Performers' Voices Across Centuries and Cultures

The following sections are included:

• Editor's Preface

• Contents

• Acknowledgements

• List of Online Examples

• List of Music Examples

• List of Figures and Table

• Notes on Contributors

I'd like to begin with a maxim I learned many years ago in school ‐ or maybe it was Sunday school. Perhaps you know it too: He who knows not and thinks he knows is a fool: shun him. He who knows and thinks he knows not is asleep: wake him. He who knows not and knows he knows not is ignorant: teach him. But he who knows and knows he knows is wise: follow him…

Most performers would like their music making to speak for itself. Increasingly, though, in recent times, performers have been compelled to find alternative public voices to complement their work and image. Beyond the expectation to speak to audiences before performing, their voices are often projected in written forms ranging from traditional print media to the large internet sites. For example, the ongoing blogs of high-profile classical artists such as Hilary Hahn (2011), Stephen Hough (2011) and Susan Tomes (2011) give not only insights into their lives as performers but also their opinions on a wide range of life matters. On the surface, it would seem that performers are more willing these days to talk more about what they are doing and share their opinions. Moreover, there seems to be an audience keen to hear the insider's perspective, to hear the performer's voice. Particularly since the developments associated with historically informed performance practice, musicology and the educational institutions of classical music have increasingly welcomed the contribution their public voices can make. Though these are pleasing developments, nonetheless, in reality most high-level performers still remain reluctant to engage publicly in deep reflection upon their practice. This paper will reflect upon that reluctance and try to account for it in relation to what Hindemith referred to as ‘the performer's eternal dilemma, his dualistic soul with both halves fighting each other’…

The following sections are included:

• Introduction

• Worldly Voices

• Musical Voices

• Loving Voices

• Soulful Voices

• Conclusion

• Reference List

The following sections are included:

• Fundamental Problems in Louis Couperin's Unmeasured Preludes

• Seventeenth-Century Controversies over the Interpretation of the port de voix

• Ports de voix in Couperin's Preludes: Types and Functions

• Sources and Editions

• Critical Performance Issues

• Conclusion

• Reference List

• Discography

The following sections are included:

• 'The Composer's Intentions': Letters of Alessandro Scarlatti

• Finding a Context for Performers

• Bass Part Sonorities

• Key Choice, Instrumentation and Affect

• Conclusions

• Reference List

• Discography

The following sections are included:

• Investigation of Performance Practice in the Baroque Period

• Aspects To Be Considered when Studying Works from the Baroque Period on the Marimba

• Conclusion

• Reference List

• Discography

The following sections are included:

• Dialogue, Answerability and the Uniqueness of Being

• Verbal and Musical Utterances

• The Performer's Voice in Theory

• Musical Objectivity and the Classical Body

• The Performer's Voice in Practice

• Performing Cultural Voices in the Menuetto of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet

• In Response to Stravinsky's Monologic 'Principle of Submission'

• Conclusion: The Performer's Mortal Voice

• Reference List

• Discography

The classical song recital format has remained much the same since its evolution as a distinct performance genre during the mid to late nineteenth century, although the repertoire has greatly expanded. Perhaps there is a need for a fresh look at this often neglected genre, particularly in terms of innovatory approaches to presentation. In a series of performances over several years, I have created a format I have called the ‘literary song recital’. This consists of a synthesis of spoken text and sung song with occasional limited staging, which engages with several of the neglected areas of the art song repertoire using the literary basis of the genre as a starting point. The focal point of this discussion is my performance of Sir Arthur Somervell's song cycle Maud (1898), based on Alfred, Lord Tennyson's celebrated extended poem Maud: A Monodrama (1855). Using unset extracts from the poem, I combine aspects of the musical monodrama with the English poetic monodrama and dramatic monologue, responding to the narrative and dramatic arc of Tennyson's poem while respecting the musical structure and sequence of Somervell's song cycle. This paper traces aspects of the song recital's history that are relevant to my research and explains the rationale behind my selections from the poem not set by Somervell in order to create a performance synthesis of the poetic monodrama, musical melodrama and the art song cycle. The song recital format has been developed through a series of similar programmes that I have devised including a performance version of Johannes Brahms's Magelone Lieder (1861‐1868); these songs are themselves extracted from the verse play by Ludwig Tieck but follow a much clearer narrative trajectory than Somervell's cycle. I have also used a variety of vocal settings of A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (1896) interspersed with unset text from the poems to create an emotional narrative of the lad of the title in this highly influential poetry collection, which has been the basis for a wide variety of musical settings. Similarly, I have used a variety of musical settings of Rudyard Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), a poetry collection that rivalled Housman's in popularity, to suggest a narrative of the mythical soldier, Kipling's ‘Tommy Atkins’, and his journey through the Empire as a British soldier during the late nineteenth century. These are some possibilities that expand the boundaries of the recital format and can be part of an imaginative re-engagement with this most intense yet neglected of art forms…

