Metaphorically Singing a Literal Song: Voice as Emblematic of the Moving Musical Experience

Olivia Lucas, Doctoral candidate, Harvard University

How do we express that a particular performance or experience of music has moved us or singularly caught hold of our attention? What was it about the articulation of that phrase that made it so arresting? While we can almost always point to the moment in some way, or describe the conditions surrounding a particularly moving musical experience, language often ends up getting in the way of specifying exactly what was extraordinary. Lacking concise descriptions for this essential facet of our interaction with music, we often turn to metaphor. The metaphors we choose attempt to bring the confusing and unclear into the realm of the familiar, or relate it to something that can be freely experienced. Thus it is that we describe instruments as having voices, or say that a player makes the instrument sing; we are all able to engage in the basic human act of singing. These metaphors of the voice and singing, used to describe the quality of a performance, point to yet another metaphor relating to the nebulosity of music's power – that of music as having life, or being alive. However, as we will see, these metaphors turn out to be more complex than the comparison of singing to the playing of an instrument, as singing itself becomes a metaphor for musicality. In this paper, I will explore these two metaphors – that of the voice, or singing, and liveliness –  as they reference that familiar but esoteric aspect of musical experience, and examine how they are informed by the bodily act of singing. In turn, the corporeality of music will be reflected in the singing body. Voice is freely used as a metaphor for musicality, but when more closely examined, reveals a constructive way of thinking about musical performance, and provides a useful vantage point from which to examine the body and temporality in music.

Consideration of the use of song as a metaphor for a desirable quality in musical performance is not unfamiliar. In the opening pages of The Sonic Self, Naomi Cumming explores her own subjective experience as a young student of the violin, and specifically, her teachers' demands that she “emote” and and make the instrument “sing.” She writes:

The critics identify the liveliness of singing – a distinctive, human act, which has its own subjective qualities – as having the potential to be heard in an instrumental sound...An absence of “life” in “singing” is a palpable absence, an affront. Not only is a quality of sound perceived to be lost, but that very element which would allow the music to realize its own “inner life.” (Cumming 2001, 25)

If the absence of metaphorical singing is an “affront,” then this human, subjective quality is one that we seek to hear in any performance by any instrument. Cumming continues, “Music is not perceived as a 'material' thing, which would be described adequately without recourse to terms applied more usually to living beings...Musical sound is not heard as sound alone, but as possessing a subjective quality.” (Cumming 2001, 25-26) The voice and singing, as literally alive in that they are emitted by a living body, come to define an often sought-after quality in music. Here, the metaphor of song is used to convey a quality of liveliness found in music, a quality that resonates with the feeling of a living, expressive body. This basic, common use of the metaphor points to certain qualities of the singing voice that together evoke the subjective quality of a moving musical experience.

Similarly, in The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy, Lydia Goehr picks up on the use of the metaphor of song to describe an ideal quality of musical performance. While her argument is more historically based, focusing on the music theory of the 19th century in general and Wagner in particular, her ideas are important to the discussion of the metaphor. In bringing up the desired songfulness of instrumental playing, she rephrases it as a “quest for voice,” that is, that all instruments aspire to sing. As Goehr positions the metaphor in its 19th century context, this pursuit of singing in instrumental music posits the voice as simultaneously entirely natural, in the Rousseauian sense, and as dramatically and culturally expressive. In other words, song is fundamentally human, and the performance of song is cultural, political and specific. Goehr then continues, asking an important question: Is it possible for a literal singer to fail to metaphorically “sing?” In answer, she cites Reynaldo Hahn, composer and singer, who distinguishes “expressive breath” from “physiological breath,” where the former animates singing with its “live spirit,” and the latter is akin to “dead technique.”(Goehr 1998, 119-120) In separating the mechanics of breathing – that which makes literal singing possible – from the less clear “expressive breathing,” - a gesture that elevates singing from mechanical to soulful - the metaphor now demands that even the literal singer aspire to song. Simultaneously, once that so-desired quality of song is divorced from the exact mechanics of its production, the metaphorical musicality of “singing” becomes something to which any musician can attain. Moreover, breath, a basic sign of life and vitality, is an expressive quality observable in players of all instruments, as well as in conductors. By Goehr's account, the metaphor of the aspiration to song does not rest with an innate quality of the voice, but is an “elusive metaphor of musicality usually expressed with all its Romantic and metaphysical grandeur.” (Goehr 1998, 123) However, despite the fact that Goehr's interpretation of the metaphor of song requires that even the vocalist aspire to this difficult-to-express level of musicality, I find it telling that the words at hand still refer to the basic and fundamental act of literal, vocal singing. In all our attempts to explain the relationship between music and the human body, music produced by the human body, alone, remains a strong and clarifying image.

