Conference abstracts and biographies

Abstract

Radio drama in the UK owes its existence to the theatre. From the very beginning of the BBC, it has relied on plays and actors from the stage to populate its drama output. Not only that, but it has frequently taken whole productions from the theatre and transferred them to audio. As early as 1923, a show to mark the anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare was performed on the stage of the Haymarket Theatre in London’s West End in the afternoon – and that evening was repeated for the audience of radio listeners. This tradition of transposing visual theatrical works into audio-only broadcasts has continued for more than a century, during which time actors have become increasingly aware of the remediation required of their theatrical voice in order to produce a successful radio (now often podcast) production. This paper will explore the issues around radio and voice, including how some early actors failed to understand that broadcasting did not require them to bellow as if they were performing in a large auditorium; problems of similarity of voice when there is no visual cue to distinguish character; and the possibilities offered by radio for people considered not visually appropriate to play particular stage characters, including the use of women to portray children. It will also note how the radio voice offers an opportunity for more intimate performance – something that could be seen translated back onto the stage with the 2023-24 Donmar Warehouse production of Macbeth.

Biography

Andrea Smith is a lecturer at the University of Suffolk. Her research focuses on audio drama, specialising in BBC Radio’s productions of Shakespeare’s plays. Her work examines the ways these productions use voice, music, sound effects and other non-verbal noises to transmedialize a text intended for the stage into a play that is comprehensible in sound only. Her research also includes radio adaptations of works by other playwrights, both early modern and contemporary, as well as radio dramas about Shakespeare. Her monograph, Shakespeare on the Radio: A Century of BBC Plays, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2025. She has also published in Shakespeare, Shakespeare Bulletin, Radio Journal and the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance.

Abstract 

While the standard practice in radio drama was for actors to be clearly distinguishable, so as not to confuse listeners unduly, postwar playwrights broadcasting on the wireless started taking different approaches to the traditional BBC voice, exploring an aesthetics of inaudibility or indeterminacy. Samuel Beckett, for example, was known to favour the croaks of actors such as Patrick Magee and Jack MacGowran. Rejecting the benchmark of Shakespeare veterans like John Gielgud, or ‘Dylan Thomas reading his fat poems and being witty’ in his ‘pulpit voice’ with its ‘hyperarticulation and sibilation’, he preferred the sound of what he called his own ‘Beaujolais Gauloise pantgasp’ or ‘gasp-croak’. When listeners complained to the BBC that they could scarcely make out the words in Embers or Words and Music, Beckett accelerated speech to the point of near unintelligibility in Cascando, a technique he would later export to the theatre in Play and Not I – among others. Admirers of Beckett, Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill continued destabilizing the voice in their own plays, for both radio and stage. This paper investigates their vocal experimentation as part of an intermedial dialogue between broadcasting and theatre, also involving transmedial adaptation. Both playwrights exploit the acousmatic nature of radio, where the source of sounds remains hidden, to disrupt the interface between body and voice on stage. In doing so, Pinter and Churchill create ambiguity to challenge traditional ideas of character, identity or language, which jars with the visual dimension of theatre but innovates dramatic performance in the process.   

Biography

Pim Verhulst is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Reading. His research focuses on radio drama and intermediality in British postwar fiction, for which he combines methodologies from sound studies, narratology, adaptation and genetic criticism with archival research. His articles and book chapters have appeared in various journals and essay collections. He is also the co-editor of Radio Art and Music (Bloomsbury, 2020), Tuning in to the Neo-Avant Garde, (Manchester UP, 2021), Word, Sound and Music in Radio Drama (Brill, 2023), and a special issue on ‘Radio’ for The Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance (2024). His current project (ETHER) studies the effect of radio on the theatre of Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill.

Abstract 

This presentation explores the idea of nonhuman songholders: songs that imagine, model, or stage machines as singers, listeners, or agents within musical networks. Beginning with the provocation of “machines singing to each other”, it asks why machines so often sing to humans, in human languages, rather than communicating purely in code. Songs, it argues, function as translation devices—mediating between machinic processes and human audition.

Drawing on examples such as Neil Young’s vocoder-driven “Sample and Hold”, Grandaddy’s android Jed, and the self-consciously machinic aesthetics of Kraftwerk, the paper traces a lineage of popular music in which machines appear to speak, sing, or even feel. These works sit alongside more abstract engagements with machine music, from melodic simulations to dissonant breakdowns, and cultural touchstones such as HAL’s rendition of “Daisy Bell”.

The presentation situates these examples within wider debates about sociable machines, drawing on Sherry Turkle’s critique of technologies that invite emotional attachment, and Jacques Attali’s claim that music anticipates social futures. Ultimately, it suggests that songs themselves operate as proto–artificial intelligences: repeatable, adaptive objects that make it easy to imagine nonhuman voices persisting, singing on, even beyond human presence.

Biography

Richard Elliott is a cultural musicologist with a particular interest in popular musics of the world. He is the author of the books Fado and the Place of Longing: Loss, Memory and the City (2010), Nina Simone (2013), The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music (2015), The Sound of Nonsense (2018) and DJs do Guetto (2022). He has also published articles and reviews on popular music, literature, consciousness, memory, nostalgia, place and space, affect, language and technology. His current research focuses on the relationship between songs and objects. Richard is Senior Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University, where he specialises in courses related to popular music. 

Abstract

This paper examines Nadine George’s half-century of work on the human voice in the context of theatre. She developed her UK practice through extended research at the University of Birmingham from 1988 onwards. There, she evolved an approach grounded in physical release, dynamic breath work, wordless sung sound and performance of classical dramatic texts. Her practice has become the core technique for work with the spoken‑word at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and is integral to actor training programmes across Scandinavia.

George’s practice fosters care, containment and gradual evolution. It nurtures participants’ subtle journeying through sensations, emotions, embodied vibration and tonal qualities. The focus is for each individual’s unique vocal expression to unfold without the restrictions of inner or outer censure. George speaks of “male” and “female” voice qualities, yet her process seeks a synthesis of this polarity and a surpassing of these distinctions: it invites a fluid and transcendental understanding of self.

I contextualise my analysis by revisiting my first collaborations with George, including my solo rendering of Macbeth directed by her in 1991. This was created while I was also working with Zygmunt Molik of Grotowski’s first company. Molik’s investigations of the body‑to‑voice continuum realised performance as immersion in a climactic totalising act. By contrast, George’s work supports incremental development through accumulated breath impulses, embodied pacing and carefully held discovery, offering a radical alternative to sacrificial experimentalism through a process grounded in continuity rather than ordeal.

George’s direction of Macbeth enabled the realisation of antagonistic figures while I processed a major family crisis, emergent queer sexuality, and explorations of gender. This case‑study reveals her use of breath, vibration and text as channels for numinous shifts within articulate expression, promoting a balance of pluralism and holisticism.

Biography 

Associate Professor Mark Hamilton directs interdisciplinary programs at Regent’s University London, leading integrated learning across foundation and first‑year curricula. He holds a PhD in Theatre and Film Studies from the University of Canterbury NZ, and an MPhil and BA (Hons) in Drama and Theatre Arts from the University of Birmingham. His professional development includes foundation studies in psychotherapy and anatomy and physiology. His research centres on performer training, embodied pedagogy, and intercultural practice, informed by extended engagement with Indian cultural forms, particularly Bharatanatyam. He has published on movement, dramaturgy, and transcultural performance in journals including Dance, Movement and Spiritualities and the Indian Theatre Journal. His teaching supports reflective practice and creative development across diverse learning communities in the contemporary arts.

