Welcome to the Performer’s Voice Online
December 14, 2010
The Performer’s Voice Online was launched following the highly successful 2009 symposium, The Performer’s Voice: An International Forum for Music Performance & Scholarship, convened by Dr Anne Marshman. The symposium’s original conceptual foundations, title, themes and objectives are derived from Dr Marshman’s research, particularly her musical applications of the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin. The Performer’s Voice was Yong Siew Toh Conservatory’s inaugural international performance symposium. It attracted 170 delegates from 22 countries (6 continents) and featured 65 presentations on the four themes: Towards Performance; Beyond the Score; My Instrument – My Voice; and Asian Voices.
Initially populated with content derived from presentations filmed at the 2009 symposium, The Performer’s Voice Online is envisioned to be an evolving resource centre for interdisciplinary performance research. Its priority is to create a space where performers can play, speak, reflect, share, and explore.
The editors of the Performers Voice Online welcome multimedia research presentations that contribute to further discussion and understanding of these themes.
If you would like to contribute or comment on the Performers Voice Online, please email performersvoice@nus.edu.sg.
From the 25th – 28th of October, the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, National University of Singapore will host the second Performer’s Voice Symposium, Horizons Crossing Boundaries.
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The role played by some music scholarship in the inhibition of the performer’s voice during the twentieth century has been increasingly acknowledged in recent years. While much of this scholarship has been linked to the modernist aesthetic that prevailed for most of the previous century, the philosophy and theory that inform this demonstrate the capacity of scholarship, specifically the cultural theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, to liberate and empower rather than mute the performer’s voice. In this presentation, Dr Anne Marshman and Marcel Luxen explore the expressive, communicative and semantic implications of ‘performing’ cultural voices in music by Mozart, Beethoven, and Stravinsky. This presentation aims to promote performers’ conscious awareness of their musical voice, elements of which might well defy notation, but which can by no means be dismissed as extrinsic to music.
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Professor Richard Taruskin (University of California, Berkeley) delivers the keynote address of the Performers Voice Symposium 2009. Professor Taruskin discusses the current state of performance studies research.
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Professor Paul Barker (University of London) delivers a lecture-recital with performer Frances M. Lynch, exploring the collaboration between composer and performer. Professor Barker es that “As a composer concerned with live performance, the individuality of the performer, their voice and the context in which it is presented are inimitably bound together. And my challenge is to find the balance between authoritative control and individual expression that enables a performer to breathe unique life into a composition, the performances of which might differ radically, while remaining recognisable.”
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The performer’s conscious and subconscious processes in preparation for a concert or recital and their parallels with more traditional research has only recently come to broader scholarly attention. A number of important articles this decade, particularly in Rink’s Musical Performance (2002), the 2007 themed edition of The Dutch Journal of Music Theory, and the forthcoming Zurich University Yearbook based on an ELIA conference on the topic (2009), specifically deal with issues of process (with its interdependent and cyclical activities of preparation, rehearsal, interpretation, and reflection) and product, exploring its broader relationship to research. Professor Huib Schippers (Griffith University) expands on the findings of this research and discusses his experiences leading the Queensland Conservatorium Research Center and establishing a research culture focussed on the understanding of musical processes as research.
