A voice is a complex thing; deeply intuitive and immediate, yet full of ephemerality and contradiction. As humans, we have a clear, embodied understanding of what a voice does and how to use it, but in trying to understand what it is we are faced with challenges. ‘Voice is nothing if not boundless, furtive, and migratory’, notes Martha Feldman, ‘sometimes maddeningly so’.1 For a composer, understanding the voice is a relentless dance between the abstract and material, the physiological and the artistic, and the aesthetic and the pragmatic. This chapter will tease out some of these contradictions and themes, beginning with voice types and styles, then looking at the relationship between language and music, and finally exploring the nature of idiomatic vocal writing and so-called extended techniques. The chapter will finish with a nod to the future of vocal music, and a provocation for composers working in this rich and engaging area.
Voice Types
Fundamentally, the voice is a wind instrument embedded in the body. It is ‘sounded’ by breath vibrating vocal folds, much like the double reed of an oboe or bassoon, with the voice’s pitch and timbre controlled by muscles in the vocal tract rather than keys and finger holes, and sound being developed in the resonating chambers of the larynx, mouth, and nasal passages instead of ‘fixed’ reverberant spaces like a flute or clarinet. In comparison to the visible, physical gestures of an instrumentalist, the voice is ‘engendered by an internal choreography [that is] invisible but audible’,2 making its relationship with the body’s mechanisms more ephemeral and complex. ‘The voice comes to us as an expressive signal announcing the presence of a body and an individual,’ writes Brandon LaBelle, ‘echoing forward away from the body while also granting that body a sense of individuation’.3 Voices are relational in a way that instruments are not: when we hear a voice, we are compelled to consider who is singing and why, and how they are situated in relation to us.
Just like bodies, each voice is unique, with its own distinct ‘assemblage of “fleshed” sounds’.4 Perhaps more than any other type of composition, vocal writing is necessarily a collaborative process: the diversity across singers of not just tone and articulation (i.e. manipulation of the vocal apparatus) but also approaches to pitch, timbre, and dynamics is enormous. This makes the task of categorising voices a complex one. One of the most common taxonomies is of range, dividing voices into either soprano, mezzo-soprano, countertenor, tenor, baritone, or bass. Figure 8.1 shows the common ranges for each voice part, presenting each voice’s tessitura – the most commonly used range, which is also generally the most comfortable and effective – with open noteheads, and more extreme notes that singers may be able to access with closed noteheads.
Figure 8.1 Typical ranges of common voice-types.
As a rule, the higher a voice is in its range, the naturally louder it is. This means that most voices lack projection in the lower part of the register (instead having a rich quality which can be sonorous in quieter moments) but are warm and lyrical across the central part of the range and able to produce immense visceral and climactic force in the higher notes. Working against this schema is of course possible, but as the voice goes higher it requires increased breath support and diaphragmatic energy to sustain. This makes it difficult to control, say, quiet dynamics at the top end, where the larynx is more tense, especially for a sustained period. Extremes of the voice should be used sparingly, as Juliet Fraser notes.
A voice’s range is not the same as an instrument’s: there is more physicality in the voice, so that one can hear the thrill of the ‘stretch’ of the high notes or of the ‘looseness’ of the low notes. Much of the drama of the higher register is because, as a listener, we sense this physical stretch that is at play in the vocal apparatus. As a result, the high notes sound higher, and the low notes sound lower, meaning that the ‘extremities’ needn’t be so extreme.5
The voice is divided into several registers. The lowest is the modal voice (also called chest voice), which is the normal register for speaking in most voices. Singing in this register has a naturally parlando quality, and at its lower end is rich with audible harmonic overtones. Above that is the ‘mixed’ or middle register, characterised by a more consistent and ‘sung’ tone, followed by the head voice (or falsetto in male voices) where stretched vocal folds and increased resonance within the nasal cavities creates a lighter, more translucent tone. Some singers have access to a further ‘whistle voice’ register (sometimes called ‘bell tone’ or ‘flageolet’) that can reach extreme high notes, employed by Thomas Adès to depict the ethereal spirit Ariel in his opera The Tempest (2003). In between each of these registers is a transition area known as the passaggio. While many schools of vocal training work to smooth out prominent register changes, some popular music and music theatre genres employ the audible breaks of the passaggio for dramatic effect, creating a sound like a stylised cry or sob.
