Cavarero and Rodenburg: Marti Newland (Columbia University)

Reading Cavarero and Rodenburg in conversation reinforce how “voice in theory” and “voice in practice” are inextricable. Rodenburg explains the challenges of vocalization within Western aesthetic, psychological, health and political ideals as Cavarero outlines the historical and philosophical influences of these Western ideas. While Rodenburg provides suggestions to overcome the challenges she outlines, her pedagogical philosophy remains limited by a vocal epistemology informed by the pathologizing of (non-Western) bodies through the colonial era as well as an essentialist frame that I found myself correcting while reading. Where is performativity for Rodenburg? This pathologizing, led by medical scientists and subsumed by voice pedagogues, defines human physiology in a way that renders vocal practices “healthy” or “unhealthy,” and consequently “right”/“wrong,” “beautiful/ugly,” etc. Accordingly, one’s vocal acts should sound the same through one’s life—as the vocal technique Rodenburg offers can discipline age, illness, and injury, a goal she recommends to readers. Intent on telling readers how to achieve “healthy” vocalization binds Rodenburg to the very traditions (“habits” as she calls them) she works to frustrate in order to encourage access to one’s “right” to vocalize. The “healthy” vocalization she celebrates comes from a specific Western vocal ideal, an ideal she uncritically naturalizes in the book. This “one voice,” as Cavarero indexes it, leaves both philosophers and practitioners with concerns about individual agency (see the book titles). I read Cavarero’s argument for the imperative “vocalized logos” and Rodenburg’s argument for exercising one’s right to vocalize as calls to express selfhood. These calls, however, require both voice “theorists” and “practitioners” to reevaluate the epistemology from which these calls emerge and consider other approaches to expressing selfhood. Fortunately, Cavarero and Rodenburg give us a path to conduct this reevaluation: breathing.

Cavarero reminds us of the role of breathing within a Western religious philosophy and shows how breathing is the mode through which humans relate to one another (Cavarero 2005: 21). “Nothing more than the act of breathing,” she says, “is able to testify to the proximity of human beings to one another”(ibid: 31). Relating to other humans requires speaking with oneself first since “interior discoursing is the condition of possibility for speaking to others”(ibid: 46). I take Cavarero very seriously here, that breathing is a “profound communication of oneself” (ibid: 31). Rodenburg describes how breathing can provide access to the self through repeated breathing exercises where “as the breath goes lower…it settles down into and disrupts a habitation untouched by intellect and rationality. When it does hit bottom it sometimes dislodges a vital clue to our being—the secret life held down under the deepest of breaths”(Rodenburg 1992: 88-89). While Cavarero addresses the external expression of self, and Rodenburg the internal search for self, both authors speak to the dangers of encountering the self through (deep) breathing in vocalization--“irrational,” “natural,” possibly even “unhealthy”(!) vocal sounds can make one vulnerable to an undesirable reception by the public. For example, one’s voice may be heard as male or female, White or non-White, educated or uneducated. And even worse—the potential for these mishearings to be an evaluation of one’s self... scary territory in the West.

These thoughts about breath from Cavarero and Rodenburg bring me to the question: How could we reconsider Barthes through a discussion of breathing? His reflection on “oratorical” language intrigues me (Barthes 1972: 186)—words necessitating vocalization in order to realize their meaning—Romantic French poetry was the example he gave of such language, but many languages are referential distinctly through sound (Mandarin Chinese, for example, as well as many regional dialects throughout the US). I understand “oratorical” language as similar to what Cavarero would call “vocalized logos.” So what, then, of deeply breathed vocalization, of self-full vocalized logos? Additionally, Barthes description of listening to a singer as erotic (ibid: 188) evokes Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1981) and connect the expression of selfhood with the vocalizing agency Cavarero and Rodenburg seek. To me, the task going forward would be to expand the episteme of vocalization through ethnographic research about breathing and vocality, at once in theory and in practice. I long for Rodenburg to pause with the “Black American gospel singer” she incessantly references: to listen carefully to her singing and ask her about how she understands vocal practice, philosophy (or not). I suspect she, along with many different types of singers, has a valuable vocal approach to add to this field of inquiry, an approach that could alter the epistemological axis around which voice theorists and practitioners often get stuck. On a different note, I found the writing style of both Cavarero (Kottman’s translation) and Rodenburg to be very speech-like in style. I look forward to talking about that.

Voice AND Logos: Christopher Grobe (Yale University)

For all the differences between their audiences and backgrounds, Rodenburg and Cavarero share much--not only philosophical presumptions but also rhetorical tactics. Both begin with evocations of the false voice, which is characterized as blandly aristocratic. (Compare Cavarero's opening treatment of the Calvino story to Rodenburg's biting description of the babbling London elite.) For both, however, the falsity of these voices is not an insidious trick, but a bald-faced lie; to the connoisseur of voice (a role they each claim), the voice can only tell the truth--even the truth of its own falsity. (For Rodenburg the voice is a "lie detector" [16]; for Cavarero, it cannot tell a lie [24]). For both, the true voice is arrived at through the body, especially the pre-linguistic body of the infant. And for both, the voice is not only "destined to speech" in general (as Cavarero often puts it), but destined to confessional, self-revelatory speech in particular. In fact, to hear Rodenburg tell it, she leaves a trail of weeping, confessing sex-crime survivors wherever she goes (see 87-8). These similarities should not, perhaps, be surprising. Although Rodenburg disavows it as the initial source for vocal work, they are both ultimately drawing on psychoanalytic thought--its hermeneutic of suspicion, its privileging of childhood experience, its confessionalism, etc.

