The thought behind the utterance : Aspects of Communication in Song

This thesis investigates how a classically trained recital singer may set about achieving mastery in his or her field. It draws upon the ideas and opinions of writers on singing, pedagogy, composition, aesthetics, rhetoric, acting and psychology. It also draws upon the experience of the author as a singer whose career has spanned thirty years as performer and recording artist, teacher of voice and repertoire, and who has written on the history and interpretation of English song. The main thrust of the argument is that the complete performer must engage the mind in every aspect of the craft, whether it be in the creation of vocal sound, in the preparation of musical and textual material, or in the visualisation and realisation of the character of a song’s protagonist: prescriptive instruction alone is not sufficient to achieve this aim. Chapter one, The voice, maintains that intellect, musicianship, imagination and visualisation go hand-in-hand with vocal technique and natural talent to create the consummate performer. Chapter two, Visual presentation, explores the visual element of performance, and how feeling may be convincingly displayed through appropriate use of the body. Chapter three, The mode o f address, looks at the delivery of text and how this may affect the performer’s focus of attention. Chapter four, The poem’s provenance, discusses how the significance of a text may be affected by the context in which it is found. Chapter five, Meaning, highlights some problems encountered in translating or interpreting texts. Chapter six, Interpretation o f a non-English text, looks in some detail at a particular song in order to explore how the nuanced meanings of poetic language can be preserved during the process of translation. Chapter seven, The thought behind the utterance, contains a discussion of the moment the protagonist finds a new thought before expressing it