Ways to the Voice Part 1.2.

The Singers are Appearing

 

We cannot say whether the changes in the ideal of the beautiful artistic voice in the past have been reflected in everyday singing, because until the invention of electronic recording there had been no direct evidence of human voices. But we do know that the idea of a professional singer offering vocal art as an available product is relatively new. Although there was evidence of the appearance of professional singers as early as the 12th century, the underlying idea of commercialising the voice remained socially absolutely unacceptable until the late 16th century. Until then, the voice was primarily used for the glory of God, and of course this was not allowed to be commercialised. The freelance singers therefore initially had no chance of asserting themselves against their often well-educated competitors from the clergy and the nobility. However, this changed abruptly through an initiative of the Italian prince Alfonzo II of Ferrara, through which, moreover, female singers finally found their leading role in the history of the singing voice. In the spring of 1580, the prince began to assemble a group of female singers who had no other task than to sing for the entertainment of his young wife. The prince's real aim was to ensure that his wife, only fifteen years old, would bear him the long hoped-for heir to the throne. This never happened, despite the use of the high art of singing. But the musical-voice legacy that the prince brought into the world still has an effect today. The singers developed a vocal virtuosity never heard before, which inspired the specially hired composers to write unique vocal pieces. In the course of professionalisation and the new quality of vocal training, the limits of vocal possibilities were significantly extended in their height, suppleness and speed. The example of the prince soon set a trend, and soon singers from different courts were competing with each other. The high voice was now finally elevated to the undisputed ideal of the art of singing. The concerti delle donne with their highly virtuoso vocal parts were the first time in European vocal history that the voice was fully emancipated from speech. Until then, the function of the singing voice had also been limited to serving the language conveying the content. The voice's hidden status in music continued to be effective until the modern era. For this reason, the emergence of melismatic singing - in which several notes are sung on one syllable - and polyphony, which today is the epitome of European music, was initially viewed with extreme scepticism by the medieval church.

 

So I waver back and forth, considering the danger of sensual pleasure, soon the experienced salvation, and am no longer inclined to the admittedly not irrevocable view of approving the usual church singing. A weaker mind may be stimulated to pious feelings by the ingratiating melodiousness. But if it happens to me that I am gripped more by the singing than by the sung word, then I must confess that I am severely sinning, and then I would prefer not to hear any more singing.

 

Augustine

 As late as the 16th century, the Tridentine Council recommended a simple voice leading for the chant, oriented towards the text. With the secular compositions for the first professional female singers at the Italian courts, however, the voice gained a new, strong significance of its own for the field of artistic singing. The sound of the voice and the aesthetic experience associated with it now stood on an equal footing with the expression and understanding of the content of the songs and madrigals. This did not change the fact that the voices were only experienced and evaluated according to the standard of beauty, which of course changed continuously. But at least the beautiful voice now became a value in itself. Strictly speaking, however, only the beautiful soprano voice remained the object of evaluation for a long time. Men hardly had a chance to make a living as professional singers. Only with the advent of the castrati, the male sopranos, were men granted entry into the halls of fame of singing, albeit at great sacrifice.

Why was the idea of the beautiful singing voice limited to the soprano in Europe for so long? What was special about the high voice compared to the other female and male vocal sounds? The answer seems obvious: the tonal height of the soprano voice literally sets it above the other vocal registers, for in the harmony of several voices, it is always the highest that is heard best. But if the purely acoustic fact of voice pitch were sufficient as an explanation, then there should be no preference for low voices in any singing culture in the world. In the Buddhist chants of Tibet, however, we find a convincing example of the superiority (!) of low singing. Voice pitch only brings us closer to an answer if we read it as a cultural phenomenon. There must be a culturally intrinsic reason for the dominance of high voices in Europe. In the Christian culture of medieval Europe, high voices had a higher (!) value per se than low voices, and this had an effect on the language in which we still refer to the better and more valuable as the higher. Our ideas and values are interwoven with what one could call the vertical metaphor of Christian thinking, right down to the language. The archetype of this worldview consists in the idea, which admittedly existed long before Christianity, that the world is divided into heaven, earth and hell. Heaven denotes the high residence of God, earth the home of mortals and hell the subterranean realm of the devil. Christians have always taken it for granted that God resides on high, and in the days of the Ptolemaic worldview this idea was not even a metaphor but a literal worldview. Up to the end of the Middle Ages, art song was consistently a religiously influenced praise of God, and so it was natural to orientate singing upwards, to the heights and to the high registers of the voice. Good is found at the top, evil at the bottom. However, this does not explain why the enthusiasm for the high voice increased in later secular singing. Was a traditional idea carried on as a stowaway, from which one wished to liberate oneself?

Despite all the changes in the ideas of the appropriate voice in medieval and modern Europe, some parameters of the vocal sounds that were given preference apparently remained stable. First of all, there was the search for the beautiful voice, which was never abandoned, and the consequent demonisation of the so-called ugly voice. Until the 20th century, the strict division of the voice into sounds that are in accordance with a work of art and the praise of God, and the chaotic rest, seemed so self-evident that no one had the idea of doubting it and asking whether the non-beautiful voice could have an interesting meaning for humans and art.

The second largely stable parameter is that within the field of the beautiful voice, the dominance of the high voice has remained unshaken to this day - another supposed self-evident fact that has not been problematised until the recent past.

