Voice Actors (part 1)
+ a playlist of compelling voices + running to novels v. walking to theatre + magpie song.
Ok, this is interesting: only the second newsletter and it turns out I had more to say than planned, in more punishing detail than anticipated or perhaps advisable. So bear with me while, as advertised, I ‘do my thinking in public’ - rather painstakingly, it turns out. Or cut to the perkier extras below.
***
I’ve been on a listening tour.
Revisiting T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land when writing the ‘About’ section of this Substack, I was arrested by a 1935 recording of Eliot reading the poem aloud. Here is the first half of the final section, ‘What the Thunder Said’ (source):
As I listened, obvious and banal features came and went: the hiss and tin of a recording getting on for a century old, and the fact that this American sounded more plummily English than I ever will.
More durably intriguing is the incantation, miles from how I had just read the poem to myself, in order to pick my way through it. My first instinct was pedestrianization. Eliot’s lofty delivery is easily off-putting by contrast, but if you accept the invitation, it grants the poem’s strange repetitions and rhythmic overstays their own momentum, pulling meaning along in its wake.
Today, we are faced with an intriguing paradox of speech. Microsoft’s VALL-E AI voice cloning software, trained on 60,000 hours-worth of audiobook recordings, needs as little as a three second voice sample to spoof speech (and yes, ‘spoof’ is the technical term). And yet the discourse of an individual ‘speaking their truth’ continues to ground authenticity and sincerity in the delivery of recognisible speech patterns, conventional to that person’s context and culture.
At least within western and westernized cultures, convincing actors and inspiring orators extend such patterns to fit the scalar demands of public address, without thereby distorting or transfiguring them. In stark contrast to Eliot, for instance, Irish actor Fiona Shaw really goes to town on her expository version of the poem from the mid-1990s.
But even controlling for changing times, Eliot’s performance suggests that some truths – or, at least, compulsions – may only be grasped when the voice departs more definitively from spoken norms. The obvious explanation is that heightened language requires heightened delivery. But what’s really going on there? And where might it take us?
The American philosopher Stanley Cavell (1926-2018) tussled with a related issue when thinking about opera. In A Pitch of Philosophy (1994), Cavell recognised that agreeing “to take singing for speaking, and to take these inhumanly developed vocal aerialists for persons of exemplary passion” (p. 158) is palpably absurd. And yet it is precisely this cohabitation of the ordinary and the extraordinary that is key to opera’s distinctiveness. Arias in particular…
“…express the sense of being pressed or stretched between worlds – one in which to be seen, the roughly familiar world of the philosophers, and one from which to be heard, one to which one releases or abandons one’s spirit…and which recedes when the breath of the song ends” (p. 144).
We are seen (in our ordinariness) when we speak, and we are heard (at the ends of ourselves, in our abandon) when we sing. To pretend we are speaking when we are singing points to something repressed or forgotten in conventional speech that song discloses all-or-nothing, only in the moment.
This introduces a way of thinking about vocal and expressive range as facilitating the passage between worlds and perhaps, in other vocal registers, of worlds within worlds.
But whose worlds, and what are they like? Cavell’s own writing on opera takes its cue from Catherine Clément’s feminist argument that, in opera, “women die because they sing” (p. 132), though Cavell’s own examples dwell more on how female voices exceed patriarchal governance. More recently and perhaps radically, we find an echo of Cavell’s approach being enacted in the writing and performances of the American poet and cultural theorist Fred Moten.
For Cavell, new worlds are opened to and by female characters in opera when the voice is raised in song. For Moten, the history of slavery means Black experience in the United States is grounded in a different vocalisation: the involuntary shriek arising from sexualised violence. Writing at the beginning of his early book In the Break (2003), Moten analyses the proximity of two passages in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845). First, Douglass’s childhood account of hearing his Aunt Hester beaten by a master, and soon after, his description of the ‘wild songs’ of slaves. Moten states: “Where shriek turns speech turns song – remote from the impossible comfort of origin – lies the trace of our descent” (p. 22).
Moten acknowledges Cavell in his book, but for Moten the political stakes are higher, and the challenge of coming to voice more fraught. Blackness is “the extended movement of a specific upheaval” (ie: the transatlantic slave trade), which can never take for granted “the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity” (p. 1).
In the Break goes on to discuss in detail radical black performances that have staged “a revaluation or reconstruction of value, one disruptive of oppositions of speech and writing, and spirit and matter” (p. 14). But the reason I have gone into some detail here is because this characterisation can also help us understand what Moten himself is doing in his recent free jazz performances with collaborators Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver.
