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Singing in Style: A Guide to Vocal Performance Practices
The first historical overview of vocal performance practice and style ever published, Singing In Style provides an introduction to how such issues as ornamentation, vibrato, rubato, portamento, articulation, tempo, language, and accompaniment with period instruments have been handled since the seventeenth century. Each chapter presents a historical period and gives background information on the singers and composers, the vocal repertoire, and the stylistic conventions of that time. Specific repertoire examples are discussed as well, to show how to use the music itself as a context for making stylistic choices. Each chapter also has an extensive reference list arranged by topic, so the interested reader can pursue a particular subject in more depth.Covering the Baroque period to the present, Elliott casts a wide net, bringing together information from historical treatises, personal accounts from composers, performers, historians, critics, and current scholarly commentary into one convenient handbook for the student and the amateur and professional performer who want to learn more about how vocal works were sung in their day.
- GenresMusic
368 pages, Hardcover
First published January 10, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 28, 2025
Excellent resource for those wanting a pretty in-depth discussion of the appropriate length of appoggiaturas in each century. The later chapters become less connected with the beginning chapters, partly because of how vocal music developed in more recent decades, and partly because she loses focus. In the chapter on the Second Viennese School, she spends most of the chapter on one work by Schoenberg, one it had just so happened that she had sung. And this was the main problem with the last chapter on working with living composers. Much of it sounded more like a humble brag about composers she had worked with and how wonderfully she had performed their works. She does talk of some other singers, but it is mostly her experience. In fitting with her earlier chapters, it would have been better to have more balance in the voices expressed.
December 4, 2023
really organized and interesting! great general overview, loved the detailed further reading section
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
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