In the operatic tradition, an additional method for categorising voices is through their tonal quality, described in terms of a voice’s ‘weight’ and sonic density. The most commonly used method is the Fach system, which breaks each voice type down into several subcategories (e.g. lyric soprano, dramatic soprano, coloratura soprano, and so on) and associates them with roles from the Western operatic canon that are seen as institutionally ‘appropriate’ for that voice type. Generally, the ‘lighter’ the voice, the more flexibility it has in vocal agility and rapid changes between dynamics and colours, while ‘heavier’ voices are typically deployed for moments of sustained dramatic intensity and volume. Most of the opera-house ‘ecosystem’ still thinks in these terms today – hiring singers primarily on their Fächer and voice quality over, say, acting style – which presents an enticing opportunity for composers to subvert traditional expectations of what singers ‘can do’. The role of ‘Piet the Pot’ in Ligeti’s ‘anti-opera’ Le Grand Macabre (1974–7, rev. 1996), for example, takes the virtuosic showmanship of the lyric tenor in Donizetti or Verdi to its extreme (Example 8.1) as a critique of the ‘stock-in-trade operatic conventions … [and their] relevance in the twentieth century’.6
Example 8.1 György Ligeti, Le Grand Macabre (1974–7, rev. 1996), fig. 50, vocal cadenza.
Another important destabilisation of vocal norms has arisen around gender expectations. Adriana Cavarero observes that song, melody, and emotion have been socially constructed as ‘naturally feminine’, whilst speech – where ‘the intellect, the words and their meaning come to the fore’ – are coded as ‘naturally masculine’.7 Creative subversion of tessitura and voice type has led to a range of creative opportunities to challenge these social (and vocal) constructions of gender and sexuality, ranging from the use of falsetto in countertenors or chest voice in upper-voice singers as a sort of ‘drag’ vocality – for example in George Benjamin’s opera Into the Little Hill (2006), where the soprano and alto performers oscillate between portraying female protagonists in their ‘sung’ middle ranges and male characters in their modal voices – to trans vocalists like ANHONI exploring queered and androgynous vocalisations by ‘juxtaposing elements strongly coded as masculine (low pitch range) and feminine (tone quality, head voice)’.8 Even today, opera is charged with subjugating the agency of female voices – who have historically been limited to portraying youthfully sexualised, ‘hysterical’, old, and demonic characters9 – and there is an obligation for composers to radically reflect on how vocal music constructs gender.
Genres, Styles, and Institutions
Voices are not innate but cultured; trained (whether formally or informally) to create vocal timbres that reflect the conditions and values of their production. Every concert hall or performance space has its own assumptions about the types of singing that will be present, and expectations of how tone is produced and vocal registers are used are the guiding force of institutional performance practice. Classical singing style for example, as heard in the opera house, originated with the Bel Canto (‘beautiful singing’) tradition, and is concerned with creating an evenness of tone across a singer’s range through good breath support (sul fiato) and connected ‘lines of vowels’. This approach originated in the eighteenth century as a technology of the stage (i.e. vocal production designed to project over the orchestra) and further developed towards the mid-nineteenth century with an increased focus on tone colour and control in response to bigger opera houses. Increased use of vibrato, lowered larynxes (creating a richness of tone), and seamless transitions between registers are as much aesthetic choices as they are practical, using resonance control to allow singers to perform unamplified.10
Musical theatre (MT) singing on the other hand emerged from actor-singers in vaudeville and cabaret, who focused on delivery of text more than sound. This technique developed a stratification into distinct registral affects (chest, head, falsetto) for characterisation, expressive use of consonants (rather than vowels), and a higher laryngeal position to create more parlando modes of vocal delivery. Contemporary MT training reflects the amplification and sound design techniques of modern theatre, meaning that vibrato is used for expression (i.e. to ‘colour notes’) rather than projection, and intensity is conveyed through the tonal device of ‘belting’ – where the chest voice is pushed higher in the singer’s range than usual – rather than the acoustical intensity achieved through register. Popular music singing takes immediacy of voice one step further, focusing on the singer’s directness of expression rather than standardised ‘beauty’ of tone. Singers prioritise raw emotional expression and expressive ‘ugliness’ (e.g. ‘twang’, coarseness, fragility, and so on) to directly and authentically communicate lyrical content, alongside a focus on the modal voice, and use of breathiness as a common expressive mode.
