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An Ashgate Book
Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body

Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies
in Opera
Series Editor
Roberta Montemorra Marvin
University of Iowa, USA
Advisory Board
Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto, Canada
David Levin, University of Chicago, USA
Herbert Lindenberger, Emeritus Professor, Stanford University, USA 
Julian Rushton, Emeritus Professor, University of Leeds, UK
The Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera series provides a centralized

and prominent forum for the presentation of cutting-edge scholarship that draws
on numerous disciplinary approaches to a wide range of subjects associated
with the creation, performance, and reception of opera (and related genres) in
various historical and social contexts. There is great need for a broader approach
to scholarship about opera. In recent years, the course of study has developed
significantly, going beyond traditional musicological approaches to reflect
new perspectives from literary criticism and comparative literature, cultural
history, philosophy, art history, theatre history, gender studies, film studies,
political science, philology, psycho-analysis, and medicine. The new brands of
scholarship have allowed a more comprehensive interrogation of the complex
nexus of means of artistic expression operative in opera, one that has meaningfully
challenged prevalent historicist and formalist musical approaches. The
Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera series continues to move this important
trend forward by including essay collections and monographs that reflect the
ever-increasing interest in opera in non-musical contexts. Books in the series are
linked by their emphasis on the study of a single genre—opera—yet are distinguished
by their individualized and novel approaches by scholars from various disciplines/
fields of inquiry. The remit of the series welcomes studies of seventeenth century to
contemporary opera from all geographical locations, including non-Western topics.
Postopera: Reinventing the
Voice-Body
Jelena Novak
New University of Lisbon, Portugal
First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge

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Copyright © Jelena Novak 2015
Jelena Novak has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
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Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Novak, Jelena, 1974-
Postopera : reinventing the voice-body / by Jelena Novak.
pages cm.—(Ashgate interdisciplinary studies in opera)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-4103-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Operas—21st century—Philosophy and aesthetics.
2. Operas—20th century—Philosophy and aesthetics. 3. Opera—21st century.
4. Opera—20th century. I. Title.
ML3858.N93 2015
782.109’05--dc23
2014042884

ISBN: 9781472441034 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781315601717 (ebk)
For my boys, Luka, Pavle and Dejan,
and in memory of my grandfather, Vlastimir
This page has been left blank intentionally
Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Tables xi
Series Editor’s Preface xiii
Foreword by Louis Andriessen xv
Acknowledgments xvii
Part I Focusing on Body Singing
1 Postopera and Vocalic Body 3
2 Body–Voice Gap, Postopera, and Body/Voice Theory 19
Part II Voices beyond Corporeality:

Performing Singing as Upgrading
3 Singing Beyond the Body: Uniqueness, Intruder, and Prosthesis 41
4 Monstrous Singing: The Politics of Vocal Existence 57
Part III Throwing the Voice, Catching the Body:

Opera, Ventriloquism, and
De-Synchronization
5 Operatizing the Film: Body Without Voice and Voice

Without Body 79
6 Singing Letters, Multiplied Bodies, and Dissociated Voice 93
Part IV Singing Gender as a Performance
7 Voice and Gender Standing Apart 113

viii Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body
8 Vocal Drag, Counter-Castrato, and the Scandal of the

Singing Body 133
Reinventing the Vocalic Body in Postopera: Conclusion 149
Bibliography 155
Audio and Video Recordings 165
Scores 167
Index 169
List of Figures
2.1 Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, Einstein on the Beach; Helga Davis
and Kate Moran perform in Einstein on the Beach in Ann Arbor,
2012. Photo © Lucie Jansch 29
3.1 Michel van der Aa, One, video still. Courtesy of the artist 44
4.1 Robot Kismet. From Act III, Dolly, video documentary opera Three
Tales by Steve Reich and Beryl Korot. Image by Beryl Korot.
Photo by Wonge Bergmann © Wonge Bergmann 64
4.2 Robot Kismet and Rodney Brooks in Three Tales, video
documentary opera by Steve Reich and Beryl Korot. Photo by
Wonge Bergmann © Wonge Bergmann 69
5.1 Philip Glass, La Belle et la Bête live performance. Photo: Tom

Brazil, © Tom Brazil 80
5.2 Armchair lion, film still. La Belle et la Bête written and directed
by Jean Cocteau © 1946 SNC (Groupe M6) / Comité Cocteau.
Photo by G.R. Aldo. Special thanks to Pierre Bergé and the
Comité Cocteau 87
5.3 Arm-shaped candlesticks, film still. La Belle et la Bête written
and directed by Jean Cocteau © 1946 SNC (Groupe M6) / Comité
Cocteau. Photo by G.R. Aldo. Special thanks to Pierre Bergé and
the Comité Cocteau 88
5.4 La Belle et la Bête, LEGO version by “barkingbartok” (Nathan
Walby), film still 91
6.1 Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway, Writing to Vermeer,

Scene 4.2. Photo © Hans van den Bogaard 97
6.2 Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway, Writing to Vermeer,
Scene 3. Photo © Hans van den Bogaard 105
7.1 Louis Andriessen and Hal Hartley, La Commedia. Photo © Hans

van den Bogaard 122
7.2 Cristina Zavalloni as Dante in La Commedia by Louis Andriessen
and Hal Hartley. Photo © Hans van den Bogaard 127
8.1 Fenway Bergamot. Photo © Laurie Anderson 139

List of Tables
7.1 La Commedia, Part 1: The City of Dis or the Ship of Fools,

synopsis comparison of Hartley and Andriessen 117
7.2 La Commedia, Part 2: Story from Hell (Racconto dall’Inferno),
synopsis, comparison of Hartley and Andriessen 117
7.3 La Commedia, Part 3: Lucifer, synopsis, comparison of Hartley
and Andriessen 118
7.4 La Commedia, Part 4: De Tuin der Lusten (The Garden of Earthly
Delights), synopsis, comparison of Hartley and Andriessen 118
7.5 La Commedia, Part 5: Luce Etterna, synopsis, comparison of
Hartley and Andriessen 119
Series Editor’s Preface
Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera provides a centralized and prominent

