Ways to the Voice Part 2: Voice and Personality

PART 2: VOICE AND PERSONALITY

 

 

 

Voice: Mirror of the Soul?

 

I recently came across a book entitled "On the Face", which already states on the dust jacket that the face is the mirror of the soul, the epitome of individuality and surprisingly little researched. I immediately thought that the same could have been said about the voice. And a dancer or a body therapist would probably and rightly so  recognise a mirror of the soul in a person's body posture and movement patterns. In a newspaper article about manicures that I happened to come across, it was even claimed that fingernails are a mirror of the soul! The list could go on, as the mirror metaphor is apparently applied to all possible physical aspects of the human being.The image of the soul mirror stands for the idea that the perceptible expressive movements of a person can be interpreted by the perceiver as a kind of "inner" movement. The physical expression indicates a movement of the mind or a state of the soul. How does it do this? What is being mirrored here and how? And how is the mirroring process organised in the case of the voice, an acoustic phenomenon for which a metaphor from the realm of the visible world can only apply indirectly? The idea that the voice is an echo of the soul would actually be more obvious. But the image of the soul mirror has also become established for the human voice and there are probably convincing reasons for this. Let's take a closer look at what can be meant by the image of the mirror of the soul.

 

Excursus: Echo and Narcissus | In Greek mythology, the nymphs - all of them daughters of Zeus - are nature deities who usually live near water. For some reason, the nymph Echo had the misfortune of angering the great Hera, who then took away her ability to speak her own chosen words. Since then, Echo has had to make do with parroting the words of others. One day, the nymph fell in love with Narcissus, a young man who must have been so handsome that men and women fell for his charms by the dozen. When the two met in a forest where Narcissus was hunting deer, Echo managed to confess her love to him by repeating her lover's words in such a way that they carried her message of love to him. For unlike the mirror image, the echo has a creative power in its depictive character. But the use of all acoustic tricks ultimately did not help the nymph Echo. Narcissus spurned her and, in prototypical Narcissistic fashion, fell in love with his own reflection instead, which he saw in a lake, perished out of grief that his self-love would remain eternally unfulfilled, accompanied by Echo's cries of "Woe, woe!" and became a narcissus.

 

If he had listened to his voice, which knew how to tell him something surprising in the reverberation of the echo, the young man might have fared better. The mirror image refers only to itself and leaves out the world in its constant change, while the echo is variable enough to produce something new and unexpected that points beyond the small self and allows it to grow. The echo echoes the result of re-creative listening, which challenges the self-image to be ready for development instead of remaining trapped in its own reflection.

 

The voice the mirror of the soul? No, this metaphor does not include it! Rather, it is the echo of the soul that can have an effect on the "soul" with its creative potential. The sound of the voice does not simply reveal a person's state of mind and character, but if you can listen to it, the voice has an influence on the development of the personality of the person who makes it sound. A look in the mirror sticks to the surface, the voice goes deeper and reveals things that remain hidden from the visible world.

 

A mirror generally refers to a smooth surface that almost completely reflects the light that falls on it, thus reproducing an image, albeit inverted, of the objects that appear on it. The word mirror (German: Spiegel) goes back to the Latin speculum, which can also mean mirror image and copy. The German word Spiegel can also be used in the sense of Spiegelbild/ mirroe image. Applied to the voice, one could say that the sound of the voice corresponds to the mirror image that is reflected in the mirror of the voice, which is "set up" in every person. Does the mirror show a kind of inverted copy of an original mental process? What does the unmirrored soul look like? Things that appear in a mirror can normally also be seen without a mirror - with the important exception of our own face, which we could hardly visualise without the mirror from which we look at ourselves every morning in the bathroom. But what should correspond to the unmirrored soul? The soul does not represent a concrete object, but is itself a metaphor that can symbolise many things.

Sometimes it stands for the totality of a person's psychic aspects and processes (which is to say nothing, because psychic is just another word for soul), sometimes it also encompasses mental processes. Sometimes it represents an undivided, even immortal substance and sometimes a universal principle. With Plato, it becomes a part of man capable of knowledge, which can dwell in the sphere of ideas after death. Modern philosophy and psychology have abandoned the metaphysical concept of the soul as a substance in favour of a purely functional concept. According to this concept, there are human emotions and states whose quality can be characterised by the term soul/psychic.

 

What is supposed to be reflected in the expression is therefore not immediately clear - regardless of whether the mirror is the voice, facial expressions or posture. But despite all the difficulties we have with the mirror metaphor, there does seem to be a plausible core to it. Our belief that the voice, face and body say something about the person to whom they belong is strong enough that we cannot discard the idea that a person's expression reveals their "inner self" without having to revise our self-image - a possibility that should never be ruled out. The voice is an expression of a person's personality! But this is not the same as saying that it is a mirror of the soul. Although both sentences belong to the same language game, as Wittgenstein would say, they are not aimed at exactly the same thing. There are two areas about which we can obtain information by means of human expressive movements through voice, face and body: the area of a person's more or less fixed character features and that of his emotional movements, which are in a constant state of flux. About the interpretation of his expression we should be able to recognise what kind of person is standing in front of us, how their personality is structured, and we should be able to see and hear how this person is feeling at the current time, what feelings and moods are moving them.

In contrast to the more mobile soul stands the almost engraved personality of a person. However, the two areas do not exist independently of each other. Roughly speaking, mental states of mind are emotional reactions to an external situation, which can be expressed through gestures, facial expressions and vocalisations. There is more than one appropriate response to every situation. For example, if someone unexpectedly gives me a nice present, I can express my surprise and gratitude with a beaming face and loud exclamations. However, I may also be moved to tears and my vocal response is rather restrained. The range of my responses is immense, but not arbitrary. Within a cultural framework, inappropriate reactions are registered immediately. On the other hand, it is very difficult to identify completely senseless behaviour. When communicating with people, we always assume that at least our counterpart sees some sense in their behaviour, even if we do not understand their actions. However, the closer we are culturally and socially to the person reacting, the lesser this assumption of understanding becomes. Let's assume that someone reacts to a gift from me by spitting at my feet and shouting three times „hey" . If it is a person from a culture and language community that is completely alien to me, I may be tempted to assume that this is an appropriate response to my gift. But if a good friend or family member had the same reaction without a hint of irony, I would have to be seriously concerned and advise them to see a psychiatrist soon.

If certain situations with the corresponding emotional reactions are repeated frequently or if there are events that trigger particularly strong or even traumatic experiences together with the associated emotional states, the original cause-and-effect relationship, in which the event determines which reactions would be appropriate, is reversed. Now the reaction patterns that have been recalled (too) often in the past determine the emotional response to the event - more than the events themselves! The boundary between emotional states and character traits, between soul and personality begins to blur. Frequently experienced emotional states form character traits, which in turn delimit the scope of my emotional life. In the long term, this interplay will characterise facial features and body posture as well as the sound of my own voice. The way I use my voice in life has a medium-term effect on the range of my potential vocal action radius. Every life demands a unique concentration on a selection from the pool of "voices" that are in principle available to me. This is how vocal traits develop.

 

In short: my voice has a story. The dominance of certain event patterns in a person's young life influences the development of personality traits that go hand in hand with typical attitudes and reactions. This can lead to situations in which new responses would be appropriate, but the person actually reacts in the old, familiar ways. In pathological extreme cases, this results in neuroses, compulsive behaviours that are triggered by external events but no longer have a generally understandable connection to them. The psychological imprints of good and less good experiences affect the young person's voice in two ways. Parts of the personality that have room for free development are given the opportunity to develop the corresponding part of their sound field. The psychic facets that are separated and blocked silence the corresponding parts of the voice. But the voice also functions as an object on which the process of unfolding and suppressing vitality takes place directly. The history of the voice begins with birth. However, the pre-history reaches even further back into the mother's womb, where the foetus' hearing is already fully formed! The surprise of being born into a world of confusing soundscapes is therefore not too great, and the baby is not afraid to immediately enrich the acoustic environment with the sounds of its own voice. Because you don't have to learn how to use your voice! As soon as a newborn baby begins to breathe, it usually starts screaming. Long before it can see or even walk. The playful use of the voice, which is not yet regulated by any social or aesthetic guidelines, produces sounds that a socially integrated, grown-up and "sensible" person no longer allows themselves. The first chapters of the history of the individual voice recount the early discovery of one's own voice, which initially goes hand in hand with its tonal development. The small child tries out all the sounds it can produce with its voice without restraint, often enough without regard for the parents' hearing. However, this is soon followed by the progressive reduction of the vocal sound range to what is socially and culturally appropriate. The more children become social beings, the more their vocal utterances are modelled on the sounds they experience. Learning the mother tongue plays an important role in this process. The child predominantly hears the spectrum of the voice that is offered to it by the people speaking around it. And it is encouraged to train precisely this spectrum and forget the rest of the vocal possibilities.

Some other voices save themselves in the reserve of laughing, crying and screaming, but as the children get older, these areas of retreat are increasingly restricted. Growing up means not being loud, but being sensible. A boy doesn't cry! A good girl doesn't shout! We probably all had to listen to these or similar sayings in our childhood. Singing is one of the few open spaces left for a child's voice. Singing is also a cultivated form of voice use and requires familiarisation with the respective musical system in which the singing takes place. You learn to hit notes, to hold them, to repeat melodies and to memorise them, to sing in a group with other voices and against other voices. But singing is often the only socially accepted niche in which children - and adults! - are allowed to be loud with impunity and, despite all the restrictions, activate parts of their voice that are not wanted in normal life. But especially for children who have difficulties learning to sing in the way they are taught, singing no longer opens the door to free and playful vocal expression. I regularly have people come to my lessons who were told as children that they couldn't sing and should keep their mouths shut. A sentence like this can have fatal consequences for the child's development. If children are denied this niche due to their supposed lack of musicality, a very important means of expression is ignored, which can have a lasting effect on a child's development - with consequences that extend into their adult life. But what happens to the "voices" that are no longer made to be heard? Have they been forgotten? Are they lost? Can they be found again? Is their re-appropriation a matter for psychoanalysis? To what extent do rehearsal and training play a role?

 

Excursus: Pitch and Timbre Listeners

 

In my seminars and vocal groups, I am lucky enough to come across people relatively often who can't hit a note, who are usually labelled as unmusical and have often been told since childhood to keep their mouths shut when others are singing. In trying to find out why these people can't hit the note you give them, I have so far come to two conclusions. The first is that two groups of listeners can be distinguished: pitch listeners and timbre listeners, i.e. there are people who, for every tone they perceive, first and spontaneously identify the pitch of the sound and, if it is within their vocal capabilities, can also reproduce it. I am not talking here about the extremely rare phenomenon of absolute pitch, where you can hear the pitch of a sound and tell whether it is a G or an E flat - without necessarily being able to sing the note. My point is rather that in our culture the vast majority of people have the ability to abstract from all characteristics of two sounds - the one that is played to them and their own vocal sound - and to compare them only in terms of their pitch. The small group of timbre listeners, on the other hand, spontaneously focus their attention on the colour of a sound and find it difficult to perceive the rudimentary similarities between a piano tone and "the same" sung tone. This is because the piano has a completely different timbre spectrum to the human voice. Many timbre listeners find it easier to pick up a note "correctly" from another voice than from the piano. In other words: timbre listeners do not hear worse than pitch listeners, they just hear differently and have the misfortune of living in a musical culture that has elevated pitch to the most important aspect of sound. This is not the case everywhere. In Africa, there are cultures that don't even recognise the idea of pitch and don't understand what is meant by it. When trying to put the very complex sound of the Bushmen's language in southern Africa into writing, European ethnologists also introduced signs to indicate the descending and ascending melody of sentences and words, but the Bushmen who were taught the written language were unable to recognise these signs. Our idea of pitch remained completely alien to them, although even the meaning of the words in their language depends on the pitch and melody in which they are spoken. We, on the other hand, are so fixated on pitch that we are unable to understand the criteria by which the Bushmen differentiate their sounds. Perhaps we could learn a thing or two from our supposedly unmusical tone colour listeners!

 

Sound colour listeners usually have to get used to being denied any musicality very early in their lives. They are not allowed to sing in children's choirs, and it is not uncommon for them to be more or less kindly asked at home to hold back vocally. No wonder that as adults they themselves believe that they can neither sing nor hear properly. Therefore, when working with them, a second highly interesting phenomenon arises, which could be called the conflict between hearing and thinking. As a result of their painful experience, they do not trust their own hearing, and every act of hearing is accompanied by a thought about what the person should actually be hearing now.

The thought is followed by the fear of once again having missed the most important thing, and under the layer of expectations and fears, the hearing actually has no chance of working well. This can look like this, for example: A person hears the first note and sings it reasonably accurately; when I play the second note for them on the piano, you can literally see them thinking: aha, that note was higher than the first, so I'll try a higher one! The result is that the second note she sings is far too high, because this thinking hearing is far too vague to recognise and implement the subtle differences that free hearing can perceive without difficulty. In addition, the next note, which has to deal with the disappointment of the previous false note, is only hesitantly let into the world and therefore often enough the pitch that was actually intended is not reached for energetic reasons, so to speak, and he or she then sings too low instead of too high. However, if you manage to stop the person from thinking, the result is sometimes astonishing. Suddenly they no longer have any problems hitting the right note! However, the task of developing confidence in your own hearing is not just for people who can't hit a note. A well-trained musical ear often makes it just as difficult to listen without judgement, because the internal correction mechanisms are so well-rehearsed that you first have to learn to put them aside. This is a great challenge for many singers, especially when it comes to hearing their own voice. In our search for the whole voice, learning to hear does not so much mean being able to distinguish a fifth from a third, but rather trusting that our hearing works best when it is left alone and not burdened with expectations, ideas and fears.

 

 

 

The story of the development of one's own voice tells of the shifting boundaries and relationships between the spheres of one's own and the foreign, in which the processes of appropriation and alienation of vocal parts are constantly at work even without explicit instruction.

 

The voice, from the most outrageous noise to the most noble song, always means something, always refers to something else outside itself and creates a wide range of associations of a cultural, musical, everyday, emotional, psychological nature.

 

Luciano Berio

 

With increasing age and a well-defined self-image, there is a growing danger of vocal boundaries hardening and losing their permeability. This can lead to vocal difficulties that make it necessary to consciously engage with the voice. The exclusion of sound spaces from the active sphere of the voice indicates that certain areas of one's own life are not being entered. However, if a person's life situation changes and new options for action are required, then some of the vocal restrictions become a hindrance. A computer specialist, for example, only has to use a fraction of his vocal potential behind his computer. Not much more than talking on the phone and occasionally saying goodbye to the computer is necessary. Let's assume he joins a consultancy firm and one of his new tasks from now on is to provide training for customers. Now he stands in front of 10, 20 or even 100 people once a week and has to teach these non-experts how to use the new software. The unfamiliar situation places completely new demands on the dynamics and flexibility of the voice, which can only be met in the long term without more or less serious vocal damage if these new vocal aspects are also "connected", i.e. if they are based on an appropriate inner attitude. With mere vocal technique and a few little tricks, it is at best possible to change something in the short term. This involves the whole person, who has to face up to the new task and, for better or worse, expand their self-image by a few hidden facets.

 

However, the moulding of one's own voice does not take place exclusively in a personal or individual context. If we want to hold on to the parallel between voice and soul/personality, this means, almost paradoxically: Personality development is not a purely personal matter! We are born into cultural and social patterns that help determine how personality traits and vocal characters develop over the course of our lives. The voice is moulded by the respective culture in which it is embedded by the same factors to which a person is generally exposed. This prepares the ground for the strange expressive process in which the voice can reveal aspects of a person's inner world. This inner world is formed from elements that other people know more or less well from themselves because they belong to a common lifeworld. In addition, the synchronous socio-cultural development of voice and people means that more is "reflected" in the sound of the voice than the mere individual "soul" or "personality". In the vocal expression of a person, facets can be heard that go beyond the individual-psychological. From the vocal colouring of a voice, for example, we can hear the affiliation of the voice to its cultural and linguistic community. Trained opera listeners recognise from the voice which country a singer comes from. An Italian tenor sounds different from a French, Russian or Korean opera singer, who all have their own specific sound. The timbres of the different voices give clear indications of which sound spectra are favoured in the culture from which the voice originated. Culture and language give form to the voice and thus set a certain framework for the sonority.

 

However, the voice not only reflects what is openly revealed in its sound. The hidden also shines through in the sound of the voice - regardless of whether we are paying attention to the individual or the trans-individual sound range. You can hear what you can't hear right now! It is precisely here, in this place where the concealment is expressed in the sound, that a path opens up to reach the concealed and buried parts of the voice, the large field of unknown voices in the voice that have not yet been utilised by the person in question. Sometimes the cover-ups in the voice actually sound as if there is a "blanket" or a "lid" on the voice. The voice seems to be covered, the vocal sound gives the impression that there is something on it that does not belong there, a feeling that is often accompanied by a corresponding physical sensation. There is also sometimes talk of furry voices, whose sound really does evoke the association of warm, soft fur. A fur under which it is difficult to sing with an open sound! Covering up certain pitch ranges, which you simply cannot reach with a loaded voice and which you would therefore not expect to hear in your own voice, is usually associated with less favourable images that clearly appear before the inner eye of the singer and the listener while working on the voice. You stand in front of locked doors, walls or fences, and there seems to be no way over or through the barriers. Giant guards with weapons, border police, mythical creatures and demons appear, who seem to have only one task: to prevent the person from entering the new, strange vocal areas by any means necessary. But it is precisely in the images and their individual manifestations, which are provoked by the utterance of the so-called false or ugly voices, that the key to open the door, the ladder to get over the wall or the trick to get round the border post is often concealed. Properly read, the concealment of the voice contains the means for its uncovering and liberation, namely when we are prepared to take every aspect of a vocal sound seriously and to understand it as an utterance that tells of the person who makes it. Every association, every image and every thought evoked by a voice in action points a possible way into the still hidden areas of the voice. These signposts do not necessarily have to come from the person whose voice is at issue; often enough, the images and thoughts of the listener help quickly and directly on the way. The alien parts of your own voice, which hold many a surprise, not only of an acoustic nature, can be accessed via the difficulties you have with your voice. Because this is where the exciting stories are hidden! The path to the whole voice therefore also leads via the problems that your voice is currently causing you, via the constrictions, blockages, obstacles and limits that prevent a free sound. Our aim is not to avoid these sounds, but to understand them and use this understanding to achieve a conscious approach to this sound range of the voice. The aim of voice development is then not to train a sound apparatus that is as perfect as possible, with which you can do everything you want to do, but to allow and get to know all the voices that show themselves in the one voice without prejudice, in order to then be able to deal freely with these voices. The longer and more intensively you work with your own voice in this way, the wider its range will become and, even more importantly, the more soulful, meaningful and personal your voice will sound.