On the foundation of the aesthetic axioms of the beautiful and the dominant high voice, there have been transformations in the evaluation and treatment of the human voice that have taken on a rapid pace since the Renaissance. However, the claim to validity of the prevailing aesthetics was never questioned with regard to the cultural-historical relativity of its own evaluations. Of course, there were always critics of the zeitgeist who propagated other ideas of beauty. The much-celebrated ideal of the castrato's voice, for example, called up a whole series of contemporary sceptics who not only raised the obvious ethical concerns, but also formulated their artistic doubts. But this is something different from claiming that the ideas of the beautiful voice are in principle subject to cultural-historical relativity. This could only happen in the 20th century, when the previously valid frameworks became too narrow in all areas of art and thought.

The Idea of the Whole Voice

Alfred Wolfsohn

The beginnings of the paradigm shift from the beautiful voice to the whole voice are associated with the names Friedrich Nietzsche and Alfred Wolfsohn. Let's start with the younger. Wolfsohn was born in Berlin in 1896 to Jewish parents and had to serve in the trenches of the First World War at the age of 18. His experiences forced him to explore the phenomenon of the human voice in a new way: As a medical orderly on the Western Front, he was repeatedly exposed to the heart-rending screams of soldiers who often enough were lying between the fronts, dying and calling for help. The war left Wolfsohn with a war psychosis. He could not get rid of the voices of the dying, which drove him into unconsciousness again and again. The doctors were at a loss, and Wolfsohn set out on his own in search of a cure. After various attempts at therapy and a trip to Italy, he began to realise that artistic confrontation with the world and himself could be a way to close the "wounds of his soul". The artistic medium that offered itself to him for his journey was the human voice. He had experienced first-hand the destructive power of voices crying out in agony. Now he discovered their creative potential, which can unfold when one begins to listen to all the sounds that find their way from within the human being into the world. This was the birth of the idea of the whole voice. Wolfsohn had not only found his life's mission; he also succeeded in looking at the human voice in a completely new way.

He was forced to realise that people in extreme situations are "capable" of a vocal expression that seems to sound inhuman in comparison to the so-called normal voice, because it leaves the culturally set and usually untouched boundaries far behind. But with Wolfsohn for the first time these voices do not appear to be inhuman. On the contrary, they are the expression of a humanity which, in its directness, touches the listener as well as the person making the sound.

Until then, Wolfsohn's story could only be seen as an interesting individual psychological case of healing from a war psychosis. To draw general conclusions from this about the human voice and its possibilities of expression in life and art would probably be quite bold. However, Wolfsohn's life-changing experiences ran parallel to a general phase of cultural upheaval, which, as always, found expression in the fates of many individuals. Wolfsohn was one of those who literally had to experience the collapse of the old world on the front line and who, out of their own need and motivation, sought a framework and foundations that would offer new support and orientation. It is no coincidence that the events that led Wolfsohn to his new approach to voice development took place during and after the First World War. The First World War represented the first widespread and probably already decisive shake-up of the classical European ideal of humanity, education and beauty: the true, the beautiful, the good. Nietzsche, with his seismographic sense for cultural movements, was probably the first to see the future upheavals coming and played no small part in intensifying them. The First World War paved the way for artistic modernism. Shortly before the war, there were already signs of a revolutionary break with traditions that did not seem to offer any opportunities for development. One is reminded of Schönberg's first atonal compositions, Picasso's and Braque's first cubist works or Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending the Stairs". After the war, the realisation that things could not go on as before became a broad social trend that had an impact on all cultural fields.

Alfred Wolfsohn's achievements are part of this movement. He was the pioneer of a vocal development that wanted to free the beautiful voice from its cultural limitations and create space for the whole voice. In order to appreciate his achievement, we must realise today how few opportunities there were in the 1920s and 1930s to hear music and singing that did not conform to traditional European ideas. With American swing and singers like Josephine Baker, a completely new style had just triggered a storm of enthusiasm in the major cities of Europe, but rock 'n' roll and pop were still "music of the future" for decades to come - not to mention today's world music movement and our ability to listen to practically all the songs that exist in the world on recordings or even in concerts. At the beginning of the last century, the horizon for vocal sounds that were categorised as singing was much smaller than it is today, as you could hardly hear anything other than the singing of your own culture. And - in Wolfsohn's case - the death cries of the soldiers in a war that marked the end of the Old World.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

On his gravestone, which can be found today in a cemetery in north London, Wolfsohn had a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche chiselled: "Learn to sing, O soul!

Alongside Goethe and C.G. Jung, the philosopher Nietzsche probably had the greatest influence on Wolfsohn's intellectual development, which also affected his ideas on the human voice. In fact, there are some parallels between Nietzsche's sporadic remarks on the voice and Wolfsohn's systematic approach. Nietzsche already emphasised the importance of the intrinsic meaning of the pure sound of the voice for the human ability to communicate, and recognised that the linguistic content of information - that which can be written down - is only a fraction of what is communicated in speech. Wolfsohn took up this idea and set about exploring the world of meaning of the pure voice. He was never merely interested in the self-congratulatory search for new, extraordinary vocal sounds. Only by discovering the significance of every vocal sound for the person speaking or singing do the voices gain their vitality and become an integral part of human expression. However, it is not only the similarities in content between Nietzsche and Wolfsohn that suggest that the philosopher should be counted among the intellectual fathers of the para-digma of the whole voice. What Nietzsche meant for Wolfsohn - and large parts of the emerging modern age - is the new way in which he deals with the objects he chooses. Nietzsche's primary interest was not in the human voice, but in morality, a subject that - unlike the voice - has always preoccupied philosophers. But Nietzsche was attempting something completely new: a moral philosophy from an extra-moral point of view! He rightly criticised the traditional moral philosophers for not being concerned with a philosophical clarification of what morality is or how and under what conditions it arises. Until Nietzsche, moral philosophy was a justification of existing morality with the means of reason, in other words itself a highly moral matter. Philosophy took the side of good morality, i.e. it was always assumed that the prevailing morality or the version that was being advocated by the philosopher in question was the only correct one and that it was possible to prove this correctness on rational grounds. Although no one could overlook the fact that morality has undergone changes over the course of time, these were often explained by the fact that they were preliminary stages or simply false morals, and that in the present the ultimate morality had finally been found and philosophically secured. However, the phenomenon of morality itself, its emergence, its history and function in a society were never problematised.

