(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! I am aware that in a philosophical text like this one the possibilities of an application like deepl.com come to its limits. Still I am hoping that the translation gives an idea of what I am looking for and an inspiration the readers own considerations! Most of the footnotes that you will find in the original book are left out in this text. If you want to know more in detail about the quoted texts and authors please get in contact with me!)
"…as Listening to the Voice of the Friend"
Derrida, Heidegger and the structure of a voice lesson
Many people who come into contact with the approach of Alfred Wolfsohn and Roy Hart and are touched by it in the best sense of the word report a problem: they find it difficult to explain to others what we are actually doing. Singing? Yes, but it's not about learning songs or harmonies. Speaking? No, rather not, although it can happen that we work with lyrics. It is more important for us to let our voices sound more or less free of music and language. What happens then? Well, not much, one person sounds and the other(s) listen. And suddenly a whole new space opens up for the voice that has just appeared; sounds that were possibly never heard from the person in this way before come out into the open. We follow these sounds on their way.
That would be a possible description of at least one possible experience that can arise in the development of the voice. At the end of such a description, there is probably the sentence that one has to try it out for oneself in order to understand what is going on. A sentence that could also be at the end of this essay.
Intensive engagement with a voice, known as individual work, is at the heart of the voice development we do in the Wolfsohn/Hart tradition. The setting is simple: I invite a person to listen to his or her voice for a certain period of time under my accompaniment and guidance. Initially, I do without linguistic or musical ingredients. On a piano, I indicate tones and ask to re-sound the respective tone on a vowel.
(The piano does not initially have the function of a musical instrument in individual work, because we are not concerned with music. Instead, we use it to give us some orientation as to where we are moving with the voice. For people who have difficulty picking up a note with their voice, the piano can be distracting, and then we leave it aside. However, the vast majority of people with these difficulties only believe that they cannot sing because it was drilled into them too often and vehemently as a child. Often it becomes apparent very quickly how well they actually hear and vocally translate what they hear! In the course of vocal work, it can of course also happen that one sings with piano accompaniment. This depends on the situation and the personal style of the voice teacher.)
Sometimes, for example in workshops, there are a number of other listeners in these situations, who are usually there with open ears. Sometimes I also ask for support with voice and/or body presence. Often, after a certain time, I ask what the others in the room have heard, or more precisely, what inner reactions they have noticed in themselves while listening. I will come back to this.
In the situation of one-to-one work, an experienced listener meets a person who wants to get in touch with his or her voice. It is in the way the two people are directed towards voice and listening that the special nature of our approach emerges. To a certain extend, this specialness always plays a part when a person listens professionally to another in an artistic, therapeutic or process-accompanying context. But for us it is the essence. What am I talking about here? What is this special thing that distinguishes our individual work? How do we listen to the voice?
In my attempt to formulate an answer to these questions, I am inspired and guided by texts by two authors who deal philosophically with the themes of listening and the voice, without having in mind even a rudimentary practical application such as I am aiming for. There is a great lecture by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in which he bends over a passage in Martin Heidegger that reads, "as hearing the voice of the friend that every Dasein carries with it."
(It is very difficult to translate the word Dasein into English. Existence is what you can read often but this word has very different connotations. A literal translation would be “being there” and this is closer to the meaning that Heidegger gives to this expression. More about Dasein below!
The text I am refering to can be read in English: J. Derrida: “Heidegger´s Ear, Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV) trans. by J.P.Leavey jr, in: Reading Heidegger, ed. By John Sallis; Indiana University Press. My considerations are based on the German version transl. from French by Stefan Lorenzer in: Derrida: Politik der Freundschaft, Frankfurt 2002)
Both thinkers, Heidegger and Derrida, are among the few philosophers in whom direct inspiration to think further emerges for the discussion of voice. As far as I can see, Derrida wrote the first philosophical work since Aristotle to mention the word voice in its title, namely "The Voice and the Phenomenon". For Heidegger, too, the voice plays a certain role, but the word, or rather the family of words around the concept of hearing, is of much greater importance for him.