 

The Foreign Aspects in Our Own Voice

 

In a vocal development process that aims to liberate the whole voice, we inevitably encounter areas of sound that seem completely alien to the person making the sound. In such situations, phrases such as "That's not me" or "That wasn't my voice", "This sound is strange to me" or "It feels as if someone else has sung out of me" are heard. The discovery of strange sounds triggers different reactions: excited curiosity, but also uncertainty, defence, aversion to the voices or even a strict refusal to accept that this voice belongs to "me". Especially at the beginning of a vocal research journey, the alien sounds lead to a strange contradiction: of course the person whose voice sounds so alien knows that the sounds were produced by themselves and are part of their voice, and yet they can hardly believe it because they have so little to do with their own vocal self-image. What is going on there? How do these strange sounds get into my voice? They have probably always been there! It's just that until now there has been no opportunity for them to reveal themselves. The search for the exact personal reasons for the masking of the now alien vocal ranges takes up a large part of the process of exploring and integrating the whole voice. At the beginning of this process comes the realisation that there is much that is alien in one's own voice. There are parts that you immediately feel belong to you, and others that you can work towards belonging to. The vocal sounds are assigned differently to the realms of one's own and the alien by the person making the sound than, for example, by acquaintances and friends who are listening. What I perceive as alien in my voice is sometimes well known to them, because we often use very strange vocal sounds in our everyday interactions without paying any particular attention to them. If we consciously listen to them, this can trigger one or two surprises as to how our voice apparently "actually" sounds.

The alien is a relative concept. What seems strange to one person sounds familiar and well-known to another. In our voice seminars, we use the different listening experiences to make the individual boundaries between the familiar and the alien in one's own voice more permeable. By using imitation exercises, for example, you can playfully learn to do things with your voice (and your body) that you would never have thought of on your own. And it's not about any acrobatic feats. Our vocal behaviour patterns are already shaken by small shifts, because our habits are so ingrained that we often only come up with the idea of making a sound differently, trying out a new timbre or accompanying a sound or melody with a different gesture as a result of an external impulse.

 

However, imitation does not exactly have the best reputation in our culture and society. Imitation is quickly seen as cheap and fake, the opposite of what we normally strive for, namely to be and appear authentic. When working with the voice, however, the focus on authenticity has a negative effect, as it often stands in the way of playful curiosity and openness to new, unknown sounds in one's own voice. The desire to be authentic is confused with not being allowed to leave the realm of the familiar and known. This makes it difficult to seek out sounds, feelings and room for manoeuvre in the alien and unfamiliar that could strengthen and expand the sphere of authenticity. Our relative self-image then prevents us from getting to know our extended self. This quickly leads to identification snapshots that leave us stuck in the familiar! This can look like this, for example:

In a seminar, a woman takes part in a free vocal improvisation in the group and suddenly drops out without warning. She sits down at the edge and no longer wants to participate. When we ask her, she replies that she can no longer take part, she doesn't feel anything. But in a tone full of anger and displeasure. This woman's "authentic" self-image categorically excludes certain unpleasant emotional qualities; they don't exist for her. When they do emerge through the back door of a supposedly harmless exercise, they are denied. The participant had a self-image in which certain things did not belong. If they occur anyway, as they obviously do in improvisation, the authentic feeling is switched off and the new one is not allowed, even though it is clearly in the foreground for outsiders. However, voice work is never about categorising any feeling or the lack of a feeling as wrong or right. The interesting questions are: What vocal sound is the current mood associated with? What can I learn about my voice here? Which voices within the improvisation exercise were responsible for the emotional blockage? Did the woman make it herself or did she just hear it? In the situation described, how does the voice affect the mood as soon as it is in motion again? The confusion of authenticity with a self-image narrowed by habit often has a very restrictive effect on the freedom of movement of the voice, so that it is sometimes literally brought to a standstill. This is accompanied by a blockage of the mind, which wants to hold on to the old self-image at all costs and shies away from any movement out into the open. Incidentally, this is a fairly common phenomenon. In voice work, however, it is particularly evident because voice and personality have a mutually illuminating relationship.

During individual work with a participant in a seminar, her voice opens up in a very impressive way that nobody in the room had expected. The woman had never been heard to sing like that before. When I asked her how she felt about producing such big notes, she said: "It didn't bother me!" Here the realm of permissible authenticity is so firmly established that no matter how impressive the experience, it is not allowed to reach the consciousness and the emotional world. But unlike in the first example, psychological and vocal blockage do not correspond with each other. In this situation, the woman had enough confidence to allow herself to be guided into sound areas of her voice that she would never have reached on her own. But her "soul" could not follow so quickly. But this is precisely one of the great qualities of the human voice. Like a scout, it is able to penetrate unknown territory quickly and allow the rest of the travelling party to follow slowly. With a good dose of confidence and time in the luggage, the woman will be able to recognise the disturbing character of the newly discovered vocal sounds and gradually make herself at home in the vocal range. An isolated experience is hardly enough for this, but if the work can be continued, the new vocal sounds will ensure an expansion of the self-image in the long term.

 

Actively listening to other voices has a great influence on the scope I allow my own voice. Experiencing an alien voice in free action often opens the door to one's own vocal potential in areas that have long been closed and unused. In voice development, we are not dependent on drawing everything out of ourselves, out of our dark inner selves. The social and communicative quality of the voice allows us to expand our personal vocal horizons through contact with other voices, which sound different but always have facets that are similar to our own voice. This is where the imitation exercises come into play again, which are a very suitable means of making the boundaries between the familiar and the alien in my voice more permeable. Normally, imitating other voices doesn't require any great leaps, but rather enables a smooth transition from the familiar to the new spheres of one's own voice. Once you have reached the alien, access to the authentic note of the new sound character is only a matter of time filled with practice.

In some other cultures, particularly in Asia, imitation has traditionally enjoyed a status that is not generally recognised in the West. Singers from different schools in Japan, China or Korea spend decades learning a vocal technique until they sound exactly like their teachers or how they are supposed to sound in the role they are rehearsing. Only when they have progressed to perfect imitation are they allowed to add a personal touch to their vocal artistry. But even in our classical singing tradition, artists must first learn a very specific way of singing that concentrates on a relatively small range of tone colours before they can find their own individual sound within this given framework. For many singers, however, the restriction to the classical timbre range virtually chokes them off, and many singing students sing better before they start their studies than they do after their exams. In our work with professional singers, we experience again and again how liberating it is to leave the classical sound space and let the parts of the voice sound that don't really belong in opera, oratorio and art song. This in turn benefits the sonority of the classical voice.

 

The Soul out of the Body:

Physiognomics of the Voice

 

 

The idea that facial expressions, gestures, body and voice say something about the person who displays them or who is characterised by them has a long history. Even in ancient times, people thought about the relationship between a person's appearance and expressive behaviour and their character and psychological characteristics. Since these beginnings in ancient Greece, these considerations have been summarised under the title of physiognomy or physiognomics. Physiognomy has had a remarkable history in which it has given rise to boundless enthusiasm among those who believed that it held the key to genuine knowledge of human nature. Others were no less consistent in their uncompromising rejection of "charlatanry". However, neither the supporters nor the opponents were particularly interested in the special physiognomic aspects of the voice. The organ of expression par excellence was once again only mentioned in passing, if at all. Systematic physiognomic observations were made almost exclusively on the face and body, and the voice was left only with its familiar place in obscurity, this time cast not by speech but by the visible aspects of the human body. Once again, the ephemeral nature of acoustic phenomena meant that people avoided the audible and focussed on researching what was in front of their eyes and much easier to capture than sound. Even in the earliest times, it was possible to record a person's face and body with simple means and then look at them again and again. In contrast, the technical possibility of recording the voice has only been available for a good hundred years, and the increased interest in it in the 20th century is partly due to the fact that it was suddenly possible to preserve the fleeting sounds of the voice on disc and tape. But even in the centuries before that, the physiognomic potential of the voice was recognised and addressed by individual researchers and scholars. On our expedition through the landscapes of the voice, we now want to study some old "maps" of the physiognomists who at least came close to the voice with their journeys between the so-called interior and exterior of the human being, and in these documents we will look for approaches, excerpts and sketches that we can use for our own journey, for small orientation aids with which we want to penetrate into areas that the physiognomists and their critics themselves only saw from afar and mostly left behind.

 

Aristotle: Similarities between Animals and Humans

 

The first systematic outline of physiognomics, in which the voice also has its place, was written by Aristotle. Here too, the Greek philosopher is not exactly fascinated by the phenomenon of the human voice and nowhere asks about its special features that set it apart from the physiognomy of the body and face. Aristotle categorises the voice as part of a collection of characteristics, including the face, hair, skin, eyes and physique, to name the most important. In Aristotle's approach, the voice functions as one field of expression among many and is treated in no more, but also no less detail than the other aspects.

 

In his Physiognomics, Aristotle compares the physical and vocal characteristics of humans with those he finds in animals, then examines which traits are associated with the physical characteristics of animals and draws conclusions about human character traits on the basis of the physical similarities between humans and animals. For example, if a human being has a loud and deep voice, Aristotle suggests that he is probably overconfident, because among animals the donkey is considered to be overconfident and also has a loud and deep voice. Soft hair is an indicator of cowardice because the deer, hare and sheep - all cowardly animals - have soft hair, while the brave lion and wild boar have hard hair. Aristotle is clever enough to recognise that one characteristic is not enough to attribute a character. It always takes several signs pointing in the same direction. Even for Aristotle, a person with soft hair does not necessarily have to be a coward. Furthermore, it is not enough to have found the right connection in just one animal species to attribute a characteristic to an external feature. It must occur in several animals and there must be no known association to the contrary in any other animal. Only one courageous animal species with soft hair would prove that the nature of the fur has nothing to do with the courage or cowardice of the animals. Despite these methodological safeguards, the aristotelian procedure seems rather obscure to us late-borns. We do know expressions from our everyday language that allude to similarities between animals and humans. A bull's neck, for example, denotes more than a physical characteristic, as it points to a physiognomic peculiarity. Looking at the similarities between a dog's face and that of its master can be very amusing and quickly leads to physiognomic judgements that should not be taken too seriously. But the assumption that all physical features have physiognomic significance because they appear in animals in connection with character traits goes far beyond what we imagine and desire in terms of kinship with animals. However, Aristotle sees the animal-human parallelisation as a way of explaining why a physiognomic sign has a certain meaning and not another. After all, why should we be able to deduce a "suitable" character trait from a facial feature, a tone of voice or a posture? What reason is there for soft hair to indicate a cowardly character and not a courageous one? Aristotle's answer is: because the same combination of physical trait and character trait can be found in different animal species, but combinations of this trait with opposite characters cannot! In his opinion, there are no cowardly animals with hard fur and no courageous animals with soft hair. The answer may seem strange to us, but at least Aristotle was still looking for an explanation. Later physiognomists, on the other hand, often had nothing more to offer than rather nebulous talk about intuition and genius when they were asked to explain why they were so sure of their physiognomic assertions.

However, the great logician Aristotle undertakes the comparison between animal and human characteristics and traits in a very questionable way. He contrasts the individual traits of a human being with the characteristics he finds in an animal species! According to Aristotle, if a "specimen" of the human species has a loud and deep voice, there is something to suggest that it has a tendency to be overconfident, because the donkey - or more precisely: all donkeys - also have a deep and loud voice and are considered to be overconfident. The conclusion is thus drawn from one species to an individual of another animal species, namely man, without Aristotle explaining why all the characteristics of the different animal species can manifest themselves in individual mixtures in man! Aristotle's physiognomic studies are logically based on clay feet, not because they compare apples with pears (which is not a problem at all, by the way), but because they only consider the species-relevant aspects of the animal as a comparative instance and disregard the individual characteristics of individual animals and, conversely, only see individual characteristics in humans and ignore the general human traits!

 

Behind this strange comparison of characteristics of animal species and individual or typical aspects of people lies the Aristotelian image of man, in which we are very close to fauna on the one hand and at the same time stand out from the community of animals to an extended degree. Aristotle understands the physiognomic relationships between body and character to be basically the same for animals and humans. However, only humans are able to possess all the characteristics and traits that are limited to the individual species in animals.

The lion is brave, the hare is cowardly. Among humans, however, there are both "brave lions" and "hare's feet". And what's more, the same person can change from a coward to a hero in the course of their life and vice versa, or even appear courageous in certain situations in one phase of life and not dare to leave cover in others out of fear. This flexibility of the human personality is expressed particularly clearly in the voice, which, in comparison to eye and skin colour, hair structure, foot size and chest circumference, is an extremely variable characteristic that reacts very precisely and spontaneously to new influences and situations. The man with the loud and deep "donkey voice" can learn to sound high and low. Unlike the donkey, he is not limited to just a few possible sounds. The human voice is capable of producing countless tone colours and an enormous range of tones. From a physiognomic point of view, this means that it can take on a multitude of different characters. The range of possible personality traits is immense, not only in the human species, but in each individual! With this realisation, we are already moving out of the area that physiology normally deals with. The voice not only shows us what is currently present. It also reveals a person's potential, which can be discovered and practised. Physiognomics of the voice is therefore never a mere "art of spying out", to use Immanuel Kant's term, but aims at a joint search for human and tonal possibilities.

 

Pros and Cons: Goethe and Lichtenberg

 

From Aristotle we take a leap into the 18th century, when physiognomy had its heyday for a few decades. In the circles of the Enlightenment and at the same time as part of an anti-enlightenment counter-movement, it briefly became a real fashion, and its czar of fashion was Johann Kaspar Lavater. We won't dwell on him for long, because his physognomics, in which he seeks to recognise a person's character with scientific precision mainly on the basis of facial shape, facial features and bone structure, has long since been rightly exposed as a pseudo-scientific manipulation of clichés. Moreover, he has contributed nothing worth mentioning to the physiognomy of the voice, although he knew that the voice also speaks about the person to whom it belongs.

 

If man were only ear or only wanted to use the sense of hearing, he could go a long way in physiognomics through this sense alone. If he had accustomed his ear to observation, he would be able to determine precisely many of the characteristics of the speakers in front of the room in a company of people who were completely unknown to him or who even spoke in a language that was completely foreign to him. The tone of speech, the articulation, together with the rapidity and height or depth, all characterise very much ...

 

Johann Kaspar Lavater

 

More interesting than Lavater himself is a look at two thinkers in his circle, one a supposed supporter, the other his fiercest contemporary adversary: the young Goethe and Johann Christoph Lichtenberg. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe worked on Lavater's "Physiognomic Fragments" at a young age and contributed a few principled ideas to the project that were not Lavater's cup of tea. Even in these early writings, one recognises the great thinker of the connections between effects and origins, the natural scientist and poet of coming into being and becoming, who leaves Lavater's approach far behind. Goethe, too, was first and foremost a man of the eye who had little sense of the peculiarities of the human voice, but his general considerations shed an interesting light on the physiognomy of the voice. His teacher and mentor at the time, Lavater, saw man first and foremost as a moral being whose moral character could be read from his facial features. He therefore saw no need to establish a connection between man and the nature that surrounds him, as his research was aimed less at psychobiology than at Christian ethics. Aristotle's idea of explaining physiognomic qualities from the similarities between animals and humans remained unthinkable for Lavater.

 

 

Excursus: Goethe's voice 

Goethe's lack of interest in the human voice is all the more surprising as, according to his contemporaries, the poet had an impressive organ of speech that he knew how to use. His speaking voice sounded like a sonorous bass. According to Heinrich Voss Jr., Goethe "spoke not only with the organ of the tongue, but also with a hundred others, which are mute in ordinary people, and the most soulful fire radiates from his eyes. (...) It is marvellous when Goethe intones in his deep, clear bass". Another of Goethe's contemporaries, Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer, reported that his voice "knew how to rise from the softest emotional tone to a thunderous voice when he was in a state of affect, anger or passionate excitement". "He has a tremendous voice, and he can scream like ten thousand fighters," wrote Moses Mendelssohn to his sister in 1821.

 

The writer Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, the proverbial old Gleim, left us an account of an evening party in Weimar at Duchess Amalie's house. They read poems to each other. Goethe was also present and at some point it was his turn to read. Old Gleim only knew Goethe from hearsay, but did not realise that it was this famous young poet who was about to recite. But no sooner had Goethe raised his voice than the visitor realised who he had before him: "Suddenly, however, it was as if the reader had been taken by the hand of the Satan of mischief, and I thought I saw the wild hunter in flesh before me. He was reading poems that were not even in the book, he dodged into every possible tone and manner ... "It's either Goethe or the devil!" I shouted to Wieland, who was sitting opposite me at the table. 'Both' - he replied."

 

 

Goethe is much closer to the ancient philosopher in this respect, as he interprets man primarily as a natural being. However, his approach goes beyond Aristotle and the physiognomist in an extended way: for Goethe, man is integrated into the - in modern terms - evolutionary development of life. Nature and man have a history! In the organic context, which is in a constant state of change, everything has its place and its meaning. Only this comprehensive context of development means that a person's physical characteristics can point to their inner traits and that physiognomics can provide usable results.

