A Voice from my Childhood
(please note: This is a very rough translation done by myself with the help of deepl.com. It is very likely that you find peculiarities and mistakes. I am happy to receive proposals for corrections and changes into something closer to proper English!)
The subject (Gegenstand in German) I want to tell you about here is, strictly speaking, not a subject at all. It never stands opposite (gegenüber) and when it does show itself, it is constantly in motion. It has a thoroughly ephemeral character, although it can engrave itself deeply in the memory, and has done so in the example I want to present. In its original form it cannot be held, it escapes at the very moment it appears. His presence often evokes strong inner reactions in people: feelings, ideas, longings, fears. It belongs to the field of art and to the everyday world. Every day we deal with this non-representational object, but we rarely pay attention to it.
We are talking about the human voice. The one voice that was apparently loud enough in my childhood to resonate in me as a memory today, however, came to me in a fixed form. The vocal sounds were stamped onto a vinyl record. The record was in a thin white paper sleeve that was in a cardboard folded bag. At that time, these sleeves were not called covers, at least not in German. Standing upright in my parents' very modest record shelf, it was waiting to be played with the help of a small wooden box with a round turntable, tone arm and loudspeaker in the lid. My not-quite-perfect object, because it was so ephemeral, thus had a tangible object dress, a kind of home in which it could be found and welcomed at any time. Although that's not quite true either, because the disc has disappeared in the meantime. I can no longer find it, neither at my place nor in the cellar of my parents' house. In the end, perhaps the difference between the ephemeral and the seemingly permanent object is not quite so great.
On the record sleeve, as far as I remember, you could see in black and white (maybe there was a red spot somewhere?) the relatively dark face of a man in his mid-thirties, with a grey fur cap and no full beard. This is significant in that I have not seen the man beardless anywhere else in the decades that followed. The face was photographed in half-profile slightly from above. To the right of the head, large Cyrillic letters, of which I still do not know what they mean. Underneath, the text in German: Ivan Rebroff and the Don Cossack Choir singing Russian folk tunes.
Now it's out. My first record, which I probably got from my parents at my own request - or maybe it was like this: it already existed before and I declared it my property? - was not by the Beatles, of whom I only became a fan later. It wasn't by Ella Fitzgerald, Yma Sumac or Jimi Hendrix - not to mention Maria Callas or Richard Tauber. My first record was by a German singer with Russian ancestry who pretended to be a folksy Russian in order to give himself and his remarkable voice an image that would make his vocal abilities seem acceptable and almost natural.
The image issues didn't interest me as an eight or nine year old boy. I was first attracted by the aura the record cover exuded. The man in the picture looked at me with a skeptical, dismissive gaze and he wasn't smiling. He scowled at me as if to warn me rather than invite me to follow him into his music. On the back of the record sleeve, hidden between blocks of black and white text, was a photograph showing a campfire from a greater distance, with a few men standing or sitting around it. One had a balalaika in his hand. Again, there was no impression of open arms. These people preferred to stay among themselves and sing their songs. An audience would only disturb the atmosphere. The almost unreal distance that these images created from me, the refusal to offer me a bridge into their world, resonated in a strange way with my young soul. I was curious.
Then this dark and at the same time warm voice of the singer, embedded in the chorus of male voices that moved around the singing of Ivan Rebroff like dark dream images. It was not the music that fascinated me. It seemed so alien and almost forbidden to me, as it matched the images on the cover. Apart from the Russian popular song "Kalinka", I can't remember a single song on the record. The fascination came from the voice. But why this four-octave voice that jumps between bear roars and birdsong? Why not Heino (an in his days very popular German singer) of whom there were also one or two records in our record cupboard, which I also listened to without feeling the fascination or rather the curiosity that Ivan Rebroff triggered in me.
