Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality
- Submitting institution
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Goldsmiths' College
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 3340
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Ashgate Publishing (Routledge)
- ISBN
- 9781409469834
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
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http://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/24892/
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
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T - Theatre and Performance
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Following an international conference of the same title, I proposed this volume to Ashgate-Routledge as the first English-language scholarly text assessing the impact of singer-composer Cathy Berberian. Leading a multilingual editorial team, my contribution continued in a chief editorial role, where I conceived the sequence and groupings of the chapters, based on each paradigm of Berberian’s legacy. Further work included: (i) joint authorship of the Introduction, (ii) transcription of archival audio footage, (iii) a chapter on the performativity of vocality and (iv) a joint translation of Sylvano Bussotti’s elegy to Cathy Berberian. _x000D_
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The argument I maintained in the Introduction was that this volume aimed to be a corrective to Berberian’s incomplete biography as ‘the Muse of Darmstadt’; that her achievement escaped the serviceability of the female singer role by championing a theory of authorship in the voice. The Introduction and chapters throughout the book appraise the practice of vocality as feminist – a writing-with-the-voice pioneered as a discrete art practice by Berberian. _x000D_
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Peer review of drafts assisted with the final decision to foreground my transcription of Cathy’s Solo Talk Show (1979) from audio files into text as a method which ‘put Berberian’s voice’ into the heart of the book. I worked with excerpts totalling seventeen hours of conversations between Berberian and producer Frans van Rossum from four radio broadcasts by the Dutch radio station KRO and made self-referential decisions about how to transcribe the intimate mannerisms of subvocalisation and extemporisations. _x000D_
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The focus of the transcription work fed into my own chapter, which dealt with vocality, lending a performative status to the artist’s use of voice. Finally, the joint translation was an opportunity to respect Bussotti’s unique turn of phrase in celebrating Berberian as a force that was mutually allegorical and onomatopoeic.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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