Description
Following Nina Eidsheim’s Distinguished Lecture Metaphor as material practice on November 11, 2024, this joint CIRMMT/ACTOR workshop will focus on vocal and instrumental timbre in relation to the metaphors used to describe them and to the concept of materiality in contemporary music.
We invite 20-minute presentations on any aspect of these topics, as well as on the music of composer Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023), particularly (but not limited to) research on vocality and timbre in her compositions. The workshop will close with a musical presentation on performing Saariaho's solo and chamber works featuring Brigitte Poulin (piano), Jocelyne Roy (flute), and Julie Trudeau (cello), a preview of their November 13 concert "Sur les traces de Saariaho" (in Tanna Schulich Hall).
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Registration and call for presentations
The call for presentations is now closed, however registration to participate remains open by filling this form.
*Participants who register by Wednesday Nov. 7 will receive lunch. Late registrations will be accepted if there are remaining spaces, but are not guaranteed lunch.
Program
Session 1: Caroline Traube, chair; Nina Eidsheim, respondent
Room A-832, Wirth Music Building, 527 Sherbrooke Street West
9:30–9:50: Welcome coffee
9:50–10:00: Introduction to the workshop
10:00–10:40: Jay Marchand Knight (Concordia University): Timbre of the Zwischenstufe: The Mezzo-Soprano Voice as Queer Metaphor in Rosenkavalier, Lulu, and Cabaret
10:40–11:20: Leïla Barbedette (Université de Montréal) and Emmanuel Vukovich (McGill University): From Wood to Sound: How Metaphors and Vocal Analogies Translate Materiality of Timbre
11:20–12:00: Thomas Quirion (École de technologie supérieure): Interaction of Voice and Alto Saxophone in Composition of Mixed Music: Inside the process
12:00–13:00: Lunch for registered presenters and participants in A-832
Session 2: Jay Marchand Knight, chair; Nina Eidsheim, respondent
Tanna Schulich Hall, Wirth Music Building, 527 Sherbrooke Street West
13:00–13:30: Hannah Barnes (McGill University): Purification of the Body: Timbre and Metaphor in Jonathan Harvey's Body Mandala
13:30–14:00: Daniel Villegas Vélez (University of Ottawa): Bridging Timbral Experience: Cognitive and Linguistic Metaphors in Auditory Perception
14:00–14:30: Yayoi Uno Everett (City University of New York): Toshio Hosokawa’s Cosmology of Sound: Poetics of Silence and Sound
14:30–14:45: Coffee break
Session 3: Robert Hasegawa, chair; Nina Eidsheim, respondent
Tanna Schulich Hall, Wirth Music Building, 527 Sherbrooke Street West
14:45–15:00: Stephen McAdams (McGill University): Tribute to Kaija Saariaho
15:00–15:30: Emmanuel Vukovich (McGill University), Jacqueline Woodley (McGill University): Timbral Chiaroscuro in Kaija Saariaho "Changing Light" for soprano & violin
15:30–17:00: Brigitte Poulin (piano), Jocelyne Roy (flute), Julie Trudeau (cello): Workshop on Timbre in Chamber Music by Kaija Saariaho*
*See also the recital Sur les traces de Saariaho at 19:30 on Wednesday, November 13 at in Tanna Schulich Hall (a co-production with the Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur and the Schulich School of Music of McGill University, with the support of the CAM et CALQ).
Abstracts
Sandeep Bhagwati (Concordia University)
Vocal Timbres as Body Metaphors in Villanelles De Voyelles
Villanelles de Voyelles is an audioscore for a comprovisatory music theatre for up to 8 singers who can freely move through any site or space. It has been performed by several groups in Canada and Europe. Singers train a repertoire of vocal behaviours that consist of an ergodic combinatory of timbral, dynamic and pitch trajectory elements. Each combination has a label and this label, as one of several types of instructions, is communicated as a spoken message to their headphones during the performance. The message then should ideally change not only their vocal behaviour but also their bodily behaviour and thus their movement and spatial relationship with their fellow singers - they must find a spatial/dramaturgical metaphor for the sounds they produce, make them plausible in performance. All timbres chosen for the combinatory are all sounds involving the vocal chords, i.e. vowel-like. In my talk, I will detail the workings of the score with special regard to the aspect of timbre production and play a short trailer of the first performance in 2017.
