How 20th Century Has Changed Vocal Techniques
Bethan Exelby
How did we come to Contemporary Vocal Music as it is today?
An exploration of how the 20th Century has changed vocal techniques.
Contemporary Music is a time in classical music history in which all previously set boundaries were pushed and broken in order to discover new things, new sounds, and new ways of doing things. This is all evident when looking at contemporary vocal music.
Before the Contemporary era, a vocal performer would only sing or speak. Europe was at the forefront of singing technique with the Italian Bel Canto school, teaching an expressive style of singing most associated with opera. The school itself died out in the mid 19th Century but its style and ideals were continued in vocal performance into the 20th Century.
In the 20th Century, Composer began testing the boundaries in music in all senses, exploring everything from tonality to structure to performance and instrumental techniques. The exploration of vocal techniques has potentially been the most lucrative in discover extended instrumental techniques.
“Extended vocal technique is in some ways entirely self-descriptive - it extends the boundaries of what most would consider a normal singing technique to include (potentially) any and all the sounds …show more content…
the human voice is capable of making.”
J. K. Halfyard
So what are Extended Vocal Techniques? Melanie Austin Crump describes them as:
“Known as “extended vocal practices,” the “extra-normal voice,” or “extended techniques,” to name but a few, EVTs may be defined as a body of practices conveyed through nontraditional methods of vocal production, possibly altering the natural timbre of the voice for the purpose of musical expression. EVTs include such devices as, Sprechstimme or Sprechgesang, shouting and whispering, laughter and crying, glissandi, microtones, altered or eliminated vibrato, sound production through inhalation and exhalation, vowel morphing, amplified or electronically generated vocal alterations, and nonsense syllables or phonemes, all of which could be accompanied by movement, improvisation and/or the playing of instruments by the singer. This list is not exhaustive as EVTs vary from performer to performer.”
M. A. Crump
The early 20th Century saw composers beginning to write music for vocalists, not just to sing, but to use their voices in different ways. It is said that this exploration of the voices capabilities can be traced back to Arnold Schoenburg. In his melodrama Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg uses a technique called Sprechgesang or Sprechstimme.
“ ‘Sprechgesang’ means a ‘parlando’ manner of singing, and indeed is translated in standard dictionaries as ‘recitative’, whereas ‘Sprechstimme’ in itself simply means speaking voice.”
R.Wood, 1946
Sprechstimme is a vocal technique that had been used before Pierrot Lunaire was written. The earliest known compositional use of Sprechstimme was in Engelbert Humperdinck 's 1897 melodrama Königskinder. However, it was Schoenberg who truly made use of the technique, using it in compositions from 1911 (Gurre-Lieder). Schoenberg made Sprechgesang more than just speaking to accompaniment and maintaining pitches, and different to singing.
"The goal is certainly not at all a realistic, natural speech. On the contrary, the difference between ordinary speech and speech that collaborates in a musical form must be made plain. But it should not call singing to mind, either."
A. Schoenberg
Being the first to use a technique such as this in his work, Schoenberg had to explain how he wanted the Sprechgesang to be performed. Giving explicit instructions of how the pitch sound not be stuck to rigidly, but to start at it and move around it, in his own words “immediately abandons it [the given pitch] by falling or rising” (Schoenberg). When giving the first performance of Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg was able to work with the vocalist to achieve the exact sound he wanted. However, in later performances, vocalists struggled to grasp what it was that Schoenberg was aiming for as the technique was so innovative. As with anything new, there were criticisms surrounding Schoenberg’s writing for Sprechgesang. Pierre Boulez criticised Schoenberg for wanting to write something different and with new techniques but not really knowing what he wanted to achieve in terms of its sound, almost like he was doing it just to be controversial rather the explorative.
“The question arises whether it is actually possible to speak according to a notation devised for singing. This was the real problem at the root of all the controversies. Schoenberg 's own remarks on the subject are not in fact clear."
Pierre Boulez
This feeling was shared among traditionalist Europeans and critics across the Atlantic. American audiences and critics struggled to understand Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. America moved more slowly with the development in Classical musical than European composers after the First World War “...newer developments including musical modernism did not reach American until well after their emergence in Austria and Germany.” They thought Schoenberg’s compositional techniques to be “a foreign and unnecessary concept” as well as being deemed incomprehensible. Although more widely understood in Europe, Schoenberg was criticized for his “musical innovations”.
