Vocal Music and Contemporary Identities

Unlimited Voices in East Asia and the West

Christian Utz, Frederick Lau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136155215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Looking at musical globalization and vocal music, this collection of essays studies the complex relationship between the human voice and cultural identity in 20th- and 21st-century music in both East Asian and Western music. The authors approach musical meaning in specific case studies against the background of general trends of cultural globalization and the construction/deconstruction of identity produced by human (and artificial) voices. The essays proceed from different angles, notably sociocultural and historical contexts, philosophical and literary aesthetics, vocal technique, analysis of vocal microstructures, text/phonetics-music-relationships, historical vocal sources or models for contemporary art and pop music, and areas of conflict between vocalization, "ethnicity, " and cultural identity. They pinpoint crucial topical features that have shaped identity-discourses in art and popular musical situations since the1950s, with a special focus on the past two decades. The volume thus offers a unique compilation of texts on the human voice in a period of heightened cultural globalization by utilizing systematic methodological research and firsthand accounts on compositional practice by current Asian and Western authors.

1		Introduction
		Voice, Identities, and Reflexive Globalization in Contemporary Music Practices
		Christian Utz and Frederick Lau

Raising one's voice to “articulate” oneself by speaking, singing, whispering, murmuring, crying, shouting, or screaming seems to be among the most natural and widely established forms of expression humans are capable of. The way in which these articulations are used in social interaction or communication as well as in musical forms, however, is highly dependent on their historical, social, and cultural context. In the West, the rise of the individual since the age of Enlightenment has placed the metaphors of “finding one's voice” or “speaking with one's own voice” at the core of social relations and self-realization, a condition closely connected with liberation from imposed authority: “This view identifies singing or vocal expression as the shared source of human community, on the one hand, and of music's significance, on the other. It says that the inexpressible moral or passionate basis of expression that inspires acts of singing is commensurate with the inspiration behind public speaking within which lies the potential for human freedom” (Goehr 1998, 89).

The basic idea that the human voice conveys a unique, inescapable, and thus “authentic” expression of individuality is deeply ingrained in many cultures, if only as an object of political, social, or religious regulation. But in closer inspection it becomes obvious that almost any use of the voice is founded on socially accepted norms of vocal expression: the “sound and aesthetics of our voices, even in the seemingly most involuntary of vocal utterances […] always appear to be culturally formatted,” writes Sandeep Bhagwati in Chapter 4 of this volume (83). John Potter and other researchers have emphasized that we are exposed to ideologies of singing since earliest childhood (Potter 1998, 190–199), a process during which “some natural and spontaneous part of our human inheritance is squeezed out of us” (Armstrong 1985, 22). A disciplining, a domestication of vocal articulation, in general institutionally channeled and guided by culture-specific norms, can be traced back to ancient times, and the history of the voice thus provides ample evidence for what Potter has termed vocal authority: the use of the voice as a means of articulating power. A complement to this hegemonic dimension is the strong impulse to associate voices with the aura of liberation: liberation of an individual voice from a group or from social restrictions, liberation of musical voices from the dominance of instrumental music, liberation of individualized vocal expression from an established vocal style, political liberation supported or brought about by voices of the masses. Both dimensions—hegemony and liberation—are the more conspicuous in intercultural situations where the ethnicization of the voice is frequently taken as a given. Not only in musical contexts but also in a wide range of public discourses, particular vocal articulations are associated with specific ethnic groups, nations, regions, or local communities: this testifies to a “persistent attachment to real or imagined cultural identities” (Dirlik 2010), a major consequence of, or counter-reaction to, the globalization process (see, for example, Hall 1992). Performers, composers, listeners, and producers who create and perceive music in intercultural situations are invariably confronted with this particular kind of cultural essentialism. On the other hand, the versatility of the voice, its capacity to simulate, mask, or transcend identities, as epitomized by narrative and dramatic musical genres worldwide, suggests that voices can be leading agents in shaping what may be termed intercultural dialogue, transnationalism, or cultural hybridity.