Jay Marchand Knight (Concordia University)
Timbre of the Zwischenstufe: The Mezzo-Soprano Voice as Queer Metaphor in Rosenkavalier, Lulu, and Cabaret
This paper focuses on the in-between (or zwischen-ness) of the mezzo-soprano voice as sonic symbol of bisexuality and gender-bending in three pieces concerned with Weimar-to-Nazi era Germany. Weimar-era sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld argued that queerness was natural. Writers and composers expanded these ideas in music and text. As acceptance of Zwsichenstufe (or transitude) grew, Strauss and von Hoffmanstahl created Der Rosenkavalier (1911), exploring sexual awakening and veiled queerness. The mezzo-soprano (or Zwischenfach) role of the teenage boy Oktavian was intended for a cisgender woman in drag. In 1933, the Nazis burned Hirschfield’s research and began incarcerating gay men. Against this backdrop, Berg and Wedekind’s Lulu premiered - one of the first operas to display overt queerness in Countess Geschwitz, scored for mezzo-soprano. As Europe experienced an exodus of artists during WW2, queerness made its way to the American stage. The 1966 musical Cabaret by Kander and Ebb, set in 1929-1930 Berlin, explores the end of the Weimar era through the lens of bisexuality and transitude. The central character, Sally Bowles, involved with two queer men, is scored for soprano with strong belt – the voice labeled mezzo-soprano in music theatre. The mezzo voice, which overlaps in range with the soprano voice, is differentiated by its greater weight and its richer, darker timbre. This paper questions why the mezzo voice has become associated with the subversion of gender norms and heterosexuality, specifically in these three pieces but also within the larger context of German opera and politics from 1786 through post-WW2 America.
Leïla Barbedette (Université de Montréal) and Emmanuel Vukovich (McGill University)
From Wood to Sound: How Metaphors and vocal Analogies Translate Materiality of Timbre
In order to perform music on stage and produce a variety of timbres on their instrument for a given piece of music, musicians develop a relationship with it to shape the sound through practice. A primary element of this preparation process is the sound adjustment with a violinmaker. Both musician and luthier listen to the instrument played by the musician, and discuss the sound they hear and experience, and want to obtain from the violin - including reaction time, projection, balance, resistance… for timbre, they use metaphors, and vocal analogies (vowels and consonants) to articulate the timbre they perceive.
For this workshop, after a short theoretical presentation about the communication between musicians and luthiers during a sound-adjustment, we propose to “perform” a sound-adjustment with the participation of people present in the room. Emmanuel (violinist) will play an unadjusted violin, and participants will be invited to describe the sound they hear. Based on this discussion, Leïla (violinmaker) will adjust the violin that Emmanuel will play again for participants to hear the difference and describe the changes in sound. The aim is not to prove anything about sound-adjustment, but to experiment metaphors and vocal analogies used to adjust an instrument. Once the violin will be readjusted, Emmanuel will perform the same excerpt from Bartok’s Solo Sonata, III: Melodia, on the four strings of the violin to compare the timbres given by different ways of playing on the violin, illustrating Bartok’s research of timbral nuance in folk music and oral tradition.
Thomas Quirion (Concordia University)
Interaction of Voice and Alto Saxophone in Composition of Mixed Music: Inside the process
Presentation of the studio recording of a 9-minute piece "Stars Past Forward", composed in 2023, also played in Tanna Schulich Hall in 2023, featuring soprano voice, alto saxophone and a fixed-media. This composition explores the concept of timbre through spectral effects between the live instrumentation and the electroacoustic piece featuring modular and wavetable synthesis. The fixed-media was synchronized with the playing of the musicians with an in-ear click track.
"Stars past forward" relates to materiality and metaphors through its more abstract use of lyrics, as well as passages of non-lexical vocalizations, together with saxophone passages and the rich fixed-media that incorporates low frequency material, fast arpeggiating motifs and diverse granulation techniques exploring the contrasting qualities of electronic and acoustic sonic elements. Modular synthesis was extensively used for the composition of this piece.
The session will include a playback of the piece and a demonstration of harmonics with the alto saxophone how and why they were spectrally chosen. We will listen to the recorded piece and analyze the resulting spectrogram to illustrate the interplay between saxophone, electronics and voice, concluding with insights from the 2023 performance and its implications for artistic interpretation.
Hannah Barnes (McGill University)
Purification of the Body: Timbre and Metaphor in Jonathan Harvey's Body Mandala
The work of Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012) contains deep connections to muti-cultural spirituality, reflecting his own experiences as a practitioner of both Anglican Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism. His large-scale orchestral work Body Mandala (2006), commissioned by the BBC for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, engages directly with metaphors of Tibetan Buddhist purification rituals after witnessing them on a trip to India. This presentation will analyse Body Mandala through the lens of timbre to explore the piece’s metaphor of ritualistic purification of the body. The use of Tibetan bells and cymbals and the imitation of Tibetan instruments (tungchens, gelling (gyaling), and rolmo cymbals) on Western instruments throughout the piece create timbre-centric materials that reflect the characteristics and ritualistic purposes of Tibetan instruments and metaphorically represent this purification ritual.
As Harvey wrote in his programme note, “There is a fierce wildness about some of the purifications, as if great energy is needed to purge the bad ego-tendencies. But also great exhilaration is present. And calm. The body, when moved with chanting, begins to vibrate and warm at different chakra points and ‘sing’ internally. As it were, ‘lit up’ with sound” (Harvey 2006).
