The Decomposing Voice of Postmodern Music

Steven Connor
Voice is a particular sound made by something with a soul; for nothing which does not have a soul has a voice. Aristotle, De Anima 1

Flute and Lyre

estern music has been formed around the dissension between music and voice. On the one hand, the human voice has provided the image of music itself, distilled, claried, and personied. For the Greeks, the power of music is epitomized by the gure of Orpheus, in whom singing and playing are powerfully reciprocal actions. The lyre of Orpheus and Apollo comes to be metonymic of the voice itself; in the terms lyric and lyrical, the voice is represented by the instrument designed to accompany it, which has nevertheless been suffused with vocal tonality and action. And yet, there is also within the history of Western music, a struggle between the voice and musical sound as such. This struggle is encoded in the distinction between the Orphic or Apollonian lyre and the ute of Pan or Dionysus. Wind instruments come to be uniquely expressive of the voice because they share the voices incapacity to play chords. Unable to organize sound synchronically, the voice organizes it temporally, through the movement of melody; but the openness to time of melody suggests the instability of those xed relations of proportion which Greek musical theory bequeathed to the West. When Apollo defeats Marsyas, it is a defeat of the aberrant powers of the voice. The ute-voice represents the power of the one to become many, moving ecstatically and unpredictably from place to place, and sometimes inducing panic and disorientation. The Apollonian lyre contains many voices, which it organizes synchronically. The one-becoming-many of the ute is assimilated to and subordinated by the image of the many-become-one represented by the lyre. Charles Segal nds a feminized version of this process in Pindars twelfth Pythian Ode, written in 490 b.c. for the annual ute contest which took place in Delphi. The ode celebrates the fact that Athena, having rescued her
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favorite, Perseus, from the Gorgon, invented the art of ute music, to preserve and to neutralize the horrifying, bestial cries of the Gorgon:
she fashioned the music of utes to imitate the piercing ululation that came to her ears from the erce jaws of Euryale. It was the goddess who invented it for mortal men and called it the many-headed melody 2

The aesthetic form of the ode, Segal concludes, is itself a victory over Gorgonic dissonance; and the ode, like Athena, absorbs and neutralizes this dissonance by incorporating it into a larger design, much as the total musical and thematic structure of Mozarts Magic Flute absorbs and neutralizes the screaming arpeggios of the vengeful Queen of the Night (33).

Composing Voice
This argument between voice and music took another turn in the eighteenth century in the musical quarrel of the ancients and moderns enacted between Rameau and Rousseau. Rameau took the view that the essence of music lay in harmonic proportion and relation. Although harmonic theory derived from ancient sources in Pythagorean mathematics, it reached its summit in modern, scientic systems of harmonic relationships, to which classical accounts of music such as Platos, restricted as they are to considerations of melody, did not attain. Rousseau, by contrast, championed the claims of melody over harmony, and in the process rejected arguments for the superiority of the moderns over the ancients. Since the form and essence of music derived from the inections of passionate human speech, Plato and other classical commentators on music were right to concentrate upon melos rather than harmonia.3 Nineteenth-century music and music theory are conventionally thought to be characterized by the repudiation of the voice and its claims by the idea of instrumental or absolute music; both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche see the voice as a vulgar and gratuitous excrescence in music. And yet one must acknowledge that this apparent defeat of the voice is also accompanied by a certain kind of enlargement of its power. For this is a period governed by the idea of the composers identifying voice or style, suffusing and stamping every work, no matter which particular voice may mediate it. It is the nineteenth century that establishes the priority

