Introduction
Art Song Anima: Ambiguities, Authenticities, Auguries was an Exploratory Workshop funded by a grant from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia awarded to Principal Investigator Rena Sharon, School of Music.
Song, the joining of verbal language with the language of pitched frequencies, is a fundamental mode of human expressivity and experiential archive. Its ubiquity suggests a primeval universal instinct with an enigmatic purposefulness. The familiarity of song as part of the social fabric is so natural as to appear unremarkable, and its diminutive structure can suggest insubstantiality. Rather, it comprises an immense store of information in a densely concentrated package: its role as aural chronicle is self-evident, with avenues for humanities studies from philosophy to anthropology, but song is also a container for information about human communication, cognition and neuroscience. Documented therapeutic applications in healthcare scenarios with Alzheimers patients offer intriguing examples of its efficacy and raise questions as to its deeper structure of meaning and usefulness to the brain and well-being.
Song resounds among all human communities, bearing our legacies in a form that traverses millennia.
In Western Classical "art song", poetic text is fused to musical composition to create an interwoven hybrid language, wherein the generated alterations to each medium can symbiotically intensify aspects of comprehension. The relative abstraction of music is offered a lexicon of gestural icons through its pairing with poetic image, while its aural textures, rhythm and melodic inflection impose a sensory dimensionality upon verbal text. This workshop was held as a scholarly companion to the Vancouver International Song Institute, which was being co-hosted by the UBC School of Music and the National Association of Teachers of Singing. World-renowned scholars and performers taught at VISI in an interdisciplinary course of study, while a concurrent performance festival offered twenty recitals on campus, nine recitals in healthcare facilities, and diverse opportunities for interface with the workshop. The workshop focused on diverse topics, with the overall goal of presenting Art Song as an interdisciplinary gateway for a compendium of art/science dialogues and productive research. An array of research questions were proposed, in a format buildt from an art focus into topics of cognition, neuroscience, and medicine. The art-based material was cutting-edge, as were the interconnections of speech, song, and potential science-based research.