Daniel Villegas Vélez (University of Ottawa)
Bridging Timbral Experience: Cognitive and Linguistic Metaphors in Auditory Perception
This paper examines two recent tendencies—dubbed here “cognitive” and “linguistic”—regarding metaphoricity in recent accounts of timbre and affective valuation. On the cognitive side, Wallmark (2022) draws on Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Arnie Cox (2016) to describe timbre as the result of autonomic mimetic motor imagery (MMI) that replicates external events in the listener. For Wallmark, timbral metaphors are motivated (ie. not arbitrary), deeply embodied, and have performative effects on auditory experience. On the linguistic side, authors as diverse as Van Elferen (2019), Eidsheim (2015), and Dolan and Rehding (2021) point out to the seeming arbitrariness and proliferation of timbral metaphors as indicative of an unbridgeable gap between the sonic event and its affective experience. If so, then timbral metaphors are equally performative, yet not indicative of timbral experience but rather of the epistemic and social structures they carry with them.
While both approaches emphasize metaphors’ crossmodal capacity to bridge distinct domains, I argue that they operate in opposed—and perhaps incompatible—directions: from mimetic motor imagery to verbal articulation in the cognitive approach, and from social structures to auditory experience on the other. Both assume that metaphoricity consists in displacing a “proper” sense from one domain to another. Yet, according to the poststructuralist critique, it is impossible to identify a “literal” meaning that is not to some extent metaphorical. I propose a third approach, drawing on a phenomenological account of listening, where the connection between sense and embodiment is neither autonomic nor arbitrary but constitutive of timbre itself.
Yayoi Uno Everett (City University of New York)
Toshio Hosokawa’s Cosmology of Sound: Poetics of Silence and Sound
By adopting cosmology as a basis of his own aesthetic ideology, Toshio Hosokawa crafts musical sounds and sonic relationships as an embodiment of Taoist and Buddhist philosophies. Notably, he draws from the music of Noh theatre in reframing silence as an embodiment of energy and places it within a continuum of sound. To illustrate these characteristics in his music circa 1984-2001, I construct a proto-taxonomy of sonic entities that are identifiable by their collective shape or gestalt, which can be categorized into: (1) a written-out pause with a back-reaching slur—an ancillary gesture (AG); (2) an emergent, barely audible sonic gesture produced through controlling the dynamic intensity and/ or applying vocal techniques to an instrument (G1)—G1a refers to a sustained gesture with a dynamic swell, and G1b to multiple instrumental entries that produce a diffuse, ethereal texture; (c) a composite attack followed by silence or a short response, often articulated in a sequence of three or more entries (G2); and (d) a sound mass texture generated by a sustained involvement of all participating voices (G3).
Combining score-based analysis of post-tonal features with spectrograms of selected passages in Fragment I (1986) for shakuhachi, koto, and sangen, Landscape I (1992) for string quartet, Landscape V (1994) for shō and string quartet, as well as selected movements from Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima (1998-2001) for orchestra and choir, this paper identifies different instances of the four sonic gestures and how they shape formal processes that materialize his poetics of silence and sound.
Emmanuel Vukovich (McGill University), Jacqueline Woodley (McGill University)
Timbral Chiaroscuro in Kaija Saariaho "Changing Light" for soprano & violin
“Colour arises through the interaction between darkness and light.” (Goethe, Theory of Colours)
“The intimate nature and fragile sound world of the duo mirrors the fragility of our uncertain existence." (Kaija Saariaho)
Discourse around musical timbre is most often described through the metaphor of colours - specifically using the spectrum of light and dark. In Changing Light for soprano and violin, Kaija Saariaho’s distinctive compositional style explores a timbral spectrum of polarities as a formal compositional element. Through instrumentation (voice vs violin), musical indications (firmo vs delicato), dynamics (pp vs f), rhythmic-motivic motion (static vs moving motives), and articulation (separated portamento vs slurred), and for the violin normally pitched vs harmonic sounding notes and sul-tasto vs sul-ponticello, Saariaho explores contrasts and the possibilities in between. As her title Changing Light suggests, colour and darkness exist not only as polarities, but counterparts: Saariaho’s dialogue between voice and violin explores timbre as metaphor to examine and evoke the poem’s themes of humanity, nature and existence. We will open a dialogue on Saariaho’s use of timbral chiaroscuro, which will include analysis of her composition, her choice of text, how she employs musical metaphors of light and dark; we will explore her creation of a musical language which seeks to materialise, via voice and violin, these immaterial themes. The presentation will be followed by a performance of Changing Light: we aim to demonstrate that the materiality and formal compositional elements in Saariaho's compositions are ultimately in service of the text and the immaterial musical understanding and experience of the listener.