(However, we have to keep in mind that both thinkers mean something different than I have in mind with the concept of voice that is so central to us. Both have little interest in the human voice as a phenomenon that is anthropologically relevant independently of language. Derrida's preoccupation with the voice goes hand in hand with the idea of orality, which is very closely interwoven with language. I, on the other hand, want to show that the human voice also carries meaning and efficacy independently of language. Throughout, Heidegger wants to avoid understanding the voice as the voice of the human being, because in doing so he would have to fear a relapse into anthropology. According to Heidegger, anthropology and psychology are late outgrowths of a metaphysics that he seeks to overcome. For him, the voice is the voice of being. In this respect, too, the passage Derrida discusses contains an unusual formulation for Heidegger, because it is about a voice from being-with and not from the ontological off. We remain phenomenologists at this point and refer to the voice that can be produced, shown and heard by the human being. Perhaps, in the end, it is precisely the very concrete human voice that proves to be a trace that leads back behind certain metaphysical decisions (such as the distinction between body, spirit and soul) into a space of being-with that is not yet consistently separated into inner space (the psyche) and outer space. Cf. Sein und Zeit (SuZ), §10, p. 45 ff.)
In the following, I want to use Heidegger's remarks in Derrida's interpretation to say something about the human voice and the way we listen to it. Whether the result still has anything to do with the intentions of the two philosophers is irrelevant to this question. I am not interested in delivering a presentable result, but rather in capturing a strange, sometimes puzzling and often astonishingly effective phenomenon in language, circling it in several approaches and thus setting one's own thinking in motion.
Hearing, voice, friend, Dasein, with oneself. These are the terms from Heidegger's quotation that I will now take a closer look at. I will begin with the term that is least familiar, Dasein, a word that occupies a central position in Heidegger's philosophy. Dasein is not an unusual word in German even for everyday language. Phrases like "in my Dasein as..." or "my Dasein on earth" are not completely foreign to us. We use them to allude to our existence in the world. As a rule, we mean a human existence. It is true that we can also speak of the Dasein of an ant, or the Dasein of a shoe, but then this way of speaking always has a slightly ironic undertone. For Heidegger, Dasein refers to the way in which the human being in particular exists in the world. From this he distinguishes the suchness/Sosein of things, that is, the way they can be understood, explained or named by us, their nature one might say.
According to Heidegger, our existence as human beings is a being-in-the-world. We always experience ourselves embedded in a worldly context. In the world we are surrounded by other living beings and things. This sounds like a banal insight, but for philosophers, as we know, so-called banalities are often anything but self-evident. With the idea of being-in-the-world, Heidegger opposes a basic conviction that has long characterised philosophical discourse: According to this, the human being is situated as a subject vis-à-vis the world as an object. On the one hand, there is the ego, which comes into contact with the objects that face it and want to be recognised or understood through sensory experience. Heidegger, on the other hand, says: No, the basic constellation of being human is not a confrontation between subject and object, but being in the world with others and other things.
At this point I can for the first time build a bridge from high theory to the practice of voice development. For the philosophical considerations, in the context that is important here, only have the function of throwing a clarifying light on individual work with the voice. The idea of being-in-the-world corresponds structurally to the way I perceive and understand the basic situation in individual work. When two people meet to dedicate themselves to the voice of one of them, it is not primarily a matter of a counterpart of so-called teacher and pupil who assign themselves the roles of sender and receiver. If they were to take on these roles, it would be clear who is sending what information on its way and who has to receive or recognise it. Instead, the people involved form a common situation with the temporal and spatial circumstances, and they go through a process together that is influenced by all those involved. The situation has its own atmosphere or, as Heidegger would say, a mood. This mood forms the basis for all the movements that can take place in the situation. For Heidegger, hearing also plays a central role in this tuned situation: "This hearing is not only connected with the ear, but at the same time with man's belonging to that to which his being is tuned (In German: gestimmt which has the word Stimme/voice in it. R.P.). Man remains attuned to that from which his being is attuned. In being attuned, the human being is affected and called upon by the voice.“
This is a quotation that should be discussed at length. For our question about hearing the voice, it is remarkable how mood, determination and voice are thought together here. The last sentence of the quotation, after the determination of the human being is called through the voice, can be directly transferred to our basic idea of practical voice development, according to which there is a deep connection between the voice of a human being and the different aspects of his existence, some of which could be called determination. In individual work with a voice, it becomes apparent how interwoven a person's voice is with his or her mood! Furthermore, one could claim that the setting of individual work according to Wolfsohn/Hart, with a cast of at least two people listening together and a voice at the centre of attention, represents the prototypical situation of Dasein in the sense of Heidegger. Here, voice, mood and purpose come together and try to understand themselves as Dasein.
