American bass-baritone Dashon Burton's 2015 recording of the song sermon “He Never Said a Mumberlin’ Word” provides a case study of the interaction between sung melodies and audible breaths in the expression of a lyric. Acknowledging the relationship between Burton's performance and earlier notated arrangements by Roland Hayes, J. Rosamond Johnson, William Arms Fischer, and John W. Work, this study draws an arc from the macro-level of the song sermon's oral and notated history to the micro-level of Burton's sung syllables and, finally, to a spectrographic examination of his individual breaths. One of these, the solemnizing breath that inaugurates the fifth stanza of the work, is pinpointed as the expressive denouement of Burton's track. A contrast is drawn between the liturgical framework of Hayes's arrangement and the images of anti-racist protest marches that accompany Burton's recording. An emphasis on the granular aspects of Burton's voice invokes Sanden's concept of corporeal liveness, Barthes's writings on cinematic sound, and Bain's recognition of breath sounds as music. Studying the narrative totality of Burton's utterance engenders a connection between singer and orator, and builds a historical continuity between Burton and his antecedents.
The audible creaking of Glenn Gould’s loose-jointed piano chair has historically been the subject of apologetic liner notes and recording studio memoirs. These chair creaks are here recognized as “sounded movements” of Gould’s body. This article triangulates the score of Schoenberg’s Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, op. 19, no. 1, published analyses of its unique rhythmic unfolding, and new micro-temporal measurements of Gould’s September 1965 recording of the work. Quantifying Sanden’s concept of “corporeal liveness,” spectrographic tools are used to generate a proper census of all the sounds captured by the microphone in order to map their rhythmic interaction. A notable “creak gap” in Gould’s recording is linked to published observations regarding the work’s process of emerging metric clarity, and one of Gould’s vocal elaborations is recognized for its augmentation of Schoenberg’s pitch material. Overlaying analytical literature with microtiming data reveals a correlation between the composition’s trajectory of metric clarification and the decrease in Gould’s physical motion. The findings are used to question the pervasive and disturbing suppression of non-notated sounds that accompany the recording of notated music. Recognizing sounds that are normally marginalized, this study fuses theoretical observations about Schoenberg’s composition with the audio artifacts of Gould’s corporeality.
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