Nietzsche set his philosophical programme against this, in which he relativised all moral rules and traced them back to the instinctual structures of societies and their individuals. He was not interested in the justification of moral rules. He wanted to find out under what conditions these rules exist, how the differences are possible and what role morality plays in a society. He also dared to ask what influence and function so-called evil had and has on the development of human cultures. Nietzsche's answers need not be shared. He soon believed that he had arrived at a fundamental classification of "slave and master morality" and was, of course, an advocate of the latter. But in doing so, he came dangerously close to the moralists, who were concerned with justifying morality and not analysing it. But the question of how to integrate the dark sides of humanity, everything that can hardly be described as true, beautiful and good, became topical at the latest after the collapse of the humanistic view of man through the catastrophes of the 20th century, of which the First World War was only the beginning.

Nietzsche thereby broke the mould of traditional moral teaching and set an example for the examination of culture and art in modern times. He wanted to talk about his topic of morality from a standpoint "beyond good and evil", i.e. from an extra-moral - not immoral! - perspective. In the case of Alfred Wolfsohn and his work with the voice, one could speak in parallel to Nietzsche of a starting point "beyond beautiful and ugly". What does that mean in concrete terms? Wolfsohn was not an academic philosopher. He was not interested in theoretically analysing the phenomenon of the voice. He saw himself first and foremost as a voice teacher and, through painful personal experience, came to the conclusion that the categorisation of the voice into registers, registers and characters, or more precisely, the categorisation of a voice into one pitch, one register and one character, were outdated limitations of the prevailing culture and its ideal of beauty. According to Wolfsohn, every voice is naturally capable of singing almost all humanly possible registers and pitches and of producing countless vocal colours and timbres, which admittedly do not necessarily fall into the aesthetic category of beautiful singing. Until Wolfsohn's time, the theoretical study of the human voice - insofar as it took place at all - was merely, to paraphrase Nietzsche, a learned form of good faith in the prevailing ideal of beauty, i.e. a fact within this category of observation as such. It was Alfred Wolfsohn who first questioned the restrictive idea of the vocal ideal, which is only orientated towards beauty, and expanded our horizon of how the voice can appear. Just as Nietzsche's change of perspective suddenly made people's so-called evil behaviour an equal object of moral-philosophical investigation, thereby gaining great insights into the psychology of modern man, Wolfsohn also turns his attention to the darker parts of the voice, listens where previously only defence prevailed, and thus discovers the whole voice with its diverse relationships to human beings and their personalities.

And in doing so, he was the first to shake the foundations of the self-evident on which since Plato all thinking about the voice and all culturally accepted ways of dealing with it  had been based. Wolfsohn became the pioneer of a new paradigm that made it possible to understand the entire human voice. He freed it from the shadow of language and musical structure and liberated it from the focus on beauty and the preference for the high voice that went hand in hand with it. He thus opened our eyes, or rather ears, to the whole human voice, allowing us to find beauty in the voice in places where we would never have suspected it, and also offering philosophy good reasons to finally engage with the voice. Wolfsohn's approach reveals that the voice is more than just an aesthetically interesting phenomenon, that it refers to the human being in an existential way, both psychologically and anthropologically. But one thing was clear to Wolfsohn from the outset: the idea of the whole voice cannot be realised just theoretically. It is not enough to write about it, because the consequences of this new way of thinking must be made audible. You can't write a book about the whole voice without having had your own experiences with the vocal sound universe, and reading the same book only really makes sense if it encourages you to get to know your own voice in all its facets.

Dear Alfred Wolfsohn,

or rather: dear AWE! Because that's what your students in London called you, for whom a "Mr" or "Mr Wolfsohn" would have sounded too distant and an "Alfred" would not have been appropriate to your authority. Even if only very indirectly, I still feel in a certain way as your pupil and allow myself to use the appropriate form of addressing you.

I first came so close to my voice in a somewhat conscious way that it astonished me at a time when I was buried in highly intellectual philosophical studies. At that time I was writing my dissertation on philosophical theories of action, which demanded and received most of my energies. Which attitude to life dominated me at that moment? From what point in my life was I picked up to set out on the path to my voice? For reasons I only realised much later, I believed at the time that anything not directly related to philosophy, rational thinking and argumentation would distract me from my goal of successfully completing my doctoral thesis. Emotions, the body and vitality have their place in philosophy at best as objective things to think about. In a classic error of reasoning, I assumed that philosophers should also keep themselves away from them. There was no clearly formulated concept of life behind this, but rather a basic attitude that determined my behaviour but which, ironically, I was not even aware of despite all my efforts to pursue pure philosophy. The result of this top-heavy way of life was a chronic inner dissatisfaction and the feeling that something was missing, without being able to say what it was.