The special feature of Dasein in comparison with other forms of being is that Dasein knows about itself. Dasein is a being that has itself, or in other words, that can distance itself from itself and relate to itself. We can make our own Dasein the subject and work on it: question it, change it. We can initiate learning and change processes for our existence. I can ask myself: How do I actually live? What tasks do I have to face? What possibilities are opening up for me in my life? What fears inhibit me or what potential do I have?
Dasein can understand itself. The often occurring option of misunderstanding is already included here!
Our relationship to Dasein always has to do with understanding and with contexts of meaning. We want to understand ourselve, we can sometimes only understand ourselves or aspects of our being with difficulty. We want to understand the meaning of life, etc. Even without explicitly asking such questions, I always have a self-understanding of myself, just as one says: This does not correspond to my self-understanding.
What is the relationship of this self-understanding Dasein to the human voice? Heidegger distinguishes between two ways of understanding Dasein. One takes the diversions via the world. It seeks a self-understanding of the things and events with which it is confronted from the outside. To paraphrase Karl Marx, one could say that in this version of the understanding of Dasein, Being determines Consciousness. The second way of understanding Dasein, preferred by Heidegger, arises from the inside of Dasein. Here, Dasein turns to itself and seeks an understanding of its existence from within itself. For Heidegger, the true way of understanding is this inner way.
Self-exploration with the help of one's own voice connects the two ways of understanding in a very special way. For the voice in its presence - when it sounds - is the self-relationship of Dasein, which carries the worldly with it as an imprint. What does this mean? In the voice, the world is present as the experienced world of Dasein in its existential form. One could even say that in the voice the distinction between inside and outside dissolves. My experiences with the world and my way of dealing with it resound in the voice. And then these experiences also resound in a way that enables others to be thrown onto oneself through listening. What is inside and outside here? Turning towards myself, as I appear to myself in the sound of my voice, enables me to imagine Dasein in its complexity. In my voice, my existence resounds together with the historical, cultural and social imprints to which I have been exposed in my life.
Let us now take a closer look at the little phrase "with oneself/itself" from Heidegger's quotation, ("whom every Dasein carries with itself."). Being with oneself is difficult to assign to the distinction between inside and outside. For being with oneself does not mean being in, but still very close to it, not at a distance and yet not completely taken in. At this point, the friend moves into the field of attention. Dasein carries the friend qua voice with it. The friend or his/her voice belong to it without merging with Dasein. The voice is close to me in a way that only a friend can be close to me. The inside and outside are suspended in the presence of the voice, which cannot be said to be only inside me or only outside! The voice is the heard voice and hearing refuses to be clearly topologically assigned. In this, hearing differs from seeing. Heidegger's idea that hearing is not primarily an "acoustic, psychophysical phenomenon" fits into this context; rather, "it constitutes the primary and actual openness of Dasein to its own innermost possibility of being". Through hearing, Dasein comes to itself. The voice helps to do so. In the situation of listening together to the voice of a person in our voice work, the one voice that resounds constitutes the openness of Dasein for all participants! A strange phenomenon: in the directed listening to a voice, be it my own or that of the other, I always come towards myself.
According to Heidegger, the horizon of all understanding of being is time. Dasein is always embedded in the movement of time. Dasein only exists as the constant and continuous process of life and the world. Everything flows! The voice fits in wonderfully with this, which can only show itself in the temporal process of its sounding. The voice is not something fixed and permanent that I can place in front of me and recognise. It is not a thing! The voice only shows itself as something that happens. And precisely for this reason it reflects the basic character of Dasein particularly well.
