The Female Voice in the Twentieth Century

Material, Symbolic and Aesthetic Dimensions

Serena Facci, Michela Garda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000352658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

By integrating theoretical approaches to the female voice with the musicological investigation of female singers' practices, the contributors to this volume offer fresh viewpoints on the material, symbolic and cultural aspects of the female voice in the twentieth century. Various styles and genres are covered, including Western art music, experimental composition, popular music, urban folk and jazz. The volume offers a substantial and innovative appraisal of the role of the female voice from the perspective of twentieth-century performance practices, the centrality of female singers' experimentations and extended vocal techniques along with the process of the 'subjectivisation' of the voice.

Part 1

The ‘voice’ and the voices: definitions, iconologies, myths and practices

1 Vocalising honey

Adriana Cavarero

In the Odyssey (12.187), Homer tells us that the songs of the sirens are honey-voiced, meligerun. And the same holds true for the voice of the Muse, which, according to Pindar, produces honey-voiced hymns through the singing of the poet (Isthmian 2.4). This image is commonplace in ancient Greek poetry and calls on an interesting metaphor: the female singing voice, be it the voice of female monsters like the sirens or divine female creatures like the Muses, is as sweet as honey. The metaphor is inherited by the entire Western tradition which, by insisting on the bond between the poets and the female voice that inspires them, continues to associate their effect with the bodily pleasure of honey. However, it would be far too difficult an enterprise to explore the long history of the metaphor, rich as it is with variations and adaptations. Thus, I would rather limit my investigation to delving a little into the metaphor’s apparent simplicity, so as to test the empirical basis its intelligibility is supposed to rely on. As is well known, metaphors make sense because of their capacity to relate to common experience, let us say to empirical reality. Well, I suspect that the metaphor in question fails to respect this canon. Something, at least at the empirical level of intelligibility, does not work; it is as if a key piece of the construction were missing. To briefly anticipate my thesis, I think that this key piece relates to the relationship between mother and child: the removal of this relationship from the traditional imagery of the honeyed female voice results in strange symptoms of unrealistic traits that affect the metaphor’s intelligibility.

In my book For More Than One Voice (Cavarero 2005), by pondering on the phenomenon of the devocalisation of logos within the Western metaphysical tradition, I have argued that the embodiment of the voice symbolised by female figures ought to be inscribed in the classic phallogocentric opposition which poses woman as body and man as mind. The metaphor that bonds voice and honey reiterates this scenario and enriches it with a crucial and regularly upsetting element: the mother. To put it simply, even if the metaphor removes the maternal figure from the imaginary that sustains it, for this imaginary to work meaningfully, what is at stake is the bodily pleasure given by the mother to the child, a mother whose voice for the child, like her milk, tastes as sweet as honey. It is not only a question of poems or songs inspired by the sirens or the Muse but, first and foremost, of maternal vocality consisting of pleasurable rhythmic waves in which, for the child, sounds mix with suction. Embedded in the musicality of every language and exalted by poetry, these honeyed waves come from a maternal body: the primary nutritive and vocalic source. Helene Cixous refers to this source when she says:

there is a language that I speak or that speaks to me in all tongues. A language at once unique and universal that resounds in each national tongue when a poet speaks it. In each tongue, there flows milk and honey. And this language I know, I don’t need to enter it; it flows, it is the milk of love, the honey of my unconscious.

(Cixous 1986: 32)

It is worth noting how, in Cixous’ text, the old metaphor immediately acquires a genuine materiality, perhaps the very materiality which poets call on – as it were, unconsciously – when they speak of honey-voiced verses that flow from the mouth of the Muse to the mouth of the poet and pour into the ears of the listeners. Indeed, to some extent, by mentioning the mother, Cixous does help us to believe poets and singers when they affirm that, in the vocality of all tongues, there is honey that mouths taste and take delight in, corporeally. That is, the delicate but voracious mouths of children take delight in it, of course. Perhaps in every poet there is a child, as Plato would claim with justified alarm and concern. Although I am very interested in the topic of Plato’s aversion for poets and mothers, I am not going to focus on it now; I will tackle it later. Now, I am going to leave the ancient Greek world aside, and pay a visit, along with the children mentioned above, to the Hebrew tradition. Not by chance, Cixous herself is Jewish, and after all, to quote Hannah Arendt’s words, ‘the distinction between a Hebrew truth, which was heard, and the Greek vision of the truth’ (Arendt 1981: 111) looks inevitably promising for speculation on the vocal-aural realm. And, not surprisingly, for the topic of honey too.

Let me begin with a remarkable page from the novel that won the Prix de Goncourt in 1959, The Last of the Just, written by André Schwarz-Bart, whose Polish Jewish family was murdered by the Nazis. In the novel, a Hebrew legend frames the story of the Levy family over eight centuries, and the author tells of the method adopted by old Mordecai to give his little grandson Ernie a Jewish education while making learning enjoyable. ‘From Poland’ Mordecai

had sent for a Hebrew alphabet in relief; he initiated the little angel through the mouth, that ancestral method which is so sweet and pleasant; covered with honey, the rosewood characters were simply given to the young student of the Law to suck. Later on, when Ernie was capable of reading brief phrases, Mordecai offered them molded on cakes.