forum for the presentation of cutting-edge scholarship that draws on numerous
disciplinary approaches on a wide range of subjects associated with the creation,
performance, dissemination, and reception of opera and related genres in various
historical and social contexts. The series includes topics from the seventeenth century
to the present and from all geographical locations, including non-Western traditions.
In recent years, the field of opera studies has not only come into its own but
has developed significantly, going beyond traditional musicological approaches to
reflect new perspectives from literary criticism and comparative literature, cultural
history, philosophy, art history, theater history, gender studies, film studies,
political science, philology, psycho-analysis, and even medicine. The new brands
of scholarship have allowed a more comprehensive and intensive interrogation of
the complex nexus of means of artistic expression operative in opera, one that has
meaningfully challenged prevalent historicist and formalist musical approaches.
Today, interdisciplinary, or as some prefer cross-disciplinary, opera studies are
receiving increasingly widespread attention, and the ways in which scholars,
practitioners, and the public think about the artform known as opera continue to
change and expand. Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera seeks to move
this important trend forward by including essay collections and monographs that
reflect the ever-increasing interest in opera in non-musical contexts.
In Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body, Jelena Novak addresses the relationship
between the operatic singing body and its reinvention in recent operatic works,
“postoperas” as she calls them. Engaging with a body of musical works that is
highly varied musically, dramatically, with regard to production design, and in
terms of what is “asked” of the voice in relation to the body, the author structures
her illuminating cultural analysis both in and through opera, a site in which she
shows how various discourses are encoded. Each chapter introduces a separate
issue regarding body and voice, based on varying types of theoretical matrices,
and illuminates the musical consequences in the repertory discussed. The author
thereby illustrates the multi-dimensional reality of both postopera and the voice/
body relationship and unpacks how that relationship works in the aural and the
visual, the musical and the verbal. This wide-ranging and theoretically grounded
study is strikingly original and remarkably distinctive, thereby promising to
contribute in significant ways to the field of opera studies.
Roberta Montemorra Marvin

Foreword
Sometime in the early 2000s I was teaching young composers and musicologists
in Poland. I think it was in Radziejowice. On the last morning I collected my stuff
to go back to Amsterdam and could not find the scores and recordings of my opera
Writing to Vermeer. At that moment Jelena Novak entered the room with all the
things I missed. She said she had studied (and copied) the score the whole night.
The first thing I thought was: she has the Right Spirit.
The book shows that she developed over the following years into somebody
who has very profound thoughts about composition and theatre theory and practice.
It triggers important discussions on postopera, music and theatre.
It is very sharp and elegant. I learned a lot from it myself.
Louis Andriessen, March 2015

Acknowledgments
Belgrade, Amsterdam, Lisbon: these are the cities that outlined my life in large
measure during the years in which this book was emerging. I cannot think about
this research process without connecting it to these three different contexts within
which it was embedded. It was all there: strained, curious and seductive Belgrade,
energetic and floating Amsterdam, and luminous and unfathomable Lisbon.
It would be strange to express my gratitude to the cities. Nevertheless, I am
confident that my work on this book owes a lot to all three of them.
My special thanks go to the University of Amsterdam and Amsterdam School
of Cultural Analysis, which provided an institutional framework for my research,
and especially to Rokus de Groot, whose advice was invaluable. I am very grateful
to Nuffic, which supported me for the second time with a Huygens grant in 2007–8.
In 2013 I became a FCT-funded postdoc research fellow of the Research Center
for Studies of Aesthetics and Sociology of Music (CESEM) in Lisbon, and the
support that I have there, especially from colleagues Mário Vieira de Carvalho and
João Pedro Cachopo, means a lot.
I am grateful to composers and directors whom I was lucky to be able to
meet and/or talk to: Michel van der Aa, Louis Andriessen, Philip Glass, Peter
Greenaway, Hal Hartley, Beryl Korot, Steve Reich, Robert Wilson. I must mention
also colleagues from the Society of Minimalist Music who offered advice and/
or helped with proofreading my text for English: Tristian Evans, Kyle Gann,
Keith Potter, John Pymm, Pwyl Ap Siôn; colleagues and friends that I met during
conferences, with whom I had inspiring conversations and who commented on
some of the chapters: Ulrike Hartung, Pavel Jiracek, Richard Leppert, Sander van
Maas, Bianca Michaels, Christopher Morris, Nicholas Till, John Richardson, Pieter
Verstraete, Caroline Wilkins; my old friends and colleagues who read versions
of the manuscript and were dynamic interlocutors: Bojan Djordjev, Siniša Ilić,
Ivana Ilić-Stamatović, Miško Šuvaković, Ana Vujanović, and Jim Samson, whose
language support and wise advice in the final stages of writing were irreplaceable;
my good friend Frits van der Waa, who taught me beautiful things about music,
drawing, writing, parenting, and Amsterdam; my dear friends Jasna Veličković
and Danijela Šendula, who not only discussed my research problems with me,
but also always generously invited me to stay in their Amsterdam and Rotterdam
homes when I was in the Netherlands.
My parents Mirjana and Tomislav, and my brother Ivan, always respected
my choices, and never failed to encourage me to explore. Dejan is the one who
cherished this research daily at all kinds of levels, and without his support it
would have looked very different. Our sons Luka and Pavle are the most beautiful
xviii Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body
research companions that I could ever have wished for. I can only hope that at least
some of their immense curiosity, love of play, bright voices, and irresistible charm
encouraged me to make this book more interesting for readers. Thank you, boys!
My wonderful grandfather Col Vlastimir Stojanović supported me in all kinds
of ways since I was born. It was maybe back then when I was one year old, and
when he started tape recording my first words, poems, and songs, that my interest
in the power of the voice begun. My grandfather is probably the most devoted
reader that I will ever have. My way of sharing this special moment with him is to
dedicate this book to his memory.
Part I
Focusing on Body Singing
Chapter 1
Postopera and Vocalic Body
In 2003 I attended a performance of Michel van der Aa’s opera One (2002), which
has only one singer on the stage. Soprano Barbara Hannigan, looking identical
to her life-size two-dimensional video, confronts the representation of herself
throughout the piece: a projected singing body and a live singing body represent
each other, and their mutual representations are at the same time complementary
and deconstructive. Despite the mimetic relationship between a live performing
body and its video double, the live and the projected images were always clearly
distinguishable. In the sphere of sound/music, however, it was sometimes difficult
to detect what was live singing and what was pre-recorded sound projected on stage.
The impossibility of clearly distinguishing the pre-recorded from the live voice
makes the relationship between the two fluctuating and dynamic, and the same
goes for the relationship between the voice and the body, since the conventional
forms of their mutual representation change significantly. The result is extremely
virtuosic singing because the physical body “competes” with the machine, whose
performance goes beyond the physical capabilities of a performing human body.
That relationship between body and machine creates a kind of vocal “alloy”
consisting of live and pre-recorded components. Such a vocal result “outgrows”
the performing body: since the body singing live is not sufficient to produce the
vocal result that Van der Aa envisaged, the technologically enhanced voice appears
beyond the physical limits and capacity of the vocal apparatus of the singing body.
Two relations are questioned in One simultaneously: between the singing
body and its voice, and between the live performer and its projected double. The
discrepancy between what is seen and heard appeared significantly different from
that usually experienced in Western conventional operatic repertoire. The singer’s
body produces a voice on stage in One, and the singing body is at the same time
determined by the voice in a virtuous overlapping of projected and live performed
sounds and images. A specific perception of the singing body is provoked, one
that Steven Connor designates as the vocalic body, or voice-body: “a surrogate
or secondary body, a projection of a new way of having or being a body, formed
and sustained out of the autonomous operations of the voice.”1 The individual,
expressive, self-reflexive body performs, while at the same time it is performed
by the voice. I read One as a strong critique of the common relationship between
body and voice in conventional opera, where it often appears to be the “blind
spot,” or pre-determined convention. By reinventing the body–voice relationship
1
Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35.
4 Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body
that constitutes the core of the opera as we know it, Van der Aa at the same time
reinvents the opera and our understanding of it. As such, One is exemplary for
both the subject of this book—singing body and its reinvention—and for my own
object of analysis, which I define as a distinctive field: the postopera.
My main argument is that the body–voice relationship establishes meanings
produced by opera and that furthermore it becomes one of the major driving
forces in recent opera. As such this relationship should be considered when
opera is analyzed. I investigate the reinvention of the body–voice relationship in
works by some of the most acclaimed and intriguing contemporary music theatre
authors such as Van der Aa, Laurie Anderson, Louis Andriessen, Philip Glass,
Peter Greenaway, Hal Hartley, Beryl Korot, and Steve Reich. In their own way,
pieces chosen for analysis raise questions and propose answers concerning the
reinvention of mutual relationship between body and voice (vocalic body) in
recent operatic practice.
The reinvention in question assumes the changes that came as the result of
the impact of new media, a de-synchronization between image and sound, or a
redefinition of sex–gender–voice relationships in opera. I also examine the ways in
which the relationship between the singing body and the voice is considered in theory.
By showing how the singing body constitutes opera’s meanings I intend to
achieve four aims:
• extend the cultural analysis of opera to the singing body;