Let's summarise briefly: The situation of a shared exploration of voice - with or without other listeners - represents a particularly intensive form of being-in-the-world, which is characterised by the above-mentioned features of Dasein.
The listener(s), including the person who gives voice, together create a situation to which they belong; they form a togetherness in which the distinction between inside and outside is in some way suspended. The listener and the voice giver do not stand opposite each other, but are with each other in a common space of closeness. With the voice we make existence itself the subject, question it and look for possibilities of development and expansion. Listening to the voice, like being, is directed towards wanting to understand, by all participants. I sometimes express this as wanting to understand the different stories that the sound of the voice tells about a person and their inner and outer situation. Only through the act of directed listening is the common situation called Dasein by Heidegger constituted. Listening allows the emergence of the mood in which we find ourselves together and is therefore much more than a mere activity of the sensory organ ear.
How does the "voice of the friend" come into play here, whom, as the quotation continues, "every Dasein carries with it"? Where does the friend appear in the situation of voice exploration? My thesis on this is:
The person sitting at the piano who is ready to accompany and support the process of voice liberation of the other person standing in front of him hears the voice of his fellow human being as the voice of the friend.
Actually, one would expect that at the end of this sentence would be: the voice of a or his/her friend. But Heidegger's formulation "of the friend" is the appropriate one for my intentions as well. More on this later. In order to find out what I mean by the assertion, it may be helpful to consider other possible ways of hearing and the associated relations between the two persons at the piano. To do this, I will momentarily leave the philosophical world of Heidegger and Derrida and look at the concrete situation of the individual work in order to find a few typical aspects of it.
The most obvious relationship between the two people in individual work is expressed by the words teacher and pupil. I believe that this terminology in the approach according to Roy Hart and Alfred Wolfsohn, especially for the so-called teacher, is perhaps not exactly misleading, but still inadequate - although there are aspects, especially from the perspective of the so-called pupil, that speak for the term teacher-pupil relationship.
My task as a listener at the piano is not to pass on any knowledge to my students. It is true that there is usually a difference in experience between me and the person who has come to me to get to know his or her voice better, or at least different levels of experience in matters of the voice. But this does not mean that I know how to do it and only have to find the right way to pass on my knowledge to the other person. Rather, I support the person in finding the way to his or her voice that suits him or her, or in other words: the way of liberating the voice to oneself. And which path this liberation process will take exactly, even I cannot say beforehand and do not want to know. With this I do not want to deny that in this process of exploring the voice there can be an exchange of knowledge and that this knowledge has an influence on the direction in which the development of the voice moves. The teacher gladly makes his knowledge available to the person he is working with, but at the same time she/he is always a learner himself who takes away knowledge worth knowing from the work.
Another constellation that can affect the relationship between the listening and the voice-active participant is that of parent to child. That teachers and group leaders are ideally suited as projection screens for parental images and the conflicts associated with them is probably known to everyone who works in the field of process accompaniment. In the work according to Wolfsohn/Hart, these projections serve in the best case as starting points for certain phases of voice development. For example, as a listener I can decide to accept the projections and react for a time from the role of a father or mother. Or I can make the projections an explicit topic in order to be able to discover the areas of the voice that are possibly hidden by the parent-child relationship. In all of this, however, it is crucial that there is no real identification between the teacher and his or her possible father/mother role.
Both the teacher-pupil and the parent-child relationship have a hierarchical structure. This brings the issue of power into play, because in these relationships one side has greater decision-making power than the other because of their position. The power is often based on the justified claim to know more than the child or pupil.
There is much to be said about the general pedagogical implications of hierarchical relationships. In our context, we are only interested in the fact that the claim to greater knowledge is often accompanied by a claim to greater power. This is not without danger for the relationship between two adults, which is what voice work is mostly about, and one should be aware of it.