For all the obvious similarities, though, there is also a major (though subtle) difference between their work. We might uncover it simply by asking, what is the quintessential mode of voice for each? For Cavarero, it is the phatic vocalization--that sort of verbal "pinging" that uses language simply to establish a relation. For Rodenburg, it is the urgent act of speech--not a "speech act" in the philosophical sense, but an vocal act so filled with doing that its vocalization equals its meaning (e.g., yelling "Stop!" to someone about to get run over by a car). Both modes render secondary the precise words spoken, but whereas Cavarero's phatic vocalization is entirely indifferent to the words that sustain it, Rodenburg's urgent speech only ditches the words once their vocalization has so perfectly captured their intent as to make them superfluous. Rodenburg's "voice" is interactional; Cavarero's, merely relational. In reacting against the grapho-centrism of Derrida, Cavarero simply goes too far in shaming the text. After all, as Rodenburg reminds us, we can "Make Sound and Sense" (7).

Nowhere is this virtuous circle between sound and sense (voice and logos) more evident than in Cavarero's case-in- point: poetic language. Despite Cavarero's claim that poetic words are chosen for "their metric value rather than their meaning" (80), no poet faces so binary a choice. In fact, the best poetic language occurs when metric value (and sound and tone and rhythm and mouth-feel) contributes to (or colors, or contradicts, but always lives in relation to) its meaning, and vice versa. In poetry, voice and logos aren't glaring at each other from across the room; they're dancing together. Paying attention to voice means watching, performing, and even choreographing this dance. In other words, I disagree with Cavarero's suggestion that "written discourse is an orphan" (209)--not only as it applies to poetry, but even moreso as it applies to dramatic texts, which are obviously designed to evoke, license, and restrain voices in such a way that voice and text mutually infect or enforce. We can absorb Cavarero's wonderful notion of the rhythmic, embodied, and unique voice without accepting her stark contrast of voice with text.

Can You Hear Me Now?: On Rodenburg and Cavarero: Derek Miller (Stanford University)

I find these two texts extremely difficult to read together, perhaps due to the simple fact that one is, ultimately, a textbook, while the other is a series of philosophical essays. Surprisingly, both books struck me as extremely repetitive. While the extensive set of exercises in Rodenburg’s work are a necessary part of her teaching, her exordium on the “natural voice” could have been summarized in five pages. Cavarero’s argument, meanwhile, though inflected in subtly different ways by each philosopher or text it engages, boiled down to the following: Western philosophy ignores the voice, but if we pay attention to voice, we may recover a new form of politics as communication-among-speakers. Neither Rodenburg’s nor Cavarero’s work is banal, but the lengthy efforts of the former and the overly intricate readings of the latter seemed to lend both texts a kind of desperation, as though neither author, ultimately, really had that much to say about voice. That is, despite both authors’ best efforts, neither contributes much positive knowledge about voice, preferring instead to declare what voice is not. (Reductively: for Rodenburg, voice is not culture; for Cavarero, voice is not language or vision.)

I’m not sure I know what Rodenburg’s definition of voice is. But my biggest concern with Rodenburg is that she seems totally to reject the past--physical and psychological--in her notion of voice. She writes that “The natural voice [...] is quite simply an unblocked voice that is unhampered by debilitating habits” (19), and discusses throughout the book how past physical and emotional injuries can shape how we sound. Rodenburg seeks a voice that expresses what we might call a “vocal degree zero” (since Barthes is one of our interlocutors here). However, there is no such thing. There is no neutral voice, no voice prior to the body, which always already has a history. It is certainly true that babies use their voices with an ease that adults forget, but that forgetting is part of learning to be a human. (Or, better, of learning that voice’s “essential destination” (209), as Cavarero has it, is in speech, i.e., in culture.) Similarly, Rodenburg criticizes how “We instantly transform voices according to our audience” (72). But, again, this is merely human behavior, what it means to be a person in culture. Anyone who behaves exactly the same way in all circumstances and with all people is insane, not “natural.” I am, perhaps, reading Rodenburg rather stringently; my own experience with voice training actually had me nodding along at some of her assertions (against floor work; in favor of being “in the moment,” which means connected to your breathing). Yet I am bothered by a manifesto that imagines a pristine past voice to which it is desirable to return. There is no vocal degree zero, there is only being a speaking being.

