Music theatre

Music theatre is a performance genre that emerged over the course of the 20th century, in opposition to more conventional genres like opera and musical theatre. The term came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s to describe an avant-garde approach to instrumental and vocal composition that included non-sonic gesture, movement, costume and other visual elements within the score. These compositions (such as György Ligeti’s Aventures (1962), Mauricio Kagel’s Match (1964) and Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (1968)) were intended to be performed on a concert hall stage, potentially as part of a longer programme of pieces. Since the 1980s, the term music theatre has come to include any live project that uses the techniques and theories of avant-garde theatre and performance art to experiment with new ways of combining music and theatre; this has been extended to include some of the historical works that influenced the music theatre of the 1960s, such as Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire (1912), Igor Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat (1918) and Kurt Weill's Mahagonny-Songspiel (1927).