New Media Pocket Opera - Hearing Voices
Transcriptions of the Phonogram of a Schizophrenic: music-theatre for performer and audio-visual media
ISCM World New Music days, Stuttgart, July 2006
The project was a practice-based exploration of new interactive audio-visual technologies for opera and music-theatre, investigating the dramaturgical implications of combining the real and virtual within music-based theatre. The project employed live performance, voice-synthesizing programmes and projected sound and images to examine the phenomenon of the technological uncanny, investigating cultural anxieties about mechanisation in modernity, and in particular cultural representations of the mechanically disembodied voice from the nineteenth century to the present. The project was part of a collaboration between the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre at the University of Sussex (CROMT), Forum Neues Musiktheater of Stuttgart Opera, The Steim Centre in Amsterdam and Tempo Reale Studio in Florence, with each centre contributing a new piece of work made to the same brief but employing different technologies or programs.
- Project Director: Nick Till
- Sound: Ed Hughes/Tom Hall
- Visuals: Kandis Cook
- Performer: Frances M. Lynch
- Audio-Visual Processing: Alice Eldridge
The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
"Hearing Voices", Forum Neues Musiktheater, Stuttgart, July 2006
Director Nicholas Till, Performer Frances Lynch, Photo A.T Schaeffer
Forum Neues Musiktheater Project Brief
All four commissioned compositions and their stagings are subject to the same conditions for the instruments and performers employed and the working materials. The challenge of a deliberately small cast with at most three singers, instrumentalists, dancers or actors is joined with a conscious limitation of technological means (two laptops, eight-channel sound system, one camera, two video projectors) which is intended to encourage and focus reflection on the essential conditions of narrative forms in musical theater and how they are communicated by means of technology. The possibilities of performance in non-conventional or not established theatrical settings should also be considered.
Each institute develops its project independently. The developmental process is, however, accompanied by an exchange of technological know-how and of the tools developed by the institutes, in particular a library of interactive audio-visual Max MSP and Jitter programmes developed by the FNMT, as well as through joint meetings of the producers to discuss aesthetic and dramaturgical questions.
The Project Content
The project sought to investigate the effect of the "technological uncanny" that arises with use of interactive technologies in live performance.
The technological uncanny arises through the blurring of nature/culture distinctions, both at the phenomenal level (the electronic that sounds human, or vice versa; the anthropomorphism of machines) and the conceptual level (do we hear technologically produced sounds/images as phenomena of nature or culture; "mediated" or "immediate" ?). Cultural representations of the technological uncanny include the image of the "double" and the idea of the "ghost in the machine" - the notion that the machine itself might have a life of its own. This latter phenomenon is increased by the use of live interactive technologies when it becomes difficult for the audience or viewer to be sure of who is in control of the performance.
The project is based upon a found text, a page of musical notation described as "Transcription of the phonogram of a schizophrenic, 1899".
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Translation of text
The world, the world, the world, the world, Fire, Fire.
Steilers Fritz, Steilers Fritz, Steilers Fritz Fritz, Fritz, Fritz, Fritz, Fritz, je
Antichrist, for he has said so.
My son, Wilhelm II, aia.
Why not then, why not then, hey?
Steilers Fritz, Steilers Fritz, Steilers Fritz.
Steilers Fritz, Steilers Fritz, Steilers Fritz
Ah, above, ah above, ah above
Near, near - near, near, near, near
Ah, what do I see there, fire burns there, yes, as fast as a train
Rather, rather, rather, rather, rather, rather, rather
Why do I feel so bad, why do I feel so bad, why do I feel so bad?
For I will be buried alive, because I have said, I would...
This page of music is published in Friedrich Kittler's book Grammophon, Film, Typwriter (1986), a book about the way in which new technologies change our relationship to the world.
The mysterious page of music was valuable as a starting point for our project for three reasons:
it provides a "score" that obviates the need for construction of a narrative and character-based libretto, which is usually required to enable the expressive word-and-drama setting of conventional opera, whose musico-dramatic redundancy we want to avoid. In addition, we are interested in exploring forms of vocality that challenge the familiar assumptions of subjectivity, interiority and transcendence usual in western musical drama.It connects to the project's main issues of technology and mediation.It connects the uncanny effect of technologically reproduced voices to the familiar condition of "hearing voices" of schizophrenia.
The content of the speech is familiar from the literature and iconography of schizophrenia: extreme paranoid anxiety (the fear of being buried alive - which is also a familiar trope of gothic literature); hallucinatory voices; reference to apocalyptic religious themes (the Antichrist); belief in relationship to royalty (reference to Kaiser Wilhelm II).
There is little personal to be learned from the text about the man or woman whose speech is documented. We have been unable to find a source for the page of music, or indeed any reference to the practice of using phonographs to record the speech of schizophrenic patients. So we start with a puzzle. Indeed, the project involves a series of puzzles.
