Both Barthes (1972) and Knight (1997) contribute to answering the question: How do we develop a language to analyze and teach vocal sounds with specificity? In “The Grain,” Barthes challenges the limits of language in interpreting music, a move that remains important among other structuralist-to-poststructuralist thinkers of the 1970s. With similar concerns about language use in musical interpretation, Norma McLeod, for example, argued for the centrality of musico-linguistic anthropology in her article “Ethnomusicology Research and Anthropology”(1974). What then accounts for “The Grain” becoming a seminal text in cultural studies? Barthes’ argument to change the musical object in studies of singing—from “music and language” to “language and voice” is the crucial contribution to this scholarship. Two of Barthes’ terms, “voice” and “grain,” however, could be more accurate in representing his ideas. (Vocal) sound is perhaps a better term for what Barthes intends in this use of “voice.” The sonic properties of speaking and singing can inform listeners about genre, ethnicity, and nationality in ways distinct from devocalized language. I agree with Barthes that these sounds are the object of inquiry in studies of singing, but the term “grain” to connote the speaking and singing products of vocal sounds seems unnecessary to me. While the term conjures materiality in vocal sound, attention to vocal mechanics is more accurate in addressing the materiality of singing.
Despite Barthes’ use of “voice” and “grain,” this essay is a foundation for the emerging field of vocal anthropology, lead by Steven Feld. Expanding on Barthes’ claims, Feld stresses to two prominent discourses about vocal sounds: the phenomenological (embodiment of spoken and sung performance) and the metaphoric (voice as a representational trope for power). Along with Aaron Fox (1994), Feld expands Barthes’ apparatus for analysis of music and language (Kristeva’s pheno-text/song and geno-text/song) into four categories: music as language, language in music, music in language and language about music. Barthes’ essay helped to open the critical conversation about music and language and I find the essay pedagogically useful in tracing the trajectory of the field.
The development of speech standards for American theater performance is (very) unfortunately understudied in Ethnomusicology. I find Knight’s overview significant for scholars and vocal pedagogues in many ways: 1) The fraught relationship between written and vocalized texts in elocution continues to emerge in anxieties about class and status on American stages. Inaccurate orthography is especially rampant in American art songs utilizing regional dialects. Better understanding the historical role of elocution in theater could strengthen current analyses of speaking and singing. 2) Knight’s suggestions for the future are not only worthy of vocal pedagogues’ consideration, but voice studies scholars as well. If Barthes were to follow Knight’s recommendation to isolate vocal sound change before prescribing a pattern (or genre norm) in his analysis of Panzera and Fischer-Dieskau recordings, I think that he would listen more closely to each singers’ use of his articulators and his timbre. Panzera and Fischer-Dieskau, or any vocalist, always already participate in pheno-song (the sound of the words) and geno-song (the timbre of one’s voice), but not necessarily in direct correlation with one’s first language (or class, or status, or ethnicity, etc) as Barthes explains. Listening for vocal sound change before language or musical genre norms foregrounds laryngeal function and stresses performativity, denaturalizing vocal sounds or “grain” from a vocalists’ subject position. 3) Finally, Knight’s celebration of narrow phonetic (print) transcription, though its use in the Tilly classroom proved painful for many students, helps us move closer to Barthes’ desire for a way to inscribe vocal sound on the page.
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