Le 29 juin 2017
de 14h00 à 14h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 6
Séance précomposée - Interpreting and Listening to the Music of Debussy
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Benedikt Leßmann
Studies on 19th– and early 20th-century French song, the mélodie, have always emphasized the importance of prosody: It seems that many composers were aware of the difficulties of setting French poetry with its often irregular metrical structure to music. Moreover, a certain focus existed on the literary nuances of the poetic texts, especially in the settings of symbolist poetry.
However, prosody is an aspect that is difficult to examine with conventional methods even though it is essential to the perception. Analyses of prosody must take into account different aspects, especially musical rhythm in its relation to speech, but also the range of the vocal part (in a complete song as well as in separate phrases) and the melodic movement inside this range. An analysis of selected songs by Claude Debussy might confirm the general assumption that his vocal music tends to a declamatory vocal style that is close to spoken language.
By concentrating on the melodic line and its relation to the text, we may obtain analytical results that seem to be of immediate relevance to the listener’s perception. Performance analysis as well as studies of sound have increased our sensibility to the overall appearance of musical works, e.g. by giving visual depictions of spectra or tempo curves. Here, a similar method will be used when scores of selected mélodies are partly transferred into visualisations of their global vocal contours, which might help us obtain a deeper understanding of their prosodic design.