This protean nature of the voice makes it highly adaptive to “reflexive globalization” (Beck and Zolo 1999), a term derived from Ulrich Beck's theory of “reflexive modernization” (Beck et al. 1995) and already applied to musical contexts (Utz 2010). Two aspects are pertinent in this context. First, globalization is not considered here as something from “outside” that “influences” a homogeneous local territory: rather, culture and society are no longer defined solely by a territory, by a “container-theory,” and instead local and global processes can interact to produce new social communities and cultural identities. This situation is akin to what Arjun Appadurai has described as “grassroots globalization,” defined as “forms of knowledge transfer and social mobilization that proceed independently of the actions of corporate capital and nation-state system” (Appadurai 2001, 3). Second, the patterns of European modernity since the eighteenth century, most prominently industrialization and technological progress, are challenged by reflexive globalization as a result of their economic and ecological consequences. This condition might lead to a reterritorialization and re-ethnicization of identity, including well-known forms of neo-nationalism. Theories of globalization that put an “exaggerated emphasis on flows, bordercrossings and cultural hybridizations” (Dirlik 2010) often tend to overlook this aspect. They fail to acknowledge “the evidence of the great majority of humankind who lead settled lives unless pulled or pushed into mobility,” and “the proliferation and reification of boundaries” (ibid.)— though not all these processes imply new kinds of nationalism.

In the present volume musical manifestations of reflexive globalization tending towards hybridity, as well as musical manifestations of reinforced identities and boundaries, can be observed “in the making,” located in the conceptualizations and situatedness of the voice in art and popular music of the past decades. The geographical axis between East Asia and the West, the focus of this book, is connected with a long and conflictual cross-cultural music history that has yet to be told. Although several substantial accounts have provided ample material on music in twentieth-century East Asia (Mittler 1997, Galliano 2002, Utz 2002, Everett and Lau 2004, Nihon Sengo Ongakushi Kenkyūkai 2007, Liu 2010, Chōki 2010), it is arguably fair to say that “the consequences of the global and globalized nature of new music haven't been fully thought through or conceptualized” (Heile 2009, 101). And a similar point can be made with regard to popular music: while its globalized nature seems to be self-evident, it is apparent that boundaries defined by local communities, language, culture, and modes of listening continue to play a vital role in its reception. In any case, the history of mutual musical influence and interaction between East Asia and the West provides endless case studies, in both geographical contexts, for the “invention of” culturalized and essentialized, or in contrast destabilized and decentered, musical traditions and identities. It is not by accident that Eric Hobsbawm's study on the “invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm 1983) has been repeatedly applied to East Asian musical contexts (cf. Lau 1996, Mittler 1997, Utz 2008).

The “contemporary identities,” evoked in the title of the present book, therefore do not represent stable entities, but are rather continuously reframed by composers, performers, listeners, and scholars. This insight provoked the adjective unlimited, introduced in the book's subtitle, that might be attributed to many case studies discussed here: whether intended or not, prominent examples of vocal music explored in this book dissolve the boundaries of “culturally” defined vocal identities, explore apparently boundless territories of vocal articulation (between speech and song, between different emotional states, between languages or phonetic systems), or evoke some geographically or historically remote vocal practice in “imaginary rituals.” The subtitle of this book, however, is not suggesting an unproblematically free-floating exchange of identities or cultural artifacts around the globe, as Byung-Chul Han's theory of hyperculturality suggested (2005). On the contrary, it is obvious from many of the book's chapters that crucial nuances of meaning emerging from contemporary vocal musical practices are deeply embedded in the historical trajectories and local situations within which composers, performers, and listeners act—to the extent that oversight of these circumstances might lead to crude simplifications or misreadings of the music in question.

The primary motivation for putting this book together was the observation that there is a vital need for a collection of studies that focuses exclusively on the intercultural dimensions of the musical voice, written by a group of authors with multicultural backgrounds and perspectives. The human voice has attracted the attention of scholars in various branches of music studies, especially ethnomusicology and popular music studies (often combining these two disciplines, as, for example, in Baranovitch 2003), as well as in philosophy (Derrida 1973, Cavarero 2005), performance and theater studies, cultural history, and media theory (Felderer 2004, Um 2005, Harding and Rouse 2006, Kolesch and Krämer 2006), not to mention psychological or psychoanalytical approaches (Žižek 1996, Dolar 2006, Leikert 2009). But so far no study has explored the problem of identities in contemporary Western and Asian vocal music in detail. Some of the more recent monographs on East Asian art music in the twentieth century (Mittler 1997, Galliano 2002, Utz 2002, Everett and Lau 2004, Um 2005, Richards and Tanosaki 2008) include limited discussion of vocal elements and techniques, as do a few studies in pop and rock music (e.g., Baranovitch 2003, Groenewegen 2010), but the fundamental importance of the voice as a key medium of identity discourses is rarely elaborated in detail. Monographic studies of the human voice (e.g., Potter 1998, 2000) tend to be almost exclusively focused on Western contexts and do not consider issues of globalization and cultural difference. The same is true for monographs on contemporary vocal music (Anhalt 1984, Klüppelholz 1995) and historical accounts of the voice (Fischer 1998, Seidner and Seedorf 1998, Meyer-Kalkus 2001, Göttert 2002, Kittler et al. 2008): restricted to Western contexts, they explore the interconnectedness of vocal practices and social, political, and aesthetic processes in great detail, but rarely invoke global perspectives and tend to gloss over the reframing of identities in contemporary music. Finally, studies by Asian scholars on related subjects are rare in Western languages, and tend to focus on technical or psychoacoustical questions (e.g., Nakayama and Yanagida 2008).

