Content: #16 –Autumn 2014 (All texts in English)
MARC SABAT
INTONATION
GARY SCHULTZ
CARE OF EDITIONS
CHIYOKO SZLAVNICS
O GLISSAND-O!
JEREMY WOODRUFF
TONAL DISCREPANCIES AND COGNITIVE DISSONANCE IN PETER ABLINGER’S VOICES AND PIANO: ANGELA DAVIS
ANTJE VOWINCKEL
TERRA PROSODIA - SOUND COMPOSITIONS WITH DIALECT MELODIES
CLARENCE BARLOW
A: ON RAMIFICATIONS OF INTONATION
B: GLOSSARY OF TERMS WITH RESPECT TO INTONATION
ADRIAN KOYE
LE TON RETROUVÉ
WOLFGANG VON SCHWEINITZ
PLAINSOUND STRING QUARTET "HOLY HOWL"
[…] Speech melodies: at home they are invisible or pale, but in foreign lands they whir around like colourful butterflies. And are just as difficult to catch. Approach them with a microphone, as with a net, and they quickly are gone. Not the people, but the melodies. If you do manage to grab one, it often seems the net becomes a steamroller, flattening out the melody – catching sight of a microphone, most people immediately speak more flatly.
My interest in dialect melodies is not so much about specific regions or traditions, but rather is connected to their unintentional, fleeting musics. I first found such unexpected melodies in international language courses – in exactly the situation where regional language differences are supposed to be overcome. For my piece Call Me Yesterday, I collected audio language courses. Throughout, I came across pronounced modulations, sounding like artificial melodies but never intended as music. The melodies were created solely out of the wish for a perfect pronunciation, emerging as a “side effect” of the didactic work. They are objéts trouvés, so to speak, which can only act musically once in a different context. To find them, however, you have to listen around a lot of meaning, and through many consonants. Thus confirming Tom Johnson’s observation, “it often takes longer to find a good piece than to compose one.”
This search for accidental melodies later brought me to dialects. But first, in composing with speech melodies, there are many different forerunners.
Even in the ancient world the ways of melody and prosody had parted. To melody were attributed harmony, metrics and instrumentation (song); to prosody, speech – a single term, encompassing not only speech-melody, but also tempo, rhythm, volume, accent, and pauses. Melody was seen as something figurative and clearly recognisable, added to language. Speech-melody, in contrast, was by definition “hidden” within prosody, bound within a bundle of parameters. Its mastery served primarily to make the meaning of the words vividly understood.
As speech-melodies emerged in the European tradition around 1600 as recitative, these served primarily to convey more content and to advance the opera’s plot. In a rather artificial way, it was “naturally” spoken; melodies were devised and music was adapted somewhat to the rhythm of speech. Not until Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912), in which the composer notated a melody that should be neither sung nor spoken, is it clearly more about the musical expression of speech than the content. This musical expression of speech also inspired Partch in his compositions for intoning voice. In his Seventeen Lyrics for Li Po (1931-33) and subsequent works, Partch conveyed the microtonal modulation of speaking in the accompany- ing instrumental parts. While he went to great lengths and invented many special instruments to reflect these intonations – overheard from people in the street – his intoning voice parts (although rhythmically free and alternating between speaking and singing voices) change exactly this natural intonation by artificially declaiming the texts. In this way spontaneous modulation (or B-prosody, according to Tillmann) was remodulated through controlled declamation (or A-prosody). In some short passages of Bitter Music (1935), the instrumental part seems to completely follow the impulsive intonations of speech, which has to do with the fact that the speaker speaks unaccompanied for a long time. However, the speaking voice is also written out; the speaker reads the text. It remains – even if diminished – a declamatory modulation. This is taken up by the piano, which often then transforms it into song melodies. […]
Excerpt from Antje Vowinckel: Terra Prosodia
Read more in the physical issue #16 !