Recent approaches to experimental music theatre and contemporary opera

The area of music studies that would profit most from the changing climate is opera studies and the insight that the musical work cannot be equated with a score and that performance is more than the execution of an ideally self-sufficient text, which was so hard-won in the field as a whole, is nowhere as seemingly self-evident as in opera. No other genre illustrates quite so clearly that music is an embodied art involving human action, and that it cannot be reduced to its acoustic dimension.