Vocal Music and Contemporary Identities (Christian Utz, Frederick Lau)

Vocal Music and Contemporary Identities
Looking at musical globalization and vocal music, this collection of essays

studies the complex relationship between the human voice and cultural
identity in 20th- and 21st-century music in both East Asian and West-
ern music. The authors approach musical meaning in specific case studies
against the background of general trends of cultural globalization and the
construction/deconstruction of identity produced by human (and artificial)
voices. The essays proceed from different angles, notably sociocultural and
historical contexts, philosophical and literary aesthetics, vocal technique,
analysis of vocal microstructures, text/phonetics-music-relationships, his-
torical vocal sources or models for contemporary art and pop music, and
areas of conflict between vocalization, “ethnicity,” and cultural identity.
They pinpoint crucial topical features that have shaped identity-discourses
in art and popular musical situations since the 1950s, with a special focus
on the past two decades. The volume thus offers a unique compilation of
texts on the human voice in a period of heightened cultural globalization
by utilizing systematic methodological research and fi rsthand accounts on
compositional practice by current Asian and Western authors.
Christian Utz is Professor of music theory and music analysis at the Univer-
sity of Music and Dramatic Arts in Graz, Austria.
Frederick Lau is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Hawai’i

at Mānoa.
Routledge Research in Music
1 Music, Science, and the

Rhythmic Brain
Cultural and Clinical Implications
Edited by Jonathan Berger and
Gabe Turow
2 Bodily Expression in Electronic

Music
Perspectives on a Reclaimed
Performativity
Edited by Deniz Peters,
Gerhard Eckel, Andreas Dorschel
3 Vocal Music and Contemporary

Identities
Unlimited Voices in East Asia
and the West
Edited by Christian Utz and
Frederick Lau
Vocal Music and
Contemporary Identities
Unlimited Voices in East Asia and the West
Edited by Christian Utz and

Frederick Lau
NEW YORK LONDON

First published 2013
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK
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© 2013 Taylor & Francis
The right of Christian Utz and Frederick Lau to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vocal music and contemporary identities : unlimited voices in East Asia
and the West / edited by Christian Utz and Frederick Lau.
pages cm. — (Routledge research in music ; 3)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Vocal music—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Vocal
music—21st century—History and criticism. 3. Voice. 4. Group
identity. I. Utz, Christian. editor. II. Lau, Frederick, editor.
III. Series: Routledge research in music ; 3.
ML1406.V63 2012
782—dc23
2012031726
ISBN13: 978-0-415-50224-5 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-07850-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by IBT Global.
Printed and bound in the United States of America on sustainably sourced

paper by IBT Global.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables ix

Acknowledgments xiii
1 Introduction: Voice, Identities, and Reflexive Globalization in

Contemporary Music Practices 1
CHRISTIAN UTZ AND FREDERICK LAU
PART I
Global Perspectives on the Voice
2 Presence and Ethicity of the Voice 25

DIETER MERSCH
3 The Rediscovery of Presence: Intercultural Passages through

Vocal Spaces between Speech and Song 45
CHRISTIAN UTZ
4 Imagining the Other’s Voice: On Composing across

Vocal Traditions 76
SANDEEP BHAGWATI
PART II
Voices of/in Art Music
5 Voice, Culture, and Ethnicity in Contemporary

Chinese Compositions 99
FREDERICK LAU
vi Contents
6 Narrative, Voice, and Reality in the Operas by Hosokawa
Toshio and Mochizuki Misato 116
FUYUKO FUKUNAKA
7 Reconsidering Traditional Vocal Practices in Contemporary

Korean Music 133
HEEKYUNG LEE
8 Escaped from Paradise? Construction of Identity and Elements

of Ritual in Vocal Works by Helmut Lachenmann and
Giacinto Scelsi 158
JÖRN PETER HIEKEL
9 The Notation and Use of the Voice in Non-semantic Contexts:

Phonetic Organization in the Vocal Music of Dieter Schnebel,
Brian Ferneyhough, and Georges Aperghis 175
ERIN GEE
PART III
Voices of/in Popular Music and Media Art
10 A “Digital Opera” at the Boundaries of Transnationalism:

Human and Synthesized Voices in Zuni Icosahedron’s
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci 203
SAMSON YOUNG
11 “Voices of the Mainstream”: Red Songs and Revolutionary

Identities in the People’s Republic of China 225
ANDREAS STEEN
12 Asagi’s Voice: Learning How to Desire with Japanese Visual-kei 248

OLIVER SEIBT
13 Voicing Body, Voicing Seoul: Vocalization, Body, and Ethnicity

in Korean Popular Music 267
MICHAEL FUHR
Contents vii
14 Afterword: Giving Voice to Difference 285
NICHOLAS COOK
Contributors 297
Index 303
Figures and Tables
FIGURES
3.1 The three heikyoku styles shirakoe, kudoki, sanjū in a

transcription of Suzuki. 53
3.2 Chikamatsu Hanji (1725–1783): Imoseyama onna teikin
(“Mount Imo and Mount Se: A parable of female virtue,”
1771); section from the scene “Yama no dan” (Mountain
scene), based on an interpretation by Takemoto Sumitayū,
reciter, and Nozawa Kizaemon, futozao shamisen. 55
3.3 Silk Road by Tan Dun, Arthur Sze for soprano and percussion,
p. 3, systems 1+2. 57
3.4 Marco Polo by Tan Dun, Scene Sea, Part “Water,” mm. 35–70. 59
3.5 Different performance instructions in the vocal part
referring to vocal articulation in Arnold Schoenberg: Pierrot
Lunaire: Dreimal 7 Gedichte für eine Sprechstimme und 5
Instrumentalisten, op. 21, no. 3 60
3.6 Shimoyama Hifumi: Breath for three voices, two
percussionists, and piano (1971/1977), five types of vocal
articulation [a–e] (p. 3, 13, 11, 2, 7).
a. [a–c] 63
b. [d–e] 64
3.7 Takahashi Yūji, Unebiyama (1992) for five-stringed zither
and incantation (from p. 1). 65
3.8 Salvatore Sciarrino, Luci mie traditrici (1996–1998),
variants of sillabazione scivolata. 67
4.1 Sandeep Bhagwati, Atish-e-Zaban (2006) for six solo voices, III:
“Mere Hamdam Mere Dost” (from p. 1). 89
5.1 Chen Yi, Chinese Poems.
Part 1 I. “Up the Crane Tower,” mm. 1–12. 103
Part 2 II. “Picking the Seedpods of the Lotus,” mm. 9–12. 104
5.2 Chan Hing-Yan, Lachrimae Florarum, at rehearsal no. 3 (p. 2). 107
x Figures and Tables
5.3 Chan Hing-Yan, Lachrimae Florarum, after rehearsal
no. 6 (p. 4). 107
5.4 Shen Xingong, “Ticao” (“Physical exercise”). 110
7.1 Kim Dong-Jin, a passage from Simchŏng’s aria “Hyosŏngŭi
Norae” in Simcheongjŏn (1992, 229). 139
7.2 Kang Sukhi, Buru (1976), mm. 50–56. 142
7.3 Kang Sukhi, Buru (1976), mm. 164–168. 142
7.4 Chung Hyun-Sue, Lotus Song (2007), fi rst phrase. 145
7.5 Yi Man-Bang, Akjang II for female voice and piano (2002),
mm. 21–30. 147
7.6 Kang Joon-Il, Sori-Tarae for Kuŭm I for voice, viola, and
piano (1998), third movement, mm. 6–15. 148
7.7 Kang Joon-Il, Hŏnhwaga (Offering flowers) from Sin Hyangga,
mm. 1–10. 150
8.1 Helmut Lachenmann, temA (1968), mm. 64. 170
8.2 Helmut Lachenmann, temA (1968), performance
instructions/vocal part (top); score, mm. 114–117 (bottom). 171
9.1 Spectrogram of the word sleeting illustrating the complex
relationship between acoustic patterns and phonemic
segmentation. 178
9.2 Dieter Schnebel, Für Stimmen ( . . . missa est) :! (Madrasha II),
Tenor 1, m. 1 (p. 2): progression of fricatives. 182
9.3 Grouping by active articulator in Für Stimmen ( . . . missa est) :!
(Madrasha II) (performance notes, p. 7). 182
9.4 Dieter Schnebel, Für Stimmen ( . . . missa est) :! (Madrasha II),
Alto 1, m. 18 (p. 5): progression of fricatives; the line above
the staff represents dynamics. 183
9.5 Dieter Schnebel, Für Stimmen ( . . . missa est), :! (Madrasha II)
(p. 19): transfer of similar phonetic material (marked by arrows). 186
9.6 Brian Ferneyhough, Time and Motion Study III (1974),
rehearsal no. G, Soprano 2 (p. 5). 192
10.1 The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Scene 1, mm. 30–34. 210
10.5 The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Prologue, mm. 1–18. 217
12.1 The “Super Live Theatre” Area established 1997 in
Takadanobaba, Tokyo. 254
Figures and Tables xi
12.2 Descending the poster-plastered stairwell of the
Takadanobaba Area. 255
12.3 “Headbanging Ringelreih’n.” Two bangyaru performing a
“furi à deux” in the Takadanobaba Area’s concert hall. 256
TABLES
3.1 Classification of Intermediate Forms between Speech and

Song (adapted from List 1963, 9) 50
3.2 Classification of Intermediate Forms between Speech and
Chant in Japanese Traditional Genres (adapted from
Hirano 1990/2004) 52
10.1 Structure of The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci 209
Acknowledgments
This book involves the scholarly knowledge, thoughtful efforts, and kind
support of many people. Several of its topics have fi rst been introduced dur-
ing the international conference “Unlimited Voices: Contemporary Vocal
Music in the Era of Globalization” from March 8 to 9, 2008 at the Uni-
versity of Tokyo (Institute for Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, Komaba
campus), initiated and chaired by Christian Utz during his time as visit-
ing professor at the University’s Graduate Institute of Arts and Sciences.
Heartfelt thanks go to Hermann Gottschewski (The University of Tokyo)
for making this conference possible and for his invaluable assistance in
organizing and obtaining funding for it, as well as to Tae Yokoyu-Ota for
tirelessly and successfully working on the conference’s schedule and public
presentation.1 The conference was officially hosted by the research project
“The Role of Machines in Music Culture: Analysis of Historical and Cur-
rent Aspects and Perspectives,” directed by Gottschewski and funded by
the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Additional support
for the conference was granted by the Piano Committee of the University of
Tokyo, the Musicological Society of Japan, Kanto Section, as well as by the
Goethe-Institut Japan in Tokyo. Our sincere thanks go to all participants of
this conference for their lively and reflexive contributions. Unfortunately it
was not possible to retain all papers presented during this conference in the
present book as its scope was extended to cover both art and popular music
as well as a more balanced coverage of East Asian and Western approaches.
We would therefore like to particularly acknowledge the rich perspectives
on our book’s theme developed by all those active conference participants
not included here: Seiji Chōki and Hermann Gottschewski (The University
of Tokyo), Harue Kondoh (Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts), Steven
G. Nelson (Hosei University, Tokyo), Steven Nuss (Colby College, Water-
ville, ME), Akeo Okada (Kyoto University), and Yūji Takahashi (Tokyo).
Special thanks go to the group of advanced graduate students that attended
Utz’s seminar on “Music and Globalization: A Critical Review of Schol-
arly Concepts and Musical Works” in Tokyo and presented the seminar’s
themes and results during the conference, namely Yōhei Yamakami, Jin
Nakamura, Ena Kajino, Stefan Menzel, and Fumito Shirai. Chapters of
xiv Acknowledgments
the present book that have been elaborated from conference papers include
the essays by Fuyuko Fukunaka, Heekyung Lee, Jörn Peter Hiekel, and by
both editors.
We would further like to cordially thank all those who have commented
on the initial book proposal and on the final manuscript and who helped
to constantly improve the book’s profi le and contents. Nicholas Cook has
incessantly accompanied the evolution of this project by commenting on
several versions of the proposal as well as on draft versions of individ-
ual essays. By agreeing to contribute an afterword and by commenting in
detail on the editors’ introduction, Cook has further prominently helped
to shape the book’s overall “voice.” Without his tireless and highly compe-
tent involvement this volume may have never reached its fi nal state. Three
anonymous reviewers, Hermann Gottschewski, as well as all authors also
contributed significantly to provide the book with a concise methodologi-
cal focus and an encompassing coverage of themes.
Many thanks to the Routledge editors, editorial board, and production
team, particularly to Elizabeth Levine, commissioning editor of Routledge
Research, for her trust in our project and for supporting all stages of its
transformation, and to Catherine Tung, editorial assistant, for her prompt
and precise support in all editorial questions as well as to Molly Coon for
her expertly copyediting and to Eleanor Chan and her team for creating
the attractive layout. Special thanks go to Dieter Kleinrath (University of
Music and Dramatic Arts Graz) who was of great help in compiling the
index. We also acknowledge the kind permission granted by the publishers
and composers from whose publications the score examples, graphics, and
images in this book are reproduced. The University of Music and Dramatic
Arts Graz kindly granted support for covering reproduction fees.
Not least warm thanks go to the authors of this book for the productive
dialogues that have developed out of the editorial revisions of their essays
and for their patience and endurance during the intricate editorial process.
We dearly hope that all of them fi nd the result inspiring for their further
research or artistic work.
* * *
This book and the conference from which it emerged are results of my
research project on the “Comparative Study of Conceptualizations of Vocal
Music in East Asian and Western Music Traditions and Their Relevance
for Contemporary Composers,” pursued from January to March 2008 at
the University of Tokyo, Graduate Institute of Arts and Sciences. Prelimi-
nary research was undertaken from September to December 2007 at the
National Chiao-Tung University Hsinchu, Taiwan. I heartily thank Her-
mann Gottschewski for inviting me to Tokyo as a visiting professor, and
thus providing me with a convenient time frame for the complex research
tasks that this topic involved. I also thank Hsing-Chwen Hsin, former direc-
tor of the Institute of Music at the National Chiao-Tung University, for her
Acknowledgments xv
invitation to Hsinchu. My research in Taiwan has been supported by the
National Science Council, Taiwan, as well as by UniNet Eurasia Pacific,
Austria. Finally, I am most grateful for the continuous support of my home
university, the University of Music and Dramatic Arts Graz, which granted
me a seven-months research leave for this particular type of “exploration
and development of the arts.”
Further discussions of my research on the voice were held during guest
lectures I presented at the University of Osaka and the Kyoto City Uni-
versity of Arts in 2008, and at the National Chiao-Tung University Hsin-
chu and the National Taiwan University in 2010. I am most indebted
to all colleagues with whom I was privileged to discuss issues of my
research during the last four years including Hermann Gottschewski,
Seiji Chōki, Kiichiro Oishi, and Karen Shimakawa (The University of
Tokyo), Akeo Okada (Kyoto University), Ayako Tatsumura and Toshie
Kakinuma (Kyoto City University of Arts), Nobuhiro Ito (University of
Osaka), as well as Ishikawa Kō, Mayumi Miyata, Yūji Takahashi, Aki
Takahashi, Hifumi Shimoyama, Yoko Nishi, Yumiko Tanaka, Huber-
tus Dreyer, and Mari Takano (Tokyo), Chao-Ming Tung, Lap Kwan
Kam, and Tzyee-Sheng Lee (National Chiao-Tung University Hsinchu),
Yingfen Wang, Yuwen Wang, and Chien-Chang Yang (National Taiwan
University), Chingwen Chao (National Taiwan Normal University), as
well as Luciana Galliano (Università Ca’Foscari di Venezia), Kyle Heide
(formerly at The University of Hong Kong), and Gerd Grupe and Peter
Revers (University of Music and Dramatic Arts Graz). Also I was highly
inspired by the discussions I had with the students participating in my
Tokyo seminar mentioned above including also Tomoko Takahashi and
Yukari Miyaki who were not able to participate in the presentation dur-
ing the conference.
Finally, cordial thanks go to Fred Lau for willingly offering to act as co-
editor to this time-consuming project and for his selfless dedication during
all stages of the editorial process despite his busy schedule. His perspectives
have substantially contributed to broadening the scope covered by the pres-
ent book and its overall coherence.
I wouldn’t have been able to complete this project without the enduring
love, understanding, and support of Wen-Tsien and Raffaela.
—Christian Utz
* * *
All scholarly projects are collaborative by nature. Their trajectories are often
as unpredictable and serendipitous as the discursive terrain they cover. My
venture into this project wouldn’t have happened without the stimulation,
critique, and encouragement of many friends and colleagues along my musi-
cal journey, both as a practicing musician and as a music scholar. Trained
as an instrumentalist, I hadn’t anticipated that voice would play such a
xvi Acknowledgments
prominent role in my life—singing in a rock band, a folk singing group, a
chorus, and eventually Chinese jingju, kunqu opera, Japanese nō-theater,
and even conducting a Chinese choir. My engagements with these vocal
genres have convinced me that no voice can exist beyond the interstices
where body, culture, emotion, aesthetic, and discourse meet. As the prod-
uct of these connections, the voice works collaboratively and interactively,
but always in the shadow of subtext and metanarrative. I have presented
some of my ideas about the voice at meetings and colloquiums. In par-
ticular, I would like to thank Rembrandt Wolpert and François Picard for
their thoughtful comments on my paper on vocality when I first presented
on this topic at the Paris-Sorbonne University. I am also grateful for the
comments I received for subsequent presentations at the University of Hong
Kong, National Taiwan University, National Singapore University, Soci-
ety for Ethnomusicology national meetings, and the Association for Asian
Studies national meetings. Finally, the 2008 conference at the University
of Tokyo gave me the opportunity to present my analysis about voice and
vocality in a themed context.
I want to thank Christian Utz and Hermann Gottschewski for inviting
me to this conference. It was here that I was exposed to new ways of think-
ing about the voice across cultures and disciplinary boundaries. It was my
honor that Christian later asked me to contribute a chapter and to co-edit
this book with him. Christian is the co-editor everyone would love to have.
He is efficient, thoughtful, thorough, and responsible. Needless to say, it is
a joy to work with him. He kept us going even when we were swept under
by the burden of our daily routine and administrative duties. Bravo Chris-
tian. Thanks also go to all contributors for their hard work and for being
good sports during the editing process. Lastly, my heartfelt gratitude goes
to my wife Heather Diamond, a scholar of expressive cultures and museum
studies. Her critique, wisdom, love, and humor are what sustained me in
the completion of this project.
—Frederick Lau
NOTES
1. To avoid misunderstandings, all names in this Acknowledgments section

appear in the order fi rst name last name. In all further parts of the book,
Asian names are rendered in the traditional order last name fi rst name (with-
out comma), including authors’ names in the references.
1 Introduction
Voice, Identities, and Reflexive
Globalization in Contemporary
Music Practices
Christian Utz and Frederick Lau
Raising one’s voice to “articulate” oneself by speaking, singing, whisper-

ing, murmuring, crying, shouting, or screaming seems to be among the
most natural and widely established forms of expression humans are capa-
ble of. The way in which these articulations are used in social interaction
or communication as well as in musical forms, however, is highly depen-
dent on their historical, social, and cultural context. In the West, the rise
of the individual since the age of Enlightenment has placed the metaphors
of “fi nding one’s voice” or “speaking with one’s own voice” at the core
of social relations and self-realization, a condition closely connected with
liberation from imposed authority: “This view identifies singing or vocal
expression as the shared source of human community, on the one hand,
and of music’s significance, on the other. It says that the inexpressible moral
or passionate basis of expression that inspires acts of singing is commen-
surate with the inspiration behind public speaking within which lies the
potential for human freedom” (Goehr 1998, 89).
The basic idea that the human voice conveys a unique, inescapable, and
thus “authentic” expression of individuality is deeply ingrained in many
cultures, if only as an object of political, social, or religious regulation. But
in closer inspection it becomes obvious that almost any use of the voice is
founded on socially accepted norms of vocal expression: the “sound and
aesthetics of our voices, even in the seemingly most involuntary of vocal
utterances [ . . . ] always appear to be culturally formatted,” writes San-
deep Bhagwati in Chapter 4 of this volume (83). John Potter and other
researchers have emphasized that we are exposed to ideologies of singing
since earliest childhood (Potter 1998, 190–199), a process during which
“some natural and spontaneous part of our human inheritance is squeezed
out of us” (Armstrong 1985, 22). A disciplining, a domestication of vocal
articulation, in general institutionally channeled and guided by culture-
specific norms, can be traced back to ancient times, and the history of
the voice thus provides ample evidence for what Potter has termed vocal
authority: the use of the voice as a means of articulating power. A comple-
ment to this hegemonic dimension is the strong impulse to associate voices
with the aura of liberation: liberation of an individual voice from a group or
2 Christian Utz and Frederick Lau
from social restrictions, liberation of musical voices from the dominance of
instrumental music, liberation of individualized vocal expression from an
established vocal style, political liberation supported or brought about by
voices of the masses. Both dimensions—hegemony and liberation—are the
more conspicuous in intercultural situations where the ethnicization of the
voice is frequently taken as a given. Not only in musical contexts but also in
a wide range of public discourses, particular vocal articulations are associ-
ated with specific ethnic groups, nations, regions, or local communities:
this testifies to a “persistent attachment to real or imagined cultural iden-
tities” (Dirlik 2010), a major consequence of, or counter-reaction to, the
globalization process (see, for example, Hall 1992). Performers, compos-
ers, listeners, and producers who create and perceive music in intercultural
situations are invariably confronted with this particular kind of cultural
essentialism. On the other hand, the versatility of the voice, its capacity to
simulate, mask, or transcend identities, as epitomized by narrative and dra-
matic musical genres worldwide, suggests that voices can be leading agents
in shaping what may be termed intercultural dialogue, transnationalism, or
cultural hybridity.
This protean nature of the voice makes it highly adaptive to “reflexive
globalization” (Beck and Zolo 1999), a term derived from Ulrich Beck’s
theory of “reflexive modernization” (Beck et al. 1995) and already applied
to musical contexts (Utz 2010). Two aspects are pertinent in this context.
First, globalization is not considered here as something from “outside” that
“influences” a homogeneous local territory: rather, culture and society are
no longer defi ned solely by a territory, by a “container-theory,” and instead
local and global processes can interact to produce new social communi-
ties and cultural identities. This situation is akin to what Arjun Appadurai
has described as “grassroots globalization,” defi ned as “forms of knowl-
edge transfer and social mobilization that proceed independently of the
actions of corporate capital and nation-state system” (Appadurai 2001, 3).
Second, the patterns of European modernity since the eighteenth century,
most prominently industrialization and technological progress, are chal-
lenged by reflexive globalization as a result of their economic and ecologi-
cal consequences. This condition might lead to a reterritorialization and
re-ethnicization of identity, including well-known forms of neo-national-
ism. Theories of globalization that put an “exaggerated emphasis on flows,
bordercrossings and cultural hybridizations” (Dirlik 2010) often tend to
overlook this aspect. They fail to acknowledge “the evidence of the great
majority of humankind who lead settled lives unless pulled or pushed into
mobility,” and “the proliferation and reification of boundaries” (ibid.)—
though not all these processes imply new kinds of nationalism.
In the present volume musical manifestations of reflexive globalization
tending towards hybridity, as well as musical manifestations of reinforced
identities and boundaries, can be observed “in the making,” located in
the conceptualizations and situatedness of the voice in art and popular
Introduction 3
music of the past decades. The geographical axis between East Asia and
the West, the focus of this book, is connected with a long and confl ict-
ual cross-cultural music history that has yet to be told. Although several
substantial accounts have provided ample material on music in twentieth-
century East Asia (Mittler 1997, Galliano 2002, Utz 2002, Everett and Lau
2004, Nihon Sengo Ongakushi Kenkyūkai 2007, Liu 2010, Chōki 2010), it
is arguably fair to say that “the consequences of the global and globalized
nature of new music haven’t been fully thought through or conceptualized”
(Heile 2009, 101). And a similar point can be made with regard to popu-
lar music: while its globalized nature seems to be self-evident, it is appar-
ent that boundaries defi ned by local communities, language, culture, and
modes of listening continue to play a vital role in its reception. In any case,
the history of mutual musical influence and interaction between East Asia
and the West provides endless case studies, in both geographical contexts,
for the “invention of” culturalized and essentialized, or in contrast destabi-
lized and decentered, musical traditions and identities. It is not by accident
that Eric Hobsbawm’s study on the “invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm
1983) has been repeatedly applied to East Asian musical contexts (cf. Lau
1996, Mittler 1997, Utz 2008).
The “contemporary identities,” evoked in the title of the present book,
therefore do not represent stable entities, but are rather continuously
reframed by composers, performers, listeners, and scholars. This insight
provoked the adjective unlimited, introduced in the book’s subtitle, that
might be attributed to many case studies discussed here: whether intended
or not, prominent examples of vocal music explored in this book dissolve
the boundaries of “culturally” defi ned vocal identities, explore appar-
ently boundless territories of vocal articulation (between speech and song,
between different emotional states, between languages or phonetic sys-
tems), or evoke some geographically or historically remote vocal practice in
“imaginary rituals.” The subtitle of this book, however, is not suggesting
an unproblematically free-floating exchange of identities or cultural arti-
facts around the globe, as Byung-Chul Han’s theory of hyperculturality
suggested (2005). On the contrary, it is obvious from many of the book’s
chapters that crucial nuances of meaning emerging from contemporary
vocal musical practices are deeply embedded in the historical trajectories
and local situations within which composers, performers, and listeners
act—to the extent that oversight of these circumstances might lead to crude
simplifications or misreadings of the music in question.
The primary motivation for putting this book together was the observa-
tion that there is a vital need for a collection of studies that focuses exclusively
on the intercultural dimensions of the musical voice, written by a group of
authors with multicultural backgrounds and perspectives. The human voice
has attracted the attention of scholars in various branches of music studies,
especially ethnomusicology and popular music studies (often combining these
two disciplines, as, for example, in Baranovitch 2003), as well as in philosophy
(Derrida 1973, Cavarero 2005), performance and theater studies, cultural his-
tory, and media theory (Felderer 2004, Um 2005, Harding and Rouse 2006,
Kolesch and Krämer 2006), not to mention psychological or psychoanalyti-
cal approaches (Žižek 1996, Dolar 2006, Leikert 2009). But so far no study
has explored the problem of identities in contemporary Western and Asian
vocal music in detail. Some of the more recent monographs on East Asian art
music in the twentieth century (Mittler 1997, Galliano 2002, Utz 2002, Ever-
ett and Lau 2004, Um 2005, Richards and Tanosaki 2008) include limited
discussion of vocal elements and techniques, as do a few studies in pop and
rock music (e.g., Baranovitch 2003, Groenewegen 2010), but the fundamental
importance of the voice as a key medium of identity discourses is rarely elabo-
rated in detail. Monographic studies of the human voice (e.g., Potter 1998,
2000) tend to be almost exclusively focused on Western contexts and do not
consider issues of globalization and cultural difference. The same is true for
monographs on contemporary vocal music (Anhalt 1984, Klüppelholz 1995)
and historical accounts of the voice (Fischer 1998, Seidner and Seedorf 1998,
Meyer-Kalkus 2001, Göttert 2002, Kittler et al. 2008): restricted to Western
contexts, they explore the interconnectedness of vocal practices and social,
political, and aesthetic processes in great detail, but rarely invoke global per-
spectives and tend to gloss over the reframing of identities in contemporary
music. Finally, studies by Asian scholars on related subjects are rare in West-
ern languages, and tend to focus on technical or psychoacoustical questions
(e.g., Nakayama and Yanagida 2008).
Research into vocal identities in more recent globalized art and popular
music, thus, has remained sparse. What Richard Klein has termed “voice
forgottenness” (“Stimmvergessenheit,” Klein 2009, 5) is still entailed in
musicology’s assumption that voices are no more than transmitters of a
superior work concept as embodied in a composer’s score.1 The impulse to
challenge this long-lasting reservation against performance-related voices
as substantial facets of meaning—facets not necessarily encoded in the
composer’s score beforehand—is crucial for Carolyn Abbate’s concept of
“voices” in music. She describes them as “moments of enunciation” that
“disrupt the flux of the piece around them, and decenter our sense of a
single originating speaker” (Abbate 1991, 251, note 5). And it is not only
in vocal music that she identifies such moments, though singing is arguably
the most vivid expression of the corporeality from which these irreducible
“voices” of performance emerge.
It would be shortsighted, however, to construct a simple dichotomy
between composer-centered and performer-centered voices in the context
of contemporary music: for several decades, many composers, as docu-
mented in Chapters 8 and 9 and other parts of the present book, have
acknowledged a “dynamic” relationship between musical text and vocal act
and have incorporated it into their compositional understanding of musical
voices. Their vocal works challenge a widespread tendency in postwar art
music to conceive of the voice simply as one instrument among many, as a
Introduction 5
musical “part” encodable by prescriptive notation. Tensions and synergies
between these poles, coined “performative” and “discursive meaning” by
Nicholas Cook in his afterword to this book, are a key concern in most
of the following chapters. In fact, a common methodological basis of the
diverse topics and musicological perspectives in these essays might be found
in what Cook recently has termed relational musicology, grounded on the
insight that musical meaning “emerges through the interaction between
different texts or practices,” that “meaning is not intrinsic but arises from
relationships” (Cook 2010).
In most cases the “musical” meaning in vocal music is intrinsically related
to the meaning of the words the music is set to. The relationship between
words and music, of course, has a long and controversial history. In new
music since 1950, the ruptures between a pre-existing text and musical syn-
tax have become increasingly problematic, resulting either in an exclusion
of the voice from compositional practice—a reaction documented here for
several periods and cultural contexts (Chapters 3, 4, 7)—or in what Erin
Gee in Chapter 9 has coined “non-semantic vocal music”: music where the
vocal parts are not primarily based on a given text, often not even on an
existing language, but are rather developed from a systematically “atom-
ized” phonetic material. Jörn Peter Hiekel (Chapter 8) emphasizes that this
tendency was informed by James Joyce’s idea of a “gestural language,” and
that the dissolution of semantics added to the importance of imaginary
ritual in avant-garde music as early as the 1950s (160–161). More gener-
ally, he informs us, voices functioned as a “subversive and uncontrollable
element opposed to serialist construction” (159).
In other cases, given texts that were highly charged with meaning and
emotion were set, but in a reorganized form, involving the application of
a rigorous phonetic analysis. Luigi Nono—who favored the voice not least
due to its ability to convey human expression and as a means of protesting
against human suffering (Nanni 2004)—argued that the phonetic material
of a text was inseparable from the meaning of words and from expression.
In his music he aimed at a “seamless unity of the abstraction of word seman-
tics and the coherence of musical gestalt” (Nono 1975, 60, translated by the
authors). Reacting harshly to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s criticism of his text-
setting in Il canto sospeso (1955/56), Nono insisted in a Darmstadt lecture
from 1960 that his “analytical treatment” of the text (passages from farewell
letters written by political prisoners before their execution in the Second
World War) in no way implied that its “semantic content is cast out,” rather
“semantics is compositionally brought into a new musical relation of expres-
sion to its phonetic material” (ibid., translated by the authors).
The persistence of meaning in vocal music even in cases where no text-de-
rived semantics are involved has been not only acknowledged but increasingly
placed at the center of attention by many composers and researchers since the
1960s. Turning away from textual semantics implies a move towards what
Michel de Certeau has described as “secondary vocalization”:
A scattered and secondary vocalization traverses discursive expression,
splicing or dubbing it. The major voice, while claiming to be the mes-
senger of meaning, appears caught up in a doubling that compromises it.
And only in those functions in which it most distances itself from dialogue
does it liberate itself from its disquieting twin. [ . . . ] Conversation reopens
the surface of discourse to these noises of otherness. As it approaches its
addressee, speech becomes fragile (Certeau 1996, 29–30).
In the context of new music, secondary vocalization provided a large variety

of “not yet exhausted means of musical expression” (Meyer-Kalkus 2009,
76). These included contingent and nonsensical features of speech, oddities
of individual modes of speech or singing, breath sounds, and “wrong” or
unclear pronunciation—in short, all those features that contemporary soci-
ety, and most historical styles of vocal music, tend to marginalize or erase.
The systematic compositional methodology that followed in the wake of
serial music suggested that this dimension was to be rationally explored
and turned into an array of “extended vocal techniques”: this was most
obvious in musical works that functioned as a kind of systematic, cata-
logue-like study of such techniques (Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III for solo
female voice, 1966, is frequently cited in this context), or in manuals of the
“extra-normal voice” (Edgerton 2005). According to Bhagwati, the “mod-
ernist desire for reductionist and essentialist approaches to the materials of
art-making [ . . . ] tried to supplant more holistic and traditional approaches
to voice in music: composers started dissecting vocal sound production into
its sonic and technical components, in order to resynthesize it” (Chapter 4,
86). As Hiekel and Utz emphasize, however, the specific, irreducible quali-
ties of vocal music played a major role in a continuous “redefi nition” of iden-
tities in European art music that went beyond exploring new resources of
musical material: Hiekel stresses the particular power that vocal styles have
had “to challenge seemingly self-evident conventions, to stretch boundar-
ies” since Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607) (Chapter 8, 158–159), while
Utz describes epochal vocal works such as Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung
(1909) or Dieter Schnebel’s glossolalie (1959/60) as an “incommensurable”
destabilization of identities on several dimensions: these works, according
to Utz, “articulate (deliberately) futile attempts at constructing coherence”
(Chapter 3, 46).
Such works therefore particularly expose vocal music’s “performative
meaning” and this book is full of further examples of its manifestation. It
is remarkable that Roland Barthes’s seminal essays on the “grain” of the
voice (Barthes 1991a, 1991b) are quoted in seven out of twelve essays in
this volume: his notion of geno-song, in particular, is still key to the discus-
sion of how such performative meaning can be grasped. Barthes’s binary
opposition of a visceral, embodied voice, represented by the throat, and an
overarticulated, disembodied voice aiming at “significance,” represented
by the lungs, is only one among several dichotomies that to many scholars
Introduction 7
appear overly simplified today (cf. Klein 2009). The impression of simpli-
fication stems not least from the fact that the vastly different cultural con-
texts of German and French singing styles, on which Barthes’s dichotomy is
based, and more generally the restriction of his arguments to the aesthetics
of classical singing, are never made explicit in his writings. Indeed, the rela-
tionship between a culturally formed vocal training and the impression of
“graininess” (Barthes’s synonym for authenticity, as Bhagwati suggests in
Chapter 4) is anything but self-evident. The voice of the reciter in gidayū-
bushi, the musical style of the Japanese bunraku puppet theater (discussed
in Utz’s Chapter 3), seems to contain a high degree of “natural graininess,”
but in fact results from a thoroughly disciplined vocal training, based on
particularly austere vocal exercises, including shouting in cold air until the
voice breaks (cf. Reese 1999). The voice’s grain is thus inseparable from its
disciplining. As Barthes (1971, 76–77) says, its “outbreak is given solely
under the very code of outbreak: the voice moves only through some dis-
continuous signs of outburst. Thrust from an immobile body triangulated
by its clothing, bound to the book which, from its lectern, guides it [ . . . ],
the vocal substance remains written, discontinuous, coded, subjected to a
certain irony.”
The relationship between an individual performer’s vocal identity and
the general attributes of one or several vocal styles that he or she incorpo-
rates into this identity has a long history in both Western and East Asian
performance arts. In Western opera, gender stereotypes have been particu-
larly persistent. While the increasing differentiation of operatic role-types
in nineteenth-century Europe reflected an increasing gender antagonism,
choirs on the opera (or concert) stage tended to represent metaphorical
topoi: voices of angels (usually associated with boys’ choirs and gender
neutrality since the Middle Ages), voices of spirits, soldiers, urban crowds,
voices of a religious community, and so forth. Again, a complement to
such typologized identities is apparent in the deconstruction of gender
types in castrati or countertenor voices, trouser roles, as well as in gen-
der ambiguities in East Asian traditional music theater—ambiguities that
have also played a prominent role in twentieth-century new and popular
music. They are visible not only in the continuous fascination with fal-
setto and androgynous voices, testifying to an increasing construability of
gender categories, but more generally in the fact that the principle of con-
tested identities in large areas of contemporary music has almost become
a sine qua non. What Erin Gee in Chapter 9 calls “layering identity” in
Georges Aperghis’s Récitations (1977) for solo voice, for example, is based
on “playful associations with (and masking of) language- or culture-spe-
cific pronunciation and meaning” (196). Fuyuko Fukunaka in Chapter 6
argues that the skepticism of a younger generation of Japanese composers
towards the “idea of onstage actors as unified bodies” (117) has emanci-
pated them from the ideas of plot and dramatic development that were
taken for granted in postwar Japanese opera, and she provides evidence
for the “distance between the tale enacted and the onstage performers”
(124). On a more technical level, several authors in this volume point to
the attraction that the intersections between vocal and instrumental tim-
bre have exerted on composers, adducing further instances of “ambigu-
ous identities” that are grounded in perception: Fukunaka and Hiekel,
for example, provide examples of breathing-based cross-relations between
flute and voice timbres (in Hosokawa Toshio’s Sen I, 1984, and Helmut
Lachenmann’s temA, 1968), while Heekyung Lee introduces Kang Joon-
Il’s Sori-Tarae for Kuŭm III (2003), where the vocal part merges intimately
with the sound of the Korean fiddle haegŭm. And in his own work Limits
& Renewals (2011), Bhagwati aims to “desynchronize a vocal ensemble
to the point where, despite their obvious and strong vocal identities, the
specific blend of their vocal sound is perceived as an assemblage of instru-
mental sounds” (Chapter 4, 88).
* * *
The crossroads of individual and cultural identities, intersecting in the

