2025 Theses Doctoral

Defamiliarizing the Voice: Approaches to Vocal Composition in the Music of Anna Korsun, Charmaine Lee, and Anna-Louise Walton

Walton, Anna-Louise Randolph

The voice is a unique instrument which is integrated into the body and culturally trained from birth. Due to its distinctive identity, many composers have the instinct to obfuscate its humanness in search of an instrument more malleable to their creative pursuits. I present Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization, "to increase the difficulty and length of perception,” as a framework for this approach to the voice. I posit that making the voice unfamiliar or strange provokes a heightened state of listening. By contemplating whether a sound’s source is human or not, the listener perceives the voice anew.

I look first to Anna Korsun’s piece Ulenflucht for twenty singing and playing performers, which integrates primal vocal techniques with animal calls and bird whistles to create an imagined environment in which the voice is one of many creatures.

I then turn to the vocal improvisations of Charmaine Lee, whose intimate integration of her voice with technology blurs the boundaries between human and machine.

Finally, I relate the music of Korsun and Lee to one of my pieces, the deep glens where they lived for vocal sextet, which mediates the voice with PVC pipes and close microphone techniques. This music explores the rich and fragile nature of the human voice, and in so doing reframes, reimagines, and redefines it.