Since 2006 Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre and the Composition Department at Guildhall School of Music & Drama have been exploring the collaborative possibilities of the making of new works for voice.
Each October a group of around eight poets and writers are matched with composers, and now at the outset also with singers, to form small creative teams. Through a process of workshops and seminars, in which students exchange work, listen to other traditions and practice, and become acutely aware of their own creative processes and assumptions, the groups develop songs. With Guildhall instrumentalists on board this process culminates in performance events in May at both Guildhall School and Wigmore Hall, London’s major international venue for song. Initially emerging from the Wigmore Hall song cycle project, this unique collaboration has developed an innovative richness that has been astonishing, not only enabling a reflective dialogue around the interface between text and music, but also establishing ongoing creative partnerships and new work.
For those developing the programme – from Birkbeck, the co-Directors of the Centre, Carol Watts and William Rowe, and from Guildhall School, Joint Heads of Composition Richard Baker and Julian Philips, with Armin Zanner, Deputy Head of Vocal Studies – Voiceworks has entailed new kinds of cross arts translation and the opening up of a different form of exchange in the process of collaboration, listening as much to the sometimes shock of encounter between traditions of text and music as learning from their coming together. From recognising the radical differences and shared ground between traditions, or listening to the expectations of poet, singer or composer and their attachment to ways of working, or weighing the freight carried by particular words - rhythm, pulse, silence, notation, score, form, voice, repetition, phrase, noise, sound, pitch, lyric – the collaboration has become a work of research practice in its own right.
Engaging with text is an activity central to most composers’ creative experience; however, perhaps because of a lack of inter-disciplinary opportunities or even the ramifications of copyright, most composers are working within the collaborative silence that surrounds an out of copyright text. As a consequence, compositional responses to text are often automatic, informed by an unquestioned inheritance of a post-19th century aesthetic; the experience of text and music relating in an exploratory, collaborative way is all too rare for the contemporary composer, and this explains in part why “song” has proved such a problematic new music genre.
By establishing Voiceworks four years ago, Wigmore Hall created a unique opportunity for the creative communities of Guildhall School and Birkbeck College to question what ‘song’ might mean in a 21st century context, not only for the singer and instrumentalist, but also for the audience. As it builds year on year, a new sensibility of ‘song’ is emerging – song not as an inherited genre but a creative space for the exchange of ideas, realised through direct collaboration with singers and instrumentalists. The two performance end points – both at Wigmore Hall and the Guildhall School – allow for a final stage of interaction, allowing a diverse contemporary audience to engage with the end-result.
Poetry has its roots in voicework, as the Canadian poet Erin Mouré describes, taking place at the point where language meets the ear and throat. All too often the conventional ‘setting’ of poetry to music has not been in touch with the potential of that taking place, and to the range of poetic forms that might be encountered, from the huge range of new and challenging contemporary lyric forms to sound poetry, kinetic performance and visual poetry. The ‘matter’ of contemporary poetry, from its thinking and performing through tongue and voice to the acoustic signals of its work on the page, is a huge and transforming resource.
Voiceworks has produced a space to explore the relations between poetry and music in a way that has heightened students’ awareness of the possibilities of their own work. It brings questions of lyric ‘voice’ to the actual body and mouth of the singer and poet in a different way, it asks questions of speech and song, or the spatial relations of notation, score and text, and it plays with seemingly shared compositional vocabularies which turn out sometimes to mean radically different things. It is a process which risks its limits and the possibilities of improvisation and potential failure – what cannot be thought or achieved with a human voice, where a particular instrument or technology is unable to go - and in so doing pushes the limits of what song might become. The result is some extraordinary work for voice.
This year for the first time Voiceworks will be live streamed on the internet, and this website will be launched at the same time. Funded by the AHRC, the Voiceworks Digital Song/Text research project is led from Birkbeck by the poet Carol Watts, with Stephen Mooney as Researcher, and with Guildhall Co-Investigators the composers Richard Baker and Julian Philips. The full Voiceworks team includes Will Rowe and Armin Zanner, with partners at Wigmore, Julia Roderick and Elizabeth McCall, Acting Head of Learning.
Our aims in developing voiceworks.org.uk are not just to make this new work available, but to extend the collaborative process using a digital platform. The new website will house the Voiceworks archive as it continues, and also ongoing work by participants: poets, composers and singers. It will document the collaboration in 2010-2011 as we work through the practice and languages of diverse and complex traditions of voice, music composition, and text, building an archive of resources and materials to help us do this. We hope to record new work as it happens beyond the programme where we can find it, to curate areas of the site to investigate areas of current and historical text/music practice, and invite visiting poets and composers on to the site. The aim is to create a major resource in the field for free access, and in opening up its possibilities, to generate active kinds of practice, exchange and debate, which might bring about new collaborations in turn.
Voiceworks has considerable potential to augment Wigmore Hall’s position as the pre-eminent venue for song internationally. This digital project will allow Wigmore Hall to engage with new audiences through the publication of Wigmore events including live streaming of performances and associated social networking. Wigmore Hall has a history of commissioning and supporting new works for voice and Voiceworks will enable Wigmore Hall to showcase this ground breaking material to a broader audience. The site will potentially provide a platform for documenting our work with young people through our schools programme and encouraging new collaborative relationships for future working.
We hope you will want to explore and take part.
Voiceworks is supported by