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of what Edward Cone calls the sense of the composers voice. It is not only the symphony that can be sung, that can be recapitulated by a single voice, that expresses the triumph of the lyrical. Opera represents, not so much the cooperation of voice with score and scenario, as the capture of the entire work of composition and performance by the act of musicalized utterance, or enunciatory music. For Cone, in fact, opera or song are only literalizations of the metaphor which governs all music, whereby the music can be thought of as a form of purely symbolic utterance, the utterance of that composite being, different for different works, even if they are by the same composer, that Cone calls the implicit persona of the composer.4 Discussing the relations between composer, song, and accompaniment in a Schubert Lied, Cone employs the analogy of the Christian trinity: The song as a whole is the utterancethe creationof the complete musical persona. Like the Father, this persona begets in the vocal persona a Son that embodies its Word; and it produces in the accompaniment a Holy Spirit that speaks to us directly, without the mediation of the Word (CV 18). With the development of recording and amplication technologies at the end of the nineteenth century, the division between classical or serious music and mass music began to take shape. However, both modern mass music and modernist music grew out of the encounter between the ideal of the free, expressive, bodily voice, and the captured, manipulable, disembodied voice of the phonograph and the telephone. The mass market in sound and music that rapidly grew up through the twentieth century, sustained by the technologies of amplication and reproduction, was centered on the human voice. Even more important perhaps than the gramophones power to store and propagate the human voice was the power given by the microphone, which was the guarantee of the voices integrity against the powers of music, which was now diminished to the mere frame or occasion for the singer and his or her song. The voice became a powerful and marketable commodity. Even nonvocal music came to obey the law of the voice in mass popular music, as solo instruments strove to impersonate the lyrical, expressive qualities of the voice. In free-form jazz, for example, every instrument could become a solo instrument. During the 1960s and 1970s, bands like Cream and The Grateful Dead bemused a musical generation brought up on the threeminute verse-and-chorus single with immensely long sets consisting almost entirely of solos. Rather than dissolving the power of the voice, this kind of playing generalized it. There was nothing that was not the expression of voice; there was no background, no mere accompaniment. It is for this reason that the electric guitar became the most important instrument of mass music. The electric guitar represented the liberation of the ute from the lyre. While the rhythm guitar played chords and

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riffs of ever greater simplicity and predictability, the lead guitar recapitulated the traditional association between the voice and the violin. The guitar merged with the players body, as the violin had been an extension of the nineteenth-century virtuosos body. The style of lead guitar playing emphasized linear melodic runs, characterized by plangently wailing bent notes, which allowed the fretted divisions of the instruments neck to be ignored. The cult of speed in guitar playing aimed to establish the absolute continuity of the melodic line, as it were disallowing any possibility of xed relations or proportions. The guitar became a wind instrument whose player never had to pause for breath. Not surprisingly, a whole range of musical effects arose to accentuate the vocal character of the guitars sound, from the wah-wah pedal to techniques for merging sounds articulated by the performers mouth with the input from the guitar. Faced with this absolute domination of voice in popular culture, modernist or avant-garde music evolved a new form of the dialectic of voice and music. As mass music came to depend upon the technological replication of the individual, bodily voice, modernist music sought to dissolve the traditional link between tonality and the voice. In classical or art music, the voice was swallowed up into the now unearthly and inaudible complexity of the work. In serial music, the composers voice or style became inaudible and unvisualizable, a matter of the buried, secret signature or coding of the works structure. The voice of the work was precisely that, the voice of the work. Modernist music thus repudiated the crasser aspects of technological Rousseauism, yet retained an abstract sense of the organized and organizing voice that Edward Cone posits as essential to all music. Indeed, Cones argument is best read not as a general statement of musical aesthetics, but as an historically symptomatic account of the ideal of modernist music, just as literary New Criticism was a generalization of some of the demands and principles of modernist poetry. Cones notion of the virtual voice of the composed work is an abstract resolution of the differing claims of voice and music as these had come to a crisis in modernism. Cone is uneasy about modern music, and about electronic music in particular; but what he says of the concerto might as well be said of the work of Schoenberg, Webern, or even perhaps Stockhausen: One who achieves full identication with the complete persona of any complex work must not only participate in the fortunes of each component persona, character, and leading agent, but also experience, vividly and intimately, the course of events produced by their relationships (CV 125). This willingness to assimilate music to the operations of voice has recently reappeared in Carolyn Abbates investigations of voice in nineteenth-century opera. Where Cone assumes the existence of a

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single voice, immanent in and actualized uniformly throughout the musical work, Abbate sees opera as being structured by a multiplicity of voices, appropriate to a Bakhtinian age allergic to the allegedly centering and unifying powers of the voice. Abbate acknowledges, even more frankly than Cone, the act of anthropomorphic guration that this involves: I make a different, deliberately prosopopoeiac swerve; in effect I endow certain isolated musical moments with faces, and so with tongues and a special sonorous presence. I construct voices out of sonorous discourse.5 Abbate appears to use the metaphor of utterance to break open the idealized continuity of the work, to restore a Rousseauian sense of gesture, occasion, and performative presence to the abstract and ideal unication made available by the composite voice of the work. In fact, however, it matters little whether the workings of the musical work are represented in terms of the utterance of a single immanent deity, or a multiplicity of divine presences. What matters is the force of the metaphor, the willingness to construe the work in terms of the idea of immaterialized utterance. This formulation may be seen as the culmination of the long work of assimilating the voice to musical process and structure, while simultaneously humanizing that idea of musical process by construing it in terms of a sublimated and immaterialized voice. The less music comes to depend upon actual voices, the more it comes to be thought of in terms of such ideal, abstract utterance. In this sense there is a profound continuity between the vulgar apotheosis of the voice to be found in mass popular music in the twentieth century and those austere forms of modern or avant-garde music which seem to refuse the voices seductive glamour or vulgarity. The key work here would seem to be Schoenbergs Erwartung, a work in which we must hear the passionate solo voice as at once unstructured expressionist intensity and as a complex cooperation with the harmonic structures of the piece. The voice allows the discovery of the new apparently voiceless language of musical serialism. Erwartung is the aring up of the voice at the very moment of its immaterialization.

