"Spoken Lieder": Expanding upon the growing field of music for spoken voice and instrument

Abstract

In 2014 while working as guitarist in the Iranian folk ensemble ‘Sweet Sound’ I was asked by Shirin Majd to write a setting of poetry for guitar and spoken voice for the combined arts project ‘Rebirth’. The question arose of how to combine speech with music in such a manner as to aid both performance and comprehension of the work. To achieve this, existing works in this field were examined through their scores, recordings, relevant literature and historical context, then used as inspiration for new compositions. The process of writing, rehearsing, performing and sometimes recording these compositions then fed back into the research. The scope of the investigations was limited to works from the Western Art Music canon that have an available score, and use at least some live component in both the narration and the music. Of particular interest was the 19th century genre of the musical declamation, and its way of notating the text-music correlation which I call ‘checkpoint’. The research revealed that what appeared at first to be a small field was in fact a large but poorly examined field, and that many of the accepted facts in the relevant literature were incorrect.