Salvation came in the form of an all too banal everyday need.  I had to think about how I could earn a living alongside my unprofitable philosophy. In order to finance my doctoral thesis, I soon started working as a radio announcer. A job that provided me with economic independence and indirectly brought me closer to my life's theme, the human voice. I knew that my own voice sounded good and interesting to a certain extent because I was repeatedly asked about its pleasant, deep timbre. However, I had not developed a special interest in it up to that time. The idea of becoming a broadcaster came to me from a radio editor who happened to hear my voice and thought I could do something with it on the radio.

At the time, however, I was only thinking about securing myself financially so that I could continue my philosophical work. The idea of turning the voice into a research topic only came to me years later. After I started working as an announcer, it quickly became clear that it wouldn't do me or my career in radio any harm to do something for my voice. So, led by a few coincidences

I suddenly found myself in the summer of 1995 at a seminar organised by two Roy Hart teachers in Cologne: Paul Silber and his wife Clara.

Roy Hart, the name of this actor and voice artist who was your pupil and who carried on the idea of the whole voice you had developed after your death, was of course something I had never heard before. It wasn't that important. What could possibly happen in a voice seminar? A few exercises to make the voice more flexible, a lot of light work to open it up, work with text or with a song ... I had no idea that my whole attitude to life, in which I relied almost exclusively on my head and didn't value the emotional world, would be shaken by this course. In fact, the workshop was a kind of revelation for me. The voice told me a few things about my life that I had perhaps suspected, but which I had never realised before.

And in Paul Silber I had a teacher, to tell me a few things at the right time, that I could finally hear and that would change my life! In short, I realised that the way I had confined my life to philosophy was a dangerous path in the long run. That it was time to let a few other life instincts into play again. That, to put it metaphorically, the head took up far too much space and was about to suffocate the heart and stomach. To correct the direction my life was taking, and to gradually reawaken my vitality, there seemed to be no better vehicle than the voice that could always show me and those who listened to it where I was at the moment and in which direction it could be extended. I can still clearly remember a very strong image that came to me when I was standing at the piano with Paul Silber and was supposed to produce loud sounds: In front of me a door leading into another large room, and my task - I felt it clearly - was to go through this door. But I had an incredible amount of luggage with me and didn't know how to get through it at first.

And it took some time before I was able to part with some of the luggage and enter the new sphere. For my further journey to the voice it was of great that your student Marita Günther, whose student I was allowed to be for a few all too short years, introduced me to you, your life and your way of thinking.

I realised that the exciting field of voice research had connections to my "other" life, in which I had been dealing with philosophy and in which I had felt for so long that some of my life forces and capacities were not needed there.

At the beginning of my journeys of discovery into the landscapes of the voice, I often had the suspicion that I would have to free myself from philosophy altogether if I really wanted to find my voice. Sometimes it seemed to me as if I hadn't really lived at all during my philosophy studies, and only now could I reveal sides of myself, at least in seminars and later on stage, that would have seemed embarrassing at best in an academic setting. But as I learnt more about your life and saw how much you have engaged with the voice on an intellectual level by studying the Bible, ancient mythology, by engaging with Goethe, Nietzsche and C. G. Jung, I slowly realised that philosophy does not necessarily have to be an obstacle for me on the path to the voice. On the contrary, philosophising is part of my path and gives me the opportunity to deepen my understanding of the human voice - and thus my own. The image that Marita Günther gave me of you became a model for me for the idea of integrating areas of life that had previously been almost irreconcilably opposed to each other. Even today, it is not always easy for me to accept with an honest "yes" in my mind the paths that life has sent me down - which in retrospect often appeared to be wrong paths. But the seriousness with which you dedicated yourself to your life's theme of the human voice and were able to understand the theoretical and practical explorations as part of your search for yourself gives me hope, even in the darker moments, that I have not completely lost my way. Sometimes I still get tangled up in the undergrowth of the philosophical world of thought, but I find my way out into the open more and more quickly and also try to utilise the results of my wanderings for the path of the voice.

 

Theory and Practice of the Voice

The brief excursion into European intellectual history has shown that there has been no philosophical examination of the phenomenon of the human voice. For anyone who is interested in the voice and has experienced at first hand how important the sound of the voice is for communication or how strong an effect singing can have on the mind, it remains a mystery that for so long philosophy was only concerned with what the voice does for language and completely overlooked how much more it means for human beings. Plato placed the voice in the shadow of language, where it remained for almost two and a half thousand years without anyone attempting to treat it as a subject in its own right. However, Plato's philosophical authority cannot have been the only reason for this lack of interest, as many later thinkers took a very critical look at him in other fields. So why was nobody willing or able to think philosophically about the whole human voice? What prevented philosophers from devoting themselves to it? I have already hinted at some of the answers: the intellectual climate of our culture, with its image of man characterised by ancient philosophy, Christianity and classical humanism, obviously did not allow the human voice to be considered outside the context of the philosophy of language. And when the development of secular art song in Italy in the 16th century took a first step towards emancipating the voice from language, only the beautiful and high voice seemed worthy of attention. The whole voice and its relationship to the whole person remained in the dark. Aesthetic considerations aside, the beautiful voice was not interesting enough to attract the attention of philosophers.

