Evaluating Vocality in Orchestrated and Mixed Works
Evoking the human voice through instrumental music has been a perennial goal for composers, appearing in traditional and historical performance instructions such as cantabile and contemporary practices such as formant modeling (e.g., Jonathan Harvey, Speakings, 2008; Peter Ablinger, Deus Cantando, 2009). Performers also make extensive use of vocal metaphors in their discourse (Healy, 2018). But do general listeners perceive instrumental music in terms of vocal qualities or metaphors? Here we address this question by asking listeners to rate their perceptions of vocality in music intended to emulate it. Listeners provided real-time continuous slider data indicating how “voice-like” they perceived our repertoire excerpts to be. These excerpts included contemporary vocal mimesis techniques, traditional approaches to vocality, and control stimuli (i.e., music that is materially similar to the memetic excerpts but not explicitly intended to evoke the voice). This study provides perceptual validation for a phenomenon that has been important to musicians for centuries. Based on these findings, a new composition by Louis Goldford has been commissioned and is currently in development, incorporating the vocality features identified in our analysis. Although the composition has not yet been performed, it represents a future application of our methodology within a creative practice.
Hearing Form in Phenomenological Music: An Analysis of Molly’s Song 3 – Shades of Crimson by Rebecca Saunders
The music of Rebecca Saunders (b. 1967) is all but absent from theoretical and musicological discourse with the notable exceptions of two recent publications: Dubiel’s (2017) analysis of Crimson and McMullan-Glossop’s (2017) application of color theory terminology to describe Saunders’ timbral and textural approach to composition. An active composer since the early 1990s and the 2019 recipient of the Von Siemens Prize, Saunders’ work is written in a distinct idiom, drawing equally upon “postwar German fastidiousness and expressionism and experimental, Cageian concentration…” (Service, 2012). Her music is marked by the exploration of noise, pitch, and silence, the use of extended instrumental techniques, and uncommon combinations of instruments. Traditional music theoretical analytic techniques are insufficient to fully describe the prominent features of Saunders’ music: timbre, texture, noise, and silence.
Speech as a Model for Orchestration
The general objective of this project was to conduct research on speech as a timbre model for orchestration. Drawing from computer analysis of speech, we aimed at exploring how two different languages and their acoustic properties could serve as compositional models. These models can be seen from two perspectives, the first one being the generation of musical material based on phonetic sound structures, and the second one the organization of this material according to rules analogous to those found in natural languages.
Orchestration as Form in Elisabeth Lutyens’s And Suddenly It’s Evening (1966)
A work of haunting beauty and mystery, And Suddenly It’s Evening (1966) is a cantata for tenor and orchestra by English modernist pioneer, Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983). The cantata is highly representative of Lutyens’ serialism of the mid 1960s, and is similar to other works of this period, especially The Valley of Hatsu-Se (1965), in terms of scope, the serial structure, lyricism and the approach to orchestration. The evocative poetry of the cantata was written by Sicilian modernist poet and Nobel prize laureate (1959), Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968), and translated into English by Jack Bevan in 1965.[i] Lutyens first wrote the work to the English translation, later adding the original Italian (as determined from examining the composer’s autograph).[ii] In this work, Lutyens sets four poems by Quasimodo, each in its own movement, with instrumental interludes on either side of each poem. The cited recording was conducted and sung by Herbert Handt (who premiered the work) with members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1967. In this analysis, I examine how Lutyens creates and demarcates form through orchestrational groupings in her cantata, which alongside pitch serialism, is the main compositional determinant.
Across the Skies - Wenchen Qin
The repertoire of Chinese composer Wenchen Qin is often characterized by immediate connections to the topics of nature and religious spirituality. For Qin, the religious connotation in his music often serves specifically as the medium connecting humans and nature. One only needs to look at the titles of his works to see the prevalence of these two topics: Pilgerfahrt im Mai (Pilgrimage in May) (2004), The Nature’s Dialogue (2010), The Border of Mountains (2012), The Cloud River (2017), The Light of the Deities (2018), Poetry of the Land (2020), among others. Qin’s proclivity for these topics can be traced back to his childhood in Inner Mongolia where he was born. The vast landscape of Inner Mongolia, with its endless grassland interspersed with surging mountain ranges, bears a palpable trait of ruggedness and broadness of space, of which one can often identify musical counterparts in Qin’s music almost viscerally.
Orchestration for the String Quartet Research-Creation Project Report
As an ensemble of four instruments from the same family, the quartet has an exceptional capacity for blending but can also sharply differentiate the timbres of its members when desired. As an uncoducted ensemble, the string quartet depends on close non-cerbal communication between its members, and quartet members are accustomed to making subtle variations in their playing to achieve timbral and orchestrational ends. The purpose of this project is to explore how composers can orchestrate for the string quartet, examining strategies for timbral blend, stratification, modulation, and contrast.