Abstract

Across historical acting techniques—in western opera and in classical Eastern performance traditions in particular—gesture and physical expression were inseparable from emotional communication and in close harmony with musical composition. In contemporary stage practice and musical theatre training, this integrated affective-somatic training approach is slowly fading, leaving many performers prioritising technical perfection over genuine physical and emotional connection.         

This presentation introduces the Choreographic Approach (CA), an inclusive performance pedagogy I have been developing over the past years, which seeks to establish this unity of the bodymind with musical expression by drawing on the concept of historical techniques without their prescriptive codes. The CA centres on performers’ individual emotional interpretations as the source of embodied expression, attempting to provide an accessible and inclusive contemporary alternative to traditional movement-based traditions. All exercises of the CA are based on the notion that performance interpretations of any text (spoken or musical) should begin with somatic engagements instead of deep analytical study, and that considerations of “meaning” should be treated as adjunct to affective-psychophysical enquiries. 

As part of my postdoctoral research and my creative work in performance, I have experimented with this approach in different contexts with various target groups (performers and non-performers alike). This presentation focuses on CA’s potential applications in musical expression, and addresses questions in vocal training and musical communication.

Biography

Dr Melinda Szuts is a lecturer in drama and theatre studies, and a freelance theatre director. She is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, conducting research on accessible performance pedagogies using movement, voice and sound. Melinda lectures in performance studies, history of drama and theatre, directing and dramaturgy, and regularly holds workshops in embodied practice and interdisciplinary performance. Her fields of research are the relationship of physical theatre and dramatic text, musical performance, interdisciplinary performance and space dramaturgy.

Abstract

This lecture-recital stages scenes from Franz Danzi’s melodrama, Cleopatra (Mannheim, 1780) to investigate how the late-eighteenth-century sentimental heroine was shaped in melodrama at the Mannheim school. An actress delivers selected monologues from the duodrama employing historically informed rhetorical acting and gesture; while Anders Muskens accompanies on fortepiano and offers brief commentaries that situate each scene within the dramaturgy of what scholar Gioia Martorella called "virtue in distress." The goal is to demonstrate, in both analysis and performance, how declamation, gesture, and music were designed to move audiences morally and affectively in the period and even today. The case study presents the imprisoned Cleopatra at the last moments of her life, as a virtuous sovereign besieged by Roman subjugation —steadfast in loyalty and honor yet exposed to extreme emotional trials. Her turbulent, Sturm und Drang emotional trajectory fuses dignity with vulnerability, making her suffering legible and pitiable, and thus exemplary of late Enlightenment sensibility. In this respect, Cleopatra participates in a broader cultural archetype familiar from Metastasian Didone and the heroines of Richardson (Pamela, Clarissa): the heroine’s moral constancy invites identification while her pathos elicits sympathetic tears. The Mannheim context is crucial: the melodramatic genre connects the musically trained voice and embodied action to instrumental musical expression, intensifying the emotional immediacy of the character for the audience.

Biographies

Anders Muskens is a Canadian fortepianist, harpsichordist, and ensemble director specializing in historical keyboard performance and musicology. He performs across Europe and North America in 18th- and early 19th-century repertoire. Trained at the Conservatoire of The Hague with Bart van Oort and Petra Somlai, he is completing a PhD in Musicology at the University of Tübingen on rhetoric, acting, and performance. Muskens founded and directs Das Neue Mannheimer Orchester, dedicated to reviving Mannheim Court repertoire; the ensemble has appeared at the Schwetzinger SWR Festspiele and recorded for Etcetera Records and Naxos. Releases include Beethoven: Waldstein & Appassionata (2023), Louise Farrenc: Complete Works for Violin and Fortepiano (2023), and Vogler: Travel Souvenirs for Keyboard (2025). Awards include First Prize at the Early Music Young Ensemble Competition (London, 2018), the Sir James Lougheed Award of Distinction (2024), and a 2024 Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg stipend.

Laila Cathleen Neuman is a performer, researcher, and teacher specialized in historical acting techniques. Having completed her singing studies with honours in Milan and Salzburg, she has performed in historically informed productions throughout Europe since 2010. She recently completed her PhD at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, focusing on the theatrical legacy of the Dutch actor Johannes Jelgerhuis (1770-1836) as a source of stagecraft for performers. Her work has been presented at conferences including the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) in Stockholm, “The London Stage”, at New College, Oxford and “Tanz als Musik- Zwischen Klang und Bewegung” at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. Since 2021, she has been teaching historical acting techniques and declamation at the Conservatory of Amsterdam.

Abstract

Doubling was a widespread practice in Venetian opera in the mid-seventeenth century. However, we have little information about which characters were actually doubled and about how doubling functioned in practice. Based on a reconstruction of the original doubling plan for Giovan Francesco Busenello’s and Francesco Cavalli’s La Didone (1641), the paper argues that the singers who performed Cassandra and Corebo in Act I would have reappeared as Didone and Iarba in Acts II and III. The two pairs of lovers are connected structurally, metaphorically and allegorically – but how about vocally? Would a singer doubling as two characters use her voice to differentiate between them? And if so, how? Cavalli’s scores may contain some clues, and so may a comparison with Monteverdi’s score for Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1640), since Giulia Saus Paolelli, the singer of Didone, had sung Penelope (and almost certainly L’Umana fragilità) in Monteverdi’s opera.

Drawing on his involvement with modern productions, in Copenhagen and Sydney, that have used his reconstructed doubling plans for Monteverdi’s Ulisse and L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) and for Cavalli’s Gli amori d’Apollo e di Dafne (1640), the author argues that the question of vocal differentiation comes down to the question of how the singers imagine the relationship between the doubled characters. Are Cassandra and Didone, in fact, the same person, or different sides of the same person? Should we regard the doubled characters as predominant passions, or as different people altogether? And how might that affect the vocal performance?

Biography

Magnus Tessing Schneider is a Docent in Theatre Studies who teaches the subject at Bergen University while being affiliated as a researcher with the Academy of Music and Drama at the University of Gothenburg. He is a specialist in the relationship between textual-musical dramaturgy and vocal-scenic performance practice in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian opera, and his performance-oriented interpretations of opera classics have inspired stagings around the world. Currently working on a project funded by the Swedish Research Council, “Doubling and Allegorical Dramaturgy in the Operas of Francesco Cavalli” (2024–2026), he is author of The Original Portrayal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (London: Routledge, 2021) and, with Meike Wagner, he has edited Performing the Eighteenth Century: Theatrical Discourses, Practices, and Artefacts (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2023).

Abstract 

Byron’s Manfred created a sensation upon its publication in 1817. Despite the author’s protestations that it was a ‘closet drama’ – and therefore not meant to be staged – it found its way onto many a European and American stage as the 19^th century progressed. This paper examines various ways in which the play was staged throughout the 19^th-century and questions which aspects of historical performance practice can engage audiences today. What kind of voice (intimate? theatrical? ‘singing’?) can make Byron’s verse resonate in the 21^st-century? 

The presentation, drawing on my own version of Manfred as a dramatic reading with musical accompaniment, will include demonstrations of theatrical and melodramatic declamatory practices.

