Vocal Delivery Research Articles

“Where Do You Go When the Radio’s Down?”: Black Women Experimental Pop Artists, “Alternative R&B,” and the Simultaneous Dissolution and Persistence of Musical Genre

ABSTRACT Since the early 2010s, the musical genre “Alternative R&B” has been used to describe artists who combine R&B songwriting and vocal delivery with electronic music and production. Meant as a means for music writers to grapple with both the ongoing evolutions of R&B and the synthpop and synth R&B revivals of the decade, the category Alternative R&B has become a catch all for Black artists who sound even remotely influenced by R&B—and for Black women artists in general. This article traces Black women experimental pop artists’ complex relationship to the moniker Alternative R&B through grounding this apparent siloing within a context of the past 100 years of Black women in American popular music. By tracing the disidentification with “Alternative R&B” of contemporary experimental pop artists FKA twigs, Tinashe, and Dawn Richard, it calls for a re-evaluation—and dismantling—of racialized musical genres.

Kesha’s Comeback and the Stakes of Live Performance: Connecting through Trauma at the 2018 Grammy Awards

ABSTRACT The use of live popular music performance as a platform to address gendered and sexual violence and trauma within the popular music industry can be demonstrated through the analysis of Kesha’s performance of “Praying” at the 2018 Grammy Awards. Analyzing the artist’s vocal and artistic delivery, in addition to her public persona following her allegations of sexual abuse against producer Lukasz Gottwald (Dr. Luke), illustrates how live performance—building on and contrasting with social media campaigns, such as #FreeKesha and #MeToo, and studio recordings—is a uniquely effective mode of processing individual and collective trauma.

Sounds like a leader: An ascription–actuality approach to examining leader emergence and effectiveness

Aspiring leaders are often advised to look the part—but what about sounding the part? This study supports and expands the ascription–actuality trait theory of leadership by proposing that vocal delivery matters for earning leadership opportunities, whereas leader competency matters for actual effectiveness in role. We tested hypotheses within an organizational simulation where 197 managers gave short campaign speeches to run for the organization’s leadership positions. AI-informed voice-analytic technology was used to measure managers’ vocal delivery, while 360° assessments from their actual organizations were used to measure leader competency and leader effectiveness. Results supported our hypotheses: Vocal delivery was positively associated with leader emergence, but not leader effectiveness. In contrast, leader competency was positively associated with leader effectiveness, but not leader emergence. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

“A Good Communist Style”

This essay focuses on the history and politicization of radio announcers’ vocal delivery in China during the mid-twentieth century. It explores how Chinese Communist Party leaders used internal party debates, national policies, and broadcasting training to construct an ideal Communist voice whose qualities would ostensibly communicate party loyalty and serve as a sonic representation of political authority.

A Dynamic Model of Speech for the Social Sciences

Speech and dialogue are the heart of politics: Nearly every political institution in the world involves verbal communication. Yet vast literatures on political communication focus almost exclusively on what words were spoken, entirely ignoring how they were delivered---auditory cues that convey emotion, signal positions, and establish reputation. We develop a model that opens this untapped information to principled statistical inquiry: the model of audio and speech structure (MASS). Our approach models political speech as a stochastic process shaped by fixed and time-varying covariates, including the history of the conversation itself. In an application to Supreme Court oral arguments, we demonstrate how vocal delivery signals crucial information---skepticism of legal arguments---that is indecipherable to text models. Results show that justices do not use questioning to strategically manipulate their peers, but rather engage in genuine fact-finding efforts. Our easy-to-use R package, speech, implements the model and many more tools for audio analysis.

Teacher’s voice quality and teaching effectiveness

The need for teachers to be effective in the course of lesson delivery cannot be over-emphasized. The voice with which the teacher carries out his professional task is vital to attaining effectiveness in teaching. The quality of the teacher’s voice is one aspect that is not given attention in the course of training teachers, so, the teacher carries out his tasks on daily basis with little or no attention given to his/her voice quality. This paper highlighted the various aspects of voice that need to be given attention to in order to attain effectiveness in teaching. The aspects discussed include: pitch, volume, tempo, articulation, pronunciation and fluency. It was concluded that teachers need to learn how to use their voices by constantly practicing and improving on the quality. It was therefore recommended that: voice training should be part of the curriculum of teacher education; in-service training on vocal delivery should be made available for practicing teachers across the various tiers of the educational system, and that teachers on their own can enrol for voice training exercises, listen to good speakers, in order for them to improve on the quality of their teaching voice. Keywords: Voice, Teacher’s Voice Quality, Teaching Effectiveness

Vocal delivery of audio description by genre: measuring users’ presence

ABSTRACTThis article presents a study that was aimed at assessing presence and emotional experience of blind and visually impaired users when exposed to emotive and non-emotive content with Polish audio description (AD) delivered with two voices: human and synthetic. The results show that AD narrated by a human prompted significantly higher levels of presence for drama and was assessed by participants as significantly more interesting and less confusing. Presence rates for documentary were similar, with no statistically significant differences in relation to AD voice type. Levels of interest and confusion were comparable for both voices, with a slightly higher result for interest for the clip with AD delivered by the synthetic voice. Overall, the respondents preferred human-narrated AD for drama, but did not show a preference between synthesized and human-narrated AD for documentary. The findings are of direct practical relevance both to the industry and to academia, as they provide important information on how to select voices for audiovisual productions in practice, and suggest that AD reproduced with a synthetic voice is an effective and viable solution for voicing documentaries.

