Composing New Media: Magnetic Tape Technology in New Music Theatre, c. 1950–1970

For the time span from 1950 to the mid-1970s, the reference works Pipers Enzyklopädie des Musiktheaters and New Grove Dictionary of Opera report on more than sixty new music theatre works that assign a fundamental place to new media technologies (Dahlhaus et al. (eds) 1986–97; Sadie (ed.) 1992–98). While opera composers’ interest in working with both visual projection technologies and modern communication media (such as telegraph, telephone and radio) goes back to the 1920s and 1930s (think of Satie, Weill, Krenek, Antheil, Milhaud, or Berg), magnetic tape recording and projection technology appears to be an especially prominent feature in operatic scores only after about 1950. Departing from a general survey of the corpus in question – that is, new music theatre works incorporating stored sound and sound projection directly on the level of composition – this chapter aims at proposing a (preliminary and certainly incomplete) categorization by discussing some of the observable paradigms of technological ‘extensions’ (to borrow an idea of Marshall McLuhan) as found, for example, in works by Mauricio Kagel, Pierre Schaeffer, Bruno Maderna, Renzo Rossellini, Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Luigi Nono, Boris Blacher, and Giacomo Manzoni.