Performer's Voices Across Centuries and Cultures


Book Description

This book and its accompanying website present the selected proceedings of the inaugural, ?The Performer's Voice: An International Forum for Music Performance and Scholarship?, directed by Dr Anne Marshman (editor) and hosted by the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, National University of Singapore. The chapters, which were selected through a process of international peer review, reflect the symposium's wide-ranging interdisciplinary scope, coupled with an uncompromising emphasis on the act of performance, the role of the performer and the professional performer's perspective.




A World of Popular Entertainments


Book Description

This groundbreaking volume of critical essays about popular entertainments brings together the work of eighteen established, emerging, and independent scholars with backgrounds in Archives, Theatre and Performance, Music, and Historical Studies, currently working across five continents. The first of its kind to examine popular entertainments from a global and multi-disciplinary perspective, this collection examines a broad cross-section of historical and contemporary popular entertainment forms from Australia, England, Japan, North America, and South Africa, and considers their social, cultural and political significance. Despite the vibrant, complex, and ubiquitous nature of popular entertainments, the field has suffered from a lack of sustained academic attention. Nevertheless, popular entertainments have a global reach and a transnational significance at odds with the fact that the meaning and definition of both ‘popular’ and ‘entertainment’ remain widely contested. Since the late-nineteenth century, class-based prejudices in Western culture have championed the superiority of art and literature over the dubious and fleeting pleasures of ‘entertainment.’ Similarly, the term ‘popular’ has carried pejorative connotations, indicating something common and outside the conventional and highbrow productions of the purpose-built theatre house or concert hall. Irrespective of whether ‘popular’ is code for a cultural product with a folk origin, or a term indicating the mass appeal of a cultural product, this volume’s re-assessment of popular entertainments from a global perspective is timely. The performance research embodied in this volume was first discussed at A World of Popular Entertainments International Conference (University of Newcastle, Australia, 2009) in response to a multi-disciplinary call for scholars to explore a variety of topics relevant to the study of popular entertainments.




Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice


Book Description

Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice brings together internationally renowned scholars and practitioners to explore the cultural, institutional, theoretical, methodological, epistemological, ethical and practical aspects and implications of the rapidly evolving area of artistic research in music. Through various theoretical positions and case studies, and by establishing robust connections between theoretical debates and concrete examples of artistic research projects, the authors discuss the conditions under which artistic practice becomes a research activity; how practice-led research is understood in conservatoire settings; issues of assessment in relation to musical performance as research; methodological possibilities open to music practitioners entering academic environments as researchers; the role of technology in processes of musical composition as research; the role and value of performerly knowledge in music-analytical enquiry; issues in relation to live performance as a research method; artistic collaboration and improvisation as research tools; interdisciplinary concerns of the artist-researcher; and the relationship between the affordances of a musical instrument and artistic research in musical performance. Readers will come away from the book with fresh insights about the theoretical, critical and practical work being done by experts in this exciting new field of enquiry.




Sounding Authentic


Book Description

Sounding Authentic considers the intersecting influences of nationalism, modernism, and technological innovation on representations of ethnic and national identities in twentieth-century art music. Author Joshua S. Walden discusses these forces through the prism of what he terms the "rural miniature": short violin and piano pieces based on folk song and dance styles. This genre, mostly inspired by the folk music of Hungary, the Jewish diaspora, and Spain, was featured frequently on recordings and performance programs in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, Sounding Authentic shows how the music of urban Romany ensembles developed into nineteenth-century repertoire of virtuosic works in the style hongrois before ultimately influencing composers of rural miniatures. Walden persuasively demonstrates how rural miniatures represented folk and rural cultures in a manner that was perceived as authentic, even while they involved significant modification of the original sources. He also links them to the impulse toward realism in developing technologies of photography, film, and sound recording. Sounding Authentic examines the complex ways the rural miniature was used by makers of nationalist agendas, who sought folkloric authenticity as a basis for the construction of ethnic and national identities. The book also considers the genre's reception in European diaspora communities in America where it evoked and transformed memories of life before immigration, and traces how many rural miniatures were assimilated to the styles of American popular song and swing. Scholars interested in musicology, ethnography, the history of violin performance, twentieth-century European art music, the culture of the Jewish Diaspora and more will find Sounding Authentic an essential addition to their library.