Schoenberg reinvented the technique of Sprechgesang, building upon what Sprechgesang was perceived to be at the time – speaking to musical accompaniment, and combining it with the expressive nature of the Bel Canto singing style, creating a technique far from anything anyone had ever done before, more avant-garde than it was before and opening the floodgates for the exploration of vocal techniques.
The Italian Futurist movement also began working towards changing the way vocal music was composed. Again using poetry as a base, authors such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti began to write vocal pieces using what are considered to be the first examples of graphic scores. Zang Tumb Tumb is a collection of sound poems, all written in unconventional ways, exploring rhythm and the sounds that can be made with different letter combinations.
“The dynamic rhythms and onomatopoetic possibilities that the new form offered were made even more effective through the revolutionary use of different typefaces, forms and graphic arrangements and sizes that became a distinctive part of Futurism.”
Caroline Tisdall & Angelo Bozzola
fig. 1 Example of the layout within a copy of Zang Tumb Tumb.
The latter half of the 20th Century was when composers truly began to explore extended techniques for all instruments. Drawing influences from Dadaism, Futurism and Surrealism, American and European composers in the 1950s began experimenting with electro-acoustic composing. This allowed composers to explore the timbres beyond those that were considered “possible and correct” for instruments and voices, breaking away from what was expected. Electro-acoustic composing forced composers to consider other aspects of their writing that must be perhaps sacrificed in their writing in using different techniques; they needed more flexibility in things such as pitch and rhythm. With this knowledge from the electro-acoustic exploration, composers came back to composing for acoustic, more instruments and ensembles.
This need for flexibility and consideration of compromising some compositional aspects in order to facilitate new playing techniques is something that wasn’t considered by Schoenberg and his contemporaries in the early 20th Century, years before Extended Vocal Technique became a more prominent compositional component. This isprobably why later composers like Pierre Boulez were critical of him and how he composed for extended techniques to begin with. However, the fundamental difference between Schoenberg, Ives and Cowell, and later composers, such as Berio, Stockhausen, Kagel, Ligeti and Cage, is the exposure to technology and the ability to explore another world of sound before coming back to the acoustic world and exploring that further. Another difference between the two groups of composers is the availability of performers willing to work with composers to achieve a different form of vocal performance.
The exploration of Extended Vocal Technique began at the end of the 1950s. A lot of vocal music was written, predominantly for the female voice with composers writing for specific performers. In 1958, John Cage wrote Aria, a piece written specifically for the American singer, Cathy Berberian. Cage and Berberian lead the way in the vocalist/composer partnership moving into the heyday of Extended Vocal Technique: The 1960s and 1970s. Berberian worked extensively with composers such as Cage, Busotti, Stravinsky and Burgess among others. Her most lucrative partnership musically however, was the one between Berberian and her then husband, Luciano Berio. Berio composed works such as Sequenza III for woman’s voice (1965), Circles (1960) and Recital I (for Cathy) (1972). Berberian explored composition for herself, writing Stripsody (1966). The piece is built around exploiting vocal technique using onomatopoeia, particularly words from comic books or graphic novels, combine with characterisation to create different sounds. Berberian was one of the pioneers of Extended Vocal Techniques, interpreting not only specifically designed works but popular music as well more traditional classical pieces. She is famed for her interpretation of the Beatles in Beatles Arias, taking Beatles songs and singing them in a Baroque style. Berberian embodies what I consider to be the compositional attitude to extended vocal techniques, pushing boundaries and being controversial and experimental. I think this is evident from her piece Stripsody. The onomatopoeic words as well as characterized sentences in this piece give the impression that Berberian is testing just how much she can do in one composition, exploring a huge amount of sounds that can be made using only the human voice and mouth.
Another notable contemporary vocal artist is Jane Manning, and English Singer of Contemporary Music. Manning has written extensively on contemporary vocal technique. When asked to define Extended Vocal Technique, Manning responds:
“I am inclined to bristle when asked to explain ‘extended vocal techniques’, since these seem to me to be largely a matter of rationalizing, annotating, and coordinating a variety of everyday sounds, which would all be familiar in different contexts. If the tonal inflections of a baby’s scream were to be notated exactly, or even the precise rhythmic values of rubato in Debussy or Delius, the visual result would be extremely complex.”