So far, we have seen two perspectives on the use of singing and breath or life to describe musical performances that are particularly expressive. Clearly, the vitality indicated by breath is something we wish to perceive in listening. Some part of the moving musical experience is the discovery of physical, bodily movement in the sound. That sense of movement, or living breath, is why singers themselves must also strive for the songfulness that gives music “inner life.” I would now like to look past the metaphors to some qualities and aspects of the voice and its situation that allow it to be elevated to the level of representing musicality, and show the voice's potential to open a new window to the study of musical performance.

What is the voice, then, that it yields such a uniquely strong metaphor for music in general? Not unlike the scholarship surrounding musical performance, the study of the voice, though originating in ancient times, remains shrouded in the difficulty of dealing with both the body and the materiality of sound as a single cooperative entity. Put differently: on the one hand, we freely acknowledge a desire for songfulness in music; on the other, we shy from dealing with that which gives us the metaphor.

The voice rests in a difficult position, being neither fully corporeal, nor fully spiritual. The physicality and materiality of the voice are undeniable. The voice is a sound, measurable and quantifiable as any other. However, every voice is unique as a product of the body from which it originates. Physically, every voice is distinctly shaped by the mouth, lips, teeth, vault of the palate, nasal cavity, etc. As Jean-Luc Nancy describes it in his dialogue, Vox Clamans:

You have to listen to each voice. No two are the same...Don't you know that our vocal impressions are the most unique of all, even more impossible to confuse with one another than fingerprints, which, after all, are particular to each of us? (Nancy 1994, 236)

Indeed, unlike the fingerprints, the voice changes throughout life. It is affected by age, by training, by lifestyle habits; the voice evolves with our personal experiences, but never changes away from us. It transforms, but could never belong in another body. Though invisible, it shows where we have been, and our lives are engraved in it. In many ways, it is just like the body, in that our history is contained in its present. However, unlike our pure physicality, the voice is veiled and unlocatable. While its sounding freely reveals a great deal about its owner, its silence easily hides just as much. The voice is a trace of the past as well as an indicator of the present condition of the body. Like music, the voice's materiality is measurable and palpable, while simultaneously remaining unique and subjective in every instance, even as its past accumulates behind it.

The voice's physicality is also its fragility, an element that becomes more apparent in the world of vocal music, especially that of western classical music. Though Western art music has plenty of vocal music in its repertoire, the voice itself holds an insecure status in this particular musical realm, often regarded as less rigorous. Compared to other melodic instruments, it is weak and delicate. Its range is very small – rarely over 3 octaves, even among trained singers. It is capricious, prone to injury and fatigue, and cannot perform well when its bearer is ill, suffering from allergies or a host of other annoyances that players of other instruments often simply put up with. Furthermore, its prime performance years are short in number, not exceeding half a century, after which it enters a gradual weakening and decline as a part of the human aging process. The life of a voice is tied to the body that produces it. It cannot be refurbished or re-strung, and despite the best of care, will inevitably deteriorate in a relatively brief amount of time. This mortality once again emphasizes the voice's unbreakable tie to breath and life, bringing its music into clear contact with the living, animated body.

However, the voice is more than a shade of human physicality, and not just the unique sound of an individual body. It is also the body's expression of selfhood, and the externalization of the hidden within a person. This gives it a quality of eternal resonance that is paradoxical in the face of the aforementioned fragility and mortality. The voice calls out, not only to indicate its life to the outside world, but to reflexively express its own existence and establish the presence of the living person. In taking breath to speak, we remind ourselves that we are alive. In this way, what the voice lacks in strength, it makes up for in salience. From birth, we are conditioned to single out the human voice from other sounds, and to find meaning not only in the sound itself, but in its use – as with language and song. How an individual uses the voice is as much an element of its uniqueness as its physical shaping. Influenced by many factors, how a person uses or does not use words is how a literary work can be said to have the “voice” of its author. Interestingly, we also speak of musical compositions as expressing the “voice” of the composer. In both of these cases, neither the author nor the composer typically speaks or sings aloud the entirety of their creative product, and the voice is then a metaphor for the exteriorization of some aspect of their internality. (Still, audiences may attend poetry readings or seek out performances by the composer. This points to a twofold desire: to concretely attach an expression with its source, and to seek out the expression's most 'true form,' as it emerges from the body of the creator via the voice.) The salience of the voice is its potential to be recognized as human, and as individual.

