On a hillside above Barsana village in remote Maramures, (a district of northern Romania) Grigore Lese – regarded internationally as the leader of Romanian traditional and pastoral music – created an unrepeatable event of musical theatre last night.

The work, based around music and stories that the local audience clearly knew, involved local singers and instrumentalists, together with classical performers Olga Podobinschi (piano), Mihaela Pletea (soprano) and Maria Chifu (bassoon), and was led by the vocalist and ethno-musicologist Grigore Lese.

Most exciting about the fusion of styles and themes was the way the audience interacted with and joined in singing at times during the evening. The performance was orchestrated and conducted from the stage by Lese who began by introducing the story before leading the audience in a rendition of a well-known folk song. As the audience sang the generator, that was powering lights and microphones on this remote hillside, failed. Without a pause the audience voices swelled in the gathering darkness and Lese left the stage walking among the singing crowd leading the voices from where he could be heard. As the lights and microphones were restored he returned to the stage and the audience continued with him completing the song. The piece then continued – a raised hand from Lese to stage left instructed a vocalist from the choir to guttural expression, or to stage right a lyrical singer joined the performance. At times the pianist (on electric keyboard) sustained a drone to create tension under his vocal explanations, or his singing and traditional pipe playing. At other times the classical performers took over using contemporary and popular music within the framework of this story. Periodically the main theme returned involving the audience in the event, incorporating the entire hillside in a musical rendition of cultural heritage, mixing old and new, traditional and contemporary, young and old.

Under an almost full moon the whole event took on a spiritual quality that was musical and theatrical, unique and site specific. This was a musico-theatrical language that spoke to a very specific community, but even for those like me who had no knowledge of the music, the story or the cultural heritage, the playful interactions of an increasingly inebriated audience with the quiet and masterful leadership from the stage resulted in an engrossing experience.

This was indeed the musical theatre of community.

How often have you been aware of the music when watching a film or a theatre performance? If the music is skilfully written you probably weren’t aware of it, and yet music in film is pervasive – what Claudia Gorbman refers to as Unheard Melodies in her excellent book.

In theatre too, at the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, new scores are produced for each new production, but how often do we notice this music unless attention is drawn to it. Perhaps some musicians appear onstage at a dance or to accompany a song or a party and suddenly we notice, but what happens when we are not aware of the music? Certainly it continues to influence the atmosphere, our mood and our response to characters. It manipulates our understanding of plot events, it slows down and speeds up our perception of time, it signifies a geographical or historical location and it adds excitement or tension as the plot develops – and yet it must not be so significant that it draws focus from the plot.

Writing theatre music that fulfils all the demands made of it is an art.

Guy Woolfenden, who died in April this year, was music director of the RSC for 37 years and wrote over 150 scores for the company. He was a master of this little noticed art. His contribution to theatre music was not simply in writing excellent scores, however. He also supported and commissioned younger composers who work across media in theatre, film and television (such as Stephen Oliver, Ilona Sekacz, Nigel Hess, Gary Yershon, Shaun Davey), and composers of electronic sound (including Delia Derbyshire) contributing to the spread of what was then an experimental area of practice. The work of the RSC in extending the variety and importance of music in theatre and supporting the work of composers and musicians is rarely discussed; an unheard melody in British theatre practice whose development was spearheaded for many years by this kind and witty man.

Rest In Peace, Guy Woolfenden: pioneer of contemporary theatre music.

The coincidence of productions of The Busker’s Opera (Park Theatre) and The Threepenny Opera (National Theatre) raises the question of what is a musical. Dougal Irvine’s revision of the story with new songs that played at the Park Theatre is definitely considered a musical, so why is the Brecht Weill version playing at the National still conceived of as a play with music? Can it be that the British theatre cognoscenti still haven’t given up an elitist preference for the literary tradition.

Perhaps the fact that songs are moved between characters and scenes in The Threepenny Opera is another clue to the difference between musical theatre and a play with songs, since in musicals songs are supposed to reveal character or move plot – and in the latest National Theatre production Jenny (Sharon Small) gets to sing the lovely ‘Surabaya Johnny’ from Act 3 of Happy End. This exchange allows directors to alter the characterisation of Jenny or Polly, or indeed Lucy, giving them more focus, more opportunity for gaining empathy and simply more stage time. The strategy therefore also alters the balance of the show.

Does such a strategy suggest that the songs are not character songs? I would suggest not. That they are interchangeable only suggests that directors want to add the quality or characteristic that is highlighted in the song to their understanding of the function of the character, offering a new reading of the relationships in the show and a new balance between characters and plot. Music in theatre is everywhere let’s celebrate the continuity between Gay, Brecht and Weill and Irvine.