Rebroff's voice will have reminded me at that time of the voice of my often absent father. Both sounded dark, warm, with a dash of mysteriousness, deep, not only in the tonal sense, but really rising from the depths. That's why Heino would hardly have come into question as a sonic anchor of longing. His voice never sounded to me as if it were sitting in the depths, rather as if it was being commanded there. For a few years after my voice broke, at least my speaking voice resembled my father's very much. I was regularly mistaken for him on the phone. People who didn't know me thought they were talking to my father, and in telephone conversations with the family there was always irritation when they mentioned each other's names.
In the childish image of longing, the Don Cossacks probably played the role of my uncles, my father's seven older brothers, who together could fill all the choir voices and who provided the background music at family celebrations. With a joy of singing, a spontaneity and naturalness that has died out in the meantime not only in our family. I watched and listened to this spectacle from an inner distance at the time, and no one had the idea of letting me or any of the children sing along. This reminds me of my reaction to Ivan Rebroff's record cover. The same distance that is not dissolved on the part of the singers and that is perhaps why I am so attracted to it. Maintaining one's own space and still being in contact with the world. As I had to realise much later, a characteristic of the voice plays a role here, which uses this very idea. When my voice is in action, it forms its own space with me, my body, my attention, and at the same time it goes out, shows itself to the world and makes contact.
My uncles could do all the so-called male voices from the low bass (my father) to the high tenor. But there was no soprano. The popular male singing voice in German countries had no use for sopranos. This was and is different in Russian singing. Here the vocal double bass has its counter-part in the soprano, which is heard just as masculine as the other vocal registers. Ivan Rebroff was able to glide smoothly over the many octaves with his voice, to move from the deep bass into the high soprano without letting any effort be heard. He could sound like a father one moment and his own son the next. It is quite possible that for me, the son's unconscious longing for an unhindered connection to his father materialised in Rebroff's voice.
I started singing at an early age, first in the children's choir at school and soon afterwards in the somewhat more demanding church boys' choir, which was called Schola in our village, pronounced German SCH. As far as I can remember, I was quite a solid singer, with a beautiful soprano that blended well into the sound of the choir. I enjoyed singing, but I can't say that any vocal epiphanies happened in me. (Those came later.) There were no ambitions or desires beyond choral singing. Music did not become my purpose in life, but remained a nice side thing.
At this point I stopped my memory notes and went searching on the internet for the cover of the record that was so important to me in childhood. Of course, I found it in no time and surprisingly, my memory turned out to be quite valid. The cover looks just as I imagined it in my mind's eye after a good four decades after all. Even the red spot I suspected exists. The German text "Ivan Rebroff sings folk tunes from ancient Russia" is printed in red. But my memory did fabricate a significant error. There is no trace of the Don Cossacks, whom I thought I had heard on the record and seen announced on the cover. My memory proved to be creative at this point, and for good reasons. As I now know from my bit of research, Ivan Rebroff sang with a Don Cossack choir and they probably made recordings together. Perhaps I had heard of it as a child. But that is not the point.
The singing of the Don Cossacks reappeared in my life many years later. The story happened in London, where I was visiting a woman called Sheila Braggins. She had been a pupil of the voice teacher Alfred Wolfsohn in the 1950s and early 1960s, who had had to flee from Berlin to London to escape the Nazis. He had developed his very unusual ideas on voice development while still in Germany in the twenties and thirties, and after the war he began teaching in London. One of his first students was the theatre director Peter Zadek, who writes in his memoirs that Wolfsohn was a kind of guru in the (Jewish) cultural scene in London for several years. In Wolfsohn's (unpublished) memoirs one can read how formative the experience was for him when he heard the Don Cossacks for the first time. Here he could hear voices in a musical context that apparently did not seem to care about the classical division of vocal registers and the accompanying demarcation of a male and a female range. Wolfsohn was concerned with overcoming the cultural restrictions in which a voice is assigned only one register in which it has to sound and sing. According to his conviction, every human voice can in principle move in every humanly possible pitch and his idea of voice liberation aims to give the voice back this