Voicing Noise
This tendency within mass music to subordinate all musical sound to the economy of utterance is challenged from within modernism by its attention to insignicant, or nonmusical, noise. Perhaps the great initiator of this tradition, which runs through the work of Edgard Varse, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Boulez, and John Cage, was the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, who called, in his manifesto of March 1913, for an

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art of noises that would liberate the musical possibilities of noise in general, especially the diverse and unsynthesizable complexity of sound in the city.6 Where modern popular culture employed phonographic technology to construct wonderful facsimiles of the human voice, modernist avant-garde music would develop a complementary capacity of the phonographits capacity to record and reproduce, not merely the sound of the voice, but the sounds of the world in general. Douglas Kahn has argued that, in the process of opening music up to what seemed farthest away from the expressive unity of voicethe accidental noises of the worldthe modernist avant-garde was in fact working to secure the powers of human utterance in general. The avant-garde, from Luigi Russolo to John Cage, resolved to listen to the voice of things; but in giving things a voice, they unwittingly assimilated aural alterity to the economy of human utterance. It is perhaps easy to see how this might be so of Luigi Russolo, who designed special noise instruments that would allow the humming, booming, scraping, and roaring of the world, especially the mechanical world, to be pitched and harmonized. For, in making what was fundamentally disorganized or percussive noise instrumental, Russolo follows the conventional modelling of instruments upon the operations of the human voice. His noise machines as it were add a larynx to the accidental noises of the world. In being given utterance, these noises are spoken through, becoming another form of musical persona for the human. But Douglas Kahn suggests that the same anthropomorphism is to be found even in the work of John Cage, which claims to be able to make it possible to listen to the sounds of the world without turning them into instruments, or prosopopoeic mirrors of the human. Rather than drawing noise into music through imitation, Cages notorious 433 aims to allow the world to be heard in the act of refraining from making music. For Kahn, even this gesture is appropriative:
The lateness of Cages modernism is in direct relation to the conservatism of Western art music. He performed the last possible modernist renovation of Western art music and thereby lled music up. After him there is no dividing line between musical sound and ordinary sound because all sound becomes music. . . . This collapse of sound into a problematic of musical sound betrays an un-Cagean act of imposition at the very center of his philosophy. By saying that sounds not intrinsically human should be thought of as music, he contradicts his anti-anthropomorphism.7

So, where mass culture saturates the audible and electromagnetic frequency bands with the sound of the human voice, avant-garde practice, by hearing inhuman sounds as a form of voicing, accommo-

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dates those sounds to the human metaphor of voice. Kahns criticism can easily generate innite regress, since the energy of its denunciation derives from the very ideas and practices being denounced; the urge to open human awareness and audition to the radically inhuman is bound to keep stumbling on the guilty awareness that the very categories of the inhuman are humanly determined. But who else but human beings could have come up with the idea of the inhuman? For whom else could the concept of the inhuman have force or allure? Douglas Kahn believes that escaping the trap of enlarging the power of utterance means separating the question of sound from the question of music altogether. I think there may be evidence in the music of the last two or three decades of other, more exible ways of construing the relations between noise and voice.

Decomposing Voice
The analog form of sonorous capture made available by early phonographysounds literally inscribed into patterns of movement in the grooves on gramophone discshas given way in the last two decades to digital processes for encoding sound. Although analog capture offered unexpectedly high levels of reproductive delity, it did not allow sound to be manipulated with the ease and exibility that digital encoding makes possible. The early practitioners of musique concrte had to work literally with scissors and lengths of tape, and in their work with radio, tape, and microphone, John Cage and William Burroughs both depended upon a close relationship between the body and the physical embodiment of the technology.8 This desire for the manual handling of sound survives into the 1980s practice of scratching, which breaks apart and reassembles the continuities of recorded music by the physical manipulation of discs. Other, less obviously physical means of editing sound, for example in the practices of over-dubbing that tape-recording technology made possible in the 1960s, always had to struggle against the law of degradation: the fact that re-recording an already-recorded sound source always meant some loss of quality. Eventually, given enough generations away from the master tape, the originating voice or signal will be smothered in the murk of surface and mechanical noise. Because it allows the production of exact facsimiles of a sound, once it has been encoded, digital technology abolishes degradation. Once rendered as bits, the sound signal remains available to be remixed and reconstituted forever. It was inevitable that the seeming elimination of sonorous decay would suggest the possibility of repairing imperfect sound. CD technology encouraged the practice of returning to recordings

