From ALMANAC; A Winter’s Tale
Maureen Howard
For Listening Through Earphones
Julio Cortá, Translated by zar and Stephen Kessler
The Character
Jena Osman
Two Stories
David Foster Wallace
Yip
Joanna Scott
Kali
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Dead Man’s Fuel
Mike McCormack
From Black Box Cutaway
Susan Gevirtz
Things That Have Stopped Moving
Gilbert Sorrentino
Without Pity
Elizabeth Willis
Burial Plot
Nathaniel Tarn
From And How on Earth
Anselm Hollo
Homecoming
Can Xue, Translated by Ronald R. Janssen and Translated by Jian Zhang
Music Theater: Texts and Traces
Thalia Field
The Bewitched: A Ballet Satire with an essay, A Somewhat Spoof
Harry Partch
From Foreign Experiences
Robert Ashley
Our Lady of Late
Meredith Monk
From Everyday Newt Burman
John Moran
Erotec [the human life of machines]: An Interview
Thalia Field, Bradford Morrow, Henry Threadgill and Alice Farley
From The Negros Burial Ground
Ann T. Greene and Leroy Jenkins
From Wallpaper Psalm (an electric & hysteric operetta)
Ruth E. Margraff
Geography and Music (cotranslated by the author)
Yasunao Tone and Translated by Judith Grossman
From Lady Into Fox
Neil Bartlett and Nicolas Bloomfield
Timeshare
Jeffrey Eugenides
The Burial
Stephen Dixon
Confession of My Images
Barbara Guest
From The Negro-Lover
Joyce Carol Oates
Instructing the Devouring Locust
Jackson Mac Low
The Pure, Scalding Light of Tombstone, 1881
Paul West
Chihuahua
Toby Olson
The Berlin Sonnets
Robert Kelly
From Doubt Uncertainty Possibility Desire
Mary Caponegro
Cover photograph © 1993 by Laurie Olinder: James Godwin as Newt Burman, Ridge Theater, in John Moran’s Everyday Newt Burman (The Trilogy of Cyclic Existence). Directed by Bob McGarth. Set design by Laurie Olinder. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Ridge Theater.
Music theater exists on some long low branch in an ecstatic tangle of phylogenies and ontologies from all over the bush. Opera, dance, art, poetry, theater, film, photography, cabaret—even, in the early days, architecture and political activism—can be seen in its genetic soup. Examples of early music theater have been found on many terrains, on several continents at once—its place as an essential literary and dramatic form continually substantiated. Although it is impossible to locate an original or originating model, we can, by the tracks left for us to follow, easily see that music theater has grown from a small phenomenon to a major movement.
—Thalia Field
Managing Editor
Conjunctions | Bard College
30 Campus Road
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504
