Below are some sample essay titles from previous deliveries of the module. These were not necessarily the final versions, but they represent the range of topics covered by previous students.
Important Support Material
- Towards a ‘total’ performance: Berio’s Circles
- Henry Purcell’s use of ground bass in text setting
- Music, text and vocalisation in Radiohead’s Paranoid Android
- Scat singing and its intertextual relationships in jazz
- From the semantic to the sonic: textual/textural disintegration in vocally-based process music
- Text setting in the ‘Sanctus’ from Britten’s War Requiem
- ‘Sorrow in Song’ – how Purcell uses music and vocal utterence to emphasise the text in ‘With drooping wings’ from Dido & Aeneas
- Non-linguistic vocalisation in Trevor Wishart’s Vox 3
- Playing with words: Beckett’s Unnamable in Berio’s Sinfonia
- Berio’s Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)
- Music/text relationships in Luciana Souza’s performance of Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet 49
- Text setting in Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb
- The use of paralinguistic gestures in Trevor Wishart’s Red Bird
- Text-Music-Text: morphological correspondences between text and music in the work of Steve Reich
- Towards madness: mimesis and vocalisation in Purcell’s Bess of Bedlam
- Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III – from vocal gesture to music
- The use of sprechstimme as a performance mode in the works of Arnold Schoenberg
- Text and performance in Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera