Digital Humanties! The Musical

It has now been twenty-five years since the development of
the first personal computer, and while many humanities
scholars have begun to explore how these machines might assist
them in their work, there have been very few attempts to
consider how electronic tools might be used to study musical
theater. Musical theater seems particularly well-suited, though,
to the multimedia capabilities of the modern PC. David Saltz’s
Virtual Vaudevilleand the “Web Operas” on Paul Howarth and
Jim Farron’s Gilbert and Sullivan Archive prove that dramatic
text and music can be presented together in interesting ways
through a digital interface. However, neither is precisely the
right model for presenting musical theatre texts. This
presentation will describe the particular suitability of
contemporary musical theater for electronic presentation and
will demonstrate the author’s electronic edition of the musical
Parade.
The electronic edition of Parade serves as a prototype for an
upcoming series of electronic critical editions musical theater
texts the author is currently working with the Library of
Congress to develop. Using the standards designed by the Text
Encoding Initiative (TEI), the text of the Broadway and the
touring version of the libretto of Parade were encoded into one
file. Textual, critical, and explanatory notes were also encoded
in the text using the same system. The text is presented in an
interactive AJAX website. Users can choose how much of these
texts to view and the way in which they should be displayed.
This functionality allows users to compare varying versions of
the text and score side by side, or (using transparency) even
one on top of the other. When the user clicks the lyrics of a
song, the music begins playing at the beginning of the associated
section and stops at the end (or when paused by the user).
Analytical tools such as an automated collation feature, an
exhaustive concordance of every word in the libretto, and a
tool which extracts all the lines for a particular character along
with cue lines to aid actors in memorization of their parts are
also included. Future editions will include tools that will allow
users to analyze patterns in the textual, musical, and
terpsichorean languages of the poem. For example, a
concordance of words will be linked to a concordance of
musical phrases and both, in turn, will be linked to a
concordance of choreographed movements. Videos of dance
numbers will be linked to computer animations of the movements of individual dancers. The early versions of these
features will also be demonstrated in this presentation.
This presentation will also describe how such editions will
benefit musical theater studies. Musical theater scholarship is
growing rapidly. An increasing number of scholarly works are
being published by academic presses, and in the past year alone
there were over fifty dissertations written on the topic. While
this scholarship is promising, the academy as a whole remains
relatively uninterested in the musical. A recent panel on
composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim was scheduled for the
Modern Language Association’s annual conference but was
later cancelled for lack of interest. The musical is still usually
relegated to popular culture studies and is rarely included in
the syllabi of contemporary drama courses. In part, this may
be a reaction to the preponderance of mostly formulaic works
in the genre. Today, aside from revivals and the occasional
limited run at Lincoln Center, artistic (as opposed to purely
commercially driven) musicals can rarely generate enough
investor interest to go on Broadway. The creators of artistic
musical theater bemoan the fact there is not a venue for their
work. In a recent article for Opera News, musical theater
composer Michael John LaChiusa (composer-lyricist of many
recent artistic musicals), writes of recent Broadway hits, “All
sense of invention and craft is abandoned in favor of delivering
what the artist thinks a musical should deliver.”1
Composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown echoes this complaint
in an interview with the author, “Only in [today’s Broadway]
musicals do things exist with the sole purpose of entertaining
their people and not hoping to make them think about the
world.” It could be that these are nothing but the complaints of
artists unable to achieve widespread commercial success, yet
the fact remains that the Broadway musical has, in the last
fifteen years, almost completely consisted of light comedy and
pastiche.
Significantly, although non-musical plays suffer many of the
same pressures, a few serious plays regularly open and close
on Broadway every season. A play can afford to fail, not only
because production costs for plays are usually lower than for
musicals, but because it is viewed as “high art.” Producers are
more willing to lose money on plays because they are
contributing to works of “cultural importance.” The musical,
on the other hand, is trapped in a degrading cycle. The scholarly
community, which might elevate the cultural respectability of
the musical, generally ignores the form because so few musicals
are artistically interesting (thereby withholding the cultural
blessing which might inspire producers to fund more interesting
musicals).
One way to break the cycle may be to provide scholars with
better access to the best works of musical theater. There is
evidence that increased access to the material can lead to
increased cultural respect. The Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing, the
first musical for which the libretto was commercially published,
went on to become the first musical to win Pulitzer prize.
Unfortunately, the full text of a musical is often available only
to theater practitioners who rent the performance texts from
theater licensing companies for a production. Despite Stephen
Sondheim’s reputation, there is, at the time of this writing, no
commercially published libretto of his Merrily We Roll Along
or Saturday Night If Arthur Miller’s or Tom Stoppard’s work
were available only under such conditions one wonders if the
literary community would have been so willing to embrace
them.
Of course, the extremely multi-medial nature of musical theater
makes the traditional codex a clumsy tool for presenting editions
of the texts. Further, musicals often exist in many different
versions with no one text definitely representing the title. The
musical Show Boat , for instance, may be better thought of as
the sum of the total of all its major incarnations rather than as
any one production. Although this notion of textuality is
difficult to represent in print, it is well-suited for an electronic
edition. Further, electronic editions will assist not only
individual scholars of musical theater, but instructors of the
form as well. Teaching close reading of musical theater texts
has always been an awkward matter. The problem of linking
text to sound and the limited available of important texts often
force instructors to assign videotaped or movie versions of the
works. This approach does not encourage careful study of the
written words of the musical. If scholarly electronic editions
of musical theater are eventually produced, it may be that
musical theater will finally find a firm footing in academic
scholarship. The first printed libretto of a musical won a Pulitzer
Prize. It seems possible electronic editions will increase the
respectability of an art form that is even now slowly finding its
deserved place in literary scholarship. Perhaps scholarly interest
will generate more funding for serious musicals. Optimistic
thoughts, to be sure—perhaps better suited for a Rodgers and
Hammerstein song than a conference presentation. Still, at the
very least, electronic editions of musical theater will provide a
new way of studying and experiencing this important art form.
1. Michael John LaChiusa, “The Great Gray Way,” Opera News
(August 2005): 30-35.