original freedom. And here we are again with Ivan Rebroff, the one-man Don Cossack choir, as he was once called. His voice was able to move confidently over more than four octaves. That's the range from low bass to high soprano, from low F in Sarastro to the two-stroke F of the Queen of the Night. Wolfsohn had pupils in the fifties who could sing all the arias of The Magic Flute. The range of some of the voices he formed was even greater by an extended margin, as we can still hear today in recordings by Roy Hart, the pupil who was later to develop the work further and make it fruitful for the theatre, and Jill and Jenny Johnson. Sheila Braggins was also part of this circle of students. By the time I met her in London, I had been working for a good ten years with various teachers who referred to Wolfsohn and his successor Roy Hart. Sheila was 80 years old at the time and still had a brilliant vocal range, although she had stopped singing after Wolfsohn's death in 1962. From Wolfsohn she had inherited a record with recordings of the Don Cossacks from the 1930s, which she played for me during the visit. The most impressive thing about this performance for me was Sheila's youthful enthusiasm for the quality of the voices and for her associated memories of her beloved and adored teacher. But the choral singing was indeed exceptional. I am no expert on Don Cossack choruses, but when compared with more recent recordings I listened to afterwards, the quality of the old chorus proves outstanding. The supple agility, the depth as a tonal quality beyond pitch, the warmth and liveliness of these voices were touching in the real sense. The singers sang not only tones but feelings, and suddenly it was clear that behind the cliché of the Russian soul lies a strong, true core. Wolfsohn could not only hear his idea of the voice playing freely with all registers confirmed in the Don Cossacks, but also that his second basic conviction had already been realised in this choir.
For him, it was decisive that every human voice sound is and represents more than a purely tonal phenomenon. In every vocal utterance, something can be heard of the person who is showing his voice at the moment, of his history, his inner situation, his longings, his fears, his ideas, experiences and hopes. That is why, for Wolfsohn, voice development never consisted of doing any exercises to train the vocal apparatus, but of listening to the voice, finding out where it is at the moment and where it wants to go, and then following it on its way. To perceive the voice in this way also means to pay attention to what is triggered by the sound of the voice in the person sounding and in the person listening. It is about listening to the inner reactions and taking them seriously. Then the voice experiences the permission to open up, often enough into regions that seemed almost unthinkable to the person sounding before.
There are people who easily acquire this openness, at least with regard to the range of the voice, or who possess it from the beginning. In principle, everyone has the extended spaces in the voice, but for some the doors to it are already open.
When, after some detours that led me to philosophy among other things, I began in my late twenties to rediscover and take seriously my fascination with the human voice in general and finally my own voice in particular, it turned out that some of these doors into new vocal spaces were also easy to open for me. It was not particularly difficult for me to listen to my voice even when it stepped out of the so-called normal sound range. I probably owe this freedom to my early listening experience with Ivan Rebroff.
When I think about how little attention I paid to my voice in the first decades of my life and how much the voice kept trying to attract precisely that attention, I am overcome by a strange feeling, as if it had been preordained that the voice would have to become my life's theme. Only it took me a long time to realise and accept that. Predestination sounds like metaphysical folklore to my ears, but as yet I don't know how to put this phenomenon into words in a better way. By the way, ignorance of the voice has not just been my personal problem. Most people only concern themselves with their voice when it causes problems. Moreover, the history of philosophy is also characterised by a frightening consistency in not taking note of the human voice. Since Plato, it has been understood only as a kind of vehicle for language, without any independent qualities. It plays a certain role in music, but as a possible source of anthropologically valuable knowledge it has only come into focus since the beginning of the 20th century. It is no coincidence that this newly awakened interest in the voice coincides with a groundbreaking invention: the possibility of technically recording voice sounds and playing them back independently of the presence of the person to whom the voice belongs. Only then did the voice acquire the qualities that make it the kind of ob-ject that philosophy likes. It loses some of its ephemeral nature and can be played back and heard as often as desired. Just like the object of my childhood that we are talking about here.