Crafting the news

Courses: This activity could be used in a basic public-speaking course to demonstrate messaging and the development of the three pillars of public speaking: content, organization, and delivery. In a basic communication course, this activity would help illustrate the process of communication (sender, receiver, feedback, channel, etc.). A mass communication class can use this activity to discuss the power of news outlets and social media while digging into mass communication theory (agenda setting, computer mediated communication, framing, etc.).Objectives: Through collaboration with teammates, small groups of students will develop a three- to five-minute news segment that will be posted on YouTube upon completion. Through social-media distribution of the YouTube link, this news clip must attract a certain number (the final number can be determined by the instructor) of viewers in a specified time limit. Student participants will be responsible for identifying valid sources and compiling credible information pertaining to their news topic while also illustrating effective competency in speech content, organization, and delivery by preparing a presentation that is trustworthy and interesting, concise and clear, and presented with energy and charisma while conducting proper vocal and body delivery techniques. The “big question”: can the group create a credible, clear, concise, coherent news broadcast and distribute the finished project to a social-media outlet in the hopes of gaining a certain number of viewers?

Battlefield by Jean-Claude Carrière

Reviewed by: Battlefield by Jean-Claude Carrière E. Teresa Choate Battlefield. Based on the Sanskrit epic The Mahabharata and the play The Mahabharata, written by Jean-Claude Carrière, adapted and directed by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne. Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Next Wave Festival, BAM Harvey Theater, Brooklyn, New York. October 8, 2016. Thirty years after bringing the complex, nine-hour The Mahabharata to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Peter Brook, his frequent collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne, and musician Toshi Tsuchitori returned with Battlefield. In contrast to the earlier production, which included over twenty actors, 20,000 pounds of mud, and a ring of fire, Battlefield was fairly minimalistic, featuring just four actors performing on a bare, umber-textured stage that contained sticks, a low box on wheels, and two pieces of fabric. Beginning near the end of The Mahabharata’s storyline, the performance invited spectators to contemplate war as a plague that infects victors and losers alike. As Brook observed in the production’s program, its central protagonists—two kings who struggle with the costs of violence—also provide important lessons for contemporary leaders. The production employed spare visual aesthetics to sharpen focus on the play’s central story and themes. The performers, for example, wore simple black pants and shirts, adding a single element to differentiate various characters: a yellow scarf for the god Krishna, a brown coat for King Yudhishthira, a large golden shawl for the great warrior Bhisma. These same costume pieces served to streamline transformations, as when Bhisma died, an actor was covered with the golden shawl and emerged as Krishna. Piles of sticks (perhaps an homage to their frequent use in The Mahabharata) were sparingly employed in Battlefield, as when two bamboo sticks became a scale to weigh the flesh of a pigeon against that of a king. Phillippe Vialatte’s lighting seldom drew attention to itself, except in two moments when red light flooded the stage as characters gave themselves to death so as to be reborn. The production’s aural aesthetics were also stark. Tsuchitori provided the heartbeat of the production on a single instrument, the djembe. Music and voice combined to create a ritualistic sound. The actors’ vocal delivery was deliberate, with significant pauses and little emotion. This aural and visual simplicity was occasionally punctuated by sudden and startling contrast, such as in the scene following Bhisma’s death, which featured his mother, Ganga, wailing loudly in sorrow. Her red, kimono-like robe was employed like the handheld curtain (javanika) used in traditional Sanskrit theatre. Such moments prevented the audience from falling too deeply into the soothing rhythm of meditation, and brought us back into the realm of active contemplation. Click for larger view View full resolution Sean O’Callaghan, Jared McNeill, Ery Nzaramba, and Carole Karemera in Battlefield. (Photo: Richard Termine.) To create this postwar, minimalist fugue, a few lines of The Mahabharata joined with new stories from the Hindu epic. The episodic structure of the script repeatedly drove home the idea that war’s aftermath means universal defeat. The kings (Brook’s stand-in for today’s leaders) were taught stark lessons of personal loss. Dhritarashtra was coolly informed, “[t]he destruction of your sons was inevitable.” The victorious king’s mother, Kunti (Carole Karemera), informed Yudhishthira that Karna, a great enemy, was in fact his elder brother. The kings, having grappled with war’s aftermath, found reconciliation. However, in Battlefield, as in life, reconciliation was not the end of the journey to understanding but the beginning. While The Mahabharata foregrounded spectacle, it was lessons that mattered most in Battlefield. Bhisma, sitting on a box covered in a large shawl, offered instruction to Yudhishthira through a series of lively, sometimes humorous stories about dharma (the way of life and the moral order of the universe), as well as the duties of a ruler. Playing both human and animal characters, four fables—about a snake whose destiny was to kill a boy; a ruler who gave his life for that of a bird; a worm who treasured his lowly life; and a man who relished honey even in the face...

