Interpreting musical solitude through practice-led research: a reflexive study of four vocal works

Abstract

Understanding musical solitude in vocal performance requires tracing how musical and poetic observations inform embodied interpretive decisions across contrasting repertoires. This study examines four contrasting vocal works, Henry Purcell’s O Solitude , Claude Debussy’s Le son du cor s’afflige vers les bois , Alban Berg’s Wir arme Leut! from Wozzeck , and Ildebrando Pizzetti’s Oscuro è il ciel , to investigate how musical solitude is recognized, interpreted, and realized through reflexive artistic inquiry. A qualitative practice-led research design integrated score and text analysis, historical and musicological contextualization, embodied vocal experimentation, iterative recording comparison, and critical reflection. Poetic and dramatic texts were treated as integral components of the score, informing decisions about declamation, prosody, phrasing, breathing, diction, resonance, timbre, dynamics, and expressive timing. Comparative analysis suggested that musical solitude was realized through relationships among score, text, context, and vocal practice rather than through any isolated expressive feature. A final cross-case synthesis brought these understandings together under four repertoire-specific interpretive mechanisms: Exposure, Suspension, Fragmentation, and Restraint. Each mechanism names an interpretive relationship through which textual meaning informed vocal sound and artistic performance. These case-grounded formulations offer a vocabulary for examining interpretive decision-making, not a fixed classification of solitude. By showing how musical structure, poetic meaning, and embodied vocal practice mutually inform artistic inquiry, the study contributes to methodological understanding of practice-led research and offers a framework that may be tested or adapted in further studies of vocal interpretation.