Play Who You Need To Play

Guro von Germeten makes the case for using original cast recordings of musical theatre pieces in looking at vocal styles and behaviors of the performers. Sonic information from the performers is as informative as the written score.

Drawing on musicology, voice studies, and cultural sociology, the author argues, because of the range of styles used in the genre of musical theatre, cast recordings can aid singers and voice instructors understand the variety of vocal behaviors and demands. Thinking of the recorded performance as a script, music analysis is based on the social interactions between performers and the acoustic signs not necessarily found in the written score.

An intentional listening practice can be a helpful method for learning the technical and aesthetic tools used by elite performers. Musical theatre vocal works are thick aesthetic events, where the performer adds subjective artistic choices and individual timbre to the established notion of the immutability of the authored score and libretto. A listener has the ability to make conclusions about the musical qualities and vocal effects created on the recording.

A listener assigns meaning to the sound that is being created. When helped being trained into becoming an intentional listener, a student can interpret the many layers of another person’s performance to know what to borrow and what not to borrow in a complex process of creating and critique.