One of the main areas of my research in contemporary performance practice as an academic and as a performing musician is extended vocal technique. Relatively little has been written about this, and the following brief history may prove useful to anyone getting started in the field. For further information, the main publication dealing with the history and analysis of extended vocal composition is Alternative Voices, by Istvan Anhalt (1982). Jane Mannings series of books on Contemporary Vocal Repertoire include some extended vocal works, and the papers in the research section of this site may also be of interest.
A very brief history of Extended Vocal Technique
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 the human voice is capable of making. Its history in Art Music is usually traced back to Schoenberg's use of Sprechgesang in Pierrot Lunaire (1912), where the performer (originally Albertine Zehmer) is designated a reciter, and delivers the text in a half singing, half speaking voice, and this is perhaps typical of much EVT: it isn't always to do with making outrageous and unusual sounds, but simply of doing things that singers are not expected to do in most repertoire.
Around the same time that Schoenberg was writing Pierrot Lunaire, the Italian Futurists developed ideas to do with sound poetry in such things as F T Marinetti's epic performance poem Zang Tumb Tuum (1913). They were, in fact drawing on ideas outlined by the French poets, Mallarmé and Apollinaire, in the 1890s. To a greater extent Apollinaire was only theorizing about what might be done with the sonic and visual aspects of poetry, but Mallarmé’s remarkable 1897 “visual poem” Un Coup de Dès Jamais n'Abolira le Hasard (A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance) is a clear precursor to the Futurists experiments from around 1909 onwards. The Futurist use of the sonic and visual in poetry, and of typography as an early form of graphic score, was soon taken up by the Dadaists around 1916. They went on to develop various forms of performance poetry that the sonic aspects of words and non-grammatical, almost anti-linguistic means of working with words which relied on randomized visual arrangements of them. Two of the most well known of the Dada poets were Hugo Ball, in works such as Sea Horses and Flying Fish, and Gadji Beri Bimba and Tristan Tzara, the inventor of cut-up poetry and the static poem (an earlier performance form of cut-ups, where words were written on cards and arranged before an audience, then collected up and rearranged, and so on until the audience rebelled).
In the latter half of the 20th century, various composers in Europe and America began experimenting with similar ideas, often using texts drawn from or closely related to Futurist, Dada and Surrealist experiments such as James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Many of these composers (including Berio, Stockhausen, Kagel, Ligeti and Cage) had started working in the early electroacoustic studios in Milan, Cologne and Paris in the 1950s. This new kind of composition had made them all much more aware of ideas of timbre above and beyond the range of timbres that were considered possible and “correct” for voices and instruments, and it also required them as composers to think much more flexibly about things such as pitch and rhythm. The result was that from the late 1950s onwards, ideas explored in the electroacoustic studio started finding their way back into these composers' acoustic compositions, and the whole area of extended techniques for both instruments and voices began to develop in earnest, foreshadowed by Schoenberg and early American pioneers such as Charles Ives and Henry Cowell..
In particular, a fairly significant repertoire has been written for female singers, large numbers of pieces being written specifically for singers such as Cathy Berberian, Mary Thomas, Jane Manning and Nicola Walker-Smith. One of the earliest was Aria, written by John Cage for Berberian in 1958, and although the heyday of EVT was the 1960s and early 1970s, there are still many composers using extended techniques in their work, particularly electroacoustic composers writing works that also involve live performers. Significant practitioners working primarily in the US include William Pearson, Diamanda Galas and, of course, Meredith Monk. In a career spanning forty years, Monk is without question the most significant performer in this genre who is equally a composer, composing with and on her own voice to create a distinctive idiom that runs in parallel to the repertoire being created mainly by male composers for female singers in Europe.
The most famous male singer in this genre was the extraordinary Roy Hart, for whom Peter Maxwell Davies wrote Eight songs for a Mad King in 1969. Hart could sing chords (he could even produced quite well tuned chords) as well as having a five octave range and astonishing versatility. The British composer Trevor Wishart has also done a great deal of experimenting, performing and composing in this area, producing extended works such as the Vox cycle for four vocalists and tape.
One of the most famous pieces in the repertoire is Luciano Berio's Sequenza III (1966), also written for Cathy Berberian, and after which this site is named.