RIDING THE WILD OCEAN: HORATIU RADULESCU'S SUBCONSCIOUS WAVE IN THEORY, PERFORMANCE AND RECORDING

This article focuses on Radulescu's 1984 Subconscious Wave, for guitar and pre-recorded digital sound, a work that features on my 2019 solo CD recording Refracted Resonance, for Métier Records, alongside music by Tristan Murail, Christopher Fox, George Holloway and myself. The article places the work in the context of Radulescu's output, demonstrates how it displays the key aesthetic concepts that drive his music and shares my insights into the technical and interpretive aspects of preparing the piece for performance and recording. The article has been adapted from a lecture-recital given at the 2021 edition of the 21st Century Guitar Conference, which was hosted by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (NOVA FCSH), Portugal in March 2021.

Maud MacCarthy: ‘The Musicking Body’

This chapter highlights the pioneering work of Maud MacCarthy and its reception. Drawing on century-old field notes, transcriptions and manuscripts, it demonstrates that MacCarthy absorbed Indian music through immersion and practice in India; upon her return to Britain in the 1910s, she initiated cross-cultural collaborations and influenced figures such as Arthur Fox-Strangways and Gustav Holst. Photographs, lecture-recital scripts and press cuttings suggest that MacCarthy became a ‘musicking body’, exemplified by the dynamic hand gestures which accompanied her singing. The chapter contextualises the dismissal of her work within the nationalist Indian and British colonial discourses which sought to proscribe gesture, the body and, by extension, women, in classical music. It was the MacCarthy-Foulds ‘Indo-European Orchestra’ which broadcast from 1930s Delhi, which Ravi Shankar took up, unacknowledged, when he became director of the station. Although erased from the history of East–West musical interactions, MacCarthy’s work has thus had an enduring effect.

Burleigh’s Singing Career

This chapter focuses on Harry T. Burleigh's singing career. When Burleigh auditioned for admission to the Artist's Course at the National Conservatory of Music, his goal was to become a classical concert singer. Like soprano Sissieretta Jones, he wanted to sing arias and art songs in recital. Like other well-known black singers, Burleigh sang for audiences in African American venues throughout the East and Midwest, as well as for mixed audiences, and on many occasions he sang for audiences that were primarily white. As he became known nationwide as “the premiere baritone of the race” and as the leading black composer in the early twentieth century, he was often invited to present full recitals, to represent African Americans as part of a program of American music, or to give a lecture-recital on spirituals. One of Burleigh's favorite accompanists was pianist R. Augustus Lawson. This chapter also examines Burleigh's contribution to the tradition of African American art music, along with his use of the works of American song composers and his collaboration with them.