• identify the theme of mutual interaction between the singing body and the
voice in opera as a site in which different discourses are encoded;
• enrich the field of opera studies with a body/voice theory; and
• define the concept of postopera, thus creating a theoretical context and
common “scene” for analyzed pieces.
These four aims constitute at the same time a major contribution of this book
towards opera studies.
Defining Postopera: History of the Term
Since postopera is my object of analysis, and since I introduce it as a theoretical

concept, it is necessary to at least provisionally position it here. With the term
postopera I reply to a wide range of operatic practices that have appeared in
Western musical theatre since the last quarter of the twentieth century, practices
for which the use of the notion of opera becomes somewhat inadequate. I will now
explain how I came to this notion of postopera and why, and in Chapter 2 I will
elaborate on its meanings further.
Postopera and Vocalic Body 5
I first used the word postopera during my research project Opera in the Age of
Media.2 This I did for two reasons, the first practical and the second theoretical.
The practical reason was that as a technical term, the notion of postopera facilitated
the process of writing. I felt that the term opera was no longer adequate when I was
writing about recent pieces by authors such as Glass, Andriessen, Reich, Van der
Aa or John Adams. The term opera became somewhat old-fashioned and unfit to
refer to all kinds of conceptual and media changes that those pieces demonstrated
in comparison to conventional opera repertoire. I felt uneasy when qualifying those
pieces as operas and that uneasiness made me constantly add some explanations
when using the word opera for them: for example, non-conventional, contemporary,
postmodern. I used these descriptions in order to distinguish conventional operatic
repertoire from unconventional recent contemporary practices. However, those
additions made me feel that my text was “stuttering” each time I had to use the
term opera. Something was wrong: my theoretical objects were asking to be
defined more in accordance with their features, and I needed a practical solution
for that problem.
The solution came with the notion of postopera inspired by the title used
by Jeremy Tambling.3 It liberated my text from “stuttering.” It designated
unconventional contemporary operatic pieces in which the relationship between
music and drama is reinvented, and the impact of new media to the opera world
is significant. The theoretical reason why I used the term postopera was that as
a theoretical concept it made me rethink recent opera in the light of Hans-Thies
Lehmann’s concept of postdramatic theatre in order to situate it on a larger map of
contemporary theatre practices.4
In this book I reintroduce the notion of postopera for two reasons: 1) because
I believe that it is productive and necessary to make a more profound comparison
with the theoretical field of postdramatic theatre defined by Hans-Thies Lehmann
in order to maintain the opposition between conventional “dramatic” opera
and postdramatic operatic practices, and 2) because I understand the notion
of postopera not only as postmodern opera, as was the case with the notion
of post-operatic introduced by Nicholas Till, but also as postdramatic opera,
2
My MA thesis (University of Arts, Belgrade, 2003) was made into a book of
the same name: Opera u doba medija [Opera in the Age of Media] (Novi Sad, Sremski
Karlovci: Izdavačka knjižarnica Zorana Stojanovića, 2007).
3
Jeremy Tambling, “Post-Opera? After Brecht,” in Opera and the Culture of Fascism
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 229–48.
4
Lehmann’s book was originally published in German: Hans-Thies Lehmann,
Postdramatisches Teater (Frankfurt: Verlag der Autoren, 1999). I used its English
translation: Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (New
York: Routledge, 2006). Since the English translation is abridged I also used a Serbian/
Croatian translation of an integral version of the German original: Hans-Thies Lehmann,
Postdramsko kazalište, trans. Kiril Miladinov (Zagreb and Beograd: CDU—Centar za
dramsku umjetnost, TkH—Centar za teoriju i praksu izvođačkih umetnosti, 2004).
and those differences need clarification.5 As I will elaborate in more detail in