Cavarero’s book, it strikes me, is only nominally about voice. Cavarero uses her critique of Western metaphysics’ rejection of voice to index the metaphysical rejection of uniqueness, which, in turn, is that which Cavarero wishes to restore to politics. In other words, this is fundamentally a book of political philosophy that, much like Plato’s Republic, gets around to the body politic by discussing the body human. Thus, to criticize Cavarero for having little to say about voice is to criticize her for not having written a different book. (Though her embarrassingly text-oriented reading of the balcony scene deserves scorn in its own right. The sheer number of absurd statements here [“The spectator, like Juliet, does not see Romeo’s face” (238)] would make me question her readings of Plato, if it weren’t so abundantly clear how dismissive Plato is of voice.) For what it is, namely a series of close readings that permit Cavarero to meditate on all the different ways in which metaphysics refuses to engage voice, Cavarero’s book is well executed.

However, and this ties back to my problem with Rodenburg, Cavarero treats voice as a singular presence: “the voice manifests the unique being of each human being” (173). I think voice is absolutely not singular. I think we have many voices, that we are always polyvocal. This is clearest to me in the oft-noted but under-theorized fact that the way we hear ourselves when we speak and the way others hear us is not the same. (The invention of sound recording takes on new philosophical importance in this light, as Jonathan Sterne has tentatively explored in his Audible Past. Veit Erlmann’s uneven Reason and Resonance is also useful here.) Cavarero calls voice “sonorous materiality” or “phonic substance” (1). But if voice is supposed to be a physical carrier of our corporeal identity, the disjuncture between my sonorous materiality as I hear it and my phonic substance as you perceive it is a serious philosophical problem, to which Cavarero gives typically short shrift. Like Rodenburg, Cavarero wishes voice to testify not only to presence, but to an essential presence that avoids culture and history, and thus can speak as a unique political subject: “The protagonist of this politics is a speaker who, leaving aside his or her belonging to this or that identity group, this or that language, communicates him- or herself first of all as voice” (209). But there is no political voice without language--the very musicality of our speech is a function of the language we speak, our upbringing, the patterns of our thought, our audience, etc. At the risk of repeating myself, I hope we can attend to this vocal degree zero that underlies these two books. Not only do I think it does not exist, but I think it undermines voice’s true political and philosophical potential: namely, to insert us fully into a community because we depend on them to hear us on our behalf.

Rodenburg’s The Right to Speak and Caverero’s For More Than One Voice: Laura Dougherty (Winthrop University)

I approached these two texts with these current projects on my mind: just this week I was given the final (purportedly) edits for a chapter I’ve contributed to the forthcoming book Playing With Theory in Theatre Practice. I was asked to contribute a case study on my work as a voice coach for a production of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus. What I try to work through in the chapter is how I used post-colonial theories in my work as a voice coach. I am also considering the Voice and Movement class I currently teach—thinking at this time of syllabus preparation of my teaching methodology, and how and where in my approach I might engage with my material in ways that might be more effective, or how I might add additional perspective. I mention this to open only to acknowledge and articulate my current subject position. As a scholar and a voice and speech practitioner I spend a good amount of time navigating the theory/praxis divide. And this is exactly the space I find between these two works.

Going back to Rodenburg’s text, having had read it before and being familiar with her and her work, I am interested in her how she advocates for access; access to the healthful production of one’s voice, but also in the scope of the work, access to voice work. I appreciate how her work and approach is usable for practitioners of specific methodologies, as well as those who might practice a general mash-up of different practices. One of the most recognizable figures in the practice of voice and speech her project here is to advocate not necessarily for her methodology, but for the voice in general. I had heard her “God doesn’t mind a bum note” anecdote before I had heard of her or her work. I am fueled, for my teaching, to constantly address in my own approach, how to better advocate for the practice of voice and speech as a whole, but also to advocate for each actor and student’s own voice. Revisiting this text serves to reaffirm that advocacy. While her examples might be now outdated (I wonder how that would resonate with my undergrads), the simplicity of her advocacy for access has great staying power.

How is the body considered in Cavarero’s text? I am interest in how this text works to complicate and celebrate the corporeality of voice. “Unlike thinking, speaking does not allow its protagonist to be an abstract subject” (175) as if voice is a somehow grounded theory for its very literalness—there is a body connected to, producing the voice. I am entrenched in opening up to my students the great weight of performativity—suggesting that something happens and is happening because of an utterance and how it is created and connected to their bodies in their moment. So if Cavarero works against a tradition in philosophy which removes or ignores the act of speaking from the idea of speech “[t]he basic strategy, which is the inaugural act of metaphysics, consists in a double gesture whereby speech is separated from speakers and finds its home in thought” (9), the practice of voice and speech necessarily answers that call, because it is, of course, necessarily rooted in the body.