This going-out of the voice from the individual signals our ambiguous relationship with our own voices, and the delimitation of the borders between voice and thought. On the one hand, the voice is a medium which enables thoughts to be externalized. On the other hand, without the voice, thought, and even identity, remain imprisoned within the thinker's own subjectivity. As the little mermaid asks the sorceress, “If you take away my voice, what is left for me?” Thus, the voice is at once a tool we are free to use and control, while simultaneously retaining an autonomy in its power to be necessary and vital to communicative expression, and to live beyond a specific instance of action. That is, we are free to remain silent, but if ever once we have spoken, that voice is departed from us. This escaped voice is perhaps the voice that Jean-Luc Nancy says, later in Vox Clamans, “is not present to itself; it is only an exterior manifestation, a trembling that offers itself to the outside, the half-beat of an opening – once again, a wilderness exposed where layers of air vibrate in the heat.” (Nancy 1994, 243) The voice locates us, revealing both our presence and our present condition, and then betrays us, leaving our internality exposed to the world. This inability to control the voice once it has left us is the vulnerability of both speech and song. Thus, the performance of song frames an act of self-revelation that occurs every time the voice sounds. Perhaps when we hear an instrument “singing,” we are feeling that kind of revelation and the vulnerability of the exposed performer.

Given all this ambiguity and complexity surrounding the human voice, it may seem like an odd choice for an angle on the more difficult-to-grasp aspects of musical performance, namely: temporality and issues of the body. However, the voice emphasizes the temporality of music, and particularly that of performance, in a unique way. Its corporeality, fragility and inherent ties to individual expression bring attention to the nowness of a musical event. This is not to say that instrumental music is somehow less temporal or that it lacks bodily involvement, but that since in the case of singing, the step of the musician becoming one with his instrument is skipped over or concealed, the singer's songfulness keeps the attention on a specific moment of individual, human, musical expressiveness.

Why has music scholarship shied from the study of performance? Largely due to the difficulties of dealing with the body's involvement in through-time creativity. The body and its voice in their distinctive relationship, shed new light on this issue. In the case of the voice, the body is not acting on an external object, such as a violin or a piano, but reflexively, on an internality that is part of itself. While both the voice and the violin require human action to make music, only the voice remains fully shrouded, and separation from its source is impossible, as even such brutality would destroy the voice in its attempt to remove it. In this way, even the escaped voice still belongs to its body. Might the performed performance likewise still belong to its performer?

The voice's salience and individuality have long made it a challenging topic for study. The temptation to treat it like any other instrument, or alternatively, to romanticize it into a realm beyond study, is strong. However, the fact that the voice and singing run just as strong as metaphors for musicality leads me to believe that approaching the voice from this perspective may not only help us to understand the voice itself, but also help in the exploration of the act of musical performance.

The voice reminds us that temporality, life and breath belong to each other, and that when we think of temporality as life, we are able to see more clearly the pressing immediacy of performance. In closing, I would like to offer a few issues about which the voice's emphasis on temporality, that which makes it emblematic of musicality, might be informative. For one, the voice might offer insight into how a musical experience develops and evolves through time without changing away from itself. It could also help us to explore the perception of motion in music, as we feel movement in our own singing. Finally, in the music cultures of the world, the voice performs in many ways similarly to other instruments. It is trained into a style, and requires human engagement in order to sound. Like other instruments, it can be said to perform in a technical, lifeless manner, or to be moving, expressive and full of song. However, that this powerful and frequently encountered metaphor of what we find beautiful in music originates in the animated human body tells us something important about the function of music. The fragile, urgent temporality of life is mirrored in that of song. Perhaps this is one reason we wish for music to sing.

References

Cumming, Naomi (2001). The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification. Bloomington: University of Indiana.

Goehr, Lydia (1998). The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy. Berkeley, California: University of California

Nancy, Jean-Luc (1994). The Birth to Presence. Stanford: Stanford University.