The Music in service of visual communication in Jesuit school drama

Tomasz Jeż

Abstract

One of the most important element of the Jesuit culture was the school drama, which combines elements of many arts into one synesthethic whole, proved to be a particularly valuable vehicle of artistic, educational and formative persuasion. To achieve its objectives, Jesuit authors applied elements of psychological introspection in their spectacles, in the form of visualisations of individual emotional states as well as solutions to those states that appeared in the course of dramatic action.

Comparing three different kinds of theatrical sources: periochai (action summaries distributed among the audience), libretti and the full music scores (coming almost exclusively from Vienna college), it is possible to discuss the music layer of individual spectacles, especially if by comparing various sources we reconstruct the methodology of encoding musical content, which varies from one group of sources to another, but betrays a rather logical general strategy.

The paper discuss how and in which way the music was used as a support of the visual communication in the spectacles played in central-European Jesuit colleges, concerning the topic of the overseas missions of the Society. For instance, the sections referred in the periochai as the choruses are actually extensive scenes consisting of a dozen or more episodes and musically completely independent. Where musical sequences are incorporated into the main action of the drama, they are shorter and complementary to the recited sections of the libretto.