Embodying Voice

Singing Verdi, Singing Wagner

Margaret Medlyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429999222
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Embodying Voice: Singing Verdi, Singing Wagner articulates the process of developing an operatic voice, explaining how and why the training of such a voice is as complex and sophisticated as it is mysterious. This book illustrates how putting together a voice, embodying a sound, and creating a character are vital to an audience's emotional involvement and enjoyment. Moreover, it addresses an imbalance of power between the opera director and the orchestra conductor – ultimately, it is the communicative power of the singer's voice that brings life to an opera, a fact well known by Verdi and Wagner.

Embodying Voice highlights the singer's creative agency to be co-creator of the composer's music. It explores the ways in which vocal performance is constructed and controlled, connecting layers of mind and bodily engagement that allow operatic singers to achieve expression beyond the text itself. Further reading, listening, and performance lists are provided at the end of each chapter, complemented by musical examples throughout.

1

The Singer’s Ineffability

1.1 Introduction

What research is discovering about memory and imagination, and how emotion, reason, and physicality are inseparable in the functioning of our brains, can have significant implications for our understanding of performance, especially live performance, and the purpose of embodiment. The nature of embodiment is in and of the body, and connects cognition, emotion, and the quality of the vocal sound itself. Operatic singing in particular is a detailed engagement of mind and body, and the singer experiences this as enacted meaning in real time, resulting in embodiment as a creative act, and incorporating any musicological aspects needed that are pertinent to the role.

By applying bodily, breathing, and mental concepts, new insights are offered into the fundamental connections between the practice of a singer, the body, the mind, and its perceptions of the performance. Bringing these elements together in an ordered way is crucial for the successful and affecting production of vocal sound: in some roles the conscious ways in which the body is managed is central to the understanding of the character’s place in the story. Combining these elements in a predetermined sequence brings certain enhancements to the vocal sound that augments the listener’s enjoyment. As well as giving pleasure, we know that the voice in operatic performance can be disturbing and addictive; in writings, the body in opera has often been figured as voice, the voice being a cipher for the body’s disturbed psyche and troubling physical presence, in some way negating the body and intensifying the effect of the voice. However, to be performing in or to be present at a performance where the singer has created an embodied interaction of body, mind, and emotion, where they are totally in the “flow”, can be an extraordinary experience. This book presents the viewpoint of the opera singer: performance plays out with live, changeable bodies, and professional experience gives a very clear perspective on the complexity of the processes of staged performance.

The many areas of research investigated reflect the multifaceted nature of opera itself: not only are vocality and performance perspectives vital, but the information that theatre practitioners have developed has much to offer about the use of body and voice in ways that shed light on both in opera. In addition, new work by neuroscientists on the cognitive processes of the brain is proving to be exciting, and has a number of potential implications for operatic singers.

This chapter will present the key theoretical frameworks pertinent to the study of opera singers’ embodiment; what is particularly interesting are the variety of attempts to incorporate aspects of liveness, immediacy, and physicality in performance into the theoretical discourse. The influence of feminist musicology, the acknowledgement of the body and subsequent focus on the diva has also opened up a new perspective on the very act of performance. Increasingly important is the musicological literature that engages with the “performative” turn in the musico-dramatic dialogue.

The acknowledgement of performance as research, and an investigation of voices as a fusion of body and voice, has the power to enhance and enrich the work of performers. A concept so far unexplored has been that of “embodiment”; scholars (with the notable exception of Suzanne Cusick) have written as outsiders as listeners/viewers for other listeners/viewers, on what they see of whatever type of embodiment they are focusing on. The singer is the embodier, and therefore experiences embodiment from the inside out: a singer’s performance-based experience is in fact a form of knowledge and research that is completely opaque to non-performers.

