Proposal for a three-year research project
"The voice is what is really at stake in modernity"
Roland Barthes, "Lesson in Writing", Image, Music, Text
Aims
The project aims to understand the social and cultural meanings of the human voice in modernity, with particular reference to the implications of such understanding for the use of the voice in contemporary arts, especially opera, music theatre and other forms of performance and digital arts foregrounding voice.
The premise of the project is that perceptions and representations of the voice undergo radical changes in modernity, as the experience of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity changes, and as technologies such as the phonograph or telephone alter people's relationship to their own and other voices. The hitherto intimate connection between the voice and subjectivity is radically dissevered, and disembodied voices assume their own autonomy.
The debate around the position of the voice in modernity first arises in discussions of the transition from oral to literary (and hence visual) cultures in early modernity, as charted by cultural historians such Spengler, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong and Michel de Certeau. In the case of each writer it is perhaps unclear whether the claim is being made that the 'scopic regimes' of modernity have indeed suppressed oral culture, or whether they have simply caused us to overlook the role of orality in culture. Both McLuhan and Ong identify a 'secondary orality' arising from communication technologies such as radio and telephone, although the implications of such a culture are not always clear. In philosophy various strands of phenomenology (and post-phenomenology) have re-imagined the relationship of voice to body and of voice to philosophical metaphysics, in particular in Derrida's identification of the metaphysics underpinning the phonocentrism of Plato, Rouseau, Hegel and Husserl. Lacanian psychoanalysis has identified the voice, along with the gaze, as one of the primary constituents of subjectivity.
Many artists and musicians in the twentieth century have revaluated the musical, performative and tele-phonic voice, and encounters with non-western vocal practices have also revealed different potentialities of the voice. But as composer Trevor Wishart writes of his Vox project of 1983-1988 'the voice is not just another "musical instrument" [It is] The meeting point of animal expressivity (laughing, screaming, crying), personality (and more basic indicators of age, health, status, and so on) and intent (the language-games of love and power), language (and therefore poetry and drama as well as the phoneme stream itself) and song.' The creative component of the project will engage with these and other aspects of the voice in modernity, and will question accepted paradigms of the lyric voice that derive from nineteenth-century vocal techniques, and the metaphysics of subjectivity, interiority and transcendence (themselves oddly contradictory) that are associated with these.
This project will examine the cultural and social forms of the voice in modernity, and will consider the implications of changing cultural and aesthetic understandings of the voice for voice-based music, art and performance in the 21 st century.
Project outcomes will include creative practice (live or digital performance), conferences, and a range of publications.
Contexts
The voice foregrounded in literature and film: Orpheus legend; Rabelais; Cervantes; E.T.A Hoffmann; Poe; Hans Christian Anderson; Villiers de l'Isle Adam; Alfred Jarry; George du Maurier (Svengali); Willa Cather; Cocteau (La voix humaine); Lady in the Dark; Singin in the Rain; The Conversation; Riddles of the Sphinx (Mulvey/Wollen); Passion (Godard)
Artistic Engagements : Schwitters; Artaud; Burroughs; Henri Chopin and performance poetry; Charles Amirkhanian; Roy Hart Theatre; Scanner; Carl von Hausswolf; Societas Raffaello Sanzio (Giulio Cesare, Voyage au bout de la Nuit).
Experimental Voices in Music: Luciano Berio; Cathy Berberian; Milton Babbitt; Peter Maxwell Davies; Trevor Wishart; Meredith Monk; Diamanda Galas; Joan la Barbara; Pamela Z, Phil Minton.
Opera and Music Theatre: muted voices (Debussy); anti-lyric voices (Schoenberg and Sprechtgesang; Aperghis, Sciarrino); dispersed voices (Stravinsky; Berio); reproduced voices (Kagel to Laurie Anderson).
