(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 Search for a Philosophy of Singing
(or: the Singing Philosopher)
"Singing is existence (Gesang ist Dasein)."
(R.M. Rilke)
"It is one of the peculiarities, not only of high-level specialisation, but already of the sciences consolidated in their self-awareness, that they always believe they know much much more precisely than can be known (...). The interdisciplinary enterprise here must necessarily be disappointing at first, in that it does not accept the object in its well-defined and proven delimitation."
(Hans Blumenberg)
Singing and Voice - philosophically considered.
Personal preface
The following text is based on a contribution I wrote in 2019 for an anthology called The Philosophy of Singing.
(Bettina Hesse (ed.): Die Philosophie des Singens, mairisch Verlag, Hamburg 2019. For various reasons, the text published there is a good deal shorter than the one presented here.)
When I was offered the opportunity to contribute an essay to this book, my initial reaction was hesitant. I suddenly realised that in all my thinking on the subject so far, I had been guided by the leading concept of the voice and not by that of singing. In doing so, I was following a convention that runs through practically all of the now very extensive literature on the subject. In the past decades, much has been written about the voice within the framework of cultural studies and philosophy, but to my knowledge, no one has attempted to make singing a basic philosophical concept. I have joined this philosophical mainstream rather unreflectively, and this is all the more astonishing because in the tradition in which I situate myself as an artist, teacher and thinker, there is almost constant talk of singing and the voice is not so much in the foreground. Already in Alfred Wolfsohn and Roy Hart, the founders of the idea of voice development, to which I feel committed, singing is understood in a comprehensive sense that offers a philosophical connectivity.
After these connections became a little clearer to me, I gratefully seized the opportunity and set out to find material that might be helpful in outlining a philosophy of singing. The search led me in several directions: first to the history of philosophy, where I looked to Plato for the paradigmatic predecisions that have made it so difficult for singing (and for a long time also for the voice) to be perceived philosophically.
I then began to look at contemporary philosophy and cultural studies concerned with the voice - with attention to the French and German-language debates. I would like to talk briefly about an Anglo-Saxon philosopher, namely Stanley Cavell, because he helps me to formulate a first working hypothesis for the search for the philosophy of singing, with which I turn to the third direction of search - to my own reflections and experiences with singing that I have gathered over the past two decades. And finally, I have made an excursion into the idea of singing in Rilke.
My intention is to put the position of the singer philosophically more in the foreground than has been done so far. By this I mean not only that more attention could be paid to the singer as an object of reflection, but also and especially that the philosopher sees himself or herself as a singer. This entails the classic danger of philosophy being contaminated by the personal. I run this risk with my eyes and ears open, so to speak.
I refer to Stanley Cavell, who has already been mentioned, and who systematically introduced the aspect of one's own voice into philosophy. According to his approach, every philosophy has its own unique voice that cannot be adequately copied. By this voice is meant more than a mere style of writing or thinking that can be copied as opposed to the voice. For example, in the many copies of Adorno's famous jargon, one finds reminiscences of his style, but Adorno's voice, what really makes him, remains reserved for his own writings.
Cavell, however, speaks of a philosophical voice in a figurative sense, which does not have much to do with the vocal sound of the speaking or even singing philosopher. When I refer to him, I adopt his mental figure and understand the voice also and especially as a sounding phenomenon. In the concrete case of a philosophy of singing, I argue, the question of whether and to what extent philosophers know their own voice and what place is given to it in the practical context of life - in short, whether he or she sings themselves! - has an influence on the voice (in a figurative sense) that can be heard in the corresponding philosophical texts. It is possible that the concrete results of philosophising about singing and voice (whatever that is supposed to mean in the philosophical context) are hardly distinguishable in singing and non-singing philosophers, but the voice that emerges in the texts is a different one in the case of the singing philosopher. This is only understandable if one denies at the same time that the voice and what it does while singing can be adequately represented in an instrumental metaphor. The Platonic precept, which I will examine in more detail later, according to which the speaking voice is no more than a servant of thought and word, leads astray. For apart from the extremely doubtful idea that a thought lies ready somewhere in the mind and is only waiting to enter the world by being transported by the voice, this model denies the voice an active part in communication. Yet the voice, in both the concrete and the figurative sense emphasised by Cavell, is a determining factor in the communicative exchange between people.
Furthermore, the best way to speak appropriately of anthropologically relevant issues is to break away from the strictly theoretical position and include the practical aspects of life. That's where the singing philosopher from the title comes around the corner.
Furthermore, I would like to claim that no philosophy can do without decisions that cannot be philosophically justified in their entirety. I don't have any proof for this assertion here, but in the following I will be as open as possible about which decisions have to do with my own experiences as a singer - and as someone who is trained to listen in a certain way. In doing so, I am moving dangerously close to the border of what one is still prepared to call philosophy, but the risk must be taken in order to do as much justice as possible to the subject matter, singing, and thus also to the human voice. The philosopher who does not sing does not know the whole phenomenal field of the voice.
I am less interested here in whether and how singing as a vocal action represents something that it is not itself, such as a musical or linguistic figure, but rather that and how it presents itself. Singing shows the voice in motion - a pleonasm, because the voice is in motion per se. The voice sings, it is always singing as an incident. But at the same time, the voice is always someone's voice when it sings. It follows that the voice in singing presents itself not only as a sonic event. The sound of the voice is more than an acoustic phenomenon. In singing, the singer shows himself or herself in their respective actual situation, not only to someone listening from the outside, but always to him or herself at the same time.
Everybody knows what singing is! –
Methodical Preliminary Remark
If one wants to make a serious attempt to say something philosophically relevant about singing, one encounters various difficulties. These are not insurmountable obstacles, but productive problems that can inspire thinking.
The first difficulty is one of the classic problems of philosophy. You have to know to a certain extent what you are talking about before you can begin the philosophical enquiry. But finding out is at the same time part of the philosophical enquiry. Thus one finds oneself in a circle from which there is no easy way out. But the circle becomes hopeless if one leaves out the aspect of the historical time in which experiences are made. For in my case, thinking about singing does not begin with the writing of this text, but has a long history in which initial insights and assumptions have been made that entail more than a mere preliminary understanding.
This brings us to the second difficulty. In my history of thinking about singing, I have not only gained insights and so-called knowledge, but the history also includes decisions about how I want to understand singing. I could have taken other paths and other investigations have done so. Settling on an object of singing to be considered in philosophical meditation always involves a decision that helps determine what is ultimately found as the insight of reflection. If the decision had turned out differently, which is always possible, then different results would have come about in the end. In this way, validity is tied back to the decisions I have made in order to grasp the object of singing for myself. This does not mean, however, that there are not good reasons for my theses and that I do not try to argue stringently.
The decisions I make are not based solely on a philosophical foundation. They are directly related to my life and my experiences with voice and singing. This leads to the third difficulty for a philosophy of singing that I mentioned already above. What singing actually and essentially is cannot be known and understood through philosophical reflection alone. The interpretation of what one experiences in action will always depend on the theoretical framework within which one seeks to understand the experiences, but without having had the experiences themselves, considerations of singing hang in a quasi-empty space.