Biography

Jed Wentz has worked as a flutist, conductor and teacher exclusively within the discipline of Early Music performance practice. He is currently assistant professor at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University and teaches rhetoric at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. He has published in Cambridge Opera Journal, Music in Art, and The Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute. He recently contributed to Early Music in the 21^st Century, ed. Mimi Mitchell, published by Oxford University Press. His current research revolves around the relationship between music and acting, 1680-1930. He is also artistic advisor to the Utrecht Early Music Festival in The Netherlands.

Abstract

At the heart of Peter Shaffer’s 1973 play, Equus, is Alan Strang’s nocturnal scream: ‘Ek!’ The scream was a subject of great intrigue to major theorists of the theatre in the mid-twentieth century, no more so than Antonin Artaud. He writes in The Theatre and its Double of his distress at the lack of such visceral expressive capabilities among his contemporaries: ‘In Europe no one knows how to scream any more’. Central to his vision for a renewed mode of theatrical performance was the recovery of such uninhibited, physically-engaged, modes of voicing: that which would rescue the actor’s throat from its flaccid status as mere ‘monstrous, talking abstraction’. Synchronic with such theatrical considerations of the scream were writings that investigated its potential role in the reconsideration of psychiatric treatments. Figures like Arthur Janov sought to capitalise on the cathartic effect of the ‘deep, rattling, and involuntary’ primal scream. Shaffer’s play, nested within this context of anti-psychiatric discourse, brings such suspicions around conventional treatments of mental illness to the stage. The cost of Alan’s institutionalisation is the concurrent erasure of any sense of individual personality. This paper locates the scream—that moment where the sensible voice gives way to something beyond singular definition—as a site of resistance. Its very recalcitrance to sense evades the analytic methods of a system underpinned by its conformance with rational explication. The scream thus becomes a vital form of theatrical voicing: the challenge of visceral instinct to the hegemony of reason.

Biography

James Critchley is a PhD student in English at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he holds the Alice and James Penney studentship. His research focuses on the archive of Peter Shaffer, and forms of transatlantic and transmedial dramatic exchange in the twentieth-century. Previous work—on topics ranging from Renaissance afterlives in Beckett, to W. S. Graham’s orally-minded revision process—has appeared in the Journal of Beckett Studies and Essays in Criticism.

Abstract 

This paper offers a semiotic analysis of the voice, understood not as a mere vehicle for language or music, but as a generative device for the production of meaning, whose operation is constitutively processual. Drawing on post-Greimasian generative semiotics, the study approaches vocality as a critical site in which the body enters meaning without fully stabilizing into form. Through an engagement with the categories of autography and allography, the voice is examined beyond traditional regimes of inscription and conceptualized as a trans-graphic process – that is, an unstable traversal of practices of notation, recording, and reproduction, in which uniqueness is not a property of the object but a situated effect of enunciation. In this perspective, vocality does not ground meaning but produces it in the act itself, where enunciation and performance coincide and meaning occurs as an embodied event, most clearly in singing. The paper relates a constellation of vocal practices from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with particular attention to theatrical and performative vocality, understood not as stylistic cases or genre-based comparisons but as historically situated configurations of vocal excess. The tensions between speech and song in Arnold Schoenberg, the vocal experiments of Cathy Berberian and Demetrio Stratos, and the extreme vocal practices of contemporary popular music – examined through Mike Patton and Brian Johnson – are interpreted as thresholds at which vocal excess becomes audible across different apparatuses, codes, and contexts.

In this way, vocality emerges as a trans-generic and trans-medial semiotic field, in which excess manifests precisely in its encounter with the body, technique, and performative risk.

Biography

Gianluca Bocchino is a musicologist, musician, and researcher. He teaches at the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, the University of Bari, and the “N. Sala” Conservatory in Benevento. His areas of specialization range from medieval secular monody to musical paleography and philology, with particular attention to sound and choreutic archives, vocality, and performative practices. In his more recent research, he has focused on the role of dance in twentieth-century Italy and on the relationship between voice and body from an interdisciplinary perspective. His publications include Raffaello Baralli principe dei paleografi musicali italiani (MiC – Direzione Generale Archivi, Roma 2019); Jia Ruskaja. La dea danzante (NeoClassica, Roma 2023); La danza del silenzio (NeoClassica, Roma 2025). He is the editor of the scholarly series Echō (NeoClassica Editore), dedicated to the study of performing arts, visual languages, and vocal practices. He also directs research projects and academic editions, with a particular focus on the voice as an artistic and semiotic device.

Abstract 

In 1995, Ortaoyuncular Theatre premiered Üç Kurşunluk Opera (The Three-Bullet Opera), reimagining Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera through Turkish popular theatre and cabaret. Relocating Brechtian estrangement within the socio-political climate of 1990s Turkey—marked by rising racism, contested legitimacy, and criminal power—Ferhan Şensoy develops a dramaturgy in which voice becomes the primary site of performative authority (Brecht, 1964).

This paper argues that Şensoy stages the fictional mafia boss Mahmut Abi (“Reis”) as a theatrical voice whereby authority is not institutionally grounded but produced through speech. Extended monologues, rhythmic escalation, humour, and direct address generate charismatic legitimacy through vocal performance. Drawing on theories of performativity (Butler, 1990) and self-presentation (Goffman, 1959), I suggest that authority is enacted rather than possessed, and that voice operates as a mediatised presence (Auslander, 1999), revealing how power is constituted through staging.

The play resurfaced in 2021 on YouTube, coinciding with exiled mafia boss Sedat Peker’s online addresses exposing alleged ties between the criminal underworld and political and business elites. These staged digital performances similarly construct authority through controlled framing, monologue, calibrated pauses, and nationalist rhetoric.

Placing these figures in dialogue, the paper proposes that Üç Kurşunluk Opera reemerges as a foreperformance of later digital dramaturgies of criminal authority, anticipating the performative logics that now structure mediated political speech. In doing so, it demonstrates how theatrical voice can prefigure—and critically illuminate—the aesthetics of contemporary media power.

Biography

Asli Kaymak is a lecturer at Erzincan University (Turkey). She holds a PhD from the University of Bristol, where her dissertation, funded by the Turkish Ministry of Education, examined adaptations of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell on early Victorian London stages. Her current research focuses on nineteenth-century opera, Republican-era opera, and musical theatre in Asia Minor. 

Abstract 

May they be considered as “divas” or not, female opera singers from the 19^th and 20^th centuries have been more scrutinised than most musicians, both on stage and backstage. As such, their public and private documents have been carefully preserved, sometimes published, sometimes kept away. The artistic and cultural value of those books and archives, often overlooked by researchers, deserve a material and formal study. 

The aim of this presentation is to present a method for analysing female opera singers’ documents in music archives. Throughout their life, they wrote letters and kept diaries or scrapbooks, thus sharing anecdotes, collecting critics and memorabilia. Those corpora are precious for understanding their perception of the repertoire, the technical and musical aspects of singing, but also for identifying their real character offstage. Nevertheless, it is a daunting task: by definition, letters are scattered throughout the globe, in different locations and institutions. Numerous documents are hardly legible due to handwriting, translations and copies. It is also difficult to identify a standard classification for these archives, both musical and theatrical, with historical value. A strong knowledge of the artistic context is required to elucidate all the names, references and innuendos. 

