Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality


Book Description

Cathy Berberian (1925-1983) was a vocal performance artist, singer and composer who pioneered a way of composing with (and listening to) the voice in the musical worlds of Europe, North America and beyond. As a modernist muse for many avant-garde composers, she went on to embody the principles of postmodern thinking in her work. This volume celebrates her path through musical landscapes including her approach to performance practice, gender performativity, vocal pedagogy and the epistemological borders of art music, the concert stage, the popular LP and the opera industry of her times. The collection features primary documentation and a Foreword by Susan McClary.




Cathy Berberian


Book Description




Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality


Book Description

Cathy Berberian (1925-1983) was a vocal performance artist, singer and composer who pioneered a way of composing with the voice in the musical worlds of Europe, North America and beyond. As a modernist muse for many avant-garde composers, Cathy Berberian went on to embody the principles of postmodern thinking in her work, through vocality. She re-defined the limits of composition and challenged theories of the authorship of the musical score. This volume celebrates her unorthodox path through musical landscapes, including her approach to performance practice, gender performativity, vocal pedagogy and the culturally-determined borders of art music, the concert stage, the popular LP and the opera industry of her times. The collection features primary documentation-some published in English for the first time-of Berberian’s engagement with the philosophy of voice, new music, early music, pop, jazz, vocal experimentation and technology that has come to influence the next generation of singers such as Theo Bleckmann, Susan Botti, Joan La Barbara, Rinde Eckert Meredith Monk, Carol Plantamura, Candace Smith and Pamela Z. Hence, this timely anthology marks an end to the long period of silence about Cathy Berberian’s championing of a radical rethinking of the musical past through a reclaiming of the voice as a multifaceted phenomenon. With a Foreword by Susan McClary.




Singers, Scores and Sounds


Book Description

This book develops ways of discussing musical practices to articulate a new approach to understanding connections between recordings, singers, and singing. Centred around materials from the mid-twentieth century, this book focuses on a time when composers and performers were questioning the idea of authorship within their musical practice. Materials drawn upon include recordings, scores, archival content, visual art, interviews, and liner notes to develop a rich conception of practices of performance. Analysis of performances include recordings of singers such as Cathy Berberian, Linda Hirst, Loré Lixenberg, Angelika Luz, and Meredith Monk. Compositions by Cathy Berberian, Luciano Berio, John Cage, and Manuel De Falla are considered. The book utilizes these sources to examine the collective way in which singers and composers form practices as multiple, transforming, emergent, and not hierarchical. The book articulates – with a detailed, close consideration of specific instances in recordings and scores – a relational understanding of performance. This book will be useful reading for students and scholars of music analysis, musicology, performance practice, and twentieth century vocal music.




Historical Performance and New Music


Book Description

The worlds of new music and historically informed performance might seem quite distant from one another. Yet, upon closer consideration, clear points of convergence emerge. Not only do many contemporary performers move easily between these two worlds, but they often do so using a shared ethos of flexibility, improvisation, curiosity, and collaboration—collaboration with composers past and present, with other performers, and with audiences. Bringing together expert scholars and performers considering a wide range of issues and case studies, Historical Performance and New Music—the first book of its kind—addresses the synergies in aesthetics and practices in historical performance and new music. The essays treat matters including technologies and media such as laptops, printing presses, and graphic notation; new music written for period instruments from natural horns to the clavichord; personalities such as the pioneering singer Cathy Berberian; the musically “omnivorous” ensembles A Far Cry and Roomful of Teeth; and composers Luciano Berio, David Lang, Molly Herron, Caroline Shaw, and many others. Historical Performance and New Music presents pathbreaking ideas in an accessible style that speaks to performers, composers, scholars, and music lovers alike. Richly documented and diverse in its methods and subject matter, this book will open new conversations about contemporary musical life.