An equal and non-hierarchical relationship, which I would like to consider as another possibility, is that between two lovers. In Alfred Wolfsohn's work, the idea of love plays a major role in voice development. "To learn to sing is to learn to love" he says in one of his writings. It's a phrase that can easily be dismissed as a nice calendar saying that remains nebulous enough not to really affect anyone. But Wolfsohn understood the relationship between singing and love quite concretely and directly. He saw the intersection between the two in the thematic field of touching. Voice touches in a direct and in a figurative way all listeners, including the person who is currently showing the voice. The kind of touch that the listeners can experience is similar to that which can occur in love for a person. Wolfsohn sought to train a loving touch in this sense in his work as a voice teacher. How can I open my voice so that its sound is more than a purely acoustic phenomenon that leaves listeners cold? How can I allow my voice to touch? Intimacy represents another possible intersection between voice and love. Listening to the voice sounding in a shared space is an intimate moment. On a more general level, we can be with something with love. Many people love voices or love to sing. There are multiple points of reference of love to the voice.
I am interested at the moment in the position of the listener in the individual work. Is his listening loving? Is the way of listening in this situation that of lovers? In any case, new lovers do not listen in the mode of judging and wanting to improve what they perceive from the beloved person. On the contrary, everything I hear and see from my beloved seems great. I just don't want him or her to change, but I am boundlessly thrilled with how this person is! This unconditional acceptance of the partner can lead to him or her growing beyond themselves. In the loving bond between two people there is a great potential for discovering new aspects of oneself and new scope for one's own life. This is also an opportunity for the development and liberation of the voice!
But the state of being in love does not last forever. At some point, one has to admit to oneself that the beloved being also has lesser great sides. Yes, sometimes the very qualities I particularly admired turn into habits that annoy me and make me sigh in their repetition.
Nevertheless, we are on the right track with the dazzling concept of love. Heidegger speaks somewhere of there having been a (spiritual) place in the history of European thought that was still before the separation of love and friendship, a time when both were still thought of as identical. We are no longer in that place today, but I think one can concede that friendship is somehow related to love.
And this brings me back to my suggestion of how, in the individual work according to Wolfsohn/Hart, the voice of the sounding person(s) should be heard by the listener at the piano: as the voice of the friend.
There is a postcard saying that goes something like this:
A friend is someone who values and loves you (in a broad sense) even though he or she knows you.
As a friend, I am there for the one I call friend, but I don't want to change him. I do not want to educate a friend! Friendship can be described as the relationship of the heart which, more than any other, is based on the fact that one gladly and openly meets the friend as he or she is, even though one knows he or she is not perfect. One meets the friend without bringing wishes for change into play. Of course, I can wish for a friend that he or she is doing well, or better if he or she is currently in a crisis. His or her life situation may very well be in need of improvement, but if I start wanting to change him or her as a person, I move out of the field of friendship. But if the friend, or for us importantly: his or her voice, shows impulses for movement, indicates paths or even dead ends, I can point these out to the friend and help him or her on the way.
Transferred to the situation in the individual lesson, it would be the teacher's task to listen to the voice of the sounding person as it is, without pursuing educational ideas. I will not compare what I hear with any vocal ideals to be achieved or look for weaknesses of the voice to work on. The impulses for changing aspects of the voice must come from the sounding person himself and from his voice! The person who comes to us for an individual lesson usually has a wish, a question, a need that drives him to us. This is where I see and hear the starting points for exploring the voice together. In the best case, the paths to be taken are indicated by the voice. The sound of the voice shows me and the sounding person the indications of the possibilities for development that are offered to us so that the voice can free itself to itself. The work revolves around the interpretation of these indications.
In relation to our question, we can now paraphrase the idea of listening to the voice of the friend in this way: Friendship is a relationship that is not about judging and valuing, but about interpreting. The aim is to better understand what is revealed - namely a situation with its own developmental tendencies. Interpretation should be understood here as a dialogue process in which neither person has unrestricted authority to interpret. The process can succeed through a consistent orientation towards transparent communication in order to arrive at interpretations of the voice together with the friend or the sounders.
Now I come to a big But: the person standing opposite me at the piano is usually not my friend. And trying to invoke a friendship for this situation would overtax and distort the relationship and thus the process of voice development. The aim is not to install a friendship between the listener and the sounder. It is only a question of how I, as a listener at the piano, hear the voice of the person: as the voice of the friend who carries Dasein with him.
