(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! 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!)
The Fade/The Bland
A first version of this text was created in the context of my voice performance "Dao Series No 3, which took place in Taipei/Taiwan in September 2012. My explanations of the bland in the Extended Voice are strongly based on Francois Jullien's book "Über das Fade - eine Eloge". Berlin 1999, original: Eloge de la Fadeur, Arles 1990. The Chinese poems that are quoted in this text are sited in the form Jullien presents them in his book.
Most people in the world would probably agree that a work of art or a performance should not be one thing: bland. The same is perhaps even more true of a meal, a drink, in fact any form of sensory perception that is expected to have some kind of pleasurable or beneficial effect. This is not a phenomenon limited to the West. Asia and China are no exception in the world-wide awe of the bland. The preference for a world that threatens to drown from the flood of acoustic and visual surface stimuli is even more pronounced in the mainstream culture of many Asian countries than in the West.
The situation is somewhat different in ancient Chinese thought. Here we find a consistently positive connotation of the idea of the bland. In Taoism (or Daoism, both spellings are common today), blandness is attributed to the Tao, i.e. the path or course that underlies the world as a totality of all processes, as a basic characteristic - one could say as the only characteristic, because unqualifiedness in the sense of not being this or that is what distinguishes the Tao.
Thus it is said in Lao-tzu's TaoTeKing:
"Music and good food
stop aliens who are passing by.
When the Tao passes through the mouth,
it is insipid and tasteless.
It cannot be seen;
One cannot hear it;
And yet it is inexhaustible."
A Taoist basic attitude would therefore include allowing blandness into life on various levels. All of this sounds puzzling to European ears at first, and as long as the nature and function of blandness in Chinese thought have not been clarified, it is impossible to see what sense there should be in turning to the bland.
For me as a voice artist, too, the question arises as to what could interest or even appeal to me about this idea of bland? Isn't extended voice art exactly the opposite of bland art, trying to bring as many facets of the voice into artistic expression as possible, thus expanding the variety towards the immeasurable and making the audience's experience exciting, unusual and impressive? The bland, on the other hand, has no facets, no outstanding qualities. A bland food tastes of nothing, is not flavoured and has no characteristic flavour of its own. What should be desirable or appealing about a bland voice? The assumption that I want to explore here surmises a special form of (vocal) freedom in the bland lack of characteristics.
In European philosophy, namely by Hegel, Confucius, who had the most lasting influence on Chinese culture, was attested a way of thinking that does not seem to go beyond the quality of better calendar sayings. There is no original theory, no new thinking and certainly no metaphysical speculation. What Confucius says in his mostly short sayings often remains bland. The expectations of a great thinker like Hegel are systematically undermined. But the greatness of a sage like Confucius cannot simply be denied; calendar sayings do not shape one of the great cultures of humankind over thousands of years. What did Hegel obviously not understand? What did he, the European philosopher, miss?
A satisfactory answer to this question would also be a comprehensive comparative study of European and Chinese thought. For our context, one aspect of this difference in thought is particularly relevant. European philosophy is to a large extent a thinking of the general, formulated in clear and distinct statements and theories. The task of the reader or listener is to comprehend the philosophical edifices as precisely as possible in one's own intellect and to recognise their truth. The Chinese sage, on the other hand, is a thinker of the situational, giving his clues in often inconspicuous allusions. In this, much is left open. It is precisely this openness that readers are called upon to use in order to relate the references in turn to their respective situations and to draw lessons from them. The work of readers of Chinese works is therefore quite different from that of a Western philosophical reading. This becomes perhaps even clearer in the case of another of China's culturally influential thinkers, Lao-tzu, the (probable) author of the TaoTeKing, a work which, however, at least to Western readers, is anything but insipid, but exerts a peculiar charm. But the attempt to read the TaoTeKing as a philosophical wisdom book full of general truths completely misses the point. There are no general truths, but sentences and sayings that only unfold their immense power and effect in the current situational application.
What does all this have to do with blandness? Blandness in Taoism represents the foundation of reality, or better, in Francois Jullien's words: the fund from which the world can rise with all its characteristic peculiarities. The fund is bland because it is still before all determination. Every taste is fixed to itself, it can only be what it is and at the same time point to its opposite. The bland as the tasteless, however, keeps the space of other tastes completely open. Because there is no definition, everything is still possible. Therefore, "the wise man tastes what is without taste", just as he "does what is without doing and creates what is without business".