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made earlier in the history of phonography, and cleaning them up, mechanically separating out the desired sound from what covered and obscured itevery kind of background noise, crackle, distortionand articially supplying those elements of the sound that had been lost in the process of recording. Digital technology allows the remixer or remasterer to act like Maxwells demon: the imaginary being who could create energy from nothing by merely sorting information about energy differentials among molecules. Once sound has become mere information, the simple exercise of sorting that information results in qualitative transformations and gains in value. Given the domination of the voice in the popular music industry, it is no surprise that this operation of remastering has been directed in particular to the exercise of cleaning up the voices of great singers of the past. But one can say that the ideal of the resurrection of the voice, by removing it from its tomb of noise, underlies the digital manipulation of musical sound in generaleven if it is the voice of Louis Armstrongs trumpet or Rachmaninovs touch on the keys of the piano that are being led back, Eurydice-like, from the realms of the dead. Music is given back its present voice by being purged of the noise of time. The problem, however, is that this kind of operation is founded on the immaterialization of the voice. The voice is to be restored to itself, by being freed from contamination. Voices are restored to themselves not only by the removal from them of frequencies that do not belong to or have not originated in the voice, but also by the amplication and enhancement of the sound-features that do belong to it, in a kind of auto-repair, or auditory skin-grafting. The result, in early examples of digital remastering, was often a paradoxically and disturbingly dead or inhuman sound. The voice could only be restored to itself, or raised from the dead, it seems, by a process of immaterialization that itself risked killing it. This process of digital immaterialization of the voice comes at the end of a long and continuous history in which articulate speech is separated from everything in the voice that reminds us of the body.9 It is a process which extends at least as far back as the work of Aristotle, who, as Frances Dyson observes in her brief history of the emergence of the radio voice, not only distinguished the voices of ensouled beings from the sounds produced by beings without souls, but also distinguished internally between the ensouled or articulate sound of meaningful speech, and the meaningless, soiled, unsouled sounds that could also be produced by ensouled beingssuch as coughing and sneezing.10 But digital technology also makes possible a different kind of response to the voice, both within music and beyond. Early phonography was alarming, not so much because of the way in which it made it possible to

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separate the voice from living beings, and therefore, as almost every early commentator observed, to preserve it after death; but because of the comminglings of voice and materiality that it seemed to effect. Early commentators on the telephone and the phonograph could not help reporting what they heard in terms of the machine itself speaking. Having separated the voice from the materiality of the body, a long technological struggle ensued to wrest the voice back from the materiality of the apparatus that had made this separation possible. The voice had to be freed from interference; from the tinniness and metallic tincture given to it by the nature of the reproducing and amplifying apparatus, as well as from the crackle and whine of radio interference, and from all the forms of background noise that the phonograph recorded indiscriminately along with the sound of the voice, noise which human beings are accustomed to ltering out. The effort to clarify the voice by freeing it from noise went along with the commodication of the voice in the gramophone industry, which, as Jacques Attali has noted, quickly turned a phonographic technology allowing for the circulation of voices in recording and playback into a gramophonic technology in which only playback is possible, and in which, rather than circulating, the voice is diffused and distributed.11 Commercial incentives (why would you pay to hear others music if you could easily record your own?) converged here with technological imperatives. The very ductility of the material that Edison used to record the voice on his early cylinder phonographs meant that the quality of the recorded voice began to decline after only a small number of playbacks. Ensuring high delity and the possibility of unlimited repetitions meant arresting those processes of degradation. All of this dened a sonorous economy governed by the supreme value of the voice at one extreme, and the pure emptiness, degradation, or waste of noise at the other. This economy is driven by the need to produce voice and the need to expel or excrete the waste product of nonvocal noise. But this economy of the voice is geared around production and consumption. A consequence of this is that the voices it produces must be used up, in order to make way for new voices and new products; it is necessary to the production of the voice that, despite the apparent immortality of the voice guaranteed by high-delity sound, it degrades through time into the waste condition of noise. The very renewal of technologies provided one means of producing and disposing of waste products: thus 78s were replaced by vinyl long-playing records; these were replaced in their turn by cassettes, which have given way to CDs, which are in the process of giving way to digital audio tape. But with the arrival of digital technology the inexorable march of time through sonic entropy is halted and reversed; the river of time can start

