Verica Grmuša, Independent Scholar
This paper explores the digital streaming of live music events as a factor impacting the art song performance tradition. It presents a sample of Oxford Lieder Festival 2020 performers’ experiences of their live streamed festival performances (online-only setting), captured via an online questionnaire. Adding a longitudinal dimension to the study, it compares these findings with the same sample’s experiences of their performances in the hybrid setting of the festival the following year (streamed with live audience present), followed by findings from 2023/24 festival return to live-only setting.
The questionnaires covered issues arising in online performance, from the length of the programme, choice of repertory and languages, use of translations; to performance and ‘storytelling’: issues arising from the absence of the audience and camera placement and approaches to word/music dynamics. Reports of increased awareness of stage ‘persona’ resulting in changes to performance (choice and extent of performance gestures, interaction with the performing partner, change in attention to text, timing and nature of the ‘gaps’ between the songs) call for discussion in the context of the levels of identity at play in art song performance (in terms of Auslander’s person/persona/character) not present in other vocal genres (i.e. opera).
Performers’ unanimous reports of ‘live performance’ experience in online-only settings, further blurring the boundaries between ‘mediatised’ and ‘live’ art song, force us to reappraise the nature of ‘liveness’ and the concept of stage itself, as well as impact of streaming on future of art-song performance.
Biography: Verica Grmuša is a classically trained soprano and a scholar interested in vocal performance. She studied vocal performance at the University of Arts in Belgrade and at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Grmuša completed her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2018, followed by the Early Career Research Fellowship at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research interests are performance, art song, nationalism, gender, and stardom. Her current projects include The Art Song Platform, an ongoing forum for knowledge-exchange and the enhancement of performance as research in the genre of art song and a collaborative blog, Women’s Song Forum (https://www.womensongforum.org/).