Ivan Rebroff was one of those people who do not have to search long for their great vocal range. He had the necessary talent and was aware of it early on. The way the voice is normally understood in our cultural circle, one cannot even think of extending one's voice to four octaves. That is reserved for a few exceptional voices. Either one had such a voice or one did not. Singers like Ivan Rebroff, Yma Sumac or Enrico Caruso, who said he could also sing bass, are considered special talents. The normal voice has a range of two to two and a half octaves, it is said, which can be trained and educated as a singer. Wolfsohn has correctly seen that this limitation has nothing to do with a natural disposition of the voice, but is a cultural construction. A construction, I would add, that can be culturally removed again as soon as the conditions for such a movement become favourable. Today, in times of globalised ears that have long since relativised the European vocal ideal, Wolfsohn's assertion sounds much less radical than it did in the 1920s and 1930s. Wolfsohn was the pioneer of vocal liberation in times when the term world music did not yet exist and the Don Cossacks were pretty much the most exotic thing you could hear in Central Europe.
Another big step awaited the process of vocal liberation, one that takes us far away from Ivan Rebroff and the Don Cossacks. From an artistic perspective, one has to ask what to do with a multi-octave voice like Rebroff's or the pupils of Alfred Wolfsohn. Rebroff's answer was to fit into the Russian tradition, in which the very low and the very high male voice have a history. With his pseudonym Ivan Rebroff, Hans Rolf Rippert made himself a Russian singer and was extremely successful with this strategy, not only in Germany, but also in France and in Russia itself! But one can hardly claim that he paved artistically groundbreaking paths with his singing. Wolfsohn also faced this problem in the 1950s. From an artistic point of view, it does not make much sense for a singer to be able to sing all the arias of The Magic Flute. Composers are needed who write for this new voice. The first attempts in the field remained very closely tied to conventional ideas of music and this created the danger that the voices, moving easily in six octaves, were understood as a kind of acrobatic circus act, appearing more bizarre than artistically valuable. The solution to this problem was in the making with the next revolutionary step of freeing the voice from the bondage of a restrictive understanding of the voice. In his work with his students, among whom Roy Hart played a central role, Wolfsohn realised that it could not only be a matter of liberating the voice within the framework of classical notions of singing, but that the cultural distinction between vocal sounds that are beautiful and therefore suitable for singing and all the other vocal expressions had to be abandoned. In Wolfsohn's voice lessons, this distinction had long ceased to play a role. Wolfsohn listened with unchanging curiosity to all the vocal sounds in his pupils that wanted to show themselves. But now it became clear to him that the whole field of vocal possibilities is potentially material for vocal art. Or to put it another way: every vocal sound is singing! Probably for the first time in the history not only of Europe, but of all so-called advanced civilisations, the separation between beautiful vocal sounds that produce singing on the one hand and the ugly vocal parts that produce shouting at best was erased. It was to be up to Roy Hart and his Roy Hart Theatre to put this insight into artistic practice. Throughout his life, Wolfsohn's master student sought ways and forms to bring the whole human voice into art. At the end of the 1960s, experimental theatre, which emerged in many places in Europe, was particularly suitable for this. In the Roy Hart Theatre, the stage performance was developed and designed entirely out of the voice. As a solo artist, Roy Hart has worked with various composers of new music, such as Stockhausen, Henze, Maxwell-Davies, to find space for the unique possibilities of his voice.
In my own way, I am continuing this search today, and in this process I have landed with my artistic partners in the middle of performance art in recent years. There the voice finds the greatest freedom from musical guidelines and is exposed to completely new and different challenges than in concert or on theatre stages. This journey of exploration has only just begun. But it seems to have been initiated in me in early childhood days, by a record with the fascinating voice of a man who sounded so different from all the other singers I knew. For whatever reason, I quite unintentionally managed a feat of abstraction back then that still amazes me today. At that time, I separated Rebroff's magnificent voice from the music it sang and focused my curiosity entirely on the voice as such. From today's perspective, this realisation became a hidden signpost through my life that I hardly noticed for many years, but followed nonetheless. At some point, I was fortunately able to see that precisely in this abstraction and in the focus on the voice as such lies the subject I want to deal with as an artist, as a teacher and as a thinker.
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