The first diagnosis of what we now recognise as schizophrenia was made in the 1890s by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, and published in a series of books after 1896.
Kraepelin's main concern was to establish secure grounds for diagnosis of the disease (rather than seeking cures). To this end he listed the symptoms exhaustively, from physical and gestural traits to behavioural and mental symptoms such as speech disturbance. In his book entitled Dementia Praecox & Paraphrenia Kraepelin devotes 10 pages to abnormal speech traits under headings such as: "Derailments in Linguistic Expression", "Derailments in Finding Words". His books are full of tables, graphs and diagrams that "measure" the physical symptoms of schizophrenic patients, and illustrations of the mechanical devices that were employed to secure these measurements.
Kraepelin's extensive catalogues of symptoms are characteristic of the general tendency in medicine towards scientific analysis of human of abnormality at the end of the 19th century. The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg notes that the late 19th century art historian Morelli, Sherlock Holmes and Freud all use similar methods of analysing insignificant clues to reveal concealed meanings; Morelli, Freud and Conan Doyle were all trained as doctors.
Technology had an important role in such analysis. Photography enabled visual analysis of movement, and was used, for instance, by speech therapists to analyse the positions of the mouth in speech. The French psychiatrist Charcot used photography to document different kinds of psychic disorder, and the English scientist Francis Galton based his attempts to establish the physiognomy and genetic characteristics of criminal behaviour on analysis of photographs of criminals.
The use of a phonograph to record the speech of a schizophrenic patient is therefore very much in accord with such practices. What is less clear is how someone might have come to think of using musical notation as part of the analysis. However, we can observe that there was a movement at the end of the 19th century towards what was described as "realism" in the setting of language to music - an attempt to set words in a way that was closer to the pace, rhythm, pitch and intonation of natural speech. The composer best known for this was Leo Janáèek, who notated the everyday speech that he overheard in his notebooks, often offering an analysis of the presumed emotional state of the speaker from what was recorded. Janáèek even dispassionately notated the words of his dying daughter. The complimentary method of Sprechgesang, first developed in the 1890s by the composer Engelbert Humperdinck, and employed by Schoenberg in Pierrot Lunaire, relates the text to the soundworld of expressionism, which itself evolved to convey extreme psychic states.
So what we may suggest in relation to our fragment is that both art and science are being employed to effect an objective analysis of the condition a mental patient. The psychiatrists who made this document are less interested in who the patient is, or in trying to decipher the meaning of his or her speech, than in the method of analysis.
Our piece is not about madness (although acknowledging the long history of the representation of madness in opera - in particular female madness). It is about the depersonalisation of an individual through the technologisation of his or her illness.
Musical and Dramatic Form
The form of the piece is constructed around a series of investigations of the musical "score". We present a performer trying to make sense of this fragment of text. In doing so she uploads her interrogations and interpretations into the modern machine of reproduction, in the same way that the schizophrenic patient of 1899 was required to record her speech into a phonograph. The text offers a number of possibilities: a lost song from Pierrot Lunaire; confused memories of a song by Schumann; a representation of the voices in a schizophrenic patient's head....
As the singer uploads her voice into the machine the machine itself responds. It has its own life. And it also seems to contain fragments and memories of the original patient. As the piece progresses the voice and physical being of the performer are increasingly absorbed into the machine, until she is completely technologised.
All of the sound and musical material in the piece derives from the fragment of score, from the voice of the performer, and from a few key elements which are invoked from the memory bank of the machine (e.g the sound of a piano).
On the limitations set by the Pocket Opera project
Technologies of sound and video have been used in the theatre for almost 100 years. For Stanislavski sound was an essential aspect of realist scenography. For Piscator and Brecht visual technologies challenged representational realism and introduced extra-theatrical documentary material into the theatrical event.
In general, artists employing sound and video technologies in the theatre have employed technology as an expansion of the sonic and scenic canvas, rather than an independent dramaturgical element. One of the aims of our project is to consider how complexities of time-space and presence-absence relations brought about by the introduction of the virtual technologies into the theatre space impact upon the fictions of liveness and music-dramatic continuity that underpin the dramaturgy of most music theatre. The real and virtual occupy different ontological spaces, and the juxtaposition of these different ontological spaces of representation demands, we believe, more careful attention. In particular, when audio-visual media are employed in ways that draw attention to the gap between presence and repetition/reproduction they deconstruct the underlying metaphysical fiction that the sound accompaniment to the live voice in conventional operatic forms is "noumenal" (ie, unheard to the character) rather than "phenomenal".
For this reason the challenge of the New Media Pocket Opera project to work with restricted means does not provide a limitation. Instead it offers opportunities for more careful investigation of the dramaturgy of presence and absence in works that employ new technologies of sound and vision.
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