At this point, I would like to come back to the little phrase "with oneself", which Derrida has long reflected on. The with-itself expresses a particular kind of proximity; something that is with me is not in me, not simply beside me, but it is somehow between inside and outside, or it abolishes the distinction between inside and outside. It belongs to me and my situation, but it still remains at a certain distance. I let the voice approach me as the voice of the friend without making it mine. This way of being in tune with the voice of the other opens the space for what is in the voice! And the voice gains the space for liberation to itself. The inner attitude of holding the voice of the friend with me allows an openness that is prior to all theory and conception of the voice. Therefore, in the approach of Roy Hart and Alfred Wolfsohn, we are not primarily concerned with learning a method or technique. Techniques of voice development are (often) effective tools whose use can be helpful when there is no space for the liberating movement of the voice towards itself that happens on its own.
In our role as accompaniers of voice development processes, we are in a mode of friendship for what is being heard and the human source of the sound of the voice. We hear the voice of the person we are working with as the voice of the friend, but without making him a friend. The voice in question becomes the voice of the friend in that I align myself with the voice in this very specific way. Through my listening, I make it the voice of the friend. This does not say anything about the mode in which the sounding person listens to himself. This can be very different, but one possible aim of voice development is to make the one who is showing his or her voice relate to himself or herself in this friendly way. Learning to listen without judging and evaluating in order to thereby be able to interpret what we hear! This is a big task that we patiently practise together in individual work.
Sometimes in individual work there are other listeners who are also in a process of voice development. For them, the listening friendship mode applies only to a very limited extent. It is true that those sitting by also have the task of listening interpretatively instead of evaluating or judging, but they are actually supposed to listen to themselves by focusing on the voice of the person standing at the piano. What does this mean? Listening is voice development! When I listen to another voice, I pay attention to my inner reactions that show up while the other voice is sounding. This gives me a direct feedback on myself. I hear how my mental, spiritual and physical situation, which is responsible for the freedom and limitations of my voice, is at the moment. I can experience in which areas my voice is ready to open and expand. Strong emotional reactions often give an indication of the issues at hand for vocal liberation. But there can also be intense physical signals or the urge to doubt or vehemently defend one's own convictions for the first time that are called into question by what is being heard - not to mention the inner images, colours, memories and stories that can be stimulated by listening in this way. But unlike the accompanist at the piano, who is completely focused on the voice as the voice of the friend (without forgetting himself!), the other listeners hear the voice for themselves, as it were, instead of with themselves.
(…)
In Heidegger's thinking - and in Derrida's reading of it - there is a twofold basic movement. Heidegger wants to overcome an old way of thinking by going back to the beginning of this thinking and tracing how the great decisions in European philosophy came about and what was thought before. In doing so, he refers primarily to classical antiquity from Socrates to Plato to Aristotle and even starts with the earlier Heraclitus. But this way back is not a way to a zero point, but takes the entire subsequent history of thought with it. There is a structural similarity here with our handling and exploration of the human voice. We go back to the point where language and music are not yet saddled to the voice, to hear there how the voice sounds to itself. In this space of the voice, which is with itself through listening, the opportunity opens up for the liberation of the voice to itself. In this way, we might overcome the limitations imposed on the voice by language and music and the associated concepts of the appropriate, beautiful or adequate voice, in order to be able to devote ourselves to both areas again in newly won freedom.
However, there is something artificial about both movements, Heidegger's philosophical one and my voice-oriented one. It could seem as if the tendency back is a historical movement, a return to the beginnings! In the development of voice, there is sometimes talk of the natural voice as the goal of our work. But this is a chimera. The liberation of the voice to itself is not the liberation to the natural voice. Nevertheless, this movement back, behind certain ideas and decisions, has its justification. But it must be understood as a logical movement, not a historical one. Then it is possible to question concepts that we carry with us more or less as a matter of course and to recognise what other possibilities of thinking are offered for the voice. Freed from the old patterns of thinking, listening can constitute the space in which the voice finds itself, or in other words, its freedom.
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