Date and location
from July 8, 2015 until July 9, 2015
Orpheus Institute
Study Day with Ronald Schuchard and Robin Bier
Eventfrom July 8, 2015 until July 9, 2015On and Off the Page
Reconstructions and reclamations of text, declamation and music in England, America, and Germany at the turn of the 20th century.
At the turn of the twentieth century artists in England, the United States and Germany were exploring the presentation of text in stylised forms of performance that they distinguished from music. In England, W. B. Yeats, Gilbert Murray, and others developed the practice of ‘chanting’; in America music publishers developed ‘recitations’ for amateurs; and in Germany there evolved a rich tradition of ‘melodrama.’ These practices have fallen into disuse, but there is growing interest both in revivals and in creative re-conceptions. For this Study Day Orpheus Research Fellows William Brooks and Valentin Gloor bring together invited researchers and performers to share work and develop proposals for future funding.
Valentin Gloor (ORCiM Fellow) is a performer who has developed techniques for integrating texts (such as letters and reviews) with song, to freshly contextualise—bring ‘off the page’—words and music that are commonly treated as fixed, printed artefacts. He has also researched and performed German melodrama (recited text with musical accompaniment) from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, by composers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Strauss.
Ronald Schuchard (Professor Emeritus, Emory University) is a scholar and a world-famous expert on Irish poetry and literature and its performance. His 2008 book, The Last Minstrels (Oxford), is the definitive study of W. B. Yeats and the contexts and traditions within which Yeats’s theories of declamation evolved. He has reconstructed the “psaltery” that Yeats designed,. American performer Robin Bier will demonstrate its use in reconstructions of performances as given by Florence Farr at the turn of the twentieth century.
William Brooks is a composer who has creatively re-applied Yeats’s ideas in a half-hour music theatre piece, Everlasting Voices, in a chapter on Yeats in Artistic Experimentation in Music (Orpheus series, 2014, Leuven University Press), and in a work called After Yeats, presently being realised in three different languages (Vietnamese, Arabic, and Italian) by performers Thuy Tranh, Merit Stephanos, and Lucia D’Errico. Thuy Tranh, Merit Stephanos, and Lucia D’Errico will present and discuss their work as part of the study day.
Though there will be presentations and performances, the focus of the study day is on discussions to which all who attend will contribute.