The Goethe biographer Gundolf summarises the difference between Lavater and the Goethe when he claims that Lavater understood man as an isolated soul being and that he took him morally and statically, whereas Goethe understood the natural being man dynamically and physically. Dynamics! Goethe is the first physiognomist to focus on the movement and development of man as a species and as an individual. Unlike the body and face, however, the voice - which Goethe ignores - is in motion as soon as it appears. The dynamic moment is an essential feature of vocal presence, because the voice never presents itself to us as a static object that we can place on the dissecting table for examination and then analyse. The dynamics of becoming are revealed directly and unfiltered in the voice, and every influence, no matter how small, leaves its mark on vocal expression. As soon as it sounds, the voice tells its story of the old, long-past and current, everyday events with which it was confronted. A dynamic physiognomy, which neither Goethe nor his successors developed, would have found a particularly expressive organ of expression in the voice. But it has not yet been proven that it is even possible to make solid physiognomic assertions! We do not yet know whether physiognomics as a whole, or at least in certain areas, has arrived at comprehensible assertions that could expand our understanding of the human being. The Göttingen scholar Johann Christoph Lichtenberg was keen to vehemently deny the value of physiognomy, denying it any scientific status. On what basis, he asked, should it be possible to make reliable statements about the relationship between the length of a person's nose and his or her character? Lavater was content with his "ingenious intuition", and Goethe's considerations ultimately go well beyond the narrow physiognomic goal, as his early studies already contain the core of a comprehensive theory of form, morphology, in which Lavater's question has no place. In his critique, Lichtenberg does not deny that we constantly make physiognomic judgements in our everyday dealings with other people. We almost reflexively infer a person's so-called nature from their appearance or their voice. However, these judgements usually turn out to be simply wrong! "We judge from the face every hour, and we are wrong every hour." Our physiognomic conclusions are usually based on previous personal experiences in which we have seen that a physical feature was associated with a character trait, and now we mistakenly believe that the observed relationship is based on a lawful necessity. According to Lichtenberg, however, the only thing we can read with some certainty from the physical and vocal characteristics are a person's momentary emotional states and moods. I can recognise a lot about a person's current state of mind from the way they are speaking or "acting" today. For Lichtenberg, however, this is something quite different from obscure character studies based on bone structure and tone of voice. Lichtenberg distinguishes the nonsensical physiognomic examination of physique and character from the much more interesting pathognomics, in which the moving vocal and physical expression provides clues to a person's inner state. We can draw conclusions about a person's current emotional state from his or her expressions, i.e. the way he or she moves, acts and facial expressions. And perhaps we can also indirectly learn something about a person's character by observing his/her mental state, but the body does not provide us with any direct information about personality.

 

However, Lichtenberg's distinction proves to be unsuitable for the area of the voice, because where should we draw the line between physiognomic and pathognomic characteristics? Unlike the body, the voice is never motionless; vocal expression is necessarily linked to a certain activity. While we look at a face and try to interpret its features physiognomically, it can be completely static, dormant or even dead. Goethe's observations of Schiller's skull are a famous example. There is nothing to interpret about a sleeping or dead voice; it has to show itself, it has to be alive in order to be perceived. Physiognomics and pathognomics are therefore much more difficult to separate in the case of the voice than in the case of other physical personality traits. The boundary between the areas that Lichtenberg wishes to distinguish is particularly permeable in the voice, and the effects of the soul on the personality and vice versa are particularly diverse. We have already seen that individual vocal utterances, which often recur, can develop into character traits over time and that the physiognomic characteristics of a voice can change as a result of new life circumstances. This does not necessarily make physiognomic judgements about the voice any less questionable. In his radical criticism of physiognomics, Lichtenberg perhaps therefore goes into detail about an example in which the voice plays the main role. In it, he recounts his own experience with physiognomy long before it had "become fashionable": for years, Lichtenberg had to suffer under a night watchman who woke him from his sleep every hour of the night to call out to him and the city what time it was. One night, Lichtenberg set about drawing the person he suspected was behind this voice and whom he had never seen before. The result was sobering, to say the least. He had visualised a tall, lean and healthy man "with an elongated face, a downturned nose, straight unbound hair and a slow, sowing, grave step". When he met the guard on the street a short time later, he saw a man who looked nothing like his sketch! He was neither tall nor lean, neither his hair nor his stride matched the image he had been given by the sound of his voice at night.

 

Lichtenberg describes an experience that we have every day in the age of telephones and mobile phones. We hear a voice, imagine a face or a stature and are almost always surprised by the real appearance of the person we heard on the phone. Our imagination usually has nothing to do with the real image of the person. But for or against what is this example an argument? Lichtenberg cites the story to prove how uncertain physiognomic judgements are. However, in the case of the night watchman, he does not draw a comparison between external features and inner character traits! Instead, he tries to draw conclusions about the watchman's physical appearance from his voice. The relationship between the inner and the outer is not the issue at all, but Lichtenberg merely provides an argument in favour of the fact that the sound of the voice does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about a person's appearance. The question of the value of physiognomic judgements is not directly posed in the example. But for Lichtenberg, the mere possibility of physiognomy presupposes that body and voice express the same thing about a person.

If I were in a position to say something correct about a person's character on the basis of his voice, then in an further step I should also be able to reproduce his characteristic facial features and physical characteristics. With his example of the night watchman, Lichtenberg believes he has proved that precisely this is not possible. But do body and voice always show the same aspects of a person's inner self? Isn't the picture that the various human media of expression paint at the same time sometimes extremely contradictory? Can there be situations in which the physiognomic and pathognomic judgement of the voice comes to different conclusions than the interpretation of the face and body? Can the face laugh while the voice cries? Can the body appear courageous and energetic while the voice sounds anxious and hesitant?

 

Lichtenberg provides us with an another starting point for our own research into the landscapes of the voice. In the example given, he is roused from sleep by the night watchman in the middle of the night and immediately begins to sketch the man. For the making of a portrait, the initial situation seems quite unusual. Three o'clock in the night, sleep in his eyes, annoyed to have been woken up again! You have a different picture of the author of all this unpleasantness in front of you than on a warm, sunny afternoon, when the same man calls out the time and you know it's time for coffee. The afternoon drawing would probably be different from the night drawing, because the situation determines what and how you hear! The idea of an objective perceptual authority that sees and hears people as they are was one of the wishful dreams of some physiognomists who wanted to see the scientific nature of their discipline in this. But not only do different people hear "the same thing" differently; as we learnt from Lichtenberg's example, one and the same person hears different things depending on the situation and life situation.

Is this a deficiency? Does the listening interpretation of human voices require scientific objectivity in order to have value? On the contrary! It is precisely listening, which remains integrated into the respective situation, that provides new and interesting insights for the person showing their voice. This is exactly what voice research is all about: vocal self-knowledge, getting to know your own voice better and thus being able to use it more effectively. There is no room here for a mere "art of spying", to which physiognomics has generally been reduced by its advocates and critics. Physiognomy was often enough used as a political tool to give a negotiating partner and dialogue partner a knowledge advantage over the object of observation. As early as 1228, the Scottish scholar Michael Scotus wrote a long influential physiognomy ("Liber physionomiae"), which he recommended to his employer at the time, Emperor Frederick II. He recommended it pointing out how important physiognomic knowledge was for political business: from the facial features and voice of his interlocutors, he could recognise the disposition, virtues and vices of people and thus better assess who he was dealing with and how best to deal with his counterpart. A few hundred years later, the German Enlightenment philosopher Thomasius used similar arguments to praise his physiognomic findings. Nowadays, it is no longer just "dukes", "emperors" and other members of the political class who can use physiognomic knowledge about the face and voice to spy out the true intentions of their counterparts. In business, too, seminars and training courses are organised to learn to read the intentions of business partners from their body language and to align the "readable" aspects of one's own appearance as effectively as possible. Voice seminars with comparable promises are just a short distance away.

Of course, we also want to gain knowledge about the voice, but not in order to use it against someone else. For us, hearing is part of the process of interpersonal communication. What and how someone hears a voice says something about the voice and its bearer and almost as much about the listener themselves! The exchange about what is heard is informative for everyone involved and promotes the development of the voice even of those who only listen. This process of listening and sounding together is at the centre of our practical research into the human voice. Physiognomics with an uninvolved observer who interprets a research object is completely useless for us. For this pseudo-science makes no contribution to the liberation of the voice to itself, our primary goal.

 

Lichtenberg's night watchman example has made it clear that the particular situation in which a voice is heard will have an influence on its interpretation by the listener. Conversely, the sound of the voice also depends on the internal and external circumstances in which the night watchman finds himself. If he feels fresh despite the late hour and is walking through a warm summer night, bathed in moonlight, then his voice will sound different than on a wet, stormy night when he also has a headache. On another level, however, the night watchman's voice will remain recognisable, because many aspects of a vocal sound have become ingrained over the years and can only be changed slowly. This brings us back to Goethe, who pointed out that the subject of physiognomy is not actually the naked body. The human being is always perceived "clothed". Not the naked figure, but

"status, habits, possessions and clothes" cover the person and form the surface that we perceive. However, these covers do not conceal his "true nature", rather they are part of his existence and show just as much of his personality as his posture or movement patterns. The external circumstances have an effect on a person's existence, but they help determine which factors influence their life and which should be kept out of their living environment. Clothes make the man, but people have a greater or lesser degree of freedom to decide which clothes they want to wear.

 

Such coverings can also be found in the area of the voice. The "clothes" with which people clothe their voices are linked to their speech, to style, melody, dynamics and sound character! Just as no-one chooses their first clothes, we are also given our mother tongue, which sets the course for a person's vocal development through its tonal character. But everyone is able to develop their own individual version of their mother tongue, which has very personal characteristics. We recognise another person not only by the sound of their voice, but also by the way they speak. Language shapes people, people shape language. The "language game" in which we move is embedded in a form of life, as Wittgenstein would say. The ways of speaking and living influence each other, just as the world of life and the other people around me have an effect on me and my self-image and I help to shape this world of life. And that is why the peculiarities of linguistic dress physiognomically point to the characteristics of the speaker, just like the way he dresses or the car he drives. In addition to speech, singing is a second possible dress for the voice - compared to speaking, it is more of a light garment, the summer dress, so to speak, which reveals a little more of the "naked" voice. The way in which someone handles a song or an aria also says something about the singer, who gives every musical performance their personal character. Up to this point, the extended physiognomy of the clothed person, as Goethe understood it, evidently offers the same opportunities for understanding the voice and the body. But the voice can do more. It can free itself from a large part of its clothes of language and music and reveal the quasi-naked sound of the voice. The human voice allows us to show the "naked" version as well as the clothed forms without much effort. This brings us to the description of a primal situation of our voice development: instead of speaking or singing, our lessons are often simply about opening the mouth and allowing the voice to "emerge freely". This is usually easier said than done. Because the voice stripped bare in this way is actually perceived as naked by the singer at the beginning. Nakedness leads to shame, and for many, the naked voice is more likely to cause shame than the naked body. Once the shame has been overcome, the voice provides an acoustic insight into the person making the sound that does not remain stuck on surface phenomena. The voice that emerges from the shadows of language and music tells something about the person to whom it belongs, about their wishes, fears and dreams, about the conflicting forces they sometimes have to contend with and about their strengths in dealing with others. But she never tells this to anyone who wants to eavesdrop on her. The scientific physiognomist is at a loss here. The situation of voice exploration must be one of trust, and the primary goal is and remains the self-knowledge of the person making the sound by getting to know his or her own voice, which only speaks openly to an audience when this audience supports the goal of self-knowledge. Before I go into this basic situation in more detail and explain why only a non-scientific interpretation of the human voice can be considered for our idea of voice development, I will look at some psychologists who have made the voice their subject.

 

 

 

Dear AWE,

 

Lately, I often find myself recognising a certain necessity when I look back on my life so far, which has brought me so close to the subject of the voice. Is that always the case? Does the same chaos that sometimes roars around you when you are in the middle of this life sometimes appear so clear and structured because in reality there has always been some kind of predetermined path? Or because hindsight has an organising effect? I don't know. In any case, the universe of the human voice seems to be large enough to link the strands that run through my life. But let's start at the beginning, which had relatively few signs of a vocal career. After all, my father came from a musical family which, with his seven brothers, was an entire men's choir in which every voice was represented. He, the youngest, sang in the bass and passed his voice on to me, certainly not the worst part of the legacy I inherited from him. I still remember one of his performances at a village festival in his home town very well. The festival hall was packed with people and my father sang a song on stage with a large wine glass in his hand. Probably "In the deep cellar I sit here ..." Alone, without instrumental accompaniment and in a vocal range that was certainly a lot lower than the original notation. When I was about seven or eight years old, it made such a strong impression on me that the memory is one of the clearest of my childhood. Unfortunately, my father only very rarely had the idea of singing with me and my siblings, and at the gatherings at my grandparents' house, when the uncles got together and sang one song after another, I remained an onlooker, watching the goings-on rather sceptically and feeling no impulse to join in. But somewhere inside me, an interest in the voice seemed to develop and I started listening to music that favoured voices very early on, mostly male voices. My favourites were Heino and Ivan Rebroff, both singers with deep voices. If there wasn't a longing for the often absent father involved! But Ivan Rebroff not only had a brilliant bass, he could go all the way up to soprano and put the whole "Russian soul" into his songs.

 

My own singing career began in the children's choir at primary school and continued shortly afterwards in the Schola, the church boys' choir in my home town. Without attracting any further attention, I sang there until my voice broke, and as far as I remember, I thoroughly enjoyed it. My mother would probably have liked to hear me sing the Gloria as a soloist in church, but my ambition was not sufficient for that, and the talent of some of the other boys was already so advanced that there was no need to fear any shortage of soloists. My mother's more or less subliminal disappointment that I didn't sing the solo part in Ave Maria confronted me early on with an experience that I share with many people who were completely denied the opportunity to sing: The pressure to perform, with which childlike singing is burdened, inhibits joy. Every "Do it better!" or " Leave it better!" stifles the original spontaneous impulse to let the voice run free. I stuck with it anyway and sang in the boys' choir until my voice broke. Even after that, I knew how to continue to use the chancel as a stage for myself by switching from singing to speaking and was now able to act as a soloist in front of the audience. For two or three years, we put on a nativity play with a youth group at Christmas. One of my parts was to send a few sentences loud and clear into the rather large church without a microphone. It gave me great pleasure and enjoyment to have a fairly large crowd of people listening to me! When I was about thirteen, I started reciting the readings at Sunday Mass, which in retrospect was ideal preparation for my current activities as a broadcaster and reciter!

 

Singing was out at the time, though, because it was stupid and not cool, and as I was a rather repressed teenager in some phases of my puberty, I wouldn't have been able to show as much of myself as I would have had to when singing anyway. I resorted to playing the guitar, but only until I couldn't go any further without regular practice, and as I was not only quite uptight but also had a tendency to be lazy, Johnny Guitar Watson was quickly removed from the list of possible role models. My relationship with music was limited to listening to the radio and cassettes for a few years, without any particular preference for a group or singer. After all, the focus was on singing, mind you in pop music, I had no access to classical music at the time. But the songs had to be sung in such a way that I could at least begin to understand what they were about. In other words, Bob Dylan was never my thing, but Cat Stevens was - before his father complex led him to Islam.

After the worst seemed to be over in terms of growing up, the idea of forming a school band was born at a party at the high school where I had been hanging around more or less regularly for a few years. I was probably sitting at the table with the three candidates, a guitarist who looked harmless but played like the devil, a pianist who listened to people like Jerry Roll Morten and played the keys just as wackily, a drummer who wasn't exactly consumed by musical ambition, and me with rudimentary instrumental experience on the guitar and recorder, who at best would have been suitable for a trashy Jethro Tull revival band, but who  wanted to hear that?

You play the bass, I was suddenly told, because every band needs a bass.

And so it happened, my music teacher lent me the school's own double bass and gave me a few hours of free lessons, for which I am truly grateful. Later I bought myself

a bass guitar and played what the guitarist suggested to me. It didn't sound virtuoso, but it wasn't completely out of the framework of our sometimes quite experimental music. For the one or two conventional pieces from our repertoire, a singer was soon needed, and as I was once again sitting at the table, the choice was not difficult, and I warbled "Ich brech die Herzen der stolzesten Frau'n", which was even less true for me at the time than it was for Heinz Rühmann, whom I saw before me as a brother in spirit.

I can remember that singing on stage seemed much more exciting and frightening than playing bass, although my electric bass skills would often have given me much more cause for concern than my singing. But I probably already suspected that the voice doesn't simply function like an instrument that you hang around your shoulders.

In any case, I had to summon up more courage for my singing than for my bass lines.

 

At the beginning of my studies, after a few years of abstinence from singing, I came up with the idea, seemingly out of the blue, of looking for a choir in which I would not stand out as a singer and where I would have the opportunity to make new friends. Both of these things worked out more or less straight away: the University choir with its approx. 130 singing students guaranteed that I would not stand out from the crowd either positively or negatively, and at the same time offered the chance to make new friends in a city that was still foreign to me. At the same time, I experienced the tremendous power that comes from singing together in such a large group. A force that carries you and moves you along, an energy, that, especially when you really sing together, brings sheer joy! When my new friends left the choir after two semesters, I looked for a new place to sing and soon found a jazz choir, which became the seed for the social network in which I still feel part of today and which still has the voice at its centre. Singing together led to friendships that still exist today.

 

Opening our voices together and letting them resound creates a very special feeling of togetherness that I had never experienced in my other life to this extent. I have learnt more about this strange power of the human voice over the years with the various voice teachers who are committed to your tradition. When I had my first encounter with Paul and Clara Silber from the Roy Hart Theatre, my enthusiasm for their vocal work was great and contagious. Their vocal work was great and infectious enough to entice almost half the choir, including the choir director, to attend their courses the following summer. I soon began to organise the Cologne workshops for Paul and Clara and set up an Easter course, during which we took a group from Cologne to the Roy Hart Centre in southern France for a total of seven years. Slowly but steadily, the voice with all its revelations and secrets moved to the centre of my life, and you can still find it there.

 

Do these episodes from my vocal life explain why the human voice is at the centre of my existence today? I don't know.

 

 

 

 

Voice in Psychology

 

After the precise criticism of Lichtenberg and a few others, including Immanuel Kant, physiognomy disappeared from the public intellectual consciousness, although researchers continued to ponder the unsolved problem of how soul and personality are reflected in physical expression. Among them were scientists of the calibre of Charles Darwin, but for almost 150 years it was not enough for an independent physiognomic discipline to work continuously on the questions. At the beginning of the 20th century, the subject once again aroused wider interest, now under the mantle of the newly emerging field of scientific psychology. At last, the human voice also moved closer to the centre of physiognomic research. There was a good reason for this. The invention and rapid spread of recording and playback devices for voice and sound, radio and gramophone, made it possible for the first time to listen to the same acoustic material several times and thus to analyse it much more precisely.