More Scattered Thoughts on Voice: Gelsey Bell (New York University)

Cavarero’s dream of a philosophy stemming from a logos of vocal resonance rather than one of understanding and a politics based on a polyvocal song of unique voices is rightly complicated by Rodenburg’s practice of helping the natural and healthy voice emerge. With phenomena like pushing or devoicing, we can see how relationality begins with the individual voice and how Cavarero’s song could go a step further and take into consideration not just the unique timbre of each voice, but also what voices are louder than others, the subtle differences in articulation, as well as those whose voices shut down and go unheard. I have always found Cavarero remarkably naïve in her discussion of the “unique voice” as if subjecthood and vocal sound were stable entities. Rodenburg, though pointing toward a natural (otherwise known as healthy) voice, over and over explains the ways that a voice can get tied up in social situations that mold it in many directions, be it raising or lowering the pitch range of speaking due to gender roles (74-85) or utilizing urban glottal attacks (68). As she says, “we learn rather swiftly to stop pleasing ourselves and please others with the sounds we make” (39). So what does this mean for Cavarero’s desire to make a politics with the unique timbres of our voices? If we can trace those timbres back to biological, environmental, developmental, and socio-economic factors, our unique voices are still not on a level playing field – just as Levinas’s face-to-face with the other will always be colored by race and culture. How can we take into consideration that the fact that when some of Rodenburg’s students do finally speak in healthy and sustainable ways that they speak with what feels and sounds like a different voice?

Cavarero does engages the disconnect between voice and one conception of subjecthood (that based on thought and intent) when she states that “speaking is not at all a thinking that expresses itself out loud, nor is it merely vocalized thought, nor is it an acoustic substitute for thinking. The phenomenology of speaking possesses an autonomous status in which the relationality of mouths and ears come to the fore” (174). However the relation that she focuses in on is of a certain degree of intimacy: the voice on the phone that can say “It’s me” and you know who is talking. It is a voice that you already have an established relationship to (“[E]very voice is unique, and because it is unique, once it is known it can be recognized” [25; my emphasis]). It seems to me that the integral vocal period to politics is the introductory period, when the conversation is getting started and people are in the process of learning each other’s voices. This is the space where Rodenburg’s “vocal imperialism” (5) is particularly dangerous.

The idea of “vocal imperialism” also points to one essential point that both authors bring up: the fundamental place of listening in the dialogic configuration of vocal activity. Rodenburg mentions our need to re-educate our ears so that we do not interpret ‘high status’ voices as more informed than others, pointing to how with some voices we take responsibility for what is being said, while with other voices we blame the speaker. While Cavarero scolds philosophy for being bad listeners and conversationalists. One thing I often have to remind myself when writing about the voice is to not focus solely on the vocal object (I’m using the word object very loosely here – obviously that’s a whole other discussion) but also the intertwinement of the activity of listening.

I also find it fascinating how Rodenburg talks about the health of the voice and sincerity. (Bringing to mind a whole score of texts including Shoshana Felman’s The Scandal of the Speaking Body and Mladen Dolars’s A Voice and Nothing More.) How much of philosophy is an extended and confused attempt to make sense of strained, insincere, and unhealthy voices. How do performances of awkward rhetoric or unimpassioned nonsense complicate knowledge formation? How can they be taken into account?

On Cavarero and Rodenburg: Andrew Kimborough (University of Kentucky)

Over the years I’ve made my way through books by Berry, Linklater, and Lessac, and even the articles Catherine Fitzmaurice has posted on her website, but I’ve never got through a book of Rodenburg’s. So this was my first exposure, and truth be told I found it tedious going. The repetition was excessive and I found myself turning unread pages often. The emphasis on what the psychological literature calls “folk psychology” might get a lot of sympathetic heads nodding in agreement, but the lack of citation, or any burden of proof besides her personal experience, had me losing my patience the first dozen or so pages in. But here’s the kicker—I was one of those sympathetic readers nodding in agreement! Yes, students come to acting with a lot of inhibitions, and yes, a lot of our expressivity is tied to the voice. But reading Rodenburg, I’m tempted to think she sees the voice teacher as one of analyst/therapist/life coach (granted, she offers many notes of caution in this regard). I bridle at this sort of thing, even with the caveats. The language of Freudian psychoanalysis had so infiltrated actor training in the US (and apparently the UK) by the end of the twentieth century that the two could have been confused as synonymous (the language is in Berry’s and Linklater’s books, too). The irony here is that when Stanislavsky first started trying to link psychological research to the actor’s process, he was trying to find ways of instilling psychological verisimilitude in characterization. A century later teachers don’t even bother with the research; without any credentials they go about addressing the psychological make-up of the actor. The question this raises for me is when or whether we will develop a tradition of voice pedagogy that breaks from early twentieth century theoretical models and complements contemporary research in speech pathology and linguistics.

I am a big fan of our second text, Cavarero’s book. I am not at all surprised that hers is only one of two books specifically dedicated to the sound of the human voice in the vast philosophical literature (the other is Don Ihde’s phenomenological study Listening and Voice. I’m not counting Mladen Doler’s A Voice and Nothing More). As she delightfully argues over and over, western philosophy has simply not been in a position to hear or discuss the voice, so why should there be more than two books? One of Cavarero’s many achievements lies in her critique of the theories that adopt degrees of hostility to an oral sensibility. Her take on Plato’s conception of language and logos, while not altogether unique (see Harold Innis and Eric Havelock), helps me to properly contextualize Plato’s ambiguous contribution to linguistic theory. Her dismantling of Derrida, who grossly distorted the lay philosopher’s understanding of western philosophy by calling it a phono-logocentic tradition, counts as one essential refutation of the poststructural enterprise. She does not refute Derrida on empirical grounds (which is easy to do); rather, she simply points out the misreadings revealed in his own writing.

