Envoicing the other
Symposium
A symposium and themed concert in honour of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and the 75th anniversary of the death of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) hosted by the Scottish Chapter of the RMA and the School of Culture and Creative Arts, University of Glasgow, Saturday November 10, 2012, The University Concert Hall
If you are intending attending the symposium please email us so that we can confirm numbers for catering.
| 09:30 | Tea/coffee provided, Archive Room |
| 09:45 | Welcome and introductions, David J. Code, Lecturer in Music, University of Glasgow |
| Session 1: Debussy and Some Others (Old Worlds and New) | ||
|---|---|---|
| 10:00 | Teresa Davidian, (Tarleton State University) | ‘Envoicing Debussy During the Interwar Period in Japan’ |
| 10:45 | Catherine Nolan, (University of Western Ontario) | ‘Giving Voice to Hildegard Jone, Anton Webern’s Creative Muse’ |
| 11:30 | Robert F. Waters (Seton Hall University) | ‘Envoicing the Other in Indianist Opera: Separation and Assimilation in Victor Herbert’s Natoma’ |
| 12:15 | Kassandra Hartford (Stony Brook University) | ‘Lost in Translation and Lost Translations: Ethnography and Engagement in the Maracatu de Chico Rei’ |
| 13:00 | BREAK Buffet lunch provided in the Archive Room | |
| Session 2: Dancers and Performers; Theoretical and Practical Reflections | ||
|---|---|---|
| 14:00 | Emma Adlard (King’s College, London) | ‘The Allure of Ida Rubinstein and the Case of Ravel’s Boléro (1928)’ |
| 14:45 | David Kjar, (Boston University) | ‘Wanda and Sting: Voicing and Re-voicing the Other’ |
| 15:30 | Panel: Theoretical and Practical Reflections on ‘Envoicing’ | |
| 1. David J. Code (University of Glasgow) | ‘Cone, Abbate, and Bilitis’ | |
| 2. Jonathan Hicks (University of Oxford) | ‘What Envoicing Leaves Undone’ | |
| 3. Robert Szymanek (Royal Academy of Music) | ‘Crossing the Self/Other Divide: A Composer’s Journey’ | |
| 4. Respondent: Björn Heile (University of Glasgow) | ||
| 17:00 | End of Symposium: Refreshments provided in the Archive Room | |
Concert
‘Envoicing the Other’, introduced by David Code - featuring Debussy’s Trois chansons de Bilitis and Ravel’s Chansons madécasses alongside new and recent works on similar themes performed by Taylor Wilson, mezzo-soprano, Scott Mitchell, piano, Ruth Morley (flute) and Robert Irvine (cello)
18:30 |
Richard Peat |
Shepherd’s Purse (2012) for solo voice |
| Caroline Wilkins | from Carte du tendre (1993), on poems by Charles Baudelaire | |
| II – Recueillement | ||
| III – La mort des amants | ||
| Claude Debussy | Trois chansons de Bilitis (1898), on prose poems by Pierre Louÿs | |
| I – La flûte de Pan | ||
| II – La Chevelure | ||
| III – Le tombeau des naïades | ||
| Drew Hammond | Coyote Nocturne III (2012) | |
| Maurice Ravel | Chansons madécasses (1926), on poems by Évariste de Parny | |
| I – Nahandove | ||
| II – Aoua! | ||
| III – Il est doux de se coucher … | ||
| Louis Johnson | A Meditation on Fear (after Ravel) (2012) | |
| William Sweeney | Casida de la Muchacha Dorado (1994, rev. 2012), on a poem by Gabriel Garcia Lorca | |
| Caroline Kraabel | Recording the Other (2012), for four performers and tape recorders | |
| c. 19:30 |
Final note of thanks with composers and audience, chaired by David Code |
|
| 20:00 | END proceed to conference dinner | |
Orientation
Catherine Clément’s 1979 book Opera, the Undoing of Women, one of the earliest contributions to feminist musicology, argued that the countless staged deaths of transgressive women in the operatic canon could be closely tied to the patriarchal project of bourgeois masculinity. Some years later, Carolyn Abbate’s 1993 article ‘Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women’ significantly qualified Clément’s plot-based argument by reading the vocal and timbral extravagances of Richard Strauss’s Salome as exemplary of the power of women performers, and operatic divas in particular, to usurp the male authorial ‘voice’. It is not necessary to accept either Clément’s or Abbate’s argument wholeheartedly to recognize, in their exchange, a suggestive exemplification of the complex questions that have always arisen from any creative attempt to voice or give voice to or—in Abbate’s term—envoice some cultural ‘other’, however that may be defined.
For a narrower exemplification of the questions at issue for this Study Day, please refer to the accompanying ‘Call For Works’, based on song triptychs by Debussy and Ravel that each display the ideological instabilities characteristic of literary and musical ‘cross-voicing’. But beyond opera, music theatre and song (in all of their variety), we also invite submissions that take the idea of ‘envoicing’ more broadly, to encompass central issues of scholarly debate. By what authority can we claim to speak for the Other? Is it better—morally, politically, methodologically—to try and give voice to ‘othered’ subjectivities, or might we still ask why we think that is ours to give? Amidst the wide range of subjects that could be addressed in this light, we particularly welcome reflections on pressing contemporary concerns: the multiple ‘otherings’ associated with globalisation, post-colonialism, the ‘War on Terror’, and the debates about Britain in Europe and Scotland in Britain; the present state of gender- or sexuality-oriented music criticism; the sense of the ‘self’ as an ‘other’ within contested cultural norms.