 

Karl Bühler: The Acting Voice

 

The Viennese psychologist and linguist Karl Bühler soon recognised the opportunities opened up by the new techniques for a physiognomics of the voice - even though he was not interested in the voice as such, but rather thematised it, like so many of his predecessors, within the framework of a theory of language. However, his considerations come very close to the voice in its own way. Bühler makes the speech act the subject of his investigations alongside the speech structure, which normally attracts the full attention of linguists. He is not primarily interested in the grammatical structure of language, but wants to find out how language works in action. What happens when we speak to another person? What makes speaking an action? Bühler is talking more or less abou the same thing as which the American philosophers Austin and Searle who brought the idea of "speech act" to philosophical prominence decades later. However, the distinction between speech act and speech structure goes back to the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who spoke of parole (action) and langue (structure). Speech action involves the use of the voice, and Bühler sets out to define its role in speech more precisely. In doing so, he identifies three basic language functions that rarely occur completely separately from each other, but are nevertheless constitutive for the human use of language: the representational function, expression and appeal. In the representational function, language and speech reflect how something exists in the world, what is currently happening or what properties an object has. Sentences such as "It's raining" or "The traffic lights are green" initially describe certain circumstances in a very matter-of-fact way, they represent a factual situation. But if you have forgotten your umbrella and are crossing the road during a shower, the first sentence can also be an expression of surprise and annoyance. The expressive function is then added to the representational function, although this can also occur without being tied to a linguistic representation. Sometimes the speech act of swearing quietly is enough to make it clear what is going on. The reference to the green traffic light in the second sentence conveys the mere information of the traffic light colour. However, just as the traffic light itself already has the character of an appeal, the uttered sentence, when uttered by a passenger, for example, implies the request: You can drive off now!

According to Bühler, the language theory of the past concentrated too much on the representational function and failed to recognise how important expression and appeal are for human communication, which is largely oral - functions that already exist in animals. Although Bühler also maintains that representation - showing and symbolising - is the most important function of language, expression and appeal are the basis of language and form its foundation. However, the metaphor of foundation and superstructure, which Bühler uses here to illustrate the connection between the various language functions, suggests that the lower parts of the structure do have an influence on what the upper part looks like and whether it will be stable. However, the foundation itself, once it has been erected, no longer changes. The direction of effect is one-sided, from the lower to the so-called "higher", in our case from mere, almost animal expression to the specifically human function of representation. As natural as the talk of higher and lower functions and of foundation and structure may seem to us, it is misleading when considering the voice and language. The increase in the complexity of human communication through the emergence and development of the representational function of speech also expands and differentiates the so-called lower functions, which are regulated by the variations in vocal sound. This even applies to animals that have to find their way in the social context of humans. For example, it has been found that the vocalisations of domestic cats, such as meowing and purring, are much more differentiated than those of their wild counterparts. With their larger repertoire of sounds and rhythmic figures, they are in a position to demand and receive what they need from their owners at any given moment - food, exercise, being stroked. The living conditions influence the repertoire of expressive and appealing sounds of social animals, including humans. Another question is whether these greater possibilities of vocal expression are recognised and used by cultivated humans in the western hemisphere. The metaphor of superstructure and substructure, in its various forms, has characterised our thinking and self-image to such an extent that we tend to ignore the fundamental, ancient, so-called lower aspects of our humanity. The history of the non-existent philosophy of the human voice provides a very vivid example of this. In any case, we will have to come up with other metaphors for our map of the voice in order not to run into the same philosophical wall again and again.

By turning to the act of speaking, Bühler has brought to light a matter of course that has been almost completely overlooked - or overheard? It is part of the nature of every human action that it pursues an intention, and the intention of a speech act or a vocal utterance is usually, if not always, aimed at another person to whom one has something to communicate. The "sender" needs a "receiver" if the transmission is to have any meaning. Hearing is part of the voice! Vocal utterances come to nothing if there is no one to hear them. However, hearing is not a purely bodily-mechanical matter of eardrum, cochlea and all the little bones in the ear. Rather, the concept of hearing stands for a process in which the whole person, body, soul and spirit, is involved. It would therefore be the ideal subject of a reverse physiognomy, in which research is conducted into how the external stimulus is characterised by the inner disposition of the perceiver. The soul and personality - even if we still don't know exactly what they are - listen in and determine what and how we receive what we hear. There is no pure, objective sound in vocal communication, because the "acoustic material" is characterised by the listener as much as by the person performing the voice. Every interpretation of a vocal utterance contains physiognomic information about the person who makes the voice sound and about the person who hears it. Objectivity in the evaluation of a voice does not provide a meaningful yardstick here. Although the possibilities for interpreting the sound of a voice are not unlimited, and different listeners often understand a voice in action in a very similar way, it is sometimes more interesting for the person presenting the voice to receive many different comments on the effect of their own voice. The differences result from the different voice histories of the listeners. Let's assume, for example, that a person presents vocal sounds that are clearly aggressive in character to the participants of a seminar in individual work. The associations this triggers in the listeners depend on how they relate to aggression. While the aggressive voice has a liberating effect on some, it may trigger defence reactions in others. In addition, experienced listeners can specify the sound of the voice more precisely and detect hostility, courage or resentment in the sound, and these interpretations in turn influence their own reactions. Depending on the situation, the reaction may consist of a purely vocal response, or the listener may use linguistic utterances to reproduce an impression left by the voice. However, because language also makes use of the voice in order to be heard and because it echoes moods and sensitivities that do not necessarily occur in the words, the verbal reaction of the listener always tells more than could be read from the pure content of what is said.

 

The voice from the off / Radio experiments

 

Let us return to Karl Bühler's attempt to use radio and gramophone for a physiognomic interpretation of the voice. One advantage of the new techniques for Bühler was that he was no longer forced to place the test subjects in a laboratory, whose artificial atmosphere makes a natural voice sound almost impossible. The vocal expression becomes "consumptive" in the laboratory, it lacks all "warmth of life", and thus the vocal testimonies obtained there are not suitable for psychological analysis. It is doubtful, however, whether the recordings in front of the microphone in a studio provide the warmth of life that Bühler misses in the laboratory. A microphone changes every situation abruptly, and it takes a lot of experience in the studio to sound reasonably natural there, unless you are persuaded by good interviewers to almost forget the microphone.

 

In any case, during his time in Vienna, Bühler supervised and accompanied several experiments in which the relationship between voice and personality was investigated using radio and gramophone. Under the leadership of his colleague Herta Herzog, a major experiment was carried out in 1931 in which nine people from different social classes and educational levels read a text on the radio on three consecutive days. The radio listeners were asked to fill in a specially designed questionnaire on the voices of the readers, which was published in a Viennese newspaper. As many as 2700 Viennese took part!

 

Excursus: The questionnaire | The evaluation of the questionnaires showed that the audience was able to state the height of the speakers very accurately, both in absolute terms and in relation to the other speakers. "Fat" speakers were also recognised; whether someone was lean or medium could not be heard in their voice. Female / male did not cause any difficulties except in the case of a pubescent young man who sometimes passed as a "housekeeper" and "Naschmarkt woman". The additional comments even included information on hair and eye colour - with a significant number of correct guesses! The voice apparently does not reveal age. The tendency was towards the mean, the older respondents were rated younger, the younger ones older. The occupational classifications tended to be correct: intellectuals were more or less recognised as such, as were manual workers. The dialect colouring was obviously an indicator for the listeners. A merchant speaking High German was often categorised as an academic.

 

The question of whether the speaker was "used to giving orders" was understood in two ways. Sometimes the ability to give orders was only a consequence of the presumed profession - academics and intellectuals are more likely to give orders than labourers. Often, however, the answer was an inference from a "domineering voice", for example, to the personality of the speaker. It is not clear from the study whether the information was correct and whether the domineering voices were the result of people who were used to giving orders.

 

 

Ms Herzog published the results in an article entitled "Voice and personality" in a psychological journal. What was the experiment about? What landmarks can we take from the results for our map of the human voice? Herzog wants to make a contribution to the question of whether a physiognomy of the voice is possible or "to put it more precisely: To what extent is the voice of a speaker an expression of his or her personality?", i.e. she asks the very question that interests us. She seeks her answers in two ways: Firstly, in a so-called quantitative procedure, the answers of the radio listeners from the questionnaires are statistically analysed. In the second, phenomenological approach, Herzog wants to use detailed subjective individual analyses of trained listeners to find out "what happens in the listener when they hear the voice". Herzog also wants to find out some data from the people who send in the questionnaires in order to at least begin to analyse which listeners or groups of listeners heard what.

 

The questions to the listeners relate to three areas, which Herzog titles body type, environment and interiority. Physique refers to the size and girth of the body, the gender and - not quite appropriately - the age of the speaker. These physiological data are not actually part of physiognomics. Similar to Lichtenberg with his night watchman, they draw conclusions from one appearance, the voice, to another appearance, the body. Nevertheless, the answers on physique form the focus of the analyses of the experiment because, in contrast to the information on milieu and especially the area of interiority, they provide statistically reasonably clear material. Moreover, according to Herzog, interiority was "such a controversial problem in psychology at the time of the experiment that we did not want to and could not push it to the forefront of the survey". I suspect that little has changed to this day, but that should not prevent us from continuing our search for the relationship between the voice and the so-called inwardness of the human being. We can at least learn from Herzog not to neglect the body in the exploration and development of the voice.

In the phenomenological part of the study, Herzog described 30 radio voices in transcripts that she made while listening to the voices. The experience reports were compared with the comments made by numerous radio listeners in addition to the questionnaire entries. The result is the outline of a law-like structure of the reports, which all have more or less the same course: They begin with a "resonant impression", an initial, relatively generalised reaction to the voice. This is followed by a phase in which individual aspects of the voice stand out and are interpreted. Listeners have "ideas" about the voices; sometimes the voice also reminds them of other familiar voices, usually ones they heard not so long ago. Herzog quite rightly notes here that these "ideas" point to the individuality of the listener and often say more about him or her than about the speaker. In a third and final phase, an attempt is made to arrive at a final judgement about the voice. This almost always leaves an unresolved residue, something about the voice that cannot be interpreted. Herzog assumes that the interpretation of the voice through the remarkable moments that the listeners notice also represents a typification of the voice. As a unique phenomenon, it is not completely tangible. Although listeners hear more than the typical parts of the voice, they cannot include everything they hear in their description.

 

If we now set out in search of the ideas and landmarks from Herzog and Bühler's study that fit into our map of the voice, we must first realise that we are dealing with a scientific study. What does that mean? Bühler and Herzog want to discover objective findings about the relationship between voice and personality that are valid regardless of the situation in which they were found. To do this, they construct conditions in which the so-called object of research can show itself as it is, uninfluenced by the observer.

It must be isolated from all 'disturbing' influences without changing its characteristics through isolation. Modern recording techniques offer the possibility of isolating the voice from the speaker to such an extent that the listener is not distracted from the sound of the voice by visual stimuli. In turn, the listener is isolated from the speaker so that the voice does not react directly to the presence of the listener. The scientist is separated from the whole system of speaker, voice and listener in such a way that he or she cannot distort the results through his or her presence. With the help of radio and gramophone, this should finally be possible without cutting off the "warmth of life" that the voice needs to sound natural.

 

However, voice research, as we are striving for, is not at all about objectivity. We are not interested in scientific findings and try not to isolate listeners and observers of the voice and the person behind it, but to integrate them into the situation! External instances are of no help if they cannot directly feed their ideas, comments and reactions into the process of voice exploration. This may not lead to objective results, but instead we achieve results that are relevant and often vital for those involved. A scientific copy is not our goal, we want to go on expeditions together, carrying our own experiences and the maps of other travellers in the landscapes of the voice. However, we also isolate ourselves. We separate the voice from language and music so that we can first hear it as itself. This is the constantly repeated first step, followed sometimes earlier and sometimes later by the reintegration of text and melody. In some situations, the sound of the voice virtually forces certain words or sentences on the listener; they are heard almost before they are spoken, whispered, shouted or screamed. At other times, the voice moves freely for a long time without wanting to approach language or music in the usual sense.

But regardless of the different claims and approaches, there are some very important points of reference in the studies by Herzog and Bühler for our journeys. Bühler's discovery of the listener for researching the voice is of existential importance for our voice work. However, we go beyond Bühler's intentions by leaving the listener in the situation that is characterised by the vocal utterances. We also make the person showing the voice a listener too! Learning to listen to and interpret one's own voice is an indispensable part of the path to one's own voice that I am proposing here. We only follow the three-phase process of voice experience, which according to Herzog is made up of "resonant" impressions, ideas and final judgement", in the first two phases. However, after the " idea" phase, we are concerned with bringing the associations of the listener - including the person who is currently making the voice sound - into contact with the voice and hearing how the voice sounds when it follows an image, an idea or a feeling. There cannot and should not be a final judgement because the voice never brings the process of its development to an immovable final state. The voice is constantly changing through the course of life, ageing and new situations. The only question is whether we want to intervene in the process or let it go its own way.

 

The body plays an important role in voice exploration and development, but not primarily, as in Herzog's case, as an "exterior" whose condition can be deduced from the voice. The body represents a part of the personality which, like the voice, has great flexibility and changes its expression in movement. The voice will support the body in these movement sequences and, conversely, the body will help the voice to flow and move. The body does not interfere with the exploration of the voice, but provides important information about the meaning of the vocal sounds. Does the body emphasise the "message" of the voice? Or does it counteract it? Does the audible aggressive mood meet a restrained, hesitant gesture? Or does the sad tone of voice meet an uninvolved face? What happens to the voice when the body starts to move? How can the body support the intention of the voice and how can the voice activate the body? It is not the hidden body, but the integrated body that is part of the research into the connection between voice and personality.

 

 

Paul Moses: Voice as a Symptom

 

A good twenty years after Bühler and Herzog, the relationship between voice and personality has become the subject of a researcher who is much less shy of the realm of inwardness. In his book "The Voice of Neurosis", the German-American laryngologist Paul Moses argues in favour of diagnosing mental disorders on the basis of the patient's voice. In contrast to his medical colleagues, most of whom still limit themselves to visualising some parameters of the voice with more or less complicated measuring devices, Moses advocates trained listening on the part of the doctor, which can provide much more meaningful results than oscillograms, however precise they may be. Psychological difficulties, including pathological neuroses or psychoses, are expressed in the voice; voice disorders often indicate underlying psychological causes.

In short, the relationship between the sound of a person's voice and their psyche is ideal for psychosomatic diagnostics. Moses wants to provide the tools for this. In a review of the book, the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno remarked that Moses "delivers more than he promises"! According to Adorno, he sketches a physiognomy of the voice that eclipses all previous literature on the subject by overcoming the static view of the voice in relation to the body and personality. The physiognomy of the voice becomes part of an anthropology that places the decisive influence of the respective culture and its changes on the expressive behaviour of the human being at the centre of its considerations. It is therefore not surprising that Moses was probably the only one of his guild to take note of Alfred Wolfsohn's work in London in the 1950s, which was concerned with dissolving the cultural and psychological limitations of the voice in order to allow the whole - or as he says: the human - voice to resound. Moses saw Wolfsohn's then unique approach to voice expansion as a far-reaching practical realisation of his own ideas. If this is the case, then it must be recognised that Moses' own medical practice, insofar as it can be read from his writings, falls short of his ideas on the psychology of the voice at key points. As with Karl Bühler, the reason for this lies primarily in his endeavour to do justice to the criteria of an objective science. The book is a mixture of extremely witty remarks on the function of the voice in culture and the psyche and, at the same time, methodological instructions on the diagnosis of the voice that verge on narrow-mindedness.

Analysing the voice?

 

Let's go in search of landmarks and orientation points for our map of the voice. In voice diagnosis, Moses, like Bühler, relies on the possibilities of modern recording technology - in the 1950s on tape rather than gramophone! He records conversations with patients so that he can listen to them later on until the content fades into the background and he can concentrate fully on the characteristics of the voice sound. Here, too, we are dealing with an isolation of the voice from the language, only Moses does not allow the person giving the voice to reduce it to the "naked" voice as we do, but the listener or diagnostician learns to disregard the content aspect in the process of listening. The isolation of the voice from the speech is therefore not absolute, as the type of speech - speech melody, speed, accuracy or the pauses between words - remains the focus of the listener. It can't harm a voice teacher if he or she is able to recognise anomalies in a pupil's speaking mode and place them in the overall picture of the voice. However, we are neither doctors nor scientists, and the "advantage" of Moses' diagnostic strategy proves to be anything but desirable for us. By taking the patient's voice out of the actual conversation situation and listening to it on tape as often as needed, Moses ensures the objectivity of his diagnostic findings, which was already a priority for Bühler and Herzog. All subjective and emotional "prejudices" that spontaneously arise when listening to a voice are pushed aside by the trained listener of the isolated voice in order to make room for the sober analysis of verifiable parameters of the voice. What does Goethe say? Rationality is thinking without experience. Modern rationality depends on the belief that true knowledge can only be gained by freeing thought from the "disturbing" and contaminating affects, instead of consciously dealing with the emotional sphere - and incidentally also with thoughts, which one often experiences rather than creates! - to weave an integral picture of oneself and the world. From the perspective of a physicist, the accusation may sound ridiculous. Whether it is justified is open to debate, but for the voice psychologist? In any case, I will not follow Moses on this point - just as Wolfsohn did not fulfil this "ideal" in his work.

Moses opens a small window out of his strict objective methodology: he brings "recreative listening" into play, which comes one step closer to integrating the affective realm into listening by involving the body. Recreative listening works on the same principle that stimulates a person's salivation when another person bites into a lemon - an old trick to annoy singers or the wind players in the orchestra. When listening, the sound of the voice fulfils the function of the lemon. If, for example, a tenor "gags" during a vocal performance, i.e. constricts the throat, there will inevitably be a significant increase in throat-clearing and coughing in the audience. The audience also constricts its throat, the base of the tongue comes closer to the throat, the throat becomes dry and the audience restless. However, the tenor does not necessarily find the "lemon" taste of his own voice sour, he can strangely believe that he is singing with an open, sonorous voice. The listener experiences an effect on a physical level that only belongs to the singer in purely physiological terms. If you couldn't hear the sound of the throat being tied up anyway, you could point out the constriction of the throat to the tenor based on your own physical reaction. However, this recreative hearing does not only work on a physical level, the emotional reaction to a voice can also be recreative. The feelings that I experience when I hear the sound of a voice can run parallel to the feelings that are partly responsible for the specific sound of the voice. The emotional reaction to a voice may give the person making the sound information about their own feelings! This is why recreating emotional listening, which largely includes physical reactions, is a fundamental element of our way of exploring and developing the voice. In seminars in which several participants listen to a voice in action, the listeners' involuntary reactions to the sound of the voice are often themselves emotionally coloured. It is not possible to create an objectively distanced situation in which one can safely articulate one's own feelings, so to speak. On the contrary, it can become very lively! Recreative listening works in a similar way to an echo, in which the meaning of the sounds shifts and changes slightly through the temporal succession of their repetition. The echo does not mean the same as the original sound because it sounds later and is therefore heard and interpreted in the context of the original source.

