How to define musical is a basic problem that puzzles China people and many foreign experts.
Rudiger, a famous German music historian? Rüdiger Bering wrote helplessly in the preface of his book Musical: "In the development of musical 100 years, it has experienced various forms, and it is difficult to make a complete and exact definition. First of all, there is no single musical style-from Kurt? This opera features street scenes in Kurt Weill and is dedicated to Frederick? The opera style in Lowe's My Fair Lady, and Leonard? The music was inspired by the jazz in Leonardo Bernstein and galt's west side story? The rock music in galt Delmotte's Long Hair is ever-changing. Secondly, as far as orchestration is concerned, there are endless changes from classical bands, jazz bands to rock bands. In addition, in most musicals, singing and dialogue alternate, but some works are very close to opera, with only a few lines, such as Andrew? Lloyd. Ai Weita, Andrew Lloyd Webber. Therefore, it is not easy to distinguish musicals from other types of musical works. " [Quoted from the musical, Rudiger? Rudiger Bering)/, Heilongjiang Fine Arts Publishing House, August 5438+0, 2006, Preface. 〕
In fact, when it comes to defining musicals, we should first mention Oscar, a famous musical lyricist. In Oscar Hammerstein II's words, he said, "It can be anything it wants to be. A music absolutist must have only one thing-music. " It is any element you can think of. There is only one factor that musicals absolutely contain, and that is music! Now it seems that what I said decades ago is still very enlightening. Although each musical focuses on drama, music and dance differently, for example, Notre Dame de Paris focuses on singing, Contact with Love focuses on dancing, and Fiddler on the Roof focuses on drama, with singing, dancing and acting. If the performance is not successful, no matter how well you sing and dance, you can't do it well, but they are undoubtedly musicals and the music belongs to them. Obviously, this is actually a question of how to define it.
To accurately grasp the concept of musical, we have to start with the change of English musical. This culture from the west itself has its complicated historical evolution process, and the culture created by different cultural backgrounds can only be described from a historical perspective.
Generally speaking, there are two main categories of musical families: one is musical and the other is book musical. ), one is variety show (variety show) and current affairs show (revue).