In their first posts, a few of our panelists made allusions to some of the poststructuralists, and I am curious to hear others’ thoughts in this vein. I make no secret of my hostility to poststructuralism, and my initial research on the voice sprang from an early desire (1999) to challenge the wholesale embrace of poststructual linguistic theory, and especially the theories of voice expressed by Derrida and Lacan, in theatre scholarship. I found it perverse that critics regarded language and stage speech in a light diametrically opposed to practitioners, and I thought the critics were wrong.

Cavarero’s entire book is premised upon the tensions between writing and speaking, and she drives home the point that throughout the western tradition the scholars have always been hobbled by the perverse desire to reduce the aural dimension of human existence to sight, whereas the sound of a human voice always seems to “destabilize the rational register” (17). I believe this dichotomy holds true for theatre scholarship, too. Cavarero mentions two of the scholars associated with the Toronto School (Havelock and Walter Ong), but does not engage a discussion of the causal effects of language media. Nonetheless, the book anticipates a shift in the philosophical regard of language currently taking place under the influence of cognitive science. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, when we can’t teach writing to save our lives but electronic media proficiency is the norm, we are seeing the philosophies move away from traditional rationalism and towards embodiment and synesthesia. This emergent body of literature begins to attend upon what Cavarero calls the “sonorous manifestation of an embodied uniqueness” (84) within human voices.

Barthes, Knight, Rodenburg, Cavarero: Tamsen Wolff (Princeton University)

All four authors are invested, implicitly or explicitly, in specific sound traveling from one mouth to another listening ear, as well as how a listener perceives a speaker’s vocalization. Barthes and Knight are arguably more generally concerned with the issue of inscribing vocality, describing, dissecting, and, in Knight’s case, teaching specific vocal sounds. Rodenburg and Cavarero focus their attention more on the individually embodied voice and, in Cavarero’s case, putting logos in its place. But the importance of a given listener’s perception of a voice informs all of the arguments made here, showing up in Knight’s description of Tilly’s groupies on the “beautiful” sounds his method demanded; Barthes’ subjective response to the voice of Panzera versus that of Fischer-Dieskau; Part One of Rodenburg’s argument in which she details the wide range of speaking habits that develop as a result of listeners’ judgments; and Cavarero’s belief that to consider vocal expression without considering the reciprocity of speech and listening is untenable. At the same time, the dual emphasis on speaking and listening in these texts contains curious floating assumptions about vocal truthfulness, or the question of what the distinctive voice reveals to the listening ear, and how the voice can be termed (as these authors variously do) “neutral,” “inauthentic,” “false,” or “true.” I’m interested in these claims, their points of overlap and divergence. When, for example, Cavarero refers to a “simple sonorous truth” (2), what does that mean? What could possibly be simple about the idea of truth or authenticity in vocal expression?

Cavarero provides an account of the entrenched hierarchy in philosophy between speech (semantics) and voice (phonics), placing an emphasis on the embodied singularity of the voice, and offering “a vocal ontology of uniqueness,” which is apparently new to philosophy. It’s not new to anyone who works in voice from a practical standpoint, as is clear from Knight’s approach to actors’ existing vocal histories and Rodenburg’s basic premise that an individual’s background and self is exposed in his or her voice. Not unlike Cavarero, Barthes embraces the geno-song (phonic) over the pheno-song (semantic), although he also makes Cavarero’s point for her about theory’s traditional rejection of the individual body in several ways, none more entertaining than his dismissal of the universally stupid lung. The idea of the “grain” even seems in part a way to bypass the question of the body in addressing the voice; or at least the grain of the voice cannot be reduced to the body, or to specific bodies.

Theoretically and practically, it seems to me straightforward that voices are unique, embodied, and rely on specific listeners, real or imagined. Rodenburg, who attends to the rights of the speaking person to be heard for who they are, stresses that there are no bad voices, only bad habits. According to Rodenburg, a person’s voice is always true to who he or she is, whether that voice is remarkably “free” of repressive habits or a complicated reflection of various forces that have adversely affected it. Knight is similarly interested in preventing the obfuscation or neutralization of sounds any one speaker instinctively wants to make or could potentially make. Both criticize the alleged “beautiful” or “neutral” sounds of a BBC or aristocratic voice (Rodenburg) or World or Standard English (Knight). Both are primarily concerned with opening up vocal potential, beginning with the body and the possibilities of expressive sound and moving toward comprehensible speech.

But when Cavarero wants to establish the primacy of embodied phonics, she does so in part by contrasting the deceptiveness of language with the truth of the voice. Moreover, the singular voice, unlike speech, “plays no trick…but rather unmasks the speech that masks it” (24). This sounds like a lot of work for the voice. And why if a voice is singular may it not also deceive? Why does the first preclude the second? Is singularity synonymous with truthfulness in this argument, and if so, could the opposite also be true? Like Tolstoy’s families (all happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way), do all false voices sound the same whereas every true voice sounds distinctive?