 

Excursus: The archetypes of the voice

 

The psychologist C. G. Jung developed a vocabulary that can be used to describe the relationships between individual and supra-individual aspects of personality and to which voice teachers such as Alfred Wolfsohn and Gisela Rohmert (functional voice training) also refer with good reason in order to better understand the relationship between voice and person. Jung's psychological approach centres on the idea of the collective unconscious, in which every person, or rather every individual "soul", participates. The unconscious realm of the psyche is therefore larger, more primal and older than the conscious mind. The psychic structure is built up from psychic archetypes that belong to the collective unconscious.

These archetypes represent an unchangeable material for shaping the soul. Which archetypes from the immense pool come to influence in a person depends on the culture in which he or she lives and on his or her life history, in which certain events activate the psychic energy of the appropriate archetypes. These influences all take place in the realm of the unconscious, i.e. they cannot be accessed with language, an instrument of consciousness. For this reason, all attempts to summarise the archetypes in a theoretical psychology are doomed to failure. Nevertheless, Jung has no choice but to characterise the archetypes linguistically in his writings. To do this, he makes use of a very richly visual terminology in order to at least come close to what he "actually" wants to say. At one point he speaks of the archetypes as old, dry rivers that bear the traces of (life) water that once flowed through them. But only a new dynamic of psychic events can help the rivers to come alive again. The mythologies and religions of mankind ensure that the riverbeds do not dry up, because they are based on the archetypes of the collective unconscious. However, no culture other than ours could have formulated this in these words. In order to arrive at concepts such as archetype or the unconscious, a lot had to happen in the history of ideas. Only in a world that has been "disenchanted" by enlightenment and science can the sphere of gods and spirits - or whatever the active forces that elude our control are called - be shifted completely into the human soul and transformed into a purely inner-psychic phenomenon.

The influence of what is now called the collective unconscious on modern man is certainly not diminished by this. On the contrary! It therefore seems wise to deal with the unconscious forces. In the process of individual development into personality, individuation, as Jung calls it, the search for the relevant archetypes that are active in one's own soul and the integration of the soul parts symbolised by them into the overall personality represents the decisive challenge. Let us consider, for example, the anima/animus archetype, one of the archetypes that more or less actively shape the psyche in every person and to which Jung therefore devoted a great deal of attention. He used it to describe the opposite-sex part of a person's psyche. Anima stands for the female part of a man's soul and animus for the male part of a woman. From the point of view of analytical psychology, a person's gender is not one hundred per cent clear-cut. The opposite-sex parts are no less a part of a person's personality than the supposedly problem-free aspects, which are assigned to one's own gender without hesitation. This is an idea that, following the renaissance of androgyny in Western culture in the late 20th century, no longer seems as alien and provocative as it did when the psychoanalytical movement was born at the beginning of the same century. But how do the archetypes of the collective unconscious manifest themselves in a modern person? According to Alfred Wolfsohn, this is where the voice comes into play again, because it is a medium in which the archetypes can show themselves clearly and recognisably on the surface of consciousness. In order to search for a man's anima, the man's female voices must be made to resound, usually the high-pitched voices that are generally avoided by men today. And conversely, women will focus on the low part of their voice to bring out their masculine side. However, the division of voices into male / female is not simply the same as low / high. There are very low female voices and very high male voices. The categorisation depends solely on how the voices are actually heard, namely by the person raising their voice and by the other listeners. Sometimes those who raise their voices are not able to hear the female or male colours of their own voices, even though the listeners assign them to one gender. In the practical work of voice development today, unlike in the days of Wolfsohn and Jung, the first task is to awaken and integrate one's own gender voice potential. Shyness towards the voices of the opposite sex is often overlaid by the search for one's own identity as a woman or man. Awakening men's willingness to express the different varieties of masculinity and women's willingness to try out vocal forms of expression for their femininity are often at the forefront of synchronised voice and personality development.

 

The insecurity about one's own gender identity that we observe today echoes a cultural reorganisation of the ideas of what is considered masculine and what is considered feminine. Another symptom of the shift in gender identities can be seen in our everyday singing culture: the chronic shortage of men in high tenor choirs is now taking on disastrous forms, whether among amateurs or professionals. German tenors seem to be dying out.

The archetypes that express themselves in the high tenor voice - in earlier times the very epitome of the man, the hero and the lover - hardly seem to exist in the modern male psyche.

 

Alfred Wolfsohn took up the idea of archetypes and made it fruitful for his approach to voice development. Wolfsohn focussed on the relationship between voice and personality from the very beginning. He was never interested in training mere vocal apparatuses that could produce a particularly large number of sounds. Rather, he wanted to explore and awaken the spiritual quality represented by the sound of a voice and integrate it into the context of a person's life with the help of the voice. As soon as the search for the hidden voices in one's own voice is orientated towards discovering the archetypes that express themselves in the sound of the voice, there is no longer any danger of aiming for mere acrobatics. With the connection to the archetype, the respective vocal facet gains its meaning, which goes beyond the purely acoustic event and becomes understandable for both the singer and the listener. The archetypal images help to locate and grasp the new voices in order to integrate them into one's own vocal corpus. And conversely, the voice proves to be an extremely useful "instrument" for bringing a person into contact with what psychologists call the unconscious. With the extended voice, the mental and spiritual horizon is also more extended. In this way, the liberated voice opens up completely new possibilities for action and life. In short: the development of voice and personality remain linked.

 

 

 

 

 

Of course, not all emotional reactions to a voice are re-creative. However, it is not the teacher or the listener who decides whether a feeling that arises in a listener refers to a similar feeling in the person who made the voice sound, but only the person making the sound. He or she retains the exclusive right to interpret his or her own voice. This does not have to coincide with what the listener experiences, but it does not help anyone to impose any "truths" on the singers, which only draw them away from the point at which their own vocal exploration must begin.

 

In the situation of joint voice exploration, the voice teacher has a clearly defined task that sets him or her apart from the other participants. In principle, he or she hears in the same way as everyone else: subjectively, with the possibility of emotional involvement. At the same time, he or she should be specially trained to consciously perceive his or her own reactions and then be able to decide which ones can help the student's voice development in the respective situation. The voice teacher does not have to be the undisputed diagnostic expert in comparison to the so-called pupils like a doctor. Rather, his competence must lie in guiding the emerging vocal and emotional "material" in directions that are favourable to the voice or voices in question. This includes bringing in one's own strong emotional contributions or holding back completely and giving the pupil's impulses the space to express themselves. To achieve this, it is necessary for the teacher to create an atmosphere of trust. The participants should feel that they are in good hands and gain the impression that the teacher can also handle tricky situations. But this probably applies to any lesson that goes beyond the teaching of data and invites the pupils to make a personal contribution.

For all his understanding of the interconnectedness of a person's voice and personality, Moses only uses the voice as a diagnostic tool. His therapy for voice disorders and psychological difficulties relies entirely on classical psychology and psychoanalysis, apart from a few "technical tricks" to get the voice moving. For example, one of the dimensions that Moses analyses in the voice is rhythm, a characteristic of singing and speaking that is closely linked to the movement of the voice. Rhythm is movement in time; it gives form to the dynamics of the voice. Moses understands the rhythm that is audible in the voice as a mixture of three rhythmic elements: the "biological rhythm for the individual", the rhythmic specification of the language in which one expresses oneself, and the use of speech rhythms to support the understanding of what is said - the semantics. In the voice diagnosis, the voice specialist will want to find out whether the patient is using the rhythmic elements adequately and whether the content of the spoken text is conveyed appropriately and comprehensibly through the rhythmic form. If there are problems, he will diagnose the underlying psychological disorders and treat them relatively independently of the voice. In our voice work, we are dealing less with patients than with travellers on the path of the voice, for whom the teachers are the tour guides at some passages. By encouraging people to let their voices sound and move for a change without linguistic and musical guidelines, we create space for their own rhythms. If I give the pulse of my own rhythm the chance to unfold and express itself, the linguistic and musical rhythms will then combine in speaking and singing to form a mixture in which the personal remains audible instead of being completely subordinated to external circumstances.

Only when I trust my own rhythm I can get involved in larger rhythmic contexts in groups, choirs etc. without losing myself in them. If I know where I'm starting from, it's not difficult for me to go to a different rhythmic place. Of course, my rhythm is not always the same. It is constantly influenced by my current state of mind. But the more I am able to notice my rhythm, the more I can consciously modify it and thus influence my mood rhythmically. At this point at the latest, breathing comes into play in voice exploration. Breathing is the basis for all vocalisation and requires a great deal of attention in voice development. However, this is not about learning so-called correct breathing techniques, but about discovering what rhythm my breath takes on when I release it.

 

Turning the voice into a medium with which the psychological status quo and its movement tendencies can not only be read, but further developed, is a core aspect of Alfred Wolfsohn's understanding of the voice. But Moses summarised the essential similarity between voice and personality, which is what opens up this path of voice development in the first place: "The dynamics of the voice express the psychodynamics." For Moses, voice dynamics are the "mirror image of psychodynamics", which brings us back to the mirror metaphor with which we began our reflections on the relationship between voice and personality. This time, however, with the decisive addition of dynamism! Movement! The inclusion of the dynamic dimension of voice and personality is what makes the relationship between the two understandable. Personality is not a thing, not a stable construct! Personality has a history, which also includes the hardenings and adhesions that soften and set in motion the goal of every personality development. The path of the voice is so well suited to this goal because it allows precise snapshots to be taken at any time, in which the moving and hardened parts can be heard. Voice physiognomics discovers the significant connection between a person's inner movement and the associated blockages and their moving vocal expression. In addition, the voice indicates the best direction for synchronised voice and personality development. If you concentrate on listening to the meanings of the old and new vocal sounds in the joint voice exploration, you are already on the predetermined path to expanding your personality and voice. The mutual influence of psychodynamics and voice becomes particularly clear when - as in the above-mentioned example of rhythm - we first free the voice from language and musical guidelines. For many participants in voice seminars, it is a very impressive experience to hear their voice "undressed" for the first time and to present it to others. There is hardly anyone who is not excited, because you realise very quickly - usually before you have made the first sound - that this voice shows much more than its sound. The almost physical experience of the close interplay of voice and personality by "simply making a sound" reaches almost everyone who tries it in the right context.

 

 

(In the German version of the book you will find here a text of Nietzsche from his Zarathustra, “About the Great longing”. It is one of his writings where he combines the ideas of soul with singing, which later became Wolfsohn´s famous “Learn to sing oh my soul!” I don´t dare to do a translation of this text but there are surely professional ones to find!)

 

The dynamics of the voice and those of the personality correspond with each other, and the landscapes of the voice that we want to transfer to our map gain their specific character through these correspondences. The constant interaction between the voice and the person to whom it belongs has a similar effect to the climate of a region of the world, which determines which plants grow there, which animals live there and whether or how the region can be cultivated. This climate has an influence on the course of the paths in the landscape and on the distances between the waymarks and artefacts. The discoveries that we have made so far with the help of the "masterminds" from Aristotle to Paul Moses are coloured by the climate; they appear in a special light that helps to determine their significance. If we consider the voice and personality not as stable objects, but as dynamic phenomena that "communicate" their movements and changes to each other, then the artefacts are grouped into a new field of meaning. We leave the field of physiognomics, in which an expert claims to have a set of instruments that enables him to decode the so-called interior of another person. A dynamic approach to voice exploration requires all participants to go on a journey, the course of which cannot be determined in advance. There are more or less experienced travellers, and the voice teacher should know the one or other route from previous journeys and know what to expect for the "expedition group". Objective diagnoses of the vocal sound have no place here, we need the subjective reactions that provide new material for the next steps on our explorations. There is no final destination of the journey, such as climbing a high mountain, in the landscapes of the voice. The somewhat overused phrase "the journey is the goal" is justified here. Every path into the voice and to the voice is new and different. There is always something new to discover, even on supposedly well-trodden paths, because the voice is constantly changing through its exploration - whereby we naturally have the expansion of vocal possibilities in mind and in our ears. With the expansion and partial liberation of the voice, however, the field of possibilities for action and life also becomes larger. Once I have experienced the correspondence between vocal and inner movement in my own body, the expansion of my lively radius of action also affects the scope of my available vocal potential. The voice supports the development of a "wide" personality, and the extended inner horizon of a large and flexible sphere of action allows the voice to unfold more freely. This process is not without conflict, and often enough old behavioural structures that restrict life to regions that the voice has long since expanded prove to be extremely stubborn. Patience and the willingness to engage with the voice for a long time and at length are part of the path of the voice!

 

The metaphor of the voice as a mirror of the soul has not been refuted in the explorations of other researchers and cartographers. Something from within a person is expressed in their voice. But both voice and "soul" are not fixed objects that I can analyse and possibly press into a form that suits me. Both are more like a river that is constantly in motion. There are natural and artificial dams where the river is slowed down, side arms where the movement comes to a standstill, but the river cannot be stopped. Voice and personality are manifestations of the same river. They correspond with each other and influence(!) each other. The mirror metaphor is too narrow to adequately depict this living interconnectedness. The phenomena we are dealing with here are far more diverse. We can only get close to them if we enter the flow and become part of the living process. An observant look in the mirror is sometimes part of this, but it alone does not provide any truths, only starting points for the next journey with the flow of the moving voice!

 

The Healthy and the Free Voice

 

 

In a study supported by the German Singers' Association it was found that prolonged singing stimulates the production of immunoglobulin A in the human body. This is a substance in saliva that protects the upper respiratory tract against colds. Does this scientific result finally prove the old claim that singing is healthy? Somehow this finding seems strangely modest. Did popular wisdom really mean nothing more than that people who sing a lot are more resistant to colds than others? Most passionate singers would probably insist that singing has a much broader effect on health and affects the well-being of the whole person. On the other hand, there are quite a number of professional singers who would not readily confirm that their profession promotes their health. Not to mention those who run the risk of ruining the sound and therefore the health of their voice through incorrect vocal training. The relationship between voice and health is obviously so complex that it cannot be adequately described in individual medical studies. Not only does a person's voice influence their health, but their lifestyle also has an effect on their voice, which can sound more or less healthy or sick. But in any case, the understanding of a healthy voice depends both on what we understand by health and on what idea we have of the sound of a healthy voice. In other words, in order to find out what constitutes a healthy voice, we must first clarify what we mean by health in this context.

In Western countries today, we invest an incredible amount of energy and time in looking after our health and our illnesses. It is one of the most loved and hated topics in our everyday conversations. Our multi-billion dollar, chronically indebted healthcare system reinforces our daily conviction that we must put in a huge amount of effort to combat the threat of disease and to protect our endangered health! With the memorable result of living in a society that is getting older and older, but at the same time more and more vulnerable to illness. Health has an enormous significance for the self-image of the affluent citizen, and the idea of a healthy voice does not exist independently of the prevailing concept of health.

 

What do we understand today by health in general and by a healthy voice in particular? How does the understanding of the healthy voice fit in with our idea of the free and whole voice, which we have presented in the previous chapters? Are the healthy, the free and the whole voice congruent? Are there differences?

 

A purely medical definition of a healthy voice would be too narrow for our purposes. Even the everyday understanding of health in general encompasses much more than can be formulated in a medical vocabulary. In the case of the voice, there is also the fact that it defies medical observation and treatment to a certain extent. Because it is not part of the body. There is the larynx, the vocal folds, the tongue, the mouth, the "vocal apparatus" and the whole body as a resonance chamber, but the voice represents more than these physical aspects and therefore cannot be operated on directly or given medicine. An attempt is made to do something about this by making a medical distinction in the area of the diseased voice. In addition to organic damage, where direct, visible impairment of the vocal apparatus can be demonstrated, there is also functional damage, which is audible but for which there is no physiological equivalent. The medical endeavour is to place visible, organic findings alongside the only audible functional disorders, which can then be measured and observed. Only what can be seen and, if necessary, directly manipulated therapeutically is medically manageable. In the ideal case, medical diagnoses are based on physiological findings; only functional diagnoses remain deficient, because the logic of Western medicine is physio-logic.

But health is not a purely medical category; it reflects social and cultural aspects of a society. The idea of a healthy voice encompasses more than can be recognised in purely medical terms and is made up of components that for the most part have no place in medicine: the prevailing notion of the beautiful voice, the underlying beliefs about the role of the voice in people's lives and the understanding of health that is currently represented in society. The judgement as to whether a voice is healthy or not depends not only on the physical integrity of the vocal apparatus. Of course, this does not mean that the vocal apparatus should not be cared for and protected. In a broader sense, however, we can call the voice healthy when it can give uninhibited expression to everything that offers itself to it as "inspiration". A healthy voice is largely free of blockages that stand in the way of its development and sounds correspondingly open and flexible.

 

Understood in this way, the concept of a healthy voice is broad enough to include the socio-cultural dimension as well as the medical and psychological aspects. However, this also increases the number of good reasons for not calling a voice healthy. Countless voices whose vocal apparatus shows no medical signs of damage sound anything but free of blockages. The healthy voice is apparently the exception in our society, the blocked voice the rule. How did this come about? What cultural tendencies have taken away the space for the voice to develop freely?

The restriction of the voice is a phenomenon that can be found in all cultures. Every society distinguishes between vocal sounds that are permitted and desired and those whose expression is sanctioned. These judgements are based on various categories, the most important of which is the distinction between beautiful and ugly. In all high cultures, there are voices that are called beautiful and are emphasised above other vocal sounds. The good, well-loved voices are used in artistic or ritual contexts and function there as singing. The other vocal sounds and colours that lie within the human voice are excluded from the regions of cultural life. One technique of limiting human vocal expression is that certain forms of life, as Wittgenstein would say, permit and characterise the appropriate language games and exclude other possible ways of speaking. At the same time, however, these forms of life also determine which vocal sounds and purely vocal utterances are appropriate in the respective situations. Without the rules being explicitly formulated, we intuitively know very precisely how "one" should behave vocally and immediately register any deviation from the vocal norm in others: the guest at the neighbouring table in the restaurant who apparently wants to entertain the whole restaurant, the shop assistant who can barely be understood, or the colleague who suddenly talks much faster than usual for no apparent reason.