Chapter 2, for Till post-operatic is a kind of synonym for postmodern opera.
He does not connect post-operatic with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s concept of
postdramatic theatre. As a point of differentiation I find Lehmann’s concept of
great importance for understanding the changes that happened in a number of
recent operas. Alluding to some emblematic theoretical foundations of opera
studies—Opera and Drama by Richard Wagner6 and Opera as Drama by Joseph
Kerman7—I will discuss what I call “opera after drama” or “opera beyond drama,”
postopera: that is, opera which is postdramatic and postmodern at the same time.
The Vocalic Body and Ventriloquism
The practice of reinventing the body–voice relationship in opera was introduced

to me by One, and Connor’s concept of a vocalic body attracted my interest in
theorizing that relationship. The concept of the vocalic body, or voice-body as
Connor also designates it, interrogates the understanding of a relationship between
body and voice. As is usually understood, the body produces the voice. The concept
of the vocalic body emphasizes not only that their inversion is possible, but that it
happens all the time. It emphasizes the reversibility of the mutual influences between
body and voice: “The principle of the vocalic body is simple. Voices are produced
by bodies, but can also themselves produce bodies.”8 I perceive the voice-body as a
kind of mirror mechanism—the voice is projected by, but also on, the body and that
projection, in this case vocal performance, immediately affects the identity and the
presence of the body that produced it, by reflecting itself back to it.
Slavoj Žižek’s theorization of the body–voice relationship precedes Connor’s
vocalic-body concept. It exposes the problem of belonging between the voice and
the body. Žižek questions the core of this relationship, describing its paradoxical
mechanism: “The voice acquires a spectral autonomy, it never quite belongs to
the body we see, so that even when we see a living person talking, there is always
some degree of ventriloquism at work: it is as if the speaker’s own voice hollows
him out and in a sense speaks ‘by itself’, through him.”9 Another author whose
5
Nicholas Till, “‘I don’t mind if something’s operatic, just as long it’s not opera’:
A Critical Practice for New Opera and Music Theatre,” Contemporary Theatre Review,
vol. 14, no. 1 (2004): 15–24.
6
Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1995). Originally written in 1851.
7
Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1988).
8
Steven Connor, “Violence, Ventriloquism and the Vocalic Body,” in Psychoanalysis
and Performance, ed. Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear (London and New York:
Routledge, 2001), 75–93, 80.
9
Slavoj Žižek, “I Hear You with My Eyes,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed.
Slavoj Žižek and Renata Salecl (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 92.
writing on voice is a major contribution to the field of voice theory, philosopher