My preliminary definition of what I would like to call singing and explore philosophically is: singing is an intentional vocal utterance. Or in the words of my voice teacher Paul Silber: singing is a vocal action.
This is a very broad concept of singing that not only encompasses the musical utterances of the voice, but also, in a comprehensive reversal, declares every vocal utterance to be singing. Understanding singing as vocal action gives the concept of singing the most extensive possible scope without becoming completely arbitrary. Every vocal sound is singing. Every vocal utterance of the human being comes from a field of intentions and therefore always represents more than a mere acoustic event. The human voice always carries information and dimensions that allow its sound to be heard and understood on different levels. With this characterisation of singing, it is not meant that every vocal action represents a consciously and deliberately intended action. Actions are not always intentional in this sense, but they imply an intentionality, an inner directedness towards something with which the person singing is connected.
Even with this limitation, however, the notion of action in connection with singing remains problematic. As will be shown in more detail later, there are more and other aspects to singing that are not covered by the intentionality of the action. In the event of "I sing", movements take place on various levels that happen outside the realm of sovereign action and cannot simply be understood as effects of the action. An alternative to action would be the concept of vocal practice. I will return to this later. For the time being, I understand all the proposed terminologies to be provisional. Only a philosophy of singing will be able to find an adequate expression for what becomes thematic here.
With such an advanced concept of singing, is it still possible to draw a distinction between singing and speaking? On the one hand, singing and speaking are not the same thing, but at the same time, every linguistic utterance has a level of sonority. Speaking therefore belongs to the field of singing, even if the relationship between sound (with all the stories that show themselves and can be interpreted in it) and the linguistic enunciation of sentences in it is different than, for example, in the singing of a song. There, too, is the aspect of the utterance of statements and sentences, but the song brings speaking much more closely into the context of purely vocal utterances, which colours what is said in a certain way.
Against the attempt to make singing the core concept of philosophical considerations instead of placing the voice at the centre, the objection is obvious that the concept of voice covers a much broader area than singing and is therefore the more fundamental starting point. But this is the result of a decision that can also be made differently. Thus, I would argue that singing is more fundamental because this concept combines three aspects from which something like the condition of the possibility of vocal action emerges. Singing occurs in the interplay of breath, voice and hearing. None of these three elements can be ignored and the voice must join the basic trinity. Nevertheless, the field of phenomena that is to be treated philosophically reorders itself through the decision to begin singing. Viewed from the perspective of singing, the real voice, which is always connected to a person who displays it, moves to the centre of interest and the many other metaphorical and transcendental voices, which remain silent despite their potentially great effects and occupy a great deal of space in the discourse on the philosophy of voice, slip from the central focus to the periphery. In the end, it may turn out that many of the qualities and functions attributed to voices in the mute and figurative sense actually have their origin in the real sound of the voice, i.e. very close to the human being.
With my provisional definition of singing as a vocal action or practice, which I choose as a starting point for my reflections, I deliberately place myself at a distance from the contemporary discourse on the voice, as it has been conducted since the middle of the 20th century, especially in France, and for some decades also in Germany. At the beginning of most approaches, there is the indication that a philosophy of the voice cannot only be about the voice that expresses itself audibly, but must be joined by the search for the silent but nevertheless very effective voice in its transcendent quality. One could speculate here for a long time about why philosophers like to speak so fondly of the powerful voice that basically remains silent. In any case, this whole discourse is based on a decision that can be called metaphysical with some justification. I do not go along with this decision here and insist on starting from singing and placing the audible voice, with all its inherent fleetingness, at the centre. Metaphorical exaggerations and shifts of the concept of voice are no less legitimate as a result, but I plead for not placing them at the beginning of the considerations. For this, the change of the subject from voice to singing in the sense mentioned above is very helpful.
Here the objection is obvious that I am falling prey to an outmoded concept of the subject by assuming a sovereign relationship between a voice-having subject and its identifiable voice, and countering that neither this one subject nor the one voice can be presupposed without necessity. I quite agree with the latter, but I have not yet wanted or been able to say anything about the question of who is acting vocally and whether and how the voice can be grasped as an entity belonging to a subject. One of my working theses, however, is the assumption that singing can be located through the physicality and corporeality of the singing person. There is at least a topological identity or possibility of identification between the voice that becomes loud and the person who raises this voice. Only in this way singing is possible.
Singing is dangerous or
Plato and the general suspicion against singing
The first expedition takes me to the beginnings of European philosophy in Greece. In the ancient founding period, decisions were made about how singing and song could be philosophically located and what could be said about them. In other words, one can see which decisions prevented a philosophy of singing from developing. The most important person to set the course is Plato, who provided the first large and comprehensive framework that has guided philosophical thought in Europe ever since.
(Aristotle expanded, supplemented and already corrected this framework in a way that is no less binding for the history of philosophy. And he wrote - probably - the first writing in whose title the voice appears: Concerning the Voice. However, it is not entirely certain whether he was really the author. Cf. Ways to the Voice, pp. 117-120. In the following, I take the liberty of concentrating entirely on Plato.)
For the voice and singing, as for so many other things, Plato sketched out the framework within which most of what was later said and written on these topics in the context of European intellectual history moves. Elsewhere I have explained how Plato places the human voice in the shadow of language, from which, with a few exceptions, it does not find its way out until the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment. For Plato, the voice, in relation to speech, is no more and nothing more than a serving tool or the means of transport with which thoughts expressed in words are expressed. Its sole purpose is to put thoughts into a form that makes it possible to communicate their content. For his philosophical investigation of thought and language, the voice plays no further role. It was not until Jean-Jacques Rousseau that the voice was thought to owe much more to language and speech than Plato and the tradition that followed him gave it credit for. But the idea of the instrumental and functional character of the voice for speech is still present in thought today, for example in the instrumentally oriented branch of media theory.
It is not wrong to regard the voice as a tool with the help of which thoughts are expressed as words and sentences. What is wrong is to reduce the voice to this one aspect and claim to have grasped it completely. Plato's guidelines have led to a philosophical consideration of the voice and then also of singing and its relevance to the question: "What is a human being?” In Plato, the voice takes on the function of a mere servant of speech and thought. The Platonic precepts continued to have an effect well into the modern era. Modern linguistics, based on Saussure, is still in the Platonic tradition with its branch of phonology.
(Following Derrida, however, the role of the voice in the history of metaphysics is characterised in a very different way. According to Derrida, the voice in Western metaphysics is "the basic element of language", the one that stands at the very beginning. Writing, on the other hand, is already no longer at the origin and is only secondary to access to an unclouded presence. From this constellation, Derrida concludes a phonocentrism in philosophy and metaphysics. Much would have to be said about this. In my opinion, this thesis is based on a lack of distinction between voice and orality. What is being weighed against each other here is speaking and writing, listening and reading. But speaking is only one mode of vocal activity, and the one that is necessarily already connected with speech. (Cf. S. Krämer: Die Rehabilitierung der Stimme, in: Kolesch/Krämer: Stimme, Frankfurt 2006, pp. 269-295. The author's aim is "to detach the voice from the bipolar, conceptual scheme of "orality/literality"", op. cit., p. 271).