voice’s presence and mediated by vocal styles, physical and aesthetic deci-
sions, musical notations, aural traditions and contexts of performance, and
modes of listening—all of these indeed provide an “unlimited” territory of
investigation. The three parts of this volume approach this territory from
three distinct perspectives: the three chapters that make up Part I follow the
voice’s path through the broad areas of philosophical aesthetics (Chapter
2), intercultural musical analysis (Chapter 3), and intercultural composi-
tional aesthetics (Chapter 4), while the following parts explore vocal iden-
tity in art music (Part II, Chapters 5–9) and popular music and multimedia
art (Part III, Chapters 10–13). At fi rst glance this organization might seem
to be a reconfi rmation of both the territorial defi nition of globalization
or culture denounced above, and the highly controversial art-popular-di-
vide. However, all the contributions make it abundantly clear that local
and global dimensions constantly condition one another and that “art”
and “popular” discourses frequently expose similar challenges. For exam-
ple, the discussion of libretti in postwar Japan in Chapter 6, which serves
as a background to Fukunaka’s evaluation of more recent developments,
emerges from a global as well as a local dimension: on the one hand the his-
tory of the reception of Western music in Japan since the Meiji Restoration,
and on the other a particular Japanese pre- and postwar discourse that
included traces of imperialism and nationalism. “Territorial” restrictions
in this chapter are further dissolved by the fact that the “Japanese” operas
of Hosokawa Toshio and Mochizuki Misato were premiered in Europe, use
Western languages, and are conceived mainly for European audiences. In
addition, it almost goes without saying that many composers and pop art-
ists discussed in this book have a polycultural biographical background, 2
often confronting particular expectations about or essentializations of their
Introduction 9
“native” culture. Secondly, while the chapters in Parts II and III do not
introduce many examples of explicit “crossover” between art and popu-
lar domains in either East Asia or the West, art and popular music share
many problems and solutions when it comes to the question of how voices
represent or destabilize identities. It is not surprising, for example, that the
two chapters on Korean music (Chapter 7, Heekyung Lee, and Chapter 13,
Michael Fuhr) put an emphasis on the appropriation and transformation of
the p’ansori genre, which with its bewilderingly “raucous, raspy, and rough
voice” (Fuhr, 272) seems so “uniquely” Korean. Fuhr, however, makes clear
that, not least due to a lack of the vocal training required for p’ansori and
other traditional genres, “Korean pop voices are [ . . . ] in no way limited
to articulating merely an ethnic Korean body. They are rather manifold in
nature, performed and embedded in multiple and shifting contexts” (275).
And Lee stresses that “performativity and orality of Korean musical tradi-
tion have yet to be incorporated in new compositional contexts as musi-
cal modernization in Korea has too often appropriated traditional styles at
the expense of their idiosyncrasies” (152). Obviously, then, the appropria-
tion of “culturally unique” vocal characteristics into contemporary vocal
practices not only involves complex challenges concerning their practical
realization, but also contests conventional models of musical composition,
production, and transmission.
Within Part I of the book (Global Perspectives on the Voice), Chapters
2 and 3 attempt to grasp what the “presence” of the voice might entail.
Dieter Mersch’s essay argues that the voice can be conceived only as a social
phenomenon: “As an ‘erotic being,’ the voice always provokes a reaction. It
cannot be ignored” (Chapter 2, 28). For Mersch, the voice’s presence origi-
nates in its materiality and singularity, in its particular kind of corporeal-
ity and physicality. As a key exponent of a philosophical concept that has
been termed post-hermeneutics, Mersch emphasizes that a listener “not
only understands what is said [ . . . ], but also comes into direct contact with
it—touches it—by receiving and accepting the voice” (27). The musical and
literary avant-garde has expressed this experience in sound poems, spoken
poetry, or intermedial compositions, mediating between language and its
sounds—creating situations where the conjunction of voice and language is
intentionally subverted. Mersch’s second key term, ethicity, emerges from
conceiving the voice as intertwined with alterity, as demonstrated by the
voice’s “urgent demand for care, attention, or respect” (26). The ethicity of
the voice results from this demand and is thus closely linked to a speaker’s
or singer’s identity. In an encompassing critique of Derrida’s writings on
the voice, Mersch further argues against the tendency to “semioticize” the
voice, to subordinate it to the symbolic. While for Derrida every move-
ment of speaking implies a saying, thereby sustaining the primacy of writ-
ing, Mersch locates the key principle of the voice in its responsivity: the
“self-positing” of the voice enables “language to free itself from the [ . . . ]
stranglehold of existing discursive practices” (39).
Mersch’s reference to historical avant-gardes points to the fact that the
space or “passage” between the meaning (semantics) and sound (phonet-
ics) of languages is a particularly fertile area for the exploration of voices’
“presence.” A related passage along the manifold areas between speech
and song serves as the common ground on which, in Chapter 3, Christian
Utz develops a comparative study of both traditional and contemporary
vocal works and genres. Utz traces composer-performer interaction, often
in the form of long-term collaboration, or, more generally, the interaction
between notation and performance: he sees this as key to the role of the
voice in the broad field spanning speech-to-song-related techniques. Per-
sonal collaboration places an emphasis on local networks, and in many
cases seems to indicate a kind of “relocation” of individual voice forma-
tion in musical contexts. This does not, of course, exclude the multiplicity
of “characters” within the styles discussed in this chapter. The voices in
Japanese gidayū-bushi, Tan Dun’s opera Marco Polo, and in Schoenberg’s
Pierrot Lunaire are cited as evidence for a high degree of microstructural
fragmentation in speech-related vocal styles, reflected, for example, in
the ambiguity of traditional terminology for vocal delivery techniques in
gidayū-bushi. A “continuous sliding between different forms of articula-
tion within a highly specific vocal timbre” is rendered by a particular per-
former, suggesting that “only the performer can fi nally make sense of the
fragmented material” (Chapter 3, 68). Composer-performer collaborations
can thus be understood as a strategy to avoid “actual” fragmentation. The
same applies to the connection of vocal parts with the aura and rhythm of
the phonetic material, as demonstrated in works by the Japanese composers
Shimoyama Hifumi and Takahashi Yūji: the specific techniques that medi-
ate between music, destabilized verbal meaning, and vocal articulation
lead to a liberation from rigid structural codification, particularly in rela-
tion to pitch organization. This tendency to destabilize pitches is a recur-
ring principle in the intercultural trajectory Utz draws, from Jacopo Peri’s
and Giulio Caccini’s early Baroque recitative, through Takahashi’s quasi-
shamanist recitation mode, to Salvatore Sciarrino’s idiosyncratic singing
style sillabazione scivolata. Based on minute analyses of language articula-
tion, these styles all develop into free-floating vocal forms that effectively
emancipate themselves from mere speech-like declamation and thus match
Barthes’s defi nition of geno-song—“The space where significations germi-
nate ‘from within language and its very materiality’” (Barthes 1991a, 269).
“The rediscovery of presence,” which the title of the chapter invokes, is a
prominent feature of these vocal styles, not least due to the fact that (per-
formance- and speech-related) “articulation” and (notation- and context-
related) “codification” tend to diverge in a more pronounced manner than
in most examples of instrumental music.
Utz’s conclusion that voices in both traditional and contemporary
contexts “oppose the idea of a simple ‘reproduction’ of notation” (69) is
answered by Bhagwati, who—despite a pervasive skepticism about the
Introduction 11
voice’s supposed “authenticity”—concludes that “the human voice [ . . . ]
still resists the amalgamation, reification, and instrumentalization that
characterizes and defi nes its instrumental partners in music” (Chapter 4,
87). The desire for voice’s authenticity for Bhagwati is symptomatic of a lack
produced by what Peter Sloterdijk has described as “anthropotechnics”:
the invention of means to “optimize” human bodies and actions in order
to overcome nature’s “insufficiencies.” The tendency of twentieth-century
music to appropriate any available acoustic event for a musical context
might be termed “musical anthropotechnics,” and according to Bhagwati
it is a “violent act” (drastically illustrated by the legend of a fifteenth-cen-
tury French organ whose sounds were produced by living pigs). Musical
anthropotechnics has afforded the voice a role as a medium of “redemp-
tion effects”: the assumed authenticity of the voice, its conceptualization as
“exempt from the unavoidable pull towards abstraction that characterizes
our attitude towards all other kinds of sounds” (78), is here connected with
cultural phonocentrism as analyzed by Jacques Derrida and Walter Ong.
In popular music, in particular, the singing voice “stands as a signifier for
all that has been excised from the commodified sound of instrumental and
digital music: rawness, individuality, and unreliability” (79). “Redemption
effects” produced by voices are explained in a threefold categorization: (1)
the normative voice achieves redemption through its integration within a
collective, often associated with spiritual or religious experience, (2) the
individualistic voice rediscovers “the embodied nature of sonic material,”
associated here with Barthes’s “grain,” while (3) the naturalistic voice
exists only in reproduced form, in works of electronic music or sound art,
cut off from its human source and resonator and so enabling a “fear-free
acceptance of the previously so powerful (and therefore potentially danger-
ous) sound coming from a live mouth” (80). Bhagwati sees the “acoustic
voyeurism” associated with the latter type as a particularly representative
and problematic outcome of the domestication of sound by “eurological”
composers. It is the continuous drive of new music towards recombination
and resynthesis, arguably represented in its rich creative potential by the
three case studies in Gee’s Chapter 9, that has prevented composers from
developing heterogeneous and hybrid voices, a shortcoming equally attrib-
utable to a lack of multiculturally trained vocal performers. Among Bhag-
wati’s own works, Atish-e-Zaban (2006) goes furthest in this direction,
confronting Western avant-garde vocalists with performance practices of
the North Indian khyal vocal tradition.
Part II (Voices of/in Art Music) features five chapters, three on East Asian
and two on European art music. All chapters present detailed interpreta-
tions of a limited number of composer case studies (just two composers in
Chapters 5, 6, and 8, and three in Chapter 9); all are set into broad politi-
cal, cultural, and historical contexts, with particular consideration given
to interculturally accentuated and linguistic dimensions. The three essays
on East Asian contexts once more impressively document the complex and
wide-ranging effects that the introduction of Western music generally had
on the appreciation of local traditional music, its role in society, and the
conceptualization of the voice in particular. For example, Chapters 5 and
7 describe the processes that made Western bel canto (here designating
a historically unspecific and idealized “Western” voice quality) the main
model for a standardization of vocal style and appreciation in China and
Korea, epitomized by what was respectively called Chinese and Korean
art song (yishu gequ, hanguk kagok). This idealization of bel canto in
many respects mirrors parallel developments in Europe, where since the
late nineteenth century bel canto had been nostalgically essentialized as
a “mythical vocal technique from a previous era” (Potter 1998, 47). The
Chinese “school songs” (xuetang yuege), introduced by Frederick Lau in
Chapter 5, were equally modeled on Western voices. Children’s choir sing-
ing and its assumed educational efficiency was a significant type of musical
Westernization in East Asia, prefigured by the activities of Izawa Shūji and
Luther Withing Mason in Japan, where the fi rst volume of school songs had
appeared in 1881. The volume contained about 90% Western melodies;
“Given the program of the modernization of society, the music used could
only have been Western” (Galliano 2002, 30).
The historical background of adaptation, utilization, and re-significa-
tion of Western vocal production in China serves as a main point of crystal-
lization for Frederick Lau’s analyses of the voices created by contemporary
Chinese composers in Chapter 5. The bel canto-based emergence of a new
vocal aesthetic in early twentieth-century China, labeled meisheng changfa
(beautiful singing method), provides the context for understanding vocal-
ization as a social act. Lau argues that the voice is more than a sound car-
rier subordinated to its referential content: it serves as index of place, class,
gender, religion, ethnicity, and identity. Discussing choral works by US-
based Chinese Chen Yi and Hong Kong-based Chan Hing-Yan, Lau sug-
gests that the compositional strategies employed in these works effectively
intervene and disrupt the linkages between voice, culture, and ethnicity,
but also assert reinterpretations of Chinese vocal tradition and language.
He concludes that if voice can bring out unspoken but deeply felt senti-
ments that transcend tradition, the mundane, and everyday life, then it can
be consciously co-opted in the discourse of identity formation and trans-
gression. The politics of voice are never constant and neutral, but represent
a construction situated within the terrain of the cultural imaginary.
In Chapter 6, Fuyuko Fukunaka introduces two case studies that show
how long-cherished paradigms of Japanese opera have been challenged by
composers from a younger generation. Recent stage works by Hosokawa
and Mochizuki innovatively rethink the issues of dramatic plot and
musical functionality. Referring to Umberto Eco’s emphasis on disunity
brought about by memory and recollection, Fukunaka demonstrates how
the realist “monologic” opera narrative, based on causality, as favored by
earlier generations of Japanese composers, is subverted by Hosokawa and
Introduction 13
Mochizuki into “polylogic” settings. The voice plays a key role in this
process. In Hosokawa’s Hanjo (2002), adapted from a play by Mishima
Yukio, the composer’s idea of “impure” voices contributes to a ritualis-
tic and disembodied presentation of the characters on stage, attributable
to the influence of nō-theater, while the instrumental ensemble repeatedly
takes the role of “embodied” personae. This sense of psychological dis-
tance is further increased in Mochizuki’s parodistic Die große Bäckereiat-
tacke (2005–2009), based on short stories by Murakami Haruki, where
plot fuzziness, musical quotations, and surreal musical and vocal effects let
events and characters appear “intentionally uneven, multifaceted” (Chap-
ter 6, 128). In many scenes, the vocal parts are not based on precise pitches
but rather follow contours and gestures derived from the words of the Ger-
man libretto (according to the composer, German was chosen for its “idio-
syncratic sense of tempo and of rhythm,” 128). Fukunaka expands this
principle of vocal writing to an interpretation of the musical plot, arguing
that Mochizuki demonstrates how opera “needs not present a story, but
may only allude to its contour” (130).
In Chapter 7, Heekyung Lee argues that Korean composers have been
particularly reluctant to use the voice, and among the rare examples of vocal
music from the 1970s, some betray deep-rooted prejudice about the “inferi-
ority” of traditional Korean singing styles. Representative of this tendency
is Kim Dong-Jin, whose compositional method sinch’angak aimed to “rein-
vent” the p’ansori genre, but in fact remained deeply indebted to the “tonal
and rhythmic frameworks of Western music, rather than seeking to cap-
ture and refashion characteristic p’ansori vocal practices” (Chapter 7, 138).
According to Lee, this is symptomatic of a far-ranging marginalization of
traditional Korean music in postwar South Korea, which was a result of
Japanese colonization and the rapid pace of modernization and Westerniza-
tion. State-governed preservation tended to turn traditional musical styles
into “museum artifacts,” creating a gap that was filled by a small group of
contemporary composers who labeled themselves the “Third Generation.”
These composers, however, had no models to elaborate on: “Traditional
Korean music was not a ‘natural’ resource for composition, but something
that had to be ‘consciously’ pursued in the compositional process” (136).
For pragmatic reasons, most composers active in this field focused on instru-
mental music, while many traditional vocalists did not consider it necessary
to further develop their genres. However, vocal performers did eventually
acquire a pivotal role in the creation of new works in the 1970s, leading to
a “dependence of composers on the vocal practices of traditional singers”
(145). Popularization of traditional Korean music during the 1990s further
motivated composers to develop an increasingly broad spectrum of strate-
gies towards the voice, including the integration of traditional voice and
computer-based sound processing, the reuse of the traditional mensural
notation chŏngganbo, the reinvention of p’ungnyu (a traditional manner of
instantaneously adding melody to poetry), and kuŭm, a mnemonic practice
imitating and characterizing the sound of Korean instruments. But only in
a few cases did composers explicitly aim at intercultural hybridization. One
example is Kang Joon-Il’s Sin Hyangga for soprano, p’ansori singer, cello,
haegŭm, and strings (2007), where “the parts take on a shifting texture,
sometimes fiercely conflicting, sometimes unified in a single flow” (149).
Lee stresses the far-reaching potential of traditional Korean vocalization
for transformation in a contemporary context, arguing for the future pos-
sibility of “performance-centric” composition.
Jörn Peter Hiekel’s decision, in Chapter 8, to compare the highly diverse
approaches to vocality by Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905–1988)
and German composer Helmut Lachenmann (b. 1935) is grounded on the
insight that they both enact “redefi nitions” and “dissolutions” of identi-
ties that have been closely associated with vocal music for several centu-
ries. Their vocal works are therefore particularly relevant to the topic of
the present book, reaffirming the observation that an “identity discourse”
is not restricted to the East Asian context. Identity issues are paramount
in Scelsi’s much-debated “compositional” method (the creation of scores
by assistants from Scelsi’s electronic versions, largely based on improvisa-
tions): this method, Hiekel says, “intentionally undermin[es] key principles
of Western art music” (162). Similarly, Lachenmann’s more general invo-
cation of the “magical” dimensions of music is grounded in a spirituality
partly informed by the composer’s reception of Japanese music and philos-
ophy. Against this background, Hiekel particularly stresses the connection
between voice and ritual that is evoked by both composers. Scelsi’s Canti
del Capricorno (1962–1972), also referred to in Chapter 3 (47–48), quite
obviously conjures up the aura of ritualistic acts: this is largely due to the
contribution of vocalist Hirayama Michiko, who remains almost the only
performer of this cycle and is sometimes seen as its co-composer. By con-
trast, when Lachenmann recalled his fi rst visit to the Darmstadt summer
courses in 1957, he emphasized that the “paradise of happy intactness” was
not for him: he was specifically referring to a concert of traditional Indian
music, but the description is probably equally applicable to the “intuitive”
and unrestrained vocalization of Scelsi’s Canti. Lachenmann rather pur-
sued “a music which [ . . . ] reflects on itself, observes its own structure or
structuredness” (quoted in Chapter 8, 165). For Lachenmann the distance
implied by musical “structuredness,” the principle of self-reflection, and a
“perception perceiving itself” (168) doubtless form key aspects of “Euro-
pean identity,” and as such contrast with the “unbroken” magical power of
non-European ritual music which is evoked by Scelsi’s work and Hirayama’s
voice. All the same, Lachenmann’s key work “Zwei Gefühle . . .”, Musik
mit Leonardo (1992) subscribes to a particular ritual quality, characterized
by an “atomized” kind of speech voice that the composer has frequently
performed himself: it seeks to enact the “joy of discovery,” and to provoke
the “listener’s commitment to the experience of the unknown” (168) by its
structurally ritualized intensity.
Introduction 15
Lachenmann’s aesthetics clearly document how closely the dimensions of
structure, perception, and performance can be intertwined in compositional
practice. Such connections are equally insightfully presented in Chapter 9,
where Erin Gee discusses the impact of linguistic research and categoriza-
tion on European vocal music since the late 1950s. The focus on phonetic
structure repeatedly connects with questions of identity, not only in a care-
ful analysis of the playful “identity game” instigated by all three discussed
composers—most explicitly by Aperghis—but also by reference to cross-
cultural linguistic research. Comparing microscopic dimensions of vocal
articulation in different languages reveals the extent to which the meaning
and “emotional content” of phonetic utterances are language- and culture-
specific. This means that composers who create “non-semantic” music do
not merely abstract vocal sounds from their linguistic contexts, but redefine
the “semantic” through their radical deconstruction of phonetic structure.
Dieter Schnebel and Brian Ferneyhough achieve this by using the Interna-
tional Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to codify vocal sounds. As the IPA is based
on a rigorous segmentation of phonetic constituents of speech, this provokes
an “atomistic” approach. All three composers, however, clearly go beyond
a mere “atomization.” Schnebel creates processes, “chains,” or transforma-
tions between different categories of vocal sounds such as vowels, nasals
(m-/n-/ng-sounds), fricatives (f- and s-sounds), vibrants (r-sounds), or later-
als (l-sounds). While Schnebel’s vocal writing is “fi rmly grounded in the
physical processes of the human body” (Chapter 9, 185), Ferneyhough’s
Time and Motion Study III (1974) for 16 voices dissects and decouples the
vocal organs in an attempt to create a kind of vocal “machine”: a postserial
structuralism serves to reframe the “eradicated identity and silenced mean-
ing of the original texts” (190) by an encompassing phonetic restructuring.
Finally, Aperghis’s fascination with the sounds of languages, connecting
to Mersch’s reference to the traditions of spoken poetry, is channeled into
“mental miniatures” for solo voice, in which “French” and “non-French”
vocal sounds contribute to the audience’s “disorientation.” Again, the role
of the vocal performer is highlighted here: she decides which references
to the relevant languages are to be hinted at or hidden, as she “adds and
removes the sound qualities that act as cultural triggers” (196). In her anal-
yses, Gee reveals substantial interdependences between notational choices,
the construction of the performers’ “expressed and hidden identities,” the
flexibility performers have during the interpretation of the scores, and the
“cultural clues” inherent in the resulting vocal sounds.
The examples discussed in Part III (Voices of/in Popular Music and
Media Art) reveal that the prism into which voices, electronic media, and
mediatization converge indeed reflects a framework with rather different
fault lines than the art music discourse. On a sociological level, art and
popular musics are of course multiply intertwined. For example, the rise
and increasing commercial success of popular music in East Asia and a
growing marginalization of contemporary art music in this region to some
degree seem to be interdependent, particularly in China, where this situa-
tion has been repeatedly described as the “isolation” of art music compos-
ers: new music is largely considered a luxury product (shechipin), without
access to public funding. The artistic use of advanced audio and video
technology might to some extent help to overcome this form of isolation
as Samson Young demonstrates in Chapter 10. Young introduces the mul-
timedia digital opera The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Hong Kong
composer Steve Hui Ngo-shan (b. 1974), who is also working in the field
of popular and electronic dance music. The opera consciously departs from
the conventions of canonized European opera and is based on the encoun-
ter between Matteo Ricci (a sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary and a key
figure in the Western “discovery” of China), represented by a bass soloist,
and various historical and fictional characters, presented by digitally syn-
thesized voices. By analyzing the musical structure, the use of technology
and vocal production, and the symbolism of traditional Chinese musical
styles alluded to in the opera, Young offers a reading of how the characters
are produced and constructed, most importantly including acts of “identity
masking” (208, 211). Hui’s reconfiguration of culturally referential musical
material in the form of musical gestures or “musical nods” evokes a “hori-
zon of expectation” which is further expanded by the reference to the genre
of opera: Young argues that by labeling his work a “digital opera,” the
composer is able to draw audiences’ attention to its contradicting set of his-
tories, conventions, and assumptions. This domain of cultural production
also affords the license to creatively misread, misinterpret, and reinterpret,
and in this way to temporarily “reclaim opera as one’s own” (218). The
composer thus provokes a situation “in which the borders of cultures and
the defi nition of opera as understood in the classical tradition are brought
into question” (206). The operatic space is a space where fantasies in eth-
nicity, gender, centrality, and marginality are enmeshed. Young’s ultimate
goal, informed by his own life history as an overseas Chinese living in Aus-
tralia, is to explore the process through which composers creatively reframe
multiple traditions in their creation.
Prefigured identities with strong political undercurrents rather than
identity masking or deconstruction have dominated large areas of Chinese
popular music in the past decades, as demonstrated by Andreas Steen in
Chapter 11. Steen engages China’s “red songs” (hongse gequ) and their
recent popularity as the focus of a historical survey and analysis. By pointing
out the myths, discourse, language, history, ideology, popularity, and his-
torical transformation of red songs, Steen succinctly shows how the ongoing
interest in this century-old song genre, involving both state apparatus and
mass audiences, has contributed to the maintenance of communist ideology.
Steen’s analysis demonstrates how references to revolutionary songs from
earlier decades of the Chinese communist era intentionally “strengthen” the
listener’s patriotic spirit, building on myths of collective identity, epitomized
by the idea—which already formed the basis of the early-twentieth-century
Introduction 17
“school songs” described in Chapter 5—that choral singing has a positive
effect on people’s overall character. Despite being a popular music genre
and a recent success in the entertainment business, red songs are tacitly
endorsed by the state as they keep the “revolutionary spirit” and patriotic
and nationalist sentiments alive. In the context of recent outbursts of Chi-
nese neo-nationalism, most notoriously represented by the bestselling book
China Can Say No! (Zhongguo keyi shuo bu!, 1996), red songs have served
to “actively and optimistically” support and accompany China’s economic
rise and international recognition. The genre has also proved to be very
flexible in terms of both stylistic transformation and the adoption of new
performance concepts, including highly popular TV singing contests. As
a song genre inextricably intertwined with the history, prevalence, and
changes of communism in China, red songs have been (and probably will
be) the voice of the “mainstream,” supported by the state apparatus and
appropriating formerly dissident voices such as that of famous rock singer
Cui Jian.
In contrast to China’s red songs, musicians from the second generation
of the Japanese glam rock genre visual-kei also enjoy high popularity in the
West. In Chapter 12, Oliver Seibt probes the linkage of desire and voice in
the “band girl’s” (bangyaru) dedication to visual-kei musicians. The lead
singer’s voice is what attracts most of these (predominantly female) fans
to visual-kei groups. Seibt interprets this attraction from the perspective
of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis. Employing a Lacanian “theory of the
voice,” worked out by Mladen Dolar (2006), as an interpretative frame,
Seibt suggests that the fans’ fascination for the visual-kei voice involves an
ineffable and unfulfillable desire. Arguably, this also contributes to making
visual-kei a worldwide success, transcending regional and national bound-
aries. The voice is what is left over when signification is subtracted from the
speech act: it initiates a type of fantasy that is not primarily language- or
culture-specific. This desire invoked by the voice, however, cannot be acted
out due to the ritualized behavior during live concerts and their “inbuilt
mechanisms of deference” (Chapter 12, 264). By combining ethnography
and psychoanalytical theory, Seibt is able to provide evidence for his argu-
ment that the unique situatedness of the voice in visual-kei can be under-
stood as a particularly adequate cultural training ground for “learning how
to desire.”
In Chapter 13, Michael Fuhr demonstrates the multiple roles of the voice
in contemporary Korean pop music. Fuhr intends to debunk a stereotype:
the perceived entanglement between what is essentialized as “Korean” vocal
timbre, body, and ethnicity. The essay surveys various vocal techniques in
traditional Korean genres such as chŏngak, p’ansori, and in the popular
t’ŭrot’ŭ songs from the early twentieth century, as well as the notion of
sigimsae—idiomatic, stylized embellishments, a prominent figure in the
essentializing Korean aesthetic discourse. Fuhr demonstrates that vocal
styles in contemporary Korean pop music such as croaking, screaming,
grunting, crying, sobbing, and whispering are often understood and inter-
preted in the contexts of sigimsae and the collective ethos of sorrow (han),
but also function in the political realm as the “rebellious habitus” of
Korea’s punk subculture. Referring to Nina Eidsheim’s attempt at “decolo-
nizing vocal timbre,” Mersch’s idea of a voice’s paradoxical “present non-
presence,” and Dolar’s notion of the “object voice” (designating the space
between the voice as a “carrier of meaning” and as a “fetishized object”),
Fuhr shows that understanding the voice as a performative and material
phenomenon implies a rejection of cultural essentialism and ethnicization:
the “Korean vocal body is only one configuration among a rich diversity of
vocal styles in Korea’s contemporary pop music” (282).
* * *
The significance of the voice in the field of tension formed by intercultural iden-
tity discourses, according to a formulation in Nicholas Cook’s afterword, lies
in its potential to show “how traditional ethnic markers can be transformed
in light of new cultural and economic circumstances [ . . . ]. New identities
build on the past, but transform it in unpredictable ways” (286). Furthermore,
these identities are in many cases not a byproduct of vocal performance, but
consciously staged, enacted, or subversively dissolved: examples may be found
in all three parts of this book. “Reflexive globalization” in vocal music indeed
implies that most cases of such identity formation and rejection through the
vocal medium are conceived consciously and deliberately as reaction, objec-
tion, or amplification of globalized representations of “vocal authority.” As
all the chapters vividly demonstrate, however, it is not sufficient to conceive
of the voice simply as an “authentic” means of sustaining the affirmation of
personal or cultural identity. Rather, the voice’s entanglement in transforma-
tions of musical genres and styles, intimately cross-related to political, com-
mercial, or populist agendas, is multiply influencing the manner in which
voices articulate identity issues in musical contexts. Most notably in China,
but increasingly in other rapidly economizing societies of East Asia and the
West, uses of the voice that are independent of political and commercial pres-
sures are becoming increasingly marginalized. Indeed, as researchers in the
context of African art music have argued (Scherzinger 2004, 610–611), the
very concept of creating new art music in non-Western contexts can often be
read as a resistance against the commodification and reification of music in
commercialized, officially acclaimed, or conventionally established forms of
cultural representation.
The voice in globalized contemporary music, as Cook’s afterword puts
it, stands “like an earthquake belt at the junction between multiple tec-
tonic plates” (285). In musical contexts it reflects a century-long process of
domestication as a primary means of cultural expression and social empow-
erment, crystallized in the proliferation and transformation of vocal styles
and genres. But it also articulates a potential to transcend these limitations
Introduction 19
by affording moments of “unlimited” presence, a potential to transgress
personal and cultural boundaries. That is the potential which the contribu-
tors to this book aim to bring to light.
NOTES
1. A more elaborate discussion of the work-concept is beyond the scope of the

present introduction. Among other aspects, recent research has increas-
ingly focused on the differences involved with a historical understanding of
the work-concept on the one hand and its philosophical ontology on the
other (see, for example, Strohm 2000, Goehr 2000, Wellmer 2011). Many
researchers have moved away from the historically and culturally restricted
theories of the work-concept established by Theodor W. Adorno and Carl
Dahlhaus, though both theories continue to function as major references in
this debate.
2. Apart from Hosokawa and Mochizuki this applies to Asian composers who
live (or lived) abroad permanently such as Yun Isang, Tan Dun, or Chen Yi,
or who have lived in Western countries for a longer period but have then
returned to their country of birth such as Kang Sukhi or Takahashi Yūji.
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Part I
Global Perspectives
on the Voice
2 Presence and Ethicity of the Voice
1
Dieter Mersch
“INDEFINABLE” VOICES
From the Heliconian Muses let us begin to sing, who hold the great
and holy mount of Helicon, and dance on soft feet about the deep-blue
spring and the altar of the almighty son of Cronos, and, when they
have washed their tender bodies in Permessus or in the Horse’s Spring
or Olmeius, make their fair, lovely dances upon highest Helicon and
move with vigorous feet (Hesiod 1914, II, 1–8).
It is the chant of the muses with which Hesiod’s Theogony begins, or

rather the muses instill their divine air into the singing poet, “and they
plucked and gave me a rod, a shoot of sturdy laurel, a marvelous thing, and
breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things
there were aforetime; and they bade me sing of the race of the blessed gods
that are eternally, but ever to sing of themselves both fi rst and last” (ibid.,
II, 30–34). One of the earliest European poets thus connects the enigma of
the voice with the motives of “truth-saying,” authorization, and alterity,
because the voice does not only express itself authentically, but exposes
something different, an otherness alienated from human nature. The voice
is speech, medium, and at the same time without location, different from
the world, babbling and murmuring—“telling of things that are and that
shall be and that were aforetime with consenting voice” (ibid., II, 38–39).
The voice therefore encompasses a plethora of features: it is tone, sign,
manifestation of the mood, emotion, cut, or bewilderment or adjournment.
It seems to evince nativeness and authority, touches the early memory of
the speaking mother and father, evokes confidence and belief, while at the
same time it sounds like a doubleganger, mirroring the soul, and appears
as mere flesh or breath. The voice makes our life and subjectivity audible,
it seems to be an insignificant “signifier” that immediately gives birth to
significance, presents our identity to society, or “acts” and takes part in
the incessant process of communication which forms culture. However it
never belongs to us, because at the same time it sounds obscene and exceeds
our control. Then again it pretends to come from a higher place and order,
26 Dieter Mersch
a non-humanity, embodied by divine qualities that assemble its different
pitches into a collective universe of sound. Music is the voice’s “insistence”
(“Inständigkeit,” Heidegger), endowed with the power of synthesis or sym-
phonia, unifying the spheres of nature with the order of society by creating
an ethical coherence of elementary harmonia.
It is impossible to tackle the voice completely; it eludes any conceptual deter-
mination. Instead it resembles an unlimited play of vexations that refuses any
consistent definability. Every characteristic provokes its opposition: equally
both, general and unique, symbolic and meaningless, transcendent and
immanent, present and fluid, material and immaterial, familiar and uncanny,
literal and metaphorical, vivid and exposed to death, and at the same time
able to found or break a community. The voice sounds Dionysian, capricious,
and seducing. It marks the boundaries between the inwardness and the out-
wardness of the subject, stages itself as a venture of exposure, addresses the
other, and still remains self-sufficient, while attracting those who are willing
to hear, elusive for those who are without understanding (barbaros). Also, the
voice embraces and bids a cold farewell, it conjures and prohibits, it behaves
imperiously and is inasmuch a command as a demand, but never shows itself
neutral in its affection, neither in the moment of request or identification nor
as an empty position without any specific agenda or need. Like music it stirs
us to tears or pushes us into aggression or violence, just as Pythagoras alleg-
edly moved a youngling into ardent furor by intoning a Phrygian song and
adjourned him again by singing a Lydian tune. The voice, hence, is always
a beginning, an openness to attention, and to the same extent it calls us into
response and “responsivity,” but never offers any arrival.
In this chapter the voice is considered under the philosophical perspective
of its ethicity. “To speak with one’s own voice,” the ethical maxim of enlight-
enment, primarily served as a model or metaphor for individual freedom and
the right to present one’s own opinion to the public. This essay, in contrast,
approaches the physical presence of the voice from a phenomenological point
of view and deals with its inherent challenge, which enters the social scene
from the very first moment on. There is a deep and inextricable entangle-
ment between the voice and alterity, which exists immediately when we hear
a voice’s distant or fading sound, an embroilment or implication, which never
stops its urgent demand for care, attention, or respect. Its ethical claim there-
fore lies beyond any question of intentionality or will. It allows no exception.
The ethicity of the voice is thus grounded on a stronger demand than any
ethical principle, a demand that is always related to identity or individual
acceptance: the voice is a “persecution” (Lévinas 1978, 101, 121).2
MOMENT AND PHYSICALITY OF THE VOICE
In order to fi nd a pathway through the labyrinth and different characters

of the voice we start with its instant and with the voice as an instant. From
Presence and Ethicity of the Voice 27
a performative point of view, the voice exists always as the moment and
as physicality. It exhibits aspects of both occurrence and materiality. In
the moment when the voice is employed, both aspects are simultaneously
given. That is why each voice in its suddenness is constantly shocking and
brought to life by a moment of magic. Always “appalling” and strangely
appealing, it is “flesh” and unexpected nakedness all at once. The relation
between the voice and sound (Klang) corresponds to this. The voice reveals
itself in sound (Laut), and this sound has an unmistakable tonality, a par-
ticular key, an almost obscene “grain” as Roland Barthes (1991b, 269–271)
expresses it with respect to the singer Charles Panzera. As tone, sound, or
resonance, the voice is concerned with the physical. This is most tangible in
the foreign: the voice stemmers, it seems inarticulate, like an animal sound,
and its tone hangs isolated in the air.3 The listener not only hears the voice,
not only hears what is said and its meaning, the listener feels it. This also
means that, unlike writing, the listener not only understands what is said
in the meaning of hermeneutics, but also comes into direct contact with
it—touches it—by receiving and accepting the voice. There is something
inherently tactile about the voice and through it, the voice creates a direct
contact with the speaker. The contact has, qua touch, a physical impulse.
Sometimes it is this physical impulse that decides if I listen to it, if I take in
what is said or if I turn away internally or even if I reject the other.
The voice, as a bodily trace, remains nonetheless dependent on ears and
hearing. That means we are dealing with perception, which in its own way
induces presence. This presence originates in the materiality of the voice
and materiality always describes a singularity. Each voice is unique and
distinct, like the moment in which it addresses me, speaks to me, touches
me, and involves me through its affection. As such the voice is the body
of the speaker, incorporated in its organs, its immediate articulation. It is
this incorporation that lends each voice its own type of presence, which,
in the moment that it has begun to speak and is not yet entirely language,
already involves. That means, as Michel Serres—drawing on Merleau-Pon-
ty’s phenomenology—says, the voice is first and foremost “flesh,” whereby
the expression refers to what cannot be classified, defi ned, or determined,
but rather bursts out of the body so to speak, without any clear contours:
“Voice makes the name flesh, delivers words from death” (Serres 2008,
132).4 What is meant here is that, like the face, it is present before the
said. Nonetheless, as that which remains undefi ned and comes too close, it
simultaneously withdraws. The voice as materiality withdraws. It refuses
to cooperate with the conceptualization in the sense of those peculiar dia-
lectics of withdrawal: that which is uncooperative is attractive to the same
degree in and through its uncooperativeness. Barthes emphasized that there
is no voice which remains entirely neutral, even when it is unnoticed: each
time it is familiar, aggressive, foreign, uncomfortable, or even fleeting like a
shadow. Each voice is an “object of desire—or of disgust” (Barthes 1991c,
279). If we understand the word erotic in a broad sense, a voice has a
28 Dieter Mersch
specific eroticism to it. As such, it shimmers between fascination and rejec-
tion, between desire, shyness, or aversion, but as an “erotic being” the voice
always provokes a reaction. It cannot be ignored. In speaking the voice
captures or incites as flesh to the point of enticement or disgust, it infects or
repels the listener and enables—or bars—a connection.
In every voice, the bow is drawn between the corporeality of the speaker
and his/her relationship with the other. In the voice, language meets the
body and thus a presence that attracts and attacks the other. In doing so,
the voice gives birth to itself as a body, and in the same way it turns to the
other and requests a response from him/her. This is a “gift” and gesture to
the other. It opens itself up to the other, endangering itself to the point of
futility. For this reason, the voice is always a breath of life, a self-abandon-
ing, a physical presence, and a turn to alterity. They cannot be separated
from each other.
THE TRACE OF PRESENCE
What one encounters fi rst in writing about the voice is its corporeality, its
physical presence—a physicality which in turn is not writing and cannot be
experienced through writing. To talk about voices therefore implies grasp-
ing onto an inalienable difference. It is difficult to set, because the voice is
incessantly superimposed by what it says: a meaning pushes its way in front
of the voice’s presence, disguising it and covering it. It therefore requires
special methods to bring the voice as such to light, to literally expose its
meaning. This is primarily and powerfully tangible where words turn out
to be distorted, namely in artistic practices in which the voice is turned into
material and its exterior is presented, e.g., in the Lautdichtungen (sound
poems) by Kurt Schwitters and Ernst Jandl or in John Cage’s late (language)
compositions (see Mersch 2000 and 2002a, 278–289). Without exception,
paradoxical maneuvers are involved, which serve to change the focus: series
of sounds, words, and syllables are continuously combined or cut up and
subject to contingencies, until, as in Cage’s Empty Words (1973–1976),
only meaningless vowels and consonants remain, which are nothing but
tones. Then that which is not meaning rises in the voice: the corporeality
of the sound.
As every verbal sound, but especially screams, sighs, or songs reveal,
not just the throat and the vocal folds participate in this physicality; the
entire body is literally absorbed. The body functions as a sounding board,
as a metronome. This also means that the body functions as the volume
and rhythm ascribed to the singularity of only one respective body and as
such is incorporated into language and its musicality. As a location for the
voice and language, the body can be understood as a medium. Nonethe-
less, the fi rst issue we will consider here is: how does this singularity of its
physicality relate to the mediality of the voice? This in turn corresponds to
the question of the relation between phenomenality, medium, and articula-
tion. If the phenomenality of the voice refers especially to its materiality,
its body, then its mediality is relevant where it first produces language and
meaning. Consequently it enters into the function of articulation.
Articulation, however, is based on cuts and differentiations. In this
sense, every articulation, even in music, turns out to be discrete (and is,
thus, noticeable), which is why Ferdinand de Saussure generally defi ned
sound through the figure of the “slice” (1997, 355, 366, 393), 5 because as
he states, “A language does not present itself to us as a set of signs already
delimited, requiring us merely to study their meanings and organization. It
is an indistinct mass, in which attention and habit alone enable us to distin-
guish particular elements” (1986, 102). In particular, every cut constitutes
that which Saussure referred to as “signified/signifier” scheme, which can-
not itself be separated. Articulation thus turns the voice into an instrument
for sign production. It puts the voice in the service of language, which oscil-
lates between physicality and significance. For language, both moments are
relevant: whereas the body of the voice opens up the connection in that it
triggers an affection, the significance fi rst “gives” the meaning, while the
voice in music, particularly, offers a continuous interplay between both,
revealing one against the other.
A non-verbality thus creates the point from which sound and language
occur. In doing so the voice precedes language, insofar as it represents the
unobtainable condition, which precedes communication. To unwrap this
preceding means to free the voice’s presence from the non-presence of the
signs, just as on the other hand the pre-emption at the beginning point
means connecting speech to the experiences of a withdrawing present. It is
reminiscent of an existence. The voice corresponds then to the audible, the
face to the visual. It is non-interchangeable and unmistakable in the same
way as the face of the other which testifies to its extraordinary presentness.
The voice is the trace of this presence, just as the “nudity of the face” in the
sense of Emmanuel Lévinas’s “true representation” means the vulnerability
of the other (1986, 352). To the same degree, the voice refers to an endan-
gering, to a violability. This violability correlates to the voice’s exposure, to
its unveiling, in which the ambivalence is inherent right from the start—the
ambivalence to be as much a location of an “appeal” and an “appellation”
as to be overheard or rejected.
ARTICULATION
In a peculiar way the unnamable start of speech thus seems to be bound to

