PhD defence | Felicita Brusoni "A Voice Beyond the Edge"

Felicita Brusoni, PhD candidate at Malmö Academy of Music, will defend her PhD thesis “A Voice Beyond the Edge" about new fields in the scenario of the extra-normal voice.

Artistic presentation "Red Carpet": 19 January 2027, at 19:00, Palladium Read more about the artistic presentation here

Public defence: 20 January 2027, at 10:00, Inter Arts Center

PhD title: “A Voice Beyond the Edge”

PhD supervisor: Kent Olofsson (main), Karin Johansson (second)

Institution: Malmö Academy of Music

Opponent: Catherine Laws, University of York

Committee: Hadvig Jalhed, Carl Unander-Scharin, Francesca Placanica

"A Voice Beyond the Edge" investigates how the role of the contemporary music singer can be redefined through the concept of the Extended Singer. The project grows out of a sustained artistic practice that began within operatic vocal training and gradually moved toward a critical engagement with its aesthetic and technical premises. Rather than rejecting the Western classical tradition, the research examines the limits it establishes – particularly regarding authorship, technique, and stylistic identity.

Over the past decades, work within post-Darmstadtian contemporary music has provided a laboratory for expanding vocal practice. Through collaborations with composers, experimentation with heterogeneous vocal techniques, and long-term performative inquiry, the singer’s role has shifted from interpreter toward co-creator and negotiator of meaning. This practical development forms the experiential ground of the research.

Central to the project is a reassessment of the term ‘extended vocal techniques’. It has historically been used to describe vocal sounds that fall outside established Western art music norms; the term carries implicit hierarchies between the “standard” and the “extended.” The research draws on recent scholarship on multivocality (Baumann, 2023; Meizel, 2020; Nowitz, 2019) and proposes an alternative conceptual framework. The focus moves from the classification of techniques to the agency of the singer: a performer who navigates multiple vocal identities, aesthetic affiliations, and cultural references, and who actively shapes the conditions under which meaning emerges.

Through artistic practice, theoretical reflection, and interdisciplinary collaboration – involving composers and other artistic practitioners, with or without the mediation of a written score – the project seeks to articulate new performative strategies through which vocal multiplicity becomes a site of artistic agency and knowledge production.

Visit Felicita’s artist website – felicitabrusoni.com

Read more about Felicita’s PhD in the Lund University Research Portal – portal.research.lu.se