Between 18 October and 2 December, a seminar entitled “Performance: la voix en question. Création audio à partir de la voix chantée, perlée, soufflée” (Performance: the voice in question. Audio creation from the sung, beaded and blown voice) was held at the Maison de l’Europe in Paris under the patronage of the Italian Cultural Institute.

Professor Stefano Lombardi Vallauri of IULM University of Milan led the seminar, with Professor Pascale Weber of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne providing scientific coordination.

“The seminar was divided into four six-hour sessions, combining theory and practice,” explains Lombardi Vallauri. “On the one hand, the discussion focused on the use of the non-singing voice in contemporary Italian music, with in-depth analysis of individual composers, such as the variety of approaches exemplified by Luciano Berio’s work for Cathy Berberian, the use of noise in Luigi Nono’s music inspired by Ungaretti’s poetic recitation, and the concept of making music vocally and holistically, understood as a self-transforming practice in Domenico Guaccero’s model and Sylvano Bussotti’s inexhaustible graphic invention. On the other hand, the seminar dealt with the relationships between the sound aspects of the voice and their density of meaning in human experience.”

“The twenty-four Master 2 students from the École des Arts de La Sorbonne who attended the seminar were not musicians, but rather specialists in the visual arts,” continues Stefano Lombardi Vallauri.

“In fact, as well as working with their voices, they were also asked to develop original graphic ways of notating their sound creations, with surprising results. Working in groups, the students created a wide variety of vocal objects (singing was the only banned vocal technique), focusing on the transition from one emotion to another. They had to choose one of the following pairs of emotions: fear/relief, anger/tenderness, disgust/pleasure, sadness/joy, or boredom/surprise. For each of them, working on their voice was also a way of working on themselves and their relationships with others, experimenting with formal and stylistic limits, but also psychological and social ones, since the voice is the human being made sound.”