a withdrawing presence, which nevertheless “draws one” into the conversa-
tion or cuts it off. A fatal theoretical bias has limited the investigation of
the voice to the mediality of the sign, to articulation, and to meaning (see
Mersch 2002b, 100–125). It thus strangled the perspective and robbed the
30 Dieter Mersch
voice of its phenomenality. This corresponded to the distinction between
significance and writing, which “semioticizes” the voice right from the
beginning and subordinates it to the symbolic as an expression, enuncia-
tion, or discourse. Accordingly there is no voice which does not at the same
time say something or present something to be understood: the voice as
sound, as flesh, or as a moment does not come into play. If the voice is
analyzed only within this frame then conclusions such as those that Jacques
Derrida drew in his debate with Edmund Husserl in Speech and Phenom-
ena are unavoidable. Here, Derrida concluded that the moments of a neces-
sary non-presence of the voice and the loss of its authorship, in the sense
of non-authenticity of speaking with one’s own voice, are a consequence of
its iterability and differentiality (see Derrida 1973, 69). In exposing these
moments entirely as effects of the sign (Zeichen) and its articularity, Der-
rida already begins his reflection, which is focused on the voice, with the
topic of the sign or rather the problem of the “indication” (Anzeige). In
particular, this discussion is conducted within the context of a critique on
the unity of phoné and signification and thus on the presence of meaning
in the voice. This however always places it under the custody of a primary
meaning or scripture and thus the grapheme of the script-sign.
Because the voice always says something, and what was said already
carries the sign, the writing consequently precedes the voice. The writing
breaks with the voice’s presentness, because it understands the voice exclu-
sively as a medium: it has already assumed the secondarity of mediatiza-
tion. The voice is introduced by Derrida as a “desire to say”; through the
operation of the simultaneous auto-affection, a “hearing-oneself-speak”
(ibid., 78).6 Whoever speaks, hears himself, understands himself—and
such understanding is not thinkable without repeatability: “To speak to
someone is doubtless to hear oneself speak, to be heard by oneself; but, at
the same time, if one is heard by another, to speak is to make him repeat
immediately in himself the hearing-oneself-speak in the very form in which
I effectuated it” (ibid., 80). As Grammatology maintains, the repeatabil-
ity subordinates the voice to the primary scripturality as long as it not
only makes the sound repeatable as sound and thus recognizable, but also
already refers to a repeatability that detaches from it in the moment of its
vocal presence. “And here again we fi nd all the incidences of primordial
non-presence,” concludes Derrida’s questionable chapter in Speech and
Phenomena, since “auto-affection supposes that a pure difference comes
to divide self-presence” (ibid., 82). As correct as the observations are, they
only raise one aspect of the vocal, namely the movement of “speaking to
someone” (which may mean “speaking to myself”), a movement of speaking
that implies saying. In this way the analysis of the voice falls totally in the
context of semiology and grammatology. The entire account thus follows
a program of refl ection, which inscribes itself in its results right from the
start. In other words: it is the distance of the reflection that gives the voice
the aporia that Derrida refers to and thus alienates it from its presence. The
logic of the conclusions in the corresponding chapter in Speech and Phe-
nomena as well as in Writing and Difference is a result of this prejudice.
However, the phenomenality of the voice is in no way wiped off by this. On
the contrary, from the point of view of writing and scripturality the relation
between voice and recording alone dominates; that is the puzzle of memory
and its marks. Derrida’s philosophy of non-presence, therefore, basically
repeats the psychoanalytical insight of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan
that experience is a result of a tracing or forging, which places the processes
of memory at the start and not the event itself.
Consequently, media theory has brought the subjects of archives and
storage to the forefront and ousted the question of transfer not only in the
sense of a medial transport, but also in the sense of a transformation in the
meaning of the word from meta-phora, of a “carrying over” and displac-
ing or “recasting” (“Umbesetzen,” Hans Blumenberg). Although Derrida
added fundamental aspects through the motifs of repeatability and rup-
ture, of iteration and alteration of the circulation of writing, the structure
of transference is not exclusively covered by the structure of writing. The
term transference especially brings the dialectic of proximity and distance
into play, which in turn assigns the voice another place beyond writing.
As transmission medium, the voice belongs to the realm of the interstice
or space (spatium), of the simultaneously separating and connecting. Once
again this accentuates the aspect of physicality, because the experience of
the distance, the spatial fissure or gap as well as the bridging or wiping out
is fi rst and foremost a corporeal one, which the equally intruding as well as
withdrawing presence of the voice contributes to.
BEYOND THE MEDIAL
In no way whatsoever does the corporeality form only the passive sounding
board for the tone and intonation. Rather, it also describes an element that
can be made both modular and plastic, that both contributes to the training
and aestheticization of the voice and is destroyed by it. Thus, where such a
voice and body are conceived together—the unity understood as conjunc-
tion and disjunction, because the joined constantly includes the separated—
one is already dealing with two media: the mediality of the voice on the one
hand and that of the body on the other hand. Thus we are confronted with
an “intermediality” which produces its own interferences, oppositions, and
chiasms. In other words: voice and body can become opponents; they can
overlap with one another, strengthen each other, mutually slow another, or
thwart one another. Art acts as witness for that: when voice and body are
separated, their respective characteristics become visible, so that the mix of
media, their confl icts, and their inconsistencies can be promoted to means
of refraction and reflection, which unveil something other than the semiotic
character of the voice in the mode of its articulateness. In particular such a
32 Dieter Mersch
fracture subverts the dogmatic focus of supposed scripturality, because it is
able to dissolve the entwining of the voice and language and/or voice and
significance. Especially, the art of performance and theater as well as “new
music” have worked again and again with such strategies—Cathy Berbe-
rian’s Stripsody (1966) or György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre (1974–1977,
revised 1996) are perfect examples for that; also it brings to mind Antonin
Artaud’s excess of breath—“It wildly tramples rhythms underfoot” (Artaud
1958, 91): “But let there be the least return to the active, plastic, respiratory
sources of language, let words be joined again to the physical motions that
gave them birth, and let the discursive, logical aspect of language disappear
beneath its affective, physical side, i.e., let words be heard in their sonority”
(ibid., 119).
Artaud thus refers to the voice’s non-semiotic character, its power, inar-
ticulateness, richness, or urgency as well as its unwieldiness and force,
which does not express the violence of the signs, but on the contrary con-
veys their “intensity” or “nakedness.”7
What one could call the aesthetic of the voice then becomes obvious:
the voice proves to be a medium of representation, a product of multiple
adjustments and disciplinings as is demonstrated by rhetoric or musical
training—where volume, range, and repertoires need to be rehearsed and
trained. However, at the same time the medial limits are also made audible,
because something appears which exceeds the voice’s expressiveness and
expression just as it exceeds the word, language, or musicality, and remains
dissonant to any sound. To be more precise: there is no voice which is not
at the same time controlled, modulated, or trained, because the voice con-
stantly appears in public and stages itself and thus is displayed. Nonethe-
less, to the same extent there is also no voice which is fully performed or
stylized and even “stylizable”: in each tone a fragility or strain resonates,
in which resistances against the training emerge and express the voice’s
mortality, the possibilities of decline, pain, and future death. Certainly the
voice is not less superficial or mask-like than the face in which we display
our public presence—but just as the face shines through each of the differ-
ent faces and masks that we wear as a singular trace, an “aura” is inherent
in the voice, which, according to Emmanuel Lévinas, gives it a face-likeness.
It is therefore not so much the trace of a body as the trace of an otherness as
expressed in every single body.
This also means that the voice cannot be separated from its mediality, and
that it is also something other than a medium. If one assigns the mediality
of the voice its articulateness and dispositive performance, its non-articu-
lateness withdraws from an appropriate defi nition or adequate conceptu-
alization. Just as the medium is unable to obtain its own mediality or the
writing its structurality, the voice is unable to express its non-assimilability,
its uniqueness: it proves to be non-recordable remains, residuum, or perma-
nent reserves. At best, it can be defi ned negatively and thus the paradox of a
present non-presence is inherent in the voice. In this lies its indescribability.
It opens the space of an indeterminability. Roland Barthes tried to explain
this space from the difference between articulation and pronunciation (Bar-
thes 1991c). The latter includes those “erotic” effects which again refer to
the incompliance of the body. It is—contra-intuitively—characterized as
the “moment of significance.” The expression is misleading insofar as it
recalls a significance, which the voice actually does not possess. We are
not dealing so much with a significant relation as with the moments of an
emergence. The pronunciation means this emergence. It signifies the con-
spicuous and can therefore be interpreted within the context of ecstasis:
the ecstasis of the voice in the sense of expositing itself. Here significance
is not meaning, but rather something that jumps out and appears. Perceiv-
able especially through disruptions such as stuttering or interruptions or,
according to Roland Barthes, the noise, its “grain,” its whistles, scratches,
or coarseness, the voice turns out to be a source of reflection, which not
only fi nds a negativity in the voice but also, on the contrary, a surplus,
which cannot be domesticated by any censure or production. The thesis is
that this intensity of surplus is the reason why the voice involves us and in
the moment of communication appeals to us and compels us to respond.
Similarly, it is this compelling that Roland Barthes tried to make conscious
in the imperative “listen to me” (Barthes 1991a, 246).
METACRITIQUE OF DERRIDA’S CRITIQUE OF PLATO
This imperative “listen to me” draws the other into the voice. There is no
cry, no monological speech, and no whispering to oneself without a social
addressing, without imploration or a relationship to the other. The voice
as a trace of the body, therefore, also marks the location of an “appella-
tion” that forces the response. Both “appeal” and “response” displace the
frame of scripturality and fall out of the repertoire of grammatology. Inas-
much as grammatology is based on the misjudgment of the spoken word
it fails to recognize the voice in its relationship to the other. This prompts
me to take up the critique of Derrida again, which I began elsewhere (see
Mersch 2006), this time by producing a metacritique of Derrida’s metac-
ritique of Plato’s critique of writing (see especially Derrida 1981b). At the
end of the dialogue in Phaedrus—after Socrates and Phaedrus have spoken
about Eros, the art of language, and the status of rhetoric in relation to
truth—Plato inserts a myth dealing with the notion of writing. The logical
location of this myth in the midst of all the different themes consists of the
question about the relationship between the living and constantly respond-
ing word and the silent writing, which can only be received as a monologue
(Plato 2007, 53–54). In doing so, Plato speaks of the old Egyptian deity
Theuth (or Thoth), who is ascribed the “gift” of wisdom and the sciences
of geometry, astronomy, and the game of dice. According to the tale, the
origins of writing and numbers can also be traced back to him. It should
34 Dieter Mersch
be added here that the same position in Greek mythology is taken up by
Prometheus, whom Aischylos ascribes in Prometheus Bound not only the
“gift” of fi re, but also the discovery of the crucial media writing and num-
bers: “Yea, and the art of number, arch-device, I founded, and the craft of
written words, the world’s recorder, mother of the Muse” (Aischylos 1995,
20). In Plato’s version of the myth of Theuth, writing is presented to King
Thamus for examination. King Thamus is supposed to be convinced of the
advantages of writing for remembering and commemorating. Instead, King
Thamus points to the difference between poiesis and reflection as well as to
the ambiguity of advantages and disadvantages that are inherent in every
discovery: “And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from
a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a
quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create for-
getfulness“ (Plato 2007, 53).
In his metacritique of Plato’s analysis of writing, Derrida emphasized
this pharmakon of writing, which functions both as poison and remedy.
Nonetheless, this passage by Plato is noteworthy in the sense that it treats
writing as a technē, which, placed between art and technology, can be
questioned with regards to its use—and which, according to Plato, even
the inventor himself is unable to evaluate: the designer who only thinks in
terms of functions fails to see the consequences of a construction; technol-
ogy and reflection, as a result, obviously separate from one another. That
which the medium “writing” holds ready as an obvious advantage, namely
that it provides memory and is able to serve as a cultural technology for
recording and archiving, can only be judged in its full ambivalence by oth-
ers who are affected by it. In addition to hinting at the precariousness of
writing’s mediality, the passage thus also unveils the double-sidedness of
the technological, whose conflicting nature inscribes itself into the medium,
which in constituting deconstitutes as well. As Plato suspected, no technol-
ogy escapes this two-sidedness; its ambivalence lays not in using it wrongly
or rightly, rather it is inherent in the technology itself. There is no writing
which does not record and document how it in the same moment trans-
forms memory into another document or archive. It is there that Plato’s
analysis of writing has its deeper sense: It is not actually a critique of writ-
ing, but rather a critique of technology.
Derrida’s critique of Plato’s writing analysis in turn takes up the perspec-
tive of the double-sidedness through the figure of the pharmakon in order to
read the implicit gesture of a privileging of the spoken language before it is
fi xed in writing—thus missing the crucial point. Derrida is again concerned
with a reversal, demonstrating both that Plato always has to think from the
perspective of writing in order to distinguish language, as well as to assert
the indispensability of the sign’s (marque) non-presence, the fictionaliza-
tion of the supposed authenticity of the spoken word and the presence of
the voice. In a double move, Derrida proposes that (i) it is not the voice that
precedes the writing, but rather the writing that precedes the voice, and
that (ii) the notion of presence, of the “present” that is given to itself does
not exist, and instead memory—with its play between remembering and
forgetting—is primary. In other words, for Derrida the medium of writing
is inevitable, because every recollection or forgetting as well as every per-
ception, experience, cognition, dialogue, living word, or communication is
indebted to the primacy of writing. This conclusion runs radically counter
to Plato, because Plato assigns the phoné, the present sound, its own weight
and indivisible dignity in that it is oriented on the other.
The link between philosophy, voice, and dialogue, which was obvious to
Greek thought, implied in particular that the speaker testified for what he
has said to others with his own voice. Consequently the voice advances to a
guarantor, who binds what was said to the speaker’s presence and corporeal-
ity. Reasoning and knowledge thus become, as Pierre Hadot also emphasized,
an “experience of a presence” (Hadot 2002, 70): for Plato, science is never
a theory, it is an activity, a form of life, in which the other, who speaks and
responds, takes on an outstanding place. In his study on rhetorical and discur-
sive traditions in antiquity, Jean-Pierre Vernant also insisted that, besides all
graphical representations, a general separation between the alethinos logos,
the faithful language, and the wonders (to mythodes) of verbal expression
was decisive to Greek thought. This is a difference which cannot be exhausted
by any theory of semata or grammata, because these apply to the impact
of the talk on the listener. Vernant argues that the power of the voice pos-
sesses an “other” intensity than the word and its written fixation, because the
voice belongs to sympatheia, and the written fixation to mimesis (see Vernant
1990). Reading offers the reader a critical analysis and a possibility to return
to the text again and again and thus demands more distanced attitude com-
pared to listening to an oral lecture. Greek rhetoric was fully conscious of
this: the speaker has to seduce his audience, in order to hold its attention. The
spoken word affects the listener like an invocation. Despite the legitimacy of
Derrida’s metacritique of Plato, his deconstruction misses this crucial distinc-
tion. The voice brings it into play in a way that cannot be eliminated, because
in connecting ego and alter there is a dimension inherent in it, which is dif-
ferent from writing. This can be understood as its genuine “ethicity.” Since
antiquity its first evidence has always been—music.
MIMESIS AND THE POWER OF SPEECH
The notion ethicity requires a few additional remarks. The ethicity of the
voice—which does not mean an ethic, but rather only its precondition or
prestructure—seems amalgamated with authenticity, since she who speaks
with her own voice speaks as author of her language and her thoughts, for
which she, as such, takes responsibility. However, Derrida correctly argued
that no authorship and thus also no authenticity can be ascribed to the voice,
because it does not create language, but rather, at best, delivers it. The ethical
36 Dieter Mersch
claim which the presence of the voice raises can therefore neither lie in the
authorship of the person, if this means being the origin or base of language,
nor in what is said by it. Similarly, the notion of authenticity proves to be dif-
ficult, ambiguous, and rebellious. Connoted with own, with the character of
originality, the notion seems once and for all to be related to appearance. The
word names the authentes, the “perpetrator,” a compound of autos, “self,”
and a-nyein, “accomplish.” As a consequence it describes those who accom-
plish something themselves, which is why the idea of the subject’s sovereignty
and the pathos of authenticity form a set. With the authentic as appearance,
the figures of sovereignty also become problematic, just as they have inhabited
modern thought since Descartes and have brought the freedom of “no,” i.e.,
a primary refusal, into language and its references. Right from the start they
destabilize the possibilities of the social through the negation and the dif-
ference which posit the individual. Accordingly, part of the basis of modern
philosophy is to oppose this double-sidedness with a norm, such as Kant tried
to establish it from the self-legislation of reason. Nonetheless, the crux of this
idea of self-legislation lies in a circular argument: in order to control its arbi-
trariness, it still has to assume the principle of sovereignty and therefore also
confirms that which it strives to limit. Therefore, the other is lost right from
the very beginning. To the same degree with which language and the social
are brought into play again—a process which in opposition to Kant began at
the latest with Herder, Johann Georg Hamann, and Wilhelm von Humboldt
and which reached its first peak with Marx’s social theory—the moment of
the necessity of alterity also comes back into view. Speech—in addition to
work—here turns into a place of power, whose historicity goes beyond sub-
jectivity and its freedom of “negation.” However, with that—and there once
again lies the limiting of this program—language is reduced exclusively to the
said, to the sense, and to the structures of signification, which result from its
internal differentiality.
The normativity of the social cannot be thus explained. It neither results
from the bonding power of language nor from the orders of the symbolic
alone; rather it requires the analysis of practices which obey categories other
than the syntax or semantics of language. It is not even a function of the rhet-
oric or the figuration, but rather at best a function of the performance, which
also sets the fact of language and the reality which is indicated in it at the
same time. Accordingly, one has derived the remaining obligation from the
pragmatic presumptions of language, the legally enforceable claims of valid-
ity representing the obligations of the speaker to both mean what she says as
well as to defend what she says with reasons. Thus, the promise to stay true
to language in the act of speaking is inherent in language, especially from the
perspective strongly supported by Jürgen Habermas. And it is this promise
that guarantees the relationship between language and truth (see Habermas
1984, 1979; for a critical view cf. Mersch 2003b, 2004). There are not only
promises that bind, rather language itself contains the promise of connection,
although this is created alone through the practical sense of speech. Despite
all pragmatics, the semantic continues to dominate. Nevertheless, that which
I can say, have said, or possibly wanted to say, seems less decisive, as it is not
at all about supposed understandings and their justifications—which would
mean having to define the success of sociality exclusively from the rationality
of the interpretations. Instead, it is much more concerned with the anteced-
ence of the responsive which does not need a specific justification of the social.
In other words, with the first word language is coupled with the structure of
alterity and thus finds itself already in the social horizon, which remains as a
frame and therefore seems neither eligible nor deniable.
This implies the further consequence that speaking occurs nowhere fully
intentional, but rather continually already as an other, i.e., superimposed
and inspired by the voice of the other, even when there is no real counterpart
or when the other remains a stranger. As Vernant already suggested, refer-
ring to the classical understanding of the dialogical, each “speaking” occurs
mimetically and not because it emulates the others in what it expresses, but
rather because speaking takes in the other’s voice and lets it melt with its
own, resonating even where I no longer sense it. One knows the echo of the
voice that pierces deep into our ears and that occasionally continues to talk
much longer in one’s own speech. This is particularly obvious in a foreign
country, where voices remain incomprehensible. It then turns out that one’s
own speaking has literally been appropriated by the voice of the other—
speaking which I am not or which I do not represent and cannot represent,
but instead accept through others in that their voices speak through me and
alienate me from myself. In given moments of speaking, it is then often not
clear why I say or said it like that, so that both the performative status of
my speech as well as its reference remain undetermined, because there was
no specific addressee and no response possesses that from which it responds
(see Mersch 2008 for a more detailed discussion). In this sense, the subject
constitutes itself as the speaker through the response, which is always the
response to a stranger, because I can only ensure my own speech through
the complexity of the reponsivity’s structure: already its prestructure
retreats into the darkness of the moment, because it speaks itself. Conse-
quently, speaking does not mean producing language as a spontaneity, but
rather to let its possibilities fi rst of all occur through the structure of such
withdrawnness. The performativity of the response is a passivity, or rather
a passibilité. It opens up an interstice which constitutes both the realm of
meaning and of communication. This also applies when I have apparently
made the fi rst step, where I have broken the silence and raised my voice to
speak—and perhaps with futile efforts have fallen on deaf ears.
TESTIMONIAL AND PARRHESIA
Language is thus never one’s own; it is the language of others in numerous

ways, because we can only speak in the mode of another speech, of another
38 Dieter Mersch
voice. The same is true for other media, for play, drama, painting, photogra-
phy, sound, and so on: we always refer to an entire history, to traditions, to
other actors and their practices or utterances, to their artworks, and inscribe
our interventions into the body of cultural institutions. This does not only
apply to the semiotic character of cultural processes with the parameters
of repeating and quoting, to which Derrida pointed again and again, but
rather also—and this remains covered within the concept of writing—to the
mimetic power of the voice, to its unique presence and impact, which despite
all apparent ignorance forces one to listen and to take a stand. Certainly, the
voice cannot state the “truth” or “truthfulness” of a meaning in the sense
of authenticity—believing this would indeed be naïve. Instead, the meaning
is always already another meaning permeated with the “grain” of alterity.
Moreover, in each moment it is purloined from its immediacy. Accordingly,
the voice also does not certify the subject. On the contrary, language—as well
as the arts—and their iterability and scripturality (and it has to be said that
Derrida is right here) are always ahead of every Eigentlichkeit of the subject
and its meaning. The voice would literally carry too much, if it had to carry
the whole weight of authorship. It—as “perpetrator” of saying—is as little
capable as the subject—as “perpetrator” of meaning—of admitting the truth-
fulness and falseness, the sincerity or deception of a speech and being made
responsible for it.
Nevertheless—and with that I begin my objection to Derrida’s objection to
Plato—the decisive focus of Plato’s analysis of writing lies not in the coupling
of voice and authorship, and neither in the truth or truthfulness of speech,
but rather in the act of positing and the corresponding performativity of the
response which does not coincide with the performance of the said and the
pragmatics of meaning.8 Authenticity, in the sense of the sincerity of a testi-
monial of truth, is only concerned with the content of language, its proposi-
tional substance. Nonetheless, the positing of the reference which requires the
presence of the voice and provokes a response seems crucial to Plato. Thus
Plato’s privileging of the voice in comparison to Derrida can be read as an
indication of the distinction of the performative in language—a performativ-
ity, however, that is already inherent in the connection between physicality,
presence, and alterity.
What the voice announces is thus not so much truth or truthfulness of an
expression, which in producing the presence of the speaker literally attests to
the testimony. Nor is it concerned, in the sense of an “occidental” discourse
of presence, with such testimony, or with the attestation of one’s self as the
subject of speech. Rather the voice is occupied with a testimony of the mean-
ing of being responsible for oneself, which is bound to the occasionality of the
moment and turns to an other. It does not rise from any sovereign act, but
instead, as testimony, is nothing without the alterity. As such the voice can
be brought together in context with Michel Foucault’s rereading of the classi-
cal parrhesia (Foucault 1983, cf. Mersch 1999), the forthright articulation of
one’s opinion. Parrhesia does not constitute authorship in an emphatic sense,
but rather the virtue of self-positing in the face of the other. Foucault tried in
particular to establish a virtue of critique out of it—and what has been named
the “ethicity” of the voice above is linked to that. The voice articulates itself
in the sense of an “outspoken belief” or rather an enunciation which risks
it all and dives into the scales of history, without letting itself be bound to
discursive power practices or without insuring itself through justifications.
Instead it is much more concerned with the unreserved nature of one’s own
positioning, which corresponds to the exposure of one’s own voice, which in
turn makes itself vulnerable and endangers itself through this exposure. As
a result we are dealing with a non-rhetoric and non-strategic way of expres-
sion, which, as Foucault’s example of the relationships between the monarch
and his advisor illustrates, is rooted in an asymmetric relationship that cor-
responds to the asymmetry of discourse and power (Foucault 1983). But it is
especially because of this that it lends the “own voice” a particular dignity.
The parrhesia resists both power as well as doxa, the opinion of the major-
ity; it subverts hegemonic conventions and breaks its laws. This also means
that its fundamental moment is an ethos. It can be understood as the ethos
of self-testimony. It testifies to a conviction. It is not so much based on a
claim of truth, even when this is always meant alongside with it, but rather
on the relativity of the situation in which it is executed and the relation which
it respectively posits. It is not belief or knowledge that belongs to truth, but
rather the act of an ethic self-positing.
This ethic of testimony is generally realized in performance. It is based on a
“praxis of existence.”9 The voice is its identification. Not the individual argu-
ment, nor the giving of evidence, nor even the reasoning seem to be relevant—
they might be supported through the sound of the voice, strengthened, or in
contrast undermined and thwarted. Instead, it is the nature of the appear-
ance, the self-positing, with which language frees itself from the bonds and
stranglehold of existing discursive practices, setting its own course and only
thus producing a relationship. In order to do so the voice needs both a direct
confrontation, a face to face, as well as the possibility to respond. The vocal
presence can be compared to this self-positing, which due to the power of the
exposure sets itself in relation to the other and knows to answer for itself. By
virtue of physical presence it literally challenges one to respond. The parrhe-
sia is this type of “responsibility” in language, which is in a direct way car-
ried out through the voice’s body.10 However, as already mentioned, this does
not only hold for language, it also holds for any physical vocal presentation
or performance and its genuine abandonment, including acting and musical
performance: the voice’s parrhesia testifies not only the actor’s or singer’s pres-
ence but also their donation and present to the audience, which, as it were,
equip them with the glory of an ephemeral holiness.
“ETHICITY” OF PRESENCE
Writing does not necessarily include parrhesia, on the contrary writing shifts
parrhesia’s performativity into the medial. Because the text cannot respond
40 Dieter Mersch
to the written discourse, it dictates, sets, and presents its knowledge without
being able to respond, replacing parrhesia through figuration. Accordingly,
extensive rhetoric or literary means are needed to restage parrhesia in the text,
in order to inscribe itself into the voice of the author and to throw its radical-
ness into the scales of circulating discourses. Parrhesia, hence, signifies the
traces of active self-positing into the social realm. It does not mean authentic-
ity, but engagement. The voice—also in its metaphorical meaning—is its sign.
Parrhesia, therefore, develops its function not with regards to the significance
of an enunciation, but rather specifically in looking at the social place of the
actor or speaker, the actor’s position in a public conflict or the speaker’s posi-
tion in a dialogue, in the power games in that she confronts himself with her
own voice, i.e., the actor or speaker pushes the vulnerability of his own body
into the ring of debate. Only the voice and its presence are then able to ade-
quately respond, as in turn it is only possible for voices and bodies to answer
appropriately to their violability. Answering here does not mean a discourse,
rather it means an act, a performance, a presentation. The presence of the
voice belongs to this “presentation.” Thus, the basic difference between voice
and writing lies not in the difference of the media and their formats, but rather
in the actual performance of the response.
This is Plato’s crucial insight. Philosophical language is the adventure of
candor and unreservedness. Consequently it does not primarily offer les-
sons, knowledge, or wisdom, but is instead based on the performativity of
a positioning, which requires the voice in order to manifest itself. It is this
concept of philosophy that underlies the dialogic structure of antique texts,
which, as one could say, keeps alive the memory of the continual mourn-
ing for the lost voice of Socrates. That is why Plato preferred dialogicity
compared to writing even when he—paradoxically enough—articulated
himself exclusively in the written medium. Nonetheless, the presence of the
voice is not so decisive in the dialogue or scene because I lend my word or
act the weight of my presence in this moment. Rather, what is fundamental
is the ethicity that is linked with the moment of connection and orienta-
tion to the other which consistently includes the possibility of responding
and is absorbed in the moment of the response. In other words: the extent
of its genuine sociality is crucial to the presence of the voice which presents
itself in society—a circumstance which Plato directly implemented in his
philosophy. In this sense philosophy generally constitutes a political act
that claims parrhesia as its own virtue.
One can thus say that the Platonic dialogue is rooted in such a relation
to the other, in the fact of a responding “responsibility.” By reading Plato
only in view of the medial intertwining of writing, logos, and memory,
Derrida disposes of the relevance of the element of parrhesia, the perfor-
mance of the voice and its introduction to the other, and thus of its genuine
ethicity. He completely shifts the power of parrhesia into the toneless cir-
culation of writing. In moving the reading and picking up of the sign, the
quote, the figures of repetition and their displacement into the center of his
considerations, Derrida loses the equally corporeal and social dimension
of the voice which exposes itself to the other. Instead with my voice—and
this also means my acting out of the voice, its parrhesitic claim—I simul-
taneously manifest my position in the here and now, whether I argue in a
dispute or address my voice to a public audience, or present it to the open
space of the political. Such positioning then means taking a stand in an
ethical way. Greek antiquity had a deep sensibility for the ethical impact of
positing oneself and being part of political life.
Does this also hold for music? Obviously parrhesia has no immediate
relevance for musical sounds—the term is only reserved for rhemata, i.e.,
the way of expression in language. However, music played an important
role for the entire Greek culture, especially with respect to the preservation
of knowledge and the harmonic relationship between physis and polis, the
latter mirrored in the former. Any musical performance therefore was con-
sidered to be the highest fulfillment of this relation. Music, thus, appeared
to be in itself ethical. This ethical dimension of music also applied to the
presence of the gods as well as the co-presence of the audience in the the-
ater as a collective event of their occurrence. Ethics here is neither based
on a normative judgment, nor on the formulation or defending of a rule,
an imperative, or maxim, instead it is grounded on positing oneself sim-
ply as human, sometimes, as the myth of Antigone demonstrates, against
tradition and its political representation. The voice marks ethics’ corporal
actualization. In raising my voice in the public, in discussion, or in a dra-
matic clash, I consequently gain a social body. Similarly, singing the liturgy
without any instrumental aid turns the congregation into one single reli-
gious subject. Correspondingly, Gregorian monody means to participate
in a voice’s collective prayer. The voice forms its edifice. It approximates a
“communion” in which the absoluteness of social relationship is embodied.
Thus, the voice primarily is a social phenomenon—right from the very
moment of its first appearance on. Its sociality exists immediately in that it
enters the scene as a cry, a “call,” or an enunciation. This also implies that
we cannot hear a voice or its disrupted tone without responding to it, even
if the answer is the ignorance of a passing by, a weariness, or mere indif-
ference. In every case the voice penetrates me, even if I don’t understand. It
documents a genuine cathexis (allocation), a social “in-indifference,” which
Lévinas rightly referred to as “persecution.”
NOTES
1. Parts of this essay have been published in a German version as “Präsenz und
Ethizität der Stimme,” in Stimme: Annäherung an ein Phänomen, edited by
Doris Kolesch and Sybille Krämer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2006), 211–236.
The present text is based on a translation of this German version by Rett
Rossi, but has been expanded and revised by the author to fit into the context
of this volume.
42 Dieter Mersch
2. Don’t we experience such a persecution as a real phenomenon when we are
captured by the voice of the other or when a musical tune, a sung melody
touches our “inner” ear over an entire day?
3. Yoko Tawada’s fi rst Tübingen lecture on poetics examines the comparison
of human voices to bird’s chirping and other animal voices (2001, 7–22). I
would like to express my gratitude to Daniela Dröscher for the information
on Yoko Tawada.
4. In the same sense Hélène Cixous also speaks of the voice as the “flesh of
language” (1981, 54).
5. Nelson Goodman’s general theory of symbols deals with a similar problem.
His solution is noticeably the same, freely formulated in the language of ana-
lytical order relations. Goodman differentiates between “references,” which
generally constitute the symbolic, and “notations,” which in turn enable the
construction of a symbolic system. The latter prompts the question of an
unambiguous determination of its elements, which are provided by inscrip-
tions based on an organization of classes (Goodman 1976, 127–174).
6. In his essay “Listening” Roland Barthes also draws attention to the iden-
tity of “announcing something” and “hearing oneself,” i.e., hearing oneself
speaking, which tears the voice as the carrier of meaning literally away from
itself and makes it reflexible (Barthes 1991a).
7. This is directed particularly at Derrida’s interpretation of Artaud (Derrida
1981a).
8. See Mersch 2003a for a discussion of defi ning the voice as an “occurrence of
positing.”
9. With regards to the meaning of an “ethic of existence” in later Foucault see
Ewald 1990, 1991, Deleuze 1991, and Hadot 1991.
10. Right from the very beginning Foucault brings parrhesia together with ethi-
cal dimensions (see Foucault 1983).
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3 The Rediscovery of Presence
Intercultural Passages through Vocal
Spaces between Speech and Song 1
Christian Utz
THE VOICE IN TWENTIETH- AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY MUSIC
Due to its mythical and magical implications and due to its close relation to
speech and language, the human voice has always been a pivotal hinge between
musical and social, spiritual, religious experience. It has also been a medium of
sound that from the beginning was considered highly capable of communicat-
ing meanings, ideas, and ideologies. Researchers of evolutionary musicology
and linguistic anthropologists have suggested that human language originated
from symbolic patterns of vocalization and singing.2 Notwithstanding Jacques
Derrida’s counterargument that speech and song had “always again” begun
to separate (Derrida 1967, 199),3 a strong tendency of vocal music to convey
meaning, often in a “speech-like” manner, is obvious even in the most radi-
cally “desemanticized” forms of avant-garde vocalization. On the other hand,
all forms of speech, including highly “disembodied” forms such as the voices
of TV or radio newsreaders, retain levels of subversive sonorous autonomy,
which structurally and syntactically oriented linguistic theories tend to ignore.
In musical environments—that often tend to stress this autonomy of vocal
sonority—the voice is embedded in structural and cultural frameworks that
may both restrict and expand this sonorous presence and thus influence or
multiply its connotations. These frameworks or codes enable the musical voice
to convey a particularly rich spectrum of emotions and meanings—meanings
that are usually more ambiguous than in language, sometimes intention-
ally ambiguous. Within the process of musical globalization, understood as
an interaction of homogenization and diversification (cf. Hall 1992),4 vocal
music can play a particularly important role, since this versatility and ambigu-
ity in the construction of meaning allows for both cultural rapprochement or
hybridity as well as for the reinforcement of local, regional, national identities.
Furthermore, as a result of personality, musical training, traditional and con-
temporary singing styles, and many further factors, individual and collective
identities merge or conflict within a single voice to a degree that would make
any attempt to separate them neatly from one another seem absurd. Indeed,
mono-, cross-, or hyperculturally shaped vocal technique and expression
enable story-tellers, opera singers, actors, or avant-garde vocalists to switch
between a broad range of diverse characters or moods within short time spans.
46 Christian Utz
In contrast, a (depth-) psychologically grounded tendency to liberate the voice
from all technical and cultural restraints aims to overcome all vocal “role
play,” including the formalized manners and “masks” of the everyday use of
the voice—an approach which was particularly developed by the twentieth-
century voice-pioneers Alfred Wolfsohn and Roy Hart (cf. Peters 2008) and
which has been taken up repeatedly in new music since the 1960s.
It was the observation that vocal timbres and techniques, especially when
connected to a given text,5 were particularly imbued with historical and cul-
tural aesthetics of sound and the generation of meaning that lead many com-
posers in the twentieth century to either evade vocal writing almost entirely or
to conceive vocal parts as radical approximations to an instrumental idiom.
German composer Helmut Lachenmann has made this point very explicit:
I have always paid special attention to familiar musical genres—in a para-

digmatically modified context so to say. Of course this also applies to a
response to the question: “How do you feel about singing?” To this day,
this question has remained traumatic to me. There is something amiss
with a notion of music that evades the voice, or even shuts out singing.
[ . . . ] [My opera The Little Match Girl] is not least attributed to an—
unfinished—examination of the singing voice (Lachenmann 2002, 33).6
Lachenmann has explained further that his compositional practice, developed

in the late 1950s and early 1960s, by definition excluded the option to sim-
ply “retrieve” established modes of vocal and of instrumental expression by
employing “recognizable emotional gestures.” He argues that, compared to
instrumental music, vocal music is particularly relying on such gestures since
“singing without preconceived emphasis is impossible”; a “singer cannot [ . . . ]
deliver his/her tone in a ‘clinical’ manner, but [ . . . ] has to identify” (quoted
from Meyer-Kalkus 2009, 105–106). This is why Lachenmann largely con-
ceived of the voice in his few vocal works as a bodily materiality on the basis
of a non-rhetorical “breathing syntax” (ibid.), transferring “musique concrète
instrumentale,” a key concept of his instrumental writing, to the vocal medium
(see Chapter 8, Jörn Peter Hiekel’s contribution to this volume, 170).
No matter whether this reluctance towards vocal identification is traced
back to the nineteenth-century aesthetics of instrumental music’s “meta-
physical” superiority over vocal music or to the fundamental criticism of a
music-language-similarity in the European and American postwar avant-
garde, it is apparent that works such as Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung
(1909) or Dieter Schnebel’s glossolalie (1959/1960) react to historical situ-
ations that tend to diminish the communicative power and presence of the
voice in musical contexts. The incommensurability of these works is also
manifest in a new prominence acquired by the performer’s voice, emanci-
pating itself from the monologic authority of a “composer’s voice” (Abbate
1991, 11–14). However, in Erwartung or glossolalie neither the performer’s
nor the composer’s voice communicate a stable identity anymore, rather
they articulate (deliberately) futile attempts at constructing coherence which
The Rediscovery of Presence 47
is clearly documented in their non-linear, anti-narrative formal design (cf.
Klüppelholz 1995).
For several decades, most non-Western postwar composers have used the
vocal medium with equal restraint, presumably because instrumental works
were considered to be more easily communicable to global performers and
audiences of art music, not least since they avoided problems of language and
phonetics (a prominent example is the œuvre of Takemitsu Tōru in which
vocal works are scarce; see Chapter 7, Lee’s contribution to this volume, for
similar cases in contemporary Korean music). Thus it is particularly striking
to observe that vocality played a key role in the musical self-definition of the
young generation of Chinese composers in the 1980s and 1990s (Utz 2002,
315–317), emerging from diverse local and national Chinese (and sometimes
other Asian) vocal genres and techniques that were, however, mediated and
refracted by the revelations of the newly encountered Western vocal modern-
ism including Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.7
Another reason for this reservation towards vocal music might also stem
from its resistance against codification by musical notation, a phenomenon
particularly well known in ethnomusicological discourse (Nettl 2005, 74–91).
Vocal music reflects the tensions between oral/performative and written/
denotative realms of music more obviously than instrumental music—and
thus also offers a key challenge for an intercultural historiography that aims
to take into account both oral and literal types of musical transmission (cf.
Utz 2005). It seems indeed difficult, arguably impossible, to encode all details,
timbral modifications, pitch fluctuations, etc. of a vocal part in a written
score. In contemporary art music, this situation on the one hand has lead to
an overdetermination of written notation, e.g., in the scores of Brian Ferney-
hough where, however, notational complexity is linked to the principle that
“performers are no longer expected to function solely as optimally efficient
reproducers of imagined sounds; they are also themselves ‘resonators’ in and
through which the initial impetus provided by the score is amplified and mod-
ulated in the most varied ways imaginable” (Ferneyhough 1995, 100). On the
other hand, the problems of vocal notation have increasingly lead to situations
where composers created an “oral tradition,” usually established together
with a specific vocal performer, including the case of a one-person (vocal)
composer-performer (Coons 2011). Although some of these developments can
also be traced in contemporary instrumental music, it is particularly obvious
that key vocal works emerging from such collaborations rely on highly specific
vocal characteristics and sometimes on unique abilities of a particular vocal
performer. Such collaborations include Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs
for a Mad King (1969), written for the “multiphonic” voice of Roy Hart and
reflecting the anti-psychiatry debate of the late 1960s in the “madness” of the
protagonist (Williams 2000, 83–84); the broad number of pieces created for/
with (and by) Cathy Berberian (including John Cage’s Aria, 1958, and Luciano
Berio’s Sequenza III, 1966; see Herzfeld-Schild 2011); and Giacinto Scelsi’s
works for solo voice, most prominently Canti del Capricorno (1962–1972),
intimately emerging from Hirayama Michiko’s voice who also contributed
48 Christian Utz
her (largely intuitive) knowledge of traditional Japanese vocal genres to this
work (Kirchert 1998, Hirayama 2005, Tortora 2008; see Chapter 8, Hiekel’s
contribution to this volume, 161–164). In some cases, these collaborations have
challenged conventional concepts of authorship as the performer acquired a
role as co-composer (Halfyard 2001, 2006, Hirayama 2005). Notation, con-
sequently, here is often, just as frequently in traditional genres, hardly more
than a sketch to remember the overall structure, a mnemonic device, not an
authoritarian musical text. In the globalization context, such collaborations
also highlight a new tendency towards the increasing significance of local situ-
ations for the formation of musical identities—a localism complementary to
a globality that “reframes” such new local conditions in the light of a global
“interconnectedness” (Tomlinson 2006, 1–31).
VOICE ARTICULATION AND CODIFICATION:

BOUNDARIES AND INTERACTION
BETWEEN SPEECH AND SONG
The limitations of notation for vocal music are particularly obvious where
the multifold areas between speech and song are concerned, and they are
analogous to the problems of representing the pronunciation of unconven-
tional text or non-semantic phonetic material, for which even the means of
a highly refi ned system such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
are limited, e.g., where gradual changes between different types of pho-
netic articulation are concerned (cf. Gee 2007, 265). Such areas of transi-
tion between established voice types, vocal styles, and linguistic layers are,
however, crucial to an understanding of vocal music from different histori-
cal periods and cultural contexts. An intercultural music historiography
that aims to incorporate aspects of orality, performance, and perception
arguably has to specify the tensions resulting from such areas of transition
precisely. The following sections therefore explore changing boundaries
and transfers between speech and song in musical settings from different
cultural and historical contexts, suggesting “passages” (cf. Zenck 2009)8
and network-like trajectories between them, while respecting their partic-
ularity. The interpretations focus on structural and performance-related
dimensions of the music; they try to isolate compositional and performative
strategies of creating meaning in and through the medium of the voice.
This method presupposes a basic comparability of musical works from dif-
ferent cultural and historical spheres that are not connected via a linear his-
torical narrative. Such a presupposition, however, does not suggest a purely
functionalist notion of musical structure (in the sense that “all music” can
simply be conceived as a succession of more or less organized sounds). Rather
methodological rationality demands seeking a balance between a rigorous
culturalist relativism (that would exclude any possibility of comparative study)
and an emphatic, implicitly ethnocentric universalism (that would conceptual-
ize all individual phenomena as offsprings of a single referential concept). This
method is in many respects akin to Michael Tenzer’s approach to an “analysis
and theory of musics of the world,” though I do not share Tenzer’s optimism
that we are indeed heading towards a “world music theory” (Tenzer 2006,
32–35). What I share is Tenzer’s insight that “comparison across any bound-
ary requires reconsidering basic assumptions so that clear descriptive language
can emerge and lead not only to new categories of learning, but beyond them
to new experiences and construals of music” (Tenzer 2010, 517).
Such a method requires, fi rst of all, to conceive of composition, nota-
tion, oral/aural transmission, performance, and perception not as isolated
areas, but as correlated and interdependent. More specifically, I aim to
stress the interaction between what I call articulation and codification. The
term “articulation” here is not used only in a technical, linguistic, or pho-
netic sense, but understood as a metaphorical image for the way in which
a voice navigates in the area between speech and song, both physically and
structurally. This means that “articulation” here also signifies the role of
a singer’s voice as one among several “voices” on the one hand, and as an
autonomous psychophysical presence on the other: is a vocal “body” appro-
priated into the musical structure or does it rather break structural “rules”
and reveal its uncontrollable properties? By the same token, “codification”
is not only used to describe the encoding process of vocal or musical sounds
in written form, but also as a general term for those immanent (voice-spe-
cific, musical, symbolic) and discursive (verbal, paratextual) means that
help to constitute codes of (cultural or historical) particularity, hybridity,
or “non-reference.” Both types of codification are particularly pertinent to
a discussion of the voice in the context of musical globalization.
Presuming that the intermediate areas between speech and song indeed
take a crucial role in the way a voice articulates itself musically, a “techni-
cal” description, a “cartography” of these areas appears to be necessary
at the outset. In the tradition of comparative musicology, George List has
provided a “chart for classifying forms intermediate to speech and song”
(1963, 9) which is based on a broad number of examples from traditional
and contemporary vocal styles (represented in an adopted version together
with List’s main examples in Table 3.1). The examples include Western
Australian Nyangumarta wangka speech, Native American Hopi people’s
laváyi (speech), táwi (song), and tí:ngava (“announcing,” a chant on two
reference pitches), and the New Zealand Maori’s koorero (speech), karakia
(ritual chant), waiata (song), and haka (narrative form with mixed styles).
In addition, List discusses forms of heightened speech in “auctioneering,”
Western spoken drama, and jumping rope rhymes, forms of recitation
from Palau/Micronesia, Thailand, songs of black Americans, Schoenberg’s
Sprechstimme, and Chinese opera “recitative.” The presupposed possibility
of comparison within this very broad scope of course provokes the ques-
tion to what extent the “technical” aspects of these voices can be plausibly
isolated from their socio-cultural backgrounds and emic conceptualiza-
tions—a familiar argument from the broad criticism of comparative musi-
cology since the 1960s. This obvious shortcoming, however, should not
50 Christian Utz
deter us from reconsidering and making use of the map’s “technical” levels:
while in everyday speech pitches are rather unstable (top-center), the con-
tour of discrete pitches (and usually also the range) is increased in more
stylized forms of heightened speech or “semi-sung” styles such as Schoen-
berg’s Sprechstimme (middle-left), and reduced in forms of monotone reci-
tation (middle-right), often in ritual contexts. Repetitions of a single pitch
are common features in many recitation styles including the “parlando” in
opera buf a. Further increases in the stability of pitch (middle-right to bot-
tom-center) and the expansion of scalar structures (middle-left to bottom-
center) both lead to forms that are commonly described as “song.”
Table 3.1 Classifi c a t i o n of I n t e r m e d i a t e F o r m s b e t w e e n Speech a n d Song

(adapted from List 1 9 6 3 , 9 )
intonation/range: expansion reduction
pitch: SPEECH
1
instability
[International
3
Recitation] [Recitation]
3
expansion of I reduction of\

intonation I intonation
SPRECHSTIMME 5 4 MONOTONE
stability expansion of
\ofpitch scalar structure
6
Chant]
[International 7
Chant]
10
*) 9
stability
SONG
1: heightened speech (Western drama); 2: jumping rope rhymes (US); 3 : Palau women song
(Micronesia); 4: type of Thai Buddhist chant; 5: Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire; Maori: haka;
Chinese opera recitative (not specifi ed); 6: tobacco “auctioneering” (US); 7: Hopi people
(Arizona): announcement; 8: Australian aborigines (songs); 9: songs of black Americans; 10:
bi-, tri-, tetratonic chants (Vedda; children’s songs; folk songs).
Even on a purely technical level, however, List’s map provides only a
rather basic grid. Most vocal styles require more specific categories. In
the traditional vocal music of Japan, the area between speech and song
has received particular attention, and highly refi ned systems of different
vocal delivery styles in genres summarized as katarimono (literally “nar-
rative pieces”) have developed. Table 3.2 provides a summary of the most
important vocal styles in heikyoku (ancient narrative genre), gidayū-
bushi (performance type in bunraku puppet theater), nō (medieval music
drama), and shōmyō (Buddhist chant) according to a threefold categori-
zation developed by Japanese scholar Hirano Kenji (1990, 35–37): ginshō
(declamation close to spoken language), rōshō (syllabic recitation in regu-
lar time intervals with repeated notes on the same reference pitch(es)), and
eishō (recitation in changing time intervals including sustained notes and
pitch changes).
The performance styles listed here are far from complete, and their
order within the intermediate regions is to some degree arbitrary, espe-
cially in the cases of heikyoku and gidayū-bushi where performance
styles are huge in number and traditional terminology referring to
these styles often remains ambiguous and also depends on the diff er-
ent performance schools (Komoda 2008, Yamada 2008). The three
examples in Figure 3.1, showing the sections shirakoe (category ginshō),
kudoki (category rōshō), and sanjū (category eishō) from the heikyoku
piece Suzuki, arguably represent the three categories in a relatively
“pure” form.
These performance styles, generally referred to as kyokusetsu
(“melodic formula,” Komoda 2008, 84) in heikyoku and senritsukei
(“melodic type,” Yamada 2008, 205)9 in gidayū-bushi,10 usually indi-
cate a certain type of vocal delivery technique, but can equally refer
to certain melodic contours, lines, or even individual pitches. Gidayū-
bushi includes particularly numerous transitory styles that are used to
switch between the main styles kotoba (speech), iro (recitation), and ji
(chant), such as kotoba-nori, ji iro, or kakari. Cadential fi gures, melodic
patterns, and quotations of specifi c melodies are juxtaposed to these
main styles, resulting in a layered complexity that is inwardly connected
to the process of oral transmission (Ferranti 2003, 141).11
The overlaps between ginshō, rōshō, and eishō are of paramount
importance in performance. Hirano emphasizes the hybrid nature of
most of the listed vocal styles: a kotoba recitation in gidayū-bushi, for
example, might tend to stabilize pitches in rōshō-manner, depending on
the dramatic, phonetic, and symbolic situation, whereas hiroi in heikyoku
might extend both in the eishō and ginshō regions. Furthermore, as both
traditions are transmitted orally, performance styles specific to a certain
school and/or to individual performers might lead to substantially differ-
ent interpretations of the same technical terms. We can thus infer that
even the most refi ned typologies do not provide sufficient tools to grasp
the specific manners and criteria of transformation between speech and
52
Table 3.2 Classification of Intermediate Forms between Speech and Chant in Japanese Traditional Genres (adapted from Hirano 1990/2004)
Speech Song
ginsho t rosho eisho
Christian Utz
1 sanjii ZL
heikyoku yomimono konokoe \ hiroi shoju ~\ chuon origoe
(heikebiwa shirakoe kudoki sashigoe ko W-jo kudari
sage sage'uta age'uta (kami'uta)
gidayu-bushi kotoba (-^ first person) kotoba-nori iro (-> third person) Ijiai
naka jushi
(joruri i (sugatari kakari; jo no kotoba
ofbunraku
no kotoba j sashi i kakaru] tsuyogin ryowagin

nanon •• katari kudoki saee-uta '„ age-uta _
tsuki-zenju notto [introductory songs: issei etc.
mondo closing songs: waka
shomyo', sashigoe kirigoe hikigoe

[shirakoe]
[kudoki]
[sanjū]
Figure 3.1 The three heikyoku styles shirakoe, kudoki, sanjū in a transcription of
Suzuki. (Interpreted by Imai Kengyō Tutomu. Transcription: Komoda 2003, 404–
417. Copyright © 2003 Haruko Komoda/Daiichi Shobō Tokyo.)
song inherent to many elaborate vocal styles. This obvious shortcoming

implies that the interaction and transformation between speech and song
have to be comparatively analyzed in diverse specific contexts.
ANALYSES
Fragmentation and Montage (gidayū-bushi, Tan Dun, Schoenberg)

The fi rst case study discussed here is a section from gidayū-bushi, a per-
formance tradition of the narrative genre jōruri which is the musical basis
of bunraku puppet theater. Gidayū-bushi was developed by Takemoto
Gidayū around 1684 in Osaka. Ambiguities and complexities in the vocal
style of gidayū-bushi will provide significant points of reference for the
discussion of the other historical and contemporary types of vocal music
discussed below. Gidayū-bushi is performed by a reciter (tayū, “narrator”)
and a player of the three-stringed long-necked lute futozao shamisen (a
“thick-necked” shamisen in the bass register, usually tuned to honchōshi
tuning with the relative pitches B-E'-B'). The tayū acts as narrator of the
story and also lends his voice to the direct speech of all characters. His
vocal timbre is based on a strong chest voice and diaphragmatic breath-
ing, producing a raucous, throaty quality which is based on the aesthetic
ideal ibushi (“oxidation,” Reese 1999, 148) and closely connected with the
futozao shamisen’s buzzing sawari-timbre. The shamisen contributes to the
expression of the text by supporting the reciter with refi ned heterophonic
lines and repeatedly bridges the sections by rendering solo melodies (meri-
yasu). The constant changes in the vocal quality of the narrator is reflected
in the sparse original notation that consists only of a few technical terms
54 Christian Utz
annotated along the right-hand side of each column in the reciter’s text-
book (see Yamada 2008, 204–205 for further details).
Figure 3.2 reproduces and annotates William P. Malm’s transcription
of a section from the scene “Yama no dan” (Mountain scene) in Imo-
seyama onna teikin (“Mount Imo and Mount Se: A parable of female vir-
tue,” 1771), a bunraku drama written by Chikamatsu Hanji (1725–1783).
This section aptly demonstrates the mosaic-like microstructure highly
characteristic of gidayū-bushi, where vocal styles frequently change with
every line of the text or even within lines (Malm 1990, Inobe 1990). The
chanted lyric passage (category ji) in the beginning of text line 44 (left,
third staff system), marked by the term nagaji (a melodic type symbolizing
elegance), is subdivided by the direct speech of the young female protago-
nist Hinadori beginning on the word koishi (Dearest [longingly missed
Koganosuke]) which is clearly set apart from the stable pitches of the ji-
type by spoken articulation. The melody then ascends to a melodic and
emotional climax at the high B' (kami) on the word anata (you). The high
pitch reoccurs at the beginning of line 46 on the word kiita (I begged [my
mother to let me go]), but with slightly less intensity and in a half-spoken
quality indicated by the style iro. The “open end” of the chanted phrase
on F', the upper neighbor note of the central pitch E', facilitates the transi-
tion to a half-spoken, then purely spoken passage (category kotoba) which
is followed by another transitory recited passage (kakari) that takes up the
F' again and fi nally returns to the chanted type ji. During all these transi-
tions, the direct speech of Hinadori continues, thus the changes between
spoken and sung passages here are not synchronized with the narrative-
dramatic sectional structure.
The transitions between chanted and spoken passages are organized
in great detail and with great variety, including cross-relations in pitch,
timbre, and voice-instrument interaction. Even in the lyric passages (ji),
a reference to stylized speech persists in the high proportion of repeated
notes (in Hirano’s terms, a mixture of rōshō and eishō), while the spo-
ken passages (kotoba) retain a strong sense of melodic design (resulting
in a mixture of ginshō and rōshō). The proportion between speech- and
song-like articulation in gidayū-bushi is usually linked to the characters’
differences in gender, class, or age as well as to the dramatic situation. In
short, the complex relationships between melodic design, melodic pat-
terns, and the signifi cance of the words and their phonetic structure can-
not be reduced to schematic rules. This highly fragmented vocal material
as refl ected in the ambiguity of traditional terminology and notation is
arranged in a montage-like manner and closely embedded in the perform-
ers’ interaction. The timbral shading of the tayū’s voice is the common
basis of this fragmentary microstructure and turns it into a coherent
vocal presence.
Such a continuous sliding between different forms of articulation within
a highly specific vocal timbre is characteristic of many Asian dramatic
3
0
(Hn»43) ON — NA-KA FU - WA NO SE - Kl TO M TO'[line 46 KH - TA o IA - YD -N
KOTOBA KAKAWl
3
NA - m AU KO - TO - SA - E MO K A - T A - I - T O NO HA-WA-SA-MA-E (fern (RneSt)SA-KA-t NO KA-WA Nt HEDATE-

