From Melodrama to Vocalizing Pianist – The Evolution of a Genre

Abstract

Works featuring a solo pianist playing the piano while reciting text and performing vocalized effects emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This genre, known as vocalizing pianist, became popular among contemporary composers, and many of them began exploring the different possibilities of this genre. The genre of vocalizing pianist did not appear suddenly at the end of the twentieth century, but evolved from Romantic melodramas during a hundred years of profound change – musical, cultural, and technological. Romantic melodramas evolved in a multitude of ways and developed different techniques as time passes, while allowing later composers to embrace the musical influence around them to create a new genre. It is through a multi-pronged evolution that vocalizing pianist is created. From the genesis of late Romantic melodramas created through the combination of the early French and German melodramatic tradition, to the invention of Sprechstimme by Arnold Schoenberg and the experimentation of vocal events for the pianist by George Crumb and John Cage, the vocalizing pianist genre comes to its maturation in the 1990s in the hands of Frederic Rzewski and Jerome Kitzke. This study will investigate how the vocalizing pianist genre appeared and how it adopted earlier genres and techniques.