This is the case in Cavarero’s first example, Calvino’s story “A King Listens,” in which all the voices of the court are heard by the King as a wash of false sounds, before the sole voice of an unseen woman singing registers what Cavarero describes as the “simple sonorous truth.” Indeed, almost all of the examples of the truth-telling power of the voice in Cavarero—from the pivotal character in Calvino to the Sirens to opera singers—are female singers. While the speaking voice is revealing, as Rodenburg would affirm, for Cavarero the singing voice attests definitively “to the truth of the vocal” (6). The power of singing is so far privileged here that Cavarero claims, “no woman is more mute than a woman who loses her singing voice” (119). This distinction between speaking and singing truthfulness is similar to the way in which speech, song, and dance in musical theatre often function in a hierarchy of authentic affect. A character becomes most articulate and emotionally truthful in song and dance (and characters are not necessarily in charge of their revealing, intuitive singing and dancing selves). This truth-telling narrative convention also dovetails with the exposure of a performer’s ability, which is revealed principally in song.

I don’t think there’s a question that aspects of who we are as individuals are revealed in our voices, and even in our breathing, but whether that information can be read clearly or accurately by anyone else is another story entirely, so the question of truth and the truth of what is revealed vocally seems nebulous at best. With all her listening experience, Rodenburg, for example, perhaps would have greater powers of perception than most. Yet, as Barthes puts it, emphasizing the singularity of the listener at least: “This phonetics—am I alone in perceiving it?... isn’t the truth of the voice to be hallucinated?” (184). Certainly the ear that hears is every bit as individual as the voice that speaks.

Barthes and Knight Response: Marlene Johnson (University of Alabama at Birmingham)

It has been twenty years since I have had to read Roland Barthes. A few key concepts arise for me in this reading, particularly his borrowed dichotomy between the “geno-text” and the “pheno-text”--what Cavarero in a somewhat clearer elaboration throughout her book calls the dichotomy between the “phonic” and the “semantic.” In seeking to articulate an idea that is, to use Barthes’ words, “ineffable”, i. e. the “grain” of the voice, he does not altogether clarify his meaning, but manages to obfuscate it. He is reduced to describing “grain” as “a space of encounter,” “a thrill,” “something directly in the cantor’s body,” “not original, yet individual,” something akin to the “geno-song” which “works at…the voluptuousness of its sound signifiers.” In contrast to this voice is the voice of the Culture—which according to Barthes requires its art to be clear, to translate an emotion, and to represent a meaning—“an art that inoculates pleasure (by reducing it to a known, coded emotion.)” A recent visit to a well-known Shakespeare Festival left me implicitly understanding this. The actors were precise, clear in their storytelling, and predictable. The show left me feeling bored and disengaged, even though it was fine professional work. Something deeper, something ineffable which could move and excite was lacking. The work did not seem to be connected to impulse or to flow from deep within the performer’s bodies.

This dichotomy between the moving phonic and the rule-governed semantic appears in Knight’s discussion of the history of William Tilley’s stranglehold on speech training (which did not truly include voice production) that came to be called first “World English” and later “Good Speech” with its sense of prescriptive, unchallenged superiority and a basis in “RP colonialism.” Knight lays out a model of a different kind of speech training that allows the performer to explore all kinds of sounds as opposed to the adjectival codes of “standard,” “cultivated,” “cultured,” “intelligent”--the codes of Good Speech—which Barthes might claim are lacking in depth and grain. Knight now regularly teaches this exploration model so that all sounds become available to the performer rather than only certain prescribed ones. The performer is then free to choose from a wide palette of sounds to create distinct dialects or characters.

The provoking question “Are we condemned to the adjective? Are we reduced to the dilemma of either the predicable or the ineffable?” is one that compels me. In many ways my teaching of voice and body work in Alexander Technique—as well as acting methodologies in general—is seeking to ask this same question while trying to articulate something that is essentially ineffable. How do we balance technique, methodologies with the subject matter that is in essence ineffable, impulsive, and alive to get to the embodied grain?

I have used the Knight article before when teaching classes in the International Phonetic Alphabet. I found it useful to give students a context for what they were studying. I read sections of the Barthes article aloud to my husband and both of us found Barthes to be murkier (there’s that adjective!) and seemingly purposely obscure. Since I don’t spend much time with Barthes, it is not surprising that I do not readily speak his language.

All of this raises for me other questions that are occurring while reading Cavarero’s dense and excellent account which pieces together from where and how this semantic preferencing has come into its insistent superiority over the practical, grained, embodied, “mother tongue.” I find it interesting that Barthes calls the lungs a stupid organ that gets no erection along with his degrading breath work in general. Compare his contentions concerning the lungs/breath with Cavarero’s points particularly in the chapter “When Lungs did the Vocalizing.” I am left to wonder how much breath work or impulse training Roland Barthes ever had. This to me points up some issues with theorizing—that too often the practical, the experiential, and the embodiment can get left out of the academic philosophical discussion of voicing and speaking.