47-50)
iNAGAJtHARUl |J HAWUl
Qbwt^MU-SU-BO-RE -TO - KE-NU WA - GA O - MO-1 - RA-RE (Una ») MO - NO H — KA-WA-SU KO - TO
M 0
KO-I - SHI YU - KA - SHI - I Kl - YO - FU - NE - SA- MA 8A- E MO NA - RA - NU WA - QA — Ml
I KAMI I
M ^3 0
(Nr»4S) KO-NO-YA-MA NO A - NA TA NO MA - MA NA - RA NU(Hn«S3) I - MA WA NA-KA-NA-KA
Figure 3.2 Chikamatsu Hanji (1725–1783): Imoseyama onna teikin (“Mount Imo and Mount Se: A parable of female virtue,” 1771); sec
tion from the scene “Yama no dan” (Mountain scene), based on an interpretation by Takemoto Sumitayū, reciter, and Nozawa Kizaemon,
futozao shamisen (transcription: Malm 1990, 78–79). The transcription follows the convention to render the open strings of the futozao
shamisen as B-E'-B'. The 1976 recording of this scene on which the transcription is based (also included with Malm 1990) is about a minor
third lower, i.e., G#-C#'-G#'.12
56 Christian Utz
and narrative genres, although arguably few exhibit the same degree of
fragmentation as gidayū-bushi. Vocal parts in Beijing opera (jingju), for
example, usually summarized with the terms sangzi (voice) or changbai
(singing and reciting) also encompass numerous different formalized types
of voice, though in practice differences are minimized by conceiving of a
vocal continuum:
Because the same basic techniques of vocal production are used for all
types of vocal performance, there is no feeling that a character sud-
denly stops talking and starts singing, or stops singing and begins talk-
ing; “a very smooth transition from speech to song and vice versa [is
achieved], contributing to the unity of a whole play” (Wichmann 1991,
177; quotation from Hwang 1976, 220).
Along with the Chinese folk song type shan’ge (mountain songs), Dao-
ist ritual and shamanist music, and Schoenberg’s Sprechstimme, the
recitation styles of Beijing opera form a key element of the vocal style
developed by American Chinese composer Tan Dun (b. 1957). Similar to
many Chinese composers of his generation like Qu Xiaosong (b. 1952),
Wen Deqing (b. 1958), or Mo Wuping (1958–1993), Tan Dun has elabo-
rated this unique singing style primarily out of his own voice, frequently
acting as a vocal performer of his own works. Starting from the early Fu,
Fu, Fu (1982) to On Taoism (1985) and Nine Songs (1989), Tan devel-
oped his voice to increasingly stunning performative dimensions. Later
he taught this singing style to other singers who were usually Western-
trained, but also included Beijing opera singer and director Chen Shi-
Zheng (b. 1963). Tan thus established a small “oral tradition” of his
own. Singer-composer Susan Botti (b. 1962) worked together with Tan
Dun for a period around 1990. Silk Road (1989) for soprano and percus-
sion has been an important step in their collaboration.13 Figure 3.3 shows
a section from this work where the voice changes on almost every beat
between Tan’s register notation which is marked by a special clef, follow-
ing a model of Beijing opera vocal instruction experienced by Tan during
the 1970s (Utz 2002, 498), and a chromatically pitched Sprechstimme,
marked by a conventional soprano clef and crossed noteheads. The isola-
tion of syllables and phonemes is indebted to the Beijing opera practice
of “segmented pronunciation” (qieyin) which individualizes head (tou),
waist (fu), and tail (wei) of a pronounced word (ibid., 425f.; cf. Wich-
mann 1991, 193–196).
The segments in register notation connect individual syllables by minutely
prescribed contours, implying a continuous change between head and chest
voice characteristic for Beijing opera’s heightened stage speech yunbai, a
style that molds the Chinese tones into one melodic contour (Wichmann
1991, 204–211). Yunbai follows the tones of the artificial Zhongzhou-yun
pronunciation, based on a dialect from the Zhongzhou district in Henan
Figure 3.3 Silk Road by Tan Dun, Arthur Sze for soprano and percussion, p. 3, systems 1+2. (Copyright © 1989 by
G. Schirmer, Inc. [ASCAP]. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.)
58 Christian Utz
province from the tenth to fourteenth century (ibid., 204–207), rendering
it distinct from spoken dialogue in Beijing opera pronounced in Beijing
dialect (Mandarin). In Tan’s Silk Road the two types of stylized recitation,
yunbai and Sprechgesang, are combined to a simple type of hybrid timbre
that minimizes their conceptual difference not least by attributing them to
the same vocal performer implying a timbral continuity.
In his opera Marco Polo (1991–1995), Tan Dun has referred to the yun-
bai technique extensively and expanded the concept of stylistically hybrid
voices.14 The vocal part of the symbolic character “Water,” impersonated
by Susan Botti in the 1996 premiere, particularly explores this concept
of vocal-cultural hybridity. The character represents water as a “geo-
graphical” medium of transportation between cultures and as an agent
of “spiritual” and stylistic transformation. The section shown in Figure
3.4 integrates allusions to Beijing opera chant, heightened and colloquial
speech, the singing style of Chinese “mountain songs” (shan’ge), and the
delicacy of a high Western soprano register with controlled vibrato. The
vocal performer again lends a strong sense of timbral unity to this mosaic
structure—indeed Susan Botti’s singing technique here seems not to be
informed by Asian vocal technique, to the extent of making the notion of
hybridity contestable.15
At this point it is important to remember that vocal styles essential-
ized as “models” usually describe a montage of fragmented patterns in
themselves. This is true for the voice in Beijing opera, a hybrid form which
has emerged from a number of different local traditions,16 as well as for
Arnold Schoenberg’s Sprechstimme introduced in the monodramas of
Pierrot Lunaire (1912), one of the most influential and ambivalent vocal
concepts in the twentieth century. A conception of Schoenberg’s Sprech-
stimme as a “montage of fragments” might refer to the multiplicity of
potential styles that can be cited as Schoenberg’s models. This prehistory
of Sprechstimme includes post-Wagnerian styles of musical declamation,
namely in the songs of Hugo Wolf (Kravitt 1962) and in Engelbert Hump-
erdinck’s short-termed experiment with Sprechgesang, contemporary styles
of heightened speech in theater and recitation as performed by Karl Kraus
or the legendary Burgtheater actor Josef Kainz who significantly extended
the pitch range of speech in their public readings and performances (Cerha
2001, Nöther 2008), and, not least, the aesthetics of “tonal freedom” in
vocal articulation as documented in the 1920 treatise on “artistic speak-
ing and singing” by Albertine Zehme (1920) who commissioned and pre-
miered Pierrot in 1912 (see Brinkmann 1995, Stephan 1998, Meyer-Kalkus
2001, 299–318). It is obvious, however, that in Pierrot Schoenberg wanted
to go beyond a simple imitation of the fi n-de-siècle trend of “pathetic
speech” when in his 1914 preface to the study score he insisted that the
vocal performer “must always be on guard against falling into a ‘singing’
manner of speech” (translation quoted after Byron 2006, 2.6; cf. Nöther
2008, 131), and that he seems to have opposed the increasing extent of
Figure 3.4 Marco Polo by Tan Dun, Scene Sea, Part “Water,” mm. 35–70. (Copyright © 1997 by G. Schirmer, Inc.
[ASCAP]. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.)
60 Christian Utz
“tonal freedom” taken by Zehme in her Pierrot performances following the
premiere (Meyer-Kalkus 2001, 308–309).
The fragmentation of possible and actual sources of the vocal part in
Pierrot is analogous to its microstructural fragmentation. No. 3 , “Der
Dandy,” introduces six dif erent modes of vocal sound production in addi-
tion to the “ordinary” Sprechstimme within a short time span, including
the delivery techniques tonlos gefl üstert (whispered tonelessly), tonlos
(toneless), gesprochen (spoken), mit Ton gesprochen (spoken with tone),
halb gesungen (half sung), and gesungen (sung) (Figure 3.5). This broad
spectrum of delivery techniques prominently contributes to the “surreal”
atmosphere and eccentricity of the Pierrot in general and the “Dandy”
movement in particular.
Only fi ve further pieces of the cycle include similar instructions,
all of them only in one instance. 17 While this on the one hand surely
proves that the fanciness of this movement (and the portrayed charac-
ter) was of particular importance to Schoenberg, I would suggest that
rit.
6 fai'siiniri'n^l freiprochen)! Ktonloi gefliistcrt) unit Ton gesnrochen)!
a eh war zen, hoch hei li gen Waaeh . tisch dea
9 langsam a
schweLgenden Dan . dys von Ber ga . mo. In to nender,
15 Kgesungen)! Ktonlos)! kflresunzen! (gegprochenJl
Mit ei . nemphan . ta _ sti _ schenLicht.strahl
Kl
Kl
pp subito
18
mmolto rit.
last gesungen, mit etwas Ton, sehr gezogeiJ an die Klarinette anpassend
erleuch . tet der Mond die krvstall nen Fla > kons.
rasch
30 |(tonlo» geflii«tert)|
mit einem phanta.stischen Mond.strahl.
Figure 3.5 Dif erent performance instructions in the vocal part referring to vocal
articulation in Arnold Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire: Dreimal 7 Gedichte für eine
Sprechstimme und 5 Instrumentalisten, op. 21, no. 3: “Der Dandy,” mm. 6–11, 15–20,
30–31. (Copyright © 1914, 1941 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE 5336.)
the continuous change between different nuances of Sprechstimme here
only prescribes a performance practice in particular detail that can (cau-
tiously) be transferred to the other movements as well. This kind of
constantly changing articulation suggests a highly fl exible, though by
no way arbitrary solution for the much-debated interpretation of the
vocal part. In this context it is highly relevant to observe that by notat-
ing exact pitches according to the chromatic scale for the vocal part
while obviously in practice accepting, sometimes maybe even prefer-
ring performances in which the sung pitches deviated signifi cantly from
the score (Byron 2006, 4.1–4.12), Schoenberg’s conception of Sprech-
stimme opened up—if unintentionally—a new space for a collaboration
between composer and vocal performer. His notation and preface lead
to a specifi c composer-performer constellation that should neither be
interpreted as a license for “musically over-ambitious reciters” nor as
an unambiguous product of a “radical aesthetic of the musical work”
(Meyer-Kalkus 2001, 309). Schoenberg’s concept of Sprechstimme ulti-
mately “resists the view of music as solely the composer’s sound which
needs to be reproduced by passive performers” (Byron 2006, 4.6), open-
ing a passage between notation and orality, compositional intention and
performative presence.
There are key moments in Pierrot Lunaire where the voice reaches out
into extreme registers as for example in some phrases of no. 8, “Nacht,”
where the lowest registers of the voice symbolize blackness, darkness, or
in no. 14, “Die Kreuze” (The crosses), where leaps of up to two octaves
are embedded in a musical cross-symbolism. In all these cases, the voice’s
ecstatic potential is fully manifest, it clearly reaches beyond the meaning
of the words and a mere rhythmical declamation of the text.18 In these
moments the presence of the vocal performance emerges most obviously,
while the diversity of delivery techniques is “fi ltered” into a timbral
coherence by the performer—similar to what has been said about the
gidayū-bushi reciter above. All examples discussed until now therefore
exhibit a tension between a tendency towards the particularity or even
disintegration of articulative components and their synthesis, their (re-)
enactment by a vocal performer.
Incantation, Prosody, Ritual

(Shimoyama, Takahashi, Peri, Sciarrino)
As outlined in the fi rst section, the (re)discovery of such moments of
intensifi ed presence, immediacy, even ecstasy has become a key area
of vocal composition in the twentieth century, arguably most thor-
oughly exhausted in “psychoanalytical” and ritualized approaches
such as Dieter Schnebel’s, Giacinto Scelsi’s, or Jani Christou’s. And it
seems hardly coincidental that this attraction of vocal presence emerged
as a remarkable result from the kind of structural fragmentation that
62 Christian Utz
parametric serial organization had entailed (see Chapter 8, Hiekel’s con-
tribution to this volume, 159–161). Presence and ritual have also been
explored in the context of contemporary Japanese music at least since
the 1970s, among others by Shimoyama Hifumi (b. 1930) and Taka-
hashi Yūji (b. 1938), as a reaction to simplistic juxtapositions of West-
ernized “structure” and Japanese “color” in some examples of Japanese
postwar music.
In Shimoyama’s vocal works, mostly textual material from Buddhist
ritual music as found in shōmyō or nō is used, where ancient Sanskrit
is rendered “with the Japanese pronunciations of Chinese characters
that were once phonetic equivalents of the original Sanskrit text” in
an attempt to preserve the “symbolic power” of the original language
(Nelson 2008, 67–68). According to Shimoyama, the meaning of some
of these texts is either unknown or irrelevant for his musical writing
(personal communication, Tokyo, February 26, 2008). He rather refers
to the magical implications of individual words or phonemes. This is
also refl ected in his focus on ancient Japanese words that are no lon-
ger used in everyday speech but are still part of the local tsugaru dia-
lect of his native region in Aomori prefecture as also reflected in the
tsugaru-jamisen genre (Groemer 1999). Shimoyama says that this
magical dimension of individual sounds is equally present in tsugaru-
jamisen, in gidayū-bushi, and in nō-chant, sometimes resurfacing in
everyday speech.
His Monolog for shamisen-vocalist (1991), written for the late Takada
Kazuko, and Breath for three voices, two percussionists, and piano
(1971/1977), written for Hirayama Michiko, both introduce an almost
pure type of rōshō that suggests ritual Buddhist recitation as a main
technique from which all vocal articulation emerges. It consists of fast
syllabic repetitions that mostly do not rely on a stable, prescribed pitch.
Monolog (on a text from the nō-play Funa Benkei [Benkei on a ship])
assembles fragments around this model that trace the auratic quality of
isolated phonemes and describe relations between voice and instrument
reminiscent of traditional genres. Breath introduces a multiplication of
Hirayama’s voice in three vocal parts, two of which are prerecorded on
tape (Figure 3.6). All textures are based on the same rōshō model, ren-
dered in different variants including microtonal juxtaposition ([a]), whis-
pering ([b]), and a type of pressed voice that Shimoyama associates with
gidayū-bushi (personal communication, Tokyo, February 26, 2008),
but which he has labeled with the German word sprech-stimme in the
score ([c]). Sustained throaty textures ([d]), which might be interpreted
as slowed-down versions of the rōshō-model, and mixed polyphonic
textures ([e]), including voices in the instrumental parts referencing the
kakegoe vocal interjections in nō-theater (Tamba 1981, 228–229), com-
plement the mosaic-like vocal material.
[a]
[b]
[c]
Figure 3.6a Shimoyama Hifumi: Breath for three voices, two percussionists, and piano
(1971/1977),five types of vocal articulation [a–c] (p. 3, 13, 11, 2, 7). (Copyright © 1982 by
Hifumi Shimoyama, Tokyo.)
64 Christian Utz
[d]
[e]
Figure 3.6b Shimoyama Hifumi: Breath for three voices, two percussionists, and
piano (1971/1977),five types of vocal articulation [d–e] (p. 3, 13, 11, 2, 7). (Copyright
© 1982 by Hifumi Shimoyama, Tokyo.)
The vocal style of Takahashi Yūji’s Unebiyama (1992, Figure 3.7)19 for
a reconstructed fi ve-stringed zither and incantation is mainly derived from
vocal practices in shamanistic genres. In Japan, there are still active women
shamans (fujo, cf. Kawamura 2003). The vocal style of this piece, however,
is principally indebted to shamanistic music from Southeast Asia, “hidden
traditions” that are scarcely documented, although Takahashi has listened
to recordings. As one reference for the vocal style in Unebiyama, he men
tions shamanistic music of the Western Malaysian Temiar people (personal
communication, Tokyo, February 22, 2008) who belong to the Senoi group
of the Orang Asli aborigines (Roseman et al. 1998).
The voice takes up the pitches from thefive open strings; the indication
in the score instructs the performer to use a “muttering” (tsubuyaki) and
“whispering” (sasayaki) voice. The text is taken from the Japanese classical
Figure 3.7 Takahashi Yūji, Unebiyama (1992) for five-stringed zither and
incantation (from p. 1). (Copyright © 1992 by Yūji Takahashi, Tokyo.)
collection Kojiki (c. 712, compiled by Ō no Yasumaro). Its water and cloud
symbolism can be associated with the dragon iconography on the origi-
nal instrument (Takahashi 2000, 9–11). The text belongs to the category
of the wakauta, “songs which recorded the oracles of young virgins that
warned of political crises” (ibid., 11), and is attributed to Isukeyorihime,
the empress-consort of the mythical emperor Jinmu.20
佐韋河よ saigawa yo from the Sai river

雲立ち渡り kumodachi watari clouds rise and spread across the sky
畝傍山 Unebiyama Unebi mountain
木の葉さやぎぬ kono hasa yaginu rustling in the leaves of trees
風吹かむとす kaze fugamutosu a wind is about to blow21
The notation which Takahashi has developed in this piece (Figure 3.7) origi-
nates from reflections on the difference between instrumental notation and
vocal notation in Japanese traditional music. Whereas instrumental notation
normally uses a kind of tablature (indicating the position of hands, finger
holes, number of strings, etc.), complemented by fi xed instrumental patterns
learned through mnemonic techniques, vocal notation is mostly gestural as
in hakase (e.g., in shōmyō) or in gomaten (e.g., in nō) (ibid., 11 and personal
communication, Tokyo, February 22, 2008; cf. Malm 2000 for an overview
66 Christian Utz
on Japanese traditional musical notation). For Takahashi, this suggests a pre-
dominantly temporal characteristic of vocal music where sounds are
“stretched out continuously” in time, in contrast to the more spatial charac-
teristic of the (plucked, hit) instrumental sounds.
Shimoyama’s and Takahashi’s strategy to avoid fragmentation is the inten-
tional abandonment of a precise pitch organization. Pitches are reduced to
register notation or connected with pragmatic-acoustic properties such as the
tuning of the string instrument; they fluctuate within a rather narrow range—a
strategy that is closely connected with aura and rhythm of the phonetic mate-
rial. In a completely different historical and cultural context, the voice has
equally served as a platform for a liberation from rigid structural codification,
also concerning pitch organization in particular. In his preamble to Le musi-
che, sopra l’Euridice (1601) Jacopo Peri (1561–1633), singer, composer, and
key figure of the nuove musiche around 1600, refers to the antique distinction
between “diastematic” and “continuous” singing that can be traced back to
Boethius (who had already described a mixed type, used for the recitation of
“heroic poems”) and further to Aristoxenos’s Elementa Harmonica (Palisca
2001, 456–457). This distinction, mediated by Girolamo Mei and Vincenzo
Galilei, served Peri for his theory of Italian speech melody and intonation.
The “diastematic” principle was adapted for the stressed syllables, the “con-
tinuous” principle for the unstressed syllables. Whereas stressed syllables were
attributed a long note and usually a change of harmony, unstressed syllables
were allowed to move independently from the bass. An intercultural trajectory
can be traced by linking Takahashi’s spatial character of instrumental sounds
to Peri’s “diastematic” singing (where the changes of harmonies clearly mark
“spatial” segments of the music) and the temporal character of vocal sounds to
Peri’s “continuous” singing.
Peri, who just like his rival Giulio Caccini had been trained in strict
counterpoint, was much aware of the provocation of such a style, equally
documented in the contemporary controversy between Monteverdi and
Artusi (ibid., 54–87). In Daphne’s speech from Peri’s Le musiche, sopra
l’Euridice unconventional dissonances, however, were not only determined
by prosody, but also connected to “negative” affects expressed by the text
(they appear with text lines such as “Angue crudo e spietato,” “con si mali-
gno dente,” ibid., 460).
A flexible articulation of unstressed syllables was also fundamental to
Giulio Caccini’s theory of vocal style as documented in the dedication of his
L’Euridice (1600) and his collection Nuove Musiche (1602). Caccini used a
key concept of high renaissance to describe the lightness of these phrases,
sprezzatura ([noble] negligence): “In this manner of song, I used a certain neg-
ligence that I valued as having a noble quality, for it seemed to me that with it
I approached natural speech that much more” (L’Euridice composta in musica
in stile rappresentativo [1600], dedication to Giovanni Bardi, adapted from
ibid., 463).
One might argue that Peri’s and especially Caccini’s references to
everyday speech in the long run had the paradoxical effect to increasingly
emancipate singing from the rhythmical rigor of speech-like declama-
tion. Indeed, virtuosic, melismatic “fioraturi” and “passagi,” commonly
extended by improvisational practice, were soon to replace the ascetic early
syllabic style, and in 1614 Caccini’s term sprezzatura consequently refers
to passagi, rather than to speech-related forms of singing (ibid., 464–465).
Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino (b. 1947) has described his vocal style
with the term sillabazione scivolata (gliding syllable articulation) and this style
can be interpreted as a kind of “shadow” of Peri’s recitative: Sciarrino’s vocal-
ization is equally indebted to spoken language and the composer emphasizes
that the “scioltezza” (lightness) of everyday speech should serve as a model for
the vocal performers. The contrast between long-held notes and succeeding
extremely short notes can clearly be related to Peri’s diastematic and continu-
ous modes. The basic model for this type of vocal articulation is a pitched note
held for a relatively long time followed by a fast sequence of very short notes,
usually in descending direction with the preceding pitch often retained as main
reference pitch in this closingfigure. According to Sciarrino, these short notes
need not be intoned precisely, but rather should be understood as “non-tem-
pered intervals as in common speech” (Sciarrino 1998, 37).
P
[a]
vi sono k spine
P- mp
[b] }- 7- 7- PP
vi so no le spi ne
PP PP pp. P
IcJ gliss.
La. mano mi sen - to. venir me - no.

gocciola
Id]
Perche? Corneal
Si
cadaveri?
Per Ufede avotb

Per questo:
[e] PPP> PPP> PPP> PPP> PP^P^^ PPP>P>
Fnmc e que - sto letto sta di mez-zo ta mor- le

PPP> m PP>
Chi troppoa - maste
Figure 3.8 Salvatore Sciarrino, Luci mie traditrici (1996–1998), variants of sillaba-
zione scivolata: [a–c] Scene 1, Il Malaspina (baritone), mm. 15, 17, 29f.; [d, e] Scene
8, La Malaspina (soprano)/Il Malaspina (baritone), mm. 67–69, 8 3 . (Copyright ©
1998 by Universal Music Publishing Ricordi—Milan, Italy [NR 138034]. Repro-
duced by permission of MGB Hal Leonard, Italy.)
68 Christian Utz
Figure 3.8 shows increasingly modified variants of sillabazione scivolata
from Sciarrino’s opera Luci mie traditrici (1996–1998), including figures
where the intervallic structure is stylized and modified ([a, b]), fragmented
by rests (that serve as symbols for hesitation [b], fainting [c], death [e]),
and dissolved into falling glissandi ([b, c, e]) or into a monotonous speech
style ([d]). In fact, the opera can be described as a process of continuous
reduction of intonation until in the dark fi nal act all vocal types reappear in
nightmare-like reminiscences and sequences (see further Utz 2010).
CONCLUSION
The discussion of these highly diverse but interconnected case studies

reveals three key “threads” in the field of tension in between what I have
termed articulation and codification above:
1. Types of vocal music that construct hybrid styles out of a montage-

like combination of fragmented delivery techniques located between
speech and song are numerous and occur in diverse cultural and his-
torical contexts. Many of these vocal styles are further characterized
by attributing much importance to the act of performance, both in
written and oral traditions, since only the performer can fi nally make
sense of the fragmented material. This applies to a tayū in gidayū-
bushi, to a singer or actor who prepares her own, unique version
of the Pierrot Lunaire, and for a singer who tries to fi nd the right
intonation for Sciarrino’s sillabazione scivolata. Although different
degrees of prescriptive notation are involved in these examples, their
transmitted form needs to be re-created by the performer in a highly
specific manner considering a broad spectrum of secondary informa-
tion as well as intuitive decisions. In this respect, oral transmission of
traditional genres and oral practices in contemporary music tend to
converge, although they also retain their specific qualities.
2. Types of vocal music that incorporate these “floating” qualities of vocal
performance often operate in a particularly close connection with lan-
guage, while sometimes the semantics of the phonetic material might be
of secondary importance. The discussed musical examples clearly differ
from one another with respect to their technical production and socio-
cultural background, however they all explore what Roland Barthes has
described as “the space where significations germinate ‘from within lan-
guage and its very materiality’; [ . . . ] where the melody really works at
the language, [ . . . ] explores how the language works” (Barthes 1991,
269), often extending this space to a point where language is obscured or
even destroyed. Thus they represent Barthes’s “grain of the voice” argu-
ably much better than the examples that Barthes has cited himself which
are limited to a polemic polarization of French and German aesthetics
of classical singing (cf. Meyer-Kalkus 2001, 427–444). Most of the case
studies discussed here thus provoke conflicts with conventional forms
of prosody or intonation, rather than composing “along the lines” of
linguistic structures.
3. Carolyn Abbate’s extension of the concept “voice” as an “aural vision of
music animated by multiple, decentered voices localized in several invis-
ible bodies” (Abbate 1991, 13), the idea of competing voices of diverse
origin that might support, but sometimes also contradict the “mono-
logic” authority of the composer and the confinements of musical struc-
ture, can be pinpointed in all discussed examples. The “codification” of
vocal articulation is not reducible to the type of notation used, nor to the
gestural-performative presence of its realization, but emerges from the
interaction of these two “voices” with cultural memory and reception. It
seems especially characteristic of the passages between speech and song,
however, that notationally encoded voice and vocal performance tend
to diverge in a more pronounced manner than commonly in instrumen-
tal music (for which Abbate’s model is also applicable). This divergence
can be identified as a highly flexible medium for the development of
such elaborate vocal styles as gidayū-bushi, the Sprechstimme of Pierrot
Lunaire, heikyoku, Beijing opera’s diverse vocal styles, Peri’s Euridice,
Tan Dun’s hybrid voice, or Sciarrino’s sillabazione scivolata. The voices
representing these styles are highly idiosyncratic and oppose the idea of
a simple “reproduction” of notation. They consequently rely on very few
individual performers who are capable of steady reinvention, performers
who frequently emerge from local networks and thus symbolize the very
opposite of a globalized mass culture.
Although it was a main objective of this text to show that vocal music of
diverse cultural and historical origin can be reasonably discussed within
a common methodological framework, this should not minimize the sub-
stantial technical, conceptual, and sociological differences that emerge
from and feed back into these styles, differences that ultimately cannot be
separated from their more “technical” aspects. The necessity to reconcile
a cross-cultural methodological framework with the acknowledgment of
such socio-cultural difference, however, can arguably best be realized by
continuously returning to those elements in the musical microstructure that
construct and trigger crucial components of musical meaning—a method
that characterized the main line of argument in this essay.
NOTES
1. This chapter has resulted from the research project “Comparative Study of
Conceptualizations of Vocal Music in East Asian and Western Music Tra-
ditions and Their Relevance for Contemporary Composers,” pursued from
January to March 2008 at the University of Tokyo, Graduate Institute of
70 Christian Utz
Arts and Sciences, with preliminary research from September to December
2007 at the National Chiao-Tung University Hsinchu, Taiwan. The research
project has been kindly supported by both universities and by the National
Science Council, Taiwan, as well as by UniNet Eurasia Pacific, Austria. A
preliminary German version of this text has been published in Utz 2009. I am
most grateful to Hermann Gottschewski, Frederick Lau, Nicholas Cook, and
an anonymous reviewer for commenting on earlier versions of this essay.
2. “Vocal music might have been the evolutionary laboratory in which early
humans developed complex syntactic patterns and a system of multifac-
eted discrete contrasts that allowed them to attach to these patterns their
preexisting symbolic abilities and thus to establish a stable speechlike sys-
tem” (Richmann 1980, 244). “Performative functions associated with oral
sound-making provided initial pressures for vocal communication by pro-
moting rank and relationships. These benefits, I suggest, facilitated confl ict
avoidance and resolution, collaboration, and reciprocal sharing of needed
resources” (Locke 2001, 37, Abstract).
3. This argument appears in Derrida’s deconstruction of Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau’s Essay on the Origins of Languages (Essai sur l’origine des langues,
fi rst published posthumously in 1781). Rousseau argues that speech and song
had a common origin in a primordial era and that both were “nothing but
language itself in those happy climates and those happy times” (2008, 15–16).
Rousseau’s ultimate intention here is to prove that melody, not harmony, pos-
sesses priority in music as it “imitates the accents of languages” and “it not
only imitates, it speaks, and its language, inarticulate but lively, ardent, pas-
sionate, has a hundred times more energy than speech itself” (ibid., 19).
4. For applications of this theory of globalization to music see Utz 2008.
5. This point is made explicit in a statement by Dieter Schnebel, quoted by
Erin Gee in her contribution to this volume: [in serial music] “vocal music
[ . . . ] was almost taboo, because vocal music always has a text, and the text
provides an emotional plan. The text has its own progression of sound, but
we wanted to compose the sounds themselves” (as quoted in Chapter 9, 180;
German version in Gee 2007, 281).
6. Quotations from German sources are translated by the author.
7. Pierrot Lunaire was likely first introduced to the young Chinese composers
by Alexander Goehr during his workshops in Beijing in 1980. See Utz 2002,
350–351.
8. In this encompassing essay, Martin Zenck develops a multifold theory of “pas-
sage,” drawing on topographic-cultural fields (passages between geographical
cultures or regions), cross-cultural fields (passages as interactions between cul-
tures), philosophical fields (passages between physical and metaphysical realms
and concepts), and aesthetical fields (passages as crossings of boundaries). These
fields are linked to more specific musical connotations of the term “passage”
(transitions as part of classical musical syntax and form, permanent transition
as a principle in new music, etc.). According to Zenck, passages might turn
into “‘transgressions’ that intentionally ignore rules and tear down borders in
order to break open the restrictions of systematized and totalized thought and
aesthetic practice” (English summary, Zenck 2009, 233).
9. Sometimes the term onsetsu (syllable) is used instead of kyokusetsu (Mayeda
2004, 174).
10. The usage of these terms is not always consistent among scholars and not
restricted to these two genres. Generally, the term kyokusetsu “tends to
indicate longer passages of section length, while [senritsukei] [ . . . ] refers to
shorter phrases” (Tokita and Hughes 2008, 24).
11. According to de Ferranti and other researchers, “All katarimono of pre-
modern provenance stem from oral practices in which text and music were
produced by techniques of oral composition. Evidence for oral composition
in such traditions is demonstrable through analyses developed from the prin-
ciples of oral-formulaic theory” (Ferranti 2003, 141, note 22).
12. From William P. Malm, “A Musical Analysis of ‘The Mountains Scene,’” in
Theater as Music: The Bunraku Play “Mt. Imo and Mt. Se: An Exemplary
Tale of Womanly Virtue”, edited by C. Andrew Gerstle, Kiyoshi Inobe, and
William P. Malm, Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies 4 (Ann
Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1990), 78–79.
Copyright Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan. All
rights reserved. Used with permission of the publisher.
13. A fi rst version of Silk Road was premiered by Joan La Barbara on April 1,
1989, but subsequently performed and recorded by Susan Botti in 1993 (Utz
2002, 397–398).
14. Cf. Utz 2002, 423–427 for a detailed discussion of Tan’s writing for voice until
1998, and Utz 2002, 460–474 for a comprehensive analysis of Marco Polo.
15. Cf. Tan Dun, Marco Polo, CD 1, Track 11.
16. The most important styles or musical systems preserved in Beijing opera are
xipi and erhuang, inherent to local opera genres in the Chinese provinces
Anhui und Hubei (cf. Li 2010, 18–24).
17. Four out of these five instances introduce a “sung” phrase, the end of which is
marked by the instruction gesprochen (spoken): no. 4 (“Eine blasse Wäscherin”),
mm. 14/15; no. 8 (“Die Nacht”), mm. 10/11; no. 9 (“Gebet an Pierrot”), mm.
13/14; no. 11 (“Rote Messe”), mm. 24/25. In no. 10 (“Raub”), mm. 9/10 intro-
duces a change between tonlos (“toneless,” which is indicated by special note-
heads that are repeatedly used without comment in later parts) and Ton (tone).
18. Some recent research (Rapoport 2006) has argued that the melodic design of
Schoenberg’s Sprechstimme was following the speech intonation of the Ger-
man text in a very literal manner, applying musical structural techniques like
inversion or octave transposition in order to “alienate” the musical result.
Although I doubt that Schoenberg’s melodic design for the voice in Pierrot
simply started from a declamation of the text, the relevance of speech intona-
tion is defi nitely relevant for the rhythmical design of the vocal part.
19. See Utz 2005, 53–54 and Utz 2012, 615–618 for more extensive analyses of
this piece. Utz 2005 and 2012 introduce Takahashi’s aesthetics and composi-
tions in detail.
20. There is no explicit reference, however, to the archaic recitation style usu-
ally associated with the Kojiki (712). This style was practiced by narrators
called kataribe and is regarded as the origin of Japanese katarimono. Hirano
1990/2004 connects this style with genres practiced by the Ainu (Yūkara)
and peoples in Okinawa (omoro).
21. Adapted from Takahashi 2000, 11 (Takahashi’s translation here is adapted
from A Waka Anthology, vol. 1, The Gem-Glistening Cup, translated by
Edwin A. Cranston [Stanford: Stanford University Press 1993]).
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4 Imagining the Other’s Voice
On Composing across Vocal Traditions
Sandeep Bhagwati
Wollen wir uns fi nden, so dürfen wir nicht in unser Inneres hinabstei-
gen: draussen sind wir zu fi nden, draussen (Hugo von Hofmannsthal,
Das Gespräch über Gedichte, 1903; Hofmannsthal 1976, 83).1
Musicking is the act of domesticating sound: all instruments are designed

to make very precise sounds available to us whenever we need them. Just as
our diet consists of the predictable foods available through farming, music
making in all “cultural” traditions until the electroacoustic age has chosen
to limit itself to comparatively few, but unfailing and trusty, sound classes.
And just as artful cooking is a way of compensating for the loss of material
diversity by replacing it with the limitless possibilities of recombination and
nuance, musicking takes limited sounds and “composes” them, as we say,
thereby unfolding a space of infi nite variety.
The intrinsic, primary quality of a sound thus is only one of the fac-
tors that determines musicking across traditions. The other is the second-
ary quality of “composition,” in other words: the manner in which these
sound qualities have been arranged sequentially and simultaneously to
give rise to a composite sensation—or, as scholars in Sanskrit aesthetics
would say, a rasa—a word that literally means “a vivid taste,” in both
cooking and music.
Art music traditions, almost as their defi ning characteristic, tend to
favor this secondary aspect over the primary aspect of sound. This prefer-
ence can appear in different guises: music theories are usually abstracted
from sound—they are maps through a recombinatory landscape. In Chi-
nese Silk and Bamboo music, where playing techniques—and thus sound
qualities—are notated by contemporary urban musicians whereas tempo-
ral evolution is not, aesthetic value is nevertheless attributed to a player’s
ability to create a convincing flow. In the milieu of Hindustani musicking,
discussions about sound quality are considered trivial, almost on par with
discussions about what clothes to wear during performance. The ad-hoc
instrumentations of European medieval to baroque performance practice
Imagining the Other’s Voice 77
are instances of a similar bias and so is the portability of compositions
from one highly individual gamelan to another in Indonesia and the cross-
traditional exchange of rhythms in different African music traditions.
Musicking, in the overwhelming majority of music traditions around the
world, has been an exercise in abstracting sound from its context and
refi ning control over it.
No traditions of musicking have progressed further towards this goal
than those using digital instruments: sampling, sequencing, and live-syn-
thesis are currently spearheading the domestication, even commodification
of sound—affording musicians a previously unthinkable level of control.
Like so many twentieth-century inventions, they seem to have been a
realization, if a problematic one, of long-standing desires—in their case,
perhaps, a desire typical for European musicking, as this (probably apocry-
phal) story seems to illustrate:
That brutal monarch, Louis XI of France, is said to have constructed,

with the assistance of the Abbé de Baigne, an instrument designated a
“pig organ,” for the production of natural sounds. The master of the
royal music, having made a very large and varied assortment of swine,
embracing specimens of all breeds and ages, these were carefully voiced,
and placed in order, according to their several tones and semitones, and so
arranged that a key-board communicated with them, severally and indi-
vidually, by means of rods ending in sharp spikes. In this way a player, by
touching any note, could instantly sound a corresponding note in nature,
and was enabled to produce at will either natural melody or harmony!
The result is said to have been striking, but not very grateful to human
ears (Crofts 1885, cf. also Quignard 1996).
The attempt by Louis XI, the fi fteen-century king, to create a “pig organ”
may seem morally insensitive to us today. But even if the story is indeed
apocryphal, it perfectly speaks of the immense loss that comes as a collat-
eral in domesticating music: we instinctively “know” that an animal sound
should not be at our disposal just like that—and so it is with many other
sounds we habitually use in musicking.
Using a sound as a musical resource, abstracting and determining its
production in this story appears as what it always is: a violent act. The
metaphor of the blood-covered, screaming pigs can make us realize to what
extent brutality constitutes the unavoidable fl ipside of the otherwise so con-
venient act of sonic abstraction that we need to perform in order to make
music. Wrenching sounds out of context, in this perspective, derails our
sense of sonic balance—and leaves a wound in our relationship to the sonic
fabric of reality. Too much controlled sound, just as too much processed
food, causes us physical—and sometimes moral—discomfort. Making such
controlled music therefore makes us demand signs of redemption—and the
more control, the stronger the yearning.
78 Sandeep Bhagwati
II
Redemption of this kind is often thought to be accessible in (or at least

attributed to) the singing human voice. In all predigital musical tradi-
tions (and in most of digital traditions as well) the human voice has been
accorded a unique and virtually unassailable position. Vocal utterances
seem to be exempt from the unavoidable pull towards abstraction that
characterizes our attitude towards all other kinds of sounds: in descriptions
of voices, words such as primeval, authentic, true, raw, unmistakable, hon-
est, direct, intimate, etc. are used as commonplace attributes. Some part
of this reverence for the human voice certainly stems from the phenom-
enon of cultural phonocentrism that Derrida (1967) and Ong (2002) have
described and criticized. Phonocentrism, in Derrida’s view, is a cultural
tendency that establishes vocal utterance as the most reliable indicator of
individual intentionality, as the locus of testimony and authenticity. Writ-
ing, in this view, amounts at best to a dehydrated, deteriorated, distorted
oral discourse. Phonocentrism is apparent in the inordinate importance still
attached to orality in even the most literate of contexts: in a court of law, at
a PhD defense, in religious practices purportedly based on the hermeneutics
of holy books. It can be equally traced in the emergence and success of what
Ong describes as “secondary orality”: a revamped orality enabled, medi-
ated, and fostered by a technology-savvy, and therefore necessarily literate,
culture. Examples for secondary oralities can easily be found in contempo-
rary societies around the globe: talk radio, TV talk shows, but also skype,
cell phone, personal navigation systems, call centers, etc.
Many symptoms seem to indicate that music, too, is usually made with
a phonocentric image in mind. Many traditions, including European art
music, claim vocal music as their mythical origin—and eternal wellspring.
Instrumental musicking, in most traditions, aims to imitate and support—
but almost never to actually supplant—singing. Even in traditions where
instrumental music has gained in cultural value, as in nineteenth-century
European symphonic and chamber music, 2 this process is often seen as one
of slow emancipation, albeit with a clear, implied hierarchy: written music,
even more than written words, in this perspective is just a dehydrated ver-
sion of “song”—the standard non-specialist name for all music.
It is interesting to observe that this central role of singing gains even
more importance as the production of sound becomes more commodified.
In contemporary popular (i.e., commercial) musicking, vocal production
often remains, in fact, the only locus of the artistic. While in the 1970s
bands such as Novalis or Pink Floyd and producers such as Alan Parsons
or Mike Oldfield could still successfully release long-playing instrumentals,
while in the 1990s the music at techno events and raves worked largely with-
out the singing voice, anything produced in the popular field today needs
a voice in it: be it rap, or pumped-up emotionalized singers such as Celine
Dion. Freddie Mercury could well be a genius in digital orchestration for
all he liked—yet without his voice he would not have been fully accepted
as a genuine star. A.R. Rahman, as successful as he may be as Bollywood
composer and arranger, garners respect, but never genuine adulation as an
artist—because he cannot convincingly sing. It is as if voice and singing
have become a sine qua non of making music—perhaps because everything
else has been blanded down by the ubiquitous use of sound design?
The singing voice, in postmodern popular culture, from Mick Jagger to
Amy Winehouse, from Janis Joplin to JayZ, from Tom Waits to Leonard
Cohen, from Bob Dylan to Adele, indeed stands as a signifier for all that
has been excised from the commodified sound of instrumental and digital
music: rawness, individuality, and unreliability—however much even these
qualities themselves are again commodified and marketed. Just as in other
contemporary domains, the very fact that something can fail for apparently
inexplicable reasons removes it from the realm of the utilitarian commodity
and “proves” that it must be part of authentic human experience. Voices
can be counted upon to potentially fail dramatically. Apart from making
voices more “human,” this fact also makes a successful vocal performance
a more precious achievement—the authentic fickleness of voices thus con-
tributes strongly to their exceptional status in contemporary musicking,
especially in the studio practice that dominates commercial music.
III
Singing practices, in most historical and present musicking traditions, can

be practiced in an individualistic and in a normative mode: the normative
mode or sound most readily exemplified by choral singing, 3 but, in a more
subtle sense, also by the “cultural” vocal sounds used in many folk and
art music traditions, is a way of singing that affords redemption effects via
the integration of the lone individual voice into the voice of one’s village,
region—or the voice of god. Walter Ong observes that “oral peoples com-
monly [ . . . ] consider words to have great power. Sound cannot be sound-
ing without the use of power [ . . . ]. In this sense, all sound, and especially
oral utterance [ . . . ] is ‘dynamic’” (Ong 2002, 32).
Normative singing, in its amplification of this power, highlights the
always latent oracular undercurrent of vocality; it is an instance of the
modo sacris orationibus reverenter attoniti (mode of inspired sacred utter-
ance, reverently heard), one of the psalm singing modes listed by sixth-
century commentator Cassiodorus (Expositio in Psalterium, c. 545, quoted
after Deusen 2001). It is no accident that normative modes of singing usu-
ally are designed to let the human singing voice appear more powerful than
both the normal speaking and the normal humming voice—whether we lis-
ten to Bulgarian teshka and leshka styles, to the vocal style of Beijing opera
(jingju) or to Italian bel canto. In amplifying the intensity of their voice,
singers emphasize and tap into the power traditionally associated with vocal
80 Sandeep Bhagwati
utterance: while standard human oral utterance already is accepted to be
powerful in earthly matters, such an elevated and obviously more powerful
or beautiful voice must come from somewhere else, and can connect us to
matters beyond individual control—it can reach further than our bodies
could. Indeed, before the advent of technology, using the voice to beckon,
communicate, and command was the only action-at-a-distance a human
being could perform.
Whereas normative singing thus transfigures the singers’ bodies, the
individualistic mode of vocal production, as evoked in Roland Barthes’s
essay “The Grain of the Voice” (Barthes 1977), attempts to reinscribe the
singer’s voice into the body. Barthes’s “grain” is the outcome of a unique
process whereby a voice
is directly the cantor’s body, brought to your ears in one and the same
movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes,
the cartilages [ . . . ], as though a single skin lined the inner flesh of the
performer and the music he sings. The voice is not personal: it expresses
nothing of the cantor [ . . . ] and at the same time it is individual: it has
us hear a body [ . . . ]. The “grain” is that: the materiality of the body
speaking its mother tongue (Barthes 1977, 181–182).
Although Barthes in this essay goes on to mainly speak about instances

of highly trained art music voices, notably the sonic virtuosity of Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau,4 which he derides as “grainless,”5 the notion of the grain
of the voice has been deeply influential in the digital music and sound art
scene: in rediscovering the embodied nature of sonic material, the highly
individual human voice within each of us was put to use, perhaps for the
very fi rst time, for artistic ends.
This ushered in a third mode of musical voices, one that not necessarily
could be called “singing”: the naturalistic (or better: the “eavesdropping”)
mode. The discovery that a voice, in its tonal qualities, whether spoken
or sung, needs not be projected, nor specifically formed, to be artistically
viable, has made “non-directed” voice an integral aspect of soundscape art.
Integrated into an aesthetic of the accidental, the voice became even more
an emblem of authenticity—eavesdropping to recorded fragments of every-
day vocalization obviates the direct, engaged confrontation with a heard
voice and lets us contemplate and engage with it rather dispassionately,
enabling a suddenly fear-free acceptance of the previously so powerful (and
therefore potentially dangerous) sound coming from a live mouth.
On the other hand, the extreme intimacy implied by hearing a voice so near
and clear in one’s ear makes it hard for the listener to reject an utterance: these
voice sounds had over millenia been reserved for lovers, children, and parents,
and could hardly ever be heard outside the confines of one’s inner circle. For
composers such as Pierre Schaeffer or, much more pronounced, Luc Ferrari,
this voice mode led to a new dimension of musical eroticism through the use
of neither a normative, nor an individualistic voice—these voices, whether
sung or spoken, reveal to us the logical endpoint of any discourse of authentic-
ity in voice use: the acoustic voyeurism they invite the listener to enact frames
them as “accidentally overheard.” What reason would there be to mistrust the
truth of these voices, especially as they obviously are not directed at me, the
listener, and therefore can safely be assumed to be non-manipulative—espe-
cially if, once more, the composer integrates instances of failing and faltering,
of stumbling and indistinctiveness into the vocal stream—“comme s’il fal-
lait retrouver la part la plus abyssale, archaïque et obscure de notre vocalité”
(Cohen-Levinas 2006, 13).6
All three modes of voice in musicking (the word “singing” alone obvi-
ously does not cover them all) are thus effective vehicles for the redemption
effects mentioned above. The normative mode quite patently connects us to
something beyond ourselves as all collective or culturally determined action
does; the individualistic mode offers us absolution through the body in
the occidental paradigm of the mind-body split, as the body here produces
a distinctive quality beyond our conscious control; and, fi nally, digitally
mediated “overhearing” affords us redemption effects through the illusion
of contingency: if we are neither the addressee of the voice we hear, nor,
therefore, called upon to aesthetically evaluate it, we obviously cannot be
implicated in any of the brutal raping-of-sounds that may have taken place;
we can always tell ourselves that we were just bystanders, present only by
accident, when a sudden gust of wind lifted the veil from unsuspecting
sonic reality—and let us hear it in the nude. What could be more redemp-
tive than that?
IV
In contemplating these three modes, a contemporary composer of concert

music as well as most professional singers of new music would possibly
argue that none of these three modes really describes how they interact and
use voice in their musical context. For the practice of most contemporary
eurological composers,7 the voice has for a long time already ceased to be at
the center of gravity for making new music—both the obliviousness offered
by the normative voice and the preciousness of the embodied voice have, to
them, become highly problematic.8 Instead, the presence of voice in music
has increasingly been subjected to the same process of decontextualization
that instrumental music underwent centuries ago: singing eurological new
music today means virtually the same as playing an instrument, namely,
to command and control each element of the vocal tract in a quasi-inde-
pendent, technical fashion—as epitomized in Michael Edwards Edgerton’s
Friedrich’s Comma for two solo voices (1999).9
The performative ideal of the contemporary eurological music singer
is thus neither to connect to the normative sound of vocal performance,
82 Sandeep Bhagwati
nor to do right by her/his body. Rather, it means to dispassionately and
non-oracularly display the generic sonic richness of the voice—and the stu-
pendous control the singer has over it. Of course, this is not a new phe-
nomenon: vocal virtuosity has been a feature of European music making
for a long time—the singer-virtuosi of the baroque and classical periods,
for one, had already widely explored the faculties of the human voice. But
whereas traditional virtuosity showcased the fluidity and control over the
singing voice, contemporary eurological compositional practice has largely
moved away from the traditional concepts of singing detailed above, and
just as the “natural” voice in electroacoustic music, has embarked on what
Danielle Cohen-Levinas calls “a voice beyond singing”: “En effet, au XXe
siècle, la voix fut comme arrachée au chant [ . . . ], voix dont on ne sait plus
si elle exprime le sujet ou si elle est un artefact technique” (Cohen-Levinas
2006, 12–13).10 In this perspective, voice in music has become a matter of
discourse, an artistic surface material, or, as Barthes calls it in reference to
Julia Kristeva’s famous phenotext-genotext classification, a pheno-song:
The pheno-song [ . . . ] covers all the phenomena, all the features which
belong to the structure of the language being sung, the rules of the
genre, the coded form of the melisma, the composer’s idiolect, the style
of interpretation: in short, everything in the performance which is in
the service of communication, representation, expression, [ . . . ] which
forms the tissue of cultural values (Barthes 1977, 182).
Or, as Barthes later succinctly notes, again in negative reference to Fischer-