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to swirl back upstream. All recorded voices will be able to be restored to us. One striking result of this is the piling up of the very vocal waste that we might have supposed would be eliminated forever. Voice was alive because it was ephemeral; it belonged to a speaking moment. A voice that can sound forever, which will never decay or be lost because it can always be restored, threatens to turn into a kind of nondegradable debris. Digital technology not only makes the long-dreamed-of immateriality of the voice a possibility, it also renders us increasingly aware of the waste matter of the voice. This is assisted by the new intimacy of production or transmission of sound on the one hand, and its recording and manipulation on the other. If every transmitted sound is, at least in principle, also a recorded sound, then the very living presence of the voice becomes a kind of detritus. Contemporary music can be seen anticipating and responding to this hidden economy of degradation of the voice. During the early 1960s, two composers who had begun experiments with electro-acoustic technology, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio, became interested in working with the human voice. What is striking here is how much that musical encounter between voice and synthesized sound depended, for both composers, upon a decomposition of the voice. Stockhausen has spoken of his interest in consonantal melody, in using those elements of speech which had previously been thought to have nothing musical about them, presumably because, at least until the era of sound recording, the consonants were the most fugitive and least capturable elements of speech:
Traditionally in Western music noises have been taboo, and there are precise reasons for this. It began from the time when staff notation was introduced, and music could be notated in precise intervals for the rst time. Then it was mainly vocal music, sung predominantly with vowels rather than consonants. If I sing a melody of consonants now, people would say it isnt music: we have no tradition of music composed in these sounds, and no notation for it. There you see how narrow our concept of music is, from having excluded consonants, these noises.12

Stockhausens Gesang der Jnglige (195556) and Carr (195960), took the form of elaborately engineered rapprochements of voices and music. Having been chopped into manipulable fragments, voice-elements became musical material. As Robin Maconie describes the process in Gesang der Jnglige, For each sound component of spoken language there exists a synthesized equivalent. . . . Thus a continuum between electronic sound and vocal sound is established at every point between the extremes of tone and voice.13 In his Momente of 1962, Stockhausen

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elaborated a complex, semi-controlled coordination of three groups of musical elements: what he called M-moments, in which melodic characteristics predominated, K-moments (from Klang, sound), which focused on timbres or sound-spectrums, and D-moments, which involved emphasis on various kinds of musical duration. The piece also included words, or word fragments, as Stockhausen himself describes: I have used quite a lot of words and syllables, shouts that I have heard from the public during performances of my music. Remarks like Stop it!, Bis!, Ugly, Beautiful, Terrible!, or Be quietthese are all incorporated, and I have indicated how these syllables should be delivered, sometimes strictly in rhythm, sometimes chanted in church style: Ug-ly, beau-ti-ful; ug-ly, beau-ti-ful (SM 7273). These fragments are in one sense a decomposition of the voice; but they are a reconciling or integrating decomposition. The vocal interruptions are woven into a kind of musical counter-enunciation, which envelops and transforms them, performatively healing the assault that they constitute, and in a sense immunizing the work against them. At around the same time, Luciano Berio was also beginning to turn his attention to the voice. He worked with Umberto Eco on a study of the overture section of the Sirens episode of Joyces Ulysses, which he later developed, in collaboration with the remarkable singer Cathy Berberian, into a tape piece called Thema. Like Stockhausen, Berio begins by breaking up the voice, analyzing it into a number of phonetic elements. These elements are then ordered and re-articulated, but in musical rather than expressive or semantic terms, by combining them with electronic sounds of various kinds. For his next electronic-vocal project, Visage, Berio dispensed with an originating text altogether; or rather he used as his text a remarkable repertoire of nonverbal utterances and articulations generated by Cathy Berberian in the recording studio. Only one word appears in the nal tape piece, the whispered Italian word parole (words). The fact that nothing of what we hear around it is a word in any sense makes it impossible to decide whether the utterance of this word constitutes a claim that the hypoarticulate shouts, stammerings, grunts, mumblings, whimpers, screams, gusts of laughter, and other vocal gestures which we hear throughout the piece are, in fact and after all, kinds of word, or wordings; or whether it is meant to strip even the word parole of its meaning in favor of the pure musicality of its utterance. The decomposition of the voice into such articulatory elements or gestures appears to neutralize the voice, making it a merely disposable resource to be articulated with the range of electronic sounds that Berio generated for the piece. In fact, the piece depends upon the sense of struggle between the voice and the music; rst of all in the fact that the voice is so

