Readings, Listenings, Viewings
Peter Maxwell Davies, Eight Songs for a Mad King. This one is easier to watch, but have a look at this one, too; and have a look at the score.
Luciano Berio, Sequenza III for Voice.
Kate Soper, Only the Words Themselves.
Tanya Tagaq/Kronos Quartet, Nunavut.
Reflections
Adrian Curtain, “Alternative Vocalities,” Mosaic 42.2 (2009): 101-17.
Enrique Pardo, “Figuring Out the Voice: Object, Subject, Project,”
Performance Research, 8.1 (2003): 41-50.
Michael Poizat, “‘The Blue Note’ and ‘The Objectified Voice and the Vocal Object,” Cambridge Opera Journal, 3.3 (1991): 195-211.
Questions
This week we transition from a focus on opera to what might be called anti-opera. Last week we pondered opera as a site where voice and pleasure readily intersect. In a 20th-century post-war context, however, composers of opera began to investigate ways of moving beyond pleasure in art — beyond beauty, beyond melody, beyond bel canto — and the voice became a major locus of this investigation. Two essays for this week — by Enrique Pardo and Adrian Curtain — center on one of the 20th century’s most infamous works: the barely performable, vocally exertional Eight Songs for a Mad King. Please be prepared to agree or disagree with Curtain about whether Eight Songs represents a “queering” of the voice. And in Pardo’s article, pay attention to a general celebration of “broken voices.” (Sound familiar from Koestenbaum? Are we really so far from bel canto after all? What is the particular quality of brokenness being celebrated here?) For Michel Poizat, Koestenbaum’s Lacanian doppelgänger, moving “Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera” means asking ourselves some deeply troubling questions about our attachment to voice and brokenness: why do we find ecstatic pleasure in an art form involving suffering, death, and a kind of vocal exertion that sometimes resembles screaming? As with Koestenbaum, be on the alert in Poizat for a negative relationship between the operatic voice and writing, and definitely ready yourselves to explain what the heck a “Blue Note” is!
Exercise
Develop an extended vocal technique suited to a particular dramatic situation. You can choose the situation from an existing opera, one we have studied or one you know; or from any text that you think might be adapted to an opera. You should 1) describe the situation, and include the text you are setting (it can be a relatively short passage); 2) describe the technique; and 3) make a brief recording of the technique in action (performed by yourself, by yourself in collaboration with others, or adapted or altered from a source in recorded sound, coaxed from an animal, etc. etc.). And then of course 4) the usual commentary on the whole operation. The technique, of course, is the heart of the matter, and describing it could involve the full range of linguistic possibility we have so far used to describe voice, from the technical to the metaphorical—but as best you can, make it a description that would allow readers to try out the technique for themselves.