Owning Our Voices

Vocal Discovery in the Wolfsohn-Hart Tradition

Margaret Pikes, Patrick Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429655074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Owning Our Voices offers a unique, first-hand account of working within the Wolfsohn-Hart tradition of extended voice work by Margaret Pikes, an acclaimed voice teacher and founder member of the Roy Hart Theatre.

This dynamic publication fuses Pikes' personal account of her own vocal journey as a woman within this, at times, male-dominated tradition, alongside an overview of her particular pedagogical approach to voice work, and is accompanied by digital footage of Pikes at work in the studio with artist-collaborators and written descriptions of scenarios for teaching. For the first time, Margaret Pikes' uniquely holistic approach to developing the expressive voice through sounding, speech, song and movement has been documented in text and on film, offering readers an introduction to both the philosophy and the practice of Wolfsohn-Hart voice work.

Owning Our Voices is a vital book for scholars and students of voice studies and practitioners of vocal performance: it represents a synthesis of a life's work exploring the expressive potential of the human voice, illuminating an important lineage of vocal training, which remains influential to this day.

PART 1
Why ‘owning our voices’?

Margaret Pikes

What does it mean to own something?

While something can be in your possession, true ownership involves recognition that you have responsibility for it, and this implies a certain level of maturity. As the proud owner of a house or a car you are legally obliged to insure it, as a way of establishing your responsibility. The utility, or luxury even, of enjoying these possessions comes with answerability. Our voices belong to us from birth, but it takes many years, maybe a lifetime, to build the connection between the baby’s ability to unconsciously express an extraordinary range of vocal sounds and the true ownership of that range. This building is the process of developing consciousness, of working towards understanding who one is, to which exploring the human voice following the Wolfsohn-Hart tradition can contribute enormously.

So, I begin my account of the way that I teach in that tradition with an overview of my personal and ongoing journey towards this goal, because as well as my own vocal practice, inevitably my life experience contributes vitally to the way that I teach, just as will be the case for any teacher of the Wolfsohn-Hart approach to vocal development. The reasons for this, specifically when following the Wolfsohn-Hart approach, will become clear at the end of Part 1 of this book.

FEMINIST APPROACHES TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY – A PREFACE TO PART 1

Patrick Campbell

From the 1960s onwards, feminism has become increasingly interested in, and influenced by, autobiography. In turn, thanks to feminist theory’s shift from the 1970s onwards towards poststructuralist and materialist conceptual frameworks, scholarly conceptualisations of autobiography have broadened, and rather than being considered solely as a literary genre, today autobiography is understood as a wider cultural practice that involves a range of contemporary forms of self-exposition, knowledge-sharing and being-in-the-world. Autobiographical forms have definitively transcended the literary cannon, and now inform an array of communicative social strategies, ranging from professional résumés to blog entries and social media posts. In many ways, rather than the privileged pursuit of a prestigious elite, autobiography is increasingly ubiquitous in today’s mediatised, globalised world, and is not only driven by a need for self-expression, but by market forces, bureaucracy and technological innovation as well.

Traditionally, the ideal autobiographer was white, western and male, of considerable social standing. Autobiography, in turn, served to reify a unified, transcendent, male subjectivity, untroubled by issues of gender, class, sexuality or race whilst possessed of (a putative) self-presence and agency. Importantly, autobiography has historically been as characterised by those who were not given a voice as by the chosen few deemed worthy enough of public interest. Hence, feminist theory’s appropriation of autobiography problematised and unsettled the genre. The feminist movement has traditionally been interested in the autobiographical due to a need to link the ‘personal’ to the ‘political’ whilst platforming the experiences of women as a vital epistemic field. A growing awareness of the complexities of gendered subjectivities opened the way for a consideration of the more fragmented, relational senses of self that many women have been conditioned to develop, due to the oppressive, unequal structures of power pervading androcentric, patriarchal societies (Cosslett et al. 2000: 1–23).

Thus, feminist-inflected autobiographies (also termed life-writings or personal narratives) have political potential. As Mark Zuss suggests:

Life-writings provide contexts to question the limits of unquestioned accounts of the construction of subjects. They provide an opportunity to challenge celebrations and claims by uncritical proponents of constructivist and identity politics alike to authenticity, stable self-presence and genuine experience untrammelled by discourse, desire and power.

(Zuss 1997: 657)

This is the case of Pikes’ autobiographical account of her journey through becoming a vocal practitioner working within the Wolfsohn-Hart tradition. Pikes’ discourse is saturated with the relational knowledges honed and developed through her training with Roy Hart in the 1960s within the setting of The Studio (the closed community of vocal explorers that Hart inherited and nurtured after Wolfsohn’s death); her experience as a core member of the RHT and her five-decade-long career as a master voice teacher. However, importantly, her authorial voice in this section of the book is also informed by what came both before and after she left the RHT community and Malérargues: her life as a working-class British woman growing up in the wake of what Marwick (1998) has termed the ‘long 1960s’ (the period spanning from 1958 to 1974 during which western society experienced seismic cultural shifts, including the rise of feminism and the sexual revolution); her experience as a single mother in France who had adopted a child from Burkina Faso in the 1990s; the six years she spent in Togo in Africa; and her long career as an independent voice teacher and artist.