Investigating the complex nature of voice and operatic singing cannot be engaged without firstly acknowledging the work by two seminal French writers, philosopher Roland Barthes and psychologist Michel Poizat. In his much-quoted article “The Grain of the Voice” (1977), Barthes listens for the sound of the body in the singer’s voice. By acknowledging the significance of the voice, including the lyric pronunciation of language in the timbral qualities of the sound, Barthes focused critical attention on the vocal sound itself.¹ He felt that with the sound the listener receives, information from the body and the intentions of the singer are comprehended; as well as that, Barthes connects the traces of the body in the sound with the pleasure, or jouissance, that we receive from the act of listening. Pleasure itself is the focus of Michel Poizat: in his influential book The Angel’s Cry, Poizat engages with voice from the perspective of operatic fans’ pleasure, both aural and bodily, investigating why listeners receive so much pleasure from the operatic voice.² Basing his work on the psychoanalytic work of Lacan, he stimulated investigation into why the human voice, and particularly the operatic voice, has such an effect on the listener – a sound and effect that is not notated on the page, nor expressed in the text. The cry – the sound in the voice that arouses the listener – is, according to Poizat, a vocal sound beyond music and more to do with a primal, instinctive reaction.³ His is not a musicological point of view: Poizat’s questions and hypotheses focus on the development of the voice from song to cry, reflecting his training in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Most importantly he picks up on Barthes’ use of the term jouissance and distinguishes between the ordinary pleasure of hearing a role well sung, and the orgasmic pleasure of jouissance – the (possibly painful) pleasure beyond self-control, experienced when a vocal sound or cry seemingly touches a deeply seated psychological need – and its effect on the listener.

Concentrating on the listener’s experience, Poizat does not mention the pleasure of the performer – the idea that the singer might enjoy jouissance offers a distinctly different perspective on his ideas and is an area that has remained mostly unexplored. Singers get physical pleasure from their bodies working intensely to produce sound, and naturally have some satisfaction from singing well and in assuming an interesting role. But jouissance is more than that – as José Gil in Metamorphoses of the Body (1998) writes, the word itself points towards the visceral connection between the voice and its flesh, the presence and power of the voice, and can be powerfully addictive.⁴ Indeed, jouissance encapsulates the kind of ecstasy that happens at key moments in opera, for both listener and performer – and can become a key aspect of the interpretation of that role. In this way, it is intriguing to contemplate how much composers like Verdi and Wagner were in fact crafting the physical experience of singing. Both listeners and singers seek jouissance as the fundamental operatic end. There are, however, fundamental differences: a listener’s jouissance is metaphysical and intangible whereas a singer’s jouissance is embodied, physical, and tangible.

The embodiment of the voice is also the embodiment of the emotions expressed by the voice. Some fans react to the operatic voice bodily and emotionally in largely instinctive and non-rational ways and exploring these responses can lead to valuable critical observations. It is the voice that brings words and music together, but the sound of the voice exceeds both by enhancing, through embodied cognition, a state of communication that can bypass rational communication: wildness, the uncanny, the ineffable, and jouissance.

1.2 The Wildness, the Ineffable and the Uncanny of Voice

In modern musicological literature, an important early writer on the philosophical import of the sound of the voice was Carolyn Abbate, who, particularly in Unsung Voices, In Search of Opera (1991) and her seminal article “Music: Drastic or Gnostic” (2004), discussed the metaphysical aspects of voice and touched on the transcendence of the listening experience.⁵

While she is seminal in laying out some of the complexities of performance, separating the drastic (the actuality of live performance) from the gnostic (the application of intellectual knowledge and interpretation), she acknowledges that the division is not natural and that in reality the two aspects are inseparable. Her retention of the two terms ultimately emphasizes the estrangement of the drastic from the gnostic, and in the end encourages scholars to adhere to the gnostic and shy away from the drastic as something that cannot be articulated. The reality of performance is far more complex: live performance is multi-dimensional, and for performers, separating the gnostic from the drastic simply does not work.

However, Abbate’s evocation of the “uncanny” and “wildness” suggests a link connecting listeners to the invisible perceptions of music and emotion. Her articulation of these ineffable qualities of music encouraged scholarly interest in performance and in vocality itself. Abbate turns critical attention to the unexpected and fortuitous in live performance, and the thrill the audience has in watching singers walk (and sometimes fall off) the tightrope of the live show. Invoking the drastic, she calls this extra quality “wildness” – the uncontainable and unpredictable of live performance, the extra information that enhances a musical performance’s “strangeness”. She also identifies ways in which the power of a charismatic performer and their delivery of the text are central to the system of operatic meaning. This is provocative: it promotes the power of the voice and of vocal spectacle to a l...