Before it became possible to formulate the idea of the whole voice, the so-called uncultivated vocal sounds had to resound so loudly that they could no longer simply be ignored or shut out as the evil part of man. The situation arose with and after the First World War, when it could generally no longer be denied that Europe would also have to deal with the dark sides of humanity in a new way - if it did not want to run the risk of being dominated by them. 25 years later, Hitler showed what the dominance of evil means. After the Second World War, there was a change in the cultural climate that was much less violent and decisively changed our understanding of the human voice. The convergence of different cultures in modern Europe meant that Europe was able to take note of songs that did not conform in the slightest to our ideals of beauty, but were clearly not uncultivated. Our ideas of beautiful singing were suddenly joined by Peking Opera arias, Mongolian throat singing, African traditions and a whole range of other types of singing that must have sounded strange to Western ears, to say the least. And no one could claim that „our" ideal of the beautiful voice was binding for all people.

The field for the whole voice had been prepared, and even before world music reached Europe, Alfred Wolfsohn and his students had entered some of the furthest corners of this human vocal field. But philosophy continued to hold back noticeably. In addition to the cultural-historical circumstances mentioned above, there are apparently other reasons for the philosophical ignorance of the voice that concern the character or "essence" of philosophising. For philosophising in the classical sense requires an object -„Gegenstand“ in German - a thing that confronts the philosopher and of which he can form a concept. But the voice refuses to do this, because it cannot simply be perceived and analysed from the outside.

As Derrida has shown, we perceive our own voice at the moment we let it sound, without it coming to us from outside. We hear ourselves directly in our voice and hear it, as it were, in a sphere between inside and outside. If we turn the voice into an object that we grasp philosophically from a neutral observer's position, we cannot understand it. There is no neutral position here. In order to understand the voice, we must remain close to it and want to recognise it in connection with our body, our emotional world and our reason. The voice undermines the division between theory and practice that was common in philosophy until the modern era, as well as the division between the general and the personal. It forces the philosopher back into the world from which he had withdrawn in order to be able to grasp it from the outside "without prejudice". In short, there is hardly a less suitable subject for traditional philosophy than the human voice. It is not so easy to make a copy of it - but a map, and this brings us back to Deleuze / Guattari, whose map metaphor stands for a philosophical approach in which the subject-object separation is cancelled. Thinking is now understood as a performative act, i.e. an action that does not leave the world unchanged. This alone brings the activity of the thinker closer to the life-world sphere. But if there is no separation of subject and object - in our case of voice and philosopher - every change in the object of cognition, the voice, leads to a change in the cogniser, the thinker! Nowhere can this strange interlocking of cognition and the cognised be better observed than in the human voice. For every person who thinks about the voice has a voice himself, and when she/he uses it, it simultaneously comes from within her/him and is "heard" by her/him as if it came from outside. The ego hears itself and changes its self-image with every new aspect it hears.

 

The Singing Philosopher?

Nietzsche once called for the dancing philosopher, although he would have already been satisfied if the thoughts had increased their inner dynamism. But he did not go so far as to set the "great reason of the body" in motion by starting to dance himself, body and soul. He first had to go mad to be allowed to jump around his room naked and singing. It almost seems as if "great reason" had taken its dance and its share of life by force after Nietzsche had sketched out a philosophy on paper that was bursting with energy and life, albeit without giving it a lively expression in person. In Nietzsche's fate, one sees a confrontation of opposing forces that in earlier times would rightly have been described as a battle with the gods, whom man can challenge but not defeat. In any case, the singing philosopher would do well not only to let his thoughts "sing", but to open himself as a whole person to his own voice and its possibilities. However ridiculous this demand may sound in the ears of many academic philosophers, the human voice will not reveal itself to a merely theoretical observation far removed from the world.

 

Writing aloud: "It is not carried by dramatic modulations, mischievous intonations, pleasing accents, but by the roughness of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language and can, for its part, like diction, be the material of an art: the art of leading one's body (hence its importance in far eastern theatre). With regard to the sounds of language, writing aloud is not phonological, but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the spectacle of emotions; it seeks rather (in the pursuit of voluptuousness) the impulses, the language covered with skin, a text in which one can hear the roughness of the throat, the patina of the consonants, the delight of the vowels, a whole stereophony of sensuality: the combination of body and language, not of sense and language.

Roland Barthes

 

What is the aim of a philosophy of the voice that ventures back into the world? What is the relationship between theory and practice, a relationship that Aristotle already assumed would have to be redefined depending on the subject under consideration? On the one hand, the ancient philosopher is regarded as the key witness in favour of pure theoretical thinking, because he was the first to claim that only thinking that no longer needs an external goal leads to eudaimonia, happiness. Thinking makes you happy! The gain in knowledge is self-sufficient. Until not so long ago, an echo of this idea of bliss was to be found in the famous freedom of science, which could choose its topics unencumbered by questions of practical utility - an idea which, in our now economised world, causes scientists to feel melancholy and the rest of society to mostly lack understanding. But even for Aristotle, theoretical eudaimonia was only one path of philosophy, and not the only one. He had recognised that different possible objects of knowledge require different methods of investigation. And the citizen of a Greek polis realised that theory was not sufficient for all aspects concerning man as a political and social being. At one point Aristotle says of virtue, which in this context could be described as the ability to act well, that he does not philosophise about it in order to know what it is, but in order to become virtuous! Otherwise his work would be of no use. This is because thinking about good actions can help people to put the right decisions into practice, but it is not a substitute for action. Aristotle calls for a necessary connection between theory and practice in the field of ethics. If it has no practical effects, the theory of ethics has no meaning, because ethical knowledge is not sufficient in itself. The parallel between Aristotle's ethics and a philosophy of voice lies in the fact that both areas require theoretical considerations to be close to life or relevant to life. But how do the theoretical considerations of voice have a concrete effect on the way we deal with our voices? What is the relevance of ideas about the voice for the voice itself? For Aristotle, the spheres of thought and action remain largely separate. Despite his plea for the relevance of ethics to life, Aristotle sees himself as a theorist and does not interfere directly in day-to-day political business. Through thinking, he wants to arrive at a knowledge of virtue that leads to a virtuous life. Theory comes first, then practice. In Socrates we find yet another understanding of the relationship between thought and action. He would not have shared Aristotle's assessment of virtue in its relationship to theory, because for him there is no theoretical knowledge of virtue in this sense. For Socrates, knowledge is virtue, i.e. every true realisation inevitably leads to the corresponding action. Knowledge that remains stuck in the sphere of theory is not only worthless, as Aristotle would say, it does not represent knowledge at all! Only through its application in the sphere of action does its character as true knowledge become apparent. Only through our actions can we prove whether the assertions about the nature of good behaviour are true for us or not.