As well as being a prolific writer on Vocal techniques, Manning is also a dominant force in performance, premiering over 300 works of contemporary music as well as touring the world with her virtuosic ensemble.
Ivan Hewitt writes:
“For many people Jane Manning is simply the voice of contemporary classical music in this country. Anyone who took an interest in this burgeoning area of music in the 1970s and '80s grew up with the sound of her astonishing voice in their ears. It’s instantly recognisable, but it’s also a chameleon. Whether she’s faced with the pure angular leaps of Anton Webern, the throaty suggestiveness of Schoenberg or the black, crazed humour of Gyorgy Ligeti, Jane Manning is always equal to the task.”
Manning shows the skill needed to perform Extended Vocal Techniques, studying and the Royal Academy of Music and fronting an ensemble of virtuosic musicians (Jane’s Minstrels). Manning is the definition of a classically trained vocal performer. She understands each piece of music she performs whether it be a piece of Baroque Chamber music or Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. I think this scholarship and professionalism is something that sets aside those performers who dare to take on Contemporary pieces. The discipline to accept that everything you are asked to do is part of the music and what the composer wanted you to perform. This is why artists such as Manning have such long careers and are held in such high esteem by their peers and by critics.
J.
K. Halfyard considers Meredith Monk to be the most significant performer of Extended Vocal Techniques. Monk is both a performer and composer of contemporary vocal music famed mostly for her work with extended vocal techniques. A distinguished soloist with a long list of accomplishments, Monk has been working within Contemporary Music from the late 1960s and is still working today. A lot of her explorative work has been building upon and running parallel to the work of the European composers of the 1960s, creating her own “distinctive idiom” with her voice and compositions. Monk has explored in depth Extended Vocal Techniques within ensemble singing, something which her European contemporaries steered clear
of.
Monk on her own work:
"In most of my music, theatre pieces and films, I try to express a sense of timelessness; of time as a recurring cycle."
Monk demonstrates what I consider to be the best way to explore Extended Vocal Techniques in Contemporary Music; writing for herself, seeing what other’s are doing and moving forward with it.
A male performer worth noting is Roy Hart. Hart’s ability to perform Extended Vocal Techniques was physiological. Roy Hart had the ability to sing chords, as well as having a five octave range. These abilities made Hart extraordinarily versatile as a performer.
Throughout history, we have improved and progressed every technique known to man, musical or not. This progress causes new beginning and new discoveries. It is human nature to explore and force new discoveries. I believe that this has happened for Vocal Music. It may seem sudden, given that the vast majority of this development happened in the space of around 15 years, and the fact that no one had ever heard such techniques shocked and even appalled audience.
“...the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.”
Alvin Toffler
The development of Extended Vocal Technique was a natural progression, just long overdue.
Bibliography
Caroline Tisdall & Angelo Bozzola, Futurism, Oxford University Press 1978, Quoted in Via Libri
Halfyard J. K. Home. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.sequenza.me.uk/index.html. [Accessed 1 January 2014].
Hewitt, I. Jane’s Minstrels at the Purcell Room, review – Telegraph [ONLINE] available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalconcertreviews/7345656/Janes-Minstrels-at-the-Purcell-Room-review.html. [Accessed 1 January 2014].
Jane Manning, New Vocal Repertory 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1.
CRUMP, MELANIE AUSTIN. D.M.A. When Words Are Not Enough: Tracing the
Development of Extended Vocal Techniques in Twentieth-Century America. (2008)
Directed by Mr. David Holley, 93 pp.
Schauman, Clara S., "Premiering Pierrot lunaire, from Berlin to New York: Reception, Criticism, and Modernism." Master 's Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2006. http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/1787 http://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3140&context=utk_gradthes Schoenberg, Arnold. “My Evolution.” In Style and Idea edited by Leonard Stein with translations by Leo Black, 79-92. New York: St. Martin’s, 1975.
Schoenberg, A. Style and Idea. Edited by Leonard Stein with translations by Leo Black. New York: St. Martin’s, 1975.
Schoenberg, Arnold. Verklärte Nacht and Pierrot Lunaire. Dover Publications. New York, 1994.
Alvin Toffler, 1984. Future Shock. 0 Edition. Bantam.
Wood, Ralph W.. Concerning "Sprechgesang", Tempo, new series no. 2, December 1946.