Thus, her reflective life-writing importantly questions the dominant ideologies that continued to pervade and steer the internal structure of the RHT, both under Hart’s guidance and after his death, which, as Pikes argues, meant that women were not treated as equals within the artistic community. In analysing her trajectory through the Wolfsohn-Hart tradition, Pikes inevitably finds herself reconsidering and deconstructing her relationship with Hart, the man who both taught her how to develop her expressive voice and took away her agency. In many ways, this resonates with Judith Butler’s exploration of intersubjectivity and its link to autobiography. As Linda Anderson suggests, paraphrasing Butler:

‘I cannot muster the “we” except by finding the way in which I am tied to “you.”’ And that relation, impossible to fix or reify as ‘relationality,’ also undoes the subject, makes her other. ‘We are not only constituted by our relations,’ as Butler states; we are also ‘dispossessed by them as well.’

(Anderson 2006: 127)

Tied by a deep-seated emotional connection to the Wolfsohn-Hart tradition (her ‘professional culture,’ to paraphrase Eugenio Barba [1999]), Pikes was also dispossessed in many ways by the domineering nature of Hart’s leadership style. Thus, her autobiography allows her to work through this complex relationship on the written page. Whilst challenging and provocative, this written critique is not, however, dismissive of the many ways in which Wolfsohn and Hart’s contributions to vocal exploration and expression were richly ground-breaking, pioneering and liberating. Rather, the reader is confronted with the inherent contradictions of a small group culture forged in a moment of historical transformation and transition. Whilst Hart’s holistic approach to voice, his espousal of an extended vocal range that challenged gender norms and his communal aspirations all resonated with the countercultural tendencies and increasing liberalism of the time, his ability to dictate group members’ lifestyles, including their relationships and procreative rights, was ultimately damaging, and a source of frustration for Pikes. Pikes has expunged this charismatic, dictatorial approach to voice work from her own practice as a voice teacher, whilst cultivating and promoting the restorative, creative aspects of the Wolfsohn-Hart practice through her continuous work with generations of students.

The relational nature of Pikes’ account of her time at The Studio and the RHT also brings to the fore a number of other key female members of the group, in particular her best friend and confidante, Vivienne Young. Thus, together with Pikes’ account of her own experiences, the Wolfsohn-Hart tradition is rearticulated from a feminine perspective. This is an important feminist gesture; the polyphonic nature of Pikes’ personal narrative counters other, more strictly historiographic accounts of the Wolfsohn-Hart tradition that have chosen to foreground the life and work of the vocal practice’s male pioneers. Pikes’ account also offers valuable insight into the activities of the RHT in Malérargues after Hart’s death in 1975. Little has been written about this period of the group’s activities, and thus Pikes’ writing here makes a unique historiographical contribution to the field.

Social class is another important issue, touched on at several points throughout the autobiography. From the school children who teased Pikes for her strong Hampshire accent at grammar school to the ways in which the RHT was primarily upper-middle class in terms of both membership and aspirations, the materiality of working class experience is articulated by Pikes as both a grounding force and, at times, as a prison from which she has been able to escape through the voice work itself. To a certain extent, Pikes’ mistrust in Hart’s global vocal project stemmed from the ways in which she felt alienated by his very spoken voice, with its heavy RP¹ accent and actorly emphases. On the one hand, Pikes’ narrative emphasises the complex intersectionality (in this case, between gender and class) that shape women’s experiences in a different way from men’s, due to the androcentric structures of power pervading society. On the other, her sense of Hart and other upper-middle class members of the group as somehow indelibly ‘other’ to her, is used tactically as a sounding board off of which she can define her own identity as an artist from a working-class background operating within the Wolfsohn-Hart tradition. Miller (1991) points to a long tradition of alterity underpinning (feminist) autobiography, which stands in stark contrast to a generalised preoccupation with the primacy of the self, especially in the West. This complex play of alterity underscores the ways in which Pikes has negotiated her relationship to the Wolfsohn-Hart approach to vocal exploration and expression, as will become apparent over the following pages.

The register of the upcoming autobiographical section is not densely theoretical or narrowly methodological in nature: the writing style Pikes adopts for this part of the book is, rather, literary, bordering on the conversational or conspiratorial at times. This too, however, is a deliberate, considered strategy with a genealogy that can be traced back to feminist textual production. By articulating her life-writing through a register more akin to orality, Pikes foregrounds a link between personal narrative and voice, the guiding principal of the Wolfsohn-Hart tradition of practice, in which the crafting of identity and the development of the human voice form a continuum. The link to orality also hints at a connection between Pikes’ autobiography and a long line of feminist oral historians (such as Carroll [1976] and Roberts [1984], amongst others) who have attempted to recover women’s lost voices and hidden histories whilst developing politicised methodologies and approaches to writing that privilege the cadences of everyday speech (Cosslett et al. 2000). Moreover, there is a link here to feminist traditions of personalist criticism, and earlier attempts to connect theorisation to lived experience through a more direct, daily register of writing, as pioneered by Jane Tompkins in the early 1990s (Tompkins 1991).

As Pikes explained during a conversation, ‘I wasn’t in love with Roy and I had questions about it all’ (Pikes 2019). By maintaining a critical distance whilst continuing to champion experiential work on the potential of the extended human voice, Pikes tempers rigour with a duty of care to the Wolfsohn-Hart tradition. Her critical examination of both the material factors shaping the RHT and her own unique development as a voice teacher and vocal practitioner are illuminating and thought-provoking, offering an essential historiographical framework for the more directly pedagogical considerations that comprise the second part of this publication.

Note

1RP stands for Received Pronunciation, indicating the accent traditionally regarded as the hegemonic standard for British English. It is often associated with the upper classes.

References

Anderson, Li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Series foreword
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Part 1 Why ‘owning our voices’?
• Part 2 Methodology
• Conclusion: Owning our voices – a pluriphony
• Epilogue: a dialogue
• Index