The Still, Sad Music of Humanity in Doom Metal's Romanticizing Machine

The Still, Sad Music of Humanity in Doom Metal's Romanticizing Machine Atene Mendelyte (bio) The still, sad music of humanity,Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power —William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey This essay was inspired by Ronald Bogue's pioneering Deleuzian reading of the three types of metal music—death, doom, and black. The scholar avoids the traps of oversimplification obvious in previous (mostly sociological) studies of such music that tend to concentrate on the threat of inducing violent behaviour. Such a stance by now has become a cliché and has little analytical value. I see a great potential in further developing this type of Deleuzian listening as it can offer a better understanding of metal music. It needs to be mentioned that there have been other analyses hinting at a more positive potential of metal music, such as musicologist Robert Walser's against the grain observation that metal music "creates communal attachments, enacts collective empowerment, and works to assuage entirely reasonable anxieties"1 or Nicola Masciandaro's experimental attempt to merge the discourses of black metal and theory.2 The essay collection edited by Niall W. R. Scott and Imke Von Helden The Metal Void: First Gatherings (2010)3 includes many varied explorations of metal music. The journal Glossator has a number of interesting articles on black metal, and another online journal Helvete is entirely dedicated to black metal theory. But such a surge of analytical readings tends to cluster around black and death metal while doom metal remains on the outskirts of scholarly interest. What is then lacking, I suggest, is a close(r) attention paid to individual doom metal practices. This is where my approach differs from Bogue's, since, unlike him, I think that each type of metal practice has to be understood on its own terms instead of comparing them based on a more transcendental or general basis. The practice that will be scrutinized in this essay is that of the [End Page 469] legendary British doom metal band My Dying Bride since, as mentioned above, doom metal, in comparison to death and black metal, has received by far the least interest in academia and non-academia alike. Even in Bogue's illuminating essay it remains the least explored subgenre, which is a direct consequence of the basis chosen for comparison; if one specifically discusses musical intensities and avoids focusing on the connection between lyrics and voice, one is bound to conclude that doom metal is both less technical, less virtuoso than death metal and less visceral than black metal. The lack of interest and doom metal's underdog status follow from that. But the center of gravity in doom metal is precisely the relation between lyrics, vocal modalities, and musical accompaniment, which makes it an entirely different kind of assemblage from the other types of metal. Moreover, I wish to argue, it is exactly where the greatest and most interesting musical thought potential lies. The machinic assemblage produced by My Dying Bride's practice is of a peculiar sort. I shall be referring to it as "the romanticizing machine" because it brings to fruition the principal logic of British Romantic poetry and European Romantic music. The processual aspect of the given title is pivotal as well, since the machine works by combining musical, textual, conceptual, affective, temporal, dramatic, and other elements and repurposing them for the sake of drawing its own plane of immanence and consistency, engaging in its musical world-making. Musical Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization My Dying Bride strives to create a total poetic experience. The band provides atmospheric musical plateaus that work to produce a mood, an affective space rather than a metric, rhythmic, musically progressive experience. The lyrics are highly poetic, often spoken in a narrative voice. Vocal delivery is used in a multiplicity of its modalities: sung vocals, death metal grunts, spoken word, whispers. Speech itself is modulated; it can either be a narrative voice, as in the closing lines of "Hail Odysseus," or a more poetically expressive voice, as in most songs on A Map of All Our Failures (Peaceville Records, 2012). The voice is made to exude despair, sadness, and other strong feelings via emphatic intonation...

Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw” in Postwar Europe by Joy H. Calico