Mladen Dolar refers to another branch of metaphysical history in which the voice as song is viewed with great suspicion because it holds so many dangers for morality. I will come to this in a moment. Cf. on the whole complex of themes the first two chapters of Dolar: His Master's Voice.)
In contrast to the relatively clear attribution of the voice for speech, Plato's assessment of singing and chanting proves to be much more ambivalent. On the one hand, he is concerned to define singing in terms of its function for truth and morality. "The well-bred will therefore be able to dance and sing beautifully", he says in one passage. Singing that only seeks to please is judged by him to be mere flattery. But sometimes Plato doubts that singing can fulfil its great ethical function. In any case, singing must be strictly regulated. Plato specifies which inhabitants of the polis are allowed to sing which songs. Who may sing which keys is determined by him in detail. Men of different ages sing different things (but always those that refer to bravery and the sublime), women sing different things (namely, the modest and humble), and even slaves have the songs assigned to them. "No one should allow himself to deviate from the sacred chants laid down by the state and from the entire dance style of our youth in terms of chanting and dance movement". At the same time, however, Plato seems to be well aware of how much he could make himself ridiculous with such a regimentation of song and dance. He therefore wonders how he could "make this kind of legislation secure against general ridicule". A little later, he restricts the validity of his legislation for art again with a quotation from Homer, since "you will also believe the words of the poet: Some things thy heart will tell thee thyself, O youth; others a god will put into thee. I think you were not born or brought up without gods".
In Plato's concept of song, music and poetry meet and unite with dance. For him, following the ideas of his time, the arts cannot be performed and considered separately. The poet is the one who composes the songs and performs them throughout his life. After his death, rhapsodes take over the task of keeping the poems alive.
Plato concedes that song can do much more and is much more than merely a means of educating a good person who is committed to truth. He does not deny that he himself is sometimes moved by song. In conversation with a rhapsodist, in this case a singer who specialises in Homer, he says that he often envies these artists for their art. But the touching nature of singing seems to him to be primarily sinister and he places singing under the general suspicion of endangering the morality of man. Plato clearly saw the seductive potential of singing. Singing touches people deeply and puts them in moods that, as long as one listens to the singer, one cannot easily resist. Plato was largely negative about this power of singing. His understanding of singing is moralistic and this prevents him from philosophically recognising, investigating or appreciating the entire phenomenal realm of singing in all its diversity and relatedness to human existence.
It was Nietzsche who first uncovered the subterranean moralisation of European philosophy, which, roughly speaking, led to the objects of thought not becoming thematic as themselves, but appearing in the distorting light of the respective morality.
With regard to singing, Plato sees the task of "voice and hearing" as enabling man to realise harmony, not only in a musical sense, but in a cosmological sense. Voice and hearing share this task with the sense of sight and, in principle, with all the senses available to man. Only the realization of the harmony of the larger world contexts allows man to state his own potentially or factually disharmonious state and to strive for inner harmony.
"The same saying applies to sound (the voice) and hearing. (...) (What) of music is useful to the ear through sound has been given to us for the sake of harmony. But harmony, whose movements are related to the movements of our soul, has been given by the Muses to him who reasonably avails himself of the service of these goddesses, not for the purpose of any unreasonable pleasure, in which nowadays its use seems to consist, but as an aid against the disharmonious state of the soul, whose movements are thereby to be brought to a regulated form and to conformity with itself".
According to Plato, singing must be limited to the few varieties that promote the knowledge of truth and morality, the two factors that alone help to achieve inner and outer harmony. Everything wild and disorderly is morally reprehensible and must not be mouthed by the true artist. Honourable men will never "imitate neighing horses or roaring bulls and rushing rivers and the roaring sea and thunder and all such things".
Understanding the tonal harmonies as a factor in which the human being or his soul appears integrated in the cosmos is an idea that was even more central in Pythagoras 150 years before Plato. A variation of the sound-cosmological world view, which became very influential for Europe, can be found in the apocryphal biblical tradition. There is the idea that the most important task of the angels is to ensure the order of the world through perpetual song.
In the respect that is decisive for my question, this goes beyond the mathematically founded image of a world ordered according to acoustic rules as well as beyond the Platonic heuristics according to which music supports a possible realisation of the harmonic order of the world. The singing of the angels became the theological justification for the religious practices of singing in Christian Europe, and one could read the cultural history of singing on the continent as the continuous conflict of these two strands: the Platonic scepticism towards singing and music on the one hand, and singing as the highest praise of God on the other, which strives to emulate the model of the angels. The conflict reappears in Augustine, for example, who, although he recognises the great power of singing, would prefer to do without it.
At the Council of Trident in the 16th century, another attempt was made to keep the seductive potential of the voice in check, when it was decreed that the voice should be closely bound to its platonic function as the servant of the Word and should not be given any further or more free musical possibilities. This changed in the 17th century with the appearance of virtuoso female soprano voices at the courts of northern Italy. But the distrust of emotionally charged singing in particular, as heard in the pop music of the 20th century, has been articulated again and again.
Back to Plato. The close connection between singing and harmony that he emphasises is not only obvious, but it also has a multitude of implications that yet escape Plato's thinking. He considers all human activities in terms of their possible function for the knowledge of truth and the morality of man that largely results from it. This, by the way, is a high aim, and I do not mean to ridicule it in any way. On the contrary, I pick up here, albeit in a way not envisaged by Plato, by taking up the close connection between knowledge and virtue called for by Plato and asserting that a relevant knowledge of singing cannot be limited to a theoretical discussion of singing, but must engage in the practice of singing. In other words, the philosophers of singing need their own experience of singing.
In addition, I can follow up on Plato's assertion that singing contributes to the harmonisation of the soul. After all, the close interrelationship of soul processes and singing is one of the fundamental theses of a theoretical understanding of singing, as I have in mind following Alfred Wolfsohn. For the voice teacher Wolfsohn, it is precisely in this close voice-soul constellation that the starting point for profound voice development and voice liberation lies, which is paralleled by an inner development and liberation of the singer.
Always mindful of the danger that comes from singing, because it does not only stimulate the good passions, singing for Plato only acquires a positive value if the singing takes place with a knowledge of what the singer is doing. Quite contrary to everyday intuition and experience, according to which one can sing without knowing in all details what is happening technically or morally, Plato also wants to link knowledge and virtue as closely as possible in this respect. He would certainly not have been pleased to hear that his theory of the production of vocal sounds, which he considered similar in principle to a flute, was based not on knowledge but on false opinion. However, it took until the 17th century for this theory to be revised. For many centuries singers did not know what they were doing in this respect!