Using an appropriate method, based on comparisons between different singers and letters, these documents could be reassembled and studied, providing useful insights that do not necessarily correspond to the views of critics and newspapers. In short, it could give these singers their voice back. 

Biography

Malo Maleszka is a PhD student at Lyon 2 University in France and holder of a teaching certificate in literature (agrégation). He wrote a Master thesis under the supervision of Olivier Bara, entitled “From the Stage to the Quill. The Targeted Construction of an Ethos in Letters and Memoirs by Maria Casarès and Maria Callas.” He is now focusing on his thesis: “Extending the Voice: Letters and Memoirs by French and Italian Female Opera Singers, from Giuditta Pasta to Maria Callas” under the supervision of Olivier Bara and Céline Frigau Manning.

Abstract 

The Croatian mezzo-soprano Dunja Vejzović (1943) joined the ensemble of Nuremberg Opera in 1971. While initially singing a broad range of minor and major roles, her 1973 performance as Venus in Wagner's Tannhäuser was particularly acclaimed, foreshadowing her subsequent international triumphs in the Wagnerian repertoire. Another turning point in her career was the portrayal of Azucena in Verdi's Il Trovatore in 1974, directed by the pioneer of Regietheater Hans Neuenfels, marking the beginning of Vejzović’s numerous collaborations with innovative directors. Among the significant roles she portrayed for the first time while a member of the Nuremberg ensemble (1971-1977), before joining Frankfurt Opera and her 1978 debut at the Bayreuth Festival, are Marie in Alban Berg's Wozzeck (1975) and, most notably, the guest appearance as Kundry in Wagner's Parsifal at the Theatre Basel in 1978 – a role she would go on to perform 81 times throughout her career.     

This investigation of these beginnings of an operatic career is primarily based on the Dunja Vejzović Press Clipping Archive. Collected and preserved by the singer in her home in Zagreb, it contains an extensive collection of concert and opera programmes, reviews, interviews and other primary sources. Based on the extensive reception of the roles in the German press, it is possible to conclude that the foundations of this stellar career were laid in Nuremberg since this period defined the hallmarks of Vejzović’s operatic artistry: repertoire versatility with a focus on Wagner and Verdi, the desire to transcend the boundaries of the mezzo-soprano Fach and a commitment to dramatic, unconventional stage expression.

Biography

Ivan Ćurković is an Associate Professor at the University of Zagreb, Academy of Music, where he served as Head of the Department of Musicology (2018-2021). He received his PhD in 2017 at Heidelberg University and is the author of The Vocal Duets of G. F. Handel and His Italian Contemporaries (1706-1724). His research focuses on vocal music of the 18^th century with emphasis on G. F. Handel and his contemporaries, as well as historical and contemporary performance practice. He is a member of the network Music@Alpe Adria, and of the management committee of the COST action A new ecosystem of early music studies.

Abstract

This paper considers the position of early-nineteenth century castrati as influential vocal pedagogues. By focusing on the vocal treatise of Venanzio Rauzzini and Girolamo Crescentini, this paper calls into question prevalent narratives about castrati and demonstrates the value of centring sources written by castrati for historical enquiry into opera.

One particularly generative approach to these vocal treatises is a transnational one. Castrati were conceptualised as quintessentially Italian, and in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries individual castrati were often viewed as embodying aspects of Italianità when they travelled outside of Italy. Crescentini’s bilingual editions of his vocal treatise, published in French/Italian and German/Italian editions in the early-nineteenth century, highlight how the author’s Italian identity could be used to lend legitimacy to his vocal pedagogy and the deference to Italian singing in Europe at this time whilst also presenting Italian singing techniques as translatable and teachable in other national contexts. Rauzzini, on the other hand, was able to use his popular publication ‘Twelve Solfeggi’ and position as a successful vocal pedagogue in England to transcend an association with Italianità and be considered ‘the father of a new style in English singing’. 

Positioning the final castrati of the operatic stage as influential vocal pedagogues also allows us to consider the networks that their teaching created. That Rauzzini, a castrato, could be considered ‘the father’ of a school of singing is especially significant here. By positioning these castrati as influential voice teachers, we are able to incorporate them into wider genealogies of nineteenth-century singing. 

Biography

I have recently completed an MA in history from UCL where my principal research interests were histories of gender and transnational histories of opera. This culminated in a dissertation project, titled ‘Bodies of work: Castrati Experiences in Late-Eighteenth Century Europe’, which considered the position and reception of castrati as their popularity on European operatic stages declined. I plan on pursuing my interests in opera studies and gender history further in the future through a PhD programme. 

Abstract 

Vocal learning is continuous across the lifespan. It precedes any schooling and is constitutively bound to the transformations of the vocal organ and the brain. This paper proposes a reflection on voice education grounded in such continuity, drawing on the pedagogical tradition of Italian opera singing as a paradigmatic case.

Three claims structure this reflection. First, I establish the voice as a process of morphogenesis, observing how development, learning, and education are different dimensions of a single transformative continuum that begins in utero and ends with the last breath. Second, I articulate a tension at the heart of vocal morphogenesis. Informal vocal learning unfolds through ongoing changes in the nervous system and vocal tissues, driven by use, exploration, and adaptation. Formal voice education, insofar as it aims for consistency and recognizable outcomes, often works against ongoing change. The pedagogy of Italian opera singing makes this tension particularly visible. Third, I observe that vocal learning extends well beyond phonation. Opera singing pedagogy reveals that managing the voice means managing an entire physiological dramaturgy, across the timescales of the day, the performance, the season, and the career.

I conclude by arguing that continuity, in vocal learning and voice education, is not the persistence of forms but the persistence of transformability. Read in this light, the pedagogy of Italian opera singing discloses something universal about how voices learn, change, and endure.

Biography

Francesco Venturi is a musician and researcher trained in composition at the Milan Conservatory and musicology at Goldsmiths University. He studied singing and voice with Guillermo Bussolini, Margaret Pikes, and Ermanna Montanari. A PhD candidate at Kingston University, his research investigates how voices form and transform, weaving together theory, performative practice, and pedagogy. He publishes on voice in journals and magazines and is the editor of Creak: Theories and Practices of Pulse Phonation (2025). He leads educational projects on voice across artistic, pedagogical, and clinical contexts and collaborates with Milano Musica, Teatro Donizetti, and Opera Domani. In 2024, he founded the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Voice (CRIV) in Bologna. He has performed solo and in several ensembles across Europe since 2014.

Abstract

Barbara Strozzi (1619-77) is usually characterized today as one of the great composers of the baroque era.  The extent of her publications—seven volumes of mostly secular vocal chamber music—is often read as “impressive witness to her excellence as a composer in the eyes of her contemporaries” (Taruskin, Oxford History, 2:75).  Yet what little testimony those contemporaries actually left us characterizes Strozzi not as a composer but as a singer, poet, and—most tellingly—courtesan. Indeed, Strozzi’s career resembles to a great degree those of such well-studied cortigiane oneste—honest or honored courtesans—as Veronica Franco and Margherita Costa.

