This presentation features recorded live performances by Marcel Luxen (clarinet) of excerpts from Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet K.581 (with the Danis Quartet), Beethoven’s Piano Trio op. 11, ‘Gassenhauer’ (with Qin Li-Wei, cello, and Bernard Lanskey, piano) and Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet.

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 presentation sits more comfortably under the banner of postmodernism.

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. Also investigated in some detail are specific intricacies of the performer’s art, including tone (colour and signifying potential), articulation, expressive and communicative gesture, and more subtle nuances. By doing so the presenters demonstrate the capacity of scholarship, specifically the cultural theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, to liberate and empower rather than mute the performer’s voice.

This presentation aims to contribute to the growing field of performance research that fosters greater appreciation for the performers voice and to help 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. A subsidiary purpose of this presentation is to suggest modes of listening to and speaking about music that foreground the performer’s voice and, in doing so, promise to engage listeners (so frequently disenfranchised by modernist discourses and aesthetics) in fresh and meaningful ways.