Musik über Stimmen

Performers have always had a decisive influence on the creation, performance practice, distribution, and reception of compositions. This makes them central figures in music-making, but it is only in recent years that musicology has discovered them as an independent subject of research. This publication focuses on three performers from the immediate and wider circle of the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music: singers Cathy Berberian and Carla Henius, and actor and vocal artist Roy Hart. All three had a particularly significant influence on the vocal repertoire of their time, either through their specific vocal abilities and working methods or as initiators and commissioners. This repertoire often raises questions of performance practice: How can compositions be interpreted that were created as vocal portraits of a singer or that can possibly only be performed by a single person? What is the relevance of this historical repertoire in the present day, and how does it define the scope of interpretation? What can interpretation achieve—not as a servant of a supposed authorial authority or as a medium for illustrating research findings, but as an independent epistemic technique?
This volume thus aims at two things: on the one hand, to shed light on concrete historical contexts and to apply the insights generated from them in music research and music practice; on the other hand, to illustrate music practice in its potential as a knowledge-generating process. Both aspects are united by the understanding of interpretation as a creative practice.

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