In this paper I argue that Strozzi’s publications themselves—their poetry, music, and use of the voice—likewise foreground her status as a courtesan.  Scholars have long noted that her musical language is saturated with the markers of sensuality: harmonic flux, stylistic volatility, melismatic extravagance.  But a study of Strozzi’s choice of poetry—which has received rather less attention—reveals prevalent and unusually explicit eroticism, with overt sexual imagery, same-sex yearning, and allusions to prostitution. Drawing on recent studies of “erotic cultures” in the Renaissance, I will suggest that while Strozzi’s published scores certainly offered brilliant pieces of music, they may also have served as silent tokens of her singing body; that is, they may have stood surrogate for sonic and physical pleasures that most would never enjoy.

Biography

Roger Freitas is professor of musicology at the Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester).  His work has primarily addressed two fields: Italian secular vocal music of seventeenth century and the vocal performance practices of the nineteenth.  In both areas, he has often explored the role of gender norms.  His first book, Portrait of a Castrato, on the life of Atto Melani, won the Philip Brett Award of the American Musicological Society, and his article “Singing Herself: Adelina Patti and the Performance of Femininity,” received the H. Colin Slim Award, again from the AMS.  A critical edition of Luigi Rossi’s first opera, Il palazzo incantato, is in press with A-R Editions, and he is currently pursuing a substantial study on the vocal chamber music of Barbara Strozzi.

Abstract 

My paper examines the authorial politics of mid-twentieth-century electrovocal works, arguing that theatrical performances of singers like Bethany Beardslee and Cathy Berberian are authorial, not simply realizations of composer-intellectual labour. This much-critiqued but still prevalent composer-performer hierarchy is exacerbated by electroacoustic music’s potential to eliminate the performer altogether, yet destabilized by the inclusion of the voice in several mid-century electroacoustic works. This is especially true of works with live performers, whether by design as in Philomel (1964), or a later addition as in Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958/9). These pieces, and their respective performers, Beardslee and Berberian, are my case studies for critiquing these authorial politics, by conceptualizing authorship as processual (Sawyer 2017; Gray 2013). Electroacoustic modernism depends on, and yet systemically minimizes the vocal labour of these singers, which its current models of authorship cannot acknowledge. Further, these works were not exclusively electronic, but also theatrical, performed regularly by Berberian and Beardslee in recital. Part of the creation of these works is vocal and bodily gesture, elements most fully controlled by the performers themselves (McGirr 2017). Focusing on these live and mediated vocal performances, I use recording analysis and reception history (Nickleson 2023; O’Brien 2022; McHugh 2015) to trace how authority was negotiated across compositional and performative domains, attending in particular to the gendered dynamics of artistic-creative discourses. In doing so, I argue that Beardslee and Berberian’s contributions to Philomel and Thema constitute a case for reconceptualizing musical authorship in mid-century modernism as collaborative, processual, and embodied.

Biography

Vanessa Romao is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the University of Toronto, with a collaborative specialization in Women and Gender Studies. Broadly, her research interests include voice and identity in 20th and 21st century art music and music theatre. Her current CGS-D supported research focuses on uncovering the gendered dynamics and authorial politics surrounding the use of extended vocal techniques in mid-century musical modernism and experimentalism. Vanessa also holds an MA in Musicology from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor of Music in Voice from Queens University.

Abstract

Despite a relatively brief and uneven performance history, Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda has eventually become part of the operatic repertoire over the past six decades. This increase in performance frequency has coincided with a significant shift in its interpretation. This paper examines one specific manifestation of this change: the evolving tempo of the opera’s final cabaletta, “Ah! se un giorno da queste ritorte,”, a moment in which vocal display, dramatic urgency, and theatrical convention intersect.

Drawing on a collection of 135 recordings spanning around sixty years, the study measured the durations of both the initial statement and the repeated section of the cabaletta using the audio analysis software Audacity. These timings were plotted against year of performance to identify long-term trends. The results revealed a marked slowing of tempo by approximately 25 per cent over the last fifty years in the final cabaletta. A comparative, though less detailed, analysis of the opening cabaletta showed no comparable shift and so this was not some overall stylistic shift.

The paper situates these findings within broader questions about the theatrical voice in bel canto opera: how cabalettas are now viewed, who determines tempo in performance, and how approaches differ between staged, concert and recorded examples. A possible explanation for the observed slowing is explored calling on evolutionary models of performance practice. Finally, the question arises whether cabalettas and particularly the final cabalettas of other bel canto operas might see similar behaviour.

Biography

After a career in industry, I completed degrees in Opera Studies at Rose Bruford College and Musicology at Oxford Brookes University. My current work centres on English opera of the Victorian period, an interest that has led to the development of three websites exploring different aspects of this repertoire, alongside several papers on nineteenth-century opera, drama, and stage practice. Until its recent closure, I also ran the Donizetti Society website, which served a wide audience interested in Donizetti and Italian opera of the early nineteenth century. The research discussed in this paper grew directly out of that interest.

Abstract 

This paper examines whether voice can constitute a sufficient thematic focus for sustaining a scholarly journal in the field of Performing Arts. It draws on the editorial experience of Revista Voz e Cena, a biannual electronic journal founded in 2020 and based at the University of Brasília, in articulation with fifteen other universities from diverse regions across Brazil’s vast territory. The paper examines the challenges and potentials of a thematic focus on voice, understood as a transversal axis articulating artistic practices, pedagogical processes, and theoretical approaches.

The journal publishes texts resulting from research, debates, artistic and pedagogical practices, with an emphasis on sonorities, reflecting specificities of the Brazilian contexts and, more broadly, South American settings. These settings are marked by dynamics of knowledge circulation among universities, artistic collectives, and heterogeneous cultural territories. Within this framework, voice emerges as a privileged field for addressing questions of corporeality, orality, memory, performativity, and technological mediations, in dialogue with situated epistemologies and critical perspectives attentive to the historical and cultural dynamics of the Global South.

The paper outlines the main challenges faced by thematically focused journals, including the ongoing renewal of approaches, the expansion of collaborative networks in South America, the maintenance of epistemological diversity, and editorial sustainability in the face of funding instability and increasing pressure for indexation and impact metrics. It argues that focusing on voice can bring together interdisciplinary perspectives if it is supported by open editorial policies and by an expanded and a situated understanding of voice in the Performing Arts.

Biographies

Ana Wegner is a postdoctoral researcher at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil (2024 -2027), where she is conducting a research project on the history of sound design, funded by FAPESP (grant n°. 25/13756-3). She holds a joint PhD from Université Paris 8 and the Universidade de São Paulo. She previously taught at Université de Poitiers (2020 - 2022) and Université d’Artois (2022-2024), France. She co-edited Pratiques de la voix sur scène. De l’apprentissage à la performance vocale (Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2018), Scènes du Brésil (Alternatives théâtrales, n°. 143, 2021), and Sound in Performance (Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença, vol. 14, n°. 4, 2024). She is a member of the editorial committee of the journal Voz e Cena [Voice and Stage] (UnB).

Cesar Lignelli is an Associate Professor of Voice and Performance at the Performing Arts Department (CEN) and a Graduate Program in Performing Arts (PPG-CEN) at the Universidade de Brasilia, UnB. Brazil. Visiting Researcher of the project Arquivos Sonoros de Teatro with the project Dicionary of Scene Sounds based at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil (FAPESP 2025/01572-5). He has a PhD in Education and Communication, FE / UnB (2011); Master in Art and Technology in the research line Compositional Processes for the Scene, Institute of Arts of the UnB (2007). He also leads the Vocality & Scene Research Group (CNPq since 2003) and is the Editor in chief of the journal Voz e Cena [Voice and Stage] (ISSN: 2675-4584).