Dieskau (FD):
Everything in the semantic and lyrical structure is respected and yet

nothing seduces. [ . . . ] His art is inordinately expressive [ . . . ] and
hence never exceeds culture. [ . . . ] With FD, I seem only to hear the
lungs, never the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucuous membranes,
the nose (ibid., 183).
What is perceived as a significant loss in Barthes and as a violent act in Cohen-

Levinas, a use of voice indifferent to the yearning for redemption that drives
the positive images both of normative community sound and of individual
body sound—in other words, a purely cultural use of voice in musicking—has
indeed been a preferred mode for most practicing musicians worldwide—and
has opened up immense sonic vistas for the age-old human voice.
It must be emphasized at this point that there is no such thing as an “authen-

tic” voice. True, the sound of an individual’s voice a priori must be unique,
not only because all vocal folds have a different length, but because a sing-
er’s or speaker’s entire body is one-of-a-kind. Thus, two important aspects
of voice production, namely phonation (in the vocal folds) and resonance
(in the body), appear to be largely and highly individualized, embodied
beyond the reach of cultural shaping. At fi rst glance, therefore, it seems
plausible that each of us indeed possesses that ineffable Barthesian granu-
lar voice—a voice that appears to be located deep within our body, a voice
we could own and project, were we not so culturally deformed. Exploring
the body as the locus of the authentic has, after all, been one of the major
streams in recent aesthetic discourse across all the arts.
But there are two more—and equally important—aspects of voice produc-
tion: respiration (air control) and articulation. In sound synthesis terminol-
ogy, they correspond to velocity/duration (co-dependent in the human voice)
and an array of interdependent filter types and filter settings, respectively.
In articulating, we filter the phonic stream coming from the vocal folds—in
respiring, we power it. While phonation and resonance may possibly be con-
strued as epiphenomena of the body itself, as dimensions that are beyond our
volition, respiration and articulation can only be seen as what they are: mus-
cular actions—and thus subject to training and usage. They are the aspects of
voice that the aesthetics and semantics of speaking and singing tend to focus
on—just as religions and the military generally show little interest in our hair
color, but often do like to control our hairs’ cut and flow.
Indeed, research around the kind of sounds that people fi nd semantically
relevant, or even just perceivable, shows strong evidence that the human
voice, even before it is socially received and evaluated, already reveals itself
as socially formed. Within the very fi rst months of their lives, children can
differentiate between “familiar” and “unfamiliar” speech sounds (Kuhl
1987). Later, speakers and listeners recognize phonetic contrasts in a famil-
iar language better than those in an unfamiliar language. In her metastudy
on language acquisition, Patricia K. Kuhl also observes that “numerous
studies of perception [ . . . ] indicate that adults have difficulty discriminat-
ing phonetic contrasts not used systematically in their native language”
(Kuhl 1999, 611).11 If people cannot hear these contrasts, they obviously
cannot articulate the voice sounds that constitute them.
A person’s voice thus simply cannot be reduced to the cartilage configu-
rations that may be “authentic” to their body—the sound and aesthetics
of our voices, even in the seemingly most involuntary of vocal utterances,
from alarm cries to laughter, always appear to be culturally formatted.
Even before I open my mouth to speak, the culture into which I have
been born has entered and suff used it. My place of birth and the coun-
try where I have been raised, along with my mother tongue, all help
regulate the setting of my jaw, the laxity of my lips, my most comfort-
able pitch [ . . . ]. I speak with my voice but my culture speaks through
me (Karpf 2006).12
84 Sandeep Bhagwati
The average speaking pitch of a voice usually is informed by a local lan-
guage convention—British-English voices are pitched higher on average
than German voices. In Japanese society, male voices and female voices
tend to accentuate gender difference by going to extremes of low (male) and
high (female) average pitch, whereas such gendered average speaking pitch
differences are less conspicuous with contemporary speakers in Scandina-
vian or North American societies (see also Giles 1979). While individuals
vary in their degree of conformity to a particular cultural voice norm, these
variances usually lie well within a narrow range of acceptable pitch areas.
In the context of immigration, successful social integration can also depend
on how well the learner picks up the pitch conventions of the new language.
The ear and the brain inform the aesthetics—and thus the sound—of an
individual’s voice more than any of her/his other organs.
Articulation and breathing, being muscular activities, must be trained,
consciously or involuntarily, even for speaking, especially if it is intended
as a communicative act. Singing, however, adds another level of necessary
training: most singing techniques, while making strong use of respiration
and articulation, also employ the other two factors of voice production in a
highly controlled fashion. While speech focuses mainly on formants and noise
production, i.e., elements of articulation, singing also tightly controls pitch
change and stability, as well as regulating different body resonances. To learn
singing, we need to learn to play with these resonances; to be a singer, we have
to learn how to control them effectively. All this does not come naturally, it
is a matter of exercise, training, practice, i.e., a result of the way we use our
body, our time, and our resources. And that, obviously, is a matter of cultural
preference and conditioning—or, as Peter Sloterdijk would call it, an example
of “anthropotechnics” (see below). When voices are described as “authentic,”
“beautiful,” “deep,” “granular,” or “raw” it is therefore not the actual sound
of the voice that is being described—these terms rather describe degrees of
conformity or divergence to a societal or cultural expectation of the listener.
Sloterdijk (2009, 2010) has recently (re)opened a discourse on what he
calls “Übung,” a word only inadequately translated with “practice,” “train-
ing,” or “exercise.” In this discourse, he examines what he calls anthropo-
technics, a specific aspect of human self-improvement. Anthropotechnic
activities, according to Sloterdijk, are compensatory “measures designed to
facilitate the self-modeling of the human individual and hence the overcom-
ing of a nature that is perceived as insufficient (whether as a consequence of
biology or of life circumstances)” (Hübl 2010). The desire for the “authen-
tic” voice may well stem from this rise of anthropotechnics in modern
and postmodern societies. Where “optimizing” the body becomes a social
imperative, Barthes’s distinction between pheno-song and geno-song must
become increasingly meaningless, as the imperfections associated with the
authenticity of geno-song are eliminated in the perfection-oriented model-
ing of vocal professionals. Non-Western singing, in turn, emerging from
societies considered by many as “premodern,” where anthropotechnics play
a minor role, will almost by default accrue the cachet of being “authentic.”
It is, however, surely ironical that singers, of all people, are invoked to
represent the authentic: as if they were not, in any community, among the
very few and fi rst to actually use anthropotechnics in order to better adapt
their bodies and minds—in order to produce what their culture considers
a “beautiful” sound.
VI
Composers in the eurological tradition, for reasons we cannot cover in this

essay, have long had a penchant for “exotic” sounds, i.e., sounds beyond
their contemporary consensus of what constituted a “musical” sound. The
term “exotic” refers here to all kinds of non-standard sounds or harmo-
nies in the eurological context—but it of course also applies to sounds and
sound sets already in standard use within non-European traditions, be they
art music or not. The history of twentieth-century music can be also read
as a history of the expansive induction of originally non-European sounds
and instruments into the eurological sound catalogue, a process often, but
not necessarily paralleled by an aesthetical and theoretical voraciousness
for music and sound concepts. This process usually followed predictable
(and familiar) patterns—alienation (“These drum glissandi are weird”),
annexation (“I use tabla to reinforce the cello pizzicato here, because this
makes for the best compound sound. I do not care if it is Indian or Russian,
really!”13), representation (“Tabla stands for India and cello for Europe in
this multicultural composition; we must respect each culture’s sounds”),
and then, after some time, amalgamation (“This cello should sound a bit
like tabla here and a bit like erhu there”).
Within its own episteme, expanding the array of aesthetically and tech-
nically available sounds had, at least since the nineteenth century, evolved
into a central terrain of innovation in eurological composition. While such
innovations until around the mid-twentieth century seemed more focused
on the semantic recombination of existing “musical” sound (through inno-
vative harmony, microtonality, new rhythmic constellations, etc.), the
invention of sound recording and the non-performative approach to sonic
reality it afforded gave rise to the phonemic use of sound. This would even-
tually result in a novel approach to musical sound, as exemplified by Pierre
Schaeffer’s objets sonores, Helmut Lachenmann’s musique concrète instru-
mentale, and Dennis Gabor’s, Iannis Xenakis’s, and Curtis Roads’s devel-
opment of granular synthesis.14 These approaches to sonic innovation—all
three involving fi rst the isolation of sounds, and then their recombina-
tion and resynthesis—subscribed to an essentially abstract, reductionist
approach to sound, where more and more parameters of sound production
were thought of as being independent of one another, in order to be con-
trolled aesthetically and technically.15
86 Sandeep Bhagwati
This modernist desire for reductionist and essentialist approaches to the
materials of art-making naturally also tried to supplant more holistic and
traditional approaches to voice in music: eurological composers started dis-
secting vocal sound production into its sonic and technical components, in
order to resynthesize it, and they also experimented—as in Luciano Berio’s
Sequenza III for female voice (1966)—with the recombination of diverse
existing paradigms of voice use in one continuous composition.16
Applying this reductionist exploratory habitus to voice nevertheless
progressed at a much slower rate—and, in a very tangible way, it still has
not yet really arrived in the mainstream of contemporary musical prac-
tice. While extended instrumental techniques and advanced electronic
sounds (with their own traditions, schools, contexts, and semantics) have
become commonplace tools that almost every professional instrumentalist
will encounter and use in the course of a standard orchestra, jazz, or pop
career, the various types of extended technique for the voice still remain
specialist tools whose competent practitioners are a rare and sometimes
even endangered species.17 These techniques have not carried over into the
realm of commercial music to the same extent as their instrumental coun-
terparts. The specific sounds present in Tom Waits’s, Björk’s, Bob Dylan’s,
Kate Bush’s, Barry Gibbs’s, or Nina Hagen’s highly idiosyncratic voices18
may technically be similar to those required in Georges Aperghis’s Récita-
tions (1977; see Erin Gee’s Chapter 9 in this volume) or other experimental
voice compositions, but they are always perceived as a unique set of sounds
that together create a distinctive vocal identity, rather than as the result
of a conscious aesthetical selection from among a variety of vocal colors
and textures.
Similar issues have dogged the introduction of sounds from other exist-
ing vocal traditions into eurological composers’ sets of aesthetically avail-
able sonic resources. Moreover, cross-traditional processes for voices do not
seem to follow the trajectory outlined above for instrumental sounds: while
one can, of course, find countless examples for vocal alienation, the use of
non-European voice sounds and vocal music rarely extends to annexation
and amalgamation. The most prevalent (and practical) approach to cross-
traditional voice use still seems to be representation—practical, because it
can usually be realized by integrating a singer from another vocal tradition
into an ensemble.19 Voice virtuosos who are able to reliably navigate more
than two distinctive vocal and musical traditions are much rarer to fi nd
than multitraditional instrumentalists: as a eurological composer, it almost
seems safe not to assume their very existence.
It does appear as if the voice simply does not lend itself easily to a reduc-
tionist or recombinatory approach: perhaps because so many of its actual
sound-generating “knobs and levers” are hidden inside the body and not
readily manipulable. In fact, classic texts on Indian music use precisely this
observation to distinguish instrumental music from singing, as reported by
Prem Lata Sharma:
Speaking of the origin of sound, Nāṭyaśāstra says that sound (śabda)
is of the nature of air [ . . . ]. In later texts, the human body is eulogised
as the medium of the primary manifestation of nāda [sonic resonance].
[ . . . ] The primary position of voice is due to the fact that the inner
space in the human body is the field of yogika [yogic] experience. [ . . . ]
[Several classic Indian texts refer to] the base of sound production as
the “earth”, the passage of air as the “walls” and the cerebral region as
ākāśa or “space”. The body is the laboratory where [this] realisation
is worked out. [ . . . ] There are four steps in this process: 1) The rising
of the will to speak or produce sound in the ātman [individual soul]
2) Activation of the mind 3) Activation of the “fi re” or kinetic energy
4) Propelling of the air upwards from the base of the navel. In the case
of instruments, the fi rst two steps are [present] but the next two steps
take place in “outer space” through the hands (Sharma 1999, 25–26,
additions/condensations in brackets by the author).20
It is very likely that similar assertions could be found in many vocal tradi-
tions; and even when Cohen-Levinas wants us to imagine a voice “beyond
singing,” the voice as an instrument, she nevertheless does not think of
it as an instrument among others: for unlike some instruments and their
repertoire, e.g., the arpeggione, the voice most likely will never fall into
plain disuse. Whatever we will do with our voices, if we do it in a musical
context, it will simply be considered a new way of—singing.
After a century of structural experimentation and sonic expansion in
eurological musicking, the human voice thus still resists the amalgama-
tion, reification, and instrumentalization that characterizes and defi nes its
instrumental partners in music. One of Dirk Baecker’s many definitions of
culture says: “‘Kultur’ ist das, was unvergleichbare Lebensweisen vergle-
ichbar macht” [“Culture” is what makes incomparable lifestyles compa-
rable] (Baecker 2001, 47). In this perspective, the patently so incompatible,
incomparable voice—its singing, whispering, croaking, hollering, crying,
humming, or speaking—sounding forth in the midst of one of humankind’s
most powerful cultural expressions, may in fact be our reminder of an
a-cultural mode of existence we all once shared: where the magical sound
of my own voice, enacting the memory of my mother’s voice, heard through
her body, is the beginning of my little, unique life. From my inside, my voice
calls the outside into being—and my fi rst song creates my world.
VII
All this could leave a composer voiceless, or make her prone to voicelessness
in creative work—and, for many composers in eurological art music, this
has indeed been the case: countless the scores that seem bent on toppling
the voice from its traditionally special status within the musical texture.21
88 Sandeep Bhagwati
Whole schools of acousmatic and other experimental music virtually seem
to shun the singing voice altogether (except if hacked into granules and
snippets, or otherwise disfigured into unrecognizability22). In intertradi-
tional musical experiments, too, can we discern a very gingerly approach
to heterogeneous and hybrid vocal sounds and vocal traditions:23 composi-
tions that amalgamate voice sounds and techniques, or attempt to write
in “the other’s” voice are rare—although in these contexts there seems
to be no inhibition to compose with “the other’s” instruments or musi-
cal ideas. Not even the most popular vocal alienation tool, the infamous
“Antares Auto-Tune”24 seems to have captured many “serious” composers’
imaginations. Alterity, conceptual thinking, and voice seem to be almost
incompatible with each other, for listeners apparently even more than for
composers. One voice, one meaning, one body, one tradition—thus goes
the consensus. 25
In my own creative engagement with the human voice, I have gone
through all the thoughts, questions, and doubts described above, through
all the cycles of attraction and skepticism towards the voice. In some works,
such as in my opera Ramanujan (1998), 26 I tried to transform instrumen-
tal sounds into a synthetic computer voice in real time, creating the voice
range and vocal behavior of the Indian goddess Namagiri, unattainable
for human singers, from the sound of a solo violin and, later on, turning a
churning orchestra sound into an agitated bodiless choir.
In other works, such as in the second and third movements of Limits
& Renewals for six singers and large orchestra (2011), 27 I tried to blur the
instrument/voice divide by de-individualizing natural voices through com-
posed desyncing: the singers rapidly weave in and out of pitch, timbre and
rhythm sync, in constantly varying directions. Inspired by Mike McNabb’s
1982 research into the confluence of vocal and instrumental timbre (an
effect he calls spectral fusion—where unrelated spectral components begin
to sound like a vocal timbre as soon as they all are subjected to a coor-
dinated vibrato—see Chowning et al. 1982, 11), I wanted to achieve the
opposite—desynchronize a vocal ensemble to the point where, despite their
obvious and strong vocal identities, the specific blend of their vocal sound
is perceived as an assemblage of instrumental sounds, and thus easily fuses
with the orchestral sonic environment. I employ this effect in many dif-
ferent ways that aim to focus and defocus the listener’s attention on the
presence of voices—although the six singers are singing almost at all times,
and can easily be heard if one expressly listens to them and watches them
intently. To a listener concentrating on the overall sound it may well seem
as if one voice with uncertain, alien timbre and a slightly unsymmetrical
gait sang along with the orchestra.
Finally, in works such as Atish-e-Zaban (2006), 28 I asked six a cappella
new music singers to reimagine voice sounds of Hindustani music, from the
bol-syllables used as oral notation by percussionists to the differentiated
meend-glissandi, and the taans (longer ornaments) and gamaks (shorter
AUSKLANQ
an "Ho" in demselben Atem
AUFGANG angehangt, wie auslaufend,
Liberamente, in beliebigem portamento, decrescendo
Tempo, auf "Gar" zislend, N.B.: Alle Noten im Refrain (auBer Aufgang und Ausklang) mit Mini-Glissando von oben Oder unten beginnen I
R stats glissandisrand. = 120
E
Gar mu-jhe iska ya-qin ho
F
R Gar mu-jhe iska ya-qin ho
A
I Gar mu-jhe iska ya-qin ho
N Gar mu-jhe iska ya-qin ho

BORDUN Alternative Rhythmen fur
Grundsatzlich stats den Basispuls singen. Einzelne Sanger kbnnen zu jedem "mujhe", "iska", "yaqin".
Zeitpunkt "Alankara" singen, immer wieder zum Basispuls zuruckstrebBndl
Beliebig kombinierbar I
"Taans" nur ab und zu, v.a. wenn Sollst pauslert,elnzeln Oder mehrere zusammen
aucti mehrere gleichzeitig uberlagert, Oder in Kombi mit "Alankaras".
"Tihais" als Betonung des Refrains stets nach Absprache allB einstimmig zusammen.
Alle Taans und Tlhals enden mtt mlndestens elnem Takt Basispuls I
ALANKARA VARIANTEN TAAN + TIHAI VARIANTEN

1 = 120 C1 D1 Taan 3
B A1 B1 3
NB: Tempo stabil

halten, auch bei 3
Alankaras, Taans Taan 1 (halbsa Tampa) Taan 3 (halbes 1
jnd Tihais
0 Jede langere Note mit
A2 B2 C2 D2
Mnem Mlnl-Gllssando
/on unten Oder oben
wginnen „ .
R Basispuls A3 S3 C3 D3
Tihai Main fab Schlag 1 von "iakamatartartj Tihai gross (ab Schlag 1 von 'mujtw"station)
D Na Na Na Na -3- 3 3
Oder: Dha Na Ga Na A4 94 C4 D4
Alle anderen Fragmente
U abwechslungsraich mit
folgenden Silben: Taan 2 (halbes Tempo] Taan 4 (halbes Tempo]
AS 95 C5 D5
Na, Ga, Dha,
N Tin, Ghe, Sa
-3 -3 -3 120
120
Figure 4.1 Sandeep Bhagwati, Atish-e-Zaban (2006) for six solo voices, III: “Mere Hamdam Mere Dost” (from p. 1); the solo bass
voice sings “Refrain” and other elements not shown on this page, the otherfive singers sing the “Bordun” (drone). (Copyright ©
2006 by matramusic. Reprinted by permission.)
90 Sandeep Bhagwati
ornaments) of the North Indian khyal vocal tradition. 29 The vocal score of
Atish-e-Zaban represents a resolutely on-the-fence attitude to all the quan-
daries enumerated above. The example from the third movement shown in
Figure 4.1 provides many options and models which the singers can follow.
These models were developed from, but do not replicate Indian structural
music elements with the same names (taan, tihai, alankara, etc.). The nota-
tion is conceived for Western singers, but the voice quality and the musical
treatment of the models proposed in the score should ideally be that of
Indian singers. While Atish-e-Zaban was written for a specific ensemble
of Western-trained virtuoso singers—voices that are perfectly acceptable
to me with their specific eurological voice sounds—many elements in the
score, as well as the entire compositional realization of the piece would
also work well, perhaps even better, with trained khyal singers—were there
such a thing as a khyal ensemble.30
In a way, this comprovisation score tries to skirt and subvert the limi-
tations that both the concept of the geno-voice and that of the pheno-
voice have riddled us with—and in doing so it articulates, in writing and
in the sensual reality of music making, my aspirations and expectations for
a future possible cross-traditional amalgamation of embodied and experi-
mental voices: in Atish-e-Zaban, I have composed for six voices that I have
never really heard anywhere—Indian voices, but trained in all eurological
techniques and score reading. Imagining the other’s voice, always a utopian
proposition, has in this work mutated into a distinct hope—composing it
has expanded my personal sonic and musical imagination, and has made
me sensitive to the richness that the unknown sound of an other’s voice can
afford me—and how it can guide me through the many cultural layers of
my own musical imagination.
NOTES
1. “If we want to fi nd ourselves we must not descend into our inner world—
outside are we to be found, outside” (translated by the author).
2. A prominent example for an attempt at a reversal of these roles that remains
influential until the present is the idea of a “metaphysical” superiority of
instrumental over vocal music in early nineteenth-century music aesthet-
ics—an idea that had a deep impact on the codification of the Western
musical canon with its progressive marginalization of the voice in twentieth-
century music. One possible reason for this paradigm shift may lie in the fact
that the traditionally trained singing voice in European music, as it involves
a tightly focused remodeling of the very body of the singer, is much less ame-
nable to expanded, sonically flexible, and virtuosic sound production than
instruments can be (see further below).
3. Christopher Adler has introduced this term for the sound generated by Asian
music ensembles, where every instrument is assigned a specific function:
“The sonic result [ . . . ] is a highly consistent and distinctive textural identity,
which I propose may be understood as a normative sound: a sonic identity
characteristic of a type of ensemble, a body of repertoire, or an entire musical
tradition” (Adler 2007, 13).
4. Fischer-Dieskau incidentally died during the writing of this text.
5. Obviously, for Barthes, his concept of graininess implies authenticity,
although he does not make this explicit.
6. “as if we had to rediscover the most fathomless, archaic, and obscure aspect
of our vocality” (translated by the author).
7. I employ this term, coined by George E. Lewis in reference to certain forms of
jazz practiced in Europe (Lewis 1996), to designate music practiced around the
world that is based on the European heritage of musicking, composition, and
discourse. I find it to be more adequate within a global perspective than the
terms more conventionally used, such as “Western Classical Music,” “Western
Art Music,” or the falsely universalist term used for this musical tradition by
most musicologists in Europe and North America, namely “music.”
8. And, indeed, they have even become the object of musical satire, as in Mau-
ricio Kagel’s Blue’s Blue (1981) where he, as one reviewer wrote, “invents a
turn-of-the-century New Orleans blues singer with the rawest voice you’ve
ever heard” (Swed 1998).
9. The most analytic (and therefore instrument-like) guide to vocal technique
(and “voice orchestration”) is indeed Edgerton’s handbook The 21st Century
Voice (Edgerton 2005). An example of his minutely parameterized approach
to vocal technique is provided by a score excerpt of Friedrich’s Comma acces-
sible online on the composer’s website (http://michaeledwardedgerton.fi les.
wordpress.com/2011/04/friedrichs-comma-p-1.jpg [accessed June 6, 2012]).
Another example for his approach to voice can be found in the above-men-
tioned book in a page from his 1997 score Taff y Twisters for solo voice and
percussion (Edgerton 2005, 50).
10. “Indeed, in the twentieth century, voice was snatched away from singing
[ . . . ], a voice of which we do not know whether it expresses a subject or
whether it is a technical artifact” (translated by the author).
11. The popular stereotype that East Asians cannot differentiate between the Euro-
pean letters L and R draws on this observation, as does the inability of most
European speakers to perceive the different nasal and aspirated consonants in
several Indian languages as semantically relevant. My father, whose native lan-
guage is Gujarati, when he came to study in Germany in the 1950s carefully
noted down, in Devanagari script, all the different consonant variants he heard
in the Goethe Institute language school—and yet to this day he is occasionally
confused by the nonchalance with which German speakers (including his chil-
dren) often substitute one consonant sound for another, without noticing they
are different from each other, even when he gently points it out to them.
12. One of the few vocal compositions that actually aims to exploit this fact as
a sonic and aesthetic resource seems to be Kagel’s Tower of Babel for solo
singer (2002) where the same biblical text is set in 18 different languages.
13. In its deliberate insouciance, Kagel’s Exotica (1972) seems to most demon-
stratively exemplify (and thereby almost caricaturize) this position.
14. The grain here is not the Barthesian grain: Barthes sees the grain as a pars-
pro-toto term for (agreeable) noise in a “rough” voice, Gabor, Xenakis, and
Roads merely as a neutral and meaning-free, small subunit that is part of a
longer sound and destined to be recontextualized in a mass phenomenon.
15. Of course, these terms address only one aspect of all three approaches
mentioned—each of them also is concerned with other issues: Schaeffer was
interested in abstracting sounds from their anecdotal origin, Lachenmann
questions what constitutes a playing technique, the “granularists” were look-
ing for a sonically richer and more effective sound synthesis method as an
alternative to additive synthesis sounds.
16. A rather paradoxical solution, tackling the vocal/instrumental divide
head-on, would combine voice and instrument into one body/instrument:
92 Sandeep Bhagwati
“In Voix Instrumentalisée (1973), [Vinko] Globokar asks the bass clarinet
player [ . . . ] to sing, speak and blow into the bass clarinet while changing
the fi ngering and adding special effects with the voice and keyclick sounds”
(Behringer 2011).
17. This kind of specialization prevailed despite many important works by semi-
nal composers such as Luigi Nono (e.g., Sara dolce tacere, 1960), Dieter
Schnebel (e.g., glossolalie, 1959/1960), Giacinto Scelsi (e.g., Canti del Capri-
corno, 1962–1972), Trevor Wishart (e.g., Red Bird, 1979–1987), and many
more. See Chapters 8 and 3, Jörn Peter Hiekel’s and Christian Utz’s contribu-
tions to this volume, for a discussion of Scelsi’s Canti and the impact of vocal
performer Hirayama Michiko on this work.
Some of these specialized vocal performers have been and still are, in
no particular order: Hirayama Michiko, Linda Hirst, Joan La Barbara,
Cathy Berberian, Nicolas Isherwood, the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart,
Salome Kammer (there are, of course, more—but probably only a few dozen,
certainly not hundreds). Most other experimental singers also use a wide
range of such techniques, but not so much with the aim of singing music
conceived by others and potentially willing to use and master all known
and yet-to-be-discovered voice techniques—they rather tend to establish a
personal selection of some techniques as a sonic signature of their own cre-
ative work: these performers include David Moss, Diamanda Galas, Sainkho
Namchylak, Fatima Miranda, Meredith Monk, Shelley Hirsh, David Hykes,
Diamanda Galas, Laurie Anderson, Joane Hétu, db boyko, Jaap Blonk, etc.
Their approach resembles more that of the commercial singers discussed a
few lines below who create and market their own “special” voice sound.
18. I am aware that this list terribly dates me, the author—but any reader should
be able to easily supplant those names with more current extraordinary
voices in commercial music.
19. A borderline case may be Tan Dun’s A Sinking Love (1995) where he notates
tonal inflections of spoken classical Chinese—but where the actual voice
sounds are based on standard Western classical singing, not on the Chinese
opera voice. When he needs these sounds, such as in Marco Polo (1991–
1995), he, too, just asks for a Chinese opera singer.
20. This description mirrors the way Indian aesthetics views aesthetic commu-
nication in general (see Bhagwati 2012 on the concepts of bhava and rasa):
an inner thought or will arising from an individual soul (1), which leads to a
heightened state of awareness (2), then to the activation of an energy poten-
tial (3), and only then to a perceivable action (4). The point where instrumen-
tal music diverges from singing is in (3): the energy potential in instrumental
music must be activated in an outer action, not inside the body. This makes
the voice an intimate component of an inner (yogic) process connecting eter-
nal “space” (mind) to transient “earth” (material sound source)—whereas
the instrument can only mirror, mimic, or emulate this inner process.
21. Examples include the “egalitarian” orchestration principles that are a con-
sequence of dodecaphonic and serial composition techniques, to the quasi-
electronic use of singers in compositions like Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna for 16 solo
singers (1966) or Karin Rehnquist’s Davids nimm (1984), as well as Lachen-
mann’s complete integration of voice sounds into his sonic language in Les
Consolations for 16 voices and orchestra (1967–1968/1977–1978) (see also
Chapter 8, Jörn Peter Hiekel’s contribution to this volume).
22. It must be acknowledged though that Jean Baptiste Barrière’s experiments
in simulated voices (Chréode, 1983), or Paul Lansky’s granular voice experi-
ments in his Idle Chatter series (1994) have led to a distinct and new voice
aesthetic in electroacoustic music, and that many synthetic voice software
tools developed by IRCAM developers for the reconstruction of a male
castrato singer’s voice for the soundtrack of the fi lm Farinelli (1994) have
become part of the standard toolkit. But still, the impact and immediacy
an actual singing voice affords often is regarded with respectful reticence in
electroacoustic contexts—not without some justification: voices do tend to
“hug” the sonic “stage”! (The author’s source for this particular observation
are many personal conversations with practitioners in this field.)
23. An interesting non-eurological example for this is Aneesh Pradhan’s composi-
tion Samagam (2003) for dhrupad singer, khyal singer, tabla, tanpura, and
Western chamber orchestra. Dhrupad and khyal are North Indian vocal styles,
but very different from each other in many respects. In order to compose for
them, Pradhan abstracted melodic figures that, within the two styles, have dif-
ferent musical functions but are similar in gesture and pitch sequence—and
asked the singers to sing them “out of context,” i.e., not where they would
usually “fit,” but where he wanted them to happen. As Pradhan’s orchestra
arranger, I was part of the collaborative creative process leading to this work
(together with Shubha Mudgal, khyal, and Uday Bhawalkar, dhrupad), and
can testify to the inordinate difficulties and negotiations that were necessary
to make Pradhan’s idea feasible for the singers without relinquishing the emo-
tional intensity of their individual voices. These difficulties are the most prob-
able reason for the cautious approach to intertraditional/intercultural voice
composition shown by many otherwise quite adventurous composers.
24. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-Tune (accessed June 6, 2012).
25. My favorite, and highly successful, exception to this rule is Alejandro Viñao’s
composition Chant d’Ailleurs for soprano and computer (1992), a rich and
exhilarating ride through different degrees of vocal proximity, alterity, and
alienation, purporting to present three song-like chants from a fictional
culture.
26. First performed on April 17, 1998 at the Munich Biennale for Contemporary
Music Theatre, in collaboration with IRCAM Paris.
27. First performed on February 10, 2012 by the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart
and the Radiosinfonieorchester Stuttgart conducted by Matthias Pintscher.
28. First performed on July 26, 2006 at the ISCM World New Music Festival by
Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart.
29. Bol-syllables are not only the mnemonic devices they are often made out
to be: the musicians actually use them to compose, remember, and modify
rhythmic compositions, and then to convey them to colleagues and students;
bols are a rare example of an oral form of musical notation (cf. Bhagwati
2008).
30. One of the great difficulties in putting such an ensemble together would be
that Indian music does not employ any kind of concert pitch. Instead, every
singer has his/her own central pitch, which does not need to coincide with
any Western scale step. This leads to a proliferation of central pitches, and
instruments are usually built to fit a specific singer’s central pitch.
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94 Sandeep Bhagwati
Behringer, Felix. 2011. “Vinko Globokar (1934): Voix instrumentalisée (1973) for
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ity Closet, edited by Greg Ross, http://www.futilitycloset.com/2008/02/11/the-
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taires de France.
Deusen, Nancy van. 2001. “Voices from the Page: The Anthropology of Musical
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Ursula Schaefer and Edda Spielmann, Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 108–123.
Edgerton, Michael. 2005. The 21st-Century Voice: Contemporary and Traditional
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Giles, Howard. 1979. “Ethnicity Markers in Speech.” In Social Markers in Speech,
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Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. 1976. Das Gespräch über Gedichte (1903), in: Gesam-
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Hübl, Michael. 2010. “You Must Change Your Life: Peter Sloterdijk on High-Perfor-
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. 1999. “Birdsong and Human Speech: Common Themes and Mechanisms.”
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New York: Routledge.
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Musique, Paris: Gallimard/Calmann-Levy, 185–193.
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Part II
Voices of/in Art Music

5 Voice, Culture, and Ethnicity
in Contemporary Chinese
Compositions 1
Frederick Lau
The human voice has been employed widely in rituals, chants, and musical per-
formances for centuries and in every culture. Its emotional quality, expressive
power, and evocative capability are perceived to be extraordinary and superior
to those of musical instruments, thus making it the medium of choice in many
secular and sacred musical genres (see for example McClary 2004, 6; Sundra
2008; Rose 2004). Notwithstanding the voice’s emotional and magical quali-
ties, it is often thought that lyrics, i.e., language, is what brings concrete mean-
ings to vocal music. In Roland Barthes’s concept of pheno-song, the structure
of the sung language and coded rules of the vocal medium help to communi-
cate and present emotions (Barthes 1977, 182). The voice, in this particular
formulation, is construed primarily as a sonic carrier mediating words and
language. According to Barthes, pheno-song is defined by “everything in the
performance which is in the service of communication, representation, expres-
sion, everything which it is customary to talk about, which forms the tissue of
cultural values (the matter of acknowledged tastes, of fashions, of critical com-
mentaries)” (ibid.). By introducing geno-song as a complementary concept,
Barthes makes clear that there are versatile and multiple ways in which voices
convey meanings, and that viewing voice merely as a sonic carrier subservient
to words is insufficient to grasp voice as an expressive means.
We hear voices everywhere in our daily life in all sorts of modality, tonality,
inflection, frequency, and density. People make themselves heard by voicing
their opinion and by means of various vocal gestures and intonations with or
without words. Voice is the embodiment of meaning, emotion, and intentional-
ity transmitted to the receiver in what Edward Hall calls “high-context” com-
munication (Hall 1990). Vocality, the quality of being vocal, is undoubtedly
endowed with significance above and beyond the meaning provided by words.
As a product of the human body and a communicative medium, voice consti-
tutes the social and is grounded in the way people make sense of the world.
In exploring the territory between music and language, Feld and Fox
insightfully suggest that the voice, with its grain, timbre, and texture,
often grants meanings to music that transcend the referentiality of lan-
guage (Feld and Fox 1994). Their approach is to investigate the voice both
as “the embodiment of spoken and sung performance,” and, in a more
metaphoric sense, “as a key representational trope for social position and
100 Frederick Lau
power” (ibid., 26). Along these lines, Middleton (2006) asks how music
voices people into existence, Groenewegen (2010) discusses how a voice
embodies a tradition, a nation, or a generation, and Weidman (2006)
examines the politics of singing in Carnatic music and how singing ties to
postcolonial national discourse and notions of “Indianness.”
Vocal music, more so than other musical forms, is generally seen as closely
tied to a specific culture because of its connection to language, location,
timbre, and body. Roland Barthes’s insights into the relationship between
language and voice focus on what he calls the “grain” of the voice, “the
materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue” (1977, 181). Barthes
defi nes “grain” as the encounter between a voice and language; or, more
precisely, the voice, as a product of corporality and materiality of the body,
is in a “dual position, a dual production”of language and of music (ibid.,
182). While Barthes’s concern is strictly with expressiveness confi ned to an
individual in his/her corporality, I argue that his concept of voice within a
voice beyond the structure of language is applicable to the study of voice
and culture because individuals and society share a common logic of signi-
fying processes and aesthetic dispositions within the same habitus. Inevita-
bly, the connection between vocality and culture has led to the belief that a
culture or a group of people “own” certain sounds and that the ethnicity of
vocal music is always easily identifiable (Bohlman and Randano 2000, 6).
However, simple associative connections of vocal quality to ethnicity come
into question when applied to contemporary compositions in which creativ-
ity and originality often motivate composers to go beyond conventions and
disrupt traditional practice and thinking. As a result, new compositional
strategies and techniques often mask issues of race, ethnicity, and colonial
history, and are justified in the name of art, originality, and innovation
(ibid., Olwage 2004). Vocal and cultural references in contemporary com-
positions that may seem obviously “ethnic” to listeners cannot be so eas-
ily essentialized. In the works of contemporary composers, they are often
part of complex sets of associations that are fi ltered through the politics of
sound and creative processes.
The voice is, therefore, a priori a product of a particular culture, con-
text, and group of people. The human voice, like music, is by nature
“racialized” (Bohlman and Randano 2000). Sentiments evoked in an Ital-
ian madrigal are intrinsically different from that of Japanese nō-theater
singing because voice, timbre, lyrics, articulation, and the overall sonic
aesthetic foundation are culturally defi ned and codified. Vocal strategies
in manipulating the tonal quality and the text such as layering, melisma,
text painting, and padding inadvertently and simultaneously accentuate
the voice’s ethnic underpinnings. A productive discussion of the voice
thus has to include viewing human beings as cultured bodies and social
agents. Vocalization, according to Steven Feld and Aaron Fox, is an
inherently social act insofar as vocal style and inflection serve as indices
of place, class, gender, religion, ethnicity, and identity (Feld and Fox
1994, 38–39).
Voice, Culture, and Ethnicity 101
This chapter focuses on the Chinese voice, in particular the adaptation,
utilization, and re-signification of Western vocal production in China. I
intend to reveal the complexity of the way musical and social voices are cre-
ated, heard, and interpreted in the twentieth-century Chinese context. My
assumption is that voice is more than just a carrier that is subordinated to
its referential content, meaning, and message. Using recent Chinese vocal
compositions that testify to a new aesthetics of voice as examples, I explore
the ways contemporary Chinese composers tackle this issue and make
social sense of vocal practice and production. I argue that using text and
language in music requires composers to employ strategies of intervention
that disrupt the linkages between voice, culture, and ethnicity, and assert
reinterpretations of tradition and language.
In many contemporary Western compositions, the use of extended vocal
technique often intentionally goes beyond everyday speech by includ-
ing vocables and unconventional utterances that are nonexistent in most
Western languages. While these special effects have provided endless cre-
ative possibilities for non-Asian composers, many of these sounds, includ-
ing tonal inflection, pitch bending, non-pitched aspiration, or heightened
speech, are culturally and semantically significant in many Asian languages
(see for example Yung 1983).
Considering language as a primary expression of cultural and ideologi-
cal difference makes clear that the use of text or vocality in a piece of
music inevitably inscribes a composition with ethnic identity. Is it possible,
then, for Asian composers to utilize the same vocal techniques employed
by Western composers without evoking the culture-specific Asian meanings
of these sounds? Do certain sounds or vocal utterances, such as height-
ened speech in Beijing opera and Chinese rituals or the drummers’ calls in
nō-theater, “belong” to specific cultures? In other words, to what extent
are vocal utterances already embodied in the social construction of ethnic-
ity? How can composers resolve the interrelationship of language, music,
and ethnicity?
CHEN YI: CHINESE POEMS FOR A SIX-GIRL CHORUS (1999)2
Chen Yi’s Chinese Poems for a Six-Girl Chorus (Zhongguo gushi

hechang wu shou, 1999) was written for a six-part girls’ choir with
piano accompaniment. The work consists of five short movements,
each with its own characteristics and specifi c treatments of the voice.
Three poems were written by the prominent Tang dynasty poets Li Bo
(701–762) and Wang Zhihuan (688–742), two were selected from the
Yuefu collection of poems, an anthology of ancient Chinese folk poems
and songs, compiled by Guo Maoqian during the Song dynasty in the
twelfth century. The piece is composed in a way that is reminiscent of
an early twentieth-century practice of combining pentatonic melodies
with Western harmony. But Chen forsakes common-practice Western
102 Frederick Lau
harmony by creatively imposing a harmonic structure that both chal-
lenges and surprises listeners’ expectations. While reminding audiences
of the signature pentatonicism of Chinese folk song, she mixes in subtle
atonality in her harmony. On top of this, she injects a series of vocal
techniques that are common in Chinese vocal genres, such as glissandi,
murmurs, and tonal infl ections.
As in most Chinese poetry, the five poems describe deep emotions
experienced through the beauty of nature and scenic landscapes. The
traditional way of “reading” Chinese poetry is based on several vocal
delivery techniques such as yin (recite in a singing fashion), song (recite),
nian (speak), or du (read) (Cai 2007). These vocal styles contain a broad
range of musical delivery techniques ranging from simple reading, to
reciting in rhythm and rhyme, to chanting in a manner between reading
and singing a melody. These various ways of “voicing” poems are part of
the literati practice of poetry reading (ibid.). Given this cultural founda-
tion of “reading” Chinese poetry, it is interesting to see how composers
negotiate creativity, originality, and established convention of rendering
Chinese poetry in sound.
In the fi rst movement (Figure 5.1 Part I), which sets the poem “Up
the Crane Tower” (Deng guan que lou) by Wang Zhihuan, the vocal
composition is reminiscent of the style and melodic contour in tradi-
tional Chinese work songs (haozi) or group singing during communist
collective labor movements after the 1949 Communist Revolution and
during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1960). The vocal melody might
remind knowledgeable listeners of the contour in xipi tune-type in Bei-
jing opera. The staggered vocal parts, accentuated by trochaic rhythmic
figures (a sixteenth note followed by a dotted eighth note, see Figure
5.1, mm. 1, 3–5), are built on melodic gestures typically found in Chi-
nese folk song genres such as errentai, hua’er, haozi, and xintianyou
from Shanxi, Shaanxi, Inner Mongolia, and Yunnan. 3 The insertion of
non-semantic syllables, emotionally charged vocal utterances between
the text lines, in this movement refers to another vocal dimension com-
monly found in Chinese folk songs where it serves to enhance density,
atmosphere, and collectivity.
The second piece “Picking the Seedpods of the Lotus” (Jiangnan ke
cai lian) references a folk song from the Jiangnan region south of the
Yangtze River. Here, Chen Yi makes use of glissandi derived from tonal
inflections of the Chinese language, providing another timbral and eth-
nic marker. The vocal quality resembles that of the dialects spoken in
Southern China and the tonal inflections add a strong Chinese “fl avor”
to the music. By selecting fragments of the text such as the words dong
(east), xi (west), nan (south), bei (north), yu (fi sh), xi (opera), ye (leaf) as
melodic and rhythmic motifs, the composer does not follow the poem
verbatim but turns the articulation of the text into a rhythmic device for
the entire piece (see Figure 5.1 Part II).
«« Energetic
Yo
1 fP
1
/ •mfY°.
Yo- H Yo Yo
Yo_
rfYc fP
2
/
Yo mf Yo
Yo Yo Yo
/ mfY° / fP
3
mf
Yo Yo Yo
Yo Yo Yo.
rfY° f unis. fP
4
mf
Yo Yo Yo
Yo
6 f P
unis.
1
Yo Yo
ff
unis f P
2
Yo Yo
ff: PI' unis