Cathy Berberian and Music's Muses


Book Description

This richly illustrated anthology (containing more than 120 photographs and images) heralds the 25th anniversary of the demise of Cathy Berberian. The celebrated mezzo-soprano, composer, polyhistor and artistic non-conformist died in March 1983 at the age of 57. Jennifer Paull paints her close friend's portrait with perceptive detail and personal reminiscences analysing Berberian's unique standpoint. Paull applies Berberian's comparativist perspective to exploring a miscellany of Music's fascinating facts, stimulating surprises and other musicians who are quintessentially 'different'. The role of the woman, the lack of division between the Arts; dance, design, fashion, imagination, humour, languages, theatre and wit: these, her eclectic components, shaped the borderless artistic landscape of Cathy Berberian into an ingenious philosophy herein elucidated, illustrated and applied. Cathy Berberian's due stature in the History of Music has yet to be fully recognised and sufficiently appreciated.




Between the Tracks


Book Description

A collection that goes beyond the canon to analyze influential yet under-examined works of electronic music. This collection of writings on electronic music goes outside the canon to analyze influential works by under-recognized musicians. The contributors, many of whom are composers and performers themselves, offer their unsung musical heroes the sort of in-depth examinations usually reserved for more well-known composers and works. They analyze music from around the world and across genders, race, nationality, and age, discussing works that range from soundscapes of rushing water and resonating pipes to compositions by algorithm. Subjects include the collaboration of performer and composer, as seen in the work of Anne La Berge, Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian, and others; the choice by Asian composers Zhang Xiaofu and Unsuk Chin to embrace (or not) Eastern themes and styles; and how technologies used by composers created the sound of the works, as exemplified by Bülent Arel's use of voltage-control components as compositional tools and Charles Dodge's resynthesizing of the human voice. Contributors Marc Battier, Valentina Bertolani, Kerry L. Hagan, Yvette Janine Jackson, Leigh Landy, Pamela Madsen, Miller Puckette, David Rosenboom, Jøran Rudi, Margaret Anne Schedel, Juliana Snapper, Laura Zattra Composers Bülent Arel, Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio, Anne La Berge, Unsuk Chin, Charles Dodge, Jacqueline George, Salvatore Martirano, Teresa Rampazzi, Hildegard Westerkamp, Knut Wiggen, Gayle Young, Zhang Xiaofu




The Female Voice in the Twentieth Century


Book Description

By integrating theoretical approaches to the female voice with the musicological investigation of female singers’ practices, the contributors to this volume offer fresh viewpoints on the material, symbolic and cultural aspects of the female voice in the twentieth century. Various styles and genres are covered, including Western art music, experimental composition, popular music, urban folk and jazz. The volume offers a substantial and innovative appraisal of the role of the female voice from the perspective of twentieth-century performance practices, the centrality of female singers’ experimentations and extended vocal techniques along with the process of the ‘subjectivisation’ of the voice.




Transformations of Musical Modernism


Book Description

This collection brings fresh perspectives to bear upon key questions surrounding the composition, performance and reception of musical modernism.




Multivocality


Book Description

Multivocality frames vocality as a way to investigate the voice in music, as a concept encompassing all the implications with which voice is inscribed-the negotiation of sound and Self, individual and culture, medium and meaning, ontology and embodiment. Like identity, vocality is fluid and constructed continually; even the most iconic of singers do not simply exercise a static voice throughout a lifetime. As 21st century singers habitually perform across styles, genres, cultural contexts, histories, and identities, the author suggests that they are not only performing in multiple vocalities, but more critically, they are performing multivocality-creating and recreating identity through the process of singing with many voices. Multivocality constitutes an effort toward a fuller understanding of how the singing voice figures in the negotiation of identity. Author Katherine Meizel recovers the idea of multivocality from its previously abstract treatment, and re-embodies it in the lived experiences of singers who work on and across the fluid borders of identity. Highlighting singers in vocal motion, Multivocality focuses on their transitions and transgressions across genre and gender boundaries, cultural borders, the lines between body and technology, between religious contexts, between found voices and lost ones.