Musik & Ästhetik, 2009, Jg. 13, Ausgabe 51

Understanding Voice With and Against Roland Barthes

It is probably to Roland Barthes that we owe the most important recent reflections on the phenomenon of the voice in music: the recognition of the grain of the voice the insight into the erotic bond of the listener and the analyses of the connections between voice body desire and language. Barthes´s weakness however is his idiosyncratically enacted aversion to theory. If one amends this aspect his texts release their enormous potential for stimulation especially concerning the relationship between classical vocal culture and rock or blues voices.

Les extrêmes se touchent
Callas and Björk

In comparing the voices of Callas and Bjork it is integral to note the ability of each artist to give their significantly individual voices one mask. The technical expression »singing in the mask« – as it is referred to in classical music – has less to do with the ability of mask singing than outlined here. While the first simply indicates the generation of sound the second indicates that the tone of the voice exposes an ability which is reminiscent of mask dramas in theater. The only difference being that the former is heard while the latter is seen. Bjork´s technique of utilizing her voice as raw material is particularly apparent in her album Medulla. In this album she uses her voice as authentic raw material and thus in a primal sense as an instrument for the music. She executes this task with such vocal genius that the voice is presented in all its natural artistic dexterity. Compared to Bjork we can actually hear the body of Callas in her voice as if it were covered in skin or made of blood. The point being that the bodily tone of every exhalation and fading is symbolic of the classical musical stage.

Bob Dylan – Voice and Face

This text views Bob Dylan´s voice as a central aspect of his music and lyrics. The voice is the link so to speak between the person and the songs – and equally between language and music. Dylan sings language in the sense that he thematicises the process of linguogenesis by vocal means treating the origin of articulation with no less emphasis than the growth of meanings. The voice is simultaneously physis and sign. In addition Dylan manages to develop and maintain this tension between music and language articulation and semantic constitution in an immense palette of the most varied forms of vocal expression over decades.

Voice in the Jazz Age

The particular appellative character of the unformed physical vocal sound and other vocal threshold phenomena are currently a popular object of examination in the cultural sciences. But how can one determine what an uncontrolled vocal sound in the sense of Roland Barthes´s concept of the »grainy voice« is and what it is not? This article considers the transition from the vaudeville style to crooning as an example of how radical changes in media technology generate particular dispositions of listening to the voice in which the appellative functions of the vocal sound located close to the body step into the foreground in a very controlled fashion. In the singing techniques of the blues singers of the 1920s on the other hand the boundaries between materiality and expressivity must be drawn in a completely different manner from that which Barthes that lover of art songs was prepared to imagine.

Farinelli´s Flayed Voice
Voice Design as Cultural Technique

For his third cinema film Farinelli – Il castrato (F/B/I/D 1994) the Belgian director Gérard Corbiau developed a method that enabled him to reanimate a vocal ideal from Baroque opera: using a special sound processing programme two natural opera voices (soprano and countertenor) were combined to produce an artificial castrato voice. As advanced as his approach was at the level of vocal structure however Corbiau´s images do not draw on an understanding of opera that is also open to technical procedures as an aesthetic factor. In scenic terms Farinelli remains an extravaganza and thus becomes a model. With reference to the voice design used in the film the aim here is to show that image and sound separate as soon as their mode of production is concealed. At the same time the text argues that there is no contradiction between vocal artifice and artificial voice on the opera stage.

Voice and the Syntax of Breathing in Elocution Prose and Music

The theories of the art of speaking and singing developed since the 18th century have discussed how speaking and singing can gain means of expression and semantic organisation through breathing (sections 2 and 3). It is all but forgotten today that this theory of breathing developed in treatises on elocution was updated in the second half of the 18th century to provide a new foundation for literary prose (sections 4 and 5). In the theory of musical interpretation one finds in parallel reflections on phrasing in speech-like sections (section 6). In contemporary compositions one can follow the efforts to gain fresh means of musical expression from the physical conditions of breathing (section 7).

Voice Break
On the Change in Vocal Aesthetics Between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age

In the transition from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era the attitude to the singing voice in European culture underwent a dramatic change. Particularly in the second half of the 16th century the high voice became an object of almost fetish-like admiration evident not least in the rise of the castrato singers. The cult of the high voice however took place mostly in the realm of sacred music – and hence at least part of the explanation for the fascinating effect of the castrato voice must be sought in the area of religious vocal aesthetics: in the proximity of the sexless and »otherworldly« castrato voice to the (imagined) singing of angels and in the symbolism of the vocal flights almost transcending everything material as images of mystic ascension.

Voice Sublimation Music
Kinetic Semantics and Aesthetic Theory in the Works of Freud and Lacan

The concept of kinetic semantics refers to a primary mental language resulting from the inner organisation of sensory perception without recourse to imagination or language enables the reception processing and retention of experience. Examining the ideas of Ogden Stern and Tustin the author focuses on the relationship between voice and body which rooted in the prenatal stage is sublimated in music. Here the ritualisation found in music causes a loss of fear that enables the lingualised subject to re-enter the archaic world of sensory experience. This view draws on Freud´s concept of aesthetic pleasure; it does not interpret it in terms of the opposition between pre-pleasure and drive however but rather with reference to the rules of kinetic semantics. In an examination of Lacan´s aesthetics the author emphasises that the voice understood as a residual object beyond the signifier is the product of a kinetic-semantic concentration and discusses the particular form of musical linguality.

The Paradox of the Voice
Hölderlin´s Diotima in Nono´s String Quartet

Voices that fall silent that announce their presence silently or even silenced wind their way through music and literature appear in theatre visual art and ritual and have been haunting forms of medial representation since antiquity. The present essay attempts to reveal the absence of the voice as a paradoxical figuration in its space of possibility between the musical and the literary work: Luigi Nono´s 1980 string quartet Fragmente – Stille An Diotima and Friedrich Hölderlin´s epistolary novel Hyperion form the points of reference for this configuration. Two works that present the voice in its hushedness and render it legible as a figure of their intersection. Nono´s string quartet transpires as the resonance space of an absence manifesting itself through the silencing of the voice. Just as the voice of Diotima in Hölderlin´s text cannot be heard yet is audible it is marked in Nono´s work as that which is not absorbed in the act of listening. Both artists the composer and the poet figurate the paradox of the voice which as well as everything it says wants and remembers refers to things that are absent and things that are not yet and no longer part of the present.

Does the Voice Lie?
Klaus Altmann – Klaus Barbie

Is a person´s voice a place in which the true is separated from the false a place where lies become apparent? It is not only psychologists who answer this question in the affirmative. It seems to be part of the peculiar aura of the human voice that one can find something authentic »in« it which eludes the control of the speaker. So does the voice expose a spoken lie? The essay investigates this problem and takes an extreme example: the recording of a conversation contained in Marcel Ophüls´s documentary film Hôtel Terminus. It suggests something like irrefutable – vocal – evidence of lying. The text takes this impression seriously in phenomenological terms and examines the strange type of evidence that could be involved here more closely. It cannot be generalised nor does it hold up to forensic standards. Nonetheless it enables us to draw conclusions about the peculiar thusness of the voice. The article ends with an ethical a lie-theoretical and a voice-theoretical thesis.