Mladen Dolar, also identifies the gap that exists between the body and the voice
in general. He also claims that the voice never sounds like the person emitting it,
and insists on gap, and mismatch between them.10 Dolar connects that gap with
practice of ventriloquism “as if ventriloquism was the standard use of the voice
that we overlook by mere habit.” 11
It is in disembodied voice and ventriloquism, the “practice of making voices
appear to issue from elsewhere than their source,” that Connor finds this gap
between body and voice that both Žižek and Dolar write about.12 According to
Connor, “the disturbing effect of ventriloquism may derive from its transcendence
or disruption of seen space.”13 To me the effect of the ecstatic conventional operatic
voice (for example in romantic operas) was precisely the one that disrupted the
“seen space” often containing the motionless body of the singer. “The ventriloquial
voice asks in particular to be understood in terms of the relations between vision
and hearing, a relation which it itself helps to disclose,” writes Connor.14 I believe
that the same principle stands for the operatic voice too.
Through theorizing ventriloquism Connor arrives at the concept of a vocalic
body. Due to a questioning of the body–voice relationship on which it is based,
ventriloquism is of interest to my research on the relationship between body and
voice in opera. Some kind of overlooking of perception of the body–voice gap,
while insisting on its performance, is common to both ventriloquism and opera. In
both ventriloquism and in opera we know where the voice comes from, but most
often are implicitly asked to agree that we do not. The act of the ventriloquist is
usually based on the procedure of lending a human voice to the dummy, or puppet.
In conventional operas, there is a similar procedure: we know where the voice
comes from, and still it seems like the singer borrows the voice for his/her own
body which, like a dummy, waits for the voice to vivify it. The “borrowing effect”
is the result of a body–voice gap on which both opera and ventriloquism rely. I will
elaborate on this gap further in Chapter 2.
Reinventing the Vocalic Body (in Opera)
In the pieces that I have chosen to analyze, the relationship between the singing
body and the voice becomes a site for creative exploration where the boundaries
10
Mladen Dolar, “What’s in a Voice?” in Resonant Bodies, Voices, Memories, ed.
Anke Bangma et al. (Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2008), 196–212, 203.
11
Ibid., 203.
12
Connor, Dumbstruck, 13–14.
13
Ibid., 15.
14
Ibid., 14.
of the opera world are stretched.15 The vocalic bodies of the singers in these
pieces could be interpreted as theoretically meaningful statements, making the
body–voice relationship a place of discursive density. The problem that persists
throughout opera history is the ambivalent relationship between the music and the
drama in opera. In the pieces I have chosen as theoretical objects, the body–voice
relationship in opera comes into the foreground.16 New interpretations and
interventions appear that strengthen opera’s move beyond its institutional borders.
The relationship between voice and body is increasingly varied in these chosen
operas, where interventions upon the body–voice relation open possibilities not
only for expanding the borders of the opera world further, but also for what is
considered body and voice in opera.
I illustrate this reinvention of the relationship between body and voice in
relation to six works, listed here chronologically: La Belle et la Bête (1994) by
Philip Glass, Writing to Vermeer (1997–98) by Louis Andriessen, Peter Greenaway,
Michel van der Aa, and Saskia Boddeke, Three Tales (1998–2002) by Steve Reich
and Beryl Korot, One (2002) by Michel van der Aa, Homeland (2007) by Laurie
Anderson, and La Commedia (2004–2008) by Louis Andriessen and Hal Hartley.
I list the names of directors (and in the case of Van der Aa in Writing to Vermeer the
name of composer of electronic interludes) also as authors of the analyzed pieces
since I believe their direction is inseparable part of the discussed postoperas. Some
of these works I have experienced in performance (Writing to Vermeer, One, La
Commedia, Homeland) and others I have seen via DVD (La Belle et la Bête, Three
Tales). For the analysis of almost all of them I have also relied on scores, and
audio and video recordings of opera performances. The only exception here is
Homeland: there is no score for this piece.
Concerning the coordinates in which these chosen pieces emerge, the temporal
frame is between 1994 and 2008. The territory encompassed involves the
Netherlands and the United States of America, since the composers of the operas
depicted here are significant figures within the field of repetitive music established
in the USA (Reich, Glass, Anderson), a musical language that received one of its
most fruitful and productive responses in the Netherlands (Andriessen, Van der Aa).
The social system discussed is that of late capitalism since it gives a framework
15
According to Danto’s institutional theory of art, the term “art world” designates an
institutional framework that gives legitimacy to the work of art. That framework includes
art theory, the art market, the educational system, artists, works of art, art collectors, art
professionals, directors of artistic institutions, the audience, and so on. Arthur C. Danto,
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983), 5. I use the terms “opera world” and “music world” in analogy to
the term “art world.”
16
The notion of a theoretical object designates highly discursive works, and implies
analysis in which the piece is read and discussed by theory, but at the same time the theory
is illuminated by the piece itself – that is perceived, as it is, by a kind of discursive practice.
For more about theoretical object see: Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art,
Preposterous History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 48.
to the pieces and permeates them. Analyzing the implications of late capitalism in
these chosen pieces is a complex task and could have been the subject of another
book. Thus, it was not my primary preoccupation in this study. At the same time,
Jameson’s claim that “every position on postmodernism in culture—whether
apologia or stigmatization—is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an
implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism
today”17 was on my mind when focusing on the analyzed pieces.
The unconventional staging of these works affects developments in the
body–voice relationship. In One the singer’s performance is deeply interwoven
with a pre-recorded matrix of sounds and images. In the video documentary
opera Three Tales documentary footages are reworked and synchronized with
pre-recorded and live performed music and singing. Moreover, this work severely
transforms stereotypes of operatic singing by inventing specific, electronically
enhanced procedures that reshape the vocal expression. La Belle et la Bête is an
opera for ensemble and film. The original film is projected while its soundtrack
is silenced, and operatic music and singing are composed and synchronized with
the pronunciation of the spoken dialogues of each film character. In Writing to
Vermeer—a multimedia piece with live singing, video, extensive projections of
the written texts, and dance—all the singing bodies are feminine, and the principal
characters are triplicated by dancing characters with the same costumes. The
film opera La Commedia merges film projection, opera performance, and video
projections in complex ways. Playing with vocal travesty, the role of the poet
Dante is played by a high female voice. In Homeland Laurie Anderson plays with
a band on stage while using a harmonizer (pitch-shifting device) to manipulate the
gender of her voice. Although it exists on the edges of several fields—performance
art, rock concert, and music theatre—Homeland also intervenes in the opera world
and questions it by referring to a man’s voice produced by a woman’s body (and
vice versa) through operatic history.
I specifically chose these postoperas for analysis because they address the
questions of the relationship between the singing body and the voice. The principle
of the vocalic body becomes obvious in them in various ways. In One and Three
Tales technological procedures used to produce detached, machine-like, even
“monstrous” vocal expression reflect back to the singing body and question its
identity. In both La Belle et la Bête and Writing to Vermeer a purposely obtained
de-synchronization between multiplied bodies that are assigned to a single voice
problematizes their mutual “belonging” to each other. Finally, in La Commedia
and in Homeland the way the vocal representation of gender is projected onto
the “wrong” body confronts us with a break in the conventions of representation
between body, voice, and gender.
With this range of recent productions my intention is not to illustrate some
examples of contemporary operas within late capitalism, nor to map current trends.
17
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(London and New York: Verso, 1991), 3.
These works are chosen because the vocalic body becomes increasingly
problematic in them in various ways, reinterpreting in turn the institution and the
world of opera.
Reinventing the Vocalic Body (in Theory)
Concerning the relationship between the singing body and the voice in opera in
theoretical terms, not much has been written. Both in opera studies and in the
majority of operatic pieces the singing body is often taken for granted. It appears
as the invisible within the visible and the inaudible within the audible. But it is
neither invisible nor inaudible. Invisible and inaudible are the cultural mechanisms
making the listening spectators overlook the materiality of the singing body that
performs opera before them. Abbate introduces the notion of a listening spectator,
implying that it would be the spectator who is aware of his/her position as the
listener, capable of comprehending the mutual influences between what is seen and
what is heard at the same time on stage.18 I believe that defining this position of a
listening spectator is of importance not only for opera but for all performing arts,
because it tends to theorize an (often neglected) sphere of the aural in connection
to the visual. Thus, when referring to the recipients of the opera in my analysis I
consider them to be the listening spectators. I imagine them as being alert while
perceiving the relationship between visual and aural in the singing body.
Michelle Duncan writes about the absence of the theoretical interest in the
singing body in opera studies and explores the performative potentials of the
singing body. She gives a brief summary of how concepts of body and voice are
being treated:
While fields outside of musicology have begun to take a keen interest in the
materiality and audibility of voice, opera studies has given the idea scant
attention, as though voice were only a minor feature of the art form. Despite the
central role of the singer’s body in the production of opera and the production of
voice, opera studies persists in thinking of voice as extra-corporeal. […] As for
the body of the singer, opera studies has tended to ignore it altogether unless it
possesses currency as the object of desire or of a fetish. And when this happens,
both the body and voice of the singer become secondary to the affect or erotic
desire of the spectator.19
18
Carolyn Abbate, “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women,” in Musicology and
Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993), 221–258, 251.
19
Michelle Duncan, “The Operatic Scandal of the Singing Body: Voice, Presence,
Performativity,” Cambridge Opera Journal vol. 16, no. 3 (2004): 283–306, 285.
There are some exceptions to this. Carolyn Abbate discusses the relationship
between body and voice in conventional opera,20 as does Peter Brooks.21 Michal
Grover-Friedlander researches encounters of opera and film, and in that context
she tackles the relationship between the singing body and the voice.22 Finally,
Joke Dame’s book is a rare theoretical study focused on the singing body in
Western vocal music.23 According to my knowledge, there is no study yet that
focuses on the problem of the relationship between the singing body and the voice
in contemporary opera. And indeed, except in previously mentioned studies by
Abbate, Brooks, Dame, Duncan, and Grover-Friedlander, the singing body was
an object for analysis and theorization in opera studies primarily in the context of
obtaining vocal technique. Even the figure of the castrato singer, with its obvious
“fleshly” intervention upon the body for the sake of the singing voice, has involved
gender-related theorizations of operatic body–voice relationship only in relatively
recent texts.24
I dissect the singing body as an object of what Slavoj Žižek names “the naive
ideological consciousness,” a set of rules, protocols, effects, and strategies that
are embedded in a reality in which they intervene, in what appears to be a quasi-
intuitive way, due to the fact that they are not theorized.25 That dissection pulls out
20
Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices Opera and Musical Narrative in the 19th Century
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
21
Peter Brooks, “Body and Voice in Melodrama and Opera,” in Siren Songs:
Representation of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. Mary Ann Smart (Princeton, NJ and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 118–35.
22
Michal Grover-Friedlander, Vocal Apparitions: The Attraction of Cinema to Opera
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Michal Grover-Friedlander, “The
Afterlife of Maria Callas’s Voice,” Musical Quarterly vol. 88, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 35–62;
Michal Grover-Friedlander, Operatic Afterlives (New York: Zone Books, 2011).
23
Joke Dame, Het zingende lichaam: betekenissen van de stem in westerse vocale
muziek [The Singing Body: Meanings of the Voice in Western Vocal Music] (Amsterdam:
Kampen, Kok Agora, 1994).
24
For example: Joke Dame, “Unveiled Voices: Sexual Difference and the Castrato,”
in Queering the Pitch, The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, 2nd edition, ed. Philip Brett,
Elisabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2006), 139–54; Naomi
André, Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti and the Second Woman in Early-Nineteenth-
Century Italian Opera (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006).
25
According to Žižek, “The most elementary definition of ideology is probably the
well-known phrase from Marx’s Capital: ‘Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es’ (‘they do
not know it, but they are doing it’). The very concept of ideology implies a kind of basic,
constitutive naiveté: the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own effective
conditions, a distance, a divergence between so-called social reality and our distorted
representation, our false consciousness of it. That is why such a ‘naive consciousness’
can be submitted to a critical-ideological procedure. The aim of this procedure is to lead
the naïve ideological consciousness to a point at which it can recognize its own effective
conditions, the social reality that it is distorting, and through this very act dissolve itself.”
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 28.
the singing body from its invisible/inaudible status, and shows how a singing body
acts within the world of opera, what interventions it makes, and how it constitutes
opera’s meanings.
It was theorizing on body, music, and voice by three authors coming from
different disciplines—Steven Connor (modern literature and theory), Richard
Leppert (musicology, sociology of music, art history), and Peter Brooks
(comparative literature, psychoanalysis)—that helped me to find the way to focus
my theoretical interest on singing corporeality and induced its reading in the field
of postopera. While I was formulating the thesis the writings by these authors
served as a theoretical backdrop. Although only Brooks’ text is related to opera,26
I found both Leppert’s findings on the physicality of music-making27 and Connor’s
definition of the “vocalic body” in connection to ventriloquism immensely helpful
for an understanding of the body–voice relationship in postopera.28 Connor’s
concept of vocalic body has previously been introduced. I will discuss Brooks’
theory in the next chapter while elaborating the notion of the gap between body
and voice, and here I will briefly present how Leppert’s theory sheds light upon
the subject of this study.
“Whatever else music is ‘about,’ it is inevitably about the body,” claims
Leppert.29 He designates the connection between music and the body throughout
Western history as “highly problematic and contradictory, the product of deep
socio-cultural anxieties and antagonisms.”30 He points to a contradiction that in his
opinion makes the music–body connection troublesome, emphasizing the role of
human sight in it: “the slippage between the physical activity to produce musical
sound and the abstract nature of what is produced creates a semiotic contradiction
that is ultimately ‘resolved’ to a significant degree via the agency of human sight.”31
I find precisely this “slippage” situation a major contradiction in my understanding
of the connection between the body and the voice in opera.
Leppert insists on a corporeal dimension of music: “Music despite its
phenomenological sonoric ethereality is an embodied practice, like dance and
theater. That its visual–performative aspect is no less central to its meanings than
are the visual components of those other performing arts is obvious in musical
theatre—opera, masque, and so forth (though this linkage is little discussed in
musicological literature)—but the connection between sight and sound in other
sorts of art music remains untheorized.”32 I agree that the corporeal aspect of music
is no less central to its meaning than the sound, and I argue for it in this study.
26
Brooks, “Body and Voice in Melodrama and Opera,” 118–35.
27
Richard Leppert, The Site of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the
Body (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993).
28
Connor, “Violence, Ventriloquism and the Vocalic Body,” 80.
29
Ibid., xx.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid., xxi.
32
Ibid.
However, I wonder how obvious music is as an embodied practice in musical