Barthes and Knight: Marti Newland (Columbia University)

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.

Observations on Barthes and Knight: Derek Miller (Stanford University)

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.

Barthes’ “The Grain of the Voice” and Knight’s “Standard Speech: The Ongoing Debate”: Laura Dougherty (Winthrop University)

I’m taken with Barthes’ suggestion of the grain of the voice as a space, (the space of encounter), a generative and germinating space, for how spatializing the production of voice, of mapping the movement enacted in that “encounter between a language and a voice” can work to express the gravity of voice. As we on this panel are all (presumably) invested and interested in the voice as a subject of practice and/or theoretical investigation, I need not argue here for the notion of just how weighty a subject and practice voice and speech is. In my research and practice with voice and speech, I am interested in how the practice of voice and speech offers or excludes access to our USAmerican stages (using “stage” broadly—playing space, as if any one place in/on which a performance happens is someone made a stage). I grapple with the questions of which stories in what style can be told on our stages because of an expected and presumed “neutral” voice, and for whose consumption. In this I think about the texts we produce, the actors who can perform in them and the audiences who have access to our performances because of that space created by voice.

While I appreciate Knight’s attention to the intricate role class has played in the genealogy of the practice of voice and speech in the US, I take exception with his notion that a sought-after “neutrality” “is actually merely anonymous” (178). Thinking of voice, as Bathes suggests, as a place where “significance explodes”, there is nothing anonymous in this presumed neutrality. Whose “neutral”? I am struck with how deeply steeped in identity markers of race, class, education, economic status and regional affiliation and citizenship any presumed “neutrality” is.

As I approach and work with voice and speech in scholarship and practice, I then turn my thinking to how I teach voice and speech given the gravity of the grain, the generative space of encounter of the voice (mindful of the specific trajectory of voice and speech practice and pedagogy in the US). This is of particular significance now to me as I teach voice and speech in South Carolina (and hail from the Boston area)—place plays a huge role in pedagogy, given the tension around southern dialects. (I can draw from this experience if our conversation moves toward pedagogy; I mention it here just to foreground my current moment in thinking and practice.)

[Untitled]: Andrew Kimbrough (University of Kentucky)

For me the story of the voice in the twentieth century—at least as heard in what we call, for better or worse, the “west”—may be summed up in the tensions Dudley Knight points to between the textual perspective of William Tilly and his ilk, and the perspective afforded the rest of us glued to our radios, TVs, and cell phones. At first glance we may find perverse the number of educators at the beginning of the last century who championed a correct way of speaking English that no group of English speakers actually employed. Or that such a fictitious manner of spoken English actually became a preferred manner of speech on respectable theatre stages. So while Knight makes a few passing gestures, I think a fuller exploration of the material factors that created this interesting and bizarre cultural artifact still could be teased out. Theatre critics and historians Bruce McConachie and Tobin Nellhaus have got us started with useful models of investigation in recent publications (see McConachie, American Theatre in the Culture of the Cold War, 2006, and Nellhaus, Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism, 2010).

Both employ contemporary versions of what is known as the Toronto School of Communication Theory, which had its genesis in the 1940s with economist Harold Innis of the University of Toronto. Innis proposed that human forms of thought and expression are in some respects dictated by dominant media of language use, be they oral, written, printed, or electronic. Marshall McLuhan did most to give the theory traction in the 60s, but because McLuhan quickly came to be viewed publicly as a crank and a shameless self-promoter, the theory fell out of the limelight—though it still could be found here and there in popular and scholarly discourses (see Kristin Linklater’s Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice, for example). Bolstered in part by empirical studies in cognition, however, the theory is gaining in credence. It seems evidence exists to confidently propose that British and US societies at the end of the 1800s, after centuries of the cognitive conditioning afforded by writing and print, would actually envision, rather than hear, an idealized version of spoken English. Given the rapid incursion of electronic forms of communication in the twentieth century, however, the arch-textual perspective cultivated in the nineteenth century would give way to cognitive nodes of orality introduced through radio, telephone, records and cassette tapes, movies, and the computer. Thanks to electronics, the voice is making a comeback.

In discussing the voice Roland Barthes unwittingly skirts the textual/oral divide. Pheno-text derives from what can be studied optically: the verbal score and all that can be represented and dissected in writing. The geno-text, on the other hand, evades the discursive strategies indebted to the eye. The geo-text attends to the ear and those spaces of our psyche still attuned to the resonance of being communicated through sound. Along this line, Barthes completely misinterprets the impact of the phonograph and adopts instead the dread and negativity typical of pundits who value dated and cumbersome technologies as somehow superior to new and popular inventions (i.e., records and radio; see 184, 185, 187). He is unaware that electronic sound technologies have brought to his attention the existence of the geno-text in the first place. It would probably be blasphemous of me to suggest here that had Barthes been writing 70 years earlier he could easily have fallen in league with someone like Wm Tilly. But note his totally incongruous assertion, and non sequitur conclusion, that “what is produced at the level of the geno-text is finally writing” (185). Nothing of what he has written up to this point prepares for the leap of logic. Rather, Barthes relies on a truism of poststructural dogma that everything is textual, everything must be reducible to writing. Therefore, the argument must go, whatever we may think we perceive in the geno-text that resists language has to be a fiction; rather, as Barthes says later, something merely “shifts” in the “chain of the signifier” (187). For Barthes, the grain, that which should escape signification, is simply “the emergence of the text in the work” (188).