Suggested Research Topics
Physiologies of the voice
Traces, theories and representations of the voice in pre-modernity
Voices and vocality in non-western cultures
The voice and subjectivity: psychoanalytical approaches from Charcot and Freud ("the talking cure") to Wolfsohn and Lacan
Voice and power
Metaphors of voice ("the composer's voice"... "le corps parlant")
Amplified Voices
Reproduced Voices
The Erotics of the Voice
Gendered voices
Collective voices
Suppressed, silenced and disciplined voices
Theoretical Frameworks
Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princetion: Princeton University Press, 1991)
Theodor Adorno, 'The Curves of the Needle', in Richard Leppert (ed), Essays on Music (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: UC Press, 2002)
Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991)
I. Anhalt, Alternative Voices: Essay on contemporary vocal and choral composition, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984)
David Applebaum, Voice (Albany: State University of New York, 1990)
Roland Barthes, 'The Grain of the Voice', 'Lesson in Writing', in Image, Music, Text, trans Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977)
- The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang), 1975
Marie-France Castarède, La voix et les sortileges (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1987)
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984)
- "Utopies vocales: glossolalies" Traverses 20, 1980, 16-37
Michel Chion, La voix au cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/ Editions de l'Etoile, 1982)
Henri Chopin, Poésie sonore internationale (Paris, Jean-Michel Place, 1979)
Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: OUP 2000)
- 'Echo's Bones: Myth, Modernity and the Vocalic Uncanny', in Michael Bell and Peter Poellner (eds), Myth and Making of Modernity: The Problem of Grounding in Early Twentieth Century Literature (Amsterdam: Atlantia Georgia: Rodopi, 1998)
- 'Violence, Ventriloquism and the Vocalic Body', in Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear (eds) Psychoanalysis and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2001)
- "The Decomposing Voice of Postmodern Music" New Literary History, Vol. 32, No.3, Summer 2001
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1973)
- Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976)
- 'La parole soufflée', in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978)
Mary Ann Doane, 'The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space', Yale French Studies, 60 (1980), 47-56
Leslie C.Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, Embodied Voices: Representing female vocality in western culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
M. Duncan, 'The operatic scandal of the singing voice: Voice, presence, performativity', Cambridge Opera Journal, vol.16, issue 3 (2004)
Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography (New York: McGaw Hill, 1987)
Barbara Engh, 'Adorno and the Sirens: Tele-phono-graphic bodies' in Dunn and Jones
Ivan Fonogy, La vive voix: Essais du psychophenétique (Paris: Payot, 1983)
Felicia Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice and the Artificial in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995)
David Gradol and Joan Swann, Gender Voices (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989)
Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976)
Claire Kahane, Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative and the Figure of the Speaking Woman 1850-1915 (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins, 1995)
Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (eds), Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1994)
Cheris Kramarae (ed), Technology and Women's Voices: Keeping in Touch (New York & London: Routledge, 1988)
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)
Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Pess, 1980)
Donald M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Brighton: Harvester, 1982)
Jacqueline Martin, The Voice in Modern Theatre (London: Routledge, 1991)
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (London: Routledge, 1962)
Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven & London: Yale, 1967)
- Rhetoric, Romance and Technology (Ithaca: Cornell, 1971)
- Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word ( London: Methuen, 1982)
Michel Poizat, The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992)
- La voix du diable (Paris: Métaillé, 1991)
John Potter, Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology (Cambridge: CUP, 1998)
Jonathan Ree, I See a Voice: A Philosophical History, (London: Harper, 1999)
Guy Rosolato, 'La Voix: entre corps et langage', Revue francais de psychoanalyse, 38, 1 (1974)
Philippe-Joseph Salazar, Le culte de la voix au XVIIe siecle: formes esthetiques de la parole a l'age de l'imprime (Paris: Champion, 1995)
Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996)
David Schwarz, Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997)
Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1988)
Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)
Allan S Weiss, Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia (Bloomington: Indiana, University Press, 1988)
Trevor Wishart, 'The Composer's View: Extended Vocal Technique', The Musical Times, vol.cxxi, no.1647, May 1980