In all genres, meaning is cultural coded within the sonic materiality of the voice. For example, classical singing is often associated with artistic legitimacy and the ‘elite’, while popular and folk traditions are thought of as immediate, authentic, and ‘untampered with’: a place for alternative ways of ‘doing voice’ that welcomes singers from a range of identities and physicalities (even though these alternative or inexperienced voices often undergo electronic mediation such as pitch correction in mainstream commercial music).11 At the heart of the intersection of vocality, genre, and identity is the mediation of training, with John Potter arguing that the ‘truly democratic and “natural” singing’ of aural storytelling traditions since ancient times has been marginalised by formal approaches, like classical singing, as a ‘means of articulating social power’.12 One critique of the hegemony of classical singing modes has been to engage in stylistic pluralism, either through a single performer as in John Cage’s Aria (1958), which requires singers to inhabit ten different vocal styles, or by combining different voice types and performers. Donnacha Dennehy’s The Hunger (2019) opposes a singer from the Gaelic seán-nos (‘old style’) tradition against a classical soprano to evoke the social tension of nineteenth-century Ireland, whilst Du Yun’s opera Angel’s Bone (2018) uses two non-classical singers (a punk vocalist and a crooner) to depict the other-worldliness of two fallen angels who find themselves in a suburban community of traditional operatic voices.
Another response to classical vocal hegemony has been to explore alternative ‘non-genre’ ways of creating passion and intensity, often focusing on specific performers and bodies. Meredith Monk, for example, employs both her own voice and the voices of others to create non-narrative but emotionally direct vocal collaborations. Works like Our Lady of Late (1972) and Atlas (1991) attempt to cross cultural and linguistic barriers with vocal rituals that might as equally sound like operatic singing as they might the voices of babbling children or ancient shamans. The demands of vocal technique and concentration in Monk’s work call for meticulous preparation, but do not require ‘training’ in the traditional sense, focusing instead on processes of embodiment and personalisation (many of Monk’s collaborators come from oral traditions) in a commentary on classical singing’s complex relationship with the direct communication of personal experience. Collaboration and world-making are key to Monk’s compositions, leading her to use non-traditional notation (Example 8.2) and verbal instructions to communicate intentions, instead of traditional notation.
Example 8.2 Meredith Monk, ‘Slide’ (1972) from Our Lady of Late, opening. Ink on printed transparentised paper.
Text and Language
Finding a text to work with is a difficult task for a composer. Texts need to personally resonate in some way (through themes, use of language, etc.) but must also be suitable for setting. Choosing texts with ‘high poetic intensity’13 for example can be challenging: Stephen Sondheim playfully observes that ‘music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn’t need music; lyrics do.’14 Each language brings its own syntax, sonic colours, speech-rhythms, and historical ‘baggage’ of setting; how these relate to music’s own ‘regimes of patterning’ (e.g. pitch, rhythm, timbre) will vary from language to language. ‘In some cases,’ notes Kofi Agawu, ‘language travels only a short distance before becoming music; in others the gap is much wider.’15 Beyond semantic meaning, words are also sonic phenomena, with their own sequences of syllables, phonemes, and cadences. In this sense, even fragmented or invented languages (like we find in much of Claude Vivier’s vocal music) are never ‘neutral’. The human voice invites audiences to try to hear the meaning ‘hidden’ beneath the sounds, and an audience will struggle to dissociate from the communicative act no matter how fragmented or ‘broken’ a text is.
Once a composer has settled on which text(s) to use, they must strive to familiarise themselves with it from all angles. Reading a text aloud will be the most useful method to understanding both its technical elements of prosody – metre, construction, rhythmic pacing, and structure – and the more abstract qualities of tone and emotion. Understanding a text’s density is crucial for knowing where it needs space to breathe, or where the written punctuation might hinder musical expressivity. As Edward Cone observes, it is the composer’s reading of a text that forms the basis for interpretation, rather than the text itself. ‘A composer cannot set a poem directly,’ he writes, ‘for in this sense there is no such thing as “the poem”; what [s]he uses is one reading of poem’.16 Setting a text therefore means to ‘feel through’ the words and respond to their effect and their qualities of sound as much as their functional and emotive qualities.