/ t
3
Yo Yo Bai_
unis.
P
4
./£ 'p'p
/
Yo Yo Bai
12 mp
1
Bai Ri Yi Shan Jin Huang He
. mp
2
Bai— Ri Yu Shan Jin Huang He
•mp
3
Ri Yi Shan Jin Huang He Y o — Yo
irm
4
Ri Yi Shan Jin Huang He Yo— Yo
Figure 5.1 Part I. Chen Yi, Chinese Poems, I. “Up the Crane Tower,” mm. 1–12.
(Copyright © 2000 by Theodore Presser Company. International copyright
secured. All rights reserved. Used with permission.)
104 Frederick Lau
9
VI
You You You You
IV
You You You You
III
Xi Nan Bei Dong Xi Lian Ye
I+II
Xi Nan Bei_ Dong Xi
slow gliss.up & down

13
VI
P
Yu Xi
P
V
Dong Xi Lian Ye
You You You You
IV
You You You You You
III
Nan Bei Lian Ye Dong Lian Ye Xi Lian Ye Nan
I+II
Nan Bei_ Dong Xi Nan
Figure 5.1 Part II. Chen Yi, Chinese Poems, II. “Picking the Seedpods of the
Lotus,” mm. 9–12. (Copyright © 2000 by Theodore Presser Company. Interna-
tional copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used with permission.)
The third movement is based on the poem “Night Thoughts” (Ye si) by
Li Bo, the fourth movement (Chile ge) on an ancient folk song of the Chile
minority in Northern China (fifth to sixth century). Both movements are
dominated by pentatonicism, melismatic passages, often sung in unison with
the melody characterized by large leaps. Thefifth movement is based on “The
Cataract of Mount Lu” (Wang Lushan pubu) by Li Bo. The composer relied
on the rhythm of spoken words, whispers, whistles, and clapping to create an
accompaniment on which a repetitive melody unfolds, rather than referenc-
ing culture-specific timbral or vocal gestures. We hear a clear use of Chinese
speech tones, pentatonic melody, and a prominent use of glissando, elements
that are derived from the conventions of the tonal Chinese language but with-
out the specific linguistic and cultural implications of vocal timbre that were
alluded to in the preceding movements. The piece ends with another penta-
tonic melody followed by a short section of vocal whispers and utterances.
Chen Yi’s use of the voice in this piece demonstrates her ability to incorpo-
rate different conventions of reciting Chinese poetry and yet she transcends
these conventions in order to recast them in a contemporary context. On the
one hand, one can easily hear that the vocal pattern and design serve as a
sonic device for expressing the meaning of the words. On the other hand, the
voice is also being used as an expression of Chen’s positionality as a contem-
porary composer from China who has experienced many different folk songs
and regional instrumental styles firsthand and is able to utilize materials from
different aspects of Chinese culture in writing for a US group of vocal perform-
ers. Due to the use of the Chinese language, the total effect to a non-Chinese
speaker would remain mostly at a sonic level, without semantic reference and
without an understanding of the cultural and emotional meaning emanating
from the text. To someone who knows the language, however, this piece pres-
ents two distinct voices: an intercultural “Chinese” composition for a global
audience and the voice of a diasporic Chinese composer writing for a contem-
porary local (American) audience. The latter “voice” is only audible within
the specific cultural and political time frame of the late twentieth and early
twenty-first century marked by the rise and prominence of China on the global
political stage, coupled with the global popularity and widespread acceptance
of Chinese culture.
CHAN HING-YAN: LACHRIMAE FLORARUM (2001)
Similar to Chen Yi, Hong Kong-based composer Chan Hing-Yan also evokes
the power of centuries-old Chinese literary tradition in his composition Lach-
rimae Florarum (Si hua hai si fei hua, 2001). This choral piece is based on
the ci-poem “Willow Catkins” (Ci yun Zhang Zhifu yanghua ci) by the Song
dynasty poet Su Shi (Su Dongpo, 1037–1101) and the labeled tune (qupai)
shuilongyin (water dragon chant). Ci-poetry is a type of classical Chinese
poetry using patterns of fixed rhythm, fixed tone, and variable line-length (also
known as changduanqu, “long and short lines”), which were originally set to
a precomposed melody known as qupai. The structure and melodic content of
the qupai thus predetermined how the lines of the ci-poetry were composed
with regard to length, rhythm, and tonal inflection. In his piece, Chan reversed
this process by selecting the words of the ci-poetry and setting it to his own
compositional structure, rather than using the pre-existing qupai melody. His
musical writing is nevertheless highly suggestive of the traditional style of recit-
ing ci-poetry.
The piece is a one-movement choral setting scored for six voices (SATB
with the soprano and bass divided into two parts) and harp. It contains
seven sections which follow the grouping and paragraph breaks of the
106 Frederick Lau
poem. The sections are separated by pauses ranging from three to ten
seconds. The rhythmic design of the vocal parts is based on the meter of
the verses, while the melodic lines are derived from the composer’s own
recitation of the text, with special attention given to the speech tones
of standard Mandarin (putonghua) and the Cantonese dialect (personal
communication, Hong Kong, March 2007). Although rhyme and rhythm
of the lines provide a basic melodic and rhythmic framework, there is
still space for creative input from the perspective of the reciter/composer
concerning the performance of the text, depending on the interpretation
of the text and the specific tonal property of the dialect used in enunci-
ating the text, since the tonal property changes from dialect to dialect.
The melodic contour mostly is kept within a narrow range, resulting in a
frequent use of major and minor seconds. The constant meter change cre-
ates a sense of freedom that follows the grouping of words in the text. To
enhance his personal understanding of the emotional content of the text,
Chan incorporates a range of extended vocal techniques which include
unpitched recitation, monodic incantation, isolation of meaningless syl-
lables and phonemes, and whispers, along with vocal techniques such as
Sprechstimme, tonal inflection, glissando, toneless utterances, buzzing
of the lips, etc. Although isolated, non-lexical syllables in traditional
musical contexts are often considered rhythmic fi ller and semantically
ambiguous, they can sometimes be meaningful and symbolic. In Georgia,
for example, non-lexical vocables are associated with particular genres
such as the funeral lament, work songs, and the circle dance (Ninoshvili
2009, 409). In Chen’s piece non-lexical vocables are certainly meaning-
ful and they are used to establish specific atmospheres. In the passage
shown in Figure 5.2 the three female voices are re-creating the sound of
wind by repeating the vowels i-u-i-u-i in an non-metered passage juxta-
posed to the three male voices singing the syllables ha-ta-hu in 4/4-me-
ter. This creates a strong contrast between text-based and non-semantic
sections in the piece. In general, the coherence of the composition lies in
the recurring use of vocal devices that straddle traditional recitation of
Chinese ci-poems and a contemporary voice.
Chan’s vocal treatment reminds one of the use of the voice in works
such as George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children (1970) and Luciano
Berio’s Sequenza III for solo female voice (1966). In these works, the
composers intentionally disrupt the traditional role of the voice by using
it both as carrier of sound and carrier of meaning. They attempt to
decouple the voice from its conventional role of transmitting the mean-
ing of words and a text in a linear manner.
One of the most noticeable features in Chan’s treatment of the voice
is his design of spoken passages. Figure 5.3 shows an example of pitch-
less recitation of the text which functions as a recurring motif in the
piece. His way of recitation is creative in terms of its rhythmic arrange-
ment of the lyrics. One of the most conventional ways in reciting this
line, “si hua hai si fei hua,” is to put the fi rst two words si and hua
Wind-Sound (S.I, S.II & A.J: while producing a continents buzzing sound,
the lips form alternating vowel positions! Except for the entries, no need to coordinate!
>Pca : 112-120
F pp »f. .pp
\Keep repealing 1-measure "wind-sound" effect!\
S.I
i-u-i-u - i-u-i
zz
pp. ™f: pp
S.II \Keep repeating 1-mmsure "mnd-sound" effect !\
i-u-i-u-i-u-i
PP •*= pp \Keep repeating 1-measure ~iundsouud"effect!

A.
i-u-i-u-i-u-i 4 fen = 112-120, very freely, like falling petals
I
zz
T.
ta hu ta Hu
wp /
Bar.
[start rehearsal no. 4 after
5" of "wind-sound"]
ha
wp
B.
ha ta hu
Figure 5.2 Chan Hing-Yan, Lachrimae Florarum, at rehearsal no. 3 (p. 2). (Copy-
right © 2001 by Chan Hing-Yan.)
\whisper, breathy1\
T.
sihuahai si feihualsi huahai si feihua!

Jp :/: P
\whisper, breathyl\ i
Bar.
sihuahai si feihua! si huahai si feihua!

JP
\whi$per, breathy!
-P
B.
sihuahai si feihual si huahai sifei hua!

JP f P
Figure 5.3 Chan Hing-Yan, Lachrimae Florarum, after rehearsal no. 6 (p. 4).
(Copyright © 2001 by Chan Hing-Yan.)
108 Frederick Lau
as close to each other as possible and to lengthen the words hua and
fei. Chen’s treatment, however, gives each word the same duration and
thus disrupts the expectation of the (Chinese) audience. In his work, he
thus not only makes tangential reference to the conventional manner
of reciting ci-poetry but also creatively alters the emotional impact of
the lyrics.
DISCUSSION
The two pieces discussed here share similar characteristics. Both were
written for a contemporary vocal ensemble exclusively trained in Western
vocal technique, and both are based largely on non-functional and non-
triadic harmony. The fact that both works are settings of ancient Chinese
poetry predominantly sung in putonghua (Mandarin), the official Chinese
language, inevitably brings up questions of history, culture, ethnicity, and
identity. The composers have incorporated Chinese vocal elements into
a Western frame and expressed Chinese sentiments in a chorus, a vocal
ensemble type originally imported from the West. It is likely that contem-
porary music audiences read this music as fusion, hybrid, or intercultural.
However, if we consider the voice both as a carrier of sounds and a carrier
of meaning, then we can assume that there is something more going on
in the music. In order to better understand the way these composers have
incorporated cultural or ethnic layers of vocality into their works as well
as how these are received, one needs to understand how vocal quality in
the Chinese context historically has been conceived and perceived. As
vocal music’s “poetic de-referentializing of language heightens the sym-
bolic efficacy of its affecting discourse,” it also becomes “a key resource
in both the construction and the critical inversion of social order” (Feld
and Fox 1994, 43). Read against the history of the reception of Western
vocal techniques in China, some vocal elements in Chen’s and Chan’s
pieces that may seem extremely innovative, and a radical break from
established vocal concepts and aesthetics, might in fact be considered
rather “traditional.”
In traditional Chinese music, vocal timbre is often associated with extra-
musical meanings rather than treated as mere sonic effect. This is perhaps
compounded by the fact that Chinese languages and dialects are tonal lan-
guages in which timbre and vocal quality are crucial markers of locale and
regions. Frith insightfully points out that a person’s voice is a signature that
enables listeners immediately to recognize who is speaking and from where
one is speaking (1998, 184). Apart from their function to heighten dramatic
effects and emotions, the qualities of voice and timbre thus serve as mark-
ers of social, ethnic, regional, and musical identity. In Chinese folk songs
(min’ge) timbre is generally characterized as cukuang (rough) and cucao
(rustic). These qualities are diametrically opposed to those found in elite
genres such as shuochang narrative, xiqu opera, si- or ci-poetry. As a mani-
festation of social class, vocal qualities in these literati genres are character-
ized as refi ned (xini), elegant (youya), and civil (wenya). Similarly, the open
vocal style and polyphony treatment of the Northwestern Chinese minority
Dong genre dage epitomizes the tendency to distinguish the uniqueness of
minority singing from that of the Han majority with its stylized, nasal, and
shrill vocal quality of Beijing opera and kunqu opera. All these cases sug-
gest that timbre and vocal quality function not only as “carriers of sounds”
but also as carriers of social meaning, as signifiers indexing class, status,
and ethnicity (Frith 1998, 184).
However, in recent years, this dual function of vocal quality and timbre
has been gradually eroded due to changes in vocal production. In China, the
early twentieth century ushered in a new age of singing brought on by the
introduction of “school songs” (xuetang yuege) and the emergence of a new
tradition of Chinese “art songs” (yishu gequ). Based on models borrowed
from Japanese school songs and European folk songs, xuetang yuege were
officially introduced in 1902 by the Chinese government as a compulsory sub-
ject in the newly implemented school system music curriculum. Using singing
as the primary musical activity, these early school songs were intended for the
cultivation of a modern personhood as part of the education reform spear-
headed by reformers such as Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao
(1873–1929). In a proposal presented to the imperial Qing court, Kang and
Liang suggested that since schools in foreign countries all have singing classes,
a viable educational reform must include music as a major subject. Liang fur-
ther proposed that every class should have a singing class every day (Liu 2010,
30). As part of this reform, a large number of new school songs were com-
posed by a group of reformist composers who were trained in Japan, such
as Shen Xingong (1869–1947), Li Shutong (1880–1942), and Zeng Zhiwen
(1879–1929). These new songs were modeled on songs from Japan and Ger-
many (ibid., 33). The themes of these songs were didactic in nature, ranging
from anti-feudal slogans to promoting democracy, national unity, revival of
the Chinese nation, anti-superstition, civic responsibility, and promotion of
science (ibid., 44). As a new subject inspired by imported knowledge and prac-
tice, these songs required a kind of singing that was drastically different from
that of traditional vocal genres.
Xuetang yuege emphasized simple and uniform texts in a syllabic style
and in an easily comprehensible vernacular language. An example by Shen
Xingong shall demonstrate the simplistic approach to setting voice to mel-
ody in a syllabic style. The duple-metered song is entitled “Nan’er di yi zhi
qigao” (The most important thing for a young man is to have aspiration),
and was later renamed “Ticao” (“Physical exercise,” Figure 5.4). Composed
in 1902, it is Shen’s fi rst composition in this genre and the fi rst Chinese
school song ever written (Qian 2001, 1). It was a well-known song across
the country since it was promoted in all school music classes. Another pio-
neer of this genre, Li Shutong, reported in 1906 that even those students
110 Frederick Lau
Figure 5.4 Shen Xingong, “Ticao” (“Physical exercise,” transcribed from

Liu 2010, 43).
who “didn’t know how to sing the scales” would be able to sing this song in
high spirit (ibid.). The language used was vernacular Mandarin rather than
classical Chinese. With the use of simple melody and harmonic progression,
the singing of xuetang yuege was determined as part of political reform to
“saving the nation” and the “construct of a modern personhood.” Singing
in groups and choral music quickly took root across the nation. This trend
also planted the seeds for the foundation for the rapid development of Chi-
nese choral music in the following decades.
A visible result alongside the popularization of xuetang yuege was the
emergence of group singing using a new kind of vocal production different
from that of traditional regional folk songs. This development has inad-
vertently altered the aesthetic preferences attributed to the Chinese voice.
Under the influence of xuetang yuege, vocal music became an important
genre in schools and in the May Fourth Movement, resulting in a large
number of new school songs as well as in the development of a new art
song tradition. Inspired by the European nineteenth-century art song tra-
dition, especially by the German Lied, composers such as Zhao Yuanren
(Chao Yuan Ren), Huang Zi, and Xian Xinghai began to compose solo
art songs in Chinese in the 1930s (Liu 2010, 185; Wang 2002, 113–134).
The Chinese art songs (yishu gequ) adopted the most prominent Western
vocal techniques, the German Lied style and the Italian operatic bel canto
style. Both are generically known by the Chinese name “beautiful sing-
ing method” (meisheng changfa) collectively. The reception of meisheng
changfa greatly altered vocal production and timbre in China.
Beginning in the 1920s, meisheng changfa was popularized in urban
areas and conservatories of China. Meisheng changfa stresses evenness and
extreme smoothness of vocal timbre. The voice quality is open and relies
on a head tone as opposed to traditional Chinese techniques that included
compressing the chest or throat. The voice quality produced by meisheng
changfa is resonant, pure, and contains a tremendously sweet timbre. In
contrast, traditional Chinese singing is nasal, throaty, and reliant on the
front part of the oral cavity for projection. In sum, bel canto singing is
antithetical to traditional Chinese vocal technique.
As a vocal technique introduced from Europe, bel canto was also nick-
named yangsangzi (foreign voice) in China. Like in similar expressions
used for most imported European concepts and practices, the prefi x yang
(foreign) connoted a sense of superiority, modernity, and sophistication.
Bel canto by many Chinese musicians was considered superior to the tra-
ditional Chinese voice and an icon of musical modernity. In the notes to
one of his most famous art songs “Jiao wo ruhe bu xiang ta” (How can I
not think of her), the composer Zhao Yuanren states that the singer has
to be emotionally immersed in singing the song (Liu 2010, 149). On the
technical side, Zhao expected the vocal sound to be round when singing
fast notes but to use vibrato when singing long notes (ibid.). The use of
vibrato and round tone, techniques from bel canto singing, are markers of
expressivity and represented newness and modernity. Shanghai-born and
now Hong Kong-based soprano Barbara Fei Mingyi (b. 1931) recounts
how in her early training under the famous composer and vocalist Zhao
Meibo (Chao Mei-Pa) she was criticized during her fi rst few lessons for
having no formal vocal training; subsequently she was introduced to West-
ern vocal techniques (Fei et al. 2008, 65). The preference and reverence for
a Western vocal sound was in vogue in cosmopolitan Shanghai and Hong
Kong music circles (Law and Yang 2009). As a result, traditional Chinese
singing style and method were often called tusangzi (earthbound voice) by
those trained in Western music, where the prefi x tu- implies backwardness
and unsophistication.
Bel canto was popularized mostly in urban areas while Chinese tradi-
tional singing continued to be performed and listened to in rural areas and
villages. Based on Western notions of modernity, Chinese intellectuals and
artists inserted vocal timbre into a hierarchical discourse of race and class.
As understood in the Chinese context, the term race refers to people of vari-
ous foreign countries. According to this thinking, the meisheng changfa
vocal quality, singing style, and timbre in China since the twentieth cen-
tury has been racialized and measured as a sign of progress and moder-
nity. Within the logic of the May Fourth Movement, meisheng changfa and
bel canto have been positioned as progressive anti-backwardness against
which traditional vocal quality is measured. It is via this modern-tradition-
al-binary that Chinese vocal timbre has been mapped onto a discourse of
ethnicity and authenticity.
Given the historical background of Chinese singing styles and their
changing significance since the early twentieth century, it is clear that the
112 Frederick Lau
Chinese voice and its political implications present a challenge for compos-
ers. The compositions by Chen Yi and Chan Hing-Yan I have described
above are particularly innovative in terms of their use of the voice as an
articulator of meaning. Rather than using vocal techniques from tradi-
tional Chinese vocal genres, these composers disrupt the traditional Chi-
nese use of language and timbre. Relying on a homogenized vocal timbre
they generate a clean slate where new meaning can be voiced into existence
and cultural memory minimized to the point where the composers are free
to manipulate the text in creative ways, such as taking fragments of text
and turning them into melodic and rhythmic motives. The melogenic treat-
ment of vocal sounds, which tends to obscure the meaning of the words,
blurs the boundaries between music and language and creates a new space
in which a new sense of “Chineseness” can be articulated.
The relationship between speech tone and meaning in traditional Chinese
music is of utmost importance. Bell Yung argues that in Cantonese opera
the treatment of text, the “text-setting,” hinges on paying close attention
to the relationship of speech tone and melody and is an essential aspect of
the creative process (Yung 1983, 297). By largely circumventing this unique
traditional compositional procedure and by creatively manipulating speech
tones, many contemporary Chinese composers extend musical signification
to all musical parameters rather than merely relying on timbral, tonal, or
rhythmic properties inherent to the lyrics. This also applies to the use of the
voice in Chinese popular music. With its strong resemblance to Western pop
music style, the originality and ethnic/national specificity of China’s popu-
lar music is often considered inseparable from a nationalist, state-governed
discourse (see Chapter 11, Andreas Steen’s contribution to this volume). In
a study of minority pop music from Inner Mongolia and China’s western
region Xinjiang, Nimrod Baranovitch argues that in China’s popular music
new voices and sounds are closely intertwined with politics, despite musical
innovations and expansions of vocal strategies: “For close to three decades
in China after 1949, one could hear in public a single voice, that of the
party-state” (Baranovitch 2003, 1).
In traditional Chinese music genres, sound quality is the most immediately
recognizable social marker. When Chinese musicians began to adopt Western
singing in the early twentieth century, a new identity marker was imposed on
the music, re- and displacing traditional Chinese vocal timbre. In the “moder-
nity” of the xuetang yuege, the signifier of ethnic specificity—the voice—was
filtered through a new vernacular baihua language, which was considered a
more elite, intellectualized, and formalized expression of culture rather than
the “backwardness” invoked by traditional timbre, sound, and vocalization.
The use of Chinese vernacular together with a new school song vocal qual-
ity has thus become the sonic marker of xuetang yuege and subsequently
altered and expanded the Chinese concept of vocal aesthetic. As Christine
Yano, Simon Frith, and others have argued, vocal technique and the aesthet-
ics of voice are culturally produced and can be associated with many types
of identity—national, gendered, instrumental, ethnic. The music of Japanese
enka, according to Yano, is more than a pop music genre but is imprinted
bodily on its listeners. This process establishes a set of familiar musical and
emotional expectations that function as a kind of musical habitus and allows
the listener to “consume the song at a primal level, through direct emotional,
even bodily, appeal” (Yano 2003, 91). If voice can create and bring out unspo-
ken but deeply felt sentiments that transcend the mundane and everyday life,
then it can be co-opted in the discourse of the nation and identity formation.
Amanda Weidman makes a poignant point in her provocative study of the
voice in Indian Carnatic music:
The valorization of the voice in Karnatic music is part of a distinctly

modern set of ideas about music, the self, and Indianness. The voice,
in twentieth-century discourse about this music, has been figured as a
realm of pure Indianness, untouched by colonialism or worldly con-
cerns, the element that gives the music both its distinctive Indianness
and its ability to exist as part of a continuous “civilizational” tradition,
unaffected by history (Weidman 2006, 287).
What is considered a coarse and raspy vocal quality, an impure tone, or

nasal utterance by outsiders may be perceived by insiders as beautiful, mean-
ingful, and an embodiment of cultural references and history. In the creative
process, the politics of voice are never constant and neutral but a construction
situated within the terrain of the cultural imaginary. By adopting a homoge-
nous Western singing style since the early twentieth century, Chinese compos-
ers on the one hand have inadvertently abandoned the close synergy between
language and vocal expression and thus the function of the voice as a carrier
of meaning within the context of traditional Chinese vocal music. On the
other hand, the shift of the voice to being solely an “instrument” of sound
has not diminished the expressive power of more recent Chinese vocal music.
Instead it has opened up avenues for composers to reimagine voice and text in
creative ways. The quality of sound is at once personal and implicated in the
politics of identity, ethnicity, and the wider world in which it and the music
are situated. No matter how innovative a composer’s use of voice in contem-
porary compositions, decisions of how to utilize the voice or vocal elements
are still embedded in the political trajectories along which music has traveled.
Taking all this into perspective, the voice is the very substance that constitutes
subjectivity, agency, power, authenticity, cultural imagination, and metaphor,
all set in a specific locale and historical moment when the voice is singing.
NOTES
1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference “Unlim-

ited Voices: Contemporary Vocal Music in the Era of Globalization” at the
University of Tokyo (March 8–9, 2008; see Acknowledgments, this volume)
114 Frederick Lau
on March 9, 2008. I would like to thank Christian Utz and Hermann Gott-
schewski for inviting me to this conference. The meeting was theoretically
provocative and engaging. I appreciate all the comments I have received at
the conference and during my revision.
2. A complete recording of this piece can be heard at http://www.myspace.com/
composerchenyi/music/songs/chinese-poems-by-chen-yi-9379104 (accessed
May 17, 2012).
3. The treatment of the voice in Chinese traditional vocal music is documented
on a recent CD entitled Songs of the Land in China: Labor Songs and Love
Songs, released by Fengchao Yousheng Chubanshe in 2001, in which 31
pieces of various types of traditional folk genres are presented.
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6 Narrative, Voice, and Reality in
the Operas by Hosokawa Toshio
and Mochizuki Misato
Fuyuko Fukunaka
The question of how I would be able to write what may be called a

“Japanese opera” has been nagging me day and night. [ . . . ] There are
several problems, such as the problem of subject-matter, of the rela-
tionship between music and drama, of musical style, and of onstage
production, but most urgent is that of libretto (Shimizu Osamu in
Hatanaka et al. 1958, 54, translated by the author).
My thoughts about opera did not change at all even after I saw the
production [of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly] indeed. We need to rid
operatic scores of anything unnatural. We need to present the world as
real as possible (Yamada 1930, 232, translated by the author).
The composer Shimizu Osamu (1911–1986) has often been credited with
having set the postwar Japanese trend of writing operas based on stories
of Japanese origin (often folktales) with his Shuzenji Monogatari (The tale
of Shuzenji, 1954), along with Dan Ikuma’s (1924–2001) Yūzuru (The eve-
ning crane, 1952). Shimizu’s concern stated in the fi rst quotation, part of
a 1958 round-table talk, may at fi rst seem to have little relevancy to the
second quotation, words from Yamada Kósçak (1886–1965). Studying in
Germany for four years in the early 1910s, Yamada made himself one of
the “fi rst” Japanese composers that fully assimilated the vocabulary of
Western art music. In particular, he ardently advocated the creation of real
“European” opera by Japanese composers, and in 1940 introduced a grand
opéra japonais with his Yoake—Kurofune (The dawn—the black ships),
which in many ways established an operatic prototype for Japan’s future
generations of composers.
During the round-table talk Shimizu and four other musicians—a critic,
two composers, and a singer—discussed “difficulties” facing modern-day
Japanese composers attempting to write “good” operas, and it is clear that
they believed what prevented composers from writing full-fledged stage
works was, primarily, an absence of experienced libretto writers. They
also suggested that what would amount to a good libretto comes from the
Narrative, Voice, and Reality in the Operas 117
amalgamation of plausible drama, well-portrayed characters, and a solid,
reasonable plot—in other words, characters who behave real on stage.
That this “reality” does not mean the sort of “realism” in, say, Arnold
Schoenberg’s Von heute auf morgen (1928–29), probably needs not be
emphasized. The word “real” here is instead to be interpreted as signifying
a dramatic framework that heavily draws upon the logic of causality—a
closed plot that unfolds in a syntactically continuous manner from scene
to scene. Yamada’s prewar claim lies in the same line of thought and is
particularly remarkable for using the words “unnatural” (fushizen) and
“real” (riaru) side by side. He seems to argue that the kind of causality as
observed in natural phenomena that call for explanation, not interpreta-
tion, would be essential for opera to take root in Japan’s music culture.
Indeed, his opera Yoake presents itself as a clear example of musical and
textual actions unfolding in a linear narrative, whereby characters would
appear reasonable, convincing, and (if necessary) sympathizable.
The pursuit of a narrative based on causality—often contextualized in
the larger framework of Operaturgie, a term that appeared repeatedly in
Japanese talks and essays of the 1950s and 1960s to round up the con-
ditions necessary for writing a good opera (Chōki 2010, 259)—may not
have appeared out of place back then, given that opera was still quite a
traditional (i.e., conservative) genre: the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt,
for example, had not yet been added to the vocabulary of opera compos-
ers and librettists in Japan. However, how about Japanese composers of
the post-Staatstheater generations, who have witnessed and experienced,
fi rsthand, contemporary music, opera, and theater in Europe from the
1970s onwards? In a time of great suspicion against grand narratives and
of a search for “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1988), how would these
younger composers react to operas that drew on folktale (or similar) char-
acters that explain themselves, thus furnishing what Barthes calls the “illu-
sion of totality” (1971, 77)? It is in this light that this chapter takes a look
into the stage works of Hosokawa Toshio (b. 1955) and Mochizuki Misato
(b. 1969), both of whom have been highly visible in the music scenes in
Europe since the 1990s. My argument is that Hosokawa and Mochizuki,
aversive to linear narrativity as well as to the idea of onstage actors as
unified bodies, have renewed onstage physicality—focusing on a physical
presence that is disunity, rather than unity. Vague though it may be, this
“decentered” physicality—enacted by characters who accumulate con-
flicting images—may fi nd an adequate explanation in the “postscript” to
Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980). There Eco refers to the Latin
hexameter he quoted on the last page of the novel:1 by stressing one of the
functions of name (and, by extension, language) that expresses “the nonex-
istent and destroyed” (Eco 1980, 505), Eco reminds us that what we believe
to be a totality may in fact embrace several different origins, as well as
different gestures and voices, just as Barthes observes three écritures—the
puppet, the manipulator, and the vociferator—in the presentation of the
118 Fuyuko Fukunaka
bunraku puppet theater (1971, 76). Moreover, Eco’s emphasis on memory
and recollection as perpetrators of disunity (“all these departed things leave
pure names behind them,” Eco 1980, 505) is relevant here, as they play an
important role in undermining the direct, fi rst-person indicative mode of
story-telling in Hosokawa’s and Mochizuki’s compositions. Below, follow-
ing a brief outline of the postwar opera making in Japan, we shall examine
how that decentered physicality manifests itself in their respective works
and what musical and textual strategies are found behind it.
OPERA IN POSTWAR JAPAN: ONE STORY,

ONE AUTHOR, ONE VOICE
That Japan did not have a state-run opera theater until 1998 (The New
National Theatre Tokyo)2 seems a paradox, given the large volume of new
operas composed following the end of World War II (one statistic puts the
number at ten per year at an average; see Sekine 1987, 33). Opera was
already a popular genre by that time: the “fi rst” opera production in Japan
had taken place at the Tokyo Music School (now Tokyo University of the
Arts) in 1903 with Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, produced in Japanese, while
Japan’s fi rst opera company, the Fujiwara Opera Company, without its own
theater, had begun its activities in June 1934, with the production of La
Bohème in the original language. In the history of postwar Japanese opera,
the year 1952 should be noted: the aforementioned opera by Dan, Yūzuru,
was produced that year, 3 and it soon became a milestone in demonstrating
what “Japanese” opera would look like: source-text was sought in “Japa-
nese” classics, with much consideration given to establishing a linear nar-
rative; declamatory singing style was heavily preferred, as a way of treating
the sheer volume of the text, itself resulting from the sovereignty of the
original text; and “Japanese” colors, such as fragments of folk tunes or
“Eastern-flavored” modes, were heavily drawn upon in its music.
The motivation behind the high quantity of sōsaku operas (creation
operas)4 written in postwar Japan seems to have been rooted in a widely
shared consensus that virtually none of the prewar operatic works would be
worth performing, both musically and as drama. This qualitative “short-
age,” of course, resulted partly from a quantitative shortage: only a handful
of performable operas had been created during the period following the
“fi rst” Japanese opera, Hagoromo (1906), composed by Komatsu Kōsuke.5
Despite the increasing volume of newly composed operas in postwar Japan,
however, only a few of them have been added to today’s repertory; for
this, the long-time absence of an opera house may have been to blame.
Alternatively, though, it may simply indicate that at that time the pursuit of
quality did not really match that of quantity (Sekine 1995, 18). A criticism
along this line was indeed expressed by a well-known playwright, Waka-
bayashi Ichirō, who claimed that “postwar librettists and composers do
not understand what opera is all about,” and bluntly stated that a national
opera theater, then still in its blueprint, would be a “waste of taxpayers’
money” (Wakabayashi 1985, 44, translated by the author).
Whether or not Wakabayashi’s criticism can be applied straight to all
postwar sōsaku operas, is questionable. It is, however, symptomatic of
“problems” that were aesthetic rather than pragmatic, that almost all of
them were set to Japanese-language libretti: while the trend had surely its
reasons on the practical side, it may also be understood as an end result
of the logocentricity pointed out above. Indeed, the operatic tradition that
Dan’s Yūzuru pioneered—a carefully constructed “plot” with a language
that reflects everyday (i.e., “realistic”) life on the one hand and textual and
musical narratives that serve to create a linear buildup of events on the
other—was never fully challenged during the fi rst postwar decades. This
perhaps had to do with the fact that younger composers that were eager
to absorb the latest compositional currents pursued in Europe and in the
United States (for example, those invariably associated with the famous
Sōgetsu Concert Series of 1960–1964 where John Cage was a central figure
in 1962) were uniformly absent from the genre prior to the 1980s.6 The
anti-opera sentiment of Europe’s leading composers, as illustrated by Pierre
Boulez’s “Let’s blow up the opera houses” (1967, 53), Karlheinz Stock-
hausen’s calling opera an “ugly, rotten corpse” (1963, 48), and Mauricio
Kagel’s 1971 Staatstheater, was therefore far detached from the reality of
opera making in Japan regardless of the story types—whether based on
folktales,7 on nō or kabuki classics,8, or on contemporary topics,9 or those
constituting the Japanese Literaturoper.10
In short, Japanese opera long strove to speak of one centralized “story.”
There is not much conflict in interpreting what is presented on stage: the
audience hears the author’s (composer’s) voice dictating the story, linearly
and chronologically reconstituted. (One exception to this can be found in
Genji Monogatari (The tale of Genji), a mono-opera by Matsudaira Yorit-
sune premiered in 1995. The opera vaguely alludes, not to a story, but
to its contour, and the text’s intertextuality leads to images of multiple
love stories.) Equally symptomatic is that this monological presentation of
drama situates characters solidly on stage, thus the reality of their physical-
ity rarely presents challenges to the audience, in a manner similar to the
verismo opera.
HOSOKAWA TOSHIO’S MUSICAL GESTURES
However, it is not to say that the antidote to such a monologic operatic con-
ception would have to call for a denial of the physicality of voice. Indeed it
is with this respect that Hosokawa’s opera concerns us: Hosokawa’s music
demands listening to musical gestures, both real and imaginary, that bear
very much physical traces. It is hardly an overstatement that all his music,
120 Fuyuko Fukunaka
including purely instrumental works, essentially contains traces of the
“human voice.” This is not simply to say his music “speaks” or “sings.”
Nor do I mean his music, instrumental or vocal, presents a “narrative.”
Rather, what one may fi nd distinctive in both his instrumental and his
vocal/theatrical music is some primal energy, a still unrefi ned “body”—the
Barthesian “grain” perhaps. This character is well exemplified in his Sen I
(Line I) for flute solo (1984), where one is encouraged to hear not the mel-
ody per se but the physical mechanism that lets out the fragmentary, cha-
otic fluctuations of melodic contours whose asymmetrical movement turns
the abstract breath-work into a heavily bodily labor. Another example is
Danshō I (Fragment I) for shakuhachi, koto, and sangen (1988), in which
the sounds of the three instruments each present their own competing tan-
gibility and weight.
It is no surprise, then, that his operas (three so far: Vision of Lear, 1998;
Hanjo, 2002; and Matsukaze, 2011) present the voice and instruments as
a collection of sensual sonorous events that contain traces of “the articula-
tion of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language” (Bar-
thes 1975, 66–67). Fragmentary, tableau-like dramatic events in Lear, a
100-minute chamber opera commissioned by the Münchener Biennale and
premiered there in April 1998, are driven by sequences of melodic “ges-
tures,” both instrumental and vocal, even the briefest or airiest of which
drag themselves with a sense of weightiness. In Hanjo, too, the voices and
the instruments negotiate their ways with an equally conspicuous sense
of physicality and of enunciation, which invites one to imagine someone
“speaking” already in its brief instrumental prelude (Scene 1).11
While the musical texture of both works consists largely of isolated
pitches or gestures that together create an image of bodily movement, this
does not translate into the drama itself, however. True, these two operas
present stories that offer no moment of emotional relief: a king (Lear)
betrayed by his children, who dies in despair (with most of the other char-
acters also dead by the end12), and a beautiful geisha girl who keeps waiting
for her unfaithful lover (Hanjo). Yet the key concept of “insanity” (com-
mon to the protagonists of the two operas, King Lear and the geisha girl)
is deprived of its inherent cruelty, and instead reduces itself into a de facto
dramatic component that at times provides the onstage events with an oth-
erworldly atmosphere. Partly as a result, the two operas create the sensa-
tion as though nothing really “happens” on stage (this perhaps is what the
British critic John Warnaby captures in his expression “the ritual signifi-
cance” in his review of Hosokawa’s Lear; Warnaby 1998, 52).
How and why did Hosokawa follow this path? The reason is certainly
not that Hosokawa consciously pursued a musical translation of the “post-
dramatic theater” of the 1960s and 1970s, a theater that pulls away from
logocentricity and from the principle of linear narrative in an attempt to
engage in an alternative onstage reality (Lehmann 1999). Nor can we infer
Hosokawa’s emotional detachment from the tragic stories that offer almost
no catharsis. Rather, the “ritualistic” presentation of stories, especially in
Hanjo, seems to result from the subtly balanced presence of reality and
non-reality or, put in another way, from a mixture of what is present (seen/
embodied) and what is imagined (unseen/disembodied). Of course, this is
not to deny that there is a clear story line to follow in Hanjo (as will be
introduced shortly), and Hosokawa does not exhibit strong inclinations
towards an anti-narrative, “avant-garde” approach to theatricality, as in
Helmut Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (1991–
1997/2001). At the same time, the voice-like quality of the instruments, the
incomplete constellation of characters (one of the three protagonists does
not turn up until halfway into the work), and different modes of singing
(speaking, Sprechgesang, declamatory, and regular singing) seem to offer
multiple readings of the story in Hanjo, allowing for multiple voices which
may or may not originate in a single source (i.e., author/composer).
HANJO: WHO IS SPEAKING TO WHOM?
While Roland Barthes in “The Grain of the Voice” underlines the body
of the singing voice (Barthes 1985), its signifying mechanism may also be
extended to “voices,” both vocal and non-vocal, that participate in the tell-
ing of a plot, and this is the context within which I would like to focus
on Hosokawa’s Hanjo. Hanjo is the story of a beautiful mad woman who
awaits the return of her lover, who pledged to return, only to fail to do so
for three years. It originally was a classical nō-play attributed to Zeami
Motokiyo (1363?–1443?), the son of Kan’ami (1333?–1384?) who in the
region of Yamato (today’s Nara region) fi rmly established the Yusaki (now
called Kanze) school of sarugaku performers (actors who perform the nō,
a medieval theatrical genre that involves singing—in addition to dancing—
and the kyōgen, also a medieval theatrical genre that mainly uses speech,
rather than singing). Zeami is said to have written over 200 nō-pieces (today
at least 30-odd plays are attributable to him), and is credited with having
formalized the genre of mugen nō (as opposed to gendai nō), where the core
story is fi rst related by a local to a man on a journey (often a monk). After
a brief disappearance the local reappears on the scene again, this time as
one of the characters in the story he has just related to the traveler, and acts
it out, only disappearing again towards the end, prompting the traveler to
wake up from the “dream.”13 Zeami’s works still constitute a large part of
today’s repertoire, and among them Hanjo is one of the famous plays of his
kyōjo-mono (mad-woman prototype).
Hosokawa’s English libretto is fashioned after a modern adaptation by
Mishima Yukio, set in modern Japan and written in modern Japanese.
Mishima’s play was fi rst published in 1955 (reprinted in Mishima 2002,
131–150) and translated into English by Donald Keene two years later
(Mishima 1957, 174–198; Hosokawa referred to this translation for his
122 Fuyuko Fukunaka
libretto, with only a few alterations and deletions added). The opera, com-
posed in six scenes, follows Mishima’s story line:
After the opening scene (Scene 1), an instrumental introduction (with

the sound of trains heard from tape), Scene 2 opens with the middle-
aged female painter Jitsuko—Mishima’s creation, not part of the original
nō-play—agitatedly reading a newspaper in her studio. The paper carries
a report on a beautiful mad woman, Hanako, who comes to the train sta-
tion every day, holding a fan with a motif of Hanjo, a Chinese court lady
of ancient times. She looks into the faces of men that get off the trains to
find the unfaithful man with whom she once exchanged fans as a pledge
of their mutual love, the report goes. The audience learns that Jitsuko now
lives with Hanako, taking care of the latter. Her monologue hints that Jit-
suko has made the utmost effort to hide Hanako from the outside world,
to keep Hanako only to herself (“I have never submitted to an exhibi-
tion any of the pictures I painted of Hanako, preferring people not to see
them”). Jitsuko fears that the man, Yoshio, may show up after learning
from the paper Hanako’s current whereabouts (Scene 2). Hanako returns
home in the following scene (Scene 3), and after their exchange of words
that reveals Hanako’s determination to continue to wait for Yoshio, she
retires to her bedroom. The scene also subtly discloses the barely-hinged
power equilibrium between Jitsuko and Hanako, an equilibrium that is
placed in danger when in the next scene (Scene 4) Yoshio turns himself
up at Jitsuko’s house: he has come to take Hanako away, firmly (and
opportunistically) thinking that his return would restore Hanako’s san-
ity. The conversation between Jitsuko and Yoshio reveals that Hanako
was a geisha girl when she met Yoshio, and lost her mind when Yoshio
did not return despite his promise to do so (“I managed things extremely
badly, I know,” Yoshio pleads). In the following scene (Scene 5), Yoshio,
forcing his way into Hanako’s room, faces her. In the original nō-play,
Hanako regains her sanity at this moment and exchanges with Yoshio
the fans again to pledge their restored love. Yet in Mishima’s adaptation
and in Hosokawa’s opera, Hanako does not recognize Yoshio. The only
thing she admits is that the Yoshio in front of her resembles the Yoshio
she knew, but as with other men whose faces Hanako stares into at the
station everyday, Hanako sees only “skeleton” in place of his face, she
declares (“You too are a skeleton. [ . . . ] Why do you look at me that way
with your hollow eyes of bone?”). Aghast, Yoshio leaves Hanako. Jitsuko,
who knows Hanako only as a woman whose beauty is perfected by her
insanity, is reciprocated in the most unexpected way when Hanako, con-
tent, sets out to continue her life as before (“That is what waiting is . . .
Waiting, waiting . . . and soon the day ends,” Scene 6).
While Hanako is the opera’s chief protagonist, much of its dramatic

