"Just the Right Bullets": Music and Postmodernism in Robert Wilson, William Burroughs, and Tom Waits's The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets

In March 1990, three American artists, Robert Wilson, Tom Waits, and William S. Burroughs, came together and presented a revised version of the classic Der Freischütz folktale to a Hamburg audience. Since its premiere with a thirty-minute standing ovation, this updated re-staging, titled The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, has been mounted by theaters around the world. Despite this success, however, there has been little research on the show, especially its musical components. After providing an overview of the show, the creative team, and existing sources in chapter 1, this dissertation examines the music of The Black Rider from a large-scale perspective in chapter 2, finding traces of associative themes in the work as well as evidence of Waits’s musical influences and theatrical compositional style. Chapter 3 investigates each sung number of the work and considers how it fits into the drama at large, finding that current systems of evaluating how numbers are integrated into a work are insufficient. The chapter closes with proposals for new models. Examining Waits’s music and lyrics, in addition to the contributions from both Wilson and Burroughs, chapter 4 explores how the materials of the show point towards a postmodern attitude and considers how this postmodernism relates to Germany at the time of the premiere; the chapter argues that, much in the same way that Carl Maria von Weber’s Freischütz opera reflected Germany of 1821 and continued to play an important part in the country’s identity, The Black Rider reflects the world of post-Cold War Germany as it sought to redefine itself. Chapter 5 closes with a summary of findings and proposes new areas of study, both in The Black Rider and the two Waits/Wilson stage works that followed: Alice (1992) and Woyzeck (2000).PhDMusic: TheoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/169871/1/jakeart_1.pd