Determining how the text interacts with the music is vital: how interdependent the musical structure and expression will be from text, whether musical expressivity serves as a supplement or point of departure, and if the music will rupture or disturb the meaning of the text rather than just working with it. Here are some examples of text-music relationships to explore:
1. Integration: the vocal piece ‘is not reducible to word influence or musical influence, but … acknowledges the sphere of influence exercised by both domains’.17 The ‘Kneeplay’ interludes from Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach (1975), for example, employ numbers and solfege syllables as text: repeated strings of numbers and words that do not hold ‘meaning’ by themselves, but create the aesthetic language of the piece in context. The counting and manipulation of rhythmic cycles being both technical – revealing the schemata behind Glass’s tight ‘repetitive structures’ – and spellbinding, drawing us into the hypnotic state of Buddhist ritual.
2. Incorporation: ‘a poem is never really assimilated into a composition … [but] retains its own life, in its own body, within the body of the music.’18 Here, words give access to meaning in order to ‘remain true to the poet’s song, echoing it with [the composer’s] own’, but perhaps also ‘uncover[ing] hidden strains of poetic music, revealing beautiful … patterns that might not be heard without the aid of the composer’s art’.19 Whilst this mode appears across much art and popular song, an interesting ‘alternative’ example is in Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988), where recorded speech is ‘musicalised’ by pitched melodies but retains its own textual and sonic independence.
3. Simultaneity: words and music coexist, affecting each only in as much as they are perceived as one unit. This device is used to humorous effect in Gerald Barry’s surrealist Alice’s Adventures Underground (2016), where Humpty Dumpty recounts his tragic story to the tune of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, with the melody and words not ‘fitting’ together, creating unnatural rhythms, accentuations, and repetitions that prompt us to engage with the words in a new way.
4. Assemblage: ‘poem and music are brought together to form a temporary, sometimes strong and sometimes weak, set of bonds. These bonds are not parallel … [but] a complex intertwinement … which cross multiple layers and voices.’20 In Harrison Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus (1986), the myth is retold through ‘broken’ and fragmented narratives, with different versions of the texts presented both forwards and backwards, sometimes simultaneously. This enigmatic treatment of text is not intended to be ‘followed’ in the traditional way, but rather acts as a commentary on themes of temporality, memory, and loss of identity.
This final example – where text provides a sonorous and affective (rather than semantic) quality – brings up the important issue of intelligibility. Text cannot be delivered with the same clarity in all parts of the voice, for instance. ‘Think about the physical set-up’, writes Fraser. To sing extremely high ‘you need to open your mouth and you need a lot of space within the mouth. For this reason, if you want your text to be audible, you should follow the sensible convention of favouring open vowels … and avoiding bundles of consonants; even better, use a melisma so that no syllables change up high.’21 That said, where genres like art and pop song might tend to assume clarity and directness of text, opera plays a delicate game with intelligibility in order to bring the voice to the forefront. Mladen Dolar claims that operatic singing is ‘bad communication’ because it prevents a clear understanding of the text, but that this reversal of hierarchy lets ‘the voice take the upper hand … [and] the voice be the bearer of what cannot be expressed by words’.22
Technique I: Idiomatic Approaches
Writing idiomatically – what Paul Barker and Maria Huesca refer to as writing ‘for’ (rather than ‘against’) the voice23 – requires composers to think about the body.