The relationship between theory and practice, as we strive for in the field of voice, is less like Aristotelian ethics than Socrates' thoughts on the connection between knowledge and virtue. Our ideas about the human voice in general and our own voice in particular inevitably have an effect on the possibilities of our voice. It does not matter at first whether we are aware of the effective beliefs about the voice or not. But as soon as we begin to think about the function and meaning of the voice and question our previous ideas, there is an interplay between the effects of our thoughts on the voice and, conversely, the effects of our more conscious use of the voice on our ideas and thoughts. We can go beyond Socrates: Not only does knowledge only prove itself when it becomes action - or thought only becomes voice when it becomes sound - but the expansion of vocal possibilities can change our access to ourselves and to the world and thus exert its influence on theoretical activities. Practical work with one's own voice will change our idea of the voice in a very concrete way. Theory and practice are closely interwoven when it comes to the voice, without forming causal one-way streets. Only in and with this interweaving can we hope to do justice to the subject of the voice.

Now, one could argue that this interrelation of cognition and subject matter is also present in any other subject - or should be, because otherwise we are missing the point. But Being, Becoming or Time, to name a few typical philosophical "objects", do not react directly to the process of cognition in the same way as the human voice.

The points of reference for metaphysical thinking remain rather unimpressed by the results of philosophising. Unlike anthropological themes such as the human being, action or the voice, they are designed to be copied by thinking. Until Nietzsche, it was assumed that an unprejudiced grasp of the world was only possible if the philosopher separated himself from the world, otherwise he ran the risk of only finding in the object what he himself had placed in it, a process that was given the name "projection" in psychoanalysis. For the exploration of the voice, however, philosophical and psychological projections pose no danger at all as long as one is aware of the power of projection and declares it to be part of the journey of discovery. The expressive process of the voice is so closely linked to the human being that it would make no sense to ignore the personal aspects. In connection with the realisation that there can be no clear separation between subject and object in the study of the voice, the voice philosopher becomes the object of knowledge himself! And thus, incidentally, returns to "Know thyself!", which already marked the actual goal of all philosophising with the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.

One of the tasks of the voice philosopher is therefore to familiarise himself with the phenomena of the voice in a practical way and to acquire the diversity of the human voice through extensive listening experience. Despite the globalised world of hearing in which we live today, there are vocal sounds to be discovered that are important for a philosophical consideration of the whole voice. Without these experiences, the philosopher does not know what he is talking about. It would be like someone wanting to talk about trees but only knowing the leaves so far. He can draw some correct conclusions from this, but he still lacks a fundamental knowledge of the context in which the leaves must be seen. On the other hand, the practical confrontation with one's own voice, which provides experiences that cannot be replaced by anything else, is one of the prerequisites for its philosophical understanding.

Only the experience of my voice can make clear the close relationship it has to my body, to my emotionality and state of mind, to my own history and to my own thinking. The peculiar vocal self-reference and its meaning for the person can emerge appropriately in the concrete experience.

If we want to formulate the interim results of the previous considerations in the map metaphor, then the collection of external and internal vocal experiences can be equated with the cartographer's expeditions to the parts of the world he wants to map. When he returns from his travels, in the best case he has not only familiarised himself with the foreign countries, but has also settled into them and integrated them into his sphere of home. However, if he now begins to draw his map, he will encounter some difficulties. The newly discovered intrinsic meaning of the vocal sounds, which exists alongside and independently of language, presents him with the problem of how he should appropriately draw the non-linguistic field of expression and meaning with his instruments - the " meaning-laden" language. Can the meaningfulness of the voice be translated one-to-one into language? Or what is lost in the translation? The way in which voice and language coexist could be compared to a marriage in which great value is placed on the separation of property and both spouses are granted a private realm, e.g. in the form of their own room in the shared home. You live together, you naturally appear as a couple to friends and in public, you have children together and share the small and big worries of life.

