Reading these two essays, I was struck by several issues, on each of which I will touch briefly. The first point is how different these essays are in their functions and in their approaches to voice. Barthes’ essay is addressed to music critics, philosophers, semioticians, and the rest of the cadre of intellectuals who engage with critical theory. Barthes is concerned that music criticism (and, I infer, writing on sound in general) fails to account for aesthetic, non-linguistic signification. Knight, of course, is writing to practitioners of voice training, offering a history and a critique of World English, and proposing principles for a more productive speech training, particularly for actors. The theory/practice divide between these two essays is thus extremely clear, and, in this respect, the essays make excellent touchstones for our conversation. However, the essays also emphasize different functions of the voice that may provide a key to thinking about the difference between theory and practice. Knight is ultimately concerned with speech, with phonetics, with enunciation, with dialect. In short, Knight writes about all the culturally encoded elements of spoken language that Barthes rejects as part of the pheno-song. For Barthes, what is interesting in a voice, the grain, is not something learned or acculturated, rather it is in and of and from the body. (Knight’s interest in speech training that allows an actor the flexibility to express character and his or her own identity within a standard dialect is the closest he comes to connecting sound and body.) Using these two approaches to home in on the theory/practice tension, I would ask: is what theory values in voice that which cannot be taught, which cannot be rehearsed, but only performed? Or, to invert the question, does practice demand nomination and indexation of sound in a manner that theory (or post-structuralist theory) necessarily rejects?
The second point of interest is the hidden voices behind these writers. For instance, I had occasion recently to read Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Music and the Ineffable, and that author’s friendship with and influence in Barthes was extremely clear to me in reading the latter’s essay. (The influence extends to Barthes’ praise for Fauré, a Jankélévtich favorite.) Barthes is, of course, always in extended dialogue with multiple authors, some of whom receive explicit citation (in this essay, Kristeva, Saussure), while others remain in the background, though clearly present in their vocabulary (Lacan, Jankélévitch). But Barthes’ writing rarely gives way to the language of others, his authorial voice (consistently transmitted by Richard Howard’s English translations) is clear and strong, if his ideas are occasionally obscure. Knight, by contrast, follows a more usual scholarly path of precise notation (footnotes), and his writing, while crisp and coherent, has relatively little character. (The joke about the Mid-Atlantic native speakers who call for help “faintly, but very very clearly” was a charming exception (179).) I am tempted, then, to say that “grain”, in the sense of that which eludes notation and is not allied with clarity of communication, is not something peculiar to voice, but is present in writing as well. Barthes is full of grain; Knight has relatively little. Knight’s writing is strong on pheno-song; Barthes emphasizes geno-song. In this sense, then, both essays are exemplary performances of that which they value in voice.
Third and finally, I hope that we can spend some time discussing voice and class. This was an extremely well-told element of Knight’s story, and Barthes struck me, this time, as very much in conversation with Adorno (particularly the paragraphs about grain and long-playing records). Voice is, of course, very much about class. (My father consciously eliminated some Pittsburgh inflections from his speech when he attended graduate school.) But is class merely expressed in the markers of dialect that can be transcribed in IPA? Or does the grain that Barthes admires also express class? Barthes hints, elusively, that grain might offer a way out of the elitist admiration for Schoenberg and Webern on which Adorno insisted. But is not Barthes’ own admiration for French mélodie (rather than German lied) itself a highly nationalist and classist preference. (Indeed the nationalist element is almost laughably strong.) Barthes’ argument about Panzera--that his voice’s “marginal, mandarin” status allowed him to transcend its bourgeois function--is exactly the argument that Adorno makes about Schoenberg. Similarly, as much as Knight wishes to avoid the overtly racist and nationalistic overtones of Standard Speech, any advocacy for voice training that serves a canonical repertoire necessarily reinforces that canon’s importance. It is, of course, far easier to throw stones than to build new houses, and I recognize that criticism of Knight and Barthes on these points ignores the sensitivity with which they approach class. But I remain unsettled about voice and class, and reading these essays together left me more uncertain than ever about how even to begin a conversation on this topic.
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