A singer can often tell whether a composer is writing from experience or not. Evidence can come from a detail like an unexpected rest in a phrase, [or] a crescendo that defies its dynamic expectation across a trajectory. … Good vocal writing demands embodied composition: an ability to understand, on some level, the physical demands that music places on a singer.24
As mentioned earlier, the voice centres around breathing, with its own naturally repeating rhythms, and working ‘with’ the breath is the foundation of fluent vocal writing. Traditionally this idea has been synonymous with lyricism: employing linear flow to shape melodies like inhalation and exhalation, keeping phrases to either one breath or finding natural ways to punctuate them, and avoiding short, staccato notes apart from in brief ‘characterful’ songs and arias. Whilst compositional practice has largely moved on from the style of Verdi or Puccini, linearity of phrase is still valuable to think about. Moving the voice around its full range to flex and rest the laryngeal muscles, for example, ensures that voices do not become tense, strained, or tired. ‘The voice needs stretch and release, motion and flow,’ notes Fraser. ‘Asking a singer to deliver sustained high pitches for pages and pages is like asking a dancer to balance on tip-toes with arms stretched above their head for several minutes – it’s fatiguing.’25 It is also important to consider rhythmic and melodic density. Fast-moving and complex vocal writing is unlikely to be clear and accurately pitched for all but the most specialist performers, and music with clear harmonic polarity or repetition is generally easier than completely atonal writing.26
It is important to remember here that a singer’s voice is also part of their personal identity and the same ‘voice’ they speak with and hear in their internal cognitive processes, so their vocal technique will be inextricably linked to their individual approach to communication. Where possible, try to help singers access the ‘feeling’ (i.e. affective aspects) of vocal delivery by choosing the most helpful vocal quality, range, articulation, and dynamics for a musical gesture. For example, rising lines remain the most effective way to drive climax and tension in the voice (and falling phrases, the opposite), since ‘the muscular movements [required] to support breath … in a rising phrase generate physical and emotional response[s] in singers’, helping them to characterise a gesture.27 We can see this approach in Betsy Jolas’ Quatuor II (1965) for soprano and string trio, which shapes the voice around a vocalise-style text (i.e. consisting largely of vowels), working ‘around’ the singer’s instinct and physiology in a careful interplay of elasticity and flow, despite the largely atonal idiom. Remember too that there is no such thing as neutral for a singer: even a mid-range, prosaic mezzo-forte phrase will be interpreted in an expressive way (e.g. ‘bored’) to communicate with the listener.
In general, the composer needs to think about clarity and efficacy of expression as one of the ways they owe a ‘duty of care’ to a singer. Linda Hirst is clear on this matter: ‘composers have a responsibility to make their music possible to vocalise or else to accept practical suggestions that make performance feasible. The fact that some composers choose not to make a particularly idiomatic distinction between the music they write for voices and for instrumental forces can generate tension.’28 The composer needs to take care around what support the singer needs – musically, notationally, and interpersonally (when applicable) – and ensure that any difficult passages are approached carefully and have moments of vocal rest nearby. It is always helpful for composers to sing through their own vocal writing and try out the music in a pragmatic way. Evidence of understanding is a guaranteed way to develop trust with singers and a willingness to collaborate.
Technique II: ‘Extended Techniques’
Much contemporary vocal music has moved away from ‘traditional’ modes of singing towards alternative methods of delivery that blur the boundaries between speech, song, and sound, exploring the musical possibilities of a full range of vocal timbres and performance techniques. There are three areas in which vocal experimentation can occur:29
1. Pitch
○ Intonation, pitch bends, and melismas
○ Range and tessitura (including belting, falsetto, etc.)
○ Vibrato and tremulation
○ Agility and motility (e.g. ornamentation, coloratura)
2. Prosody
○ Phrasing and breathing
○ Metric placement
○ Consonant articulation (glottal or ‘soft’ onset and aspiration)
○ Percussive effects
3. Timbre
○ Vocal resonance (e.g. nasal, warm, shrill, and so on)
○ Loudness and intensity
○ Phonation (tensed = throatiness and growl; relaxed = breathiness)
○ Paralinguistic features (sobbing, whispering, humming, shouting, etc.)
To think of these techniques as ‘extended’ (and therefore radical) is erroneous, since many of these sounds are the most natural things a voice can do. Martha Feldman observes:
Were we able to strip away speech, poetry, phonetics, morphology – all of language, in short – we might have the pure terrain of the thing we call voice. For what would we be left with? Resonance, timbre, phonation. The vocalise, the vowel, the scream, the sigh, the cry, [and] the gasp.30
Outside of Western classical music, many of the vocal sounds of avant-garde art music are commonplace in a range of popular and indigenous musical cultures, such as beatboxing, South Indian konnakol, death metal screaming, Appalachian eefing, and Tuvan overtone singing. Helmut Lachenmann’s temA (1968) for example – a vocal composition built around variations in breath sounds (inhaled sharply, held, exhaled normally and through the performer’s teeth, etc.) – has similar sonic characteristics to Inuit katajjaq (‘throat singing’) – a rhythmic breathing game between two performers – despite both experiences being achieved through different methods, and holding very different social significance.31 István Anhalt draws a comparison between Japanese Bunraku recitation (known as gidayu-bushi) and a range of experimental works of the 1960s – especially Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) – noting a colonising force that seeks to transfigure the ‘rich expressive domain’ of a global vocal tradition into a ‘pathological expression’ of alterity and mental illness.32 Even within the Western art tradition, there is a long history of neglected expressive gestures outside ‘standard’ post-Enlightenment singing; for example the stuttering trillo from the seventeenth century, which we find given new life by Hans Abrahamsen in his song-cycle Let Me Tell You (2013) (Example 8.3).
