Week 4: Round-table reflection
Date: 8th April, 2025
Time: 4:00-6:00pm
Venue: Pa11
After several jamming section, Genie and I have created some many interesting improvisatory products but it seems like we have stuck the endless rounds of improvising. Therefore, this week we have decided to spend some time in reflecting of our work before we further. We have decide that we need to set some restictions on the ‘go wild’ approach.
Genie’s thoughts
We started on the positives in the project. Genie took the lead. She expressed so far she has been enjoying what we have done in previous section. With my accompany in reading scores, She feels more comfortable in handle conventional notations. She felt that we are getting more confident on working with each other on the improvisation sections and we have successfully move on to a more experimental phase with further exploration on extended techniques, tone and timbre. She really what we did by staying away from electronics and then find the meaning of it. We both agreed that we want electronic to elevate our singing but not substituting. She didn’t have anything particularly bad at the moment but she asked that we should explore more dissonance in our improvisatory section, she expressed her interested in improvising on dissonance harmonies. Genie also mentioned about the materials that we have worked on (Materials on Turandot and Isolde) might be enough. She thinks that we might lost the focus in the improvisatory performance if we as inputting too much materials and it hinders the room for generating new ideas during the improvisation.
My thought
I agreed with most of Genie’s thought. The only thing that I commented is that I might need to include one more character to represent Birgit Nilsson holistically. Therefore, we finally locked our decision on focusing on the character Turandot, Isolde and Elektra that signifies different phases of Brigit’s operatic career. However, there are are two thing about our improvisation that I would like to address. Firstly, how should we end the improvisation. Although Genie and I are quite comfortable with working together. It seems like can never tell how we should end at a section. Of course, we can observed each other’s physical language but it seems like we can do something beyond that. We need find this element of consensus in our improvisation so that we know where to end the performance, or else it will last forever or the ending of section is be purely based on speculation. Another things is that, we may have looked into musical materials from operatic roles that Brigit Nilsson have performed. However, these materials are not sufficient to define her in our sonic experience. We have need to a way to fit in the qualities of Birgit Nilsson back to our project. It also raised the possibility of incorporating visual or lightings to our performance but I guess it’s still early days to take these elements into account.
The Inja Analysis
Regarding my concern’s about the lack of Birgit in our project , Genie and I opened the playlist that we have since the start of the project. We did this what we ‘Inja’s analysis’ so as to analysis Brigit’s voice in detail. We call it Inja analysis as t approach is similar to what our performance head would do with us during our performance lecutre. Through doing Inja analysis on Nilsson’s recording In questa reggia, we noticed that there is a certain sense of mascilnity in Brigit’s voice. Her voice has a hafty, full and rich timbre with darker tone compared with most of the sopranos. She used quite a heavy chest voice in the lower reigster as well. Her vibrato is rather big and she breathes heavily in between phrase. In Liebestod, we notice a Nilsson pronounce ‘ch’ in German to ‘sh’. She would articulates ‘t’, ‘l’ and ‘r’s but not the ‘n. She has a tendency heavily accentuate the ending consonant of a phrase but consonants are alway absent in the top register. However, despite have a big voice , she sang the top notes very gently. Amidst admiring the beauty of the piece, I explained the notion of day and night in the opera with Genie. Finally, ends with Elektra’s arias and we identified Birgit’s focused projection on quiet passage and the use of portamento on leaps. Throught, knowing the qualities of Nilsson’s we can try to mimick her singing style in our improvisation so that we are therefore not longer only present the opera characters but Nilsson herself.
To push the Inja Analysis further, we also listened to The Colours Don’t Match by Natacha Diels and Ipsa Dixit:II. only the Words Themselves mean what they say by Kate Soper so as to understand elements in existing electronic manipulation that one adopted, the use of texture, how electronic are cooperate with other elements of the piece, etc.