At one point in the dialogue Laches, Plato has Socrates' interlocutor claim that the true singer is actually the philosopher. For the philosopher does not depend on having a well-tuned instrument at his disposal to call forth the harmonies in the interplay of voice, poetry and music. For the philosopher, it is rather the concordance of attitude and life, of thought and deed, that stands in the foreground. "And such a one seems to me to be the true sound artist who has not tuned a lyre for the most beautiful harmony, not at all instruments of amusement, but in truth has formed his own life harmoniously, in agreement in word and work." With this trick, beautiful singing is completely decoupled from the singing arts and projected only onto authenticity, as we would say today - whereby Plato is not concerned with sounding authentic, but with being authentic. In any case, there are obviously some interesting points of connection here to a contemporary understanding of art, in which closeness to life sometimes counts more than the artistry of music and song. Plato has in mind to dismiss real singing in its moral value. His version of the singing philosopher is far from what I am interested in and mean in this text.
Plato only ever lets his real teacher and literary protagonist Socrates speak about singing either from the meta-level of the philosopher or from the position of the listener, but never as a singer himself. It was only at the end of his life that Socrates began to have doubts about whether he had correctly understood his recurring dream in which he was called upon to practise and engage in "musical activity", in which he believed that he was already fulfilling the demand with his philosophising. Did the dream not rather mean that the philosopher should have immersed himself in life far enough to sing and dance himself?
The expedition to Plato did not unearth any direct evidence of a philosophy of singing. Rather, it confirmed the assumption that Plato's understanding of singing prevented rather than promoted a philosophy of singing. However, clues and intellectual figures have emerged, some of which still appear in contemporary thinking about voice and singing. Foremost among these are the functional and instrumental character of the voice, which has not only anchored itself in the image of the voice as an instrument in singing practice, but also reaches into contemporary debates on media theory.
Singing: Medium, Performativity, Existence
A considerable part of contemporary cultural theory's discussion of the human voice takes place within a theoretical framework defined by the concepts of medium and performance or performativity. A lot of important things have been said here.
(The discourse on media theory with its unmanageable mass of publications can only be dealt with here in brief. Roughly speaking, there are two lines of differentiation of the concept of media. One distinguishes quite practically between perception, distribution and communication media. In a first classification, hearing would become a perceptual medium, the voice a dissemination medium and singing would find a place as a communication medium. All three classifications are fraught with questions and doubts that yield relatively little for a philosophy of singing and will not be pursued further by me here. The second line of differentiation postulates a difference between the classical instrumental concept of medium, which is fraught with major problems, and, among other things, an ontological concept of medium. According to this, the medium is a concept that is capable of replacing the old philosophical concept of being. For, it is then said, everything that exist is medially mediated. I cannot go into that here either. A third concept tries to understand the medium less as a means, i.e. instrumentally, and more in translation to the middle. The medium would then be a place from which the situations unfold in which communication arises).
Can this favourable starting point be transferred without further ado to the search for a philosophy of singing? The first doubts about this can be found in the work of two authors who deal with the opera voice in the debate on media theory and are thus as close as possible to our topic of singing. Both deny that the highly artificial singing in the European opera tradition can be adequately grasped in terms of media theory, at least if one thinks of an instrumental concept of media. In opera, according to Susan McClary, "the voice ceases to serve language as a mere means of transport and instead metaphorically demonstrates how a body freed from the constraints of gravity would feel" For as cultural philosopher K. Ludwig Pfeiffer points out, the opera voice is not a means of transporting something else, feelings, musical guidelines or linguistically formulated stories, but primarily a body technique (in the Greek sense of techné as artistry) that stands on its own and would only be diluted in its significance and power by functional contexts formed by media. It is true that the opera voice appears in the thoroughly medial primal situation of the stage, but this does not yet make singing a phenomenon that can be exhaustively penetrated by media theory. "No theory of performance, of the performative or, on the other hand, of (media) technologies fits the operatic voice, although opera is of course surrounded by all kinds of technologies."
With the concept of body-technology, Pfeiffer connects for our question a highly interesting counter-concept to the concept of medium, without completely wanting to say goodbye to the space of media theory. "This technique (of opera singing, R.P.), which has been perfected in years of education and continuous training, acquires an anthropological significance because it represents a skill on the body and in the medium (sic! R.P.) of one of its central components, the voice. As one of the few fields remaining, for example, alongside dance, it demonstrates the irreplaceability of the bodily elements that come into play and thus of the body precisely by not treating them as a given." But, I would like to add, as conditions in the living system called singing that are constantly changing in the regular practice of singing.
Although the special position of the opera voice according to Pfeiffer cannot and should not be transferred to other forms of singing, the author addresses something that is likely to be of great relevance for a general philosophy of singing. Singing is a practice with which the singer is engaged with him/herself before all communicative involvement. This practice includes, as possibilities, the modes of repetition and practice, through which what, from a media-theoretical point of view, is transported by a voice singing - a song, a sentence, an exclamation, etc. - recedes into the background as a carrier of meaning. In this case, I am singing and occupied above all else with my practice of singing and with the processes of change that accompany it on the level of body, mind and soul, including the voice. Even if the practice of singing does not necessarily happen alone, but is part of singing lessons or voice training, singing in these situations does not function directly as an instrument of medial communication. The media model reaches its limits.
The discussion of Pfeiffer's theses has already indicated that even performance cannot put all dimensions of singing in the right light. Nevertheless, singing remains an almost prototypical example of a performative act. The performative turn in cultural studies has done much to bring voice into focus as an object of reflection. The philosophers Kolesch and Krämer even say: "The voice is a performative phenomenon par excellence" in five respects, which are listed by the authors. (Kolesch/Krämer: Stimme, suhrkamp, Frankfurt 2006) This list is worth taking a closer look at, whereby I will concentrate on its significance for singing as a vocal action or practice, because the voice is performative only in its appearance, i.e. as a voice made loud. Singing is - in this sense - performance.
At the top of the list is that singing always appears as an event. There is no object, the voice, that is in any way permanently present, but the sound of the voice appears and disappears. The voice shows itself singing in time as an event. Kolesch/Krämer add: "The efficacy of the voice, which transcends the moment of its utterance, lies solely in the fact that the voice is perceived and received by others". This is a restriction that the singing philosopher will not share. The effectiveness of the voice is not only directed at others who perceive it, but also and, depending on the situation, especially at the singer himself or herself. My voice has an effect on me! Voice does not only have the character of a performance - which is the second performative characterisation of the authors. It is true that vocal expression is often a performance "of something for others and in front of others", but this is by no means always the case, and at the same time, even in the performance situation, the back-boundness of the singing to the person who is vocally expressing him or herself is important. In addition, vocal expression can be performed with others. Singing is an activity that I can practise together with others without being able to clearly distinguish between actor and recipient.
The third performative aspect is the embodiment character of the voice. "The voice is the trace of our individual as well as social body. It is as much an index of singularity as of culture". This is a very crucial aspect for a philosophy of singing. I would like to add that there are practices of singing that change this kind of embodiment in extent as well as in quality. In voice development I speak of the process of embodiment, which is quite crucial for the liberation of the voice to itself. The body is understood here not only as a physiological prerequisite of vocal action, but as an element that, like the voice itself, is involved in a constant process of change. The liberation of the voice is then at the same time the return of the voice to its body, out of which it shows itself singing. The body that receives the voice is no longer the same as before. The question of the functioning of the vocal apparatus is not irrelevant in this context, but under the keyword embodiment, it is much more about transforming the body. The most important procedure in this process is not the orientation towards physiology, but the imagination and fantasy of the participants.
