Avant-Garde Theatre Sound

Sound experimentation by avant-garde theatre artists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries is an important but ignored aspect of theatre history. Curtin explores how artists engaged with the sonic conditions of modernity through dramatic form, characterization, staging, technology, performance style, and other forms of interaction.                   

"In this engaging and penetrating study, Curtin relates the theatrical avant-garde's interest in sonic experimentation to several key features of sonic modernity. Ranging from modernity's 'acoustic imaginary' to the 'exuberant noise' of avant-gardism itself, Curtin recovers a lively historical dialogue between modernist theatre practices and the shifting soundscapes of modern culture." - Andrew Sofer, Boston College, USA

"Avant-Garde Theatre Sound lends an expert and well-tempered ear to the often clamorous but strangely overlooked soundscapes of modern avant-garde theatre. Eschewing the excitable acousmania of many other sound theorists, Curtin offers searching and historically informed explorations of the intrigues and elations of noise in modern performance. This book puts the question of sound firmly and unignorably into the history of theatre, just as it puts theatre at the heart of sound studies." - Steven Connor, University of Cambridge, UK

". . . Curtin's isa genuinely original book that effectively challenges received approaches to the theatrical avant-garde, one that more than accomplishes his goal to challenge the organizational categories of theatre history-making and of periodization and genre in modernist studies" - Theatre Research International

". . . [Curtin's] attempt at re-constructing specific 'keynote sounds' of modernity, as well as how they must have been experienced and how they live on today, is enthralling." - The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

Adrian Curtin is Lecturer in the Drama department at the University of Exeter, UK.