The Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre (CROMT) at the University of Sussex has been invited by the projet Dramaturgie Musicale Contemporaine en Europe (DMCE) of the University of Paris 8, to present a staging of Stefano Gervasoni's short music-theatre work 'Pas si' (1998/revised 2008), based on a Samuel Beckett text, at the fourth annual DMCE symposium in Paris in November 2008. \n\nDMCE was established at the University of Paris in 2005 to bring together European musicians, theatre practitioners and academics working in the field of contemporary opera and music theatre to engage with the specific problematic of musical dramaturgy. CROMT has been a partner in the project since its inception.\n\nThe primary research issue for the DMCE is the question of what are the dramaturgies that are specific to music-based theatre, considering the specific dramaturgical implications of different musical styles and forms, of musical time and space, of the singing voice, etc. A secondary set of research questions for this application relate to the specific issue of Samuel Beckett's relationship to music, and in particular the ways in which composers have approached the challenge of setting his texts. \n\nThe Research Questions for the project are :\n1. What is the dramaturgy of Gervasoni's setting of a non-theatrical text by Samuel Beckett.? In what way is it theatrical/dramatic (or perhaps post-dramatic)? \n2. How do the specific characteristics of Gervasoni's musical language translate into dramatic/theatrical forms? \n3. What dramaturgical forms are created by musical spatiality? \n4. How can a staging of 'Pas si' in real time and space convey the textual and musical negations and erasures of the work?\n5. What relationships are there between Beckett's work and music more generally? \n6. How does Gervasoni's approach to Beckett's text compare and contrast to other musical settings of Beckett?\n\nAlthough Beckett was extremely interested in music, he entered into few musical collaborations, and explictly disliked opera. However, Beckett engaged with the relationship between words and music in a number of works, including his radio drama 'Words and Music' (1962), and he frequently used musical analogies in relation to the staging of his works. \n\nIt has been said that Beckett's theatre demonstrates that, if you remove all aspects of conventional dramatic action the one thing left is theatrical space. The spatiality of music for the theatre, on the other hand, has often been overlooked. In this project I want to test the thesis that the relationship between musical and theatrical space lies at the heart of any successful musical engagement with Beckett's texts, and that musical space has its own dramaturgical imperatives. \n\nBeckett's writings also involve negation and erasure, and he once specifically bemoaned that literature couldn't be 'dissolved, like, for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony'. Stefano Gervasoni (b.1960) is a younger member of a group of composers that include Luigi Nono (with whom Gervasoni studied) Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino whose music could also be said to foreground such dissolutions of the musical sound surface, effecting different kinds of negation of conventional musical expression or form. The project will also examine therefore the musico-dramatic poetics of negation through its staging of 'Pas si'. \n\nIn addition to the DMCE symposium, the production will also be shown at a conference on Beckett and Music to be organised by the departments of Music, English and Drama, and Media at the University of Sussex in October. The conference will address the following key issues:1. Beckett's ideas on music; 2. Beckett's use of music in his work; 3. The 'musicality' of Beckett's language, and quasi-musical processes of 'composition' in his work; 4. How composers have responded to Beckett's work.