Table Of ContentSelected Proceedings of the 2009 Performer’s Voice
International Symposium
Performers’ Voices Across
Centuries and Cultures
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Selected Proceedings of the 2009 Performer’s Voice
International Symposium
Performers’ Voices Across
Centuries and Cultures
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music,
National University of Singapore, 29 Oct – 2 Nov 2009
Editor
Anne Marshman
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Imperial College Press
ICP
P845sc.9781848168817-tp.indd 1 10/5/11 4:30 PM
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PERFORMERS’ VOICES ACROSS CENTURIES AND CULTURES
Selected Proceedings of the 2009 Performer’s Voice International Symposium
Copyright © 2012 by Imperial College Press
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Editor’s Preface
This volume is derived from ‘The Performer’s Voice: An International Forum
for Music Performance & Scholarship’, which I convened at the National
University of Singapore’s Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music in October–
November 2009. The symposium’s aim was to create a space where performers
could play, speak, reflect, share and explore issues relevant to them. It was
hoped that the event, and now this volume, would serve to stimulate discussion,
develop ideas and disseminate research on music performance from a range of
angles. A key characteristic of the symposium was diversity. Pianists, violinists,
singers, cellists, bassists, gambists, harpsichordists, erhuists, Vietnamese
lutenists, oboists, trumpeters, organists, percussionists, clarinetists and flautists
were all represented, as was repertoire from the seventeenth to the twenty-first
century. Several of these instrumentalists and repertoire from five centuries also
receive attention in this volume. Delegates came to Singapore from 20 countries
and five continents, further adding to a sense of multivoicedness. Accompanying
this variety was a certain singleness of purpose that emerged from the
symposium’s uncompromising focus on the act of performance, the role of the
performer and the professional performer’s perspective. More than 60 per cent of
all presentations featured live performance and most others included recordings.
This synthesis of diversity and commonality of purpose has, I hope, been
captured here, albeit on a smaller scale, in essays focusing on the performer’s
perspective on topics ranging from Bach to Bartók to Bakhtin.
It is not always easy to do justice in print to performers’ work, ideas,
concerns and research; therefore, this volume’s additional content website,
http://theperformersvoice.org/additionalcontent/, featuring more than one hour of
audio and audio-visual recordings of performances, is a vital and integral
accompanying resource. Recordings range from a 1950 Salzburg Festival
performance of Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto with Wilhelm Furtwängler
v
vi Editor’s Preface
at the piano directing the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, to a 2009 performance
by percussionist Aiyun Huang of Sean Griffin’s stunning multimedia Tension
Study II: Eagle Claw Wu Tsiao Chen Wins at New York’s Experimental Media
and Performing Arts Center.
The Furtwängler recording and a more recent recording of the same piece
by Kenneth Cooper and the Berkshire Bach Ensemble accompany Richard
Taruskin’s keynote transcript, ‘Where Things Stand Now’, which returns to and
develops topics from his landmark Text and Act (Oxford University Press, 1995).
It seems only natural, given the symposium and this volume’s aim to clear spaces
for performers to speak, that both should be launched by that audacious
volume’s author, who had already begun, in the 1980s and 1990s, to forge a path
away from the stringent performance aesthetics of twentieth-century modernism.
‘Where Things Stand Now’, as the title suggests, also takes stock of current
performance trends and looks ahead to other topics and voices that warrant
greater attention in musical scholarship and, more specifically, performance
studies.
Accompanying Taruskin’s chapter in the first section are two essays that are
also emblematic of the volume’s concerns. Pianist, scholar and symposium
plenary presenter Stephen Emmerson revisits Hindemith’s concept of the
performer’s ‘dualistic soul’ by exploring issues that have surely preoccupied
many performers but have less frequently found representation in print. These
include the challenge of finding a balance in performance between intuitive and
rational involvement with the music and the common fear among performers that
verbally analyzing too deeply their methods, processes and techniques could
dispel the intangible mysteries of inspired performance. Like Emmerson,
Anthony Gritten skillfully and sensitively treads the borderlands between the
philosophical, the personal and the practical in his inquiry into the role of
‘existential singularity’ in the evolution of the individual performer’s ‘voice’.