Abstract 

The nineteenth-century German actress Sophie Schröder (1781–1868) occupies a liminal position between theater and music. Beginning her acting career on the opera stage, she ascended to mainstay of Vienna’s Burgtheater. Throughout her life, she used her voice as a conduit for accessing these worlds and as a site for forming and mobilizing her multiple artistic identities. Rather than a singing actress (Rutherford 2006), we might consider her an actress of musicality who maneuvered vocal modalities. This paper focuses on Schröder’s time in Prague during 1813–1814, a period I argue laid groundwork for her eventual reputation as “Germany’s greatest actress.” Reception history and historiographical analysis reveal that in Prague she associated with prominent musicians—including Carl Maria von Weber—and began developing a core declamatory repertoire that included Friedrich Schiller’s “Das Lied von der Glocke,” Gottfried August Bürger’s “Lenore,” and Klopstock’s “Frühlingsfeier,” texts she presented both with and without musical accompaniment. Prior to nationally-significant and renowned public performances of such works, Schröder cultivated these staples in Prague salon settings, billed as “Deklamatorium” and “Abendunterhaltung.” Observing these and other performances, critics freighted her voice with gravitas and inherent musicality. Historians have consequently cast her as a transitional figure between a Weimar classicism and later realism. This paper considers such performances and repertoires as foundational to a reputation predicated on the gift of her particular vocal profile. In this, Schröder used her voice strategically and flexibly to further her career.

Biography

Jacques Dupuis is a clinical assistant professor of music theory and musicology at Purdue University Fort Wayne (Indiana, USA) where he is coordinator of music theory and aural skills. His research focuses on long nineteenth-century music and theater, particularly in Germany and the United States, as well as film music and sound. He earned a PhD in musicology with a dissertation on Robert Schumann’s dramatic domestic vocal music, and has written and presented on the Schumanns, Samuel Barber, issues of voice and identity in narrative media and theater, gender in classical radio programming, transatlantic German ethnic theater repertoires and practices, and other topics. He also regularly writes program notes, specializing in twentieth-century American music.

Abstract 

The early decades of the twentieth century marked a decisive expansion of commercial recording practices in urban Spain. The recorded evidence suggests stylistic permeability: operatic vocality coexists with speech-inflected delivery; lyric phrasing intersects with theatrical declamation. Recent scholarship has illuminated the hybrid dramaturgy of early twentieth-century Zarzuela, particularly the coexistence of spoken and sung modes (Moreda Rodríguez, 2022). Yet early recording culture did more than document such hybridity. It contributed to the formation of alternative, genre-specific vocal identities, especially in instances where internationally established operatic singers recorded Zarzuela.

This phenomenon becomes particularly visible in cases where Spanish singers recorded genres closely associated with national theatrical life without regularly performing them within those stage traditions. Figures such as María Barrientos, Graziella Pareto, and María Galvany exemplify this configuration. 

If these singers were not embedded in Zarzuela’s stage practice, how did their recordings articulate the genre? Rather than reflecting stage practice directly, these recordings may register a distinct stylistic layer of Zarzuela - one that adapted to mechanical reproduction and broader circulation rather than to the acoustics and dramaturgy of the Spanish theatre.

This presentation examines selected recordings by singers engaged in such cross-genre practices and places them in comparison with performers whose careers were primarily rooted in Spain's theatrical circuit. Through close listening and stylistic analysis, it identifies divergences in vocal approach that suggest the consolidation of a recording-shaped genre identity. Early twentieth-century recordings thus emerge not simply as documents of performance, but as evidence of a historically specific negotiation between popular and classical vocal idioms, conditioned by the technological and professional environments in which they were produced.

Biography

Fatima Volkoviskii Barajas holds a PhD in Musicology from the Complutense University of Madrid. Her thesis focuses on performance practices for singing on pre-electric recordings in Spain. Recent lectures include presentations at the Universidad Veracruzana (September 2025), University of Surrey (July 2024), the University of Glasgow (January 2024), and the University of the Arts in Bern (November 2023).

She received a City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society Research Fellowship in 2023 and has participated in phonograph recording sessions within the research network funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of England. In 2023, she recorded pieces from the Spanish repertoire at the Redefining Early Recordings Symposium in London. As a soprano, under the stage name Lola Palomo, she has given concerts in Madrid, Mexico City, Xalapa, and Veracruz, among other venues, combining musicological research with artistic practice. As a researcher and performer, her musical projects are based on historically informed performance.

Abstract 

My paper proposal focuses on the formative development of interests in the theatrical voice and declamation in the early life and work of Ernest Legouvé (1807-1903), tracing a trajectory that begins in his childhood and adolescence and extends into his early poetic and dramatic production. Drawing on autobiographical and historical sources, in my presentation I would explore how Legouvé’s artistic upbringing and his engagement with oral practices shaped his understanding of the voice as a dynamic instrument, rather than merely a vehicle for textual delivery. Central to this inquiry is Legouvé’s pursuit of a precise correspondence between versification and vocal expression, a pursuit that led him to even contest dominant poetic models in order to reconceptualize the role of the theatrical voice in performance. 

By contextualizing Legouvé within broader debates about theatre reforms and pedagogical practices in nineteenth‑century, with this study I will try to situate Legouvé’s work on declamation within a larger cultural approach that linked vocal performance to social, civil and educational ideals. In this sense, this historical case study could contribute to highlight the intersections of literature, pedagogy, and theatre practice in the formation of vocal aesthetics in the XIX century.

Biography

Leonardo Mancini (Milan 1987) teaches Theatre History at the Department of Humanities at the University of Turin, where he earned a PhD in Literature, in cotutorship at the Université Paris 8. His writings, in addition to articles in journals and books, include the monographs Carmelo Bene: fonti della poetica (Milan 2020) and Luigi Rasi. La declamazione come scienza nuova (Milan 2021), and the editions of Lucio Ridenti, La vita gaia di Dina Galli (Bari 2023), and Gabriele Bertazzolo, La Gonzaga: opera drammatica rappresentante l'origine de signori Gonzaghi nel dominio di Mantova (Mantua 2023). He is also co-director of the Journal of Theatre Anthropology, founded and edited by Eugenio Barba.

Abstract 

Sarah Bernhardt’s voice has been the subject of numerous analyses, notably based on surviving recordings (Pellois and Gonzales:2022). Far less attention has been paid to how this voice was taken up, reformulated, and transmitted by other actresses. Focusing on what Mary Marquet, sociétaire of the Comédie-Française and a privileged witness to Bernhardt, does when she recounts and imitates Bernhardt at the end of her career allows an overlooked aspect of nineteenth-century acting history to emerge: the circulation of vocal knowledge through practice, outside institutional frameworks and written archives. This paper draws on two contrasting recordings. In a poetic recital, Marquet claims that one must imitate Bernhardt in order to speak Morand, asserting continuity through the active reprise of a vocal style. In a later television programme devoted to Racine, she describes her relation to Bernhardt as entering ‘in her wake’, suggesting orientation rather than imitation. The coexistence of these two gestures, imitation and wake, offers a rare perspective on how an actress’s voice circulates through transformation. To analyse this dynamic, I mobilise the notion of vocal gestures, understood as assemblages of breath, accent, and rhythm that constitute a way of inhabiting language and are perceptible only in action. I relate this to the concept of translation-as-distortion, developed in my research-creation practice, in which translating a voice involves activating an inherited gesture in another body and another moment. The paper first analyses Marquet’s two vocal gestures, then proposes a conceptual reading through translation-as-distortion, before considering the implications of this approach for contemporary vocal practice.