Sitting at the piano in his home one day in 1915, Béla Bartók used a wax cylinder phonograph to record himself playing Romanian Folk Dances, which he had recently composed on the basis of melodies collected during his ethnographic research in Transylvania over the previous three years. Bartók selected a cylinder he had used in 1913 to capture the sounds of a string player during a trip to North Africa, with the intention of recording over this earlier performance. During the production of the ethnographic recording in Africa, however, the grooves of the stylus had cut deeply into the wax, and, as a result, the vibrations caused by Bartók's piano playing were not strong enough to eclipse the other sounds on the cylinder. When the cylinder is played back, the strains of the African musician's instrument emerge part-way through Bartók's performance and gradually overtake the sound of the piano, producing the effect of an inadvertent duet between Bartók and his ethnographic subject. The aural traces left by these two musicians merge awkwardly, coalescing, despite lacking any unity of musical material, under the sound of the extraneous crackling ostinato caused by the corrosion of the cylinder that threatens to overwhelm them both…

‘The lowly voice’ is our moniker for the bass (upright and electric). We have spent numerous years as freelance bass players in both full-time and part-time capacities in Singapore and the United States. We have also worked in several other countries and with musicians from several countries. In getting gigs, there is a largely unspoken code of behaviour involving what it means to be a professional musician. At gigs, we have often ruminated with other musicians over the Singaporean freelance music scene and the distinct voices of some of Singapore's most recognized freelance musicians. In this paper we explore the extent to which we could discover more about the uniqueness of our lowly voice in Singapore. Lowly herein is wordplay, drawing attention to the low register of the instrument (often acting as the fundamental note upon which musical harmony is built), the plebeian professional roles of bassists and the humble voices of bass players as people. The tendency has been for players of instruments other than bass (especially pianists) to ask local bassists to adapt to their musical approach. But why do other musicians tell bassists how to play, and not bassists tell other musicians how to play? To what extent must the bass voice change and adapt to others' voices, and to what extent, if any, do other musicians reciprocate?…

The following sections are included:

• Documenting the Collaboration

• Intention and Authorial Perspective

• Intention in Music

• Intention in Collaboration: The Process

• Intention Revisited

• Reference List

Bruce Lee's interpretation of a good fight is as relevant in the martial arts world as it is in the creation of Tension Study II: Eagle Claw Wu Tsiao Chen Wins. In this video piece based on fight scenes from a kung fu movie paired with a live percussion performance, the performer is situated within a complex and fragmented narrative pulled from many kung fu novels and films. Pitting the performer in an epic struggle between fixed time and rhythmic flux, this work takes on early kung fu film's usage of Chinese instruments to punctuate fight moves and uses the rearranged film samplings as the score and notation for the live performer. The female character, Wu Tsiao Chen, seen on the video is originally from Master of the Flying Guillotine, a 1975 Taiwanese/Hong Kong martial arts film (Wang 1975). This article presents a conversation between composer Sean Griffin and percussionist Aiyun Huang on the stages of collaboration leading up to the current version of the work. The meeting took place on 6 December 2010 in the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. The piece was premiered in February 2008 and revised to its current version in December 2008. In this conversation, Griffin and Huang discuss the process of creating the piece and their respective views on the issue of collaboration in the creative process. We encourage the reader to watch the performance of the piece…

The following sections are included:

• Index