Spoken Word in Music

[waxwing]

What do you think about narration/speaking in music?

A few years ago, I participated in a music comp. recital of one of my college friends. The composer used lines from Nietczhe interspersed with dissonant chords sung by a quartet (satb). Very effective, in my opinion. The brokenness of the music fleshed out the meaning of the philosophy. I also like the idea of the human voice being a powerful musical instrument. Think of how we can use our voices, musically. I have this idea to record peoples' voices (in everyday speech) in an attempt to compose some sort of piece of music exploring inflection, timbre, pitch, dynamics, and so on.

Any ideas?

[kuranes]

Wax, this is a project that i've looked forward to doing too!

My original inspiration was Brian Eno, who always claimed to be a "non-musician doing music." He still knew a lot about tape recorder/tape manipulation , though, before he got started. And he worked with the synthesizer a lot as Roxy Music was born, experimenting until he was self-taught. Once he left Roxy and became a solo artist, he did a few live performances, and then just retired to his studio, to center the whole operation at that location and his home - from that point forward. Like Steely Dan used to be, he rarely appeared anywhere live again. ( For many musicians the live performances are the only way they make any serious money, and so this is often not an option. ) Doing stuff in front of a crowd isn't a big thing I'm avoiding, but it's nice to work from home in whatever field you're in.

Back on topic, the person who got me most inspired on the spoken voice thing was Randy Hostetler's "Happily Ever After" CD. He recorded people after giving them a vague structure so that there wouldn't be a whole lot of dead air, and fumbling around. "Tell a made-up story feeling free to use real incidents from your life - and start it out saying 'Once Upon a Time'" he said to them. They were instructed to end it with the words of the CD title. So you had people from all walks of life, all ages, etc. telling stories. Randy then judiciously mixed them together. The editing to this is crucial. The voices weave in and out of one another and there emerges certain commonalities between speakers who did not know one another. There is little to no music involved.

I had been doing stuff like this for a couple years with friends, sending them cassette recordings instead of letters. Some of it was just my voice cutting over the sound to various hokey TV shows and movies, while telling about my latest personal soap opera. It's odd, but there were more coincidental humorous overlaps, as the sound transitioned between these two sources, than you would think likely. And then later you could edit a little to accentuate patterns you saw emerging. The problem was I could never get my friends to put much effort into doing the same in return. They LOVED the tapes, and were sometimes even tempted to do their own less time-intensive versions of this, but afraid to ask people they knew to speak into a mike, to say nothing of accosting strangers. There is an art to doing that, and guiding the speaker(s) just enough to get them going, and then no more guiding. Strangers are much easier to work with than people you know. I recorded sounds of the environment too, like trains in underground stations, bees on clover etc. Remembering Pink Floyd moments and creating my own.

There is a guy here in Chicago I just met, who has a couple hit records in London, but would like to get out ( temporarily, anyway ) of the whole "club/dance rat race" focus, and do something different. He'll still be off to Ibiza from time to time, to make his money. But he has written a play about poor people scraping a living together on the streets/surviving, called "Po" - short for "Poor". He would like to record actual street people in the finishing of this. This guy has been part of plays that Tom Waits was involved in when he was in NY. He came to Chicago to study at the Art Institute and has graduated now. I met him at the opening of his first art show.

Recently I looked into doing spoken word as an ARTIST, creating something for more than just a few of my friends spread across the USA. I found out about something called an M-Box that would allow me to set up a mobile recording studio if I bought a couple mikes. One for the people's voices and another type for environmental sounds. All managed from a laptop. The Digidesign software came free with the M-Box as a bonus, along with a lot of other great software. That stuff ( new ) would cost about $1000 minus the cost of the laptop. ( I have a friend who I think will upgrade his Mac lap soon, and I may get THIS key jigsaw puzzle piece cheaply then. )

Since then I have heard many other interesting approaches to this, and recalled older pieces like Steve Reich's "It's Gonna Rain" and Carl Stone, Basil Kirchin etc.

You can always hire musicians to be part of the project, too. Pick people just starting out that you see performing on the street for donations. Some are very good. Get their cards or numbers. You'll probably need to set up a limited liability company and issue some release forms for people to sign too, so that you can't be sued easily by people who change their minds later about their recordings being issued.

K

[Pan]

Holy crap, waxwing... three HUGE questions. (And that's just this thread)

All right,

I think you've actually opened a few topics here...

1) The role of a narrative voice in sung music
2) The human voice as a musical instrument (with or without text)
3) The role of narration and spoken voice in mixed-media presentations
4) The use of spoken voice as sampled material to create an electronic composition.

So...

1) Everything from the old melodrama to broadway to rap music

2) I have finally decided that the human voice is a decent instrument on it's own (for a while I really wasn't convinced), but it's a funny one because (contrary to most musical instruments) individual voices are very different from each other, but have a fairly limited range of colour. Some voices, of course, do have incredible ranges of colour, and these ones are probably among the most expressive musical instruments of all.

3) This is a cause very, very dear to my heart. I have produced a few concerts based on the concept of alternating narrative reading and music, the most effective being Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, with selected poetry to help explain the thrust of each movement. It greatly helped the audience understand what is otherwise an hour of "modern music". I've started doing this sort of thing in preference to a dry explanation or printed program note. I have also taken to talking before pieces (and between movements) in my own performances - even writing narratives to work with certain pieces where I think it will work. I think one of the biggest problems for classical music in the twentieth century has been the reluctance of musicians to engage the audience with their voice... and on a narrative level they can understand.

4) If you aren't familiar with it already, you MUST find "Come Out" by Steve Reich, an early minimalist piece which uses one short recorded voice and tape loops of different lengths. Absolutely amazing piece. [Just glanced through Kuranes' post, and I see he recommended "It's Gonna Rain" - very similar, also v. good]

Trouble with manipulating recorded media as art IMO is that you can easily lose the humanity of your source material. If that's the point, then you might be OK, but otherwise you've got a problem. (And naturally, no-one on this forum would want to express detachment from humanity in their art... :whistle: ) Personally, I think you still need to keep the humanity to express the detachment effectively. These early Reich pieces work so well partly because of the source material - dealing with racism and lack of civil rights.

Also, you should check out Reich's "Different Trains," a later piece in which he uses string quartet to accompany recorded voices - ie he has the instruments match rhythm and pitch inflection.

Also the Berio Sinfonia... orchestra with choir, but the last movement probably would have been easier for him to write if he'd had electronic means.

All for now... must sleep.

[kuranes]

Yes, "Come Out" is very good also. Similar technique. Shorter piece.

[lexiphanic]

I have many thoughts on this also. For now, have a listen to the beginning of this mix. A voice can give a somewhat emotionless piece a very surreal quality.

http://www.hybridized.org/sets/?id=89&download=140

[kuranes]

I clicked on the link and went to a "Mind the Scape/Jason" site, where I tried clicking on another thing towards the top of the page that seemed to be the only thing for me to use ( for a non-subscriber ) to get started. Nothing happened.

[lexiphanic]

You just have to sit. It is a page for an automated download. :)