Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality

Pamela Karantonis, Francesca Placanica, Pieter Verstraete

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317169116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Cathy Berberian (1925-1983) was a vocal performance artist, singer and composer who pioneered a way of composing with the voice in the musical worlds of Europe, North America and beyond. As a modernist muse for many avant-garde composers, Cathy Berberian went on to embody the principles of postmodern thinking in her work, through vocality. She re-defined the limits of composition and challenged theories of the authorship of the musical score. This volume celebrates her unorthodox path through musical landscapes, including her approach to performance practice, gender performativity, vocal pedagogy and the culturally-determined borders of art music, the concert stage, the popular LP and the opera industry of her times. The collection features primary documentation-some published in English for the first time-of Berberian's engagement with the philosophy of voice, new music, early music, pop, jazz, vocal experimentation and technology that has come to influence the next generation of singers such as Theo Bleckmann, Susan Botti, Joan La Barbara, Rinde Eckert Meredith Monk, Carol Plantamura, Candace Smith and Pamela Z. Hence, this timely anthology marks an end to the long period of silence about Cathy Berberian's championing of a radical rethinking of the musical past through a reclaiming of the voice as a multifaceted phenomenon. With a Foreword by Susan McClary.

PART I
A Radical Tradition:
Re-writing (for) the Voice

Chapter 1
“The New Vocality in Contemporary Music” (1966)

Cathy Berberian

Translation by Francesca Placanica

What is the New Vocality that appears so threatening to the old guard? It is the voice which has an endless range of vocal styles at its disposal, embracing the history of music as well as aspects of sound itself; marginal perhaps compared to the music, but fundamental to human beings. Unlike the instrument, which can be locked up and put away after use, the voice is something more than an instrument, precisely because it is inseparable from its interpreter. It lends itself to the numerous tasks of our daily lives continuously: it argues with the butcher over the roast beef, whispers sweet words in intimacy, shouts insults to the referee, asks for directions to the Piazza Carità, etc. Furthermore, the voice expresses itself through communicative “noises,” such as sobs, sighs, tongue snaps, screams, groans, laughter. Moreover, the voice has a capacity for diverse types of vocal emissions, among which are two that are still considered illegitimate to this day, and quite unfairly–considering how they had left their mark on decidedly serious composers such as Schoenberg, Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, etc.—namely, those styles related to jazz and folk music. These traditions are also a reflection of our society: folk music reveals our roots and jazz expresses the fleurs du mal du siècle.

I believe that a modern singer should be both sensitive and open, albeit in an empirical way, to these diverse aspects of vocality, isolating them from the context of linguistic conditioning and developing them instead as “ways of being” for the voice–towards a musical integration of possibilities and musical attitudes not yet “officially” catalogued as emerging from musical experience and that are crucial for the further development of a “New Vocality.” (That newness, we discover, only exists to a certain extent, though, when we trace its genealogical tree.) The elements constituting the New Vocality have existed since time immemorial: it is merely their justification and musical necessity that is new. I do not want to be misunderstood: the New Vocality is emphatically not based on the inventory of more or less unedited vocal effects which the composer may devise and the singer regurgitates, but rather on the singer’s ability to use the voice in all aspects of the vocal process; a process which can be integrated as flexibly as the lines and expressions on a face.

At this point the usual question arises: what do these sound experiences have to do with music? A contemporary painter like Dubuffet uses materials completely foreign to oil, tempera and classic watercolors when he works with butterfly wings, sponges, beard hairs and the residual incrustation of a boiler–what could be further from Michelangelo, and yet closer to the objects with which we are in contact in our daily lives? In the chapter “Sirens” in Ulysses, Joyce introduces the element of noise through onomatopoeia. The text becomes the verbal sonorification of a scene in a public place; a kind of recording. Indeed, his literary “recording” was the basis for one of the most beautiful works in the field of electronic music: Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) by Berio.

I must state here that the techniques of recording and montage have had a fundamental role in vocal music. The fact that it is possible to record a sound or sounds with a tape recorder, isolate them from their original context, listen to them per se, as a sound, then modify and combine them with other sonic elements belonging to other contexts, has allowed the musician (and the singer) to listen in ways different from reality and from all the sounds that normally escape our attention because they are absorbed and masked by the action which produces them and the experience which provokes them. In order to understand the New Vocality, it is essential to establish that art must reflect and express its own era; and yet it must refer to the past, accepting the weight of history (just as my daughter envies children born centuries ago because they had less history to study!); it must, while apparently creating a break, provide a continuity which belongs to the present and at the same time leave the door open to the future. Another function of recording is the documentation of actual sounds: of interpretations considered stylistically and traditionally perfect at the time, but now revealed as overrated by the merciless evidence of vinyl. Interpretation evolves along with society. In the theater as well, what was considered a brilliant performance 40 years ago becomes an unbearable artifice today. I would say that the increased diffusion of artistic forms, the fast speed with which they are absorbed into culture (not necessarily haute culture), the multiplication of the means of entertainment for the masses to an extent never previously known, all this not only makes for, but also benefits, the essential evolution of interpretation.

