CFP: Lyric Song in Idea and Performance, London, 21 June 2012

CFP: Lyric Song in Idea and Performance (London, 21 June 2012)

The SongArt Performance Research Group, in association with the Institute of Musical Research, School of Advanced Study, London, warmly invite proposals for papers, lecture-recitals, and collaborative workshop sessions for our 3rd Annual Meeting, which in 2012 will take the form of a single-day workshop exploring the theme “Lyric Song in Idea and Performance”.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Amanda Glauert (Royal College of Music)

The workshop offers an excellent opportunity for collaboration, and for the exchange of ideas between practitioners and theorists of song performance, literature, philosophy, theatre, composition, musicology and related disciplines. The workshop will feature traditional papers, combining these with alternate format sessions that will showcase performers and explore the articulation of the lyric in performance.

Central Research Question: What is the lyric and how do we make it?

Although the idea of the lyric presupposes poetry reaching out to music and music reaching out to poetry, the actual point of lyric intersection between the arts can remain remarkably elusive. Herder defined the lyric as preparing for the moment when we hear the poet’s ‘I sing’; a lyric must be made and tested through actions of performance and response. Unlike with the drama and the epic, it is hard to lay out the lyric’s generic traits in advance, except perhaps to indicate how it is neither of those two other modes of communication. How then can we make a lyric, or know when it has been made? What models can be found and how might these illuminate the essential art of lyric song performance?

This workshop aims to offer a platform for setting out and testing definitions of the lyric, through discussion of practical models from performers and composers (past and present), and through exploration of their implications for our idea of the lyric as a genre.

Guidelines for Proposals

Proposals (maximum 500 words) are invited for papers (20 minutes), lecture-recitals (30 minutes) and collaborative workshop sessions (45)

Please include a short biography (maximum 200 words) for each presenter.

Please submit proposals via email as a Word document attachment to: postbox at songart.co.uk

Please address any enquiries to Dr Kathryn Whitney: mail at kathrynwhitney.net

The deadline for receipt of proposals is 1 March, 2012.

We regret that we cannot cover expenses of invited speakers and performers.

Further information:

The SongArt Performance Research Group: www.songart.co.uk

Institute of Musical Research: www.music.sas.ac.uk