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Selected Proceedings of the 2009 Performer’s Voice International Symposium Performers’ Voices Across Centuries and Cultures P845sc.9781848168817-tp.indd 2 10/5/11 4:30 PM TThhiiss ppaaggee iinntteennttiioonnaallllyy lleefftt bbllaannkk 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 Published by Imperial College Press 57 Shelton Street Covent Garden London WC2H 9HE Distributed by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. 5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224 USA office: 27 Warren Street, Suite 401-402, Hackensack, NJ 07601 UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. PERFORMERS’ VOICES ACROSS CENTURIES AND CULTURES Selected Proceedings of the 2009 Performer’s Voice International Symposium Copyright © 2012 by Imperial College Press All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the Publisher. For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from the publisher. ISBN-13 978-1-84816-881-7 (pbk) ISBN-10 1-84816-881-0 (pbk) Printed in Singapore. Chelsea - Performers' voices.pmd 1 9/29/2011, 4:04 PM 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
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