Who is singing and what is the impact?

As I mentioned in my previous post from the ELIA conference the programme on Thursday ended with Open Houses at the art schools in Gothenburg. At the Academy of Music and Drama the so called Discipline Sessions were followed by food, drinks and a performance with opera, music, theatre and dance by students.

In addition the participants were offered a "bonus seminar" on Artistic Research Into Singing.

The first speaker/singer was Katarina A. Karlsson, Academy of Music and Drama, Gothenburg, who talked about her research topic - the canzonas by Thomas Campion (1567 - 1620) with female protagonists. Campion composed an unusual amount of canzonas whith a female persona. One of Katarina A. Karlsson's research questions is "How does gender affect the audience's perception of the lyrics and the music of Campions's songs with female personas today?" The songs are quite humoristical and not at all decent! Karlsson started by performing a few of them with a sweet and innocent voice to a blushing audience! She wanted to make the point that the content of these songs requires something else than a nice voice and correct ornaments in the tradition of performance practice of early music. Instead she intends to make the songs come alive by highlighting aspects like folksiness and parody. She has been experimenting with different ways of presentation and has, for example, noticed that the hurdy-gurdy resulted in a completely different way of using the voice.

The second speaker/singer was Hendrik Vanden Abeele, Orpheus Research Centre in Music, Ghent. His doctoral research study "B-Gu Ms 15. What a late fifteenth century antiphoner does with a present-day performer of plainsong". He talked about how practical experience and experimenting with sources aids the understanding of performance practices. For example how the fact that a small group of singers are standing close to each other, singing into each other's ears(!) and sharing one score has an effect on the performance. Something new to me was that a lot of very specific performance instructions are included (with red text) in manuscripts from the time. Hendrik Vanden Abeele is the leader of a group called The psallentes. There are several videos with the group on YouTube, for example singing Caritas pater est.