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Show 28 music. Composers such as Meredith Monk have continued to explore the possibilities of connecting music and dramatic speech." The vocal technique that has been most explored musically is obviously singing, the second technique in the Appendix. Singing can be defmed as pitch focused vocal fold production. As with speech, filters, registers, and placements may be altered to produce very different sounds, which when stylized by extra-vocal musical features, are distinct enough to be heard as individual techniques or vocal styles. The mechanics of singing are well documented and a variety of vocal styles have been physiologically explained by the location of moveable anatomy along the vocal tract combined with placement, phonation, and register issues. The representation of styles in audio example 2 is only a small sampling of existent vocal styles, and represents only one interpretation of each style. Each style may mean something different to every singer and whole careers are spent perfecting single styles. John Cage's Aria is an exploration of dynamically varied singing styles in which singing is the exclusive technique. Recordings of this piece demonstrate how stylistically flexible one voice can be. Cage allows the p,7rformer to pick the ten different styles; Berberian chose jazz, lyric contralto, Sprechstimme, dramatic, Marlene Dietrich, coloratura, folk, oriental, baby, and nasal.i" To achieve each of these unique styles, Berberian altered the shape of her resonance cavities, changed the intensity of phonation, employed various registers, as well as added non-vocal musical nuances specific to each style. For example, "coloratura" would have a very open 28 Monk's association with theater has influenced her use of musical speech in works such as "The Education of the Girl Child." Other works such as Dolmen Music also explore speech as music. 29 Osmond-Smith, 5. |
