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).