And yet both sides protect their own space, in which they alone are responsible and where the other has no business being, unless they are expressly invited to visit. Perhaps the couple view each other's space with loving incomprehension, because it conceals a part of their loved one that will always remain alien to them to a certain extent. But the spheres of autonomy guarantee a certain independence from the spouse on the one hand, and on the other hand they contribute to the success of married life! This is because much of what is created in one's own sphere is brought into the shared space. The centre of the marriage-like existence of language and voice is the conversation, the speech, every language-bound vocal utterance, i.e. the area that we have called orality in the discussion with Derrida. In orality, voice and language are dependent on each other. Here they cannot exist on their own. Language needs the help of the voice in order to enter the world at all, and the voice needs language in order to be able to communicate. However, both sides also maintain their own sphere in which the other side is only tolerated as a guest. Language withdraws from the voice into the written word, albeit without being able to completely forget its partner, because every written word recalls its sound through its typeface. Nevertheless, the written fixation of linguistic content is possible without the help of the voice. Writing has its room in the shared flat with the voice, but it does not have its own house. Pure vocality resides in the room of the voice, which encompasses the area of vocal expression that does not require the use of words. The sound of the voice, which shapes every conversation by means of its facets and colours, forms an independent field of meaning where the language of words does not reach, which is extremely complex and eludes a residual interpretation through language. As Nietzsche said: "That's why writing is nothing!" We don't need to go that far, but language-bound thinking must learn how to deal with voice and recognise that there are fields of meaning that it cannot reach. Another reason to switch from the idea of the copy to the map, where thinking does not have to do everything on its own, but is supported by life in the joint search for the whole voice!

When attempting to approach the human voice philosophically, one encounters yet another difficulty. The idea of the whole voice goes hand in hand with the demand to free the voice from cultural, mental and habitual limitations or concepts. Only then can it find itself and "speak" for itself. However, philosophy has a conceptual character, because by committing itself to certain ideas, it naturally excludes others that cannot be harmonised with them. It is true that there are no eternal truths in a map of the voice such as the one we have in mind. New things can always be discovered that show the familiar aspects in a different light. The landscapes themselves can change. New paths and clearings are created, the vegetation changes due to (spiritual) climate changes, and in the long term rivers are shifted and mountains removed. Nevertheless, the maps assert a validity that not only concerns the voice of the cartographer, but is also relevant for others. But how do we know whether the personal voices of other people correspond to our general ideas?

Being able to say how the human voice should sound better than the individual in his or her particular life situation is one of the ideas we finally want to say goodbye to. In order to avoid replacing only one restrictive concept with another, thinking about the voice must open up to the possibility that its liberation can also take place in ways other than the one it favours. People's personal experiences of the voice can be at odds with both the general understanding of the voice that we take as a basis here and the idea that we have of our individual voice. However, this does not make the opinions that differ from ours any less correct and they should be given the chance to be put into vocal practice. Any philosophical (and even more so any psychological, aesthetic or ethical) conception, no matter how much it is geared towards the liberation of the whole voice, would otherwise have a restrictive effect on specific voices. Finding the courage to find one's own voice - whatever it may sound like - is much more important than following the guidelines set out by voice experts and philosophers. In thinking about the whole voice, personal experience must therefore be left free. Of course, this does not exclude the possibility that the maps of the voice that we make will provide orientation for other journeys of discovery - on the contrary, that is the reason why we want to draw them! But in order to remain true to our ultimate goal of liberating the voices, we must keep open the opportunity for everyone to find their own way. And who knows? Perhaps we will suddenly meet again elsewhere in the field of voices!

 

The Vocal Field

Human vocal sounds are "signs of the ideas evoked in the soul". This sentence, which can be found in Aristotle, offers a promising introduction to thinking about the voice. However, it must be taken out of the context in which it was originally written, as Aristotle, according to philosophical tradition, only speaks of the vocal sounds that belong to speech; for him, the "ideas of the soul" are all such that they can be transformed into speech. However, the significance of vocal sounds is not limited to speech-related sounds! All human vocal utterances are "animated", or to put it in more modern terms: the voice has an inherent intentionality, i.e. apart from the linguistic content that it the voice always points to something that goes beyond its tonal character - to the person who is expressing the voice, to their state of mind, to their history and to the culture and society in which they live. Intentionality is built up from layers in which there are collective and personal areas. A large part of the vocal meaning is not bound to the surface phenomenon of intentionality, but points to these deeper layers of intentionality. The intentional structure of the voice means that I cannot completely "determine" the meaning of the vocal sounds I make myself. There is more to it than what I intentionally put into my voice. Conversely, this more makes it easier for us to understand the vocal sounds of people I don't even know, because a considerable part of the intentional layers from which the foreign voice expresses itself is known to us from our own. The greater the cultural affinity between the person making the sound and the listener, the greater the likelihood of grasping the meaning of the vocal sound. Whether the listener's understanding corresponds to the intentions of the voice producer is not guaranteed, but the common field of meaning, which is based on cultural affinities, predetermines certain variations of understanding and misunderstanding and excludes others. Sometimes listeners understand the vocal sounds of another person better than the person who expresses himself vocally. This applies to the individual aspects of the voice's meaning, which lie in the dark for the voice producer, as well as to the collective parts.