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distinctively a particular voice, that of Cathy Berberian herself, and secondly in the fact that it remains so stubbornly excessive to the music, refusing to be simply read in musical terms, despite the long, loud, electronic chord washes which swallow it up at the end. Visage is perhaps best thought of as a kind of replay, in the age of electronic reproduction, of the encounter between voice and music of Schoenbergs Erwartung. Berio returned to the exploration of this excessive voice in a later piece, Sequenza III, again written for Cathy Berberian. Berio describes in an interview his attempts in Sequenza III to assimilate to the music the disturbingly unmusical aspects of the voice:
I have always been very sensitive, perhaps overly so, to the excess of connotations that the voice carries, whatever it is doing. From the grossest of noises to the most delicate of singing, the voice always means something, always refers beyond itself and creates a huge range of associations, cultural, musical, emotive, physiological, or drawn from everyday life, etc. Classical vocal music, whose implicit model was instrumental music, obviously transcended the bitumen of everyday vocal behaviour. As has already been said many times, the voice of a great classical singer is a bit like a signed instrument which, as soon as you have nished playing, you put away in a case. It has nothing to do with the voice that the great singer uses to communicate in everyday life.14

Berio attempted in Sequenza III both to intensify and to assimilate these connotative elements of the voice, which now appear both as a kind of unmanageable human opulence and as an ugly, indeterminate kind of wastea bitumen, as his odd metaphor has it. His aim, he said, was to assimilate and control not only every aspect of classical singing, but also those aspects which, both because of acoustic considerations and because they disturbed the message, had necessarily been excluded from tonal music (TI 94). Paradoxically, in order to assimilate these elements, Berio had to break them down. The voice that is heard is a voice which has been fragmented, not electronically, but through acts of verbal and phonetic analysis. These analyses at once make it possible, confronting and exorcising the excessive connotations to limit the voice, and allow the voice to retain its excessiveness, resisting the process of musical articulation (TI 94). The ambivalence of the piece depends upon the fact that the voice insists on its wild, unruly singularity, even and especially in the condition of its disintegration. The very multiplicity of vocal elements at work in the piece is what constitutes its virtuoso characterso much so, as Berio remarked, that there have been a number of sad occasions when Cathy was not performing, on which I have been tempted to transcribe this work for two or three voices (TI 96).

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During the late 1960s, Steve Reich also became interested in exploring the degradation of the voice. He undertook a series of experiments with the musical possibilities of allowing two tape loops playing the same sound to drift slowly out of phase with each other. Perhaps the most remarkable outcome of these investigations is his 1966 piece Come Out. The raw material of the tape was a sentence spoken by Daniel Hamm, a victim of a police beating at a civil rights demonstration in Harlem. In the course of explaining how he had to demonstrate his injury in order to get medical treatment, Hamm said, I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them. Steve Reich took the words come out to show them, and created a series of tape loops, which he played simultaneously. As the tapes lose synchronicity, the words are decomposed and develop into a thickly compacted yet highly complex and energetically mobile mass of sound. Unexpected overtones and counter-rhythms are derived from the coming apart and regathering of the sound of Hamms voice. Interestingly, the process highlights in particular the slight distortions of Hamms voice that derive from the interaction between the voice and the recording mechanism in the piece of tape that forms Reichs source. Eventually the articulate voice is lost altogether in a terrifying sonic swirl that we sense is destined to go on thickening and ramifying for ever. The voice dissolves into sound; but that sound is not mere noise, but rather the sounding of voice in the very condition of degradation. The piece is related to an earlier piece of 1965 which performed a similar operation on a phrase from an evangelical sermon, Its Gonna Rain, and a work of 1967 called Slow Motion Sound, which latter Reich was never able to realize. The score for the piece is simply as follows: Very gradually slow down a recorded sound to many times its original length without changing its pitch or timbre at all.15 The point of the exercise was to reveal the complex movements of pitch and timbre within an utterance that do not get noticed in ordinary hearing because they occur too fast, in something of the same way that a slowed-down lm allows one to perceive movements that are not otherwise perceptible. In this case, the voice presents itself as a kind of innitely extendable resource which will yield musical outcomes precisely to the degree that it is decomposed and made unrecognizable as voice. Here, as in Come Out, the voice is subjected to a form of technological assault that destroys its qualities of continuity as voice, and reduces it to a kind of rubble of endogenous noise, from which it nevertheless gathers a kind of unsuspected music. Come Out is the most effective and provocative of the three pieces, because of the disturbing congruity between what is being done to the voice and what the voice has begun by telling