Biography

Hippolyte Broud is an artist, voice pedagogue, and researcher. Trained in Classics at University College London and in devised theatre and voice pedagogy at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (London), he is currently completing a practice-based PhD in Voice Studies at the University of Exeter. He teaches voice and speech at the Cours Cochet-Delavène (Paris) and is invited to teach in 2026 at La Manufacture (Lausanne) and at CNSAD (Paris). He works as a voice coach, notably on Prendre soin by Alexander Zeldin (TNS, 2025) and Adolescence et territoire, directed by Kenza Berrada (Théâtre de l’Odéon, 2026).

Abstract 

In Odissi, a dance theatre from the State of Odisha, India, an entire section of the repertoire is a harmonious polyphony between the song’s lyrics and their associated bodily movements and gestures. In abhinaya items – narrative pieces –, the artist not only illustrates the poetic words through her/his body, but, as lines are repeated several times, she/he also goes beyond them. She/he shows choreographic variations, known as sañcāri, which develop the implicit of the text as it is subjectively understood by the choreographer. Thus, the gestures become a superimposed voice to the song, propelling the narration forward. How is the use of sañcāri in choreographic composition not a mere gestural transposition of the song, but an artistic vision? To bring elements of an answer to this question, I will start my lecture recital by analysing the polysemy of the Sanskrit word “sancari”, and see how its various meanings shed light on their functions. Then, via the analysis and danced demonstrations of abhinaya compositions by Dr Aruna Mohanty displaying the character of Rādhā, I will try to prove the sañcāri as intrinsically dialogic, being the product of the choreographer’s work on the song and her research on the character in other texts or items, blended into her knowledge of the specific language of the gestures in Odissi. Eventually, I will bring the case study of Kahibaku Laja, by Dr Aruna Mohanty, to show how the sañcāri convey what the words cannot, namely, the eroticism in the relationship between the lovers Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa.

Biography

Karine Leblanc Sarrade is a professional Odissi dance-theatre artist and associate researcher at the Scènes du monde, création, savoirs critiques laboratory (EA 1573), Université Paris 8. She holds a PhD in Aesthetics of the Arts, specializing in theatre and dance. Her 2023 thesis, “Nouvelles esthétiques de la danse théâtre odissi, entre Odisha (État) et Inde contemporaine”, [“New Aesthetics of Odissi dance-theatre, between Odisha (State) and contemporary India”], explores Odissi aesthetics as identity issues in contemporary, postcolonial, India. Her working methods combine participant observation and practice-based research. Recent lecture-demonstrations include creation processes in Odissi at Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, and Université Paris 8. She is also a volunteer for the international non-profit organisation CPPA (Center for Peace and Performing Arts).

Abstract

The imitation of dialect was a common feature of opéra comique around 1800, serving not just as a comedic element, but also as a sonic marker of a character’s social class and rural origin. Yet dialects and their effects were not always readily translatable, posing certain challenges when such an opera was exported to other countries. This was the case for the 1801 Munich premiere of Graf Armand, a German translation of Luigi Cherubini’s Les deux journées ou le porteur d’eau (which had premiered in Paris in 1800). Parisian critics had particularly praised the “truth, accuracy and liveliness” of its titular water carrier, Mikeli, who was given a Savoyard accent. Aside from a light sprinkle of words like “sapperment,” the German translation does not emulate Mikeli’s full-fledged dialect idiom in the Parisian original. Still, in the German press, the lifelike portrayal of this “folk figure” (“Volksfigur”) was still praised. 

Taking German translations of Les deux journées as a central case study, this paper examines what strategies were available to both translators and singer-actors adapting the French imitation of dialect for German stages. It does so by cross-referencing translations with acting and declamation manuals as well as literary and proto-ethnographic research into “folk tongues.” Bringing these sources together suggests that gesture, tone of voice, bodily comportment, and dress were at least as important as particular words and speech patterns in signaling class and origin on the stage. 

Biography

Annelies Andries is an assistant professor of musicology at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the development of Central European music cultures in the wake of nineteenth-century military conflicts, particularly the Napoleonic Wars. Her work has been published in The Journal of War and Culture Studies, Cambridge Opera Journal, French Historical Studies among others. She recently collaborated with the Musée National des Châteaux de Malmaison et Bois-Préau on romances from the Napoleonic period, which resulted in various publications and two CDs. In 2023, she received a junior scholarship from the University of Bayreuth to study early-nineteenth-century opera translations in Munich from a performative perspective, for which she collaborated with members of the Dutch Historical Acting Collective.

Abstract 

Ever since Catherine Clément’s L’Opéra ou la Défait des femmes was published in 1979, scholars have increasingly used gender as a tool for understanding opera. Given gender scholarship’s close ties to feminism, however, it can be no surprise that early studies of opera and gender focused heavily on depictions of and performances by women. In fact, there is relatively little existing scholarship on opera and masculinity; Purvis (2013) remains the only book-length study of operatic masculinities. 

My presentation aims to fill part of this gap by analyzing two depictions of male emotionality from Italian opera in the 1890s: the role of Turiddu in Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and that of Des Grieux in Giacomo Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. My discussion chiefly centers on the notated scores, libretti, and stage directions; I will also include evidence from historic performances, based partly on early recordings and on the printed reception of the operas. 

I argue that Turiddu and Des Grieux represent separate approaches to composing and performing the masculine theatrical voice on the operatic stage. Turiddu is written to reflect a traditional notion of masculine restraint and honor, while Des Grieux is a more nervous, emotional type in tune with Puccini’s modern audience and contemporary medical thought surrounding “hysteria” in men. The contrast between these examples provides a deeper context for attacks on Puccini’s emotional or “weak” male characters by Italian critics such as Fausto Torrefranca. 

Biography

Matthew Franke is a Senior Lecturer in music history at Howard University in the United States. His research focuses on music in the late nineteenth century, particularly the Italian reception of the operas of Georges Bizet and Jules Massenet, as well as nationalism in the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. He has published articles in journals such as Acta Musicologica, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and the Journal of the Society for American Music. He is currently working on a book project on non-normative masculinities in fin-de-siècle opera. He also curates the List of Open-Access Music Journals. 

Abstract 

Performing emotional roles is an inevitability for singing and non-singing actors. As Tait (2021, p1) observes, “The possibilities for thinking about and remembering emotion, as well as imagining it, have long been part of theatre and its theory and practice.” The challenges of performing high intensity emotional roles reach beyond typical considerations of authenticity and acting approaches. The term vocal athlete is increasingly popular in the field of voice. This paper considers the balance of vocal athleticism with affective athleticism, to use Antonin Artaud’s term. When approaching a performer’s ability to embody these roles, we should also consider the potential impact on the voice. Negative valence emotions have been associated with stronger autonomic responses than positive valence emotions (Kreibig, 2010). Stress and fear responses can trigger the sympathetic nervous system, preparing the body for active response (Cardoso, Lumini-Oliviera and Menses, 2021, p104). Sympathetic arousal can increase respiratory rate, impacting articulation and vocal fold vibration. Indicators of negative valence emotions on the voice include pressed phonation, increased laryngeal height, shortening of the vocal tract, and engagement of the sternocleidomastoid and suprahyoid muscles. The requirements of singing alongside emotional acting can lead to “inappropriate and excessive muscular activity” leading to fatigue and the potential for impaired vocal function (Rangarathnam et al, 2018, p300). Therefore, practitioners working with singers performing emotionally charged roles should consider vocal technique and acting approaches carefully to safeguard vocal health. This paper presentation aims to address this challenge through a review of interdisciplinary literature leading to a deeper understanding of potential risks and mitigation strategies. 

