Artist Portrait No. 19: Felicita Brusoni (vocal experimenter)

Meet Felicita Brusoni, Italian singer and voice researcher. Felicita is pursuing a doctorate at Malmö Academy of Music is Sweden (part of Lund University) where she is working on a project called “A Voice Beyond the Edge.” One of her main mentors is composer Michael Edgerton, author of The 21st Century Voice: Contemporary and Traditional Extra Normal Voice which is a catalog of vocal sounds that often comes up in conversations about extended vocal techniques. As the name of Felicita’s artistic research project implies, this is definitely going to be an episode for voice geeks but also for those who like the bizarre. Felicita and I talk about the inaccuracy of the term “extended vocal techniques,” about the somewhat hard-to-define but increasingly popular discipline of “artistic research,” about the difference between extended techniques in the mid-20th century and today, about Felicita’s fresh discovery that humans can produce ultrasounds, but also about singers Cathy Berberian and even Maria Callas and, at the end, Felicita even tries to teach me an extended technique I hadn’t done before – to mixed results. Felicita’s website: https://www.felicitabrusoni.com/ Felicita’s Instagram: @felicitabrusoni_soprano 🎵 Music: Felicita Brusoni sings Vinko Globukar’s Jehnseits der Sicherheit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5AyEU4mpBk&t=297s Felicita Brusoni sings Michael Edgerton’s Anaphora: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgkiWUgNEdA&t=344s Cathy Berberian sings Luciano Berio‘s Folk Songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiRgEFotRxM Cathy Berberian sings Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hxjCIANddU Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi in murder scene from Tosca: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnFlg1z1hPc For more about Artists on the Verge: 💋👁👂🏼 Website: https://onthevergetrilogy.com/ Insta: @Soprano_on_the_verge