Richard Pennycuick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>I've just bought a CD of overtures by JPE Hartmann.  It contains a work
>called The Golden Horns which uses a speaker.  It's a form I find very
>annoying. ...
>
>Anyone to defend?

I honestly don't believe that art forms should be defended: if their
achievements (or otherwise) can't speak for themselves, no amount of talk
will protect them.  What is true is that the rare hybrid of music with
spoken accompaniment is an extremely difficult beast to tame (technically;
as well as artistically); & that these difficulties tend to be exaggerated
by current recording processes.

On the technical side: balancing sound levels between speaker & ensemble
remains the greatest challenge facing a composer in this form & few can
truly claim to have pulled it off without artificial amplification (the
famous case of Walton's _Facade_ - which was premiered with Dame Edith
declaiming her texts through a megaphone - is only one of a number of such
shortcuts taken by composers trying desperately to make the mixture work...
Humphrey Searle's trilogy of works for speaker/s & chorus are literally
impossible to perform without artificial amplification); but recordings
almost inevitably reverse the problem by throwing the soloist so far
forward that the ensemble's performance seems to be coming in via email
(the Delos _Lincoln Portrait_ with James Earl Jones is a particularly bad
example of this practice...  assuming that you can get the image of Darth
Vader reading Lincoln texts out of your head, that is); while post-dubbing
the narration (which is the almost always the case in recordings such as
these) almost always _sounds_ post-dubbed...  ie, the speaker sounds as
though he/she is following the music rather than the other way around.

All the best,

Robert Clements <[log in to unmask]>
<http://www.ausnet.net.au/~clemensr/welcome.htm>