UC Santa Barbara

ABSTRACT

Unfachable: Transcending Time, Genre, and Space in the Twenty-First Century Solo Recital.

by

April Catherine Amante

The intended audience for my document, Unfachable, is specifically educators and performers trained, or currently training, in the Western Classical vocal tradition, specifically in the United States and Canada. Its purpose is to give performers, coaches, artistic directors, and teachers permission to exercise their creative artistic agency within the Western Classical canon when programming, curating, and performing recitals. I approach this topic from my own positionality as a white, cisgender, heterosexual woman who has been trained in the practices of Western art singing. I am interested in how and why the standard solo vocal recital came to be, why it declined in popularity by the end of the twentieth century, and how we can reconceptualize its purpose as twenty-first-century performers and educators. I consider how the Western constructs of the Fach system, Eurocentric beauty standards, and the gender binary are potentially limiting a singer’s artistry inside and outside of the opera theater. I draw from what Cathy Berberian left us with her 1966 manifesto, The New Vocality and some of Pierre Boulez’s ideas about programming. I introduce my concept of questioning the museum exhibition tradition, include excerpts from my interview with soprano Julia Bullock, and finally I build and perform a theatrical program with a narrative, incorporating my own poetry using Kaija Saariaho’s Lohn. I will show how time, genre, and space can be transcended using resources and tools, like audio engineering, electronics, videography, dance, and visual art. My hope is that Unfachable can serve as an early twenty-first-century manifesto to help singers curate personalized and creative recital programs, while also meeting academic requirements for a degree program. I also hope that it can serve as a catalyst for discussions moving forward, and that future students and teachers will continue to expound on the ideas I’ve gathered. I extend an invitation for us all to keep questioning hegemonic constructs in the Western Classical tradition and explore where they could be limiting the full potential of our individual creative agency and our fullest ways of being.