Example 8.3 Hans Abrahamsen, Let Me Tell You (2013), bb.6–11, soprano part. Copyright © 2013 Edition Wilhelm Hansen AS, Copenhagen.
A more helpful way to frame ‘extended techniques’ is as a re-negotiation of language, where duality between speech and song can be questioned, disrupted, or dissolved (Figure 8.2). This strategic rupturing of language is particularly evident in works like Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III (1966), where the score focuses largely on physical and gestural instructions for the performer’s voice and body in lieu of more ‘traditional’ parameters like pitch and rhythm. Like many other composers of the time, Berio adopts the International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA] to cross linguistic borders, focusing on sounds rather than words in an attempt to ‘decolonise’ the voice to its universal essence. ‘From the grossest of noises to the most delicate of singing’, he writes, ‘the voice always means something, always refers beyond itself and creates a huge range of associations. In Sequenza III, I tried to assimilate many aspects of everyday vocal life, including trivial ones, without losing intermediate levels or indeed normal singing.’33
Figure 8.2 The Speech-Song Continuum, after Barker and Huesca (2018).
Linda Hirst and David Wright suggest that the re-negotiation of language is not so much a destruction as a revelation. ‘With the disappearance of a conventional syntax and semantic framework,’ they write, ‘so an alternative theatre emerges, based upon the unconventional juxtaposition of phonemes and vocal gestures, all depending upon the performers’ ability to set out this alternative communication and the quality of his or her engagement with its vocalisation.’34 This notion of a ‘theatre of the voice’ is key: works that explore alternative vocalities must necessarily engage with a rich history of vocal dramaturgy and embodied performance in the twentieth century, from artists like Cathy Berberian (herself inspired by the vivacious cabaret style of Marlene Dietrich) through to Elaine Mitchener today. The deep sense of drama and exploration that typify these artists is a final key to understanding ‘extended techniques’, in this case as a vehicle for challenging traditional performer-audience and performer-composer relationships by bringing the artists’ creative agency and embodiment to the fore. In a more recent example, the composer-performer Jennifer Walshe, who acts as the charismatic ‘chansonnier’ in many of her own works, centres compositions like The Site of an Investigation (2019) around her own hyper-sensory view of the (post)modern world, employing the full gamut of the speech-song continuum to depict the vivid strangeness of our modern era with cartoonish intensity.
It is important to note here that whilst many of the extreme-sounding techniques that Walshe and others employ can be used safely, others might be impractical or even destructive for repeated performance. Techniques that involve tensing the vocal cords (e.g. singing on an in-breath, coughing, long passages of whispering, loud breathing, exaggerated vocal fry, and so on) are unhealthy for the voice and should be avoided or kept to an absolute minimum. Whistling is also difficult to do accurately, and again, many singers will not be eager to engage in this for long periods. A singer’s voice is their instrument and livelihood, and they will be unwilling to do anything which might damage it, especially in scores without adequate recovery time (i.e. rests) between more extended or vocally taxing material. Vocal production requires a mental, musical, and physical effort that is more closely linked to the performer’s personal confidence than in other mediums, and it is our job as composers to help give them that confidence. If a performer is overwhelmed or uncomfortable with a score, they will likely have ‘a “fright and flight” reaction. The score will simply be closed, put aside, and never performed.’35 For this reason, it is often helpful to think of vocal music as a script to be interpreted rather than a determinate text, facilitating interpretations that can be tailored to the performer’s individual body and artistic sensibilities rather than being completely prescriptive. The singing body needs to be supported, rather than disciplined, to communicate the score’s intentions as powerfully as it can.