Biography

Louisa is a PhD candidate with the Guildford School of Acting at the University of Surrey, with an interest in emotion and the voice. She is a lecturer (Spoken Voice Lead) for the Voice Study Centre and a private voice, acting, and singing coach. Previously, she taught technical singing to musical theatre students at the Guildford School of Acting and Italia Conti and was also a spoken and singing voice coach for acting students at the Cygnet Training Theatre. Louisa has a master’s degree in Vocal Pedagogy, a three-year diploma in Acting with Directing and a BA (hons) in English and Literary Studies. She is a Vocal Process accredited teacher and was Editor for the Association of Teachers of Singing from 2023-2025.

Abstract

This paper examines what theatre practice can offer to adults who believe or have been told that they ‘cannot sing’, reframing singing anxiety as a question not only of musical skill but of vocal identity, affect and embodied participation. This thinking emerges from an interdisciplinary pilot intervention developed by collaborators in theatre, music and psychology, working with undergraduate theatre students who self-identified as non-singers or having singing anxiety of some kind. Across six weeks, participants engaged in theatre games and exercises, vocal exploration, Alexander Technique-informed awareness, reflective discussion, and gently scaffolded group voicing and singing, alongside pre- and post-intervention psychological evaluation.

While existing scholarship documents the prevalence of negative singing identities, often exploring routes back into singing through pedagogical or choir-based models, theatre practice has rarely been positioned as a primary methodological response. This paper argues that theatre intervenes at a different point in the ecology of singing anxiety: rather than beginning with vocal accuracy or technique, theatre cultivates relational safety, imaginative permission and embodied presence, enabling participants to encounter the voice before the demand to sing. Theatre thus offers a distinct interdisciplinary pathway into vocal confidence.

My analysis situates the intervention within wider discussions of theatrical voice, embodiment and the interaction between spoken and sung expression – central concerns for contemporary voice research. In foregrounding practice-led methodology and collaborative design, the paper contributes a new model for supporting anxious or self-excluding voices in educational and theatrical contexts. Ultimately, it proposes that theatre can function as a transformative space in which singing becomes newly thinkable, felt, and possible.

Biography

Dr Karen Quigley is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at the University of York. Her scholarship spans contemporary European theatre, performance pedagogy, solo spectatorship, site-responsive performance and R&D as methodology, and recent contributed chapters also address theatre fiction and television comedy. Her monograph Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure (Bloomsbury, 2020) develops a critical framework for understanding impossibility in performance, and the co-edited Research and Development in British Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2024) argues passionately for the funding of R&D, recognising its enormous significance to British theatre making.

Abstract 

This paper theorises the capacity of a cappella voices to engage in what I here call ‘voicescaping’ in popular musical theatre. It argues that unaccompanied voices recalibrate theatrical listening by reshaping how time and place are constructed in performance. Drawing on voice and sound studies (Mladen Dolar; Steven Connor; Macpherson & Thomaidis) and anthropology (Tim Ingold; Timothy Morton), I examine the ways in which the 2019 musical Islander and the 2024 musical adaptation of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button employ a cappella to shape time and place in new British writing.

In Islander, live looping and vocal layering create a dynamic sonic ecology that replaces conventional orchestration and scenography. Voice functions as environmental proxy: breath, pulse, and harmonic accumulation evoke tides, weather, and communal memory, generating a cyclical temporality aligned with island life. Performers’ bodies become sites of acoustic inscription, remaking place through iterative vocal acts, consistent with Ingold’s (2003) conception of landscape as process.

By contrast, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, relocated to Cornwall, employs ensemble a cappella harmony within an actor-musician framework to stage reverse chronology as collective, folk-inflected narration. The score renders ageing and remembrance through shifting textures and modal inflections, aligning individual biography with communal storytelling. Temporality emerges as relational and cyclical, grounded in shared vocal labour.

Together, these works demonstrate how such voices privilege embodied acoustics over spectacle, positioning voice as narrative agent, environmental medium, and temporal marker. Such practices situate musical theatre voices within wider debates on heritage, memory, immediacy, and belonging.

Biography

Dr Ben Macpherson is Reader in Vocal Theatres at the University of Portsmouth. His work spans the intersection of musical theatre and interdisciplinary voice studies – a field he has pioneered with colleague Konstantinos Thomaidis over the last decade. He is the author of Singing Utopia: Voice in Musical Theatre (OUP 2024), Cultural Identity in British Musical Theatre 1890-1939 (Palgrave, 2018) and co-editor of the field-defining Voice Studies: Critical Approaches to Process, Performance and Experience (Routledge, 2015). He is founding co-editor of Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (Intellect) and Routledge Voice Studies book series, and principal investigator for the long-term project ‘Musical Theatre on Record’ which has, since 2020, received funding from the AHRC, British Academy and the Being Human Festival.

Abstract 

Musical theatre, since its beginnings, seems to promote the culture of evergreen youthfulness, acting upon a ‘mythologization of youth’. Even recent stage musicals and musical films (see, for example, Six, Between the Lines, 13, and Wonka) share a common, formulaic, and over-familiar element: they are all youth-centric. Although musical theatre does offer roles for ageing female performers, these roles blur the lines between progressive and regressive discourses and often turn the ageing female voice to itself. 

This proposed 20-minute paper examines the theatrical voice in musicals and the embodiment of age, gender, disability, class and ethnicity through the musicals Kimberly Akimbo, Death Becomes Her, In the Heights and Calendar Girls. It discusses how the ageing female voice is utilised as musical theatre’s scapegoat and it introduces the conceptual framework of the voice as pharmakon in musical theatre, rendering the ageing female voice in musicals a ‘type of painful pleasure,’ simultaneously linked to its (perceived) malady and its (aspirational) treatment.

Biography

Dr Faye Rigopoulou is a musical theatre voice researcher, focusing on dramaturgies of ageing vocalities. She holds a PhD in Musical Theatre and Voice Studies from the University of Exeter and an MA in Performance Practices (Musical Theatre) from Middlesex University. Her studio practices integrate feminist dramaturgies, embodied voice techniques, and intercultural training approaches. She has directed numerous musicals across Europe and Asia. Publications in both peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes include: “A Strong, Older Woman: Lived Experiences of Female Ageing in Contemporary British Theatre” (in The Methuen Drama Handbook of Women in Contemporary British Theatre, Bloomsbury, 2025); ‘The Ageing Female Voice in Musical Theatre’ in the Contemporary Voice and Music Training for Actors, National Theatre of Greece, 2024) and “Still Here? Ageing Female Vocalities in Musical Theatre” (IASPM Journal, 2024,) which was awarded an honourable mention for the Methuen Drama Prize for Best Essay in the Musical (2025, ISSM).