The Voice Of The Century

The fields of performance studies, empirical musicology, and the musicology of recordings have seen a tremendous development in recent years, shedding new light on the recent history of our performing tradition and conveying essential information to music practitioners, critics and audiences. This innovative work considers the notion of bel canto and the manner in which this vibrant tradition lives in the records of Luisa Tetrazzini (1871-1940), one of the most celebrated sopranos ever. Tetrazzini, whose discographic career includes about 120 recordings, belongs to that generation of inspirational performers who heralded the dawn of a new era of music appreciation, alongside such iconic figures as Enrico Caruso, Adelina Patti and Nellie Melba. Drawing on a vast body of scholarship and a number of contemporary reviews, Massimo Zicari establishes Tetrazzini’s role in the Italian operatic tradition and its much disputed set of performing conventions. His transcriptions of her recorded interpretations from Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi will prove invaluable to singers and conductors interested in a tradition that goes back to legendary figures such as Jenny Lind and Maria Malibran. The author also discusses her voice quality and technique, tempo flexibility, her use of vibrato and portamento—features of musical performance that question several widely-held, normative views about aesthetics and interpretative tradition. The volume includes eighty-eight musical examples and its closing section consists of the vocal scores of thirteen operatic arias. The musical material (both examples and transcriptions) is entirely original. This unique approach seeks to combine an academic perspective with the making of the music, in the hope that the plea for originality may be enhanced by models from the past.

Umm Kulthum, the "voice of Egypt," was the most celebrated musical performer of the century in the Arab world. More than twenty years after her death, her devoted audience, drawn from all strata of Arab society, still numbers in the millions. Thanks to her skillful and pioneering use of mass media, her songs still permeate the international airwaves. In the first English-language biography of Umm Kulthum, Virginia Danielson chronicles the life of a major musical figure and the confluence of artistry, society, and creativity that characterized her remarkable career. Danielson examines the careful construction of Umm Kulthum's phenomenal popularity and success in a society that discouraged women from public performance. From childhood, her mentors honed her exceptional abilities to accord with Arab and Muslim practice, and as her stature grew, she remained attentive to her audience and the public reception of her work. Ultimately, she created from local precendents and traditions her own unique idiom and developed original song styles from both populist and neo-classical inspirations. These were enthusiastically received, heralded as crowning examples of a new, yet authentically Arab-Egyptian, culture. Danielson shows how Umm Kulthum's music and public personality helped form popular culture and contributed to the broader artistic, societal, and political forces that surrounded her. This richly descriptive account joins biography with social theory to explore the impact of the individual virtuoso on both music and society at large while telling the compelling story of one of the most famous musicians of all time. "She is born again every morning in the heart of 120 million beings. In the East a day without Umm Kulthum would have no color."—Omar Sharif

Airflow -- Source -- Resonance/Articulation -- Heightened potentials.

In his previous books about singers, John Steane has taken for his subject the art of singing as heard on records (The Grand Tradition) and 'in the flesh' in opera houses and concert halls (Voices, Singers and Critics). Here, in Singers of the Century, he turns to the singers themselves, seeing how their art develops with the opportunities of their professional lives, with chance and design playing their part and all likely to be at the mercy of some quirk of taste or character. Each study is a carefully worked vignette, and the book is illustrated throughout with photographs and memorabilia, many never before published. Singers of the Century will appeal to all those with a love of singing and of music writing at its best.

By integrating theoretical approaches to the female voice with the musicological investigation of female singers’ practices, the contributors to this volume offer fresh viewpoints on the material, symbolic and cultural aspects of the female voice in the twentieth century. Various styles and genres are covered, including Western art music, experimental composition, popular music, urban folk and jazz. The volume offers a substantial and innovative appraisal of the role of the female voice from the perspective of twentieth-century performance practices, the centrality of female singers’ experimentations and extended vocal techniques along with the process of the ‘subjectivisation’ of the voice.

A stunning picture-book biography of iconic African American opera star Leontyne Price. Born in a small town in Mississippi in 1927, the daughter of a midwife and a sawmill worker, Leontyne Price might have grown up singing the blues. But Leontyne had big dreams—and plenty to be thankful for—as she surrounded herself with church hymns and hallelujahs, soaked up opera arias on the radio, and watched the great Marian Anderson grace the stage. While racism made it unlikely that a poor black girl from the South would pursue an opera career, Leontyne’s wondrous voice and unconquerable spirit prevailed. Bursting through the door Marian had cracked open, Leontyne was soon recognized and celebrated for her leading roles at the Metropolitan Opera and around the world—most notably as the majestic Ethiopian princess in Aida, the part she felt she was born to sing. From award-winners Carole Boston Weatherford and Raul Colón comes the story of a little girl from Mississippi who became a beloved star—one whose song soared on the breath of her ancestors and paved the way for those who followed.

In The 21st-Century Voice: Contemporary and Traditional Extra-Normal Voice, Michael Edward Edgerton considers contemporary vocal techniques within an acoustic and anatomical framework. Throughout, he proposes new directions for vocal exploration. Much more than a historical treatise on 20th-century masterworks or vocal science, The 21st-Century Voice explores experimental methods of sound production, offering a systematic series of approaches and methods for assessing, engaging, and, in some instances, overcoming the assumed limits of vocal singing. Appearing a decade after the publication of the first edition, this second editiondraws on and advances our current understandings of voice production. Divided into four parts—air flow, source, resonance/articulation, and heightened potentials—Edgerton considers crucial matters affecting vocal production, such as Registral challenges Filtering Airflow modification Combinatorial, multiphonic principles Extreme voice possibilities Multidimensional vocal issues With more than 250 illustrations, 150 associated audio tracks, an extended appendix on voice science, a glossary of key terms, and lists of representative compositions, The 21st-Century Voice will appeal to composers and performers interested in exploring the ever-broadening range of vocal possibilities. Its engagement with the complexities of vocal production should also be relevant to students and scholars of voice science, acoustics, linguistics, computer modeling, and more.