Posthuman Voices
The voice-body relationship and its ability to construct and challenge meaning has become something of an obsession for vocal composition in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.36 Jelena Novak argues that opera’s response to experimental staging practices, developing theories of gender, and new media (particularly film) created a space for creative re-invention of the vocalic body, allowing composers and performers to question the rules and protocols around what a singing body ‘does’ and should be expected to do. A particularly fertile thread here is of ‘desynchronization between what is seen and what is heard’37 by ‘sharing’ voices between either multiple performers, in works like Louis Andriessen’s Writing to Vermeer (1999), or multiple manifestations of the same performer ‘reproduced’ through technology, like Michel van der Aa’s protagonist in One (2002) who hockets melodic lines with herself in an uncanny duet.
One of the most important developments has been ‘extending’ of the voice through amplification. Beyond simply increasing the volume of a voice, the microphone liberates the mouth by making ‘audible and expressive a whole range of organic vocal sounds which are edited out in ordinary listening; the liquidity of the saliva, the hissing and tiny shudders of the breath, the clicking of the tongue and the teeth, and popping of the lips’.38 Being able to hear soft, close sounds affords an intimacy with the singer that is far removed from the operatic voice’s technology of power and projection. Out of these ‘close sounds’ comes whole new genres; for example, crooning, a singing technique developed in the 1920s by jazz vocalists such as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, which ‘depended on the microphone’s ability to capture seemingly vulnerable voices that could not project as loudly, or sing as high, as sturdier souls’.39 A more contemporary example of this is Rebecca Saunders The Mouth (2019–20) for soprano and binaural amplification, which sonically projects the interiority of the mouth cavity into an entire concert hall through its extreme amplification of tiny, fragile sounds.
The disembodied voice appearing from somewhere other than the singer (a form of ventriloquism) allows for a re-imagining of our relationship with our bodies and selves. ‘[T]here is the chasm between inside and outside’, writes Saunders, ‘a dichotomy between the inner and outer voice, between our secret internal monologue and the voice sent into the world and that is heard … [and] the mouth is at this threshold’.40 Recording technology also lets us explore this voice-body-self relationship, with technological mediations allowing us to manipulate the quality and identity of the voice (through distortion, compression, filtering/EQ, and pitch manipulation devices like auto-tune and vocoders) and to create the sense of multiple or displaced voices (with spatio-temporal effects like delay, reverb, panning, multitracking, and looping). The use of this toolbox of effects is endless, ranging from the beatboxer Beardyman turning his voice into a ‘one-man-orchestra’ through live looping, to Björk’s 2017 bio-political album Utopia (co-written with the producer ARCA), which melds voices into field recordings of arctic landscapes to explore an uncanny fracture between nature and technology.
In Utopia, Björk and ARCA are both literally and figuratively ‘giving voice’ to nature, reminding us of the social empowerment associated with voice ‘as a metaphor for power, difference, agency, textual authority, and expressive subjectivity’ in marginalised and oppressed communities.41 Rosie Middleton’s voice(less) project (*2019) for example uses electronically mediated vocalising to present narratives of voice damage and loss – literally and metaphonically dealing with finding one’s voice and having one’s voice heard – whilst FKA Twigs’ LP1 (2014) imagines the vocality of a gender-less, posthuman alter-ego through pitch manipulation. Themes of gender and race are also ubiquitous in the work of Pamela Z (Figure 8.3), who employs live digital processing to transcend the body like a form of prosthesis. In ‘MetalVoice’ from her multimedia work Voci (2003), Z extends her body by singing into amplified sheets of metal. By blurring together voice and metal, Z is attempting to ‘strip language of its meaning … and baggage’42 and allow the voice to queer and transcend the politics of the body, manipulating ‘both internal and external technologies in the service of a radical politics of resistance through and against technologies of power’.43
Figure 8.3 Pamela Z performing at ‘On the Boards’ in Seattle, WA.
As society moves towards increasingly hybrid and avatar-based lives (e.g. with Mark Zuckerberg’s plans for us to inhabit a digital ‘Metaverse’), exploration of digitally manipulated voices and disembodied, cybernetic vocalities are becoming more prevalent. Whether in the experimental works of Pamela Z or the posthuman hyperpop realm of Björk and ARCA, ways of reclaiming and repoliticising the performing body (particularly away from the norms of white, male, and non-disabled) requires a new set of musical values and approaches. I would invite anyone working in vocal composition to think about what types of humans we might be in the next few decades – what kind of bodies and voices we will have? What types of communication and interaction we might want to invoke and shape? – and let these questions steer us towards a new phase of composition for the voice.
