Haunted Sounds: the Presence of Phantoms in Recent Musicological Thought (original) (raw)
Related papers
Operatic Afterlives by Michal Grover-Friedlander (review)
In her Vocal Apparitions (2005), Michal Grover-Friedlander considered the ways in which the operatic voice takes up a haunting residence in the history of film. Operatic Afterlives, its title a spectral echo of the earlier volume, continues and revises the project of Vocal Apparitions, investigating "the singing voice . . . as what is essential to opera" (16) precisely because it haunts opera, because it never is fully at home within opera. To suggest that the singing voice is what most necessarily characterizes opera is not, Grover-Friedlander argues, to conclude that there is a unified phenomenon (the singing voice) that defines a closed field (opera) in a conclusively definable way: "what accounts, in the deepest sense, for the specificity of opera is singing that is unlike any other" (14)-even, she goes on to argue, unlike itself. For Grover-Friedlander this quintessentially operatic entity, the singing voice, undoes and escapes the limits of the fields it defines, including opera and opera studies. Operatic Afterlives takes this indeterminacy seriously in its analyses and methods, and its unabashedly quixotic aim-to characterize the uncharacterizablemay alienate or frustrate the reader seeking stably defined and definite theses and results. The reader who is willing to enter into the interdisciplinary or even indisciplinary space of Grover-Friedlander's text, however, will find it a productive, suggestive, and rewarding experience.
Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance, 2012
In this chapter, I discuss how theories of the disembodied voice call for a cultural understanding of our listening attitudes in music and musical theatre, which goes beyond genre restrictions. I contend that the enhanced interest in vocality on the postmodern stage, which lies at the basis of the newly emerging forms of music theatre since the 1950s (with an increase in the 1980s), has given rise to a general re-‘enchantment’ of the disembodied voice, which re-enacts, challenges, substitutes communicative properties of orality, as much as it pushes and expands the discursive realm of aurality. Therefore, I wish to focus on the principle of acousmatization, which is most inherently part of our aural cultures and technologies, to the extent that this concept is useful to explain the effects of disembodied voices on the listener. Taking various examples of acousmatized voices in contemporary music and musical theatre, I will attempt to uncover the processes of how we perceive bodies in voices, particularly by means of our modes of listening.
A Voice on the Edge: Phenomenology, Acoustemology, and the Counter-Tenor
The hearing of a voice depends on many factors and the disciplines of sound studies and acoustemology can shed some light on ways in which the counter-tenor has been suppressed. The phenomenological theories of Ihde help to point out ways in which the voice (and sound in general) is intentional, that is, a voice of something. Schafer and Feld remind one that certain sounds are marked in society as something. Hirschkind notes that, because of these soundmarks, listeners are conditioned to hear sounds certain ways and interpret them. Chion calls for an objectivization of sound, creating a space for Otherness in sound. A consideration of Ihde’s theory of multistability illustrates how the counter-tenor could function as Other, but, does not solve the problem of the counter-tenor’s marginalization. Moreover, history has proven a distinct relationship between counter-tenor reception and gender. Only recently has the falsetto sound been released from the bonds of misrepresentation (as feminine) and recast as masculine via description of the counter-tenor voice, helping to re-center the voice type and reclaim its equality with other voice types being utilized in Classical music today.
Sound Studies: Theories of the Material Voice
Theatre Journal, 2012
The aural aspect of performance has emerged as a unique topic for theatre research at a time of technological advancement, providing a distinctive entry point for historical analysis while raising important theoretical questions about recording, reproduction, the interplay of live and recorded sound onstage, and the act of listening itself. Until relatively recently, “sound studies” as a research focus has been a minor grace note in the composition of theatre studies. Historically, theatre scholarship has referred to the speaking actor, the literary voice of the playwright, the metaphorical voice of the age, or an unseen psychological voice—all of which have provided useful, if limited, insights into the subject. The informed and sharply focused modes of inquiry introduced by the authors considered here, however, promise to illuminate our understanding of the voice and inspire further research on topics like linguistic and paralinguistic voice/body expression, deictic sound effects in staging, premodern theatre acoustics, and filmed plays. With these theoretical modes of inquiry, future scholars will be able to hear anew the voices that speak from historical materials. The implications extend into the complex field of sound studies, helping to define what constitutes historical and theoretical research in aurality for theatre performance. At the junction of rapidly accelerating technology and advanced critical theory, scholars are going back to the archives and out into the field equipped with neuroscience, Merleau-Ponty, and an iPad.
Vocal Extensions: Disembodied Voices in Contemporary Music Theatre and Performance
2011
This independently published text was published as a special, limited edition of Department of Public Sound #2 (booklet) and includes a vinyl record with recordings of ‘The Weekend of Adventure’ during the sixth edition of the Opera Days Rotterdam (27-29 May 2011). The text elaborates on my notion of 'radical vocality' on the stage through associated theories and concepts of extended voice. As this text was commissioned by the experimental art centre De Player in Rotterdam in the context of the Opera Days Rotterdam (Operadagen Rotterdam), I develop my ideas through concrete examples of vocal performance artists and operatic experiments from the 'Who’s Afraid of Modern Opera' late night event at De Player. After a brief clarification of the notion of radical vocality and its recent history, I focus on the theory of the disembodied voice and its related notions (virtual, disembodied and ventriloquist voice). I discuss these theories in relation to the philosophically much contested split in the voice between body and language (as suggested by Michelle Duncan). I then open these theories up to an understanding of auditory space and the territorial implications of 'autonomous' sound in the experience of the listener through a discussion of the work of vocal performance artists seen at the Opera Festival in Rotterdam: American artist Charlemagne Palestine, German composer-author Frieder Butzmann, German vocal performer/composer Alex Nowitz and American singer/performance artist Stephanie Pan.