theatre, since the lack of vivid theoretical interest in the singing body of opera
rather confirms that the singing body is mainly considered a passive mediator than
as an active material agent in the process of making meaning. For me, the singing
body in opera is not self-explanatory. I perceive it as meaning production, and this
study is an attempt to discuss and understand the meanings that the singing body
produces in postopera.
The voice is embodied, and the embodiment of music Leppert writes about
seems to be even more obvious in vocal than in instrumental music. “The body is
real,” writes Leppert, “but its reality is produced, by cognition, as a representation.
It is a product of multiple discourses constructed via body’s sensory capacities.
We ‘know’ our bodies through the ‘Languages’ about and of the body.”33 How we
come to know the singing body in postopera is one of my concerns in this study.
The critical procedure that introduces both the voice and the singing body as active
material agents rather than as just transparent mediators reveals effects, meanings,
and powers of singing corporeality in postopera. Theorizing the materiality of the
voice explores a discursive potential of the body–voice construct. Finally, it leads
a “naïve ideological consciousness” of the singing body to the point at which its
effective conditions, signification strategies, and political effects could and should
be taken into account when attempting an analysis of opera.
Concerning the rest of the theoretical texts that form the theoretical map of this
study, I refer to texts and concepts from different disciplines. Some of the texts
belong to musicology and opera studies (Abbate, André, Dame, Duncan, Grover-
Friedlander). Other texts originate from other disciplines like theatre studies
(Lehmann), theory of body (Kunst, Stone), theory of voice (Cavarero, Connor,
Dolar, Felderer), film studies (Altman, Chion), feminist critique and gender studies
(Cixous, Halberstam), philosophy (Agamben, Barthes, Nancy, Žižek). As will be
elaborated in more detail in the next chapter, my theoretical concern is also the
involvement of theories of the voice and body in discussions about the reinvention
of the vocalic body in postopera. In each chapter I shall confront a different set
of theoretical texts with theoretical objects I analyze, reading and understanding
them through one another. Therefore, the theory of this study unfolds gradually
through the text.
In Chapter 2, “Body–Voice Gap, Postopera, and Body/Voice Theory,” my
concern is first to locate the mismatch between body and voice that I call the gap.
Relying on texts by Abbate, Brooks, and Grover-Friedlander, I suggest answers to
what this concrete gap is that constitutes singing corporeality, what it looks like,
where it is and how to imagine it in conventional operas. That specific relationship
between body and voice reveals the core of opera’s representational mechanism.
In order to locate this gap in postopera, in the second part of this chapter I proceed
towards a more elaborate discussion of the notion of postopera. I take up the
implications of Lehmann’s concept of postdramatic theatre and develop it in the
33
Ibid., xx.
opera world, while also discussing Till’s notion of the post-operatic, and the notion
of the postdramatic condition. I bring into discussion Glass and Wilson’s Einstein
on the Beach as a typical example of postopera. Finally, I map various theories
of the voice and the body in order to examine the theoretical platform they form
together in this study. With these three issues—body–voice gap, postopera, and
body/voice theory—I outline the theoretical map of this study. Confrontations
between those three issues, and an intersection of them with opera studies while
an analysis of postoperas is being performed will occur in subsequent chapters in
various ways.
The rest of the study is composed of three parts. In each of them I illuminate
two postoperas with a series of theoretical concepts. In Part II, “Voices Beyond
Corporeality: Performing Singing as Upgrading,” I examine pieces in which
the reinvention of the body–voice relationship is “upgraded” by the impact of
technology.34 I am concerned with how and why singing appears beyond the body
that produces it and with what the meaning produced in such particular mutual
agency between the singing body and the voice tells us about postopera, its status,
and its function. In both postoperas I have chosen as theoretical objects—One and
Three Tales—the voice that is heard is the result of connecting the forces of the
body with technological interventions performed upon the voice and body. In One
the main intervention comes in relation to live performance and the reproduced
video with the same performer. The live singing body only partly produces the
final vocal result, and that vocal result reflects itself back to the singing body
and changes its identity. The prominent gap between the technologically upgraded
voice and the “natural” body as its primary source is reinvented. In Three Tales the
voices are pre-recorded and transformed, brought to the sphere of the monstrous
by procedures conducted by the composer. That change in terms of the relationship
between the body and the voice in opera is in this piece put into connection with
the change of the status of the human in the age of cloning.
Part III, “Throwing the Voice, Catching the Body: Opera, Ventriloquism and
De-Synchronization,” brings some theories to the problematization of a
ventriloquism-like body-voice discord caused by a purposely obtained de-
synchronization. My theoretical objects are two postoperas in which de-
synchronization between what is seen and what is heard on stage plays a central
role: La Belle et la Bête and Writing to Vermeer. In both of those pieces several
bodies refer to a single singing voice simultaneously. In La Belle et la Bête the
live singing voice “belongs” at the same time both to live singers on stage and
34
In computer technology an upgrade would mean improving to a higher standard
and a more powerful system. Taken metaphorically, the concept of upgrading used in the
context of the body-voice construct in postopera suggests a reinvention of the conventional
relationship between a singing body and a sung voice. That reinvention often involves
new media. Since the body–voice relationship is crucial for understanding the meanings
formed on an opera stage, the reinvention of this relationship provokes an improvement, a
reinvention, an upgrade of the opera genre in general.
projected film characters. In Writing to Vermeer triplicated acting characters on