Female Performers in British and American Fiction


Book Description

The female performer with a public voice constitutes a remarkably vibrant theme in British and American narratives of the long nineteenth century. The tension between fictional female performers and other textual voices can be seen to refigure the cultural debate over the ‘voice’ of women in aesthetically complex ways. By focusing on singers, actresses, preachers and speakers, this book traces and explores an important tradition of feminine articulation. Drawing on critical approaches in literary studies, gender studies and philosophy, the book conceptualizes voice for the discussion of narrative texts. Examining voice both as a thematic concern and as an aesthetic effect, the individual chapters analyse how the actual articulation by female performers correlates with their cultural visibility and agency. What this study foregrounds is how women characters succeed in making themselves heard even if their voices are silenced in the end.




Performance in the Twenty-First Century


Book Description

Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement addresses the reshaping of theatre and performance after postmodernism. Andy Lavender argues provocatively that after the ‘classic’ postmodern tropes of detachment, irony, and contingency, performance in the twenty-first century engages more overtly with meaning, politics and society. It involves a newly pronounced form of personal experience, often implicating the body and/or one’s sense of self. This volume examines a range of performance events, including work by both emergent and internationally significant companies and artists such as Rimini Protokoll, Blast Theory, dreamthinkspeak, Zecora Ura, Punchdrunk, Ontroerend Goed, Kris Verdonck, Dries Verhoeven, Rabih Mroué, Derren Brown and David Blaine. It also considers a wider range of cultural phenomena such as online social networking, sports events, installations, games-based work and theme parks, where principles of performance are in play. Performance in the Twenty-First Century is a compelling and provocative resource for anybody interested in discovering how performance theory can be applied to cutting-edge culture, and indeed the world around them.




The 21st-Century Voice


Book Description

In The 21st-Century Voice: Contemporary and Traditional Extra-Normal Voice, Michael Edward Edgerton considers contemporary vocal techniques within an acoustic and anatomical framework. Throughout, he proposes new directions for vocal exploration. Much more than a historical treatise on 20th-century masterworks or vocal science, The 21st-Century Voice explores experimental methods of sound production, offering a systematic series of approaches and methods for assessing, engaging, and, in some instances, overcoming the assumed limits of vocal singing. Appearing a decade after the publication of the first edition, this second editiondraws on and advances our current understandings of voice production. Divided into four parts—air flow, source, resonance/articulation, and heightened potentials—Edgerton considers crucial matters affecting vocal production, such as Registral challenges Filtering Airflow modification Combinatorial, multiphonic principles Extreme voice possibilities Multidimensional vocal issues With more than 250 illustrations, 150 associated audio tracks, an extended appendix on voice science, a glossary of key terms, and lists of representative compositions, The 21st-Century Voice will appeal to composers and performers interested in exploring the ever-broadening range of vocal possibilities. Its engagement with the complexities of vocal production should also be relevant to students and scholars of voice science, acoustics, linguistics, computer modeling, and more.




Voice Studies


Book Description

Voice Studies brings together leading international scholars and practitioners, to re-examine what voice is, what voice does, and what we mean by "voice studies" in the process and experience of performance. This dynamic and interdisciplinary publication draws on a broad range of approaches, from composing and voice teaching through to psychoanalysis and philosophy, including: voice training from the Alexander Technique to practice-as-research; operatic and extended voices in early baroque and contemporary underwater singing; voices across cultures, from site-specific choral performance in Kentish mines and Australian sound art, to the laments of Kraho Indians, Korean pansori and Javanese wayang; voice, embodiment and gender in Robertson’s 1798 production of Phantasmagoria, Cathy Berberian radio show, and Romeo Castellucci’s theatre; perceiving voice as a composer, listener, or as eavesdropper; voice, technology and mobile apps. With contributions spanning six continents, the volume considers the processes of teaching or writing for voice, the performance of voice in theatre, live art, music, and on recordings, and the experience of voice in acoustic perception and research. It concludes with a multifaceted series of short provocations that simply revisit the core question of the whole volume: what is voice studies?







Staging International Feminisms


Book Description

This new volume in the Studies in International Performance series looks at feminism's engagement with and relationship to global change. The contributors attempt to develop a global scholarly dialogue by using examples from a range of countries (Israel, Japan, Korea, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Italy) as well as more familiar perspectives from the US and UK. The book aims to show a variety of performance practices which are considered to be 'feminist' from a large number of representative countries and locales.