Reviewed by: Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw” in Postwar Europe by Joy H. Calico Pamela Potter Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw” in Postwar Europe. By Joy H. Calico. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Pp. xvi + 254. Cloth $60.00. ISBN 978-0520281868. The cantata A Survivor from Warsaw, Arnold Schoenberg’s emblematic work commemorating the Holocaust, offers up innumerable challenges to performers and historians, not to mention audiences. Only seven minutes in duration, it poses programming problems for being too short to stand on its own either before or after an intermission, but its somber subject and dramatic effects make it difficult to pair with suitable works. Praised by some critics for its powerful message and derided by others for kitschy devices, it can have the effect of confusing audiences with its [End Page 219] academic compositional conception (Schoenberg’s renowned “twelve-tone” method), its jarring sonorities, and the eerie vocal delivery employing Schoenberg’s signature “speech-song” (Sprechstimme) style. Adding to its musical complexities are the oddly juxtaposed narrated texts, which mingle the English-language Jewish testimony, the Berlin-accented German orders barked at inmates, and the concluding Hebrew prayers. Music historians have long struggled to situate the work within Schoenberg’s self-imagination as a Jew, an American, a Zionist, and an heir to the imposing legacy of German music. Joy Calico’s confrontation with this perplexing work takes a completely new approach, using its postwar performance history in Europe as a cultural barometer of the Cold War. Calico situates her study within the subarea of Exilforschung that concerns itself with remigrants, but she treats the work, rather than the composer, as the object experiencing remigration (Schoenberg lived out his days in the United States). She positions the work as sharing features with the millions who migrated across Europe in the years following World War II, proposing that through its many performances across the continent it accumulated its own experiences and “baggage,” such that its successive stagings had to reckon with its previous incarnations. Moving chronologically through its performance history, this analysis of A Survivor’s “cultural mobility” further highlights the importance of artistic exchanges during the Cold War, showing how cultural artifacts managed to penetrate what has been described as the “Nylon Curtain.” Chapter by chapter, we are taken to six different European performance sites between 1950 and 1968: West Germany, Austria, Norway, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Calico structures each chapter by presenting a thorough and incisive overview of the cultural-political environment in each of the locations and periods, tracking the genesis of the performance by scrutinizing the archival and oral history of the preconcert arrangements, and documenting the fate of the work in the critical responses found in newspapers and journals. In West Germany, the site of the work’s European premiere in August 1950, the reactions escalated into a cause célèbre when Hans Schnoor, a music critic with a Nazi past, castigated the work as hate mongering and offensive to the German people, couching his attack within his longstanding record of opposing modern music broadcasts on West German radio. His tactless vilification erupted into a public scandal but also revealed the seething resentments among West Germans toward the Allied occupation and the small number of remigrants. Calico casts the subsequent performance in Vienna (in April 1951) as a more direct “remigration,” since this was where the Viennese native Schoenberg had endured systemic antisemitism through the 1920s and, after the war, tried to block any performances of his works in this city where he had suffered so much discrimination and personal attack. The Vienna performance was also the only one for which, much to Schoenberg’s dismay, the English text was translated [End Page 220] into German, and the term “gas chamber” was conspicuously excised. Yet unlike in West Germany, the critical response was surprisingly tame. Because of Austria’s official status as a victim of National Socialism, A Survivor did not ignite the feelings of collective guilt that were so volatile in West Germany. Thereafter any European performances of A Survivor fell short of inciting the types of heated debates surrounding its West German premiere, understandable...

Real men don't sing: crooning in American culture

The crooner Rudy Vallee's soft, intimate, and sensual vocal delivery simultaneously captivated millions of adoring fans and drew harsh criticism from those threatened by his sensitive masculinity. Although Vallee and other crooners reflected the gender fluidity of late-1920s popular culture, their challenge to the Depression era's more conservative masculine norms led cultural authorities to stigmatize them as gender and sexual deviants. In Real Men Don't Sing Allison McCracken outlines crooning's history from its origins in minstrelsy through its development as the microphone sound most associated with white recording artists, band singers, and radio stars. She charts early crooners’ rise and fall between 1925 and 1934, contrasting Rudy Vallee with Bing Crosby to demonstrate how attempts to contain crooners created and dictated standards of white masculinity for male singers. Unlike Vallee, Crosby survived the crooner backlash by adapting his voice and persona to adhere to white middle-class masculine norms. The effects of these norms are felt to this day, as critics continue to question the masculinity of youthful, romantic white male singers. Crooners, McCracken shows, not only were the first pop stars: their short-lived yet massive popularity fundamentally changed American culture.

The Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s by Mitchell Morris (review)

Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s. By Mitchell Morris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. [x, 248 p. ISBN 9780520242852 (hardcover), $70; ISBN 9780520275997 (paperback), $29.95; ISBN 9780520955059 (e-book), $29.95.] Music examples, endnotes, bibliography, index.In Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s, author Mitchell Morris begins to unpack some of the many parcels of meaning contained within sentimental songs of the 1970s. From Waltons to Will and Grace, Morris uses television, comic strips, film, literary theory, history, economics, and music analysis to approach the music from multi- ple perspectives. Although he sometimes leads by a circuitous route, readers curious as to why, for example, Cher's farewell tour lasted three years, and concluded eight years before the release of her most recent and highest-charting album, will enjoy the unexpected journey.Chapter 1 is not only an introduction to the text but is also the chapter that posi- tions the book within existing scholarship on music of the 1970s. In chapter 2, Morris addresses black masculinity in the United States and the increased economic oppor- tunities available for black Americans after the civil rights movement, focusing on Barry White as his central example. Similarly, chapter 3 addresses economic is- sues of black artists as well, this time con- centrating on the style of soft soul gener- ally, rather than on a single person in particular. Morris considers masculinity from a different perspective in chapter 4, which centers on the unmanly Barry Manilow (p. 90). Morris turns from mas- culinism to feminism in chapter 5, The Voice of Karen Carpenter, focusing espe- cially on Carpenter's vocal delivery in recordings. Morris is notably interested in Carpenter's appeal to young gay men, a constituency that is also central to the last two chapters of the book: on Cher and on Dolly Parton, respectively. last chapter is especially intriguing since, as an artist working in the field of country music, Parton's core audience is generally more conservative than, say, Barry White's. One way that Morris connects the different sub- jects of his chapters is by weaving them throughout the book. Excluding the first chapter, which mentions all of his subjects, and excluding the chapters specifically ded- icated to each of his subjects, Barry White also appears in chapters 3 and 4; Barry Manilow in chapters 5 and 6; Karen Carpenter in chapters 4, 6, and 7; Cher in chapter 7; and Dolly Parton in chapter 6.Morris gently chides his academic peers who might view the music in his book as popular to be (p. 2). music he addresses was certainly quite pop- ular, but other acts were even more popu- lar and have been impressive enough to warrant serious music studies (Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Madonna). Even focusing narrowly on the 1970s, he does not address many of the most popular acts of that decade (Pink Floyd, Queen, AC/DC, ABBA, the Eagles, Genesis, Journey), including some that strike me, at least, as So the music in Morris's book is not really popular to be impressive. But it might be too com- mercial. For example, because Barry White often performed wearing velvet, spangles, or sequins, because Barry Manilow has writ- ten many successful jingles for television commercials, and because Dolly Parton is part owner and namesake of the Dollywood theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, some scholars have found it difficult to take their work seriously. As Morris shows, how- ever, we should.Morris approaches music analysis from a variety of perspectives, as the following sam- ples from his close reading of Barry White's Love's Theme demonstrate (pp. 38-42). He sometimes focuses on music's social function, as when he describes the quality of the song's opening: utterly recogniz- able, it signals listeners that a song they love is about to play and gives them a mo- ment to grab a partner and head out to the dance floor (p. …

‘Find out what it means to me’: Aretha Franklin's gendered re-authoring of Otis Redding's ‘Respect’

AbstractIn her re-authoring of Otis Redding's ‘Respect’, Aretha Franklin's seminal 1967 recording features striking changes to melodic content, vocal delivery, lyrics and form. Musical analysis and transcription reveal Franklin's re-authoring techniques, which relate to rhetorical strategies of motivated rewriting, talking texts and call-and-response introduced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The extent of her re-authoring grants her status as owner of the song and results in a new sonic experience that can be clearly related to the cultural work the song has performed over the past 45 years. Multiple social movements claimed Franklin's ‘Respect’ as their anthem, and her version more generally functioned as a song of empowerment for those who have been marginalised, resulting in the song's complex relationship with feminism. Franklin's ‘Respect’ speaks dialogically with Redding's version as an answer song that gives agency to a female perspective speaking within the language of soul music, which appealed to many audiences.

“We Never Kissed”: A Date with Melba and Strings

Pianist, composer/arranger, and former bandleader Raymond Scott discovered up-and-coming jazz/pop vocalist Gloria Lynne in the late 1950s. (1) Gloria Lynne recorded her debut album Miss Gloria Lynne on the Everest Record label in 1958, and it quickly garnered the attention of noted music critics. Jazz critics Nat Hentoff and Leonard Feather gave Miss Gloria Lynne thumbs up, which led to bookings at well-known jazz clubs in Manhattan, including the Village Gate and Birdland (see Lynne and Chilton 2000, 86). In 1959, following the success of her debut album, Lynne's label only gave her the green light to record a sophomore album, Lonely and Sentimental, but also handed over complete artistic control. In response, she did something that somewhat unprecedented for the time: request that a woman serve as the musical arranger for the project. Gloria Lynne's choice of arrangers none other than another up-and-coming artist, Melba Liston. Musical collaboration between women artists certainly a rarity, particularly for African-American women during the 1950s; most artistic decision making lay in the hands of white male producers and record executives. As Gloria Lynne reminisced, this type of partnership was unheard of in that day (Lynne interview, 2013). A history-making moment like this one deserves special attention. This essay explores the musical collaboration between vocalist Gloria Lynne and trombonist-composer-arranger Melba Liston for the album Lonely and Sentimental. In assessing the contributions that Melba Liston made in crafting the musical arrangements for Lonely and Sentimental, draw extensively from oral history including personal experience narratives or conversational narratives, memoirs, and personal interviews. Prior to her recording date with Gloria Lynne, Melba Liston performing with Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra around New York City. Her visibility as the lone female in the band, her proficiency on the trombone, an instrument perceived as masculine, and her role as arranger for the band, one often dominated by men, soon caught the attention of many observers, among them Gloria Lynne. Gloria Lynne recalls her first time meeting Melba Liston amidst the New York jazz scene of the 1950s: I met Melba and so impressed, because she a girl. Melba Liston just somebody [who] you really wanted to meet and be around all the time, because, she just that sweet, and just that nice and outgoing, and very, very (ibid.). Soon after that initial meeting, Lynne approached by Liston to perform one of her original songs, We Never Kissed, with the singer's trio. Liston's song became a fixture in the repertoire for Gloria Lynne's trio. When Lynne's sophomore album project transpired, with the idea to record it with strings, she requested Liston as musical arranger for the entire album: I asked her [Liston], 'Can you do strings?' It her first string date, my first string date. requested her; figured that she's talented and why not (ibid.). Raymond Scott, the producer and musical arranger for Lynne's debut album, secured Liston as arranger, and her song We Never Kissed added to a string of standards for the album. According to Lynne, I liked the song so ... we wanted to record it with strings. It's a fabulous piece of material (ibid.). Such collaboration between Gloria Lynne and Melba Liston timely, considering the music industry's predilection for recording black female jazz singers performing popular songs with strings. For example, Ella Fitzgerald's 1956 album on Norman Granz's newly created label, Verve, ushered in such a concept. (2) Other singers followed suit including Dinah Washington, Della Reese, and, of course, Gloria Lynne. Like Washington and Reese, Lynne drew upon her gospel roots as expressed with pleading and melismatic lines, vocalese singing, punctuating the end of songs with dramatic vocal delivery. She balanced these approaches with her distinct phrasing, interpretive storytelling ability, and [vocal] range and technical control (Feather 1959). …