Furthermore, according to Kolesch/Krämer, the performative voice has a potential for subversion and transgression. Behind this perhaps somewhat pompous term is basically the realisation that Nietzsche already noted when he spoke of speaking being and showing more than what can be written down. "The voice eludes its unbroken semiotic, medial or instrumental serviceability", the two authors formulate. For a philosophy of singing, it should be added that regular practice with one's own voice pushes precisely these aspects of servitude into the background. For this reason, intersubjectivity as the fifth characteristic of the performative voice is important for a comprehensive exploration of singing, but in itself it is too narrow.
The excursions into media theory and the theory of performance have shown that there is much to be discovered there for a philosophy of singing. But at the same time, these conceptual frameworks leave underexposed an area that is central to the exploration of singing: the relationships that emerge in singing between the singer him/herself and his/her vocal activities and that unfold effects in both directions. This is where the singing philosopher is called upon, because the investigation of this aspect is necessarily dependent on experiences from the first-person perspective. When asked what effect my voice and singing have on me, a considerable part of the answer can only come from me, although in principle the effects can also be heard by another listener. This, by the way, is one of the most important skills a voice teacher acquires.
From the self-relationship in singing, a line leads to the second area that is often forgotten in contemporary vocal philosophy. The phenomenon of singing together (which includes speaking together) often seems to be marginalised. Yet joint vocal action plays a major role not only in music and theatre and, in the past, on more or less all ceremonial occasions. In virtually every religious or spiritual practice, communal singing has its place as well, both in liturgical contexts - where singing is always more than mere performative display - and in the broader meditative contexts. Especially in monastic life, singing together is part of daily practice. Interestingly, this even applies to monastic orders whose rules otherwise include silence. The question of why communal singing is so significant here has hardly been asked, let alone brought closer to an answer.
The search for a promising starting point for a philosophical treatment of these largely neglected areas of singing leads me to an excursion out of philosophy into poetry, more precisely to Rilke and his reflections on singing as can be read in the Sonnets to Orpheus. There, the poet is concerned with the question of what singing is and in which ideas of singing the essence is revealed or does not emerge. The third sonnet of the first part reads:
Gesang, wie du ihn lehrst, ist nicht Begehr,
nicht Werbung um ein endlich noch Erreichtes;
Gesang ist Dasein. (...)
Dies ists nicht, Jüngling, dass du liebst, wenn auch
die Stimme dann den Mund dir aufstößt, – lerne
vergessen, dass du aufsangst. Das verrinnt.
In Wahrheit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch.
Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein Wind.
Singing, as you teach it, is not desire,
not an appeal for something that has finally been achieved;
Singing is existence. (...)
This is not, young man, that you love, even if the voice
then pushes your mouth open, - learn to
forget that you were singing. That fades away.
Singing in truth is another breath.
A breath for nothing. A breeze in God. A wind.
In the sonnet, Rilke emphasises that singing is not always and not necessarily embedded in structures of desire. I do not have to want anything with my vocal action. For him, true singing is precisely free of desire of any kind and free of the eros of being in love. Moreover, singing for him is not a means to another end, i.e. singing should not be understood instrumentally. But? Singing is existence. Singing is what happens when a person is unencumbered by all intentions and desires and finds open access to the world through this presence. This is a rather utopian concept („Only a God can do it!"), but at the same time, for Rilke, this idea of singing is already present in every factual singing. "Once for all it is Orpheus when it sings", he says in another sonnet. Turned in this way, singing is always already with itself. Whether it can be heard in this way is the other question. Many singers and many listeners who are enthusiastic about singing will remember moments when this being-within-singing has happened. Such moments are moving in the truest sense.
Rilke's late work also offers a point of contact to emphasise the anthropological relevance of singing for late modern man. His late poems, including the sonnets, deal with the strange experience of modernity, in which the world has become so complex that basic anthropological experiences are no longer possible in direct contact with it. There are no external equivalents for such basic experiences in the modern world . "Nowhere, beloved, will the world be but within" (7th Duino Elegy). The external world lacks the vividness and cultural symbolisation of everyday life that was the rule in pre-modern societies. Only the artist, and here prototypically Orpheus, is able to modulate the world in such a way that the basic experiences become possible again. This modulation follows a path that is at least apparently similar to that of modernity: the process of making the world invisible. For therein lies a characteristic of modernity. Its extremely complex structures are no longer perceptible or comprehensible on the surface. We do not know how the world works because we cannot see it. Today, a hundred years after Rilke, the ideal example of this is the smartphone, which decisively structures our lives and whose mode of operation remains invisible to us users, both in terms of the device itself and the communication networks we access with it.
Rilke does not stop at the general cultural critique of modernism, but takes up the movement of making things invisible for art, intertwines, in his words, lamentation and praise with each other and dedicates himself to the artistic task of sublimating the world into the invisible. It is no longer seeing but hearing that is now the guiding sense! Orpheus sings!
This is a starting point for highlighting the anthropological significance of the human voice for modernity. In the exploration of singing, a structure is revealed that, despite all tendencies towards alienation, still makes basic existential anthropological experiences possible. On the one hand, the voice is a relatively simply structured phenomenon, but at the same time it carries the whole world - as my world - within it. The exploration of the sound spaces of my voice is therefore the exploration of my world. This is also evident in the practical work of voice development. There we repeatedly come up against the personally and culturally existential questions without having to wind our way through the thicket of the world that potentially overwhelms us. Orpheus is the right symbol bearer for this process, because voice (and language) became his way of passing through the spheres of the living and the dead.
According to Rilke, orphic singing brings with it two decisive qualities. It orders the elements of the world according to musical structures, to which everything in the world adapts. From a mythological point of view, this is the first cultural achievement of man, who moves from the wild, close to nature and ecstatic into form. At the same time, Orpheus stands for transgression. With his song, he crosses the border between life and death, between the world and the underworld. Order (as the giving of form) and transgression. Seen in this way, singing becomes the primordial phenomenon of human art. The only transgression that Rilke does not allow his Orpheus is the one towards the Dionysian, that is, back into the wild, as it were. Here, the Sonnets to Orpheus remain true to the antagonism between Orpheus' well-formed Apollonian song and the orgiastic rituals in the name of Dionysus.
For a different interpretation of this field of singing possibilities, the voice teachers Alfred Wolfsohn and Roy Hart come into play, on whose ideas I base my reflections. Wolfsohn developed his revolutionary approach to the whole voice in the 1920s and 30s, shortly after Rilke. In it, he also works with the name Orpheus. In order to be with oneself while singing, it is important to have descended into one's own darkness, one's own Hades, and to rise again from there. Then it becomes possible to cast off the individual and cultural restrictions imposed on singing and to have the whole vocal world at one's disposal. This world is shaped by the musical (or in the broad sense, artistic) structures of singing. Orpheus sings.