Research into vocal identities in more recent globalized art and popular music, thus, has remained sparse. What Richard Klein has termed “voice forgottenness” (“Stimmvergessenheit,” Klein 2009, 5) is still entailed in musicology's assumption that voices are no more than transmitters of a superior work concept as embodied in a composer's score.¹ The impulse to challenge this long-lasting reservation against performance-related voices as substantial facets of meaning—facets not necessarily encoded in the composer's score beforehand—is crucial for Carolyn Abbate's concept of “voices” in music. She describes them as “moments of enunciation” that “disrupt the flux of the piece around them, and decenter our sense of a single originating speaker” (Abbate 1991, 251, note 5). And it is not only in vocal music that she identifies such moments, though singing is arguably the most vivid expression of the corporeality from which these irreducible “voices” of performance emerge.

It would be shortsighted, however, to construct a simple dichotomy between composer-centered and performer-centered voices in the context of contemporary music: for several decades, many composers, as documented in Chapters 8 and 9 and other parts of the present book, have acknowledged a “dynamic” relationship between musical text and vocal act and have incorporated it into their compositional understanding of musical voices. Their vocal works challenge a widespread tendency in postwar art music to conceive of the voice simply as one instrument among many, as a musical “part” encodable by prescriptive notation. Tensions and synergies between these poles, coined “performative” and “discursive meaning” by Nicholas Cook in his afterword to this book, are a key concern in most of the following chapters. In fact, a common methodological basis of the diverse topics and musicological perspectives in these essays might be found in what Cook recently has termed relational musicology, grounded on the insight that musical meaning “emerges through the interaction between different texts or practices,” that “meaning is not intrinsic but arises from relationships” (Cook 2010).

In most cases the “musical” meaning in vocal music is intrinsically related to the meaning of the words the music is set to. The relationship between words and music, of course, has a long and controversial history. In new music since 1950, the ruptures between a pre-existing text and musical syntax have become increasingly problematic, resulting either in an exclusion of the voice from compositional practice—a reaction documented here for several periods and cultural contexts (Chapters 3, 4, 7)—or in what Erin Gee in Chapter 9 has coined “non-semantic vocal music”: music where the vocal parts are not primarily based on a given text, often not even on an existing language, but are rather developed from a systematically “atomized” phonetic material. Jörn Peter Hiekel (Chapter 8) emphasizes that this tendency was informed by James Joyce's idea of a “gestural language,” and that the dissolution of semantics added to the importance of imaginary ritual in avant-garde music as early as the 1950s (160–161). More generally, he informs us, voices functioned as a “subversive and uncontrollable element opposed to serialist construction” (159).

In other cases, given texts that were highly charged with meaning and emotion were set, but in a reorganized form, involving the application of a rigorous phonetic analysis. Luigi Nono—who favored the voice not least due to its ability to convey human expression and as a means of protesting against human suffering (Nanni 2004)—argued that the phonetic material of a text was inseparable from the meaning of words and from expression. In his music he aimed at a “seamless unity of the abstraction of word semantics and the coherence of musical gestalt” (Nono 1975, 60, translated by the authors). Reacting harshly to Karlheinz Stockhausen's criticism of his text-setting in Il canto sospeso (1955/56), Nono insisted in a Darmstadt lecture from 1960 that his “analytical treatment” of the text (passages from farewel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Voice, Identities, and Reflexive Globalization in Contemporary Music Practices
• PART I Global Perspectives on the Voice
• PART II Voices of/in Art Music
• PART III Voices of/in Popular Music and Media Art
• Contributors
• Index