Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality

Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality

Author: Dr Pamela Karantonis

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2014-09-28

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1409469832

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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: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality

Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality

Author: Pamela Karantonis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1317169123

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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.


Historical Performance and New Music

Historical Performance and New Music

Author: Rebecca Cypess

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-30

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 100380182X

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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.


Between the Tracks

Between the Tracks

Author: Miller Puckette

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0262539306

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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


Singers, Scores and Sounds

Singers, Scores and Sounds

Author: Ellen Hooper

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-30

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 100082506X

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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.


The Female Voice in the Twentieth Century

The Female Voice in the Twentieth Century

Author: Serena Facci

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-03-01

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 100035265X

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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

Transformations of Musical Modernism

Author: Erling E. Guldbrandsen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-10-26

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1107127211

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


Multivocality

Multivocality

Author: Katherine Meizel PhD

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-01-02

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0190621494

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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.


Technology and the Diva

Technology and the Diva

Author: Karen Henson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-09-12

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1316760448

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In Technology and the Diva, Karen Henson brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the neglected subject of opera and technology. Their essays focus on the operatic soprano and her relationships with technology from the heyday of Romanticism in the 1820s and 1830s to the twenty-first-century digital age. The authors pay particular attention to the soprano in her larger than life form, as the 'diva', and they consider how her voice and allure have been created by technologies and media including stagecraft and theatrical lighting, journalism, the telephone, sound recording, and visual media from the painted portrait to the high definition simulcast. In doing so, the authors experiment with new approaches to the female singer, to opera in the modern - and post-modern - eras, and to the often controversial subject of opera's involvement with technology and technological innovation.


Contemporary Opera in Flux

Contemporary Opera in Flux

Author: Yayoi U Everett

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 0472903586

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In twelve essays, Contemporary Opera in Flux discusses a series of shifts that, taken together, have radically redefined the production and reception of opera. Focusing on productions involving late twentieth- and twenty-first century scores and libretti, the contributors draw on conversations with members of creative teams and studies of archival material, dipping into a historical record that remains in flux as composers, librettists, directors, and designers revisit existing work and create anew. The contributors to this volume push the boundaries of contemporary opera scholarship by examining works that disrupt operatic conventions; tackle sociopolitical issues such as drug trafficking, racial injustice, and cultural trauma; and advance underrepresented works by female, African-American, Asian, and avant-garde composers around the globe. Contemporary Opera in Flux bridges the gaps between expanding literature on opera, theater, new music, postmodern dramaturgy, and posthuman aesthetics, while also confronting larger questions of identity, representation, and narrative agency that are at the forefront of contemporary music scholarship. This collection of essays engages critically with the past out of a conviction that, amid general public perceptions of opera as anachronistic or elitist, contemporary opera has emerged as an artistic incubator for experimentation.