1. Introduction
Why play a role in art-song?
We sing because of a lot of reasons: because we love the sound and the music, because we want to let out some of the emotion and because we want to communicate something through song. This last reason is very important, but in classical music often subordinate to making a beautiful sound. In other words, the interpretation of the words is less important than the vocal technique. In some ways, this is valid because without a good vocal technique you cannot make the subtle sound colours you need to give the words the interpretation you want. On the other hand, we live in a time where communicating with the audience is becoming more and more important. Classical musicians try to reinvent themselves and the way they give concerts. Singers try new ways to incorporate theatre in their recitals.
I always found it very interesting to dig deeper into the texts of poets or libretto writers and to discover a lot of meanings in them. The problem is then to take these meanings to the songs and to the stage and transfer them to the audience, especially in a standard recital in which the singer stands still in the curve of the grand piano. It can feel very awkward standing there and see all the prying eyes upon you: “Will she perform ‘Claire de Lune’ from Fauré correctly? It is such a beautiful and subtle song. I hope she gets the crescendos in the right places…” Probably only a small part of the audience will think like that, but in your mind, it is all of the audience.
In The Inner Game of Music, Barry Green gives musicians techniques to stay in the music and out of your own negative thoughts. The first technique is role-playing. He gives an example of a musician who imagines she is a virtuoso and famous performer. Being that role she doesn’t need to think about the things he herself isn’t able to do because she now plays a person that can do all these things. This illustrates the first reason why playing a role is important: it gets you out of your own problems of what the audience might think of you, what went wrong before and what you want to have for dinner that night. You have to keep focused on your role and your role isn’t bothered by all these things.[1] So playing a role and using theatre in recitals is not only a way to keep the interest of the audience, but it can also be very useful for the performer.
When you look at opera, there is and always has been a lot of theatre. Because opera is just a play on music. There is a story, there are various characters that interact with each other, there is a surrounding setting, a history and often an outcome. When you sing a character in the opera, you play a role, that’s clear. When you look at art-song, you have a text, often a poem, but often you don’t have a clear story, other characters, surrounding, a history or an outcome. It is already nice if your own character is clear. The question is how to create those elements that are not there? Can you treat art-song as opera to have greater dramatic effects? Can you play a role in art-song?
The answer is both yes and no. No, because it can be nice to preserve the subtility of art-song, the very thoroughly composed music on the very well thought-out poem. Sometimes it may be too distracting to move a lot. And yes, because it helps with understanding the text, staying with it while singing and therefore communicating the song better.
Playing a role in art-song is easier said than done. To make it work, you need to analyse the poem and need to know something about the life of the poet and his or her other works. Singers often just guess what a poem was about and whom they could play in those guessed circumstances. But how far can you go in guessing who is the voice of a poem in a musical composition? This research will show that I made a new step in finding more voices and more colours in performing art-song, using a case study of a poem by Emily Dickinson: I’m Nobody.
My research question is:
How can a deeper understanding of the variety of voices in three musical settings of Emily Dickinson’s poem I’m Nobody! give insight into the possible interpretations of songs with respect for the interpretations that are visible in the choices of the composers?
The three settings are
- I’m Nobody’, Ernst Bacon (1898-1990), from Songs from Emily Dickinson
- I’m Nobody, Nick Raspa (written 1998)
- ‘I’m Nobody’, Lori Laitman (b. 1955), from Four Dickinson Songs
