In Barthes’ “Grain of the Voice,” he asserts a need to change the discourse about music by changing the musical object itself, thereby creating the concept of “grain” to refocus the conversation. This “grain,” in my opinion, is a notoriously confusing and misused concept. But Barthes’ discussion of it can productively turn the conversation away from an object altogether and to the relation between listener and speaker. It seems to me that that is also what Knight is doing in his discussion of standardized speech. Barthes uses the “grain” to get to at what he likes in some voices – Panzera’s “r”s as paradoxically “totally abstract” and “totally material” (184) rather than Fischer-Dieskau’s sentimental clarity (185) – revealing the erotic relation with each voice as a game of desire or repulsion (and giving rise to such ridiculous accusations as the stupidity of the lung [183]). Knight, in the same vein, focuses on the taste dynamics present in the proponents of World English (“these sounds were quite literally more beautiful” [169]) and their interaction with the class and race prejudices present in the missionary fervor of standardizing speech. The importance of relationality is easy to see in the move from sounding object to the listener’s perception.
There might also be a productive tension in Knight’s discussion of World English as falsely described as neutral and Barthes’ description of voices that lack grain. World English, though fabricated, is still clearly not neutral as it is fabricated from very particular regional and cultural ties, most strongly the chain to Britain and the European sound as an accolade of sophistication. The ability for a voice to be devoid of grain is precisely what shuts down many scholars use of the term as what is unique or idiosyncratic in the voice or the voice’s material tie to the body. Being devoid of grain really marks, for Barthes, the intervention of a clarity of expression where one performs “an art that inoculates pleasure (by reducing it to a known, coded emotion) and reconciles the subject to what in music can be said” (185, original emphasis) – too much pheno-text and not enough geno-text. In what way does a standardization of pronunciation encourage the speaker toward emotional clarity as well? Do the bel canto singers, with their regiment of timbre, and Julliard actors, with their uniform vowels, suck the idiosyncratic particularity out of an individual? What then is the value being laid on what is unique in the voice and the individual?
In thinking about how we hear a layering of abstraction and materiality, I find the idea of appreciating the “idealized ‘elevated’ diction” (172) of theatrical speech as it segregates itself from quotidian speech really interesting. What literally stands in the place of what is considered “ideal” always accentuates the underlying politics of those labeling it as ideal. But isn’t a great deal of theatre and performance consistently labeling ideality and universality in more ways than just pronunciation? Is this not where the performance of disidentification becomes so vital? It is as if it is precisely the fascist aspect of World English, the drive to teach everyone to speak the same in a fabricated way, that makes it so easily appropriated for theatre – not in a quest for universality (which would be logical) but in a quest for uncanny strangeness from all in the audience, northerners and southerners, American and British alike. However, the ideal is skewed toward certain types of familiarity, thus the re-entry of politics as they play out in the dynamics of attraction and repulsion.
In John Cage’s Aria (a piece that I have currently been writing about), the singer is asked to sing in ten different vocal styles. When vocalist Meredith Monk was asked to perform the piece, she explained to Cage that she could not sing in ten different musical genres, but could think of each new style indication as a different vocal technique. In some cases the outcome was the same, it sounds like she is singing in different musical styles, but Monk never sounds like she is parodying style, as, for instance, Cathy Berberian, for whom the piece was written, sometimes does. The distinction of technique and style executes a subtle shift that may be useful in thinking about these texts. Seeing an idiomatic vocalization as only one technique amongst many rather than the all-encompassing world of a vocal style that cannot be escaped without breaking apart ones personality puts a great deal of pressure on both how we hear speech standardization and what a listener can label as grain in the first place. Because I often write about (and sing at) the outer limits of vocalization – extended technique, definitions of what is “natural” and “healthy” in voice, the breaking up of identity, language, and communication – these texts mark some of the straight-jackets of thought that draw that outer limit in the first place.
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