Voice Piece for Soprano
Voice Piece for Soprano is a 1961 vocal composition by the Japanese artist and musician Yoko Ono.
Work
The score for the piece consists of the word 'scream' with three options for screaming given to the performer; to scream 'against the wind', 'against the wall' and 'against the sky'.[1]
The theorist G Douglas Barrett in his 2016 book After Sound: Toward a Critical Music described the repetition of the word 'against' in the score for Vocal Piece for Soprano as redoubling "the screams singularly confrontational, antagonistic, and contrarian quality".[1]
History
The piece was part of Ono's 2010 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Ono performed the piece herself several times during the duration of the exhibition, and visitors were encouraged via an "instruction piece" to scream into an amplified microphone. The sound of visitors screaming could be heard throughout the atrium of the museum for he duration of the exhibition from July to November, with the screams being heard as high as the museum's fifth floor.[2]
References
- ^ a b G Douglas Barrett (11 August 2016). After Sound: Toward a Critical Music. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 126–. ISBN 978-1-5013-0809-3.
- ^ Carol Vernallis; Amy Herzog; John Richardson (August 2015). The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media. Oxford University Press. pp. 159–. ISBN 978-0-19-025817-7.
