Dear Mike and Vocalisters;
You wrote >my want is, that the voice one has always used to communicate >with, could be extended into singing without losing that personal history of >self expression. the singer, having negotiated these two factors, would >then just make their point about the material with 'expression' being a >by-product.
The above statement describes an art that has as its basic goal a recreation of life as it exists. This point of view assumes that art is the same as every day life rather than art as a "reflection" or distillation of life.
Some forms of art are closer to this ideal than others. Any word-based art will come closer to the ideal of art as life because we all use words in everyday life. But graphic arts and music do not approach this ideal as easily because by their very nature they are not natural expressions of our everyday life.
As each form of art progress throughout mans history it tends to become more and more abstract, that is, less a recreation of life and more a reflection of life until finally it become a distillation or synthesis of life's experiences.
Painting has clearly moved in this direction in the western world for the past 300 years. So has Music until more recently. Much of the rock and the pops world is less a distillation of life and more a reflection of life. In this sense it is a more primitive art.
But music by its nature is always both. Music has the characteristic ability to speak at a subliminal level of knowing. It does not require any fore knowledge to achieve this level of interaction with its beholders. However, music can also, very characteristically, act as a form of intellectual stimulus and become an ultimate synthesis of every day life's experiences. At this level, music achieves its highest calling and it is not for everyone that music so speaks nor does it have to.
The arts of opera and singing, because of their relation to both words and music are often caught in the crossfire between those who prefer realism and those more at home in abstraction. The final reality here is that opera and singing live in both worlds and there is a continuum from singing as mostly text to singing as mostly music. We make our choices. For most of us, the choices change from time to time.
Lloyd W. Hanson, DMA Professor of Voice, Pedagogy School of Performing Arts Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, AZ 86011
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