Major
Communication Studies
Minor(s)
Vocal Performance
Advisor
Margaret Frazier
Advisor Department
Music
Date
5-2019
Keywords
vocal performance, music, voice, arts and humanities
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Abstract
What’s your favorite song? Everyone, whether engineer, photographer, healthcare professional, retail sales associate, office worker, or taxi driver can name at least one song that they like. That is because music is ubiquitous in our lives. Whether or not you are a musician by trade, music is a language to which everyone relates. In this project, I sought out to investigate this universal language. I selected compositions by eleven different composers, from Renaissance to twentieth century. Further, I researched topics such as how the piece came to be written, translations for non-English pieces, details about the composer’s life and how the historical, political, and economic circumstances might have influenced their compositions, and how the piece is usually performed.
Throughout the course of this project, I divided my time between library and internet research and applied practice of the compositions that I have been researching, both individually and in lessons with my voice instructor and project advisor, Margaret Frazier. I used my library research to inform my applied practice. Translations of non-English pieces allowed me to understand foreign texts in order to connect personally to each piece. Knowing the context surrounding each piece aided me in interpreting the message the composer might have been aiming to send. Seeing or hearing how others have performed the piece in the past guided what artistic decisions I wanted to make in performance and how I was going to breathe new life into pieces that are hundreds of years old. A voice recital will be performed at the end of this project that will illustrate the findings of my research and display the technical progress that I have made while studying music at URI.
Streaming Media
Media Format
flash