Voice and Rhythm
Performed Poetry between Rehearsed Speech and Liveness
Despite sharing some similar characteristics such as dynamics, rhythm, and meter, for the most part music is “heard” and poetry is “read.” However, the mere reading aloud and, building on this, the artistic articulation of words both have an acoustic dimension. Since the turn of the millennium, live oral forms of poetry that are subsequently distributed digitally have been expanding the literary canon of forms. Thus, the acoustic-performative dimension of a genre that has been primarily considered in written form so far, is becoming more and more prominent. In order to do justice to the current diversity of the oral presentation forms of poetic texts, this dissertation project considers both classical poetry readings and less formal spoken-word formats, as well as the musical realization of poetry in the form of rap performances. Due to the various characteristics of vocal and performative extravagance, these forms differ by degree.
Apart from a few exceptions, almost all oral presentations of poetry share one particular characteristic: it is usually authors and artists themselves who create and present their works vocally, rhythmically, and performatively. This results in some fundamental questions regarding the creation or maintenance of a certain image and, closely linked to this, keeping the promise of being authentic to the audience. It is possible to discern various strategies to achieve such authenticity effects on different levels (behaviour, stage design, marketing, etc.). At first glance, poetry readings, spoken word formats, and rap performances reveal individual, recurring sequences, sets of rules and modes of presentation, including the fact that they are subject to a certain spatiality, temporality, and different procedures. Whether rituality and framing also have an impact on the authors’ and artists’ authenticity, is another object of inquiry of this dissertation.
This interdisciplinary dissertation focuses on the subsections of voice, rhythm, and performance. With regard to the oral presentation of poetic texts, these aspects interact in an area of tension between artistic arrangement (rehearsed) and event (supposedly spontaneous). Furthermore, it considers framing, staging strategies, and authenticity effects, on the one hand, in order to put forward basic propositions regarding the arrangement of oral presentations of poetry and, on the other hand, to point out similarities and differences in the structure (both of the performance and of the oral realization) of the presentation. Consequently, the aim of this project is to combine methods and theories from the fields of literary, media, and theater studies as well as musicology and speech science. For the field of speech science, it will both establish oral poetry as an object of analysis and increase academic discourse on the oral presentation of poetry.
Rebecka Dürr’s study “On Rhythm and Voice. Sprechwissenschaftliche Untersuchung von Lyriklesung, Spoken Word und Rap” will be written in German.