How did we come to Contemporary Vocal Music as it is today?
An exploration of how the 20th Century has changed vocal techniques.
Contemporary Music is a time in classical music history in which all previously set boundaries were pushed and broken in order to discover new things, new sounds, and new ways of doing things. This is all evident when looking at contemporary vocal music.
Before the Contemporary era, a vocal performer would only sing or speak. Europe was at the forefront of singing technique with the Italian Bel Canto school, teaching an expressive style of singing most associated with opera. The school itself died out in the mid 19th Century but its style and ideals were continued in vocal performance into the 20th Century.
In the 20th Century, Composer began testing the boundaries in music in all senses, exploring everything from tonality to structure to performance and instrumental techniques. The exploration of vocal techniques has potentially been the most lucrative in discover extended instrumental techniques.
“Extended vocal technique is in some ways entirely self-descriptive - it extends the boundaries of what most would consider a normal singing technique to include (potentially) any and all the sounds …show more content…
the human voice is capable of making.”
J. K. Halfyard
So what are Extended Vocal Techniques? Melanie Austin Crump describes them as:
“Known as “extended vocal practices,” the “extra-normal voice,” or “extended techniques,” to name but a few, EVTs may be defined as a body of practices conveyed through nontraditional methods of vocal production, possibly altering the natural timbre of the voice for the purpose of musical expression. EVTs include such devices as, Sprechstimme or Sprechgesang, shouting and whispering, laughter and crying, glissandi, microtones, altered or eliminated vibrato, sound production through inhalation and exhalation, vowel morphing, amplified or electronically generated vocal alterations, and nonsense syllables or phonemes, all of which could be accompanied by movement, improvisation and/or the playing of instruments by the singer. This list is not exhaustive as EVTs vary from performer to performer.”
M. A. Crump
The early 20th Century saw composers beginning to write music for vocalists, not just to sing, but to use their voices in different ways. It is said that this exploration of the voices capabilities can be traced back to Arnold Schoenburg. In his melodrama Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg uses a technique called Sprechgesang or Sprechstimme.
“ ‘Sprechgesang’ means a ‘parlando’ manner of singing, and indeed is translated in standard dictionaries as ‘recitative’, whereas ‘Sprechstimme’ in itself simply means speaking voice.”
R.Wood, 1946
Sprechstimme is a vocal technique that had been used before Pierrot Lunaire was written. The earliest known compositional use of Sprechstimme was in Engelbert Humperdinck 's 1897 melodrama Königskinder. However, it was Schoenberg who truly made use of the technique, using it in compositions from 1911 (Gurre-Lieder). Schoenberg made Sprechgesang more than just speaking to accompaniment and maintaining pitches, and different to singing.
"The goal is certainly not at all a realistic, natural speech. On the contrary, the difference between ordinary speech and speech that collaborates in a musical form must be made plain. But it should not call singing to mind, either."
A. Schoenberg
Being the first to use a technique such as this in his work, Schoenberg had to explain how he wanted the Sprechgesang to be performed. Giving explicit instructions of how the pitch sound not be stuck to rigidly, but to start at it and move around it, in his own words “immediately abandons it [the given pitch] by falling or rising” (Schoenberg). When giving the first performance of Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg was able to work with the vocalist to achieve the exact sound he wanted. However, in later performances, vocalists struggled to grasp what it was that Schoenberg was aiming for as the technique was so innovative. As with anything new, there were criticisms surrounding Schoenberg’s writing for Sprechgesang. Pierre Boulez criticised Schoenberg for wanting to write something different and with new techniques but not really knowing what he wanted to achieve in terms of its sound, almost like he was doing it just to be controversial rather the explorative.
“The question arises whether it is actually possible to speak according to a notation devised for singing. This was the real problem at the root of all the controversies. Schoenberg 's own remarks on the subject are not in fact clear."
Pierre Boulez
This feeling was shared among traditionalist Europeans and critics across the Atlantic. American audiences and critics struggled to understand Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. America moved more slowly with the development in Classical musical than European composers after the First World War “...newer developments including musical modernism did not reach American until well after their emergence in Austria and Germany.” They thought Schoenberg’s compositional techniques to be “a foreign and unnecessary concept” as well as being deemed incomprehensible. Although more widely understood in Europe, Schoenberg was criticized for his “musical innovations”.