Listen, for instance, to at least the first few minutes of the opening track of their recent album, the blacksmiths, the flowers, recorded live in Brooklyn in 2023:
The performance starts with a series of percussive clicks (from Cleaver?) and knocks – I’m guessing López hitting the body of his double bass. It’s séance-like, as if the voices of the past are being summoned. There’s a brief flourish from Cleaver at the drums, as if just settling in his seat. Then it’s Moten’s turn: a series of ‘da’ syllables - vocal knocking, or the reported rhythm of muffled speech from the next room that suggests meaning lies elsewhere.
‘Da’ is no ordinary syllable though. Ask the Dadaists – for whom the appeal of ‘Dada’ lay in multiple meanings, not none.* Or more directly, Amiri Baraka and the New York Art Quartet, whose controversial track ‘BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS’ (1964) Moten describes in In the Break as:
“[T]he absence, the irrecoverability of an originary and constitutive event; the impossibility of a return to an African, the impossibility of an arrival at an American, home” (p. 94).
‘Da’ can be ponderous and open-ended. But it also has a certain weight to it. Not for nothing is it what the thunder says – onomatopoeically and in this case reverberatingly capitalised – in Eliot’s poem:
Moten’s ‘da’ riff allows for the exploration of all these qualities (or others, depending on your own points of reference), before transposing those syllables into words:
If I had somebody else’s voice I could tell you how I feel.
It would be inaudible, body-rock till resonant or revenant or redolent, till resident.
Right now. Right now. So I can tell you how we do.
Once in speech, Moten uses his voice to disavow his voice. He’s the medium in the séance – or describing the medium in the séance – summoning another’s voice that starts faint (the voice of a ghost, a revenant, literally coming back), and becomes stronger until ‘resident’ – right here, ‘right now’: here to tell you how ‘he’ feels, ready to add concrete detail to the scene. Open-ended ‘da’ has landed on the more assertive, definitive ‘do.’
“The tragic in any tradition, especially the black radical tradition,” writes Moten, “is never wholly abstract. It is always in relation to quite particular and material loss” (p. 94). the blacksmiths, the flowers is not tragic in any simple sense. But what unfolds over the next 80 minutes builds out of this complicated opening. Moten is at once the vector of voices past, and displaced from himself by that same fractured history. As he speaks, he pulls these fragments together in order to speak in his own voice, at once authoritative and fragile.
It is not a voice in extremis, at least not on its own terms. Moten’s delivery is heightened for the moment, but quotidian. To depart from such delivery in any one direction would betray the contingency of what he is talking about.
But listening is another matter. What holds the blacksmiths, the flowers together is not the voice as such, but the place it takes in the broader soundworld. The album is the sound of people listening to each other.
This may be a truism of jazz improvisation, but it is particularly relevant in light of Moten’s politics and the words he utters. They are hard to follow literally. They range from apocalyptic visions to neologistic sound poetry to childhood memories. Association across the whole is more important than the sentence-by-sentence accumulation of meaning; how a word or phrase calls or responds to the sound of bass or drums in the moment supersedes the whole.
This requires a listening that is ‘bigger’ than the voice alone, more expanded. And, it turns out, durable. I do not find the blacksmiths, the flowers an easy listen, but I suspect this performance has been soundtracking my dreams. Certainly I have been coming out of sleep to Moten’s tone, if not his words.
It is not an easy waking.
End of Part 1. To be continued.
* “[F]or the singer Madame le Roy: ‘Dada is ‘yes, yes’ in Rumanian, ‘rocking hoses’ and ‘hobby horse’ in French.’ ‘For Germans’ [Hugo] Ball said, ‘it is a sign of foolish naïveté, joy in procreation and preoccupation with the baby carriage.’” (RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art 1988 edition, p. 62).
***
Cue Grams
This edition’s playlist, featuring artists discussed above and in a forthcoming ‘Part 2’ of this essay, is palindromic in structure: the first and last tracks are linked, as are the second and second-to-last, and so on. It’s bookended with the opening and penultimate tracks of, respectively, Laurie Anderson’s first and most recent albums. Both are songs about plane crashes - one of several Anderson preoccupations spanning the four decades of her recording career. ‘From the Air’ (1982) captures Anderson offsetting a frankly aggravating sax riff with delivery at its coolest and most mordant; ‘Radio’ (2024), enrols ANOHNI’s heartbreaking vibrato to complement Anderson’s matter-of-factness for the rather more dramatic staging of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance during her ill-fated attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 1937.
