Music as an artificial language - an annotated collection of early music sources mentioning the relationship between instrumental music, singing, and speaking, questioning their relevance for today’s performers
(2016)
author(s): Isabella Mercuri
published in: KC Research Portal
Name
Isabella Mercuri
Main Subject
Recorder
Research supervisors
Inês de Avena Braga and Frédérique Thouvenot
Title of Research
Music as an artificial language - an annotated collection of early music sources mentioning the relationship between instrumental music, singing, and speaking, questioning their relevance for today’s performers
Research Question
What do treatises of the Renaissance and Baroque period mention about the relationship between instrumental music, singing, and speaking and how can I use those indications in my playing?
Summary of Results
The collection of sources from the beginning of the sixteenth century until the middle of the eighteenth century showed that the indications given by the authors are often very similar to each other, although being written in a completely different time and environment. The following three main ideas appear in several treatises and were therefore examined more in detail:
- Imitation of the human voice or of a specific instrument
- Following a speech and using the means of rhetoric
- Underlying instrumental music with text
The practical application of those three ideas led to an enrichment of my palette of sound colours, to an improvement in making clear phrasings and gave me some inspiration to find the appropriate affections to communicate to the listeners.
This research paper and the included collection of sources might also be a starting point for further research exploring for instance more in detail one of the three main ideas mentioned above.
Biography
Isabella Mercuri was born in Switzerland, where she started studying the recorder with Kees Boeke and Matthias Weilenmann and completed her Bachelor of Arts in Music at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste in 2013. She then moved to the Netherlands to continue her studies with Daniël Brüggen at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, where she also studies the baroque oboe with Frank de Bruine.
Isabella Mercuri is active as a recorder teacher for children and adults and regularly performs in different chamber music settings in the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Serbia and Spain.
Glories to Nothingness
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano, Björn Ross
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
GLORIES TO NOTHINGNESS
SORROW. MADNESS. NOTHING.
A voice. A gesture.
A beginning. An experiment. A sketch.
A becoming.
... based on the story of a singer’s performance of paradoxes and passions
in 17th century Venice.
... based on a singer’s research – performed in the 21st century – about the Art of Performing Everything and Nothing.
GLORIES TO NOTHINGNESS is an artistic research project investigating performative acts of moving between Vocalizing ≈ Articulating ≈ Mattering ≈ Trusting.
The research question: How to perform trust?
Every movement, utterance, projection and articulation is consciously exploring and honoring Nothingness as an idea and a concept much debated at the time when the first public opera productions were performed in Venice around 1640. Based on a performative research approach and new materialist theories, performance acts are methodologically diffracted through musical fragments composed by Luigi Rossi (c. 1597 – 1653), Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) and Francesco Sacrati (1605-1650); through selected poems from the volume Le Glorie della signora Anna Renzi romana (Venice, 1641); through thoughts entangled with figures such as RESISTANCE, VULNERABILITY and TRUST; through the practice of exploring force and form as every day performative acts.
Elisabeth Belgrano
vocal projections / performance
Björn Ross
visual projections / scenography