). Britten dissolved Eastern sources into a Christian framework of church ceremony that is viewed in terms of "domesticating the exotic" (126). Sheppard argues that Britten significantly altered the social function of religious ritual: "the Church Parables [End Page 664...