Wolfsohn's pupil and successor Roy Hart chose Orpheus' supposed counterpart as a model for his work with the voice, which did not only stay in the musical realm but discovered the theatre as a space for the whole voice. If you listen to his singing today, it quickly becomes clear why. As a singer, Roy Hart has succeeded in dissolving the opposition of Orpheus and Dionysus to a certain extent. He integrates the wild voice into the vocal field on which singing takes place. With him, every human vocal sound actually becomes song and the wild and ecstatic turns out to be less disordered than feared from the Orphic point of view. Only this order is more organic in nature and closely connected to the physicality of the singer. For Wolfsohn, as for Hart, the liberation of singing from as many restrictive ideas and guidelines as possible was an eminently artistic project. For freedom and form are not only not mutually exclusive in singing, they are mutually dependent. Rilke and Wolfsohn shared the experience of the cultural rupture of the First World War. Nevertheless, in the period between the wars, both still have the hope of finding their way back to an orphic order of the world. Only the second catastrophe of the next world war and the Holocaust destroyed hope altogether. Now there is only the option of finding an order in which Orpheus and Dionysus, the well-formed and the wild, are integrated into one world. Only then can we succeed in stopping the barbaric excesses of modernity. This is where the cultural anthropological relevance of an idea of song comes into play, in which every vocal sound is sung. Seen in this way, the whole voice is an anthropological necessity to protect people from themselves.
The Alien and the Neighbours
Contemporary literature on the voice points out in many places that the voice is alien to the individual. In one's voice, alien voices can appear and the vocal diversity that shows up in my voice is large. There is the divine voice, the (incorporated) voice of the father, the one of the other, voices of the conscience, the unconscious, voices that creep into one's own voice with their cultural and social connotation and much more. Experiences of strangeness in and with one's own voice are in a way the norm and, depending on the philosophical concept, open to different interpretations.
The alien in one's own voice is also a significant phenomenon for a philosophy of singing. But in turning to singing (as a vocal action or practice), the alien is shown to be in a dynamic polarity with one's self. In other words, it is not fixed which part of my voice is alien and which sounds belonging to me. One of the great and sometimes disconcerting experiences in voice development is hearing sounds that come from one's own voice, yet sound deeply alien to myself. "That wasn't me." Or "That's not my voice" are typical phrases that come up in these moments. In the practical confrontation with these alien sounds, it is usually possible to reach the point where the sounds are understood and identified as part of one's own voice. This idea of singing is based on awakening and getting to know the still dormant and seemingly alien possibilities in one's own vocal field and bringing them closer to and integrating them into one's own self-image (which, incidentally, is also in constant flux) through singing and listening. The expansions and changes in one's own vocal field run largely synchronously with the changes in the respective self-image or inner situation - or at least they can be synchronised with them.
In a next, mostly artistically motivated step, processes of alienation between self and voice, self-image and singing sometimes occur again. In the successful case, the phase of integrating alien parts of the voice leads to me being able to sing how and what I want in many areas of the vocal field. In the phase of artistic alienation, the focus is on allowing the voice, which is already aware of its extended possibilities, to sing how and what it wants.
The voice is only mine to the extent that the listening experience confirms it. A lively singing means welcoming the exchange, the encounter and the shifting of one's own and alien parts in the voice.
With the dynamisation of the relationship between one's own and the alien, it is not ruled out that there is a principally alien connected to one's own voice in this context. But in the dynamic relationship, it becomes more difficult to assign the alien to a transcendent instance of any kind. Here we need to differentiate more precisely which alien and which voice we are talking about. In a philosophy of singing, the focus is on real audible singing, together with the aspects of strangeness that can be discovered there.
French philosophy of the second half of the 20th century, despite all the differences in the individual concepts, more or less unanimously follows the decision to use the term voice to refer to a conglomerate of the most diverse phenomena and figures, including the metaphorical, the transcendent, the inner voice as well as the unconscious, the alien and the acousmatic. The singing voice also appears in various places, but it is not in the centre of interest. It seems to me that the research is usually guided by the voice in connection with speech. Voice is usually used synonymously with the idea of orality, even if philosophical concepts often aim at a voice or at the vocalness that lies behind this orality and yet can only appear in orality. German discourse has largely adapted to this decision, but at the same time has intervened in some places in a different way.
There are at least two important differences between the traditions of these countries. On the one hand, German-language text production on the topic of voice tends to be oriented towards cultural studies and the decidedly philosophical voices stand on an equal footing with those of other humanities disciplines. The conceptual centre, as we have already seen, is formed by the two terms medium and performance, which, among other things, have the advantage of functioning both philosophically and single-scientifically. In the French context, on the other hand, it is precisely the great authors of philosophy such as Levinas, Derrida or Deleuze, or the thinkers of neighbouring disciplines who are particularly philosophically adaptable, such as Lacan (psychoanalysis) or Barthes (who is difficult to assign to a discipline), who turn to the voice within the framework of their own intellectual projects. Moreover, the theme of voice runs through French post-war philosophy for at least half a century, whereas (almost) all relevant German-language publications, or at least those that cite each other as reference works, were written within not much more than a decade at the turn of the century.
In both respects, the philosophically significant work of Bernhard Waldenfels, who is guided by a phenomenological stance in critical connection with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, represents an almost monolithic exception. Through this basic attitude alone, the juxtaposition of the manifold family-like vocal concepts is ordered in a different way than usual, namely in a way that at least prepares the step over to a philosophy of singing as we have in mind. The question of the alien in the voice is also grasped by Waldenfels in a way that remains close to the phenomenal realm.
Becoming loud or singing: Waldenfels
No serious search for a philosophy of singing today can avoid dealing with the phenomenological studies of Bernhard Waldenfels, which, as far as I can judge, represent the most comprehensive and expanded approach currently to be found in philosophy.
I would like to point out a few aspects in his studies that could be starting points for a philosophy of singing and which, on the other hand, suggest that despite all the richness of insights into hearing and the voice, his approach cannot be readily interpreted as a philosophy of singing. Moreover, Waldenfels forces me to reconsider the concept of vocal action.
His investigations into voice and hearing appear in various of his publications and stand there on an equal footing with other phenomenological studies on aesthetic experience and the bodily constitution of the lifeworldly existence of human beings. The guiding concept of his investigations is responsive corporeality. This idea of the body, which is constantly in the mode of responding, has in itself a certain proximity to voice and song. His reflections on the "loudness of the voice" and on hearing fit into this larger context, in which they function as building blocks of a philosophical edifice that has more in mind than just getting to the bottom of the auditory world of life. By locating the topic in this larger framework, however, there is a danger that a few factors are pushed into the background that could be precisely the decisive ones for a philosophy of singing. Although one should by no means ignore the connection of auditory experience with other senses and human conditions, a philosophy of singing has to ask whether singing, as a vocal action that includes hearing, offers possibilities and discoveries in its field that can only be experienced and actively participated in there.
