A. Krylova

Modern music theatre in the variety of genre solutions

The original thesis of the article is that everything associated with theater art has the special meaning for man of the XXI century, as it appears to be in demand not only in theatre but in whole life as it is. The consequence of this is a special public interest in theatre art as well as composers’ and producers’ attention, which encourages experimentation and gives rise to many modifications of the genres. Their classification is the task of the future. The article aims to identify the main vector of development of music theatre for the modern stage, and to outline what are the main branches of the genre matrix-tree to become the ways of its evolution process. Considering the fact that musical theatre is a complex symbolic system, encoding information simultaneously in several languages (which are the languages of music, art and drama), and the author bases on its synthetic nature and outlines several areas of synthesis, generating a variety of genre models. All these include: the upgrading of the genre from the inside by finding a new types of drama out of music; the creation of hybrids of well-established traditional genre models; synthesis at the cross of various arts – literature, dance (dance opera); various styles – jazz, rock, popular music, that give rise to such opera formats as musical and opera talk show; combination of opera and screen arts (radio, film, television and video opera); the video technologies that enable opera to include the ‘pages of real life’, that signified another direction in the development of the musical theatre – a documentary musical video-theatre.

Key words

opera, musical theatre, synthesis of arts, genre synthesis, experiment.

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