Having a tradition is as important as having a mother and a father to enable birth–but the inevitable moment always arrives when we must leave the security of the old life in order to be able to create a new one. However, the word “tradition” is also a trap. Just remember that the tradition of the recital is relatively new. Liszt was one of the first virtuosi to give a soirée with solo piano. Recitals for voice came much later–they were preceded for years by those frightful “traditional” soirées which brought together the famous dancing horses of Vienna, Anna Pavlova, Enrico Caruso, dwarf acrobats and a symphonic movement. At a certain point, someone assumed the responsibility for “breaking” the potpourri soirée in favor of the recital and so created a tradition. But a tradition is always an artifact and when it becomes no more than a legitimized fossil (look at the semi-deserted music halls, eloquent testimony to the mummification process), then it must make way for the “new” tradition.

In this sense the New Vocality not only refers to contemporary music, but also to the new way of approaching traditional music, exploiting the past experience of sound with the sensibility of the present (and a presentiment of the future).

For this reason the singer today can no longer be just a singer. Now the boundaries of interpretation, like those of the arts, are no longer clearly defined–and performers in one field violate the territory of others. (Brecht—Weill demanded actors who could sing, Schoenberg wanted singers who knew how to act.) The New Vocality affirms that there should be singers who are able to act, sing, dance, mime, improvise–in other words, affect the eyes as well as the ears. [I] propose the artist as a universal fact and the voice as part of the living body, acting and reacting. In the same way recitals and concerts will have so many theatrical elements ingrained in the musical context that these elements will function like a gestural alternative–and this is something that music will endow to the intrusive and disordered stimuli of a culture predicated upon seeing and doing.

Chapter 2
“La nuova vocalità nell’opera contemporanea” (1966): Cathy Berberian’s Legacy

Francesca Placanica

What is the New Vocality that appears so threatening to the old guard? It is the voice which has an endless range of vocal styles at its disposal, embracing the history of music as well as aspects of sound itself; marginal perhaps compared to the music, but fundamental to human beings.¹

With these words, Cathy Berberian opened her 1966 essay and manifesto “La nuova vocalità nell’opera contemporanea” (“The New Vocality in Contemporary Music”) thereby announcing to the world the performance philosophy that had gained her the accolade “the Muse of Darmstadt.” However, the Armenian-American mezzo-soprano exceeded the muse-like status accorded to her by post-war avant-garde composers; those male composers who envisaged her as either an archetypal woman or, in a sonic equivalent, the embodiment of the female voice. Berberian overcame, too, the caesura between composition and performance, carrying the compositional act all the way to the performance stage. A strong believer in the possibilities of the human voice, she codified a theory of “The New Vocality,”² investing singers with a reconceived creative role, exhorting them to become the “composers of their own performance[s].” Her validation of noises and sounds not traditionally classifiable as “musical” within notions of vocal performance in music made her approach pioneering. Most significantly, this practice and philosophy was considered an act of writing with the voice, which developed over the artist’s life course.

Indeed, the details of Berberian’s career and musical achievements present a unique case, given the historically rarefied musical milieu from which she emerged and the way in which she transformed these early experiences. This transformation then influenced the choices of subsequent performers and their experiments with vocality (see Chapters 9, 10 and 11 of this volume). Therefore her manifesto regarding “The New Vocality” is an important document in music and art history as much as it is an artifact continuous with her ongoing performance practice at the time of its writing.³ The essay notably appeared in Italian in I concerti dell’Unione Musicale in the 1980s, in a special issue of Symphonia, Giornale della radio Svizzera Italiana⁴ in 1993, and in English for the first time in Chapter 1.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the genesis and theoretical implications of the term “The New Vocality,” as evidenced by Cathy Berberian’s beliefs on the matter, in tandem with her artistic endeavors. I will examine a range of Berberian’s artistic achievements that shed light on concepts in the manifesto, making a case for the uniqueness of her valuable contribution to the history of twentieth-century vocal performance practice. This includes an assessment of her contribution to a discourse that underpins the development of twentieth-century vocality, paving the way for the discussions of her legacy within subsequent chapters in this volume. This is a much-needed undertaking, not only in order to contextualize the research dealing specifically with Berberian but to provide a more detailed and thorough account of the development of twentieth-century experimental vocality by placing this foundational document at its center.

In referring once more to the specific historical milieu of her early work, I would argue that Berberian is now read in history as the artist who preserved many works of the European and North American avant-garde school in her repertoire, making them known to a wide range of audiences, and thus increasing the debt of a generation of young composers to her active commitment. Throughout the 1970s until her death in the early 1980s, she included works such as John Cage’s Aria, Sylvano Bussotti’s L’histoire d’O and Luciano Berio’s Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) in her recitals, playing a significant role in the survival and dissemination of these pieces. Although her influence in this respect has generally been reco...