stage “share” the same voice. A similar situation happens to the live singing body
and its simultaneous video projection in Scene 2, when the character of Saskia first
appears, singing live and video-projected at the same time.
Finally, in Part IV, “Singing Gender (as a Performance),” I analyze postoperas
in which a reinvented relation between voice and body tackles the issue of gender
as well, assuming some kind of vocal travesty. Part IV will examine the discursive
“friction” that appears between the singing body and the voice in relation to gender.
The theoretical objects are two postoperas where the relationship between body,
voice, and gender is questioned through singing: La Commedia and Homeland.
In both works, the issue of body–voice–gender relationship is interrogated in
connection with what is conventionally perceived as the singing female voice. In La
Commedia, Dante, sung by a female singer, is divided further into two characters,
feminine and masculine, which appear simultaneously. In Homeland, Anderson
introduces a certain kind of “vocal masquerade” by electronic processing of her
voice to sound masculine, with the help of a harmonizer (pitch-shifting device).35
Chapter 3, “Singing Beyond the Body: Uniqueness, Intruder and Prosthesis,”
takes as its starting point the concept of vocal uniqueness by Adriana Cavarero
and shows how this concept is problematized by the postopera One. I also discuss
the concept of the intruder by Jean-Luc Nancy to further illuminate a particular
relationship between the singing body and the voice in One. Nancy’s concept of
the intruder allows a better understanding of destabilized identity, which in One
intrudes into the performance. Finally, I use the concept of prosthesis by Sandy
Stone, which elaborates upon the ways in which the scientist Steven Hawking’s
speech device could be regarded as not only his physical, but also his ontological
prosthesis, to consider the concept of prosthesis in connection to the singing
body of Barbara Hannigan. The purpose is to show how an upgraded relationship
between body and voice becomes a major semiotic generator of this piece, and
how such a changed body-voice construct questions opera.
In Chapter 4, “Monstrous Singing: The Politics of Vocal Existence,” my
concern is with how singing appears monstrous as a result of existing beyond
the body that produces it, with the politics of the monstrous voice and with the
consequences this has for the opera. I confront Three Tales with the concept of
restaging the monstrous body as developed by Bojana Kunst, a text about speaking
machines by Brigitte Felderer, and theorization of the politics of the voice by
35
Tereza Havelkova introduces the concept of vocal masquerade in an analogy with
the concept of masquerade by the film theorist Mary Ann Doane. Havelkova states: “The
notion of vocal masquerade presupposes that even when text-less, vocal expression is
culturally coded. The vocal masquerade would then involve a presentation of a vocal gesture
not as a direct emanation of the female body but rather as a sign of femininity.” Tereza
Havelkova, “Bodily Presence or Vocal Masquerade? Performing the Feminine Through
Extended Vocality” (paper presented at Song, Stage, Screen V conference, University of
Winchester, UK, September 3–5, 2010).
Mladen Dolar. Kunst’s text helps me to define the concept of the monstrous voice,
Felderer’s sheds light on how the vocalic body in Three Tales could be seen as a
speaking machine, and Dolar’s text enables me to examine the political potentials
of a monstrous voice. The purpose is to reveal the power of a monstrous voice and
its effects in this postopera, where it appears to function as a critique of monstrosity.
In Chapter 5, “Operatizing the Film: Body Without Voice and Voice Without
Body,” after discussing the practice of operatizing the film and the methodology
of synchronization undertaken in La Belle et la Bête in the context of techniques
of dubbing and playback, I explore some de-synchronous relations between the
presence of the body and the presence of the voice in this piece, and the implications
that a reinvented body–voice construct produces. I read La Belle et la Bête through
and alongside texts by Carolyn Abbate, Mladen Dolar, Steven Connor, and Rick
Altman. The purpose is to postulate a new model for the conceptualization of the
body–voice relationship through an analogy with how Altman uses the concept
of ventriloquism in film theory. The operatic music composed by Philip Glass
is comparable to a ventriloquist who takes someone else’s “dummy,” in this
case motion pictures by Jean Cocteau. I show how and why the process of de-
synchronization between body and voice is the one from which this postopera
emerges, and what consequences it brings to its status and function.
In Chapter 6, “Singing Letters, Multiplied Bodies and Dissociated Voice,” I
analyze the relationship between the singing body and the voice in Writing to
Vermeer by examining how strategies of writing, staging, composing music, and
mediation interfere in the connection between bodies and voices on stage. I read
Greenaway’s libretto against the backdrop of the concept of écriture féminine as
defined by Hélène Cixous in order not only to reveal the simulation strategies
that he uses when playing with this concept, but also to show how he questions
it. Women from Vermeer’s paintings that appear as characters of the opera are
envoiced, and I illuminate that strategy with the concept of envoicing the women in
opera by Carolyn Abbate. The purpose of the chapter is to investigate how visually
triplicate female characters that stay de-synchronized with one voice reinvent the
vocalic body of this opera, and how that reinvention significantly contributes to
interrogating the genre of opera and its relation to visual arts, postdramatic theatre,
and new media.
In Chapter 7, “Voice and Gender Standing Apart,” my concern is vocal travesty
in relation to the figure of the female singer in La Commedia, whose voice was
simultaneously assigned to two roles—the male poet Dante (in the score), and
the female journalist Dante (in the film). After discussing various strategies used
in staging I analyze how La Commedia’s multiplied narratives, deconstructed
characters and mediated stage events make an impact on the singing body. I
illuminate the vocalic body of Dante with the concept of “unveiled voices” by
Joke Dame in order to examine how a body–voice–gender construct is reworked
in this piece. The purpose is to examine how a reinvention of vocalic body includes
vocal travesty.
Chapter 8, “Vocal Drag, Counter-Castrato and Scandal of the Singing Body,”

