What is the difference between hearing something said and hearing something sung? At first glance, it would appear to be fundamentally very little: the presence of music gives varying tones and pitches to the speech of course, but surely that wouldn’t be enough to change anything within the text itself. However, music not only affects the text, but dictates our whole understanding of what we are hearing, and what we are performing.

That’s all thanks to the introduction of a third party, the composer, who does all the interpreting for us through their setting of the source. In the spoken word tradition, the interpretive process is usually carried out by the speaker themselves, creating a direct relationship with the text (as well as the author behind it) to inform their delivery of the words. However, the presence of a composer disrupts this link between author and speaker: in the case of this concert, the performer is presented with Alessandro Scarlatti’s imagining of John’s Gospel, and in their storytelling must subject themselves to interpreting Scarlatti’s reading and reproduction of John’s narrative.

Join Vocatio:Responsio, in the first leg of their exciting tour of Oxford and Liverpool, as they aim to shine understanding on the first Passion setting written in seventeenth-century Italy, as well as a closer examination on music’s relationship with spoken text, how music affects our perception of the words we are hearing.

£5