The fundamental polarity of the world, for which today the global-folkloristic yin/yang functions as a cipher, this polarity leads of its own accord from the bland to the tasty. There is nothing to be done, because the bland has within itself the tendency to its other pole. These processes that run by themselves, for which the term ziran stands in classical Chinese, are one of the great themes of Chinese wisdom teachings. The more precisely I taste the bland, which does not (yet) have an individual characteristic, the better I can recognise where or to which taste the bland wants to develop in this situation. I can follow this tendency of the bland and make it useful to me without having to intervene by acting, i.e. changing the natural course of things.
When I as a voice artist try to transfer this process logic to my voice, it is a matter of emptying the voice of all characteristic, interesting or even original sounds and tones and then listening from this place of the bland to see where the voice wants to develop on its own. The search for the bland in the voice would thus be the search for a great openness of the voice to all its potentials and at the same time the training of the ear towards an openness that notices where the voice wants to move from the bland. Voice and hearing should be freed from individual desires, preferences and habits on the bland path; the personality is allowed to rest and let the open vocal field take over.
In Chinese, the word dan means both blandness and inner detachment, because, as Jullien explains, "the blandness felt in things corresponds to the capacity for inner detachment", the "taste captivates us, blandness detaches us". Detachment from one's own preferences, habits and perhaps also fears via the indirect route of blandness - this Daoist promise opens up a way for the voice artist to let the voice be, to allow it the freedom to follow its own (Daoist formulation: the natural) inclinations and to live them out. In this process, blandness is the inner situation that opens up all the vocal possibilities and keeps them in touch with each other, providing the basis on which even the extremes can communicate with each other. In my terminology: blandness is the basic colour of the open vocal field. Here the voice is with itself. If I manage to move my voice into the blandness, everything is possible from there.
Slow rhythm, relaxed playing:
In the deep night, a simple melody.
It enters the ear, bland, and without taste;
The heart is calm, the feelings quite at home.
In another respect, the bland is of importance in terms of vocal art. So far, we have spoken of blandness as a prerequisite that can enable the voice to move freely over the entire vocal field. But the musical tradition in China has certainly attributed a positive value to the bland sound itself. Not the loudest sound is the most effective, they say, but the one that produces the strongest resonance. Reverberation requires silence, and the more closely the musically produced sounds and the silence are interwoven, the stronger will be the effect of my music. The aim of the music is not to exploit the sound to the last, but to create space for a resonance in the listener's consciousness.
The idea of reverberation is extremely appealing for the art of voice. Because in listening to another voice, I always hear my own voice as well. The voice is the instrument (?) that all human beings carry within themselves. Despite all the individual differences in the sound of the voice, there is a common fund, there is the knowledge and sometimes only the intuition that the sounds I am hearing could also come from me, are part of my voice and could come alive in it. The space of reverberation will make it easier for me to dive into this memory and suggestion. The blandness acts as a friendly invitation to enter this common space. For it is in the effortless, bland, artistically still unformed sound of the voice that we are most likely to find ourselves. In addition, there is another aspect that is central to the Roy Hart vocal development: The human voice is never a purely tonal phenomenon, neither in the singer nor in the listener. The voice is connected to an inner situation, a mood, or more precisely, it is part of this inner mood - a part that can enter into communication with the outer situation and mood. As an audible voice, it meets the hearing of another, who can let the voice flow into his or her own mood, which, influenced by it, takes on a new colour. It is not necessarily the same mood that does arise in the listener as in the sounding one, but the space for this touching of inner situations is opened by the voice - and perfected by silence, one might add from a Chinese perspective. Bringing this inner feeling to life and keeping it there is what the Chinese musical tradition strives for. For this, it need not even be necessary to produce a sound at all.
"Dian let the sound of his zither fade away,
Zhao abstained from playing the strings:
In all of this there is a melody that can be sung
and dance to."
says a poem by Su Dongpo.
There are various starting points for making the bland fruitful for the extended voice and the idea of voice liberation, and thus for pushing through to a vocal art in which the bland has a fundamental meaning in the literal sense.
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