Hoopskirts, Coffee, and the Changing Musical Prospects of the Bach Women

On June 15, 172.1, nineteen-year-old Anna Magdalena Wilcke took up her post as Hofsangerin (court singer) in the central German principality of Cothen. Hired by the music-loving Prince and having been recruited for the position by the Kapellmeister, Johann Sebastian Bach, she became the second-highest-paid member of the court's musical establishment. Anna Magdalena's salary of 300 talers amounted to twice that of the best paid of the other court musicians, with the exception of the Kapellmeister, who received only 100 talers more than she. Having recently left her parents' household in nearby Weissenfels, Anna Magdalena had established her professional status and economic independence. Five months after taking up her new post, she made what must have seemed to her another wise move up the musical ladder of success: she married the Kapellmeister, sixteen years her senior. Their combined salary of 700 talers amounted to a third of the prince's entire musical budget. Thirteen years later and well after Anna Magdalena's official retirement from her position as court singer, Johann Sebastian Bach directed in Leipzig the first performance of the Coffee Cantata (BWV 211), a vehicle for a highly skilled soprano in conditions that Bach scholarship has generally assumed spoke against public participation by women. Further, the work's libretto called into question the notion that women might articulate a position of independence through engagement with the fashionable world and a concomitant disavowal of paternal authority. This was a musical entertainment that staged family tension, patriarchal anxiety, and the problem of unwed daughters--all serious themes, notwithstanding the veneer of humor generated by its lampooning of contemporary consumer culture and in particular the fashion for coffee and hoopskirts. As I will propose here, the Coffee Cantata might well have offered a dramatic role to one of the composer's own daughters; if so, the work reflects an ambiguous light both onto the female musicians of the Bach family and, more generally, onto women and performance in mid-eighteenth-century Lutheran Germany. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The women of the Bach family were indeed excellent singers, and we can get a sense for just how fine a musician Anna Magdalena must have been from the congratulatory cantata Durchlauchster Leopold (Most Serene Highness Leopold, BWV 173a); the piece was composed by her husband in honor of their mutual employer and first performed on December 10, 1722, little more than a year after Cothen's leading musical pair had celebrated their wedding. The cantata includes two soprano arias for the court's star singer: the first, Guldner Sonnen frohe Stunden (Happy hours of golden sunshine), is one of the most graceful of Johann Sebastian's creations, requiring poise, finesse, and agility. In delivering the capering triplets and jaunty melodic leaps, Anna Magdalena would have displayed her gallant musical refinements and technical accomplishment (ex. 1). The second aria, So schau dies holden Tages Licht (Look upon this day's lovely light), allowed even greater opportunities for her to exercise her virtuosity; her voice would have soared with optimism and surety in the passage-work, just as it had to hold steadfast in the long sustained notes auguring Prince Leopold's enduring happiness (ex. 2). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In order to be able to perform these arias, Anna Magdalena had been well trained by members of the musical Wilcke family; whether her mother or trumpeter father played a more central role in her musical upbringing is unknown, but her education in the family craft of music would have begun in early girlhood. A contemporary engraving of a female singer found in Johann Weigel's Musicalisches Theatrum (fig. 1) from around 1720 makes clear that the virtuoso female singer was a literate musician who was adept at coordinating physical gesture with vocal delivery; Anna Magdalena's impressive salary in Cothen shows just how valuable such musical skills were, and these abilities reflected more than simply competence in the complex art of rendering in sound the elegant strokes of the composer's quill pen. …