focuses on figure of Laurie Anderson’s male alter ego Fenway Bergamot in
Homeland in order to examine a body–voice–gender relationship there. Presenting
a “history of vocal drag” that spans through a large part of Anderson’s career
contributes to understanding why and how she uses vocal drag in this piece.
I make the figure of the castrato productive for a reading of the body–voice–gender
relationship in Homeland. Finally, I illuminate the body–voice–gender relationship
with Duncan’s theorizations of performativity of the voice based on a critique
of Shoshana Felman and Judith Butler. Those theoretical concepts shed light on
how the body affects the singing and speech act of Laurie Anderson, and how
the gender is performed by the voice when vocal drag takes place. I aim to show
how the representation of woman on stage as one who does not have the voice
of authority affects a body–voice–gender relationship, and which meanings that
produces in the context of this piece.
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An Ashgate Book

Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body

The Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera series provides a centralized

Published 2016 by Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © Jelena Novak 2015

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

ISBN: 9781472441034 (hbk)

Part I Focusing on Body Singing

1 Postopera and Vocalic Body  3

2 Body–Voice Gap, Postopera, and Body/Voice Theory  19

Part II Voices beyond Corporeality:

3 Singing Beyond the Body: Uniqueness, Intruder, and Prosthesis  41

4 Monstrous Singing: The Politics of Vocal Existence  57

Part III Throwing the Voice, Catching the Body:

5 Operatizing the Film: Body Without Voice and Voice

6 Singing Letters, Multiplied Bodies, and Dissociated Voice  93

Part IV Singing Gender as a Performance

7 Voice and Gender Standing Apart  113

8 Vocal Drag, Counter-Castrato, and the Scandal of the

Reinventing the Vocalic Body in Postopera: Conclusion  149

5.1 Philip Glass, La Belle et la Bête live performance. Photo: Tom

6.1 Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway, Writing to Vermeer,

7.1 Louis Andriessen and Hal Hartley, La Commedia. Photo © Hans

8.1 Fenway Bergamot. Photo © Laurie Anderson  139

7.1 La Commedia, Part 1: The City of Dis or the Ship of Fools,

Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera provides a centralized and prominent

Roberta Montemorra Marvin

 Louis Andriessen, March 2015

• extend the cultural analysis of opera to the singing body;

Defining Postopera: History of the Term

Since postopera is my object of analysis, and since I introduce it as a theoretical

and those differences need clarification.5 As I will elaborate in more detail in

The Vocalic Body and Ventriloquism

The practice of reinventing the body–voice relationship in opera was introduced

writing on voice is a major contribution to the field of voice theory, philosopher

Reinventing the Vocalic Body (in Opera)

Reinventing the Vocalic Body (in Theory)

However, I wonder how obvious music is as an embodied practice in musical

projected film characters. In Writing to Vermeer triplicated acting characters on

Chapter 8, “Vocal Drag, Counter-Castrato and Scandal of the Singing Body,”

You might also like

1 Postopera and Vocalic Body 3

2 Body–Voice Gap, Postopera, and Body/Voice Theory 19

3 Singing Beyond the Body: Uniqueness, Intruder, and Prosthesis 41

4 Monstrous Singing: The Politics of Vocal Existence 57

6 Singing Letters, Multiplied Bodies, and Dissociated Voice 93

7 Voice and Gender Standing Apart 113

Reinventing the Vocalic Body in Postopera: Conclusion 149

8.1 Fenway Bergamot. Photo © Laurie Anderson 139

Louis Andriessen, March 2015