Schoenberg reinvented the technique of Sprechgesang, building upon what Sprechgesang was perceived to be at the time – speaking to musical accompaniment, and combining it with the expressive nature of the Bel Canto singing style, creating a technique far from anything anyone had ever done before, more avant-garde than it was before and opening the floodgates for the exploration of vocal techniques.
The Italian Futurist movement also began working towards changing the way vocal music was composed. Again using poetry as a base, authors such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti began to write vocal pieces using what are considered to be the first examples of graphic scores. Zang Tumb Tumb is a collection of sound poems, all written in unconventional ways, exploring rhythm and the sounds that can be made with different letter combinations.
“The dynamic rhythms and onomatopoetic possibilities that the new form offered were made even more effective through the revolutionary use of different typefaces, forms and graphic arrangements and sizes that became a distinctive part of Futurism.”
Caroline Tisdall & Angelo Bozzola
fig. 1 Example of the layout within a copy of Zang Tumb Tumb.
The latter half of the 20th Century was when composers truly began to explore extended techniques for all instruments. Drawing influences from Dadaism, Futurism and Surrealism, American and European composers in the 1950s began experimenting with electro-acoustic composing. This allowed composers to explore the timbres beyond those that were considered “possible and correct” for instruments and voices, breaking away from what was expected. Electro-acoustic composing forced composers to consider other aspects of their writing that must be perhaps sacrificed in their writing in using different techniques; they needed more flexibility in things such as pitch and rhythm. With this knowledge from the electro-acoustic exploration, composers came back to composing for acoustic, more instruments and ensembles.
This need for flexibility and consideration of compromising some compositional aspects in order to facilitate new playing techniques is something that wasn’t considered by Schoenberg and his contemporaries in the early 20th Century, years before Extended Vocal Technique became a more prominent compositional component. This isprobably why later composers like Pierre Boulez were critical of him and how he composed for extended techniques to begin with. However, the fundamental difference between Schoenberg, Ives and Cowell, and later composers, such as Berio, Stockhausen, Kagel, Ligeti and Cage, is the exposure to technology and the ability to explore another world of sound before coming back to the acoustic world and exploring that further. Another difference between the two groups of composers is the availability of performers willing to work with composers to achieve a different form of vocal performance.
The exploration of Extended Vocal Technique began at the end of the 1950s. A lot of vocal music was written, predominantly for the female voice with composers writing for specific performers. In 1958, John Cage wrote Aria, a piece written specifically for the American singer, Cathy Berberian. Cage and Berberian lead the way in the vocalist/composer partnership moving into the heyday of Extended Vocal Technique: The 1960s and 1970s. Berberian worked extensively with composers such as Cage, Busotti, Stravinsky and Burgess among others. Her most lucrative partnership musically however, was the one between Berberian and her then husband, Luciano Berio. Berio composed works such as Sequenza III for woman’s voice (1965), Circles (1960) and Recital I (for Cathy) (1972). Berberian explored composition for herself, writing Stripsody (1966). The piece is built around exploiting vocal technique using onomatopoeia, particularly words from comic books or graphic novels, combine with characterisation to create different sounds. Berberian was one of the pioneers of Extended Vocal Techniques, interpreting not only specifically designed works but popular music as well more traditional classical pieces. She is famed for her interpretation of the Beatles in Beatles Arias, taking Beatles songs and singing them in a Baroque style. Berberian embodies what I consider to be the compositional attitude to extended vocal techniques, pushing boundaries and being controversial and experimental. I think this is evident from her piece Stripsody. The onomatopoeic words as well as characterized sentences in this piece give the impression that Berberian is testing just how much she can do in one composition, exploring a huge amount of sounds that can be made using only the human voice and mouth.
Another notable contemporary vocal artist is Jane Manning, and English Singer of Contemporary Music. Manning has written extensively on contemporary vocal technique. When asked to define Extended Vocal Technique, Manning responds:
“I am inclined to bristle when asked to explain ‘extended vocal techniques’, since these seem to me to be largely a matter of rationalizing, annotating, and coordinating a variety of everyday sounds, which would all be familiar in different contexts. If the tonal inflections of a baby’s scream were to be notated exactly, or even the precise rhythmic values of rubato in Debussy or Delius, the visual result would be extremely complex.”