Fortunately we have approached a time in our (western) cultural history when the incursion of electronic forms of communication has greatly diminished the influence of textuality and encouraged new forms of expression, thought, and inquiry. We could not even discuss the voice outside of pedagogic concerns ten or twenty years ago because as a subject it was unnoted (notice the complete dearth of publications that theorize the voice compared to the plethora of speech manuals). Even Barthes ends his essay on an ambiguous note because, after all considerations of language and text, the body is still there. He ends up where Knight ends up, beckoning authentic voices. So at this point I am curious to know what is it about—for lack of a better term—the phenomenal dimension of the voice that they and others hanker after? Do we have a language with which we can discuss this dimension, or will it always resist language?

Performance Criticism—only without the performance: Christopher Grobe (Yale University)

What does Barthes’s essay have to say to a performer? It seems to me (if I may wax polemical) not much. The performer is excluded from Barthes’s regime because human agency is itself excluded. Notice the metallic and mechanistic metaphors that dominate every positive description of voice in action: “phonic metal hardens” (183), consonants are “patinated” (184), and vowels are “electronic” (184). Even an organic image like the “single skin lin[ing] the inner flesh of the performer and the music he sings” (181-2) quickly gives way to the fleshless interplay of semiotic systems. In one of the essays many eerie personifications “melody explores how the language works and identifies with that work” (182). Melody explores; it identifies. The performer is nowhere to be seen. Or rather, there is a propped-up carcass and there is a melody/language, but in between, Barthes allows only the metallic, the robotic, the cybernetic.

This blindspot in Barthes’s thinking reminds me of the anti-theatrical bias common among scholars in one of my own specialty fields: the performance of poetry. The poet-critic Charles Bernstein, in his influential book Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, coins the term “aurality” (defined as “the sounding of the writing” as opposed to “orality and its emphasis on breath, voice, and speech” [13]) precisely in order to allow authorize the critic’s direct access to the fleshless “performances” of text itself.

However different they may be in their particulars, the theories of Barthes and Bernstein both generally rely on creating a vast, excluded middle. There is nothing, for either of them, between the cellular materiality of the body and the rarefied play of language. Look at how Barthes's parallel between “deep down in the cavities” of the cantor’s body and “deep down in [his] Slavonic language” (182) erases everything more out-in-the-world than tonsils or more down-to-earth than language-as-such. (Bernstein-ian critics, much like Barthes, always profess an interest in the body, while only admitting the minimum amount of well-hidden flesh necessary to experience transcendent texts. That is, to hear them describe it, lung/larynx/tongue-cooperatives perform for ear/brain- combines. After all, anything more would risk “emotive modes” and “expressive reduction” [Barthes 183, 184].) It is a mindset born of listening to recordings—of hearing machines “perform,” and every time the same. I contend that the vast majority of performance studies, of theater studies, and of voice training lie somewhere in this excluded middle.

Knight powerfully critiques “neutrality” and “clarity” as tacit standards of voice training, and in doing so, he might seem to agree with Barthes’s disdain for pheno-typical conventions. I doubt, though, that Barthes would escape his criticism. The idea of “grain”—when it even refers to an actual body producing actual sound, rather than a "grain" producing “writing” [185]—smacks of the reductivism/minimalism that most worries Knight. If only, Barthes cries, we could strip away the drab conventions of “dramatic expressivity” and adjectival musicality, we might get down to the direct and orgasmic encounter between “inner flesh” and outermost “language." (And there's supposed to be "perversion" [187] somewhere in this coupling between the Father's “phallic stature” and the “mother tongue” [182]? All I see is a heterosexual, intramarital screw.) I can see Knight raising an eyebrow at Barthes. I paraphrase him here, with bracketed substitutions from Barthes:

To suggest, as [Roland Barthes] does, that [the grain of the voice “is directly the cantor’s body”] is to suggest that all [pheno-typical structure and meaning] would be released magically if only [the “adjectival” conventions of expression and interpretation] could be released. But released into what? (Knight 180)

Well, into writing. Ultimately, the imperatives of criticism guide Barthes’s theories—to the exclusion of performance. Granted, he may only mean to “check [our] attempts at expressive reduction” (184) and avoid “reducing [the voice] to a known coded emotion” (185)—i.e., to defer the rush to familiar meanings. Sure, "The Grain of the Voice" may be a grain of salt, but it tastes like a salt-lick to me. As I stop to taste my own argument, though, I wonder: perhaps this is just the price we pay for polemic. If so, I apologize for my own brine.

Some Preliminary Thoughts on Grain and Standardized Speech: Gelsey Bell (New York University)

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.