even back then I had started a discussion on the subject.
The final project dealt with non-verbal vocal musical theater of the late 1900s. That is, how the absence or radical reformulation of the relationship between music and text could influence the dramaturgy of musical theater at the end of the 1900s. Is non-verbal musical theater possible? What are its forms? Is there a coherent system among the various individual poetics? Is the non-verbal in itself an exaltation of the corporeal, as in the history of theater, or an exaltation of the spiritual, as in the history of music? To discuss these themes, I had proposed to analyze examples taken from the works of Meredith Monk, Georges Aperghis, and Salvatore Sciarrino.
Now I simply don't like the project anymore because I realized it was very dispersive, potentially extremely long. Regarding the examples, all three aforementioned authors have written a lot. On Sciarrino, in particular, a LOT HAS BEEN WRITTEN. I would have certainly spent the first year removing stuff, narrowing down the subject. I knew this even back then, but I was aiming for effect :-) as I imagined, in fact, no one on the committee knew either Aperghis or Monk... and indeed they criticized my bibliography because there were no texts talking about Berio (?!)