ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how musicality drives or connects with some of the central themes, performance aesthetics and productive mechanisms of today's theatre. It focuses at times on aesthetic principles in production and reception, at others on changing creative roles and practices, programmatic thrusts or disciplinary contexts. Contemporary theatre remains full of examples in which 'priority is given to musicality instead of semantic content, the text is first considered as material, which is above all constructed on musical constraints'. Discursive meaning and non-musical forms of coherence can thus be reintroduced by making use of the connotative referential potential of music and the interaction of musical coherence with textual, visual, kinetic or spatial coherence. Musicality, then, is often embraced by theatre-makers as a provider of a different kind of coherence that may at times replace, but often accompanies or counterpoints linguistic and narrative coherence and challenges their dominant position.
