Pre-accademici / propedeutici
Contemporary voice course
Teacher Guidi Virginia
How did voice and music change in the twentieth century?
The role of the performer certainly begins to open up through the hybridisation of the performing arts. Contemporary performance becomes a palette of shades between dance, music and acting, in which the singer often has to handle very different kinds of vocal writing and in which instrumentalists too are frequently asked to sing and use their voice. Composers face a wide range of choices, many of which arise from working with the performers themselves — performers who are often led to explore unfamiliar territory in their instrument and in their own body.
The workshop sets out to stimulate the creativity of composers through direct work with singers and instrumentalists, discovering new possibilities together. The hope is to lay the ground for tomorrow’s professional collaborations among these young students and to spark their curiosity about a contemporary practice that frequently moves beyond familiar boundaries.
Teaching aims
The course provides a grounding in the analysis and notation of contemporary vocal writing, for singers and for instrumentalists alike. It aims to make composition students aware of how to write for the voice as an instrument, and to give performers — vocal and instrumental — the means to understand the vocal techniques called for in contemporary repertoire.
Course structure
– about 2 hours of introduction to contemporary vocal writing.
– about 6 hours of analysis and study of contemporary repertoire (vocal and instrumental) featuring the notation and the vocal and performance techniques covered by the course.
– about 4 hours of analysis and study of material brought by the students (pieces written by the composition students — for the course or earlier — and study material from the instrumentalists and singers).
– about 4 hours of practical work on vocal technique and performance of passages from the scores analysed.
– about 6 hours of study of the ensemble vocal repertoire (e.g. Cage, Scelsi, Curran).
– about 8 hours of supervised workshop for the creation of original pieces.
- Concert | final assessment.
