'I'm whispering into your ear - and we couldn't be further apart.' A woman, a phone call, a final conversation. In this extraordinary and prophetic monologue a woman fights for the person she loves. Jean Cocteau's iconic play explores our desperate need for human relationships - and the machine that has changed them forever.

The rapid pace of technological change over the last decade, particularly the rise of social media, has deeply affected the ways in which we interact as individuals, in groups, and among institutions to the point that it is difficult to grasp what it would be like to lose access to this everyday aspect of modern life. The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning investigates the ways in which social media is now firmly engrained in all aspects of music education, providing fascinating insights into the ways in which social media, musical participation, and musical learning are increasingly entwined. In five sections of newly commissioned chapters, a refreshing mix of junior and senior scholars tackle questions concerning the potential for formal and informal musical learning in a networked society. Beginning with an overview of community identity and the new musical self through social media, scholars explore intersections between digital, musical, and social constructs including the vernacular of born-digital performance, musical identity and projection, and the expanding definition of musical empowerment. The fifth section brings this handbook to full practical fruition, featuring firsthand accounts of digital musicians, students, and teachers in the field. The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning opens up an international discussion of what it means to be a musical community member in an age of technologically mediated relationships that break down the limits of geographical, cultural, political, and economic place.

"This collection of essays provides vivid new insights into Poulenc?s world, his particular rapport with painters, writers and fellow musicians, and with the social ?te who promoted his music through their salons. Contributions from international Poulenc scholars include the influence of various artists on his music, the nature of his affinity for Eluard?s poetry, his response to texts by Cocteau and Bernanos, and his constant search for suitable libretti. New light is thrown on two friendships, the first with his childhood friend Raymonde Linossier who introduced him to the world of books, the second to his teacher Charles Koechlin who greatly influenced his choral style. A detailed study is also provided of Poulenc?s four choral works with orchestra. Finally, the reader is allowed a rare view of Poulenc at the microphone, not as interviewee but as radio presenter, in his 1947-1949 series of programmes ?A bâtons rompus?."--Provided by publisher.

Cinema and opera have become intertwined in a variety of powerful and unusual ways. Vocal Apparitions tells the story of this fascinating intersection, interprets how it occurred, and explores what happens when opera is projected onto the medium of film. Michal Grover-Friedlander finds striking affinities between film and opera--from Lon Chaney's classic silent film, The Phantom of the Opera, to the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera to Fellini's E la nave va. One of the guiding questions of this book is what occurs when what is aesthetically essential about one medium is transposed into the aesthetic field of the other. For example, Grover-Friedlander's comparison of an opera by Poulenc and a Rossellini film, both based on Cocteau's play The Human Voice, shows the relation of the vocal and the visual to be surprisingly affected by the choice of the medium. Her analysis of the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera demonstrates how, as a response to opera's infatuation with death, cinema comically acts out a correction of opera's fate. Grover-Friedlander argues that filmed operas such as Zeffirelli's Otello and Friedrich's Falstaff show the impossibility of a direct transformation of the operatic into the cinematic. Paradoxically, cinema at times can be more operatic than opera itself, thus capturing something essential that escapes opera's self-understanding. A remarkable look at how cinema has been haunted--and transformed--by opera, Vocal Apparitions reveals something original and important about each medium.

Her most recent comic seemingly depicts Amelie von Wulffen's own life. It stands in for a parody of the contemporary, female, mid-career artist. The different chapters of the comic show humourous as well as macabre glimpses of frustration, fear, insecurity, and jealousy, offering a psychological tour de force through the life of an artist working today.

This passionate and monumental biography reassesses the life and legacy of one of the most significant cultural figures of the twentieth century Unevenly respected, easily hated, almost always suspected of being inferior to his reputation, Jean Cocteau has often been thought of as a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. In this landmark biography, Claude Arnaud thoroughly contests this characterization, as he celebrates Cocteau's "fragile genius--a combination almost unlivable in art" but in his case so fertile. Arnaud narrates the life of this legendary French novelist, poet, playwright, director, filmmaker, and designer who, as a young man, pretended to be a sort of a god, but who died as a humble and exhausted craftsman. His moving and compassionate account examines the nature of Cocteau's chameleon-like genius, his romantic attachments, his controversial politics, and his intimate involvement with many of the century's leading artistic lights, including Picasso, Proust, Hemingway, Stravinsky, and Tennessee Williams. Already published to great critical acclaim in France, Arnaud's penetrating and deeply researched work reveals a uniquely gifted artist while offering a magnificent cultural history of the twentieth century.

Chion analyzes imaginative uses of the human voice by directors like Lang, Hitchcock, Ophuls, Duras, and de Palma.

The characteristic voice quality of a speaker conveys to listeners a wealth of information about his physical, psychological and social attributes. For this reason, voice quality is of interest to a wide range of disciplines, including linguistics, phonetics and speech science, speech pathology, sociology, psychology, medicine, and communication engineering. Literature on voice quality is, consequently, scattered through a correspondingly wide range of publications. While this bibliography is unlikely to be exhaustive, it aims to be comprehensive. Exceptions to this are purely medical literature and literature on speech pathology; also, although a number of different languages are represented, works in English received the principal coverage.