As well as being a prolific writer on Vocal techniques, Manning is also a dominant force in performance, premiering over 300 works of contemporary music as well as touring the world with her virtuosic ensemble.
Ivan Hewitt writes:
“For many people Jane Manning is simply the voice of contemporary classical music in this country. Anyone who took an interest in this burgeoning area of music in the 1970s and '80s grew up with the sound of her astonishing voice in their ears. It’s instantly recognisable, but it’s also a chameleon. Whether she’s faced with the pure angular leaps of Anton Webern, the throaty suggestiveness of Schoenberg or the black, crazed humour of Gyorgy Ligeti, Jane Manning is always equal to the task.”
Manning shows the skill needed to perform Extended Vocal Techniques, studying and the Royal Academy of Music and fronting an ensemble of virtuosic musicians (Jane’s Minstrels). Manning is the definition of a classically trained vocal performer. She understands each piece of music she performs whether it be a piece of Baroque Chamber music or Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. I think this scholarship and professionalism is something that sets aside those performers who dare to take on Contemporary pieces. The discipline to accept that everything you are asked to do is part of the music and what the composer wanted you to perform. This is why artists such as Manning have such long careers and are held in such high esteem by their peers and by critics.
J.
K. Halfyard considers Meredith Monk to be the most significant performer of Extended Vocal Techniques. Monk is both a performer and composer of contemporary vocal music famed mostly for her work with extended vocal techniques. A distinguished soloist with a long list of accomplishments, Monk has been working within Contemporary Music from the late 1960s and is still working today. A lot of her explorative work has been building upon and running parallel to the work of the European composers of the 1960s, creating her own “distinctive idiom” with her voice and compositions. Monk has explored in depth Extended Vocal Techniques within ensemble singing, something which her European contemporaries steered clear
of.
Monk on her own work:
"In most of my music, theatre pieces and films, I try to express a sense of timelessness; of time as a recurring cycle."
Monk demonstrates what I consider to be the best way to explore Extended Vocal Techniques in Contemporary Music; writing for herself, seeing what other’s are doing and moving forward with it.
A male performer worth noting is Roy Hart. Hart’s ability to perform Extended Vocal Techniques was physiological. Roy Hart had the ability to sing chords, as well as having a five octave range. These abilities made Hart extraordinarily versatile as a performer.
Throughout history, we have improved and progressed every technique known to man, musical or not. This progress causes new beginning and new discoveries. It is human nature to explore and force new discoveries. I believe that this has happened for Vocal Music. It may seem sudden, given that the vast majority of this development happened in the space of around 15 years, and the fact that no one had ever heard such techniques shocked and even appalled audience.
“...the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.”
Alvin Toffler
The development of Extended Vocal Technique was a natural progression, just long overdue.
Bibliography
Caroline Tisdall & Angelo Bozzola, Futurism, Oxford University Press 1978, Quoted in Via Libri
Halfyard J. K. Home. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.sequenza.me.uk/index.html. [Accessed 1 January 2014].
Hewitt, I. Jane’s Minstrels at the Purcell Room, review – Telegraph [ONLINE] available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalconcertreviews/7345656/Janes-Minstrels-at-the-Purcell-Room-review.html. [Accessed 1 January 2014].
Jane Manning, New Vocal Repertory 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1.
CRUMP, MELANIE AUSTIN. D.M.A. When Words Are Not Enough: Tracing the
Development of Extended Vocal Techniques in Twentieth-Century America. (2008)
Directed by Mr. David Holley, 93 pp.
Schauman, Clara S., "Premiering Pierrot lunaire, from Berlin to New York: Reception, Criticism, and Modernism." Master 's Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2006. http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/1787 http://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3140&context=utk_gradthes Schoenberg, Arnold. “My Evolution.” In Style and Idea edited by Leonard Stein with translations by Leo Black, 79-92. New York: St. Martin’s, 1975.
Schoenberg, A. Style and Idea. Edited by Leonard Stein with translations by Leo Black. New York: St. Martin’s, 1975.
Schoenberg, Arnold. Verklärte Nacht and Pierrot Lunaire. Dover Publications. New York, 1994.
Alvin Toffler, 1984. Future Shock. 0 Edition. Bantam.
Wood, Ralph W.. Concerning "Sprechgesang", Tempo, new series no. 2, December 1946.