The Musical as Drama

What makes the musical complex is something the Greek
drama had too—the second order of time, which interrupts
book time in the form of songs and dances. The choral odes in
the Greek drama were danced and sung, and if we knew how
they were performed in any detail, we would find Greek
tragedy more interesting. Aristotle recognized the need to in-
corporate the choral odes into the “unity of action” that he
found in the best tragedies, but the extant text of the Poetics
does not give considered thoughts on this problem. Song and
Spectacle rank at the bottom of Aristotle’s priority list of
tragedy’s components, as though they were separable from the
top categories of Plot and Character. A theory of the musical
cannot do this. It has to regard songs and dances as basic ele-
ments, equal to plot and character and influential on both.
The songs are stanzaic forms of verse against which the
music asserts a broad repetitive pattern, and intricate smaller
kinds of repetition occur within the stanzas. Characters who
break into song are being enlarged by entering into the second
order of time and displaying their mastery of repetitive, lyric
form. Shaw’s Henry Higgins in the nonmusical Pygmalioncan-
not be imagined breaking into a song. He exists consisently in
one order of time. The Henry Higgins of My Fair Ladyacts in
this order of time, too, but he breaks into song in his first
scene, and he sings several numbers thereafter. He even dances
once. He is not a freewheeling song-and-dance man, but he
joins the fandango that develops out of “The Rain in Spain”
number, and Eliza is struck by this (“I Could Have Danced All
Night”). I am not interested in the question of which is the
better form of drama, Shaw’s play or the musical based on it.
Iam interested in the difference between the two, for the
change between the two orders of time involved in book and
number makes Henry Higgins a different kind of character
than he is in Shaw’s play, or a character caught up in a different
kind of action, and the theory of integration overlooks that dif-
ference.
Integration theory would say that songs and dances advance
the plot. I can think of songs and dances that do advance the
plot, and every reader will think of others. “Marry the Man

INTEGRATION AND DIFFERENCE 7