The Neuromantics – Episode 6

In Episode 6 of the Neuromantics, we conduct an allegro ma non troppo investigation of pitch, timbre and the high drama of embodied sound – what we feel when we sing, and why we sing at all. The two papers under vocal attack – but think Philly Soul as well as Kirsten Flagstad – are Gerald J. Balzano’s “What Are Musical Pitch and Timbre?” (1974, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40285339?seq=1) and “Notes on Music and Opera” by W. H. Auden, from his wonderful anthology of essays, The Dyer’s Hand (1963, shorturl.at/fsTU7).

Concert highlights include: the way pitch is more than wave-form and timbre is fundamental to speech (and sense-making) as well as music; how dynamic pitch implies relationships, some of which give us the structure of the scale; how a single note or tone can take us on musical and psychological journeys, from the circle of fifths to Klangfarbenmelodie (sound-colour melody); why it is men have a falsetto and women, arguably, do not; why operatic tragic heroines really enjoy dying of TB.