Identity is one thing that each one performers must confront. Each time we stand onstage to ship a textual content — literary or musical, or some mixture of the 2 — we’ve got a call to make about its character, and about our stance towards it. How will we go about embodying it? Do we tackle the id of the fabric we’ve got absorbed, or does it reconfigure itself as it’s molded to our personal id? What is our responsibility to the textual content? To the viewers? To ourselves?
My e-book “Song and Self” explores and worries at problems with id that come to the fore in a number of the works I like — problems with gender, for instance. Is the true protagonist of Robert Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und -Leben” not the girl we see on the floor, however slightly the composer, whose anxieties and passions inflect the cycle at each level? What distinction does it make if the cycle is sung, because it was within the nineteenth century, by a person? Should I sing it at this time?
Then once more, how necessary is the gender of the Madwoman, which I’ve sung, in “Curlew River”? Britten makes use of the ritual sources of Japanese Noh theater to create a type of distancing. Cross-gender casting is part of this, however one which in blurring our perceptions of gender solely amplifies the influence of the austerely informed story: The Madwoman is all of us.
Troubling political points may intersect with the sung persona as I found in my analysis into Ravel’s “Chansons Madécasses.” The second part of this highly effective cycle, for voice and instrumental trio, is a setting of an 18th-century protest in opposition to longstanding French makes an attempt to colonize Madagascar, voiced by a Malagasy. “Méfiez-vous des blancs” (“Beware of the whites”) he cries — however that cry was written by Évariste Parny, an opponent of slavery but a slave proprietor.
Ravel wrote the tune within the midst of French colonial wars in North Africa, only some a long time after the bloody French conquest of Madagascar in 1896. Some early audiences noticed the piece as political provocation. There’s one thing troubling about these twin acts of ventriloquism, Parny’s poem and Ravel’s music. In addressing the tune we’ve got to ask questions concerning the poet’s dangerous religion as a slaveholding abolitionist, concerning the composer’s motives and about our personal. Who ought to sing this tune? Who owns it?
“Song and Self” may be very a lot an exploratory work. It takes the notion of the essay at its phrase — as an try, an experiment. If I draw any conclusion, it’s that the way in which to strategy classical music, in an period wherein its relevance or ideological stance is consistently being questioned, is to discover the place it comes from extra carefully, to not throw it away. Questioning is constructed into the classical music custom; and decoding this advanced music that we’ve got inherited means negotiating between the preoccupations of the previous and the current in order that we will uncover extra about ourselves.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com