Tag-teaming with ANOHNI are the soaring vocals of Samuel Mariño. He has two solo albums out, but his duets with counter-tenor Filippo Mineccia in ‘Stabat Mater’ throw the distinctiveness of his soprano into relief. Although I saw him perform ‘Ombre, Piante’, from Handel’s opera Rodelinda (1719) there is no recording, so include here a performance by Simone Kermes instead.
Next is a pairing of tracks by English singer and actor Keeley Forsyth. Then a recent Fred Moten and Brandon López release sits alongside a very different but thoroughly compelling exponent of black performance, Jacob Lusk of Gabriels. (This studio recording of ‘Blame’ captures Lusk’s singular charisma, while this short film, combining a dizzying dance montage with a barnstorming street performance of Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ (1939) at a Black Lives Matter protest, is an essay all its own).
The ‘hinge’ of the playlist is something quite different. In his new album End of the Middle, English folk singer Richard Dawson voices the everyday experiences of a multi-generational family in the north of England. Dawson can sing all right, but in ‘Gondola’, as elsewhere, he forces his voice into all the wrong places, for all the right reasons: to sing about the things that most people's lives are made of, most of the time, and give voice to a character not commonly represented in song.
***
5th May 2020
Early in the Covid pandemic, Theatre Research International editor Fintan Walsh asked editorial board members to submit a diary entry to the journal. All this voice actor talk has sent me back to my own contribution.
I can’t run to theatre. Nor music. We’re allowed out an a hour a day for exercise in the Australian state of Victoria, and to date I’m 50km or so into an audio version of Roberto Bolaño’s vast novel 2666. By a rough calculation, I have another 280km to go, or 93 laps of my local park. The novel claims enough of my attention to take the edge off the discomfort of running, while leaving room to enjoy the greenery and open spaces. Being so long, the narrative unfolds expansively enough for me to find my own pace. I’m not fast, but I can run further to this literary ultramarathon, than without.
Theatre is better for walking. The back and forth of dialogue reproduces the rhythms of conversation that walking with another draws out of us. As I rounded the southwest bend of the park on an early solo jaunt, the closing conversation of Act One of Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance between Mrs Allonby and Lord Illingworth snapped sharply into place. Cheri Lunghi and Martin Jarvis, respectively, chewed the scene up in unison with my progress, which was hampered only by an awareness of oncoming promenaders looking askance at the idiot grin that had crept across my face, as the flirtatious excesses of the characters’ biting anti-romance gathered pace.
Act One was enough, though, for that walk, and I’ve since substituted actual walking companions for recorded. Act Two awaits, as do the remaining scenes of any number of streamed performances I have launched into at home. I haven’t written them off completely; but nor did I feel compelled, as circumstances in the theatre inevitably dictate, to see them through in one go.
One of the last shows I saw before the theatres went dark in Melbourne was Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep, an autobiographical performance by the avant-garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan. It was part of the successful but prematurely aborted Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts (AsiaTOPA). As might be expected of a onetime muse and major exponent of the aleatory works of composer John Cage, Tan’s show was preoccupied by the relationship between performance and temporality. “I don’t think anything happens by accident,” she said in the show, “but it has to happen when you are ready to receive it.”
During a period where ‘…in the time of’ has become the prefix of choice for any number of discussions of the social impact of Covid-19, it is comforting to accept that now need not be the time of theatre. We just have to be ready to receive it.
Or maybe theatre is always out of joint. Running the other day, a key plot detail of 2666 passed me by. I was about to learn why one character, a famous painter, had chopped his own hand off. But something in the narrative triggered an image override. At home, I’d been watching a stream of the kabuki play Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees by the National Theatre, Tokyo. At the end of a long scene, a faithful retainer does a series of distinctive claw-like gestures with his fists to show he’s really a fox-spirit in disguise. The reason for the painter’s self-mutilation passed me by. Even – perhaps especially – when least expected, theatre punches through.
***
In the Wild
One of the unexpected pleasures of moving to Australia was making the acquaintance of the Australian magpie which, as the ethologist Gisela Kaplan explains in Australian Magpie, produces some of the most complex songs of any songbird, with the largest range of vocalisations. While humans produce sound from the larynx, songbirds use a two-sided syrinx, which, in the case of the Australian magpie, is asymmetrical. This enables it to make different sounds as air passes through one side and then the other, as well as both at the same time, “to produce harmonically unrelated sounds” (p. 161), as well as a good deal of mimicry. Here’s one I filmed in 2021, with campus life chiming in.
***