The term "vocal field" originally comes from medical phoniatrics, where it refers to the range of a voice in terms of pitch and volume. In order to determine a person's vocal field, they are asked to produce the lowest and highest tone they can spontaneously sing in a soft and loud voice, record the results with a microphone and then visualise them graphically. For certain medical purposes, it may make sense to make do with this narrow vocal field, but in the search for the whole voice, we need many more parameters to draw an appropriate field. The highest and lowest tones that I can produce in a laboratory situation only show a very small section of what my voice does in normal everyday life when it sings, speaks, screams, tones or calls, when it sighs, croaks, laughs and groans. In addition, there are all the sounds that I have not yet let into the sonic world, but which lie dormant in my voice as a possibility. In addition, the vocal field that we want to draw has a depth dimension that determines which sounds "grow" on it and which wither away. In other words, the vocal field has a history that is made up of the sum of all the influences to which the voice is exposed. This truly opens up an "extended field" that covers cultural and individual history and encompasses our ideas of the right, appropriate or beautiful, ugly and unbearable voice as well as its relationship to the body and "soul". On the way to the whole voice, we are not content with mapping the vocal field, but it is much more important to work on the field, to cultivate it, possibly to enlarge it and to ensure that it grows and flourishes well. The soil can be loosened or fertilised; we promote the growth of the voice through irrigation systems, and it is up to us whether we allow a monoculture to develop in our field or also give the so-called weeds room to sprout and develop. However, the field does not only consist of clearly delineated plots on which the plants we cultivate there grow. These relatively small crops are surrounded by areas of wild growth, where the familiar stands next to the foreign, paths have to be created and a surprise can lurk behind "every tree". But as strange, dangerous and unfathomable as the landscapes of the voice may seem, the elements of each voice field are always grouped around two poles that are aligned with each other and move freely across the field. On each voice field there is an I that produces the voice and a you that perceives it and possibly reacts to it.

Individuality and Communication

I and you represent the simple framework on which the complex structure of human voices and their significance for people and the world is built. From the very beginning, the voice refers to its individuality (the I) and its social and communicative character (the You). The polarity is in constant motion on the vocal field, i.e. the relationship between I and You is constantly changing and the quality of the poles themselves changes. Their distance is very variable both spatially and temporally. Thus, an acoustic contact can take place without being accompanied by another sensory perception through sight, touch or smell; however, isolated hearing has an influence on what and how the voice is perceived. In the vocal field, the simultaneity of voice production and its perception is the normal case, because we hear every voice that is raised in our presence immediately. However, in the age of the technical reproducibility of sound phenomena, we can still perceive voices when they and their producers have long since "faded away". The ego entity is present as soon as the voice becomes audible.

Let's sit down for a moment at a kitchen table where two friends have come together to chat. Over a substantial breakfast, the two have had a lively conversation, refreshing shared memories, talking about their current lives, discussing their worries and plans for the future. Their voices were in constant use and created a colourful field full of interesting sounds, on which the friends were constantly switching between the I and you, i.e. between voice production and voice perception. Most of the time, the voices remained within the framework of what the two expected from each other, and therefore there was no reason to make them the subject of the conversation, unless the breakfast was a meeting of singers, voice teachers or speech therapists! The situation did not require any special attention to the voice, and both naturally assumed that they understood each other's vocal utterances immediately. If you had asked the friends afterwards whether they had noticed anything about their own or the other person's voice, one of them might have remembered that the other person always cleared his throat when talking about his wife and that he himself had wanted to shout out loud at some points, but hadn't dared to do so. The other still remembers that his throat went dry at times and he could hardly continue talking and that his friend laughed far too loudly and somehow fake at one point - which was quite embarrassing for him, the listener. These small breaks, the irritations that you hardly notice, make it clear how much the voice intervenes in communicative events and shapes the image we form of others and ourselves.

The linguist Roman Jakobson once called the voice a vocal identity card that represents the person's identity. However, this image conceals a very static concept of the voice. It is true that, like an identity card, the voice contains a whole series of recognisable features that make us unmistakable and ensure that we can be recognised. But firstly, not all characteristics of the voice are suitable for identifying the person behind it as the one we know. On the contrary, the voice in particular is capable of revealing to us the alien and disconcerting sides of a person - sides that even the person showing them would not have readily suspected in their vocal identity card. And secondly, the data on an identity card is more or less limited to a person's characteristics which never change or only change very slowly. In contrast, we hear the small changes of everyday life in the voice as well as the major movements in its history. Life shapes the voice. But one of the central theses that I would like to put forward here, with Alfred Wolfsohn as a key witness, is that this history of effects can be reversed. By this I do not mean that we can turn back time, but that the voice can also have a direct influence on life. If we embark on an active search for the whole voice, learn to listen to it, unfold its possibilities and explore the meaning of its sounds, then the effects will not be limited to the voice, simply because our voice accompanies and actively supports us in almost all areas of life. The expansion of vocal possibilities goes hand in hand with the expansion of a person's scope for life and action, provided that voice development is not limited to technical issues, but always keeps the meaning of vocal sounds within the horizon of attention.This is a thesis that goes beyond the understanding of the voice development as it is practiced in an artistic or medical context. We do not see the human voice as an instrument that can be repaired or even "tuned" so that it functions as well as possible. Only if we focus our "ear" on the fact that the voice is in constant interaction with the person to whom it belongs, and incorporate this insight into the concrete development of the voice, can we find living, animated voices that are capable of expressing and living out their potential on stage or in life. The exploration of the human voice field thus requires a great expedition into the areas where voice and personality meet.

 

"When we, of the Roy Hart Theatre, talk about 'singing' what do we mean? This is, unfortunately, a difficult question to answer which is why we are not concerned with the normal job of what singing teachers are doing all over the world. For us the word "singing" means vocal action and the object of this vocal action is to recontact us to our intuitive mind, to our body, to remove ourselves a little from our over dependance on our brains, which so often project us into the virtual world of illusion which always ultimately collapses into disallusion and disappointment. The voice resonates within our body and, given enough time and effort, resuscitates our original relationship to our sensory feelings. This can only be achieved through the use of our voice, since the voice is the one real bridge which links our heads to our bodies. By LISTENING to our own sounds coming from our own bodies we can, slowly, retrace our connections back into our feelings and the possibility of expressing them again."

Paul Silber