Agnes Under the Big Top, a tall tale (review)

Reviewed by: Agnes Under the Big Top, a tall tale Mark Seamon Agnes Under the Big Top, a tall tale. Written and directed by Aditi Brennan Kapil. Mixed Blood Theatre, Minneapolis. 4 March 2011. The world premiere of Aditi Brennan Kapil's superb drama offered a timely reflection on the immigrant experience in the United States. Selected in 2008 as a National Endowment for the Arts' Distinguished New Play Development Project, Agnes Under the Big Top, a tall tale continued the mission of Mixed Blood Theatre: "a professional, multi-racial company [that] promotes cultural pluralism and individual equality through artistic excellence, using theater to address artificial barriers that keep people from succeeding in American society." Kapil, a playwright, actor, and director of Bulgarian and Indian descent and a resident artist at Mixed Blood for seventeen years, re-imagined the American "melting pot" as a kind of cultural spectacular, an enormous big top housing people of diverse backgrounds who must perform "tricks"—including lying to loved ones, retreating into silence, and committing fraud—in order to survive. Through effective design, expert acting, and careful attention to voice, Kapil upended romanticized notions of America as a nation of immigrants by scrutinizing the losses, failures, and coping mechanisms of recent immigrants. Agnes wove together seminal experiences in the lives of four American newcomers. Shipkov (Nathaniel Fuller), a former circus ringmaster, and his wife Roza (Virginia Burke) are Bulgarian immigrants in their forties. He drives a subway train, while she provides in-home care for the aging Ella (Linda Kelsey), a bedridden woman suffering from severe rheumatoid arthritis. Agnes (Shá Cage), a Liberian immigrant in her thirties, is also Ella's home-care worker. Agnes has been recently diagnosed with Click for larger view View full resolution Busker (Nick Demeris), Roza (Virginia Burke), and Shipkov (Nathaniel Fuller) in Agnes Under the Big Top, a tall tale. (Photo: Rich Ryan.) [End Page 640] Click for larger view View full resolution Agnes (Shá Cage) with Busker (Nick Demeris) in Agnes Under the Big Top, a tall tale. (Photo: Rich Ryan.) terminal cancer and has only weeks to live. Happy (Ankit Dogra), a young man in his twenties from India, works on the subway as Shipkov's trainee. An anonymous Busker (Nick Demeris) moves freely through time and space playing multiple roles, including a musician in whom Agnes confides, a silent Bulgarian clown whom Roza conjures, a pot-smoking Indian friend of Happy's, and a bird who speaks and listens to Agnes, Roza, and Ella. While not all of the characters' paths intersect, they are dramaturgically connected through themes of isolation, alienation, loss, and an unusual attention to sound, voice, and silence. Scenic designer Andrea Heilman, lighting designer Jeff Bartlett, and sound designer Katharine Horowitz created an intimate yet fragmented mise en scène for Kapil's tale of immigration. Greeted by recorded subway sounds, horizontal flashes of light suggesting train movement, and the live rhythms of a charismatic busker, the audience embarked on a theatrical journey between, across, and about barriers. Variously bright, dim, quiet, cacophonous, tranquil, and bustling, the dynamic environment served as a fitting representation for the confusion and challenges expressed in the diverse voices (and silences) of Kapil's characters. In addition to the sonic landscape of the train, Kapil further used the sounds of foreign language, vocal outbursts, and even deafening silence to illustrate the interpersonal consequences for Shipkov and Roza as they pursued economic opportunity in America. They remained physically separated throughout the production until Roza, in a shocking act of boldness, boarded Shipkov's train to confront him about her apparent inability or unwillingness to assimilate. She unleashed a jarring tirade in broken English that made plain her profound sense of loss of community, culture, family, and self. Burke's masterfully imperfect vocal delivery reached shouting levels to compensate for the whizzing sounds of passing subway trains. Fuller's frustrated, disbelieving facial expressions were at once hidden and revealed as train lights quickly flashed by and then vanished. The depth and hollowness of the subway tracks, coupled with fast-moving lights and piercing train sounds, emphasized the deep emotional expanse separating Roza and Shipkov within the tumult of their...