Waldenfels organises the field via the two main concepts of hearing and voice. Singing is more marginal to him as an example of vocal activity. However, he does not simply speak of the voice in general, but in what I consider a very successful turn of phrase, of the voice becoming loud. In this way he does justice to the phenomenologically important fact that the voice only ever reveals itself in and as an event. There is no substrate of any kind, the voice, which would provide the material for every vocal utterance, but voice only reveals itself in vocal action. The formulation of the voice becoming loud comes very close to my intention to speak of singing instead of the voice. But at the same time, the idea of the voice becoming loud obscures a central aspect of singing. It runs the risk of ignoring the relationship to the person giving voice, i.e. the person singing in his or her intentional being. Although not every vocal sound is intentional, there is always a degree of intentionality to vocal sound. It is not by chance that one says in everyday language, I become loud, instead of my voice becomes loud, or he/she has become loud. The voice that has become loud belongs to the person to whom it belongs. This points to the fact that here hearing, and specifically hearing oneself, is a constitutive element in the self-relationship of the human being and the voice.
I become loud when my voice becomes loud. In Waldenfels' approach, a programmatic attempt is made to push this "producer's perspective" of the singer into the background. According to Waldenfels, if one thinks from the position of the one who gives the voice, it is difficult to get through to the hearing of the voice at all, because one gets caught in the networks of communication with their tendencies towards "subjectification, semanticisation and pragmatisation". In other words, one only hears what someone says and who says it, without paying attention to how this saying takes place and how it affects those who hear it. This, incidentally, is the natural attitude in which we normally deal with hearing in our living world. Especially in speaking, we usually only listen to the voice that is speaking when, for whatever reason, it becomes conspicuous to us. Otherwise, our attention is on the speech, that is, on what is being said. Waldenfels wants to approach the voice and the hearing of the voice phenomenologically and proposes an "acoustic epoché" for this purpose. The epoché is a method developed by Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology. In this method, one brackets the natural way of turning towards a fact or a thing, so to speak, in order to come upon the How of its appearance in consciousness and then, in this inner attitude, to peel out the essence of the object with which I am concerned. Epoché thus denotes a kind of mental technique. Waldenfels uses it to bracket the natural attitude for the listener and thus to get behind the "What do I hear?" and arrive at the "How" of hearing and making sound. He puts himself in the position of a listener who hears behind the actual messages and social meanings of a vocal act in order to bring the becoming-loud of the voice into phenomenological focus. However, this epoché is primarily an option for the listeners and the singers can only enter into this setting to a relatively limited extent, namely insofar as they hear their own voice. In any case, according to Waldenfels, the change of focus from the singer to the listener makes it possible to grasp the voice "initially as a foreign voice", i.e. to recognise the unexpected and initially incomprehensible in the voice in the first place, instead of making the speaker in his dependence on the "overarching logos" the starting point, from which it is actually always already known what can be voiced by whom.
Up to this point, I can largely share Waldenfels' intentions, but the marginalisation of the first-person perspective of the singer(s) goes too far for our purposes and seems to me neither necessary nor appropriate for a phenomenological approach. I therefore propose a practical epoché that concerns the singers and at the same time creates a new situation for the listeners. This practical epoché frees the vocal sound itself as far as possible from linguistic and musical patterns and contents and makes the naked sonic event the dominant theme, so to speak. The voice then reveals itself in very simple sounds that have just enough orientation to enable repeatability. This is the classic situation of individual voice development that I practise in my work. By pushing aside for a while the usual semantic parts of the vocal sound as they show up in speech and musical figures, we can support the epoché on the voice in a way that allows the singers and the listeners to concentrate on the singing (in a broad sense) and to experience the dimensions of meaningfulness inherent in the voice - and without having to say goodbye completely to a natural life situation and attitude, as is the case in the classical epoché.
Only from the position of the singer do I gain access to the dimension of singing that reveals itself in a person through repeated practice. Singing and speaking have an effect on the one who repeatedly does it and practices it that goes beyond what can be heard directly by me or others. Vocal practice affects my „Leibkörper/body", to use a word from Waldenfels. My physical constitution as well as my basic inner situation change when I devote time and effort to practising my voice regularly. What can happen is more than what I hear. In fact, it also changes the way I listen. These small and continuous changes that occur within me can only be perceived and followed from the perspective of the singer, although this perception can be supported and sharpened by a listener who also follows it. It remains to be said that a philosophy of singing cannot be developed only from the perspective of hearing and the listeners, but must also include the position of the singers. Especially the question of how corporeality is involved in the processes of singing and listening needs the self-examination of the singer(s). Another plea for the singing philosophers!
Waldenfels is very interested in the phenomenon of strangeness in his philosophical approach. He searches for the alien in the voice, not least in order to prevent a hasty classification of sound-making into logical or conventional pigeonholes with this focus. For the philosophy of singing, the alien is so important, especially in one's own voice, because it always appears in a mixture with what one has already recognised or understood as one's own in the sound of the voice. The irritation of hearing the alien in one's own voice is intensified by the perception that the alien-sounding parts of one's own voice can be incorporated and are potentially part of my voice. This suspicion has a threatening side, because the integration of alien parts of my voice requires an expansion and adjustment of my self-image. I am somebody else when his or her voice is allowed to sound in a way that was not previously in the realm of the possible or permitted.
This is an experience that can also be stimulated by listening to another voice. The alien voice resonates with something of its own. Listening, I can relate the singing of another person to myself and sense the potential of my own singing in it. Sometimes a person's vocal possibilities expand when he or she hears something in another voice that is waiting to be brought to life as a possible sound space in one's own voice. This inkling can also take on threatening qualities because it is connected with the demand to understand oneself differently.
This is where psychological questions come into picture, which play a correspondingly large role in the practice of voice development. Waldenfels raises concerns at this point, because since "the voice never completely passes into our possession, but retains a certain strangeness", it cannot, in his view, be "thoroughly animated and enlivened". The voice is not a "pure soul-voice". In order to discuss this assertion meaningfully, a thorough clarification of the terms soul and soulfulness would be necessary. For our purposes, it should suffice to point out that alienness is just as much a mode of the soul as of the voice, and that the alien can appear in both areas. This often happens synchronously, in that the listening questioning of an alien aspect in one's own voice sound can lead to soul themes and sometimes remains independent of each other, because the alien without direct soul reference comes into play. But one's own voice with all its alien parts always speaks in a certain way of the person it shows, even if its sonic dimensions are not exhausted in this self-reference.
The experiences of singing and listening that were just mentioned become accessible through the aforementioned practical epoché. Expressed in phenomenological terminology, this epoché does not imply an exit from the life-world. After all, the experiences and insights resulting from the epoché are meant to be connectable to the voice in all its potential lifeworld situations. It is then not primarily about a philosophical search for knowledge, but about opening up possible paths of development and liberation for singing. The philosophically relevant results of this common search movement are rather by-products, which in turn primarily serve to liberate the voice to itself. The singing philosopher does not only think, he or she sings!
In the practical epoché, it turns out that not only is the listening process "a hybrid of event and act", as Waldenfels points out, but that something similar applies to singing. Each sounding of one's own voice has a mixture of action and eventful aspects. I am never completely in control of how my voice sounds and what is expressed with it on the various levels of meaningfulness. "The event character does not even stop at my own voice ", and this does not only apply, as Waldenfels says, to the speaking voice, which cannot completely foresee and determine what and how something is said, but to the voice in a much broader sense. This is another reason why the term vocal action that I am working with here is, strictly speaking, misleading. Singing is always more and different than action, although there are aspects of action in singing. Every vocal sound is singing and as such has event qualities. Instead of speaking of vocal action, the term vocal practice, which I already briefly mentioned at the beginning, is more appropriate. In any case, the vocal double character of action and event is one of the outstanding insights formulated by Waldenfels.