La Castrata and the Voices in my Head
Word and Music Studies 13: On Voice, 2014
In 2009, I completed my second opera, La Castrata, a project which had absorbed me, off and on, since 1995. In this one-act opera based on Norman Shapiro’s 1994 adaptation of Le Soprano, an 1831 comédie-vaudeville by Eugène Scribe and Mélesville, the word voice occurs 26 times in the libretto. The work was nevertheless composed in blissful ignorance of the theme of 'voice' as such, and I think this was probably a good thing. Creating music for characters, words, text, and dramatic situations, does not leave much time to deal with meta-textual issues such as ‘voice’, though composers may do so un-(or sub-)consciously. Voices, however, are at the heart of opera. This has attracted a great deal of attention, though little of it from composers themselves. In my opera, the plot leads to voices having additional levels and dimensions, for example, the title character is a soprano who, for complicated reasons, dresses up as a man and pretends to be a castrato. What is/are his/her possible voice(s)? And how are they to be made present (reified) to performers and listeners? Retrospectively analyzing my score, I realized that my work as librettist entailed a somewhat different voice than my work as a composer. I began by looking at aspects of voice as they appear in Shapiro’s adaptation, and at how I ‘reverse engineered’ this to create a libretto with more in common, structurally, stylistically and lexically, with the original play, recovering to some extent Scribe’s voice. And what of the composer’s voice? However that is defined or understood, I contend that it exists in a kind of choric simultaneity, occurring at the same time and in the same musical lines as other voices, but no more separable from them than voices in a choir can be separated into a multitude of musical lines sung by individual singers.
We Sing Our Lies through Empty Sounds: Hidden Voices in Gothic Music
The Luminary Issue #4: Hidden Voices, 2014
"This paper seeks to explore the narrative potential of contemporary Gothic music. In particular, it looks at works that are lyrically inarticulate, yet communicate complex ideas, narratives, characters and emotions to the listener. Chris Baldick informs us that Gothic literature combines affective features which ‘reinforce each other to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration’ (Baldick, 2009). It is my argument that the diverse emotional features of music can also interrelate to form this Gothic effect. Further, I propose that this interaction leads us to mistrust our normal cognitive response to lyrical music, and instead find contradictions between the articulate and expressive narrative voice. Inarticulate works such as Five Years by Sugar Hiccup (Oracle, 1995) describe vivid scenarios by subverting our anticipations of the lyric. These scenarios are enriched through the imposition of deliberate muteness. Although Gothic musical works often have very diverse stylistic features, the manipulation of expectations in inarticulate works is a feature which begins to suggest genre congruency. "
2019
Vox-Exo: Horrors of a Voice reframes the Lacanian object a voice as a horrific register of alterity. The object gaze has received, as it does in Jacques Lacan's work, more commentary than voice. Yet recently voice has garnered interest from multiple disciplines. The thesis intervenes in the Slovenian school's commentary of the 'object voice' in terms of two questions: audition and corporeality. This intervention synthesizes psychoanalysis with recent theorizing of the horror of philosophy. In this intervention the object a voice is argued to resonate in lacunae-epistemological voids that evoke horror in the subject. Biological and evolutionary perspectives on voice, genre horror film and literature, music videos, close readings of Freudian and Lacanian case studies and textual analysis of ancient philosophy texts all contribute to an elucidation of the horrors of the object a voice: Vox-Exo. The impetus to address the body stems from a critical intervention in one of the most recent and cited works on voice in Lacan's work; A Voice and Nothing More, by Mladen Dolar. Dolar's trajectory to pursue the 'object voice' is to move from meaning, to aesthetics, to psychoanalysis. Such a move, the expedited turn to Lacanian psychoanalysis, is recalcitrant to tackling the body. This thesis responds to the book's avidity to omit the body from the question of voice. Vox-Exo: Horrors of a Voice, contra the Slovenian School's credo, rearticulates the object a voice in terms of corporeality and audition. The significance the a, that designates other, autre, stated in Lacan's works, and numerous commentaries such as Jacques-Alain Miller's and Stijn Vanheule's, is impressed. With a sustained consideration of corporeality and audition, the unknowability and alterity of a is demonstrated to be a locus of horror. Object a voice is argued to resonate in lacunae, evoking legion, indefinite, horror-a horror. If it was successfully murdered, why does it recur? Does it not know that it is dead?-Dolar 2 This aside of Eugene Thacker's in In The Dust of this Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1 is one prompt for this thesis, for in it there is an implicit recognition of the question of voice in terms of horror. Voice, in this sense, can be taken up to announce the horror of the subject: a confrontation with a lacuna, an epistemological-or ontological-crisis. A second spark of this thesis, and the most referenced text within, is Mladen Dolar's A Voice and Nothing More. This small book, which emerged from the Slovenian School in 2006, brought the question of voice attention after gaze had been a focus for so long. In explicating the concept of the object voice Dolar, amongst others, make frequent recourse to a horror vocabulary. These two books have little in common. Firstly, Lacan is not mentioned in Thacker's book, whereas Dolar's book came from the school that re-ignited interest in the flamboyant Frenchman who seated himself-did he knot?-on the throne as heir to Freud. In The Dust of this Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1 turns to a nihilist philosophy to de-center human experience and its Sisyphean thought. A Voice and Nothing More is a psychoanalytical engagement with voice in relation to the signifier wrapped up in a treatise that explicates what Dolar calls 'the object voice'. This thesis takes up Thacker's opening gambit in the horror of philosophy but utilizes it along the way of staging an intervention. The intervention contests Dolar's posit of 'the object voice'. This text seeks to not only explore the gnomic line of Thacker's to elucidate horrors in voice but crucially departs from Dolar's conceptualization of