Stranded Out of Place: Environmental Alienation in Australian Punk

Working within ‘environmental justice ecocriticism’, this paper explores and compares British and Australian punk and new wave arguing that the environment comprises one way in which a socially disadvantaged urban poor register an experience of injustice and alienation. The paper connects cultural studies of place/environment in popular music with ecocritical arguments that stress the centrality of place to identity and the importance of sound, oral cultures and music towards conveying that sense of place. Engaging with debates about ‘authenticity’, a concept being substantially re-appraised in popular music studies, the paper will explore recurring motifs of the city, street, pollution, and the body questioning the idea of punk as a ‘spectacular subculture’ representative of ‘the death of an aesthetics based on […] the "authentic"’ (Iain Chambers)—through Allan Moore’s argument that ‘social alienation’ is ‘the ideological root of […] striving for the authentic’ in popular music. Suggesting (cf. Jude Davies) that British punk, after 1978, became increasingly sophisticated (musically speaking), articulate and politicised, the textual analysis comprising the body of this paper, will compare an example of secondary, British ‘new wave’—e.g. The Jam—with one of the environmentally-specific Brisbane punk bands (e.g. The Saints). I examine, in particular, three aspects of punk/new wave’s recurrent registering of its environment: sound, or sonic effect, looking at the lack of conventional harmony and structure, and various alienating devices; lyrics; and vocal delivery (looking at regionalised or working-class accents, and aggressiveness / alienation of tone).

Public Speaking Tools

When making a public speech, there are various tools at your disposal: vocal delivery, body language, visual aids, audience engagement, and the method of delivery. This 3-page fact sheet provides some suggestions about how to make good use of these tools. Written by Ricky Telg, and published by the UF Department of Agricultural Education and Communication, August 2011.
 https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/wc117

The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750, Vol. 2: Queer Articulations (review)

Reviewed by: The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750, Vol. 2: Queer Articulations John C. Beynon The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750, Vol. 2: Queer Articulations. By Thomas A. King. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008; pp. 536. $65.00 cloth. Thomas King’s second volume of The Gendering of Men is an ambitious work that offers new theoretical methods by which scholars of gender and sexuality might rethink the way we approach the history of homosexuality. In his introduction, King announces that he is uninterested in the project of recuperating a gay male history rooted in a belief in—and quest for—a fundamental gay male essence; instead, he proposes to search the historical archive for traces of queer practices that inscribe themselves on the surfaces of male bodies. At the outset of Queer Articulations, King notes the longstanding stereotypes that connect homosexuality to acting. Starting from this conventional idea, he scrutinizes the performative uses of the body that inform both the actor’s repertory of voice, gesture, and movement and the queer man’s campy comportment and theatrical self-display. King identifies the origins of these excessively mannered uses of the body in the politics and erotics of subjection and domination that characterized relationships between and among men within the English and French courts of the early seventeenth century. These performative dynamics of super- and subordination among men lingered on in the bodily practices of those who resisted pressures to conform to emergent models of hegemonic masculinity that insisted that men identify in relation to and against women, that men fully embrace heterosexual desire, and that men define themselves vis-à-vis increasing demands for bourgeois domesticity. Resisters against these injunctions adopted queer practices of both theatricality and sodomy as a means of signaling their refusal to embrace normative masculinity. [End Page 140] For example, in his opening chapter, King examines the practice of holding one’s arm akimbo—the placement of the arm on the hip with the hand turned back and the elbow extended into space. Examining mannerist portraits of seventeenth-century male aristocrats, King posits that such a posture originally signified sovereign legitimacy, as well as a patriarchal relationship in which the aristocratic figure spectacularly asserts power over others through a dynamics of authority and obeisance. However, by the early eighteenth century, placing the arm akimbo had come to be understood as a gesture signifying effeminate sodomy. During this era, the man with his arm akimbo resurfaces in satirical images intended to ridicule male effeminacy. Examining an array of imagery that encodes bodily performance, King persuasively reads twentieth-century images of the arm akimbo in light of earlier representations of the same gesture. In subsequent chapters, King examines both textual and visual representations of male effeminacy in bodily practice. His discussion of London’s molly houses of the early eighteenth century (public houses where men were believed to cross-dress, have sex with one another, and perform travesties of marriage and childbirth) usefully aligns representations of masculine women and effeminate men. King identifies both as figures who refused to participate in increasingly normative modes of domesticity and heterosexuality. The spectacular theatrics of the mollies (effeminate men, many of whom were also sodomites) encode in their corporeal performances an already outré mode of aristocratic theatricality, as do the outrageous antics of the “roaring girls”—masculine women who featured in the drama of an earlier age. Through satires, erotic novels, and sensationalized accounts of sodomy trials, effeminate men came to emblematize the inversion of the private, domestic male: the public, ubiquitous, affected sodomite. In a chapter devoted to the Restoration-era actor Edward Kynaston, King notes the ways that Kynaston, who had played female roles as a boy, was situated “at the margins of manliness” through a lingering effeminacy in his performances, particularly through his canting mode of vocal delivery. King examines defenses of Kynaston by Colley Cibber, whose reputation was also tainted by suspicions of sodomy. While some found in Kynaston’s effeminate acting a sign of inward sodomitical desire, Cibber attempted to deflect such charges by foregrounding Kynaston’s persuasive acting ability. Nevertheless, suggestions of effeminate sodomy persisted in accounts of Kynaston’s life, relying upon an...