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us about. The voice that describes the effect of a beating is itself subjected to a horrifying kind of pulverization; the bleeding described is reproduced in the effect of bleeding between the different loops of sound. And yet the result is a new, dynamic synthesis of voice and machine, which depends not upon the immaterialization of the voice, but upon the mechanical rearticulation of its sheer, merely phenomenal noisiness. There is no simple, or sentimental, humanizing of the inhuman here, and no simple restoration of continuity and articulation by shifting from the actuality of voice to the immaterial voice of music. Reichs practice here looks forward to some of the work of the radio and sound artist Gregory Whitehead, who has spoken of his work with the voice in terms that cohere suggestively with the thematics of wounding and healing suggested in Come Out:
[I]n the saturated buzz-world of electronic media, our voices are inscribed with all kinds of phonies other than our own. The fact is, we cannot nd our voice just by using it; we must be willing to cut it out of our throats, put it on the autopsy table, isolate and savor the various quirks and pathologies, then stitch it back together and see what happens . . . . [T]he problem of voicebodies (and the hunger to become entangled with other voicebodies) could resolve itself into the pure pleasure of speech in ruins. . . . Wounds can bleed or they can sing.16

More recent composers have responded in different ways to the sense of radical ambivalence posed by the voice which is both rich resource and sonic refuse. Trevor Wisharts work represents one of the most sustained attempts to enlarge the conventional repertoire of the voice with the noise, not just of inhuman sound, but also the noise components of the voice itself. Wishart was at work from the 1980s onwards on a sequence of voice pieces called Vox which extend the experiments with the disarticulated voice conducted by Berio and Reich two decades before. The Vox sequence grew out of a piece which Wishart wrote in 1980 called Anticredos, after a period of four years spent experimenting with extended vocal techniques, techniques which are described in a small, privately printed pamphlet entitled The Book of Lost Voices (1980). Anticredos mimics the work of digital sampling technology in conducting a kind of performative analysis of the voice. A single utterance, credos, is taken apart and reassembled through processes of distortion, exaggeration, amplication, and variation. But where the aim of digital CD analysis is to restore the voice to itself, cleanly self-identical, Wishart aims to create new and unexpected hybrids of voice and noise. At the center of Wisharts work is the idea of the continuous transformability of

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sounds into one another, which amounts to a refusal of the differences between utterance and nonutterance, ensouled and unsouled articulation. Although his allegiance is to the live voiceand he is a very considerable vocal performer in his own rightWishart has worked extensively with computerized sound. Where composers such as Stockhausen and Berio used the encounter of voice and machine as a way of staging the struggle between the actuality of voice and the abstraction of music, Wishart, like a number of contemporary composers and sound artists, is sensitive to the ways in which virtual or synthesized sound environments can dissolve this distinction: In the real physical world we are able to say quite clearly that the sound of a metal bar falling to the ground is not an utterance, whereas a sound produced by a being is. In the virtual space of loudspeakers this sort of distinction may be difcult to make. . . . We may, in fact, play with the utterances of a soundobject.17 It is this communicability between utterance and accident, voice and noise, that digital technologies are suggesting to a number of contemporary sound artists. Robin Rimbaud, who works under the name of Scanner, collects vocal detritus from the airwaves, using a scanner that enables him to intercept telephone calls, and articulates these voices into musical form. Roger Doyle has been at work for a number of years on a project he calls Babel, which he describes as a large-scale musical structure making use of many technologies and music languages, with each piece of music being thought of as a room or place within an enormous tower city.18 One of the supplements to this work is an imaginary radio station, KBBL, the parodied output from which makes up the rst of the two CDs which have so far appeared from the Babel project. Two contrasting voices present two shows: the rst a boisterous mid-Atlantic DJ who presents The Morning Show, the second a languorous, rather menacing female voice who provides the links for the Entertainment and Leisure Pursuits Show. These voices mediate others: the sound of weather forecasts, competitions and personal advertisments. The music played by the DJs ranges from simple pastiche of contemporary drum n bass to a bizarre auditory lm score called The Proposal, in which a conversation from a 1950s melodrama is cut into, and cut across by, a rapid, sinisterly plinking series of synthesized tone-runs. In the second CD, Chambers and Spirit Levels, a range of different instrumental rooms within the virtual Tower is constructed. These rooms are locations in which different instrumentalists are to be heard rehearsing or performing, amid various kinds of background noise or interruptions from adjacent rooms. Mr. Bradys Room is a piece devised for the Canadian guitarist Tim Brady. Squat puts together a long performance by the clarinettist Cindy Cummings, which exploits all the harshest timbral accidents and possibilities of the