(Schwarz-Bart 2000: 138)

Within the Jewish tradition, this ingenious method goes back to medieval Germany or France, when on the morning of the spring festival of Shavuot, children were taken to school for the first time and participated in a special ceremony. According to the description of the ritual, ‘the boy is seated on the teacher’s lap and the teacher shows him a tablet on which the Hebrew alphabet has been written’; then ‘the teacher reads the letters first forward, then backwards, and finally in symmetrical paired combination, and he encourages the boy to repeat each sequence aloud’; at that point, the tablet is covered with honey and given to the child to lick. Cakes on which biblical verses have been written and boiled eggs on which more verses have been inscribed are also brought in: ‘the teacher reads the words written on the cake and eggs, and the boy imitates what he hears and then eats them both’ (Markus 1996: 13).

There is evidently an essential connection between the written letters the boy licks with his tongue and the audible sound vocalised by his mouth. In the Polish version, mentioned in André Schwarz-Bart’s novel, this structural link between letters and mouth becomes even more significant and strengthens the link’s material, bodily aspect. Rather than sticking out his tongue and licking a written slate covered with honey, little Ernie sucks the carved rosewood characters: he puts them in his mouth, the same mouth that, by repeating the sound of each character, re-vocalises the alphabet and the written text. Written characters and voice interlock in a perfect circularity, and this very circularity, acting through the child’s mouth as both the site of taste buds and the organ of phonation, consists of the pleasure of honey.

Of course, just like little Ernie in the novel, Jewish children growing up in a religious family hear and repeat words or phrases of the Torah by listening to their relatives’ prayers long before their ritual initiation. From infancy, they hear and utter sounds of a language they do not understand. Theirs is an acoustic and vocal experience indifferent to, or separate from, the dimension of meaning. Centred on the children’s act of vocalising sounds through repetition, and tasting alphabetic characters through licking and sucking, the ritual leaves the dimension of meaning aside, too. Even though reading, reciting and understanding the Torah is, of course, the essential core of Jewish education, during the ceremony that inaugurates this process of education, special focus is put on the primary role of the mouth as the bodily site where the holy language’s vocalised sounds and written characters converge. What matters most here are sounds and characters, the alphabet in its sonorous and written expression, not meaning. The child’s mouth emits the sound and tastes the letters, licks, sucks, eats them, just like the prophet Ezekiel ate the scroll given to him by God.

We read in the Bible that Ezekiel was sent by God to speak to the sons of Israel. God handed him a scroll on which lamentations, mourning and woes were written. Thus goes the text:

He said to me, ‘Mortal, eat what is offered you; eat this scroll and go speak to the House of Israel’. So I opened my mouth, and He gave me the scroll to eat, as He said to me, ‘Mortal, feed your stomach and fill your belly with this scroll that I give you’. I ate it, and it tasted sweet as honey to me.

(Ezekiel 3: 1–3)

The scroll is not covered with honey; it tastes as sweet as honey. During the ritual of Shavuot, Ezekiel’s experience of taste is translated into the material fact that the children actually lick or suck the honey off the scripture. However, as it is worth repeating, these children are not supposed to speak to the House of Israel but only to learn the alphabet. Even if the Jewish esoteric tradition of Kabbalah claims that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are the vessels of God’s creative power, we must not forget that the ritual relates to children’s education. They are being taught the alphabet for the first time and are given honey and cakes to make learning enjoyable. Seated on the rabbi’s lap, as they used to sit on their mother’s lap when they sucked her sweet milk, children will perceive written characters as a pleasure of the mouth, the same mouth that takes pleasure in vocalising sounds by hearing and repeating them. Within a scenario of vocal communication, vocalising, hearing and repeating result in a duet between child and rabbi, similar to the one between child and mother.

Seeing, of course, is part of the picture. But it is not the central part: the letters meant for reading, and thus for sight, are internalised through licking, sucking and eating (Goldberg 2003: 83–7). At the centre of the ritual lies the mouth and its pleasurable performances. The ritual recalls and reactivates the figure of the mother as both the vocalic source of language and flowing fount of milk, coming to the child in the form of rhythmic waves of pleasure in which sounds mix with suction. To put it differently, by giving children real honey to suck, the ritual not only succeeds in evoking this common experience of the maternal gifts but, in so doing, it also illuminates the empirical basis on which the metaphor we are dealing with takes root.

As I mentioned above, in the Western tradition, beginning with Homer, the topic of honey appears constantly if not exclusively in metaphors for poetry and poets. Plato is notoriously very critical of poets and of the honey imaginary that endorses the divine source of their vocal performance. All the more if this imaginary, as I am trying to argue and Plato manages to hide, evokes the figure of the mother. In the Ion (534b), Plato asserts that the power that comes from the Muse as a gift consists of honey taken from the divine gardens, which the poet transports and transmits by making verses that, in turn, are re-vocalised by the bard. Plato’s handling of the metaphor suggests that the making of poetry has to do with the physicality of sounds that are pleasing to the ear, just as honey delights the taste buds. More specifically, to describe the poetic chain as transmission of this materia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of musical examples
• List of contributors
• Preface
• PART 1 The ‘voice’ and the voices: definitions, iconologies, myths and practices
• PART 2 The grain of the voices, experimentation and technology
• Index