A strange discrepancy has emerged in modern Western culture and society over the past 50 years. On the one hand, the possibilities for vocal expression in art have become increasingly diverse. This began in the first half of the 20th century with Afro-American music, the blues and jazz and led to rock and pop music, punk and the experimental vocal art of the extended voice movement. In the non-artistic field of vocal expression, the exact opposite occurred at the same time. The range of possible vocal expressions in our everyday lives is becoming ever narrower. There is less and less room for manoeuvre in which you can do more and different things with your own voice than just what is allowed. The possibilities for variation in the "cultivated" voice are smaller today than perhaps ever before in our history. The pressure of cultural convention has a stronger or weaker effect depending on how the individual upbringing takes place and which personal events characterise life and the development of the voice. But it affects everyone: even the most tolerant and enlightened people quickly feel uneasy, for example, when they meet a group on a tram or in a marketplace that comes from a culture in which a loud voice is still a means of communicating with one another. This seems inappropriate and uncultivated to most of us. On holiday in the countries where these people come from, the loud and uninhibited is perhaps picturesque and "so original" for us, but here at home? It doesn't fit in here! The loud voice has disappeared from our everyday lives. We are not loud. There are, of course, important historical reasons for this. The time of the Nazi screamers has thoroughly ruined the loud voice. Accordingly, the voice of power no longer sounds loud and powerful today; the powerful now speak in a muted voice. People no longer make an effort to demonstrate their power.

 

The impoverishment of the everyday voice is supported by the tendency of our society to sing less and less. In recent decades, the gap between singing and speaking, between art and everyday life, has widened dramatically. Children of pre-school age are now characterised by a shortening of the vocal folds, which no longer develop to their normal size due to a lack of practice. There is hardly any everyday singing culture today. It is not without reason that phrases such as "having a funny song on your lips" seem so antiquated. The last refuge of sophisticated amateur singing are the choirs, which offer their singers the opportunity to open and move their voices at least once a week. There are only a few places where you can still find non-artistic singing, such as in church, in football stadiums and, limited to the "fifth season", at carnival! The church is the place where people still dare to sing songs because singing is part of the service. And probably also because as an inexperienced singer, you don't stand out in the crowd of churchgoers, if you can still find them. People don't actually sing in football stadiums, they shout. After all, there it is permitted to raise your voice in a way that would be inappropriate in any other context. The loud bellowing of club songs and the unrestrained cheering when one's own team scores a goal or wins a match exerts a liberating valve function on the otherwise culturally restrained voice, which can only be criticised for the fact that such a valve function is needed in an ultra-modern society. The healthier alternative would be an everyday world in which spontaneous vocal utterance is part of good manners and does not violate every etiquette of the cultivated human being. Instead, our everyday singing is characterised by a misconceived notion of performance that prevents any form of spontaneous, imperfect and flawless vocal expression. People often say that they no longer sing because they can't. You don't sing loudly because it's not proper. The reverse is actually true: you can no longer sing because you don't do it. And the less you use your voice, the poorer and more awkward people's voices will sound in this society. In my practice as a voice teacher, I come across a surprising number of people who were forbidden to sing as children by parents, priests and teachers because their voice sounded "so awful" or they couldn't hold a note. "You sound like a rusty watering can," one mother said, as her now grown-up daughter told me. These "sins" committed by teachers and educators, whose actual task is to give children access to music and singing, often have lifelong consequences. Many children damaged in this way never dare to speak up again and express their feelings and moods freely through their voices. This is where the social tendency to only allow what fulfils the hardly questioned norms from the outset becomes manifest. In a corset that is so tightly bound, any voice will find it difficult to remain healthy. A corset cuts off the breath and robs freedom of movement in favour of a violent shaping of one's own (sound) body according to the general standards that decide how one should be and appear. The constriction of the voice leads to a flattening of the vocal sound, which is less and less suitable as a means of expressing one's own sensitivities. In other words, the state of mind that still finds expression is that of narrowness and immobility. Either you can hear precisely this narrowness in the voice, or the person has managed to cultivate a range of the speaking voice for everyday use that still sounds reasonably free within the corset. In this case, you initially hear an open voice, the limitations of which only become clear when you try to move from there into other tonal ranges of the voice. Men in so-called leadership positions often opt for a deep, serious voice whose pitch mobility rarely exceeds a third. In addition to the serious variant, women often prefer the light, nice girl's voice with a dash of childlike eroticism, behind which the adult woman remains hidden. Young female television presenters in particular seem to be the model for the squeezed voice, as they are fixed on the image of pure youthfulness, in which the slightest hint of maturity would have a disturbing effect. Any over-identification with a certain role in life leads to the vocal radius of action being reduced to the narrow range of one's own self-image. The corset that one puts on is then confused with the scope of the whole self, which is actually much larger and would allow one to sound different from time to time. Admittedly, this also increases the risk of offending vocally from time to time ...

 

 

The sound of the Voice Between

Restriction and Liberation

 

 

Every vocal sound has a specific volume, pitch and timbre. The three parameters constitute the tonal quality of a voice in that they interlock and together define the space for tonal changes. Every restriction on vocal freedom of movement is aimed at at least one of the three qualities and imposes its limits on pitch, volume or timbre in the actual use of the voice.

 

Loudness is the parameter that is easiest to measure because its changes are only one-dimensional in the direction of loud or low. In addition to the ability to measure loudness objectively in decibels, humans have the ability to subjectively assess loudness correctly in different situations. Measuring devices cannot tell us whether a voice has the appropriate volume in a situation or whether it is too loud or too quiet. We have a very fine sensorium for determining the appropriate volume of a voice. Our hearing registers very precisely when someone is too loud. Too loud is then synonymous with not fitting in with social convention, and for the integrated members of society this means: uncultivated. The standards for judging loudness have developed socially and culturally. They are not innate, and even between people of the same culture there are sometimes great differences in the interpretation of loud and quiet voices. A person who is too loud does not always have to be a troublemaker. Sometimes, by daring to raise their voice above normal levels, they act as role models. In the same way that the loudest voice can carry the staff of an entire party hall into a good mood, the voice of opposition and resistance also comes across loudly to encourage fellow campaigners and unite them. And if the voices alone are not enough, the famous whistle is sometimes used to help.

 

Excursus: Not being able to hear

 

The auditory system is a highly complex selective organ whose task is not only to make sound audible, but also to prevent people from having to perceive all sound events that come close to them with the same intensity. Just as our memory allows us to forget things so that we don't drown in the flood of information that pours down on us every day, our hearing filters out the less important noises so that we can focus our attention on the sounds or voices that are relevant at the time. But what authority decides what is important and what is not? Where does the auditory system get the criteria it uses to make its selection? What are the criteria?

 

Two people meet in a pub and have a conversation. As usual, the pub is busy at the weekend and the volume level is correspondingly high. The two of them have to make a little effort to understand each other, but unless they suffer from conference hearing loss, they have no difficulty in picking out the other person's voice from the babble of voices and noise around them. The background noise only comes to the fore briefly when something special happens, a tray of glasses falls to the floor with a loud clatter and clink or a vendor of the latest newspaper passes by the table. It becomes problematic when there is a very loud conversation going on at the next table that literally forces you to listen. Meaningful sounds are much harder to tune out than mere noise.

If the neighbours at the table spoke in an alien language that they did not understand, the disturbance factor would be significantly reduced. The task of hearing is clearly defined: My mate's voice is the only thing that counts at the moment; everything else, however loud it may be, remains in the background unless the situation changes in a way that might make a reaction necessary. Let's assume the two of them are sitting in a kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee and chatting. The sounds around them, the fridge, the rain hitting the window, the stirring of the coffee and even the sounds they make themselves, such as loud breathing, coughing or slurping, will not attract the attention of either of them. Unless, for example, the breathing is the start of an asthma attack, which cannot be ignored. But normally these acoustic signals have no meaning during the conversation. We are used to simply letting certain everyday sounds happen without having to pay attention. Only when they move out of the sphere of the usual, change their volume or their sound colour, do we become alert. Everyone is probably familiar with the experience of hearing a sound only when it has just ended and only realising that there was a permanent sound in the background because it suddenly becomes much quieter. Only sounds that are associated with clear cues, such as the telephone ringing or the doorbell, cannot be ignored: In any case, they penetrate our consciousness and force us to decide whether to react to them or not, but this decision represents a conscious act for which the acoustic event must step out of the background. The ability to block out background noise varies from person to person.

There are people who are not the least bit disturbed by a radio or television playing during a conversation. Others are then unable to think clearly. But nobody needs an absolutely undisturbed environment to be able to have a conversation. Hearing ensures that the concentration of the conversation partners can remain focussed on the flow of speech of the partner.

 

In conversation, we do not listen to the acoustic signals as such, i.e. the sound material, but to the words and sentences as carriers of meaning that want to communicate something to us. It is only when a sentence suddenly sounds different from what we expected, when the sound of the voice does not match the content of the sentence, that the listener becomes suspicious. They may begin to doubt the truth of what is being said. Is the person we are talking to actually trying to say something completely different from what can be read from the words? The art of irony is based on being able to vary the interplay between the content and tone of what is being said. A normal sentence is spoken with a slightly different tone of voice or a slightly different sentence in the usual style.

 

Although we only become aware of the sound of the voice when there are disruptions and surprises, the entire acoustic sphere in which the conversation takes place is very much present to us on a level below the threshold of consciousness. The success of verbal communication depends to a considerable extent on how someone speaks, how their voice sounds, which speech melody they use and the rhythm in which they speak. The process of hearing is not limited to the area that we are consciously aware of; by far the greater part of acoustic perception takes place subliminally, without us having to explicitly realise what is happening. The mechanisms and filters that select what is allowed to enter the conscious mind operate in the sphere of the unconscious. But there are no rigid boundaries between the conscious and the unconscious. We are able to direct our hearing to the purely tonal aspects of a speech and to push the actual content of the speech into the background. By focussing on the human voice, we begin to sense the richness of this organ and how much of it is permanently accessible to us with the help of our - so to speak congenial - hearing. In selecting the significant aspects that come to light in a voice, the auditory system allows the conscious mind to "have a say", but it does not rely solely on its decisions. Much more information is subliminally stored in the auditory system than that which reaches the conscious mind - information which, from the background, determines how we understand what we hear and how we react to it.

 

 

The human volume sensor also works for quieter sounds. We immediately recognise when someone is speaking too quietly. Someone's quiet voice shows shyness and hesitation. The other demonstrates that he or she does not need to speak louder and that the listener should make an effort to understand him or her. In our everyday world, this simple parameter of volume has a guiding function that should not be underestimated. The decision in favour of loud or quiet is the decision in favour of certain information that is conveyed regardless of what you want to say. In our living environment, the scope for using loud or quiet voices is consistently limited. There are hardly any rooms in which loud voices are permitted and quiet ones are possible. Strangely enough, only electrical sound generators such as radio, television, music systems, subwoofers, walkmen or iPods are allowed to be loud - albeit incessantly. The unspoken ban on making our voices loud does not mean that we would find places of silence everywhere. On the contrary, the fear of silence has taken on almost paranoid proportions in our culture. Nothing seems more undesirable than a place without sound. Even in churches, we are no longer safe from canned sounds whispering in the background. In an electronically polluted sound environment, however, people have to keep a low profile. As I said, the everyday voice should be moderate. No outbursts, whether out of anger or joy! The restriction of the range of variation in volume means that more and more people have to learn to hear and accept the power of their voice and to use volume variations in communication again. The social restriction of the voice is internalised, and even in the few vocal ranges, the slightly stronger voice quickly sounds too loud for the person making the sound. Being able to move flexibly between loud and soft is often enough a completely new, liberating experience when dealing with one's own voice.

 

The parameter of pitch is divided into two aspects. We assign an approximate pitch to a voice, at which it usually sounds when we speak. There are people with high voices, women usually have higher voices than men, children higher than adults, old men's voices become higher, old women's voices often lower. The pitch of the singing voice is much more precisely categorised. The first and most important characterisation of singers' voices is based on the pitch and not on the specific timbre, which would also be possible. Designations such as soprano, alto, tenor and bass only refer to the pitch of a voice. Their tone colour is only introduced via the additional attributes such as lyrical or dramatic. In classical music, a singer is confined to his or her vocal range, which must be subordinate to the divisions. The vocal literature makes little provision for the voice to spread from its natural range to other pitch ranges. This also has to do with the limitation of the tone colours of the voices. The sound ideal of Western vocal music concentrates on very specific sound ranges of the voice, which actually make it difficult to leave one's own vocal range. This brings us to the second aspect of pitch, the tonal or vocal range, which refers to the free range of a voice that can move freely as long as one trusts in the stability of the base of the natural vocal range. The range of a classically trained singing voice is around two and a half octaves; it remains true to the natural vocal range, so to speak. Alfred Wolfsohn, the pioneer of voice development that aims to dissolve the limitations of the voice, spoke of the eight-octave voice, which in principle anyone can develop. However, Wolfsohn's aim was not to set any records. Three of his students, Jenny Johnson, Marita Günther and Roy Hart, nevertheless ended up in the Guinness Book of Records: with the largest vocal range ever measured or, in the case of Marita Günther, with the deepest female voice! However, Wolfsohn was more interested in proving that the allocation of no more than two to two and a half octaves of range per voice is the result of cultural limitations and that the voice can show much more of itself. For Wolfsohn, the healthy voice was the whole voice, which is allowed to make all its facets heard - and with all these long unheard vocal sounds to bring hidden possibilities of being human to the surface. For Wolfsohn, the eight-octave voice included an eight-octave life, which has a much wider spectrum of possibilities for life and action than the so-called normal life in two octaves.

To an even greater extent than through pitch and volume, the lively variety of sound and fullness of life is reflected by the third parameter for determining a healthy voice: Timbre offers an almost immeasurable range of characteristics. The distinctiveness of individual human voices is due to the huge colour palette of vocal sounds. As with pitch, we can also differentiate between a main leg and a free leg when it comes to timbre. Every voice has something like its own natural timbre, which does not remain absolutely constant over the course of an adult's life, but usually guarantees the recognisability of the voice. In addition to this leg, the mobility of the pitch leg depends on how much the entire sound spectrum of a voice can be utilised individually and socially. Over the centuries, the singing voice of our culture has been subject to narrow limits that could be shifted, but did not expand the sound field of the voice. The colours that were allowed were called beautiful, the rest were called ugly. If you transfer this approach to the field of painting, from which the concept of colour was borrowed, you can clearly see how strange the idea of rejecting colour is. For one cannot actually say of a colour that it is beautiful or ugly; only the context permits such an assessment, if one wants to make one. In Western vocal art of the past 80 years, things have changed for the better. A much wider range of tonal colours is now part of the accepted culture of singing. Strangely enough, this has not had a revitalising effect on the everyday voice. The room for manoeuvre that the voice now enjoys in contemporary art has obviously been taken away from the range of the speaking voice. As already mentioned, this applies to all three parameters of vocal sound; it becomes particularly clear with the timbre of the voice, because the potential reservoir of colour offers the greatest range of possibilities. Today it is almost a psychological commonplace that only about one third of the information conveyed in speech relates to the content of what is said. Two thirds relate to the way of saying, i.e. the voice, voice colouring and gestures with which the content of the speech is conveyed. Against the background of this realisation, it becomes clear how much our communication is impoverished when voices become flat. In other words, if the voices are not healthy in the sense that we have defined health above, it becomes much more difficult for the dialogue partners to get through to other people with their wishes, needs and thoughts in direct contact.

 

And this brings us to a fundamental problem with the definition of a healthy voice as we have formulated it above. If we maintain that only a voice that can flow freely without being inhibited by blockages is healthy, there are certainly countless voices whose vocal apparatus shows no organic damage but which are not healthy. Strictly speaking, there is probably not a single voice in our culture that can sound free in all respects. This would mean that there is no such thing as a healthy voice. We are dealing here with a regulative idea that reality is supposed to approximate, albeit without it ever being able to become congruent with the ideal. For a theoretical cultural critique of the voice, the definition may fulfil its purpose. But for the concrete work of liberating voices, which is our actual goal, this understanding of the voice has fatal consequences. If a healthy voice is an unattainable ideal, then the real voices are all sick. Instead of promoting vocal health, this consequence would make it more difficult to develop a good, relaxed and perhaps healthy relationship with the voice.

In doing so, we would have fallen prey to a health mentality that we wanted to reject precisely because of the way we use our voice. It degrades life to a kind of competitive sport in which we have it in our own hands how good, successful and healthy we are. This is not entirely wrong; a healthy lifestyle promotes health. But of course it cannot prevent illness. Illnesses, blockages and obstacles are as much a part of our lives as death, and nothing can be done to change that. Modern thinking, however, turns health into a moral category. If you are not healthy, you are responsible for it. The inhibited voice becomes a loud signal for our own misbehaviour.

 

Winston Churchill's famous answer to the question of how he managed to live to be ninety, "A good cigar every day and no sports", would cause an outcry of indignation today. Of course, I don't want to encourage people to smoke or to avoid all physical activity. But the concept of health must be understood according to culture, and the respective understanding of health does not necessarily support the free development of people and their voices! There is another aspect to this: Western medicine tends to equate healthy with conforming to standards. The idea is certainly sometimes justified, but by no means always. It becomes particularly fatal when the idea is taken out of the narrow medical field and the general self-assessment is based on it. In voice seminars, for example, there are often people with unusual voices who believe that their voices are ill simply because they sound different from the so-called normal voice or their own fixed concept of a healthy voice.