Essays in the second, longer section of the volume revolve around themes
proposed by its title. David Chung’s, Rosalind Halton’s and Tomoyo Ueda’s
essays are concerned with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century performance
practices and repertoire. Contrary, however, to priorities that dominated the type
of historically informed performance against which Taruskin rails in Text and
Act, these performers are propelled to reach back across the centuries in order to
create a synthesis of modern and traditional performance aesthetics and practices
that will engage modern listeners. It is illuminating to be able to hear Halton’s
Editor’s Preface vii
and Ueda’s performances, which bring into sharper focus aspects of their
research’s significance that defy description in words alone. Similarly illustrated
is the chapter by pianist and fortepianist Helena Marinho and composer Sara
Carvalho, who add a twist to historical-performance research in their
collaboration on a new work for an ‘old’ instrument, the fortepiano, and that
work’s adaptation for modern piano. Marinho and Carvalho explore the practical
relevance for their co-creative work of a selection of theories relating to
authorial intention and analyze their collaboration from this angle. Baritone
Michael Halliwell’s chapter, ‘The Literary Song Recital with Special Reference
to Maud’, shows how cross-fertilizations between literature and music and
between what are all too frequently perceived as the separate and self-contained
activities of research and performance have directly influenced his approach to
programming and performance.
In preparing The Performer’s Voice symposium’s programme and, more
recently, this volume I have been accompanied by a mental image of performers’
voices, represented by oscillating horizontal frequency waves, echoing back and
forth across the centuries, which are depicted by a parallel chronological
timeline. But this diagram is, of course, too simplistic. The modern musicians
who mine the past for information and inspiration, and the voices that manage to
reach us from previous eras, ensuring that traditions and treasures of the past can
continue to bear fruit, are also simultaneously dipping in and out of many
different cultures and places. The lines and frequency waves of my diagram are
not just bidirectional, but complexly multidirectional. In fact, all essays in this
volume are concerned with performers’ voices reverberating across both
centuries and cultures. But four chapters deal more explicitly with performances
that consciously bridge cultures that might broadly be described as classical and
vernacular. Joshua Walden’s analysis of recordings of Bartók’s Romanian Folk
Dances by the composer with violinists Joseph Szigeti and Zoltán Székely
reveals details of how these musicians consciously evoke urban concepts of folk
style through specific performance techniques. In my own chapter,
‘A Philosophy of the Performer’s Voice and Its Performance in Works by
Mozart and Stravinsky’, I explore through performances by clarinetist Marcel
Luxen the expressive, communicative and semantic implications of ‘performing’
folk and popular voices in music by Mozart and Stravinsky. Meanwhile, ‘The
Lowly Voice: The Singapore Bassist Voice’, shares insights into the world of the
freelance bass player in Singapore. Bassists Greg Petersen and Tony Makarome
viii Editor’s Preface
discuss and reflect on the results of their survey on bassists’ self-image and on
how bassists are perceived by pianists with whom they work. Percussionist and
symposium plenary presenter Aiyun Huang and composer Sean Griffin bring
down the curtain on this volume with a conversation about their collaboration on
Tension Study II: Eagle Claw Wu Tsiao Chen Wins. Their discussion reveals the
processes through which Griffin was able to incorporate and accommodate both
the technical expertise of this internationally acclaimed Taiwanese–Canadian
percussionist and her passion for kung fu novels and movies. Readers are
strongly encouraged to first watch the performance on our additional content
website so that Huang and Griffin’s dialogue can be better contextualized.
I would like to thank all the authors and performers who have contributed to
this volume, especially those performers who are not so accustomed to
expressing in print the frequently elusive subtleties of their art, but have taken on
the challenge anyway. My profound gratitude also goes to the dedicated
anonymous reviewers without whose constructive engagement with the volume’s
objectives and the authors’ research and ideas this project could not have come
to fruition. Thank you also to the Director, Bernard Lanskey, and the Governing
Board of the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music for their support and
encouragement for the symposium in 2009 and now this volume. I am also very
grateful to copyeditor Catherine Jeffreys and Imperial College Press’s editor
Catharina Weijman for their skilled professionalism and advice. Additionally,
I would like to express my thanks here to symposium plenary presenters John
Rink, Elisabeth Le Guin, Helena Gaunt, Kishore Mahbubani, Qin Li-Wei and
Qian Zhou for the vital roles they played in the symposium’s success. Rink and
Gaunt have published their presentations as live recordings on the Performers’
Voices Online website, hosted by the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, that was set
up following the symposium at www. http://theperformersvoice.org/.
Anne Marshman
Contents
Editor’s Preface v
Acknowledgements xi
List of Online Examples xiii
List of Music Examples xvii
List of Figures and Table xix
Notes on Contributors xxiii
THE PERFORMER’S VOICE
1. Where Things Stand Now 1
Richard Taruskin
2. The Performer’s Voice and ‘His Dualistic Soul’:
Hindemith Reconsidered 27
Stephen Emmerson
3. What Underwrites the Performer’s Voice?
A Bakhtinian Perspective 43
Anthony Gritten
PERFORMERS’ VOICES ACROSS CENTURIES AND CULTURES
4. The port de voix in Louis Couperin’s Unmeasured Preludes:
A Study of Types, Functions and Interpretation 59
David Chung
5. Explorations around Bass Parts and Key Schemes: Recording
the Cantatas of Alessandro Scarlatti 85
Rosalind Halton
ix
