The Performer’s Voice 2nd Symposium

The Performer’s Voice aims to stimulate discussion, develop ideas, and disseminate research on music performance from a range of angles. The first international performance symposium in 2009 attracted 170 delegates from 22 countries (6 continents) and featured 65 presentations in relation to its four points of focus: Towards Performance; Beyond the Score; My Instrument – My Voice; Asian Voices. Subsequent to the initial symposium, a website was established ( theperformersvoice.org ) and a publication of selected proceedings edited by the symposium’s convener Dr. Anne Marshman was published by Imperial College Press ( ‘Performers’ Voices Across Centuries and Cultures’ ). 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.

Visit the symposium website at www.nus.edu.sg/performersvoice

Symposium Theme: Horizons Crossing Boundaries

Building on the successes of the first symposium and on its points of focus, the specific theme for the 2012 symposium is Horizons Crossing Boundaries, as we seek to explore multifarious emerging continuums: from mainstream to experimental, notated to improvised, classical to jazz, world, alternative, pop and/or multi-media, acoustic to electronic, local traditional to contemporary global, canon to contemporary, performer to scholar, west to east and east to west.

Though interdisciplinary in scope, the symposium’s distinct focus derives from an emphasis on the act of performance, the role of the performer, and the professional performer’s perspective. The programme will feature plenary and parallel sessions of lecture-recitals, papers with live or recorded performance, open rehearsals, panel discussions, and workshops. In addition to inviting a range of plenary speakers from 4 continents, this symposium also brings together an exciting number of international keynote performers, all with reputations for crossing boundaries and exploring new horizons, each of whom is also able to reflect upon and communicate about their process of working.

Welcome to the Performer’s Voice Online

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.

My Instrument – My Voice, Towards Performance

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Voices Lost & Liberated: Performer Meets Critical Theorist

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.

Beyond The Score

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Where Things Stand Now

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.

Towards Performance

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Whose Voice Is It Anyway? Shared Authority Between Composers and Performers

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.”

Beyond The Score

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Behind the Music: The Performer as Researcher

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.