The Empty Voice

(Amadeus). Opera is a singer's medium, but it comes to life on the stage. Composers write complex and detailed musical scores that are grounded in stories of passion and conflict, suffering and joy, forgiveness and despair. Acting is crucial to the experience audiences have in the theatre. Thanks to surtitles, audiences can now easily follow the dialogue and the story. Therefore, more is expected from the singers than just great voices: we expect them to embody the characters they are singing. Without character, singers' voices are empty, however beautiful they may be. This book offers opera singers a method and the tools that will assist them in developing their roles and the dramatic action of a scene. Musical and acting clues provide the foundation for creating characters. When singers study a libretto for acting clues and the score for musical clues they gain greater insight into their roles and have a better understanding of the music and a finer perception of the dramatic shape of their scenes. The methods and tools are demonstrated in an analysis of key scenes from selected operas. These examples are basic for the preparation for all characters in all operas, voice types, or time periods. The techniques offered will give the singer means to examine characters in depth, plot, and the conflicts in any scene. Singers who have that foundation are more relaxed, confident, focused and able to sing better.

Covering famous operas from 14 Italian, French and German composers, this handbook is designed to help listeners understand and appreciate the special skills required to sing famous operatic songs. The book includes a plot synopsis of each opera with information about each song, which are introduced in their dramatic settings along with the vocal requirements for the most demanding passages. Interactive literary and rhyming exercises help the reader become more engaged and knowledgeable. Foreign language passages are translated into English and key words are highlighted in each language. The operatic vocabulary is defined to help the listener better understand the technical demands for a highly trained voice. The book is designed as a useful handbook for both experienced and beginning opera listeners. Appendices provide information on singers, recordings and useful references.

The voice traverses Beckett’s work in its entirety, defining its space and its structure. Emanating from an indeterminate source situated outside the narrators and characters, while permeating the very words they utter, it proves to be incessant. It can alternatively be violently intrusive, or embody a calming presence. Literary creation will be charged with transforming the mortification it inflicts into a vivifying relationship to language. In the exploration undertaken here, Lacanian psychoanalysis offers the means to approach the voice’s multiple and fundamentally paradoxical facets with regards to language that founds the subject’s vital relation to existence. Far from seeking to impose a rigid and purely abstract framework, this study aims to highlight the singularity and complexity of Beckett’s work, and to outline a potentially vast field of investigation.

"Little Voice" is the chatter in the six inches between your ears that turns you into a hero one minute and a dunce the next. The 21 proven techniques presented here will reprogram the "Little Voice" in your brain in 30 seconds. In "Little Voice" Mastery, author Blair Singer delivers strategies and techniques that will give readers the ability to: Maintain power in any pressure situation and stop debilitating chatter in their brain so they can attract what they want - now. Uncover and realize lifelong dreams Break through self-sabotaging habits Build powerful, lasting confidence Resurrect the hero inside of them

A story that could come true tomorrow When Ishmael Jacobson creates a virus that stops the ageing process in humans and animals alike, chaos could be the only result. Striving towards a dream of eternal life, everybody do what they can to get infected with the virus, even if it means breaking the law. It is up to detective Lindique to try to stop the spread of the virus, but is it too late? Soon the world is filled with people, and every day more and more are born. The ground turns barren, too tired to keep on giving life to billions upon billions of humans who are trying to scrape another morsel of food out of the dust. When there is no more food to eat, there is always the neighbour… In the end, there is only one person who can start the ageing process in humans again, and it is the person who started the whole problem to begin with, coming full circle.

At last, Jean Benedetti has succeeded in translating Stanislavski's huge manual into a lively, fascinating and accurate text in English, remaining faithful to the author's original intentions within a colloquial and readable style for today's actors.

This book documents Janet Cardiff's 1999 audio project, The Missing voice (Case Study B), and includes the full audio CD as well as images from this exploration of London's inner city. Part urban guide, part fiction, part film noir, her audio walk entwines the listener in a narrative that shifts through time and space. Intimate, even conspirational, Cardiff has created a psychologically absorbing experience for an audience of one at a time. You find yourself transported back in time. What was that sound? Who is speaking to you? Where does reality end, and what's imagined begin? Also included is an extended essay analyzing the artist's career to date. Born in 1957, in Brussels, Canada, Cardiff works and lives in Alberta and has shown internationally in, among others, London, New York, Berlin, and Vienna. Her work has been included in significant group exhibitions, notably Skulptur Projekte Munster, 1997; Present Tense: Nine Artists in the Nineties, at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the 1999 Carnegie International; and the Museum as Muse at New York's Museum of Modern Art.