In order to liberate the voice from its old corsets, it is therefore advisable to be very careful with the healthy/ill category and, if necessary, to dispense with it. At the same time, we can try to create a relationship between voice and health in which the voice is not hindered in its self-development. We therefore need to rethink and expand our definition of a healthy voice: Voice development, as we practise it, shows without doubt that every vocal utterance is an expression of a personal state of mind and mood, regardless of whether the voice is open and sounds free. On the contrary, it is precisely the fixed, blocked or narrow voice that is meaningful. It reveals the person with all their quirks, rough edges and corners. And the voice that you can hear has been moulded by life sounds far more interesting than the clear, pure voice from which every difficulty has been trained away. Liberating the voice is therefore not about cultivating timeless and ageless sounds. It is not only the voice that can fully realise its potential that is free. A free voice is one that has sovereignty over the momentary possibilities of its own voice. In other words, the ability and courage to listen to one's own voice as it appears at the moment, without rushing to judgement, is the most important step towards freeing the voice to itself. A voice is healthy when its general ability to express sensitivities is accompanied by the fact that the person using the voice is aware of this ability, can hear it and knows how to use it.

 

The new definition is not intended to completely replace the first. The idea of the free-flowing voice retains its legitimacy; it just takes on a very peculiar meaning when combined with the second definition. The aim of voice development is then no longer a voice sound that is virtually unencumbered by life and therefore free, but a voice in which, to put it almost paradoxically, the blockages and inhibitions of a person and their voice can find free expression.

The focus is no longer on avoiding so-called wrong sounds. On the contrary, the aim is to explore and appreciate the significance of those vocal sounds that one would actually prefer to avoid. Through this practical exploration, the vocal sound becomes an integral part of your own voice! It gains acceptance and significance and is more or less available to the person at any time as a tonal possibility. The explored voice quality then no longer has to assert itself against the will of the person showing it; voice and person now pursue the same intention in expression.

 

This understanding of the healthy voice, which takes some getting used to, leads to the assertion that there is no such thing as a sick voice! (Attention, this is not a medical statement!) The voice is always healthy enough to express a person's state of mind. Whether we always want to hear what it has to say is another question! A sick-sounding voice refers to the person to whom it belongs. Malfunctions that have become ingrained are indications of health problems in an broad sense in the person who has the voice. The voice is never the first cause of the difficulties it expresses. Exceptions also confirm this rule, and a change of perspective towards medicine would shed a different light on the relationship between voice and health. In any case, a lasting recovery of an ill-sounding voice cannot succeed unless the person in his or her life situation is included in the healing process. A liberation of the voice to itself, to the whole voice, is therefore never a purely technical or logopaedic matter.

But precisely because the voice provides such precise information about the current state of health, it is a good vehicle for self-exploration. The voice not only provides information about a person's current state of mind, it also tells us about its own history - and the life story behind it. And this is not the end of the joy and ability of the voice to provide information! The sound of the voice always says something about the relationship between the person who is speaking and the voice itself. About the resistance, the struggles, the demarcations, but also about the mutual support and the similarities. People and voices are in a relationship of tension with each other. The task of health-orientated voice development is to make this tension productive and beneficial for both sides.

 

When we say goodbye to the cultivation of a merely beautiful voice in this way, there is no longer any place for merely beautiful health. Health has nothing to do with a paradise-like original state without inhibitions and restrictions, even if our longing sometimes turns in this direction. Rather than a hoped-for state of life, health describes an attitude to life that does not shy away from confronting the challenges of illness and mortality. The voice is the medium that "exemplifies" this attitude, so to speak. We just have to listen to it.

 

Alfred Wolfsohn was probably the first to systematically turn his attention to the sounds of the voice, which would generally be labelled as sick, and to cultivate them in himself and his students. In the mid-fifties, he began to research "broken sounds", i.e. vocal sounds that emphasise precisely what should be avoided in singing lessons, namely all the sounds and noises that disturb a pure vocal sound. At this time, Wolfsohn was probably already very weakened by the illnesses he had brought back from the Second World War, and he was probably only able to produce pure vocal sounds with difficulty. The voice simply expressed his state of mind, and what could be more natural than to listen to it and also give the "sick" aspects the attention they deserved. Once again Wolfsohn experienced for himself that the human voice encompasses more than just beautiful sounds. Once again, life urged him to expand his ideas of the human voice and thus to arrive at the idea of the whole voice. For it is precisely in the rough, scratchy and broken sounds that the story of a person comes to light with particular intensity. The human voice also includes the weak, the sickly, the difficult, and the voice that knows how to consciously deal with these facets and is able to tell all its stories is a healthy one.

 

 

Dear AWE,

 

I would like to tell you about a dream that I am sure you would have liked. Dreams play a major role in voice work that you have initiated. When dealing with one's own voice, the dream experience is often very stimulating, and there are often astonishing parallels between the dream experiences and the respective state of voice development. My dream emerged from the depths of my soul when I was just beginning to approach my voice and attended the second seminar with Paul and Clara Silber. It has stayed with me ever since: I am taking part in a philosophy congress that is being held in a congress hotel somewhere in the countryside. In between, I go to my room, open the door and immediately hear strange sounds in a small corridor, apparently coming from the large, dark, wooden cupboard opposite me. I open the left-hand cupboard door and see a small yellow canary sitting in its cage. The poor animal looks rather haggard and dishevelled, and I say in my dream: Damn, I forgot to feed the bird! Then I open the right-hand side of the cupboard and see a big pile of rotten bird food lying there.

 

The bird has grown over the years. In later dreams it was sometimes an owl, sometimes even a whale, and it's no longer in the cupboard. But the questions "Where is my canary at the moment?" or "How much space does it currently have in my world?" keep cropping up, sometimes in dream language, other times through feelings or moods that indicate that new food is needed or that the cage door has slammed shut. In any case, I can say that I have a bird (a German expression for being a bit crazy)! Since I realised this, I have tried to look after him and give him the space he needs to sing freely.

 

The Whole Voice on Stage:

Extended Voice

 

 

The human voice is the apology of music.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

 

At some point in the late seventies, a man appeared on a German TV show, probably "Der Große Preis", maybe "Wetten, dass ...", who could imitate machine noises with his voice. Car engines, lawnmowers, hoovers. He was really good; the noises sounded amazingly real. Even back then, however, I asked myself what such an ability was good for. What was the point of being able to imitate the rattling of a VW Beetle? This man never made an appearance as a voice artist after that. But why not? He was able to do extraordinary things with his voice and clearly left the cultural barriers of beautiful singing behind him. What was missing from this man's vocal artistry to make it more than a curiosity?

 

In the search for an answer to this question, we will approach a direction in vocal art that is still young and encompasses a whole range of heterogeneous approaches under the title Extended Voice. What all extended voice artists have in common is the intention to artistically utilise those parts of the human voice that cannot be called singing in the narrow sense. Extended voice art thus offers itself as a counterpart to the idea of voice development as I have presented it here. Alfred Wolfsohn and Roy Hart therefore play an important role in the history of this young vocal art.

In terms of cultural history, the extended voice approach is a unique phenomenon. In all voice cultures around the world, certain spectrums of the human voice have always been favoured over others. Different cultures and different eras have had and still have their own vocal ideal. As different as the ideas of the beautiful voice may be, every culture recognises vocal sounds that do not seem suitable for singing and are therefore not used either artistically or ritually. The extended voice movement is the first attempt to make the entire human voice an instrument of artistic expression. Such attempts have been made before in the religious field, for example by the tongue-speaking Pentecostals or the "French Prophets", a group of Protestant French emigrants who caused quite a stir in London in the 17th century when they made the voice resound in their church services in a way that must have had a downright shocking effect. Incidentally, these Frenchmen came from the Cévennes, the same region to which Roy Hart and his theatre group moved from London 300 years later. However, the religiously motivated escape from the confines of so-called beautiful singing never had any effect on the voice in art. At the time, the idea of bringing all these strange, irritating and often scandalous voices to the stage was simply not yet conceivable. So the religious groups were not concerned with the voice and its training, but with God and the attempt to get closer to him through ecstasy, which is expressed through the voice.

 

Today's extended voice movement, which has become ever more colourful and larger since the 1990s, is a highly individualised scene of which it is not yet possible to say for sure whether it will grow into an independent art form. There is no artistic necessity for this. Much more important than a fixed common identity is the great diversity of the scene! Artists such as Sainkho Namtchylak, David Moss, Phil Minton, Meredith Monk, Laureen Newton, Paul Dutton, Sidsel Endressen, Fatima Miranda, Jaap Blonk and Jonathan Hart-Makwaia perform very personal and very different programmes that can sometimes be classified as jazz or new music, sometimes as sound poetry or Dada, sometimes as theatre or performance and often enough refuse to be categorised. These diverse vocal artists are connected by a family resemblance in their vocal aesthetic principles and by a common curiosity for vocal sound potential. Our map of the human voice, for which we are travelling, will make it much easier for voice explorers to find their way to the whole voice by marking these common features.

 

 

Excursus: vocal encounters

 

If you meet a wild animal, a deer, a wild boar or an eagle during a walk in the forest, such an encounter in the so-called wild has a very special quality, a peculiar intensity that hardly ever occurs in contact with fellow species in a wildlife park or zoo. Animals living in the wild are surrounded by a peculiar aura that flavours every contact, however fleeting, with a strangely irritating note. In a fenced enclosure, on the other hand, you get much closer to the animals; sometimes they literally eat out of your hand. Up close, you can see things about them that remain hidden when the animals are free, at least as long as they are alive and keep a safe distance from humans. While you can study the details of the animals much better when you are in contact with them over a fence, the overall impression is much stronger in its emotional dimension in the unprotected landscape.

 

Very similar differences can be experienced in the various forms of encounter with the human voice. A live performance conveys completely different moods and vibrations than a recording of the same concert or performance on disc. Voice and music that unfold freely in space have a disturbing and moving effect on the listener, who is exposed to the event in the same place and at the same time, in a way that can be compared to accidental eye contact with an animal. In the enclosure of the electronic sound recording, the moving moment of the performance can sometimes be surmised, sometimes it even awakens the memory of similar experiences and reactivates the feelings that emerged at the time. But the experiences are never congruent. Why should they? Both media have their artistic justification. They just shouldn't be confused. Recordings on audio media can perhaps copy the sound of the voice more or less authentically, but the environment, the tension, the crackling between the actors and the audience remains tied to the time of the event. Since the sound on a recording is therefore always different from that heard in a concert hall, recordings from a studio without direct audience participation open up the opportunity for voice researchers and extended voice artists as well as listeners to experience new kinds of voice. The studio allows a very precise, almost intimate approach to the voice, for the voice artist no less than for the listener. Just as the deer in the wildlife park comes so close to the visitor that he can touch it, the voice in the studio will be able to try out the sonority of closeness and open up in a very special way.

 

 

Classical singers usually have a fairly clear idea of the sound spectra they use in their singing, i.e. the ranges of the voice that the tradition dictates for the repertoire they sing. It is well known how classical singing should sound, despite its individual character. There may be great individual differences between artists in timbre, tone colour and intonation. A Maria Callas sounds very different from Anita Cerquetti, a Bryn Terfel different from Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. But doubts as to whether a voice is still in the field of classical singing or has left it are very rare. Despite the diversity of classical voices, the framework for this type of singing is clearly defined. Extended voice artists are different: the vocal sounds they use in their performances are so new to the audience and often even to the artist that the act of performance cannot be separated from the process of vocal research. At the end of a solo concert in Cologne, David Moss once remarked with satisfaction that he had produced two vocal sounds today that he had never heard before. An example of public voice exploration! The presentation of more or less alien voices on stage is part of the journey of discovery of the whole voice. The stage is the place where you can work and play with the possibilities of the voice in front of an interested public, but outside the protected space of seminars or rehearsals. In front of an audience, the explorer finds conditions through which completely new aspects of his voice can be brought to light and explored. Aspects that relate to the question of how showing and hearing the voice can influence each other. The tension between the audience and the artists creates an atmosphere that determines what is possible here and now, in this place and at this concert, and what is not. For vocal utterances, an anonymous audience represents a different touchstone than a voice teacher or the participants in a seminar, who have learnt a part of the vocal history of the person they are listening to while working together. Voice workshops function like research trips where the participants' ears and mouths are opened to the landscapes of the voice, i.e. the separation between those who show their voice and an audience that "only" listens does not exist in the seminar. In a public performance, on the other hand, the explorer(s) tell the audience what they have experienced on their journey. The audience has different prerequisites and expectations than the participants in a voice seminar. At the same time, for extended voice artists, every public performance is also a journey to their own voice, because while they are presenting their "travelogue", they are exploring new terrain for themselves and the audience - or familiar territory in a new way. Taking the audience along part of the way is a challenge that every voice artist must face. In short: for the curious voice explorer, the stage is a particularly attractive place where the voice reveals facets that remain hidden elsewhere.

 

 

The Aesthetics of the Extended Voice

 

The goal of developing the whole voice still indicates the direction of our journeys through the vocal worlds. What can the extended voice movement contribute to liberating us from the shackles of a culturally immanent conception that is too narrow, and from the habitual modesty in its so-called normal use? The first clues can be found in the musical-aesthetic ideas of John Cage, whose expansion of the concept of music had an enormous impact on the musical art of the 20th century.

 

Cage is without doubt one of the most important composers of the last century. But what does composer mean when it comes to the music he wrote? In his "Lecture on Nothing" from 1959, Cage says that the composer, in his sense, shifts the responsibility from making to accepting. To the acceptance of sounds that present themselves in a particular compositional situation. The ability to accept presupposes that one frees oneself from all concepts of how to compose, from the tonal music of our tradition as well as, for example, from the twelve-tone music that he learnt from Arnold Schönberg in Vienna. Rejecting these musical ideas does not mean that they should not appear in Cage's music; on the contrary, precisely by not committing oneself to anything in advance, it becomes possible to allow everything - if it presents itself. The music theorist Daniel Charles speaks here of a connection between music and the memory of the human cultural being, between music and forgetting. The development of an aesthetic ideal in music or vocal art requires memory, because one must be able to remember what one calls beautiful in order to be able to hold on to it or change it. Cage asks us to refuse to remember, to forget the history behind the sounds and to hear each sound as if we were hearing it for the first time. Giving up the idea that one can own sounds, music or aesthetics, preserve them and at best develop them further is the core demand of John Cage. He refuses to continue to force sounds into aesthetic concepts that block the way to our open-mindedness. In favour of the freest possible exploration of the whole world of sound, he abandons the value standards of good, beautiful, appropriate sound. In this way, music approaches life again, from which it has distanced itself in the conception of the classical musical work. The musical world of the classical tradition virtually excludes life; in the concert halls, pure art is celebrated, to which the audience is allowed to listen devoutly and silently. Every noise and every sound that is not written down by the composer and intended by the conductor disturbs the artistic experience. Cage, on the other hand, wants to give every acoustic event the same importance. The tenor's high C has no more rights than the clearing of an audience member's throat or the creaking of a chair. Cage took his idea of free, true-to-life music to its peak in the famous piece "4' 33", in which a pianist sits down in front of the piano, opens the lid to the keyboard and plays nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds! Suddenly, the silence becomes music, a silence that is enriched with a kaleidoscope of sounds and noises that nobody would notice if the pianist were playing a "real" piece.

 

 

The sounds reach the harbour, the theatre, the ear, the great harbour of the theatre ear ... This is where the sounds return that have gone out from here at this very moment. My listening ear receives those sounds differently on their return than on their departure: the sounds are multiplied by the hearing of the sounds. I am looking for something that is said to me between the sounds and of which I do not know whether I should expect it with desire or with fear. (...) There is a voice, hidden among the voices, which resounds and disappears again ... You, it says, or I, it says. Remember. I remember the memory, she says, but I don't want to remember the memory that rises up ... But perhaps instead of the memory it is the expectation, the moment at the end ... my end, yours ... There is a voice that speaks of me, buried under the voices in me, in the listening ... You are dying, she says. I am afraid.

 

Luciano Berio / Italo Calvino: the last words of Prospero in "Un Re in ascolto"

 

 

Saying goodbye to the restrictive traditional concept of music in order to go in search of the sound of the whole world is very similar to Wolfsohn's idea of abandoning so-called beautiful singing as the only authorised form of vocal expression. Both lead to the liberation from traditional structures and concepts in order to come closer to the actual phenomenon, here the voice, there the world of sound, as a whole. Cage wants to free the sounds from the cultural-historical ballast that makes every note resound in a larger context of meaning and thus find his way back to simple sonority. Wolfsohn and Roy Hart want to give the whole voice the space to resound without being hindered by cultural guidelines as to what may or may not be called singing. But the voice has qualities that make it stand out from the general sphere of acoustic phenomena. Because it has meaning per se! The sound of the voice always points beyond itself to the person who produces it. Reducing the human voice to its pure sonority would be a violent "trick" that runs counter to the intention of its liberation. Voice minus meaningfulness leads to a vocal sound that lacks the most important thing: its very own history and thus its relationship to life. Of course, there is nothing to be said against cultivating and artistically utilising the vocal sound, which is reduced to its pure acoustic dimension. But Cage's aim of bringing music closer to life again cannot be realised in this way. Nevertheless, John Cage would not want to hear any talk about meaning. The omnipresent meaning with which every sound is infected has no place in his music. Here, sound is to become audible again as mere sound, free of any historical, aesthetic or musical function. In this radical sound aesthetic, important ideas can be found in Cage's Buddhist world view. For him, liberation from musical concepts boils down to recognising that we possess nothing and can therefore be open to everything. The realisation that every possession is based on an illusion frees us from the need to hold on to anything and gives us access to the whole world. In this attitude, the juxtaposition of two sounds is experienced merely as this juxtaposition, without attributing to it any additional meaning such as beautiful, fitting or ugly. For every aesthetic attribute is based on a concept that we could just as well let go of from a Buddhist point of view in order to free the sound from its restrictive judgement. However, Cage's open aesthetic is accompanied by an extremely high demand on the training of our hearing! The pure spirit, freed from all concepts and ideas, cannot be realised so easily. It is only the one without possessions in the sense of Cage's Buddhism who enjoys every combination of sounds. Cage's compositions are therefore, strictly speaking, music for the enlightened. The rest of us will still have our difficulties with this for the time being. But fortunately, we don't need to follow Cage's direction to achieve an aesthetic of the whole voice. The voice is not a mere sound generator, and if it is "liberated" from the meaningful dimension of its sounds, it loses its charm, its timbre, its mystery.