Varieties of Singing
One can sing alone, for oneself or for others. (Strictly speaking, one always sings for oneself, even if the singing is directed outwards to others).
You can sing together with others, with friends, with your family, in a choir.
One can sing with someone else or with another voice, for example with a song from the radio or at a concert.
You can sing dialogically, as in many folk songs, where often a leader gets a response from the group singing along.
You can sing in unison and polyphony with others.
One can sing freely, for example in improvisation, and one can sing to a given specification, which is usually in the form of sheet music.
One can sing acapella and to the accompaniment of musical instruments.
One can sing in a way that leads others - and sometimes oneself - to the (false) view that one cannot sing.
You can sing a lot and a little, often and rarely.
You can practise singing, for example by singing a lot or by doing singing exercises.
One can practise hearing while singing.
You can learn to sing in different ways.
You can sing in different moods.
(...)
Singing as a Way of Life: Alfred Wolfsohn and Roy Hart
Among the great pioneers of the conditions for the possibility of a philosophy of singing that can do justice to its subject and at the same time politely move aside the extended voice concepts of contemporary philosophy - in order to devote itself first to the voice as a phenomenon - are the German voice teacher Alfred Wolfsohn and his student and successor Roy Hart. Both names hardly appear in the literature on the voice. In the philosophical language game, virtually no one has taken notice of them so far. At most, in the spheres of voice development, in music and theatre, one comes across one of the two names from time to time. The lack of presence is partly due to the fact that Wolfsohn's writings have remained unpublished to this day (except A. Wolfsohn: …den Gestank der Welt vertreiben/..banishing the stench of the world, 2022) and Roy Hart left almost nothing in the way of texts. Therefore, the transmission of their ideas and approaches to voice and song has been largely dependent on oral and practical transmission by teachers committed to this tradition. This, by the way, is not a bad way to keep a tradition alive.
Wolfsohn was the first to liberate the singing voice in theory and practice from the conventions according to which a voice can only ever serve one register or pitch. He opposed this with the assertion that every voice is in principle capable of displaying every possible vocal sound, men the soprano as well as women tenor and bass. This was the birth of the idea of the whole voice. He also turned against a purely technical-mechanical approach to the voice and demanded that we listen to what is revealed in the human voice. "Learn to sing, oh my soul" became the motto of his work, which he borrowed from Nietzsche.
In a further step, in which his pupil and successor Roy Hart already played an important role, the separation of the voice into a range that is beautiful and suitable for singing and another that is considered ugly and only suitable for unsophisticated utterances was abolished. Now it was possible to hear any vocal sound as singing. From noisy loud breathing to so-called broken sounds and multiphonics to angelic singing, all vocal sounds were heard and explored with interest and appreciation. And as a third dimension that has rarely become explicit, there is what one can call, with Sybille Krämer, the negations of the voice: The holding back of the voice into silence, stuttering, faltering, etc. Developing the freedom to sound deliberately unfree is part of the art of singing in the broad sense that is sought here in following Wolfsohn.
With this approach, Wolfsohn for the first time shakes the foundations of the self-evident, on which every reflection on the voice and every culturally accepted way of dealing with it has been based since Plato. He opens the door to a space of singing in which every vocal sound becomes a song. It was then up to Roy Hart to carry out the first convincing artistic realisations of this idea. A philosophical study of singing today can only do justice to its subject if it reflects these expansions of the concept of voice and the accompanying change in the idea of singing. In principle (not in fact), every voice is capable of expressing every vocal sound in his/her vocal practice that another voice can produce, whenever and wherever. At the same time, every voice is integrated into a social-cultural form of life that co-determines its sound in every vocal action, from which, however, the voice can in principle (and factually) rise to other forms of singing. In all these processes, individual and supra-individual aspects of people's existence come to light, which are meaningful and can be interpreted accordingly. Moreover, this fundamental significance is the reason for the spread of talk about the voice in the figurative sense, as it has taken root in contemporary philosophy and cultural studies.
Wolfsohn was aware from the beginning that an idea of singing that encompassed the whole voice could not be implemented only theoretically. It is not enough to write about it, because the consequences of this new way of thinking must be made audible and tangible. You cannot write about the whole voice without having had your own experiences with the vocal sound universe, and reading a text like this only really makes sense if the reading inspires you to sing yourself.
In the meantime, the basic conditions for developing a philosophy of singing have also changed fundamentally in that the listening experiences of practically all people, not only in the West, are much broader than they were a hundred years ago. In the meantime, our European ideas of beautiful singing have been joined by the arias of the Peking opera, Mongolian throat singing, the traditions of Africa, the voices of pop and rock history and a whole range of other ways of singing. With this great expansion of the field of human hearing, no one can claim that his or her ideal of the beautiful voice is binding for all people.
The field for the whole voice is now prepared in this respect, too.
Singing Philosophers or Philosophising Singers?
After this foray through a few areas of philosophy and related disciplines in search of starting points for a possible philosophy of singing, I would like to conclude by raising the fundamental question of what such a philosophy of singing is actually good for. What is the deeper meaning of a theoretical understanding of singing and its significance for human beings? Not that there necessarily has to be this deeper meaning. The curiosity about everything that is and the interest in knowledge inherent in human beings needs no further justification than that of existing at all. But if, like me, one wants to take the idea of a singing philosopher seriously, then the question arises as to whether and how the theoretical grasp of the subject of singing can and should have an effect on the practice of singing. For Socrates, it was not yet a question that knowledge of a matter has a direct effect on the action and life of the knower. Knowledge in this sense is virtue, that is, knowledge of how to act well. But already in Aristotle, theory acquires a much stronger self-referentiality, of which the European tradition of thought is deeply marked. Perhaps in thinking about singing, we are moving back into a Socratic context or even out of the European lineage towards a connection between theory and practice, as found in the great intellectual traditions of Asia. I am thinking, for example, of Indian Yoga, the great meditation teachings and the Chinese schools of Qi Gung and TaiJii, in which centuries of spiritual efforts have been and are being made, all of which are integrated into a practice that acts with body and mind. Mental as well as physical actions are in the service of a liberation of the human being from certain limitations, which in turn can be of a mental and physical nature and lead to a harmonisation of life. In the vicinity of these approaches, it would no longer be a matter of the singing philosopher being able to adjust his theoretical findings with the help of his own practical experience, but of understanding singing and thinking about singing as elements of a movement whose vanishing point is a liberation, namely the liberation of the voice and of singing to itself. The singing philosopher is then joined by the philosophising singer and the more their work progresses, the less they can be distinguished from each other.
In the long run, a choir of singing philosophers will succeed in developing a philosophy of singing that emphasises and appreciates the anthropologically significant dimensions of the human voice.
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