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clarinet, with disturbing voices, sometimes murmuring just below the level of audibility, sometimes rising to screams and yells. Voice and music come together in Cummingss extraordinary technique of voiced playing, in which she sings through the clarinet at the same time as she plays with reed and keys. The music is both accompaniment to and anatagonist of this strained, strangulated song. The effect is to assert the indissoluble mutuality of body, voice, and instrument in the very moment and manner of their reciprocal mutilation. Not surprisingly, the agonistic encounter between voice and machine, between richness and detritus, has also passed across into live vocal style: for example in the automated, pitilessly de-melodized vocal styles of rap and hip-hop, or in the visceral performance styles of vocalists like Diamanda Galas, Shelley Hirsch, and Phil Minton. In some areas of performance art and composition, the very immateriality of new technology, which seems to be making composing an entirely silent process, conducted with a screen and a computer keyboard, has produced a fascination with the auditory technology which it supplants, driven by the urge to desublimate or violently to reembody voice through the very apparatuses employed for its disembodiment. The Australian artist Lucas Abel extended the 80s fashion for scratching into a gramophonic theatre of cruelty by wiring his VW van up so that it becomes an electroacoustic instrument, using needles and even knives to play records; and, by wearing an electrostatic glove provided with needles at the ngers, actually turning himself into a gramophone, a living apparatus for relaying noise as voice. In all of this work, the relations between voice, music, and machine are being transformed in newly complex ways, which make the hitherto unassailable distinctions between the idealized, immaterial voice of musical utterance and the unruly, excremental noise of technological culture hard to sustain. The efforts to separate voice from noise, or to reclaim voice from noise, which seems to have characterized earlier phases of music in this century, have yielded place to a much more complex and dynamic sonorous and musical economy, characterized by rapid exchanges of meaning and libidinal charge between living voice and dead noise, integrity and cut-up, event and echo.19 University of London
NOTES 1 Aristotle, De Anima, Books II and III, tr. D. W. Hamlyn (Oxford, 1993), p. 32. 2 Frank J. Nisetich, Pindars Victory Odes (Baltimore, 1980); quoted in Charles Segal, The Gorgon and the Nightingale: The Voice of Female Lament and Pindars Twelfth Pythian

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Ode, in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge, 1994), p. 22; hereafter cited in text. 3 This quarrel between the proponents of primitive voice and modern harmonic systems is discussed in Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, tr. Roger Lustig (Chicago, 1989), pp. 4657. 4 Edward T. Cone, The Composers Voice (Berkeley, 1974), p. 160; hereafter cited in text as CV. 5 Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991), p. xiii. 6 Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, tr. Barclay Brown (New York, 1986). 7 Douglas Kahn, Track Organology, in Critical Issues in Electronic Media, ed. Simon Penny (Albany, N.Y., 1995), p. 208. 8 See Frances Dyson, The Ear That Would Hear Sounds in Themselves: John Cage 19351965 and Robin Lydenberg, Sound Identity Fading Out: William Burroughs Tape Experiments, in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 373407, 40937. 9 The philosophical history of the cleaning up of the voice is discussed in David Applebaums Voice (Albany, N.Y., 1990). 10 Frances Dyson, The Genealogy of the Radio Voice, in Radio Rethink: Art, Sound and Transmission, ed. Daina Augaitis and Dan Lander (Banff, 1994), pp. 16799, esp. 17475. 11 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, tr. Brian Massumi (Manchester, 1985), pp. 90101. 12 Karlheinz Stockhausen, Stockhausen on Music: Lectures and Interviews, ed. Robin Maconie (London, 1991), p. 109; hereafter cited in text as SM. 13 Robin Maconie, The Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1990), p. 59. 14 Luciano Berio, Two Interviews With Rossana Dalmonte and Blint Andrs Varga, tr. and ed. David Ormond-Smith (New York, 1985), p. 94; hereafter cited in text as TI. 15 Steve Reich, Writings About Music (Halifax, 1974), p. 14. 16 Radio Play Is No Place: A Conversation Between Jrme Noetinger and Gregory Whitehead, TDR: The Drama Review, 40 (1996), 100101. 17 Trevor Wishart, On Sonic Art (York, 1985), p. 135. 18 Roger Doyle, sleeve notes to the CD Babel (World Serpent, 2000). See too John L. Walters, Rising High, The Wire, 166 (1997), 3233. 19 I have explored different aspects of the cultural phenomenology of noise in contemporary culture in the following: Feel the Noise: Excess, Affect and the Acoustic, in Emotion in Postmodernism, ed. Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung (Heidelberg, 1997), pp. 14762; and Noise, a series of radio programs broadcast 2428 February 1997 on British BBC Radio 3, a transcript of which is available on the World Wide Web at the following URL: <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/Departments/English/Staff/skcnoise.htm>