 

But what does this meaningfulness, which is supposed to make the human voice so unique, actually "mean"? In any case, it is about more than a mere musical meaning, which was an important point of attack for Cage, because the musical context usually prevents the sound from being perceived in its pure sonority. In a conventional musical composition, a tone always stands in a functional context such as a chord or a melody. There it fulfils its task for the work. It derives its meaning from the tonal environment in which it sounds. However, the field of meaning of the voice has always encompassed much more than the purely musical realm! Let's come back to the voice imitator, who can imitate the sounds of machines. His vocal sounds undoubtedly have a meaning, but it is firstly too unambiguous and secondly too banal. Too unambiguous because it allows no other association than the machine that sounds like that. It is too banal because the imitated synthetic sound does not open up any space in which one could refer to something of one's own, one's own voice or one's own history. Imitated engine noises do not create any interesting fields of meaning; they may be curious, but they are artistically uninteresting.

 

The extended voice artist, who possibly makes much stranger sounds on stage than the engine imitator, moves in a vocal field in which meaning appears, a meaning to which the imagination, memory and fantasy of the listener can attach itself. The audience's associations sometimes have little to do with the concrete meaning that the vocal artist intends with his sounds. But you can't misunderstand anything in a way in which you could hear a food processor instead of the not quite perfectly imitated hoover in our vocal acrobat. An extended voice performance awakens memories or intuitions of one's own hidden voices and - who knows? - the hitherto undiscovered life possibilities that lie behind them. Meaningfulness is the bridge between the voice artist and the audience. In the unfamiliar voice, the listener recognises or senses the strangeness in his own voice, the areas of his voice that have hitherto languished. Like all good art, the performance of the whole voice confronts us with new, unused or repressed parts of ourselves.

 

Here one could argue with the French philosophers Jacques Derrida or Roland Barthes that the idea of meaning or sense, to use the word most often used in a philosophical context, is precisely the most serious obstacle to liberation from the boundaries of our culture, which prevent the hidden sides of the human being from unfolding. By insisting on the significance of the voice, I would then achieve the opposite of what I intend, namely remaining in a world that has already assigned the voice its place and scope. As long as we understand meaning as that which is always and everywhere born of European reason and its paradigms of truth and beauty, we remain prisoners of an old story that we actually want to continue with the whole voice in a slightly different direction. But what would the alternative to meaning be? The body? From our perspective of "thinking the voice", the turn to the body, mainly in French philosophy, was a correct and necessary step. But if we stop there, the recourse to the physicality of the human being falls short and excludes too much of what is humanly possible for living practice. If I dedicate myself to a text in order to get behind the superficial meaning of the language with the help of the whole voice, then the reference to the body is a means, but not the end. Even and especially in the "roughness of the voice" (Barthes) one hears the field of meaning of its sound. The meaningfulness of the voice encompasses much more than the meaning that can be expressed linguistically. The disturbingly alien sound that "speaks" to us in the voices of artists such as Sainkho Namtchylak or Roy Hart is so irritating because it echoes things that we could also recognise from ourselves - without us knowing what or who is imagining! The search for voices also goes beyond the body, the significance of vocal sounds points to a much larger field!

 

How do vocal artists succeed in defining the fields of meaning that make their performance more than mere artistry? I believe the key lies in establishing an intentional relationship between yourself and the voices you produce, in always being on the lookout for the meanings of your own vocal sounds. The clearer the vocal meanings are to me or the stronger the curious attitude towards my own voice appears, the greater the chance for the audience to enter into the field of meaning. The audience does not have to hear the same meanings that the artist has in mind. Therein lies the difference between meaning and meaningfulness. If meanings are relatively clearly preformed, meaningfulness leaves the freedom to combine one's own images, feelings, thoughts and stories with the sound of the voice. The liberation of music and the voice from the shackles of concepts predetermined by cultural history remains a common concern of Cage and the Extended Voice movement. But in contrast to Cage, who wants every sound to be reduced to its mere sonority, the voice is precisely about emphasising the field of meaning of the voice. The often so alien sounds of the voice, which cannot be easily categorised in the usual artistic categories, are so interesting, so strange, frightening or funny because their strangeness reveals a meaningfulness that can often only be guessed at. The strangeness of another voice always refers to the strangeness of my own, to the hitherto undiscovered worlds of sound within me. Hardly any of the strange impressions appear clear, well-formed or can even be described. The voice leads us into worlds where language seems to be overwhelmed. That is why interest in the fields of meaning of the voice has nothing to do with intellectualisation, which Cage denounces with good reason. Meaningfulness is not bound to the intellect alone. It is the path to closeness to life that Cage also wanted to take with his music.

 

The integration of the voice into the living field of meaning is one of the reasons why many extended voice artists make improvisation a pillar of their vocal art. Improvisation allows them to respond to the situation in a new way, to take up their own moods and those of the audience and transfer them into the pieces. In this way, the significance of the voice and the pieces is kept flexible. In this respect, John Cage is a good composer for extended voice artists. His method of integrating random moments into the music leads to an openness that makes every performance unique. Another possibility is the collaboration between composer and singer, as practised by Peter Maxwell Davies and Roy Hart in the piece "Eight Songs for a Mad King". As far as we can understand today, the composition process was closely interwoven with vocal improvisations by Roy Hart on the themes and texts that Maxwell Davies wanted to set to music. In earlier pieces by Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, there was also some freedom, despite extremely precise instructions as to what the performer had to do. "Spiral" for voice and shortwave radio is an example of this, which was also performed by Roy Hart.

 

 

 

Steps Towards the Extended Voice

 

 

Alfred Wolfsohn was interested in searching for the hidden meanings in the human voice, and in the relationship between the sound and the person making it. This is not yet an artistic, but rather a psychological approach. But just as Cage elevated the closeness to life of music to the decisive criterion for its value, Wolfsohn found the actual interesting point of voice development in the relationship between voice and life, which also gives the artistic exploration of the whole voice its appeal.

 

 

Excursus: The "8-octave voice" 

The fact that men sing the Queen of the Night's aria is astonishing enough, but not entirely inconceivable against the background of a male soprano tradition, albeit one that dates back a long time. It is much more difficult to accept the possibility of women descending into the depths of Sarastro. For Wolfsohn, this mental barrier was not physiological, but entirely cultural. This did not make the path to the female low voice much easier. His student Marita Günther told me that Wolfsohn's group regularly celebrated when one of the women was able to sing the next lower note after months of searching. Wolfsohn and his students were truly pioneers. There were no role models for such low female voices at the time. Marita Günther, Jenny Johnson and the other female students were breaking new ground. Once the first people had been in the new territory, exploring the new areas became much easier for the following students. As Marita Günther used to say: "Today I can teach a woman in a fortnight what took me two years. However, the pioneers of the whole voice had the advantage over the later ones that their search for the new voices was always connected with the opening of new mental spaces of possibility. Only with a deep inner willingness and a genuine confrontation with the fears blocking the path to the new vocal sound they were able to find their whole voice. Today, voice lessons are often about not moving on to new areas too quickly so as not to get stuck in mere acrobatics. There is a certain danger in this when the cultural and psychological barriers that held the vocal sounds in place are now suddenly relatively easy to overcome. It becomes more difficult to listen to the new sounds long enough to recognise what is behind them and what they have to do with "me".

 

 

In the tradition of voice development established by Wolfsohn, the liberation of the whole voice into an art form that breaks free from the framework of traditional forms of singing and recitation took place in steps. The first recordings we know of Wolfsohn and his students date from the mid-fifties of the last century. Not long after Wolfsohn began teaching students in London, some of them were able to sing the arias of all the roles in Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute", from the Queen of the Night to Sarastro! The voices covered the entire humanly possible pitch range! They were human voices in Wolfsohn's sense. The recordings of the time show an incredible tonal variety, and it would be difficult to find voices capable of doing the same today. At the time, Wolfsohn had obviously reached a point where he had long since practically overcome the classical idea of a voice that can only master one register, such as tenor or soprano. His pupils provided a living example of the expressive possibilities of the whole human voice! The new paths that this opened up for a completely unique vocal art only gradually emerged in the years that followed. At the beginning of the 1950s, Wolfsohn was still working relatively closely within the framework of a conventional conception of art, which expanded the forms of singing and recitation but did not go beyond them. Things were already quite different in lessons with Wolfsohn at this time! There was room for everything that wanted to be heard, regardless of whether it had any musical "value". The only important thing for Wolfsohn was the search for the meaning of every vocal sound and the question of how it could be made into a component of the voice that was available to the singer so that he or she could consciously deal with it. Whether this was a classical artistic utilisation was of secondary importance from the very beginning. Thus, even in the mid-fifties, tapes that reflect the practical development of the voice in the rehearsal room rather than the artistic use of the results contain vocal sounds that no longer have anything to do with the conventional idea of singing or speaking. The voices are not yet part of an extended voice art, but they open the doors to a vocal art that will leave classical forms far behind. From around 1958, Wolfsohn began experimenting with "broken sounds", i.e. sounds in which the so-called background noises, which traditional singing was designed to avoid, became the main feature. We know of no recordings from these years, and it is not clear how close Wolfsohn came to the idea of an independent art form of the Extended Voice. The last step towards a creative approach to the whole voice on stage, which had to first find its own forms and rules, was taken by Wolfsohn's pupil Roy Hart, both with his later solo appearances and with the performances of the Roy Hart Theatre.

 

The theatre, which is not in something specific, but uses all languages, gestures, sounds, words, passions, cries, finds itself precisely at the point where the spirit needs a language to make its expressions known.

 

Antonin Artaud

 

How little the European audience of the mid-20th century was apparently prepared for extended voice art, or rather: how little they were thought to be allowed to expect, had to be painfully experienced by another artist who, as early as 1947, staged the first performance that gave vocal expression to the abysses of the human soul. In that year, the French actor, writer and director Antonin Artaud produced a radio programme for French radio entitled "Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu" (To finish with the judgement of God). The broadcast was banned by the director of the radio station on the grounds that he had to justify himself to a broad public that should not be offended in its moral or religious views. The danger of offending artistic views apparently did not play a major role officially, although it was precisely here and not in the recitation of any supposed obscenities that the explosive power of Artaud's radio contribution lay. One contemporary witness, whose artistic convictions were apparently severely violated, accused Artaud of combining blasphemy with obscenity and broken language with shouting. At times it would seem like being in the mental hospital - where Artaud actually had to spend years of his life.

 

Excursus: Artaud and Roy Hart

In 1972 - one year before Antonin Artaud's radio play " Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu /Schluß mit dem Gottesgericht" was heard uncensored for the first time on French radio - Roy Hart took part in a project by the German writer and radio producer Paul Pörtner. Pörtner produced a radio version of a libretto that Artaud had once written for Edgar Varèse, who had little use for it. Varèse never composed the opera for it. No musical instruments are used in Pörtner's version of "There is no more firmament/tEs gibt kein Firmament mehr"; in addition to the speakers, Roy Hart alone provides the acoustic landscapes of the radio opera with his powerful voice.

 

In his radio play, Artaud formally combines recitations that go far beyond the usual handling of texts with passages in which he lets his voice run free, supported by drums and xylophone. With " Cry in the Staircase", Artaud introduces unrestrained roaring into the vocal art. There is nothing cultivated to be heard, no beautiful art in the voice! This is precisely why it is still immediately moving today. The unrestrained voice confronts us with areas of our being that are generally ignored and suppressed in the cultivated world. Indeed, in the confrontation with a "wild" voice it becomes clear that it was the very self-understanding of culture to keep the dark sides of the human being small. Without realising that culture casts the shadows in the first place! No wonder that we initially react to these strange voices with fear and defence.

 

 

... It is only necessary to return a little, very little, to the plastic, active, respiratory sources of language; it is only necessary to reconnect the words with the bodily movements that produced them, to let the logical, discursive side of the word disappear behind its physical, emotional side. In other words, instead of being taken solely for what they want to say from a grammatical point of view, words need only be understood from their tonal point of view and perceived as movement, and the language of literature is formed anew and comes to life.

 

Antonin Artaud

 

 

Artaud's genius lay in his ability to be intellectually and artistically uninhibited. With this gift, which was completely indistinguishable from mental illness in the society of his time and probably also in ours, he did for the performing arts what Nietzsche had done for philosophy two or three generations earlier: he brought down the heavy walls that were supposed to protect us from the intrusion of the wild and disturbing into our cultural enclosure. What was supposed to preserve truth and reason in philosophy fell to beauty and the right measure in art.

 

If I am a poet or an actor, it is not to write or declaim poems, but to live them. When I recite a poem, it is not to be applauded, but to feel how the bodies of men and women, I say bodies, tremble and whirl around, whirl around, like one whirls around, in accordance with mine (...) I want poems (...) to become reality and for life to escape from the books, the magazines, the theatres or the fairs that hold it back and crucify it in order to capture it.

 

Antonin Artaud

 

 

The story in which Artaud used a lecture entitled "La théâtre et la peste" in 1933 to literally embody the plague has become famous. He did not talk about what the plague does to people, but portrayed it with all his usual uncompromising behaviour! The result was that the entire auditorium, without exception, left the hall before the end of the lecture, disturbed, shocked or disgusted. In this way he demonstrated the deep gap that opens up between a well-mannered linguistic communication of a topic and its direct embodiment. As long as language only pursues the "bread and butter" of conveying messages, it is unsuitable for Artaud to come close to the human. Language also requires an uninhibited voice in order to be able to produce "magic spells" again.

 

Uninhibition describes a particularly charged version of the willingness to allow what wants to show itself. Artaud's uninhibited voice is free because it does not allow itself to be restricted in its diversity of expression by an artistically prescribed form. The voice creates the form! But in another respect, Artaud's voice still lacks freedom. With its own force, it shows a certain psychological state in which Artaud, according to his own statements, was almost constantly and which he once described as "perpetual raving". The raging voice sounds high-pitched. A "raving addict" will never reach the lower ranges of his voice. Artaud does have vocal facets at his disposal that terrify other people just by listening to him. But he is far removed from the idea of the whole voice.

Once again, it was Roy Hart who took the final step towards an art of the whole voice. In his work, the creative combination of freedom from vocal inhibitions and free access to the whole voice came together for the first time. At the end of the 1940s, Hart moved from South Africa to London with a scholarship to study acting at the Royal Academy for Dramatic Arts. He soon met Wolfsohn and, convinced that he could learn more from him than at drama school, he devoted 12 years to exploring and developing his voice together. After Wolfsohn's death in 1962, he took over some of his students and began to transfer his teacher's ideas to theatre. Perhaps this was the decisive turning point in the liberation of the whole voice from the constraints of a traditional understanding of music. The theatre offered a stage for the colours and facets of the voice that had previously remained in Wolfsohn's rehearsal room in the context of vocal and self-exploration, and Hart knew how to make use of the freedoms that the theatre stage opened up for the voice. With his theatre group, the Roy Hart Theatre, founded in 1968, he set about exploring the possibilities of the whole voice theatrically, and in his solo performances he transferred the newly discovered freedoms back into the musical realm. Especially with "Eight Songs for a Mad King", the piece that Peter Maxwell Davies had composed for him, Hart set standards for vocal artistry that have lost none of their validity to this day.

 

Roy Hart was the first vocal artist who was able to combine and utilise all the components of extended vocal art. His voice had an enormous range of pitches and a repertoire of tone colours that encompassed and at the same time far exceeded the range of so-called normal singing.

Always in search of new ways to use the whole voice artistically, he left the traditional guidelines of performing arts far behind. Conscious of the fact that the Extended Voice should not aim at mere vocal acrobatics, he never reduced the voice to its pure sonority, but rather formed vocal fields of meaning that point beyond the pure vocal sound into the light and dark spheres of human life. John Cage's call for music to be close to life is realised in a very unique way in the Extended Voice, as understood by Roy Hart and the artists who refer to him. We have seen that Cage wants to prevent a sound from being heard only in its functional context, which completely determines its meaning and thus cuts it off from the flow of life. The art of the whole voice is about using the voice to provide a framework in which every sound has the freedom to build up a field of meaning around itself and thus intensify contact with the living. Freedom and closeness to life are the cornerstones of the extended voice. In order to fully utilise the tonal potential of the voice, the whole voice moves as free as possible from cultural and psychological restrictions and thus gains the freedom to become a meaningful voice whose significance is not completely controlled by the artist, but is consciously directed. This freedom can be heard! It is particularly evident in the sound of the voice where there is no longer any trace of vocal control. To reveal obstacles, constrictions and blockages vocally also requires freedom from traditional ideas of singing as well as from the inherited shyness to make these sounds public. Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, cultural barriers no longer hinder the development of the voice as much as they did fifty years ago. But dealing with the extended voice, the whole voice, is still not a self-evident fact. The liberated voice follows the vital impulses it encounters; it not only establishes proximity to life - it finds itself in the midst of life, which is given a new structure through the vocal fields of meaning that it unfolds. The voice moulds itself into a living form in which it can express itself freely. Here, strangely enough, we are approaching an understanding of art and beauty that one would actually have to assume to embody the exact opposite of what we have in mind. However, the demand for "living form" and "freedom in appearance" comes literally from writings on art theory in which Friedrich Schiller attempted to define the concept of beauty! Should the Extended Voice with its strange, weird sounds represent the perfection of the classical ideal of beauty? Has beauty re-emerged from the oblivion into which it had fallen in the modern age in a new, unfamiliar guise? Does the rejection of every conventional idea of beauty lead to true beauty? Both pairs of terms, freedom/creation and life/form, were intended by Schiller to illustrate the connection between spirit and nature in art. Mere imitation of nature is not enough for true art; the creative will of a free spirit must be added, which unobtrusively but strikingly gives the work of art its character. Schiller found his ideal of beauty best realised in the art of Greek ancient times, which was therefore the model for his present. We do not know very much about how singing was practised in ancient Greece. But if we consider how closely art and ritual were interwoven two and a half thousand years ago, how important the Orphic-Dionysian cults were, in which things were certainly less well-behaved than on the stages of German Classicism, then it becomes clear how close Schiller's idea of beauty was to the aesthetic guidelines of the Extended Voice, albeit without having the slightest idea of it. His definitions of beauty as "freedom in appearance" and "living form" are in any case open enough to encompass a late modern phenomenon such as Extended Voice art. The whole voice is the voice set free, which does not refuse to be guided by a "free spirit". Extended Voice on stage is a radical artistic contribution to approaching this double freedom and presenting it in an individual way.