On Vocal Rhetoric: Recital, Lecture, Conversation
Our recording and playback devices engage, seduce, immerse us into a set of private performances that enthrall, but in which the owner cannot take an active part. Video games of course do support active engagement, and an aesthetic medium, but one that is, I think, quintessentially graphic.
What sould be a game that tested interactively one's language skills.
Actually there is such a game, and it's not computer-based,
it's called conversation.
We seem though as a society to overlook the importance of vocal rhetoric
both as a tool for educators to engage their students, engage their attention, and present a model of public presentation and behavior.
Moreover as a subject of study, vocal rhetoric is something students, especially minorities, are apt to be interested-in, as they are at an age that is concerned with social presentation, of which speech is a very important feature.
Verse, or any set speech, is a kind of planned excursion in vocal-rhetorical space. Wheather in lecture or even social chat, recited verse is a display of planning.
To teach verse well requires that the teacher not only recites, but enjoys reciting. Verse, traditional verse at least, is not a puzzle but a perfected set of words meant to be performed and enjoyed.
Reciting verse presents a strange model for the student.
Verse, like gossip or social talk, often conveys emotion, depending upon the speaker. The reciter uses the rhythm of the words and lines to convey, mold, and amplify emotion through planning and rehersal, in oreder to achieve and more complex and enjoyable result.
Of course with verse there comes a splitting between speaker and audience as the reciter might go on for a longer while than in social discourse. The point to be noted here though is, that the two activities, chat and recital, are simply different points on a continuum. If the verse is kept short and apropos, verse is companionable in a wide range of social occasions. But of course, being relevant might require a considerable repertoire and even when apropos how well it can be recited at a moment's notice is problematic in itself.
The model recitation presents allows the teacher to talk not only about grammar but also about tone and projection; things that concern the social self. Talking about grammar in everyday speech among minorities is viewed, I think, with considerably too much trepidation. Yet it is this own ownership of style, sense of identity, that needs to be consciously faced by both teacher and minority student that [most] needs to be faced and explored. This exploration should occur in vocal, as opposed to written, space is appropriate as it is with this sphere that the student is most familiar and therefore most comfortable with such experimentation as composing sentences, more or less, in standard English; whatever that may be.
The reciter presents for many a new conception.
The believability of that concept depends a great deal upon the performance, the material, the setting. The porch or patio might seem unlikely and yet it should be tried just to prove to oneself the power and attractiveness of recitation. The same applies in schools, and with minorities.
The ability to recite under a range of social settings is...?
But besides verse their is also speeches from plays, or much more likely from films. What are a likely list of speeches from film?
http://listverse.com/2008/02/22/top-10-great-movie-speeches/
10. Matt Damon’s Speech Good Will hunting
9. Captain Koons Speech Pulp Fiction
•8. Monty Brogan’s Speech 25th Hour
7. A Few Good Men A Few Good Men
•6. Courtroom Scene To Kill a Mockingbird
•5. Drill Instructor Speech Full Metal Jacket
•4. Freedom Speech Braveheart
3. St Crispin’s Day Speech Henry V
•2. Patton Speech Patton
1. Chaplin’s Speech the Great Dictator
http://www.altiustutasarim.com/notdefteri/arsiv/2007/02/top_10_greatest_film_speeches.php
Top 10 Greatest Film Speeches and Monologues
•1. Robert Duvall, Apocalypse Now (1979)
2. Jack Nicholson, A Few Good Men (1992)
•3. Marlon Brando, On The Waterfront (1954)
•4. Samuel L Jackson, Pulp Fiction (1994)
•5. Michael Douglas, Wall Street (1987)
6. Peter Finch, Network (1976)
•7. Ewan McGregor, Trainspotting (1996)
•8. Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry (1971)
•9. Richard E Grant, Withnail and I (1987)
•10. Mel Gibson, Braveheart (1995)
Good Will Hunting
AMC'S
http://www.filmsite.org/bestspeeches.html
Someone else can do it better, the regular guy sits back and watches.
How ironic, that literature which has undergone so much de-formalization of content and style for so long, has become highly formalized in its presentation and consumption. Literary art is not a part of everyday life in a way that is participatory.
I used to play guitar. Recuerdoes, do you remember?
The concert hall or television is so much more preferred over the personal, ad hoc, recital of voice in song, or verse, or the short melodic piece on piano or guitar.
These events though not so spectacular are compensated for by being personal. Even the mistakes are enchanting by being our mistakes.
One thinks of the barroom scene from Joyce's Ulysses...
The ubiquitous piano, and the common facility of accompaniment.
The piano bar has given way to the karaoke.
It requires a certain size audience,
it seems to be the affectation,
compared to the simple ascending path of the naked voice,
which is always with us, always at-hand.
Surprisingly we face both in school and in the culture-at-large
aesthetic questions. How to enjoy ourselves? How to balance spectating with participation. How to use art, literature, to teach marketable skills like writing?
Guidance in the choice of hobby. How to address self-expression. Emotional engagement.
How to engage in artful conversation. What to talk about. Ambience.
The chess game at the coffee shop,
the billiards parlor and its commotion,
are all aesthetic events.
Drugs and alcohol too are to be seen and understood as tools used to construe a certain, often recurrent, mindset.
Offering some guidance to what is fun,
what to seek-for, where enjoyment lies,
ought not to be seen as fluffy questions
but strike at the heart of things as different as depression and education.
Thoughts on the sources and structure of art, pleasure, happiness might seem as uselessly abstract, eternally unanswered, yet may not be.
Some
Aesthetics, as the center of Zen, the seemingly ineffable...
My little Garden of Verse reduces the canon into a small mnemonic space.
It is the personal extraction of an essence out of a wide range of spoken art. Personal and transcendent. Now and timeless.
Rhetoric and the enlargement of the sense of self.
We are how we speak, having become what we spoke.
Learning to say new, to us, and unusual things, estrange us from ourselves.
As with the young urban black reluctant to speak formal English.
Or a teacher unwilling to project further than what's seen as safe.
to act and to disclose a part of an internal essence.
The need for mnemonics as a sense of self.
Santayana was wrong. We may not be so easily taught by the past.
What one loses by neglecting the past is an enduring sense of self that transcends the personal and contemporary.
This close awareness of the past can only be taught by being first felt and then expressed.
Personalism,
in place of an established curriculum,
the illusion of objectivity and unchanging and universal assent,
in other words, the survey and the canon.
personalism, seeks to involve the teacher's own preferences, values,
styles, and their display, as a basis. direction, in aesthetics,
and teaching the language arts.
In part this is recognition of our own inability to be other than ourselves,
and the greater degree of involvement that should occur when one is discoursing on the things that one enjoys and admires.
The accounting for one's free time paints an aesthetic profile of the self.
The programs watched or activities engaged-in.
Even our choice of hobbies, sports, express aesthetic preferences.
Our playlists are also a reflection of ourselves.
To the degree that one sees the disruption of student aesthetic values
the teacher's own recitation, favorites,
verse,
recordings of songs, short musical pieces,