Date: Friday 19 May 2017
Time: 11.30am
Venue: Room 2174, Level 2, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney, 1 Conservatorium Rd, Sydney NSW 2000
Registration: Free, bookings not required.
Convenor and enquiries: Email Alan Maddox (alan.maddox@sydney.edu.au)
Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, vocal performance was rooted in oratory, and even though today’s ‘classically’ trained singers do not use the orator as a model, pop and jazz artists prize principles of expression that are remarkably similar to a number of bel canto techniques from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In fact, the differences that set apart pop vocal performance from the lineages of European art music are far fewer than commonly thought, and this presentation explores several of the similarities (pausing, cadence, prosody, messa di voce, tonal quality, appoggiaturas).
Robert Toft has been involved in the performance practices of singing for most of his career and has given master classes and lectures on historical principles of interpretation at conservatories and universities around the world. He has published five books on the history of singing, most recently With Passionate Voice: Re-Creative Singing in Sixteenth-Century England and Italy (2014). In 2015, together with Dame Emma Kirkby and Nicholas Clapton (Royal Academy of Music), Robert launched the first international summer school devoted to historically informed approaches to Italian bel canto vocal delivery. He is the recipient of a Distinguished International Visitors Fellowship funded by the Australian Research Council for a visit to the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100‒1800, in Sydney and Melbourne. In Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council awarded him a research-creation grant for the project ‘From Research to Public Performance: Historically-Informed Re-Creative Singing’.