Synthesizer, Resonanz, Modulation: Auf dem Weg zur musikalischen Schicht des Theaters

Abstract

The article explores the question of the musicality of theatrical structures. Musicality is to be understood as a specific, historically changing relationality that can serve to think and describe practices that are not primarily sonic. 

The sonic presents no manifest objects, but spatial processes in which various sound emanations modulate, mutually ‘fold in’ or expand. Musicians have dealt with this peculiar material and its constellation over the centuries, developing a technical and conceptual knowledge. Tapped time and time again, this knowledge was repeatedly used to deal with non-sonic questions also: In the Pythagoreans, in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Paul Klee, Gilbert Simondon, or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. 

Along these and other settings, the ‘musical’ will be described as a structure of participation and mutual variation of heterogeneous agencies, forms of expression, and layers of meaning. In many cases we encounter theatrical forms in which the interplay of physical, technical, linguistic, medial and other dimensions is not oriented towards any final perspective, but rather figures itself in modulating superimposition (e.g. Arnold Schönberg, John Cage or Heiner Goebbels). These can be described as forms of theatrical musicality that are initially independent of the presence or dominance of music in the narrow sense.