momentum comes from Jitsuko’s convoluted obsession with Hanako. With
her homosexuality alluded to, Jitsuko’s reasons for keeping Hanako out of
touch with the outside world are rooted, not only in her attempt to protect
Hanako, but also in her intention to keep Hanako’s beauty in the way she
values it. Under the care of Jitsuko and thus socially handicapped, Hanako
nevertheless emotionally dominates Jitsuko in every way. In one scene, Jit-
suko’s suggestion to go on a trip is flatly rejected by Hanako (“I won’t listen
to another word you say,” Hanako says). In another scene Jitsuko speaks
of Hanako’s overwhelmingly excruciating beauty in overtly physical terms:
“I love to see you naked. [ . . . ] Your breasts, your belly, your thighs.” A
moment later: “Because you waited you possess all the beautiful things in
the world. A woman somewhere one morning lost her breasts, and then
they were shining on your body, like medals of flesh, wonderfully fragrant.
What men have fought to win, you have won by waiting.” Jitsuko thus
eloquently deconstructs the source of Hanako’s unsurpassed beauty: the
continuous act of doing something whose process becomes the end itself.
The uselessness of Hanako’s action—waiting—has come to speak for her
beauty itself, a beauty that does not need reciprocity for its sustenance.
Jitsuko’s verbal eloquence, however, is not faithfully retained in her sing-
ing voice. In the opera, the entire text is set to four different singing styles
already mentioned. As with Hanako’s text, Jitsuko’s is set to these distinct
styles. Yet, her singing line stays within the vicinity of a single pitch-cen-
tricity, for example within an E-flat-centricity at the beginning of Scene 2,
where Jitsuko is seen agitatedly reading the newspaper. Moreover, Jitsuko’s
singing heavily draws upon “psalmodic” intonation—multiple syllables
given to a single note repeated, without much pitch fluctuation. In other
words, in her singing voice, at least at the beginning, there is no such thing
as what Barthes calls “friction,” that is, a physicality that speaks of its
own presence independent from linguistic significance (1985, 275). Thus
her voice is “there” but its “body” is “not present.”
Jitsuko’s “ineloquent” singing style indeed contrasts with Hanako’s
singing voice. In the opera’s third scene, for example, Hanako changes her
modes of singing more freely and eloquently than Jitsuko, at times con-
sciously going against the rhythm of text intonation. Also, ascending fig-
ures heard whenever Hanako refers to Yoshio’s name effectively suggest
that she remembers the physicality of his name—the way she used to pro-
nounce it and the physical sensation that would accompany it. In other
words, in Hanako’s singing there are traces of the voice’s own signifying
weight, while Jitsuko’s singing voice presents itself as more mechanistic.
The “smoothed-out” voice of Jitsuko, however, is interrupted in Scene 2
at the moment when she reads the newspaper report on Hanako aloud. As
in Mishima’s adaptation, this scene is crucial in revealing Jitsuko’s anger—
directed both at the newspaper report and at Yoshio. Spoken without pitch
fluctuation, the clearer articulation of consonances nevertheless gesticulates
Jitsuko’s fear ignited by the newspaper report and her attempt to overpower it.
The instrumental ensemble, too, suddenly gains momentum, and its sway at
124 Fuyuko Fukunaka
times interferes with Jitsuko’s declamation. In other words, the passage con-
stitutes the clash between what is said and what Jitsuko further wants to say
about it, but which remains unsaid and only resonates in the instruments.
This kind of hybridity of vocal articulation types within a single char-
acter may point to what Hosokawa calls “impure” voices. Hosokawa’s
essays and interviews testify to his complex take on voice (see Hosokawa
1997), and his choice of the word “impure” (unrein) (Meyer-Kalkus 2008,
62–63)—referring to the observation that the human voice always entails
uncontrollability and thus the possibility of being polylogic—is intriguing.
Hosokawa’s idea of the human voice as containing something alien within
manifests itself also in his reference to the “physicality” (Körperlichkeit) of
the voice (ibid., 63), by which he seems to mean some independent organ-
ism within the voice.
Given the idea of the voice’s “impurity” or polylogic multiplicity, one
may wonder how we could make sense of declamatory vocal gestures
(found mainly in the lines given to Jitsuko) that at times monotonously
envelop the story-telling in Hanjo and create a kind of ritualistic styliza-
tion. The repeated appearances of short, sweeping gestures of the harp
and of portamento descents of the strings also add to the impression of a
ritualistic setting, prompting a sense of distance between the tale enacted
and the onstage performers. This aspect, indeed, seems to prompt many to
see Hanjo’s proximity to the spirit of the nō-theater (see, for example, Lau-
rence 2004). Together with Hosokawa’s abundant reference to traditional
Japanese music, this association is convenient and perhaps not too off the
point. However, when recontextualized according to the “physicality” of
the voice stressed by the composer, the psychological distance resulting
from the stylization effect in Hanjo apparently eludes explanation. The
voices as visualized (through the characters) on stage, while carrying a
sense of weight, would become impersonalized, disembodied.
This sense of a disembodiment of the characters may be understood and
redefi ned by taking into consideration the pacing of the opera, however.
Hanjo, just over 70 minutes long, follows one day’s events chronologically,
almost in real time. For example, when Hanako retires to her bedroom and
a few moments later Yoshio appears, we, the audience, perceive the time
lapse as real, together with Jitsuko left on stage. Yet singing—an unavoid-
able fact of opera—repeatedly causes a considerable sense of delay. This
delay is particularly striking in the disproportionately long fourth scene,
where Jitsuko and Yoshio exchange hateful words in a style that alternates
almost at constant intervals between “psalmodic” and melismatic singing.
Here, we cannot help feeling as though the event taking place on stage,
despite the intensity of the dramatic situation, is unfolding in slow motion.
Contrary to the singing, however, the instrumental commentary creates
an independent web of corporeality. The instrumental ensemble’s gestures
such as short shrill sounds of the winds or energized strokes of the strings,
suggestive of marked physicality, create a sense of “realness,” a certain
degree of urgency. As a result, there is a chasm between how singing voices
and how instrumental voices exist through “speaking.” This chasm, how-
ever, suddenly comes to a halt in the fifth scene where Hanako’s failure
to recognize Yoshio follows an extremely prolonged pause: faithfully fol-
lowing Mishima’s original stage direction (“a long pause”), this painfully
elongated silence overrides the preceding time lag and allows the audience
suddenly to “experience” the onstage events as embodied and present.
Indeed, the character of Yoshio may be interpreted merely as a “device”
meant to secure Hanako’s and Jitsuko’s embodied presence. Of course, it
is not to be denied that the character of Yoshio supplies the momentum
necessary to push the story forward: Yoshio’s name is uttered repeatedly by
both Jitsuko and Hanako in Scenes 2 and 3, and the resulting anticipation
effectively underscores the conspicuous absence of Yoshio in these scenes.
Yet when Yoshio fi nally appears in Scene 4, this is a moment when, against
the backdrop of Jitsuko’s revealed morbid obsession with Hanako, Yoshio’s
“reasoned” sanity (“Then you [Jitsuko] won’t let me see her. In other words,
her happiness is not what you desire”) suddenly presents itself as banal and,
moreover, vicious: for, however rational, Yoshio is the one that violently
demolishes the alternative reality which both Hanako and Jitsuko nurtured
through their own elongated obsession—with Yoshio and with Hanako,
respectively—when he hurriedly forces his way into Hanako’s room. At the
next moment during an eight-page interlude that leads to Scene 5, however,
all onstage action suspends, while Hanako, slowly appearing from her bed-
room, dominates the scene, undisturbed, as though Yoshio’s intercepting
“reality” was nothing more than a mere momentary detour.
It cannot be overemphasized that such fluctuating pacing of time results
in the instablity of physical presence on stage, presenting the same charac-
ters differently at different moments. For example, the way Yoshio appears
towards Hanako and the way he behaves towards others (including us, the
audience) are simply not the same. Hanako’s failure to recognize Yoshio,
of course, dramaturgically functions as a confi rmation of her insanity. Yet
it also indicates that, to Hanako, the person Yoshio in front of her eyes is
not identical with what the name “Yoshio” has come to embody to her—as
though the real Yoshio were invisible, embodied only by the name that
signifies more to Hanako. A similar observation may be made of Jitsuko’s
obsession with Hanako, who matters to Jitsuko as an amalgamation of all
sorts of beauty, both real and imagined, but not as someone who used to
be a geisha in love. In this sense, both Hanako and Jitsuko cherish someone
whose imagery has outgrown the actual person, and this contradicts the
realism of Yoshio who only sees who stands in front of him. We can, then,
understand the ritualistic tendency of Hosokawa’s music as a counterbal-
ance to the weight that Jitsuko and Hanako put into the images of Hanako
and of Yoshio, respectively.
Yoshio’s appearance in Scene 4, then, however important as a turning
point of the drama, is not a disruption, but merely confi rms the condition
126 Fuyuko Fukunaka
of each of the characters. The Japanese wind-bells, the harp’s arpeggiated
figures, and the descending harmonics on the strings variably accompany
Hanako and contribute to the weightlessness of “her” sound. These sounds
are what Hanako hears within herself; they, rather than the voice of Yoshio
that is present, “speak” to her. This strategy avoids turning the “tragic”
story into a tragedy reminiscent of the verismo opera repertoires. By depriv-
ing Yoshio of the authority to turn the direction of the story (unlike in the
original nō-play), Hanjo creates Yoshio simultaneously distant and present,
just as Hanako and Jitsuko play with both what is seen and what is unseen.
The opera, in other words, centers on what Hanako, Jitsuko, and Yoshio
are, not on what they do, and for this reason effectively pulls away from the
idea of dramatic development.
MOCHIZUKI AND A THEATRICAL DISTORTION
In Hanjo, therefore, imagination and recollection play an important role

in preventing the onstage characters from functioning merely as ingredi-
ents of a linear narrative. This also applies to Die große Bäckereiattacke
(2005–2009), the only opera thus far composed by Mochizuki Misato. In
this case, however, the distortion of narrative action is more foregrounded
since, as an agent for representing recollection and imagination, quotation
is an integral part of both the drama and the music.
The opera, a joint commissioned work of the Luzerner Theater, netzzeit,
the Royal Opera House, and the Wiener Mozartjahr 2006, was prompted
by a suggestion to Mochizuki, made by Sven Hartberger, the secretary gen-
eral of Klangforum Wien, in 2005, and premiered in Luzern on January
24, 2009. The English libretto by the Israeli writer Yohanan Kaldi, based
on two short stories by Murakami Haruki, “The Bakery Attack” (1981)
and “The Second Bakery Attack” (1986), was chosen in the process of an
open competition organized by the Luzerner Theater in 2007. For setting
the text during the composition, Mochizuki had the libretto translated into
German by Reinhard Palm. The short essay Mochizuki contributed to the
program notes for the Japanese premiere (sung in German) of the work
(Mochizuki 2010) insinuates that the way the project was realized was not
entirely to her advantage;14 still, the opera presents itself as unlike any pre-
viously composed by Japanese composers for its intentionally conspicuous
“crossbred” musical construction (classical/non-classical, serious/playful,
introverted/extraverted, etc.) and thus as uniquely of its own.
The libretto incorporates the fi rst Attack into the middle of the second
Attack in a form of recollection by the opera’s protagonist Kuni, a
young man. As many of Murakami’s novels, the story goes back and
forth between the absurd and the mechanistically realistic. Kuni and
Miya, his young wife, wake up one night after feeling extremely hungry
in sleep. They soon go back to sleep, only to wake up again, this time
with real, excruciating hunger. They dig into the kitchen, only to fi nd
nothing to eat. Kuni starts relating to Miya about the exactly same type
of hunger he had before: in flashback we learn that Kuni, still unmar-
ried then, and his roommate went out to “attack” a bakery to have
something to appease their hunger, but the bakery’s owner, without
showing the slightest agitation, offered them as much bread as they
would like, under one condition: to listen to Wagner (in Murakami’s
story, the overtures to Tannhäuser and The Flying Dutchman, but in
Kaldi’s libretto, the latter is replaced by the closing portion of Göt-
terdämmerung, both to be heard on tape on stage). Now Miya is con-
vinced that their hunger is a sort of Wagnerian curse and decides to
attack another bakery to dispel it. They go out as Miya insists to rob a
McDonald’s instead, get 32 Big Macs, and after consuming them, go to
sleep, content and satisfied.
The story is very absurd indeed, though in Murakami’s original the focus
is not so much on the nonsensical plot, as on Kuni’s psychological healing
process by way of Miya’s “heroic” love. At the outset, Kuni’s tormenting
hunger, a déjà vu, is represented in an image of the deep ocean with a vol-
cano at the unfathomable bottom. At the end, when Kuni “looks down”
into the ocean again, the volcano has disappeared, and he is finally able to
go to sleep in peace. In the opera, on the other hand, no spiritual redemp-
tion is emphasized and, as Mochizuki herself admits, the opera is inten-
tionally made “slapstick,” and the audience is supposed to witness a light,
guileless comedy that behaves as a comedy (ibid.).
Needless to say, this “comedy-like” character—perhaps not to be approved
by Murakami fanatics—is partly resulting from Kaldi’s libretto. For example,
after the couple goes to sleep following the first hunger-in-dream, the “Seven
Oriental Sages” (not in Murakami’s original) appear on stage and lecture on
the definition of hunger (“Hunger as concept is not only metabolic, meta-
physical, allegorical, symbolic, and so forth, and so forth. . .”15). The inten-
tion is clear: the interjecting “commentary” is supposed to remind us that the
people on stage are only actors acting out some deeds that need to be com-
mented on, thus securing the distance between the stage and the audience, a
role comparable to the choros of the Greek tragedy. The embedding of the
Wagnerian bakery episode (in the form of an acted-out quotation by Kuni) on
the couple’s nocturnal adventure (instead of presenting them chronologically)
further stresses story-telling instead of story, as we are continuously made
aware of who is speaking, rather than of what is being spoken of. Moreover,
by interpolating the curse motive from Wagner’s Ring into the nature of their
excruciating hunger, the opera creates an intertextuality that invites the audi-
ence to think and interpret, instead of feel and relate.
It would be easy to decide, therefore, that Mochizuki’s attempt was
to create a sort of modern, satirical, yet light-hearted, operetta and, by
128 Fuyuko Fukunaka
so doing, to expose the outdated dramatization of various tragic operas
in postwar Japan. It would also be easy, too, to assume that Mochizuki
intended this opera to be a “parody” by using a literary work that incor-
porates one of the “great masters” in the history of opera. However, to me,
her fundamental intention lies somewhere else, and to clarify this, I shall
quote part of an essay by Wolfgang Rihm (b. 1952) on his Musiktheater
composition Die Hamletmaschine (1986) and its text, originally by the
German playwright Heiner Müller. Rihm says: “As a result of Heiner Mül-
ler’s practical dramaturgy, one is freed from the theatrical delay caused by
long and broad clarifications. Action, scene, and sound create clarity of an
entirely different kind: light shines onto the object from many sides. Simul-
taneously” (Rihm 1997, 353, translation and emphasis by the author).16
To Rihm, a chain of logical developments, not dramatic content per se, is
to blame for an elongated dramaturgy in the genre of opera; as long as we
follow explanatory processes as in the natural sciences aiming at explicat-
ing “reality” (remember Yamada’s word quoted at the beginning of the
chapter), Rihm seems to argue, opera cannot speak for human processes of
understanding and interpreting in modern times.
Mochizuki’s fundamental concern, too, seems to have lain in realizing
an alternative stage presentation where each of the characters and actions
does not necessarily have equal physicality and reality, in order to avoid an
elongated (i.e., “delayed”) sense of time. The fact that she asked the original
English libretto to be translated into German supports this assumption.
According to Mochizuki, the German language, with its many plosive con-
sonances, was more suitable for the intended buffo character of the opera
as it has its own “idiosyncratic sense of tempo and of rhythm, compared
with the English language that flows” (Mochizuki 2010, translated by the
author). The sonorities of the German words have certainly contributed
to the agitated presentation of time throughout the Bäckereiattacke. This
agitation is even more urgently communicated to us when the background
pulse of the drums (mainly the high-hat cymbals), which continues elongat-
edly from Act 1, Scene 4 (where the couple tries to find food in the kitchen)
through Scene 5 (the encounter with the Wagnerian baker), is at times dia-
lectically interrupted by Miya’s highly self-conscious operatic singing or
by the eerily slow falsetto cantilena sung by Kuni in Scene 3 (where he is
haunted by the volcano image).
Mochizuki’s intention strongly echoes Rihm’s also in her attempt to pres-
ent onstage events and characters in an intentionally uneven, multifaceted
way (“light shines onto the object from many sides. Simultaneously”). Such
“inconsistency,” for example, manifests itself clearly in the use of different
vocal renditions: throughout the opera, much of the text is set to music in
such a manner that only exaggerated contour, not precise pitches, is defined
upon precisely notated rhythms. It is as though the voice’s performative ges-
tures—the performativity of the singers’ exaggerated “enunciations”—are
more important than the content of the text in delineating the onstage action.
Occasionally, however, very expressive cantilenas interject (for example,
Kuni’s tormenting vision of the volcano in Scene 3 or Miya’s insistence on the
Wagnerian curse), which are equally performative and self-referential because
the characters seem to be singing while perfectly aware that they are singers.17
As a result, our distance to Kuni and Miya needs to be readjusted repeatedly,
and the idea of what they are is called into question—are they just agents of a
story about a bakery robbery or just singers who perform their roles operati-
cally, only insinuating the contour of the story?
Whether or not the libretto’s call for many levels of “quotation”18 matches
the Murakami world as envisioned by Mochizuki, the libretto and musi-
cal setting create, in the end, the effect as though all events and characters
were indirect, transient, and merely imaginary. Did Kuni and his room-
mate really attack the bakery (maybe it was only Kuni’s imagination with
which Miya has nothing to do)? Aren’t Kuni and Miya only dreaming? Is
the entire McDonald’s episode a mere symbol of the process by which the
couple undergoes mutual reconnection? Furthermore, by interjecting con-
textually contrasting music into what is going on (for example, the use of
an electric guitar in Act 1, Scene 6, against Miya’s prima-donna-like rendi-
tion of her plan to rob the bakery), the opera denies the idea of one unified
story being presented (whose voice really speaks through the rock ‘n’ roll
style?). In other words, if the essential lifeline of opera as a genre, Japanese
or non-Japanese, is sustained by its attempt to convince the audience into
thinking that it is about a story, then Mochizuki, we may claim, has suc-
cessfully dismantled such operatic condition.
OPERATIC PROBLEMS, SOLVED?
In both Die große Bäckereiattacke and Hanjo, then, the simultaneous pres-
ence of multiple visions—voices—conditions the way the entire opera is
presented. This certainly echoes Hosokawa’s compositional creed, a com-
mitment to what is not visible (i.e., audible):
[In examining calligraphic work,] instead of taking into consideration

only what is written (the region of écriture), I am determined to re-
think what lies before the line is written, the line is born, and what
comes after it is written, in the space to which the energy that generated
the line returns. That is the embryo for the space, the “mother space,”
where the line, the sound, is generated (Hosokawa 1985, 100, trans-
lated by the author).
This quotation could be paraphrased in relation to opera: in the contempo-

rary world, we cannot help paying attention to a phenomenon’s generative
processes or to our understanding of them, rather than to the phenomenon
itself. Opera, too, needs to cater to our inquiry into the genesis of the story:
130 Fuyuko Fukunaka
the moment at which the “sound” is being generated, not the sound itself,
becomes our focus. At the same time, Hosokawa’s words also underscore the
way in which he turns stories full of intricate motives into an opera where
human motives are only a fraction of musical and dramatic conditions.
Hanjo and Die große Bäckereiattacke have responded to the “operatic
problem” as exhibited in various compositions of the postwar decades where,
bluntly put, most Japanese composers’ chief concern had long been the con-
tent alone (“the lack of good libretto writers”), not manners of its presenta-
tion. In this sense, the question as to why we would need to continue with an
“opera” as a sung theater with an orchestral accompaniment, never seems to
have nagged most of them. While their European counterparts were faced
with the issue of how to dismantle opera as a viable musical genre worthy of
continuing, Japanese composers took the status quo of the genre as a given.
Die große Bäckereiattacke of Mochizuki, in contrast, by prioritizing vocal
“gestures” over singing with precise pitches, using quotations both musical
and textual, and calling into question what shall constitute “operatic text,”
eloquently declares that an operatic work needs not present a story, but may
only allude to its contour. Hanjo of Hosokawa, equally eloquently, demon-
strates that a “good” story (i.e., a good libretto) alone would not make a
“good” opera and, more important, that, by allowing multiple personas (as
represented both by the onstage characters and by the instruments in the pit)
to negotiate their presence against one another, the genre of opera may turn
into a contemporary mode of inquiry. The two composers, then, have in effect
redefined the essence of the postwar “operatic problem” and, in so doing, lib-
erated Japanese opera from the restraint imposed by the long-cherished idea
of the genre. Their compositions demonstrate that opera needs not strive for
a kind of audience response that would settle in one conclusion, but instead
solicit a questioning that effectively leads to further inquiries.
NOTES
1. The hexameter goes as follows: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda ten-
emus (the former rose endures in its name, we hold empty names).
2. The “original” National Theater of Japan, specializing in the production
of Japanese traditional theatrical genres, such as kabuki and bunraku, was
founded in 1966.
3. The opera had originally been conceived as incidental music for a theater
piece under the same title, itself inspired by a famous folktale.
4. The term sōsaku opera indicates operas written by Japanese composers (see
Nihon Sengo Ongakushi Kenkyūkai 2007, 277).
5. It should quickly be added that many alternatively regard Roei no Yume
(Dreams at a bivouac, 1905) by Kitamura Suehiro or Ochitaru Ten’nyo
(Fallen angel, 1912) by Yamada Kósçak to be the “fi rst” Japanese opera.
6. Mayuzumi Toshirō, who eclectically assimilated the contemporary composi-
tional trends abroad, especially during the 1950s and the 1960s, was rather
conservative when it came to opera, as testified to in his Golden Pavilion of
1976.
7. Such as Sumiyaki-Hime (Coal princess) by Shimizu Osamu (1952) and
Amanjaku to Uriko-Hime (Amano-gnome and Princess Uriko) by Hayashi
Hikaru (1958).
8. Such as Sonezaki Shinjū (The double suicide at Sonezaki, 1977) by Irino
Yoshirō.
9. Such as Kurai Kagami (The dark mirror, 1960) by Akutagawa Yasushi, the
story of a Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor.
10. Such as Yōkihi (The Yōki princess, 1977) by Dan Ikuma.
11. Hanjo was commissioned by the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels,
and premiered at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in France in July 2004.
12. This ending of the original Shakespeare play is called into question in the
opera, due largely to the text and the production, both of which are created
by the renowned director Suzuki Tadashi. In the production, at the end of
the opera—that is, after Lear fi nds Cordelia dead, having failed to intercept
Edmund’s conspiracy—all the dead characters (Cordelia, Regan, Goneril,
the Duke of Cornwall, Earl of Gloucester, and Edmund) suddenly “come
back to life” and walk off stage, suggesting, perhaps, that all actions on
stage were illusionary visions of the “insane” Lear. His “insanity,” not as the
consequences of the plots, but as a condition that is already well established
from the start, is alluded to in this production where Lear is seen (although
not always) on a wheelchair in a place that reminds one of an isolated mental
institution or old people’s home.
13. A good introduction to the art of nō in English is Hare 1986.
14. For example, her initial wish to write an opera based on Murakami’s novels
Dance, Dance, Dance or A Wild Sheep Chase was overridden by a “group
of experts, with opera directors and dramaturgs from Vienna, London, and
Luzern,” and also as a result of several workshops with this group, with the
librettist and the conductor Johannes Kalitzke. Many aspects instructed in the
libretto, including the detail of the musical quotations and the instrumentation,
were closely followed during the compositional process (Mochizuki 2010).
15. “Hunger als Begriff ist nicht nur metabolisch, metaphysisch, allegorisch,
symbolisch und so fort und so fort. . .” (translated by author; the original
English libretto by Kaldi is not available).
16. “Hinzu kommt durch Heiner Müllers praktische Dramaturgie die Loslösung
von Aufenthalt durch lange und breite Erklärnisse. Szene-Bild-Klang schaffen
Klarheit ganz anderer Art. Von vielen Seiten fällt Licht auf den Gegenstand.
Gleichzeitig” (Rihm 1997, 353).
17. This strongly reminds of the closing music of Brünnhilde sung by the soprano
Luana DeVol in Götterdämmerung of the Stuttgart Ring in 2003, directed
by Peter Konwitschny, where Brünnhilde, dismissing the dead Siegfried and
everyone else from the stage, sings, not as Brünnhilde, but as a soprano
(Richard Wagner, Götterdämmerung, DVD, TDK/SWR/Opus Arte, 2004).
18. In addition to the Wagner episode, there are several other quotation-like
musical elements, such as reminiscences of Cole Porter numbers and the
stretta passages reminiscent of nineteenth-century Italian opera.
REFERENCES
Barthes, Roland. 1971. “On Bunraku: The Three Scripts,” translated by Sandy
MacDonald. The Drama Review 15/2: 76–80.
. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller, New York:
Hill and Wang.
132 Fuyuko Fukunaka
. 1985. “The Grain of the Voice.” In The Responsibility of Forms, trans-
lated by Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 267–277.
Boulez, Pierre. 1967. “Sprengt die Opernhäuser in die Luft.” Der Spiegel 40 (Sep-
tember 25): 53–54.
Chōki Seiji. 2010. Sengo no ongaku: Geijutsu ongaku no poritikusu to poetikusu
[Postwar music: The politics and poetics of art music], Tokyo: Sakuhinsha.
Eco, Umberto. 1980. The Name of the Rose, translated by William Weaver, New
York: A Harvest Book.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges.” Feminist Studies 14/3: 575–600.
Hare, Thomas Blenman. 1986. Zeami’s Style: The Noh Plays of Zeami Motokiyo,
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Hatanaka Ryōsuke, Ogura Rō, Shimizu Osamu, Toda Kunio, and Tōyama
Kazuyuki. 1958. “Sōsaku Opera no Kongo no Kadai” [The problems facing the
sōsaku opera]. Ongaku Geijutsu [Musical art] 16/4: 54–68.
Hosokawa Toshio. 1985. “Oto no Kyanbasu: Enkei” [The sound canvas: Distant
landscape]. Ongaku Geijutsu [Musical art] 43/5: 100–101.
. 1997. “Koe ni tsuite” [On voice]. In Tamashii no Landscape [My spiritual
landscape], Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2–7.
Laurence, Liban. 2004. “Toshio Hosokawa: Le calligraphe du son.” L’Express (14
July): 26.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 1999. Postdramatisches Theater, Frankfurt: Verlag der
Autoren.
Meyer-Kalkus, Reinhart. 2008. “Auskomponierte Stimmen: Toshio Hosokawas
Vokalkompositionen.” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 169/1: 62–65.
Mishima Yukio. 1957. Five Modern No Plays by Yukio Mishima, translated by
Donald Keene, New York: Alfred Knopf.
. 2002. Mishima Yukio Zenshu [Collected writings of Yukio Mishima], vol.
22, Tokyo: Shincho Publishing.
Mochizuki Misato. 2010. “Pan’ya Daishūgeki Nihon Shoen ni Saishite” [On the
occasion of the Japanese premiere of my große Bäckereiattacke] (Program
notes to the Japanese premiere of Die große Bäckereiattacke), Tokyo: Suntory
Zaidan.
Nihon Sengo Ongakushi Kenkyūkai [Japanese Postwar Music Study Group], ed.
2007. Sengo Nihon Ongakushi [The history of postwar Japanese music], Tokyo:
Heibon-sha.
Rihm, Wolfgang. 1997. “Gangarten.” In Ausgesprochen: Schriften und Gespräche,
edited by Ulrich Mosch, vol. 2, Winterthur: Amadeus, 350–353.
Sekine Reiko. 1987. “Yūzuru kara On’na no Jidai e” [From Yūzuru to the age of
women]. Ongaku Geijutsu [Musical art] 45/2: 33–37.
. 1995. “Sōsaku Opera no Gojū-nen” [The 50 years of sōsaku opera].
Ongaku Geijutsu [Musical art] 53/6: 18–23.
Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 1963. “Zur Situation des Metiers” [1953]. In Texte zur
Musik, vol. 1, Aufsätze 1952–1962 zur Theorie des Komponierens, edited by
Dieter Schnebel, Cologne: Du Mont, 45–61.
Wakabayashi Ichiro. 1985. “Sōsaku Opera Fumō-ron” [There shall be no sōsaku
opera]. Ongaku Geijutsu [Musical art] 43/12: 44–45.
Warnaby, John. 1998. “Munich: Hosokawa’s Vision of Lear.” Tempo 205: 52.
Yamada Kósçak. 1930. “Kageki no Atarasiki Michi” [The new path for opera,
1930]. In Yamada Kōsaku Chosaku Zenshu [The complete writings of Kósçak
Yamada], vol. 2, edited by Dan Ikuma, Gotō Nobuko, and Tōyama Kazuyuki,
Tokyo: Iwanami Books 2001, 231–232.
7 Reconsidering Traditional Vocal
Practices in Contemporary
Korean Music
Heekyung Lee
In April 1997, the eminent Korean folk song vocalist Cho Kongnye (1930–
1997) passed away.1 While the death of the Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh
Ali Kahn (1948–1997) in the same year received worldwide attention
(Schaefer 2000, 9), the demise of Cho went completely unnoticed except
in Korea. As with most traditional Korean musicians, her death was virtu-
ally ignored; short obituaries appeared in a small number of Korean news-
papers. This showed the unprivileged status of traditional Korean music
performers. Despite their huge contributions in transmitting traditional
music and developing individual artistic worlds, traditional Korean music
performers in general have been neglected not only internationally but also
by the Korean public in favor of artists who perform Western music. In the
development of contemporary Korean music, however, traditional music
still carries significant implications and potentials.
Traditional Korean vocal music encompasses a wide spectrum of the
human voice, from the highly refi ned singing style of chŏngga (the music of
courts and scholars) to the rich expressive quality of p’ansori (a dramatic
narrative form), and from Buddhist and shamanistic ritual music such as
pŏmp’ae and kut to the wide variety of folk songs whose singing styles and
idioms reflect diverse regional origins. Furthermore, each genre features
distinctive vocal techniques enabling singers to deliver a broad range of
musical expression. In contemporary Korean music, however, the human
voice has been explored only by a limited number of composers.
Since the early twentieth century influx of Western music into Korea,
European bel canto has become the standard vocal quality for most Korean
performers and audiences. The Korean art song (hanguk kagok) emerged
from this trend in the 1920s and flourished until the 1970s, while tradi-
tional music was excluded from mainstream Korean culture and its unique
values were ignored and forgotten during the modernization and Western-
ization of Korean society. The vocal styles of chŏngga and ch’ang (singing in
p’ansori style) and vocal genres such as kagok, p’ansori, kut, and pŏmp’ae
went unappreciated due to a Western-centric musical aesthetic incapable of
appreciating their idiosyncrasies. In this context, it is not surprising that,
until recently, Korean composers have shown little interest in traditional
134 Heekyung Lee
modes of vocality. Only in the last decade have composers embraced the
unlimited potential of traditional vocal practices.
This chapter examines how contemporary Korean music has appropri-
ated and transformed traditional vocal music idioms within the socio-
cultural context of Korea’s modernization in the twentieth century. The
experiments of various composers with Korean vocal traditions will be dis-
cussed in the context of Westernization/modernization, evocation of archaic
dimensions, imitation/appropriation, and assemblage in a new frame. This
analysis leads to my conclusion that the creative potential of performativity
and orality permeating traditional Korean vocal practices has not yet been
fully explored by contemporary composers.
SURVIVAL OF TRADITIONAL KOREAN MUSIC

AS A MARGINALIZED CULTURE
As in other non-Western countries pursuing Westernization, mainstream

Korean culture has generally devalued traditional Korean music since the
early twentieth century. The Japanese colonization of 1910–1945 exac-
erbated this problem in its rigorous suppression of all manifestations of
Korean culture. Traditional Korean music remained marginalized through
the 1960s and 1970s as Korea underwent a period of rapid modernization,
despite the Korean system of “Intangible Cultural Properties”; implemented
in 1962 to preserve traditional culture on a national level by the regime of
Park Chung-Hee, the system was nothing more than a specious plan to but-
tress the nationalistic legitimacy of the regime which had seized power in a
military coup in 1961. 2 Although the system did contribute to the preserva-
tion of original forms of traditional music to a certain extent, ironically the
preservation led to a lack of vitality as the traditions became museum arti-
facts. Furthermore, a large number of folk musicians not selected lost their
post and status, especially as the New Village Movement campaign raged
in the 1970s;3 most traditional musicians were left destitute. That one of
the best gong players died tragically on the streets exemplifies the diffi-
culty of living as a traditional folk musician.4 Likewise, practitioners such
as shamans or namsadang (itinerant music groups of strolling male play-
ers) were regarded as following superstitions and were thus excluded from
modernized society. Only a few performers and performances survived the
modernization process of suppressing traditional music as a minority cul-
ture within Korean society.
During the oppressive Park regime, some intellectuals in university com-
munities started to re-examine the values of traditional culture, and sub-
sequently tried to integrate those values into current society. Performance
genres such as p’ungmul (percussion band music), madanggŭk (outdoor
theater), and t’alch’um (mask dance drama) played an important role in this
cultural movement against the dictatorship in the 1970s, a reaction to the
Reconsidering Traditional Vocal Practices 135
New Village Movement’s marginalization of traditional Korean society. The
wide proliferation of student music clubs for the performance of p’ungmul,
t’alch’um, or samulnori at various universities in the 1980s emerged from
this social atmosphere, as did the efforts of certain intellectuals and artists
to modernize traditional performing arts. Samulnori, a modernized version
of p’ungmul adapted for stage performance, is a well-known example of
this process. At the same time, the pyŭngshinch’um (deformed dance) of
Kong Ok-Jin and various ritual forms of kut were rediscovered and brought
anew to stages such as SPACE Love. 5
Significantly, p’ansori earned wide attention in the 1970s. Wanch’ang
p’ansori (a p’ansori performance in its entirety)6 appeared as a new type
of stage performance; some presentations of p’ansori in a modern audito-
rium were successful, and free group lessons for p’ansori became popular.
Interestingly, a large part of the audiences on these occasions was from the
younger generation, whose initiative to make p’ansori a part of contempo-
rary culture was critical to its revival. Many p’ansori group meetings were
established in universities, sometimes creating new p’ansori works to pres-
ent criticism and satire of society.7 However, while samulnori earned huge
popularity among the general public during the 1980s, p’ansori did not
become popular outside of a certain sphere until the 1990s.
This active interest in traditional culture, distinguished from govern-
ment-directed preservation, was an expression of a new generation’s aware-
ness of folk culture neglected under the slogan of economic development.
It was also a critical reaction to the government’s cultural policy, which
concerned only the preservation and protection of old culture, neglecting
its presence in everyday Korean life (Lee Heekyung 2004, 300).
As Korea underwent rapid modernization in the 1960s and 1970s, the
music scene of Korea also shifted dramatically. Since the introduction of
Western music into Korea, the Korean musical world had been divided
between yangak (Western music in Korea) and kugak (traditional Korean
music). They exist more or less independently, despite Westernized adaptions
of kugak, and Western music was always considered far more mainstream
than traditional music. Until the late 1960s, Korean art song employed
a Western musical style which heavily relies on early-nineteenth-century
Lied idioms, while only a few composers were interested in contemporary
Western music. A critical rupture in this terrain emerged from the 1967
abduction of the composer Yun Isang (1917–1995) from Germany by the
Korean government. This incident brought attention to his music and to
contemporary composition in general in the public consciousness. Accord-
ing to Kang Sukhi (b. 1934), one of Yun’s disciples, this incident “served
as a turning point in the development of contemporary music because it
was accompanied by a flood of reports on the current musical trends of the
European music world” (Kang 1992, 12–13). One significant repercussion
was Kang’s launch, on Yun’s advice, of the Pan Music Festival (initially
known as the Seoul Contemporary Music Festival) in 1969. The festival
136 Heekyung Lee
has since consistently played a crucial role in contemporary Korean music
by introducing Koreans to up-to-date musical trends from the West. Upon
returning to Germany, Yun brought with him some Korean students, includ-
ing Kang.8 Eventually, this group became a compositional vanguard; as a
result, music in the Western avant-garde style became mainstream among
Korean composers in the 1970s.9
Although some composition of traditional music emerged during the
1960s, it was generally arrangement of pre-existing traditional music.10 As
the Park government began to hold shin kugak (new traditional music) con-
tests in 1962, and expanded this to ch’angjak kugak (creative traditional
music) contests in 1974, many works for Korean traditional musical instru-
ments were composed, but there were no significant stylistic changes in the
music. One exception was the kayagŭm (12-stringed plucked zither) player
Hwang Byungki (b. 1936), who established his own musical style indepen-
dent from this trend.11
The socio-political upheavals in the 1980s extended to great changes in
Korean music culture. As Koreans gradually wrested democracy from the
military regime, they sought a national identity independent of uncritical
subordination to Western culture. In this context, the musical identity of
Korea became a political issue. Lee Geon-Yong (b. 1947), the leader of
the self-defi ned “Third Generation” (Che Sam Sedae, a composers’ group
established in 1981), advocated artistic self-consciousness, through which
one could critically re-examine the work of past generations and improve
the current situation. Influenced by concerns for cultural traditions across
the third world, the Third Generation sought specifically Korean composi-
tional identities, and promoted “the creative transmission of tradition” (Lee
Geon-Yong et al. 1992, 11) as one of the three agendas.12 This group con-
sidered ch’angjak kugak buried under the modernization and Westerniza-
tion ideologies of Park’s regime and thus inauthentically Korean; likewise,
it considered early explorations in the 1970s by composers such as Kang
Sukhi, Paik Byung-Dong, and Kim Chung-Gil merely temporary diversions
within the process of fi nding contemporary sounds and unique timbres.
Lee Geon-Yong characterized this situation as “tradition without composi-
tion, composition without tradition” (1983, 220).
The group’s emphasis on “the creative transmission of tradition” reflects
the paradoxical situation that Korean composers encountered: traditional
Korean music was not a “natural” resource for composition, but some-
thing that had to be “consciously” pursued in the compositional process.
While the generation of composers including Kim Dong-Jin (1913–2009),
Kim Sun-Nam (1917–1986), and Yun Isang was fascinated with and under
the influence of Western music, yet also exposed to traditional culture,
the Third Generation had to search for that tradition. A great interest
in Korean tradition is also evident among certain composers outside of
the Third Generation, such as Lee Young Jo (b. 1943), Kang Joon-Il (b.
1944), and Yi Man-Bang (b. 1945). Although their approaches to adopting
tradition diverge, they share similar life experiences, having been born
around the time of liberation from Japan with childhoods spanning the
Korean War and youths spent during the period of drastic modernization
and democratization.13
As Korean composers began to consciously appropriate traditional Korean
music, they focused on instrumental rather than vocal music. This prefer-
ence most likely stemmed from the disconnect between traditional vocalists
and contemporary composers. While traditional instrumental genres such as
samulnori and sanjo were readily available for compositional reimagining,
many Western-trained musicians had difficulty approaching traditional vocal
genres such as kagok and p’ansori. The belated interest in traditional vocal
practices also indicates that traditional vocalists in Korea were unaware of
the necessity of developing new forms to keep abreast with social changes.
When the survival of a form itself is in peril, people naturally focus on pro-
tecting what already exists rather than developing the form.14 Thus, p’ansori
was totally excluded from educational institutions until the 1980s, while
only an extremely limited number of chŏngga singers were active. Within
this context of widespread social neglect of traditional vocal music and its
values, the activities of Cho Yong-Pil, a representative K-pop singer (b. 1950),
deserve attention. While classical composers showed little interest in renew-
ing traditional vocal music, Cho adopted traditional vocal techniques from
p’ansori and minyo (folk song) in his characteristic singing style.15
On the whole, although issues of identity in Korean music were occa-
sionally raised throughout the second half of the twentieth century, vocal-
ity in traditional music was rarely explored due to the predominance of
Western styles and associated modes of listening as well as a failure to
cooperate with traditional vocalists. Substantial active engagement of tra-
ditional vocal practices in contemporary music only occurred with the new
millennium; the following sections discuss works dating from the 1970s
that prefigured this renewed interest.
WESTERNIZATION AND STANDARDIZATION

UNDER THE IDEOLOGY OF MODERNIZATION
Sinch’angak (new p’ansori-style music) by Kim Dong-Jin, a member of the

first generation of postwar Korean composers, exemplifies the typical early
appropriation of traditional vocal music by Western-style Korean compos-
ers.16 His lifelong fascination with p’ansori began while he was a student at
Soongsil University in Pyongyang in the 1930s. Experiencing the p’ansori
pieces Ch’unhyangga (Song of Ch’unhyang) and Simch’ŏngga (Song of the
filial daughter) performed by a ch’anggŭk group and led by p’ansori master
Lee Dong-Baik (1867–1950), Kim was so struck by the art of p’ansori that
he decided to create a new Korean opera out of the genre. Realizing that
his musical knowledge was insufficient for crafting his own p’ansori style, he
138 Heekyung Lee
transcribed recordings of p’ansori and collaborated with the p’ansori master
Kim So-Hee (1917–1995) for over a year in 1951; Kim Dong-Jin would per-
form his transcriptions, and Kim So-Hee would judge them accurate or not.17
His long efforts finally bore fruit in the opera Simcheongjŏn, first performed
in 1978. He labeled his compositional method sinch’angak, referring to the
grafting of traditional p’ansori onto Western music idioms. Kim’s work con-
trasts greatly with an opera premiered in Munich in 1972, Sim Tjong, by his
contemporary Yun Isang; although of the same generation, Kim Dong-Jin and
Yun Isang experienced sharply divergent musical trajectories.
Sinch’angak was a meaningful attempt to create a new form of Korean
vocal music derived from p’ansori. No other composer of this generation
seemed interested in modernizing p’ansori, and Korean opera at that time
meant a theater work dealing with a Korean narrative while musically rely-
ing on Western operatic style.18 Indeed, while delving into p’ansori and
rejuvenating it as a contemporary art form, Kim’s main criteria for which
p’ansori elements to adapt were based on Western concepts of vocalization
and melody. His focus was the transformation of p’ansori melodies to lines
performable through Western vocal and instrumental practice, showing a
lack of interest in the particular vocalizations of p’ansori and its unique
attractions. As a result, Kim Dong-Jin’s work is a kind of paraphrase or
transcription of p’ansori in a Western opera style; his sinch’angak built
on musical characteristics within the tonal and rhythmic frameworks of
Western music, rather than seeking to capture and refashion characteristic
p’ansori vocal practices in a modern aesthetic.
In the following passage from Simcheongjŏn, part of the aria “Hyosŏng
ŭi Norae” (Song of filial love), the limitations of Kim Dong-Jin’s West-
ernization of p’ansori is evident in its inability to capture such distinctive
features as melodic sigimsae (a refi ned technique of vocal ornamentation)
and rhythmic patterns relating to the text (Figure 7.1).
The melody contains much ornamented figuration and reflects the text’s
articulation, but it moves in simple B-minor harmonic language and has a
regular rhythmic pattern. The delivery of subtly nuanced sigimsae—the core
element of p’ansori vocalization—is absent in this rendering, due to the dif-
ficulty of capturing and notating the multifarious melodic flow of sigimsae
in the Western notation system. Kim Dong-Jin overlooked the subtle move-
ment within the melody and tonal changes which are the crucial elements
of tone quality characterizing p’ansori. Instead, he treated most p’ansori
melodies as monotonous and simple, only distinguished by their texts (Kim
Dong-Jin 1992, 217); therefore, he worked towards more diverse variations
of particular melodies to match the different texts, neglecting the tradi-
tional use of rhythmic demarcation.
This limited form of musical adaptation can be detected in the Western-
ization process of folk melodies in most East Asian countries, an adaptation
type restricted to the addition of tonal harmonies and orchestral arrange-
ments based on tonal underpinnings. However, despite these restrictions,
29
Andante espressivo
pstr.
3
Reconsidering Traditional Vocal Practices
3
139
Figure 7.1 Kim Dong-Jin, a passage from Simch ng’s aria “Hyos ngiii Norae” in Simcbeongj n (1992, 229). (Copyright © KOMCA,
Korea Music Copyright Association.)
140 Heekyung Lee
Kim’s recognition of the depth and potentials of p’ansori as a contemporary
form and his attempt to use it as a compositional resource for the creation
of an expressive musical language within the Western musical system is
admirable. Nonetheless, Kim did not consider the originality of p’ansori
a positive representation of cultural difference, but rather as something
underdeveloped and less modernized. Furthermore, he considered p’ansori
vocal techniques based on the manipulation of vocal fold nodules “unsci-
entific” and therefore refused to use them in his music (ibid., 161).19 Rather
than utilizing p’ansori vocal techniques in his writing, he asked singers
with Westernized vocal training to sing p’ansori. This approach, related
to the “modernization” ideology of Park’s regime in the 1970s, claims the
preservation of tradition; however, this resulted in transforming tradition
into something Western, rather than accentuating the “essence” of the tra-
dition. Modernization in music at that time implied shaping traditional
music to predefi ned forms of Western music; in other words, the process
was one of Westernized standardization.20
To Kim Dong-Jin’s generation, p’ansori’s oral practice and performativity
was an unstable variable, and thus unsuited for a kind of music with fi xed
melody and structure, notated in staff, using Western vocalization tech-
niques. However, the singers who received Western musical training during
the 1970s were not versatile enough to perform in the style of sinch’angak.
Today, in contrast, certain singers with Western singing technique have
learned to render some of the particular rhythmic patterns or tonal modes
of traditional Korean music as well. Performances of lyric songs from
Yun Isang’s Collection of Early Songs (1950/1990) have demonstrated
the development of a singing style in which traditional musical gestures
or nuances can be presented by Western-trained singers with a substan-
tial understanding of traditional Korean musical practice. 21 Furthermore,
the piano accompaniment in such songs is sometimes replaced with tradi-
tional instrumental ensembles, and traditional p’ansori singers have also
performed these songs. 22 In each case, the vocalist’s gestural performative
presence plays an important role in bridging the gap between traditional
Korean and Western styles. Although Kim Dong-Jin’s sinch’angak modifies
tradition within the frame of Western tonal music, a performer’s personal
vocalization and expression has the potential to give further meaning to
these works. The vocalist’s performative act is crucial to a successful syn-
thesis between traditional and contemporary musical practices.
EVOCATION OF THE ARCHAIC:

NOSTALGIA FOR DISAPPEARING ORIGINS
While Kim Dong-Jin took the route of modernizing a traditional genre

within the framework of Western music, another generation, including
Kang Sukhi, Paik Byung-Dong, and Kim Chung-Gil, appeared in the 1970s
with new approaches. Joining in the flow of European avant-garde music,
those composers pondered their own cultural identities and attempted to
embrace traditional culture as a creative compositional resource, especially
for contemporary sounds and unique timbres.23 Hwang Byungki notes
that, as Korean composers incorporated features of Western contemporary
music, they simultaneously sought their musical origins in the long-ignored
values of traditional Korean music (Hwang 1979, 206). Hwang’s The Lab-
yrinth for kayagŭm solo and voice (1975) and Kang Sukhi’s Buru for voice,
flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, piano, and two percussionists (1976) were cre-
ated in this context. The Labyrinth was one of several experimental works
that the kayagŭm player and composer Hwang created together with vari-
ous contemporary artists from other fields in the 1970s, presenting some
of them at the Pan Music Festival. 24 Kang’s Buru was commissioned by the
1976 Metamusik Festival in Berlin under the theme “East meets West.”
In The Labyrinth, the human voice murmurs, laughs, cries, moans,
screams, speaks, and sings to convey the sounds of precivilization human-
ity, while the voice in Buru is treated as part of the instrumental ensemble,
repeating a lyric pattern in menari-tori, a melodic mode that characterizes
folk songs and shaman songs in the Eastern part of the Korean peninsula.
The melody from Buru in Figure 7.2 is based on menari-tori.
Both the use of non-singing vocal techniques and the treatment of the
voice as an ensemble instrument are prominent features in twentieth-cen-
tury vocal music. Whereas Hwang sought to move away from traditional
musical languages in The Labyrinth, Kang tried to combine the sounds of
traditional Korean music with Western musical idioms in Buru. 25 To render
the atmosphere of shamanistic kut and Buddhist ritual, Kang uses various
percussion instruments such as tam-tam, bara (Korean brass cymbals), and
small bells; in addition, the dynamic rhythmic patterns played by the piano
in the following example are based on the instrumental language of the
large drum used in pŏmp’ae (Figure 7.3).
Although their musical backgrounds differ, the Buddhist and shaman-
istic atmospheres—the sound of disappearing origins, which both works
conjure up—are similar; invoking primitive and instinctive facets of the
human voice testifies to a nostalgia for rapidly disappearing origins in
Korean society during the 1970s. Both works use texts from the Buddhist
Heart Sutra: in The Labyrinth, the last phrase of the sutra, “Aje aje bara
aje barasung aje moji sabaha om” (Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone utterly
beyond oh, what an awakening) is sung at the end; in Buru, the Korean
pronunciation of the eight Chinese characters of the sutra, “Seg tschk si
gong, gong tschk si saek” (Form is emptiness, emptiness is form) is chanted
slowly throughout the piece.
In traditional Korean society, Buddhism, shamanism, and Daoism were
closely related to one another. As Christianity was imported to Korea, these
“folk” religions were increasingly regarded as superstitions and shunned by
the mainstream ideology of 1970s Korean society. Nonetheless, shamanism
(sempre)
p (sempre)
50
142
Voice
3
Se
Figure 7.2 Kang Sukhi, Buru (1976), mm. 50–56. (Copyright © 1978 Edition Modern [G. Ricordi & Co. Bühnen- und Musikverlag]. Repro-
duced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard, Italy.)
Heekyung Lee
165
=-3
Voice
U- A U - A U - A U - A U- A A
3 flüchtig 3 3 3 3 3
B.F1
flüchtig 3 3
Cl. ^
3
Perc. 1
(tarn.)
Perc. 2
(B.D.)
3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3
3
Piano
Figure 7.3 Kang Sukhi, Buru (1976), mm. 164–168. (Copyright © 1978 Edition Modern [G. Ricordi & Co. Bühnen- und Musikverlag].
Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard, Italy.)
and Buddhism remained deeply embedded in everyday life as cultural con-
texts rather than as religions per se. The use of this cultural background
in The Labyrinth and Buru reflects the 1970s status of those beliefs in
Korea; although composers were often Christian, they remained fascinated
by Buddhist temple ritual, with its characteristic gongs, and frequently
reflected that sonority in their work. Such shamanistic evocation appears
in Kang Joon-Il’s Man-ga (Funeral song) for voice, viola, cello, piano, and
percussion (1982). Sharing features with The Labyrinth and Buru, Man-ga
captures the gestures and nuances of Korean shamanistic music while pass-
ing over the techniques and expressiveness of traditional vocal music.26
Both The Labyrinth and Buru entrusted their respective premieres to the
unique performativity of Hong Sin-Cha (b. 1940), a choreographer, dancer,
and vocalist who regularly collaborated in experimental works with Hwang
and Kang at the Pan Music Festival in the 1970s. Neither a Korean tradi-
tional singer nor a Western-style singer, her role on stage is best expressed
as a “modern shaman” delivering incantations as performance art. These
works, which bring out the performativity of voice, were thus transitory
events, singularities in the musical styles of both composers; they cannot be
fully evaluated without taking into consideration Hong Sin-Cha’s remark-
able performative acting. An insightful artist who embodied the music
within herself, her unique vocal performance encapsulated the aesthetic
of nostalgia for the disappearing indigenous sound as reconstructed in a
modern musical framework. Although such performative experiments were
ephemeral, The Labyrinth and Buru thus successfully raise the question of
how composers can creatively use the performativity and orality of tradi-
tional Korean vocal practices as significant elements establishing their own
musical languages.
IMITATION/APPROPRIATION OR REINVENTION?
Since the outset of the twenty-fi rst century, Korean composers have been
actively collaborating with traditional vocalists. Traditional Korean music
survived through the turbulence of the 1980s, an era in which the demands
for democracy and national identity were hotly debated, as reflected in
the role of the samulnori. In the 1990s, the huge box-office success of
the fi lm Sŏp’yŭnje (1993) spurred recognition of the value of traditional
art; the fi lm was the fi rst in Korean history to reach one million view-
ers, attracting audiences with p’ansori and other features of traditional
culture. Indeed, the Korean government designated 1994 “The Year of
Traditional Korean Music.” Such government support for music conspicu-
ously mirrored the increasingly exalted social status of traditional music;
as traditional vocalists and vocal genres gained recognition, composers
began to seek out the potential for new music through close relationships
with traditional vocalists.
144 Heekyung Lee
In the new millennium, the singing style of chŏngga has intrigued many
Korean composers. Chŏngga, which includes kagok and sijo, is characterized
by its slow tempo and refined vocal timbres and techniques. Its unique beauty
is created through long melismatic phrases using both the chest voice and
the head voice with narrow vibrato,27 while the subtle gradation of dynamics
provides tension. The result is a microscopic world of delicate vocal colors
that sounds remarkably modern. In addition, the singing style of chŏngga
does not require the harsh and tedious vocal training of p’ansori singers, and
thus can be incorporated in the lives of “here and now” (Park Mikyung 2003,
191–192). Although it is difficult to precisely convey the music in Western
staff notation, the manner of musical expression in chŏngga has enormous
flexibility, and modern Korean poems—beyond the traditional sijo—can be
used as text. Thus the genre has great potential for modernization.
Hyungsan for traditional voice and electronic sound (2000) by Hwang
Sung-Ho (b. 1955) revives the multifarious acoustical qualities of chŏngga.
Hwang added electronic sounds to traditional kagok vocals in setting the
eighteenth-century text of “Pakok [a natural jade] from Mount Hyungsan,”
a sijo from the late Chosŏn period. According to the composer, the piece’s
“strong timbral features, characteristic of traditional Korean vocal music
which places importance on rhythm and breathing techniques,” come from
the dismantled, prolonged, and stretched phrasing of kagok vocalization;
this is “realized using manipulation of computer and electronic sound pro-
cessing methods” (Hwang 2000). Thus, while maintaining the characteris-
tics of traditional vocal music, Hwang modernized the genres, dubbing his
style “imagery-kagok.”
Similarly, Chung Hyun-Sue (b. 1967) sets texts from the Chosŏn period
and adheres to the characteristic chŏngga singing style. However, while
Hwang’s work relies heavily on the performance practice of the traditional
kagok vocalist, Chung’s artistic goal was a new representation of the genre
itself in her series Sich’ang (Poem song): Lotus Song (2007), Gong Yang
(2008), and Cold Rain Song (2009). As shown below, she used chŏngganbo
(Korean traditional mensural notation) to notate her composition, instead
of Western staff notation (Figure 7.4).
Traditionally, Korean vocal music was conceived as a form of sponta-
neous musical entertainment via an artistically elevated spirit; p’ungnyu
was the process of adding naturally springing melody to poetry. 28
Although this improvisational nature was the essence of p’ungnyu, over
time a number of melodies sedimented and were transmitted as fossils
of traditional music. Chung sought to revive the spirit of p’ungnyu by
encompassing the vocalization of sŏdo sori (a vocal style in Northwest-
ern Korean provinces) and subtle sigimsae through chŏngganbo nota-
tion, leaving it up to the vocalist to set a natural rhythm for the poetic
text. The choice of the accompanying bamboo flutes tanso (small vertical
bamboo flute), taegŭm (long transverse bamboo flute), or t’ungso (long
vertical bamboo flute) was based on the tone color and register of the
vocal performer.
Figure 7.4 Chung Hyun-Sue, Lotus Song (2007), first phrase. (Copyright © Chung
Hyun-Sue.)
P’ansori, with its solid musical structure and variety of expressive ges-
tures, has also received a revival in more recent contemporary Korean
music. To Hwang Seong for p’ansori and chamber ensemble (2001) by Lee
Chan-Hae (b. 1945) is a transformation of the traditional p’ansori based
on an arrangement of a traditional p’ansori performance. Using a section
of the traditional p’ansori Simch’ŏngga and arranging it for p’ansori singer,
percussions, trombone, and strings, Lee retains most of the vocal line and
rhythmic patterns in the voice and percussion, but gives the strings and
trombone a harmonically and contrapuntally supporting role, sometimes
using them for expressively elaborated passages. Lee continued this proce-
dure for the P’ansori Remix series (2005–2009), arranging famous scenes
from the traditional “Five P’ansori Narratives” (P’ansori obat’ang) for
Western instruments. In these works, Lee aimed to create new sound quali-
ties derived directly from elements inherent in the traditional genre.
Such attempts raise the question of the ability of composers to fashion
“integrated” music from heterogeneous elements. For instance, the different
tonal system on which Western instruments are based potentially creates
discord or simply fails to capture the unique texture and color of p’ansori.
The dependence of composers on the vocal practices of traditional singers
to restore traditional music idioms further reflects this incomplete mar-
riage of genres and styles; rather than exploring new musical directions,
146 Heekyung Lee
composers and musicians are still working out how to fully exploit the
expressive possibilities of traditional music’s frameworks in conjunction
with contemporary aesthetics. This can be read as a transitional phenom-
enon: composers collaborating with traditional vocalists need to continue
learning the old genres. When they have fully internalized the style, there
may be a stronger push towards truly new versions of those genres.
JUXTAPOSITION AND ASSEMBLAGE IN A NEW FRAME
The works of Yi Man-Bang and Kang Joon-Il, composers who have long
pondered how to approach traditional Korean music as a compositional
resource, showcase the development of unique adaptations of traditional
vocal practices. Yi Man-Bang began to learn kagok singing in 1983, after
fi nishing his studies in Germany and returning to Korea. Knowledgeable
about the possibilities underlying traditional Korean music—the delicate
expressivity of sigimsae and subtle nuances derived from tones and tim-
bres—Yi attempted to re-create the traditional vocal style into an “art
song of our times” in such works as the Akjang series (2001–2003), his
version of chŏngga. Yi’s series referred to the vocal idioms of kagok to
provide new possibilities for the Korean art song, which had never really
escaped the musical idioms based on Western harmonization. The Akjang
series—the term refers to the vocal parts in the Korean Royal Ancestral
Shrine Ritual Music (chongmyo cheryeak)—aims to capture the essence
of the chŏngga vocal style where the “grain of the voice” (Barthes 1977)
reflects the inner state of the text within a simple and serenely flowing
melody (Figure 7.5).
The conventionally notated score provides only a pitch skeleton for
the vocal performer, as the delivery of the delicate intonation, of timbres
and sound gestures, remains unnotated; this is a reference to the Akjang
series’ dedicatee, Yi’s daughter A-Mi, herself a chŏngga vocalist. However,
Yi allows for the possibility of a performance by Western singers as well,
rather than restricting performers to traditional vocal practitioners (Choi
2005, 161). Even if this piece is performed by a singer who does not know
much about chŏngga vocalization, the focus will necessarily be on the per-
former and her/his strategy to bring this seemingly monotonous tune alive.
Yi attempts to overcome the dichotomy between Western and traditional
music in Korea in the hopes of establishing a new mode of vocality.
Kang Joon-Il also pursued the expressive potential of the human voice
in his search for the sonic essence of Korean traditional folk music. He
fi rst considered the musical element kuŭm (mouth music); 29 in his series
Sori-Tarae for Kuŭm (Sound-bunch for kuŭm) (Figure 7.6), he explored
how Western-style singers might approach Korean traditional sounds,
suggesting kuŭm as a vehicle for bridging the gap. The vocal line is word-
less: the composer allows the singer maximum individualized expression
through the choice of syllables (Figure 7.6).
Andante (J ca. 58-60)
21
-3- -_3z
Female
Voice
p
pp
Piano
pp
26
Female
Voice
Pno.
Reconsidering Traditional Vocal Practices
147
Figure 7.5 Yi Man-Bang, Akjang II for female voice and piano (2002), mm. 21–30. (Copyright © Yi Man-Bang.)
6
mp
Voice
148
Viola
sf p
Heekyung
cresc.
Lee
p
Piano
cresc. - / mf
11 sf
if
Voice
3 9
Vla
mf- sf
*r
Pno mf
sf
Figure 7.6 Kang Joon-Il, Sori-Tarae for Kuŭ rn I for voice, viola, and piano (1998), third movement, mm. 6-15.
(Copyright © Kang Joon-Il.)
Using kuŭm-derived Korean folk song melodies, Sori-Tarae for Kuŭm
I conveys the mindfulness and aloofness which come with abandoning
regret. The piano takes not only a melodic and harmonic role, but also
that of a p’ansori drummer (kosu); the viola supports the voice and the
interaction between the voice and the piano. Yet it is the singer performing
kuŭm who has the most important role. Kang’s motivation for composing
this piece was a commission by the soprano Kim Kyung-Hee (b. 1961),
who, after studying in Italy, was strongly interested in developing a genuine
mode of Korean vocalization beyond Western vocal practices. In perform-
ing works such as Kang’s, Kim developed a vocal identity capable of ren-
dering the subtle gestures of traditional vocal music, successfully creating
new expressive interpretations of traditional Korean music through non-
Western vocalization. This is most notable in Kang’s Sori-Tarae for Kuŭm
III for voice, haegŭm (two-stringed vertical fiddle), and piano (2003). Here,
the concept of kuŭm is characterized by the interaction of voice and instru-
ments: the singer is constantly conscious of and influenced by the sound
quality of the haegŭm.
Kang continued his efforts toward mining the expressive potential of tra-
ditional music as he became acquainted with the traditional singer Chŏng
Hoe-Sŏk (b. 1963).30 He fi rst embarked on projects including transcribing
and arranging the twentieth-century p’ansori pieces Simch’ŏngga and Sug-
ungga by Chŏng Kwon-Jin (1927–1986, a member of the third generation of
the Chŏng family of p’ansori performers). His arrangements (2005–2007)
added the haegŭm and a Western string ensemble to the p’ansori sonority.
By placing the p’ansori singer in the new context of the ensemble’s two het-
erogeneous tonal systems, Kang questions the feelings evoked by p’ansori
without sacrificing the distinct characteristics of either musical system.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Kang explored the use of traditional folk
music gestures through Western musical instruments; in the new millen-
nium, he has focused on the encounters and coexistence of those two musi-
cal worlds as they are.31 Sin Hyangga (New hyangga) for soprano, p’ansori
singer, cello, haegŭm, and strings (2007) creates a musical space through
the juxtaposition of heterogeneous musical elements: p’ansori singer and
soprano, haegŭm and cello do not overshadow each other, but rather pro-
duce a tension between equal counterparts (Figure 7.7).
The musical gestures of Western instruments in Figure 7.7 reflect the figu-
rations of traditional Korean music. Over a piano part, featuring frequent use
of fourth intervals in chords and ornamentations, haegŭm, cello, and soprano
are woven contrapuntally, beginning with imitative passages, followed by the
entrance of the p’ansori singer. As the music proceeds, the parts take on a
shifting texture, sometimes fiercely conflicting, sometimes unified in a single
flow. The originality of this piece thus lies in the meeting of two different
worlds, with a dynamic heightened by the active role of the performers as
participants in the process of moving beyond conventional performance prac-
tices.32 Western instrumental ensemble works by Kang Joon-Il are developed
150 Heekyung Lee
56 1Kp-
Soprano
g
P'ansori
singer g
Haegum
1
7Kp~ mf
1Kp-
Cello
g
vf ¥
g
p
Piano vf
1Kp- 1Kp- 1Kp-
Figure 7.7 Kang Joon-Il, H nbwaga (Of ering fl owers) from Sin Hyangga, mm.
1-10. (Copyright © Kang Joon-Il.)
from similar principles. It is no coincidence that in Sin Hyangga Kang chose to

use a hyangga text from the seventh century, even as he attempted to relocate
p’ansori within the context of a modern ensemble.
Another interesting take on p’ansori singing by Lee Donoung (b. 1954),
in Hansori for p’ansori singer, alto saxophone, and orchestra (1984), was
inspired by the screaming rather than singing quality of p’ansori vocals.
Excerpts from the poetry collection Mom ŭn Chisang e mukky do
(Although the body is bound to the earth, 1979) by Lee S ng-s n (b. 1941)
are set to the alternating p’ansori singing styles sori (p’ansori singing)
and aniri (spoken narrative passages). The composer only indicates basic
melodic lines, allowing for the vocalist’s unrestrained sigimsae; collabora-
tion with the performer in conceiving the lines creates maximum impro-
visation opportunities. As the p’ansori singer’s shrieking timbre and the
saxophone’s husky sound intermingle over an orchestra, the characteristic
p’ansori vocals and gestures enliven the dark, heartfelt emotions implied in
the poetry: “bandits,” “the song of burning souls,” and “weeping mind as
a river flows.”
Finally, Yun Isang’s early contributions to this stylistic development are
particularly significant. In Gagok for voice, guitar, and percussion (1972)
and Epilog for soprano, female choir, and five instruments (1994), Yun fur-
thered his own compositional voice by positioning traditional vocal idioms
in new frameworks, abstracting the characteristic elements of traditional
kagok and pŏmp’ae for transformation into his musical language.33 For
Yun, who was isolated from Korean musicians due to his political stance,
Western performers offered the only available resources to deliver his artis-
tic intentions; it is interesting to speculate on what the result would have
been had Yun had access to Korean traditional performers.
CONCLUSION: REFLECTIONS ON PERFORMATIVITY AND ORALITY
When employing and transforming traditional vocal practices in contem-

porary Korean music, Korean composers have focused mainly on the mod-
ernization of vocal genres such as p’ansori or kagok and the appropriation
of those genres’ vocalization, necessitating dependence on traditional sing-
ers. These attempts have not yet fully explored the infi nite musical possi-
bilities of the human voice, nor do they always pay attention to the genuine
performativity of traditional Korean vocal music.
In the twentieth century, vocal music has been freed from the traditional
semantics of a text, allowing for more emphasis on phonetic sound. Many
composers have meticulously notated the subtle tone color changes and
expressive gestures the human voice can create; from another angle, they
have attempted to approach the distinct performativity of specific perform-
ers through collaboration. As a performance or an action, the indigenous
“mediality” of the human voice has attracted much attention within recent
interdisciplinary research, as the focus of aesthetic experience moves from
“artwork” to “incident.” Consequently, research trends on the voice in
terms of media theory, specifically within the paradigm of “performativ-
ity,” have gained currency. This is reflected in types of media art where
the “voice” as action/performance is emphasized, while more conventional
compositional practices seem to restrict themselves to “vocal music.”
In this aesthetic environment, the vocalization and vocal expressivity of
traditional Korean music have enormous potential for transformation in a
contemporary context. Characteristic patterns of thought and expression
of oral culture, as formulated by Walter Ong (2002), are easily detected in
Korean traditional vocal music. Orally transmitted genres such as kagok, 34
p’ansori, or muga (shaman song) have highly refi ned and diverse generative
principles which fundamentally differ from conventional notions of musi-
cal creation wherein the notated work is performable only as a composer’s
construction. Performances of p’ansori or kagok thus allow for countless
152 Heekyung Lee
possible variants, even in the hands of a single vocalist; every performance
uniquely takes from the atmospheres of the performance venue, the inter-
actions between performer and environment, and countless other perfor-
mance variables.
Performativity and orality of Korean musical tradition have yet to be
incorporated in new compositional contexts as musical modernization in
Korea has too often appropriated traditional styles at the expense of their
idiosyncrasies, the consequence being that today many composers still con-
sider traditional music antiquated. In the twenty-fi rst century, the power
of modern ideology still affects traditional Korean music immensely as
reflected in the plentiful attempts to arrange or compose traditional Korean
music in the well-tempered system. The time for reconsidering such appro-
priations has come, but Korean composers have yet to achieve full appre-
ciation of the possibilities that are offered by traditional musical contexts.
Could the performative act of traditional vocal practices be relocated to a
totally new context? Can the unique sounds, vocalizations, and expressions
of traditional vocalists be decontextualized from traditional genres such as
p’ansori and kagok? Might the vividness of oral performance of traditional
Korean music see development as a compositional principle which can shed
new light on improvisation?
These questions raise further issues: if the composer is not a performer,
to what extent can the expressive power of the unique textural qualities
and tone colors of a certain voice be realized in a work? How could tra-
ditional vocal practices be reimagined in this high-technology era? Can a
composer control or manage the vitality and extemporaneousness of the
embodied voice? Is “performance-centric composing” viable? Some recent
studies in media theory or sonic arts indicate that the performative act
itself might be “composed.”35 Above all, it is important to understand the
essence of vocalization in traditional Korean music beyond the concepts
endorsed in the past century, and to reassemble that essence in the context
of today; through doing so, the creative potentiality of performativity and
orality permeating Korean vocal practices becomes a potentially paradigm-
shifting source of artistic creation.
NOTES
1. Cho Kongnye was one of the most important singers in twentieth-century

Korea, renowned for her clear ringing tone and a genuinely dignified vocal
quality. As a transmitter of local folk song of Chindo (a Southwestern
Korean island), she was appointed as a national artist specializing in South-
ern rice-cultivation songs (Namdo tŭl norae), Intangible Cultural Property
51 in 1973. Although her voice was recorded for Corée/Korea: Chants rituels
de l’île de Chindo/Ritual Songs from the Island of Chindo (VDE/Archives
Internationales de Musique Populaire, Genève, VDE 756, 1993), it is rarely
heard outside of Korea. This field recording features Cho Kongnye singing
without instrumental accompaniment.
2. For the political implications of the Korean System of Intangible Properties
see Jeon 2005, 231–235.
3. The New Village Movement (Saemaŭl Undong) was a political initiative
launched in 1970 by the regime of Park Chung-Hee to promote the country’s
rapid industrialization and modernization. The name stems from a symbolic
catchphrase that touted the replacement of traditional thatched roof with
slate.
4. Despite his wretched end, Choi Sŏng-Gu (?–1974), the leading gong player of
namsadang, had a great influence on the next samulnori generation, includ-
ing Kim Yong-Bae and Lee Kwang-Su.
5. SPACE Love (Konggan Sarang) is a performance venue, established in 1978
by Kim Swoo Geun (1931–1986). He also published the arts journal SPACE
from 1966 and directed many events promoting collaboration between vari-
ous arts in his SPACE Gallery, opened in 1972.
6. Wanch’ang p’ansori, which was fi rst attempted by Park Dong-Jin in 1968,
is the performance of the entire narrative of p’ansori. Unlike the traditional
performance format of segmental episodic singing (t’omaksori), it takes
more than five hours in total. After Park Dong-Jin’s performance, wanch’ang
p’ansori became “the standard measure of artistic merit” (Park Chan E.
2003, 107). See also Han et al. 2001, 186–190.
7. For example, Im Chin-Taek’s Sorinaeryŭk (The history of a sound), Ttong-
bada (The sea of excrement), and Ojŏk (Five bandits) based on Kim Chi-Ha’s
ballads of the same titles. This new type of p’ansori is called “socio-political
p’ansori” by Um Hae-Kyung (Um 2008, 28–29).
8. Yun’s pupils included Kang Sukhi, Paik Byung-Dong (b. 1936), Kim Chung-
Gil (1934–2012), and Choi In-Chan (b. 1923). They were called the “Han-
nover School” in the 1970s, because they studied at the Hannover Academy
of Music, where Yun was teaching at that time.
9. The Korean Composer Group (Hanguk Chakgokga Hoe) was established in
reaction to the younger generation’s experimental music of the 1970s; com-
posers in the group largely produced the art songs favored by the general
public. As a result, the Korean compositional field was divided into those
working with Western contemporary musical techniques and those produc-
ing mainstream art songs exclusively. This polarization of compositional
trends erupted in an argument between Park Chan-Sŭk and Paik Byung-
Dong, published in the monthly music journal Wolgan Ŭmak in 1975. For
a discussion of shifts in Korean composers’ aesthetic affi liations after the
introduction of Western avant-garde music in the 1970s see Lee Heekyung
2004, 322–327 and Babcok 1995.
10. The concept of “composition” did not exist in traditional Korean music, but
was derived from the West. Although the National Center for Korean Tradi-
tional Performing Arts and some universities opened composition programs
for traditional Korean music in 1959, it was a long time before traditional
music “composition” moved beyond “arrangement.”
11. Interestingly, Hwang Byungki was not trained or educated within the
realm of traditional Korean music; he came from the College of Law, Seoul
National University, where the most privileged elites of Korean society stud-
ied at the time. That such an elite figure could become a traditional musician
was shocking to the general public; however, because of that privileged posi-
tion, he was able to establish a reputation free from the unprivileged status of
traditional musicians in society. He became a role model for the younger gen-
eration, who sought to creatively fuse traditional with contemporary music.
12. The other two agendas were “self-awareness to the present reality” and
“communication with audiences” (Lee Geon-Yong et al. 1992, 12).
154 Heekyung Lee
13. These composers’ similar but distinctive musical careers are described in
detail in Lee Heekyung 2008.
14. The trend towards newly composed p’ansori pieces mentioned above (see
note 7), fi rst attempted by some p’ansori singers in the 1970s, did not mean
that all elements of p’ansori were newly composed; rather, the genre used
modern text as its narrative, while the musical style remained strictly con-
fi ned to traditional musical idioms (melodic types, mood, singing style, orna-
mentations, and rhythmic patterns).
15. Cho Yong-Pil’s initially sweet voice became much huskier during his p’ansori
singing training, at the end of the 1970s; he ultimately mastered a wide vari-
ety of tone colors and techniques. In his recordings from the early 1980s,
this change is prominent, and he included some folk songs such as Han
Obaengnyŏn in his repertoire. The p’ansori scholar Kim Ik Doo’s recent
publication about Cho Yong-Pil is intriguing (Kim Ik Doo 2010, 19–25,
50–55).
16. Born and raised in Pyongyang, today the capital of North Korea, Kim
Dong-Jin learned Western music at Soongsil University, a missionary school
founded by the American Presbyterian Church in 1897. Soongsil University
played a prominent role in the propagation of Western music in Korea, pro-
ducing leading composers including Ahn Eak-Tae (1906–1965), Park Tae-
Jun (1900–1986), and Hyun Je-Myung (1902–1960). The university closed
in 1938 under Japanese colonial rule and reopened in Seoul in 1954.
17. Kim thoroughly documented the process of his lifelong work sinch’angak
(Kim Dong-Jin 1992, 143–253). Recently, audio recordings and transcrip-
tion of interviews with him were publicized online as part of “The Oral
History of Korean Arts” in the Korean National Archives of Arts: http://
oralhistory.knaa.or.kr (accessed September 10, 2011).
18. Interestingly, while Hyun Je-Myung’s Ch’unghyangjŏn (1950), the represen-
tative early Korean opera, adopted the narrative from Korean lore, it does
not have any relation to p’ansori. Ahn Ki-Young (1900–1980) also attempted
to create Korean opera in the 1940s; this music was later labeled hyangt’o
kagŭk (indigenous opera) by the famous music critic Park Yong-Gu (b. 1914).
Ahn used Korean folktales such as K’ongjwi P’atjwi and Kyŏnwoo Chiknyŏ
(The Altair and the Vega) as the basic narrative; in those operas some folk
song-style tunes are found (see Chun 2005).
19. Recent research illustrates the vocal procedures of p’ansori masters by analyz-
ing their vocal cords. Most p’ansori singers have thick, solid ball-and-socket-
shaped nodes attached to the vocal chords; medically speaking, this is a disorder,
but the presence of vocal cord nodes is now considered equivalent to the calluses
of martial arts practitioners, a physical adaptation that makes the idiosyncratic
sŏngŭm (vocal quality) such as surisŏng (husky voice) or ch’ŏngusŏng (clear,
springy voice) possible (Kim Hyung Tae 2007, 187–195).
20. This manner of modernization remains present in many works using tradi-
tional music as a source for compositional technique, as exemplified by the
Korean art song in minyo (traditional Korean folk song) style. For instance,
the songs of Chin Kyu-Yung (b. 1947) adopting famous excerpts from
p’ansori Hŭngboga, such as Chebinojŏnggi, Hwach’ojang T’aryŏng, Pak
T’aryŏng (2008), are performed with Western-style vocalization, yet carry
a very Korean sense of humor and the cheerful atmosphere of the original
p’ansori.
21. Yun’s six early songs were fi rst published as Dalmuri (1950); in 1990, five of
these were reprinted by the Yun Isang Music Institute in Pyongyang. In the
preface of the collection, Yun wrote, “I wish singers to sing these songs with
melodic, dynamic, and colorful exquisiteness of traditional music or minyo.”
In addition, Yun sometimes directly applied elements of Korean traditional
music in the score: in Kop’ung Ŭisang (Antique clothing), the fi rst song in
this collection, he adopts kutkŏri changdan (a type of traditional rhythmic
cycles) and t’oesŏng (a sort of gliding tone).
22. The performance by Ch’angjak Akdan (Contemporary Kugak Orchestra) of
the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts in Seoul, pre-
sented as a part of “Remembering Yun Isang: A 90th Anniversary Celebra-
tion Festival” in 2007, was an interesting display of the musical gestures of
traditional Korean music inherent in Yun Isang’s songs.
23. Although the Third Generation criticized this “second” generation for their
unquestioned pursuit of Western contemporary music, this earlier genera-
tion’s achievements can now be assessed more objectively. The process of
absorbing Western avant-garde musical styles for these composers was
inwardly linked to the proposition that Korean tradition was an important
source of compositional ideas. Kang Sukhi’s Dalha for orchestra (1978),
Paik Byung-Dong’s Chŏngch’ui for kayagŭm (1977), and Kim Chung-Gil’s
Ch’uchomun for eight traditional instruments (1979) are the most remark-
able examples of this trend.
24. The piece was premiered at SPACE ’75, the event celebrating the 100th issue
of the arts journal SPACE in 1975.
25. According to the composer, Buru is the archaic Korean word for p’ungnyu,
literally meaning “path toward artistic harmony,” in fashion during the Silla
dynasty 1500 years ago; the composer’s description and explanation of the
piece is found in Kang 1979, 266–270.
26. Other examples include Kang Sukhi’s Yebul for male solo voice, male choir, and
30 percussionists (1968) and Lee Young Jo’s Kyŏng (Sutra) for male choir and
percussion (1975). However, what was incorporated into these musical works
is an image of the quiet and peaceful temple, including the solemn chanting of
monks, rather than the vocalizations heard in Buddhist ritual music.
27. These are known respectively as sokch’ŏng (inner voice) and sesŏng (fi ne
voice). See Um 2007, 38.
28. P’ungnyu implies the attitude of enjoying art leisurely as a kind of aesthetic
way of life; this played an important role in establishing aesthetic conscious-
ness in Korean culture (see Min 2003).
29. Kuŭm refers to oral mnemonics imitating and characterizing the sound of
musical instruments such as kayagŭm, p’iri, and changgo. Kuŭm is an impor-
tant method for learning melodic lines, dynamics, and timbres in Korean
traditional music practice, and has developed into its own vocal genre: kuŭm
sinawi is a vocal version of the instrumental sinawi, based on singing mean-
ingless syllables.
30. Kang Joon-Il’s fi rst major works, the samulnori concertos Madang (1983)
and Puri (1983), were products of his encounter with the famous Kim Duk-
Soo Samulnori Band; similarly, his work related to p’ansori was inspired
by his encounter with Chŏng Hoe-Sŏk, a fourth-generation member of a
p’ansori family famous for their Posŏng Sori (p’ansori style in the region of
Posŏng).
31. Following his composition of Hae-maji Gut (A Shaman Performance to
the New Sun) for cello, piano and changgo (2001), commissioned by Yo-Yo
Ma’s The Silk Road Project, Kang continued to write for similarly combined
ensembles in works including Aurŭm (Embracing) for violin and kayagŭm
(2001); Sogŭmgok (A simple string piece) for kayagŭm and string quartet
(2003); Han-Gŏ-Sa-Rak (Four pleasures living in a sequestered place) for
taegŭm, clarinet and cello (2004); Sori-Kŭrimja II (Shadow of sound) for
haegŭm, violin, and (traditional or Western) orchestra (2004).
156 Heekyung Lee
32. Instruments such as the Chinese erhu have been thoroughly overhauled as a
result of Western influence; however, the Korean haegŭm has not been fun-
damentally altered and retains its unique sound. Its performance therefore
requires special techniques to accord well with Western instruments.
33. Yun’s last work, Epilog, was written for performance in conjunction with
Engel in Flammen: Memento for orchestra (1994), but can be performed
separately. For more on the sonic world of the Buddhist ritual pŏmp’ae as
used in this piece see Choi 2006.
34. Kagok has been transmitted via manuscript since the sixteenth century, but
the score was not a prescribed or composed text written prior to performance;
rather it was a kind of transcription of what the performers had sung, a sup-
portive device to recall orally transmitted music. As such, it serves orality.
35. The singing voice can be regarded as a symbol of emotion outside the seman-
tic sphere. To this end, Kim Jin-Hyun has analyzed the micro-intonations of
the singing voice present in the performative act; her research illuminates the
complex configurations of the singing voice on the microlevel as the essence
of Korean traditional vocal music (Kim Jin-Hyun 2003). The reconsidered
role and function of notation within a live performance of a collaborative
practice has opened up the possibility of “performance-centric composition”
(Rebelo 2010).
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Choi Ae-Kyung. 2005. “Yi Man-Bang ŭi Chakp’um Segye e taehan Yŏngu” [Study
on the work of Yi Man-Bang]. Ŭm Ak Hak 12: 131–170.
. 2006. “‘Eine kosmische Klangwelt’ für Lebende und Tote: Isang Yuns Epi-
log (1994).” In Isang Yun’s Musical World and the East-Asian Culture, edited
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Chun Chungim. 2005. “Chakgokga Ahn Ki-Young ŭi Hyangt’o Kagŭk Yŏngu”
[Study on the composer Ahn Ki-Young and Hyangt’o Kagŭk]. Ŭmak kwa Min-
jok 30: 167–196.
Han Myung-Hee, Song Hye-Jin, and Yun Chung-Gang. 2001. Uri Kugak 100 nyŏn
[100 years of our traditional music], Seoul: Hyŏnamsa.
Hwang Byungki. 1979. “Chŏnt’ong ŭmak kwa Hyŏndai ŭmak” [Traditional music
and contemporary music]. In Hanguk ŭi Minjok munhwa: Kŭ Chŏnt’ong kwa
Hyŏndaisŏng [Korean national culture: Its tradition and modernity], edited
by Hanguk Chŏngsin Munhwa Yŏnguwon (The Academy of Korean Studies),
Sŏngnam: The Academy of Korean Studies, 202–222.
Hwang Sung-Ho. 2000. Hyungsan for traditional voice and electronic sound,
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world contemporary music], Seoul: Koryŏwon.
. 1992. “Contemporary Music Skyrocketing in Vigor.” Koreana 6/1: 9–16.
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[Voice odyssey: In search of the hidden secret in voice], Seoul: Book road.
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Norae [Cho Yong Pil’s music world: The song of Korean sentiment, the song for
nation], Seoul: P’yŏngminsa.
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tion der Stimme in der Musik.” In Medien/Stimmen, edited by Cornelia Epping-
Jäger & Erika Linz, Cologne: DuMont, 250–266.
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[Tradition without composition, composition without tradition]. Madang 32:
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and Huh Young-Han. 1992. “Che Sam Sedai ŭi Chinro wa Hanguk Ŭmak”
[The path of the Third Generation group and Korean music] (a round-table
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. 2008. “Hanguk Hyŏndai Ŭmak ŭi Damronjŏk Paich’i e kwanhan
Yŏngu—Ne Chakgokga ŭi Chŏnt’ong Damnon ŭl chungsimŭro” [Different
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. 2008. “New P’ansori in Twenty-First-Century Korea: Creative Dialectics
of Tradition and Modernity.” Asian Theatre Journal 25/1: 24–57.
8 Escaped from Paradise?
Construction of Identity and Elements
of Ritual in Vocal Works by Helmut
1
Lachenmann and Giacinto Scelsi
Jörn Peter Hiekel
REDEFINITIONS AND DISSOLUTIONS
Throughout European music history many situations have arisen in which

the question as to why and how vocal music is composed assumed particu-
lar urgency—situations leading to remarkable redefi nitions of identity that,
in turn, served as models or countermodels for composers of subsequent
generations. Time and again the challenge was to go beyond established
aesthetic discourses, to reconsider modes of vocal presentation and the con-
texts in which they were articulated.
When in the beginning of the seventeenth century Claudio Monteverdi
conceived the first work which can be designated an “opera” in the mod-
ern sense, singing on stage wasn’t a given. In this situation it proved help-
ful for Monteverdi to refer to the antique myth of Orpheus as this reference
enabled listeners of his work to imagine that in remote and wondrous Euro-
pean antiquity people were communicating by singing—possibly in the highly
artificial manner of Monteverdi’s musical idiom which was so influential for
the further development of seventeenth-century opera. When 150 years later
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote songs with piano accompaniment, he was
obviously convinced that the restrictive tradition of church song had to be
expanded in order to convey what he wanted to express. In his preface to the
Gellert-Lieder, Bach conceded that the new liberties he took in writing these
songs might irritate listeners. This implication of “irritation” is barely disguis-
ing a new aesthetic of sacred song that intentionally goes beyond the norms of
its times and seems to justify the term Lied or Kunstlied for the first time in
history. In further consequence, this provided a model which composers like
Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert elaborated on.
It would be possible to describe a number of similar innovatory achieve-
ments in the history of European vocal music. These include the unfolding
of a “realist” vocal style by Leoš Janáček originating in everyday speech,
and the consequent formation of Sprechgesang in Arnold Schoenberg’s
Pierrot Lunaire that built upon a new artificiality to an almost surreal
effect. A common feature of all four described situations is the impetus
of the musical art work to challenge seemingly self-evident conventions,
Escaped from Paradise? 159
to stretch boundaries. The way in which the composers achieve this aim
and their relationship to what was considered “natural,” however, could
hardly be more different: Monteverdi sought to present the very artificial-
ity of singing as “natural”; Bach, in contrast, chose to liberate song from
stiff stylizations; Janáček aimed to blend a highly artificial vocal technique
with a type of language spoken “on the street”; and Schoenberg tried to
transform “natural” vocal enactment into an intriguing artificial language.
Despite these different methods, all four composers had a common objec-
tive: utmost emotionality and a nuanced expression of affects, communi-
cated through the vocal medium.
These “redefinitions” and potentials of vocal music in European music
history have to be borne in mind, when vocal music of the European avant-
garde after 1950 is discussed. The present essay therefore aims to include
these aspects in a discussion of two key figures of new music, Giacinto Scelsi
(1905–1988) and Helmut Lachenmann (b. 1935), after sketching the general
situation from which their vocal writing emerged. The choice to focus on
these two composers is due to the principal difference between their aesthetic
concepts, which might help to give an idea of the broad spectrum new vocal
music in Europe generally has entailed, in particular since the 1960s. There
are, however, also some significant points of aesthetic contact between these
two composers, most notably the manner in which both Scelsi’s and Lachen-
mann’s vocal works demonstrate an understanding of “ritual.”
EXPLORATION OF NEW POSSIBILITIES

IN VOCAL MUSIC AFTER 1950
Some accounts generalize the postwar musical avant-garde as anti-expres-

sive, entailing a ban placed on great passions and a lack of interest in vocal
design. This, however, is an overly simplified perspective, though it is obvi-
ous that (and why) the fi rst serial works were conceived for purely instru-
mental or electronic settings. But countertendencies as well as conceptual
diversification and extension were an intrinsic part of the musical avant-
garde during this period. From the middle of the 1950s onwards an explicit
interest in vocal music developed within the context of serial music. And it
seems that this interest was not least due to auratic and expressive qualities
that were represented by the vocal medium—qualities that also symbolized
a subversive and uncontrollable element opposed to serialist construction.
This tension is a key to the paradoxical as well as fascinating situation of
well-known vocal works from the 1950s such as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s
electronic composition Gesang der Jünglinge (1955/1956), Luigi Nono’s
Il canto sospeso (1955/1956), or Le marteau sans maître (1953/1955,
revised 1957) by Pierre Boulez. In these works the auratic component of
singing competes with a strictly conceived musical structure as it were. In
Boulez’s work for alto and six instrumentalists this results in a peculiar
160 Jörn Peter Hiekel
type of impersonal artificiality that led György Ligeti to speak of a “sen-
sual feline world” (Ligeti 1960, 62). In Stockhausen’s work this situation
gave rise to a characteristic naïvety which divided the reception of Gesang
der Jünglinge into gleaming support and rigorous repudiation. Building on
the same dialectics between aura and structure, Nono achieved a new con-
nection between an unsettling content and a kind of musical expression
that balanced pathos and aesthetic distance.
Surely all three composers—and many more could be named here—
aimed at a strict negation of stereotypes of expression from the classical-
romantic tradition. Even more important though, these composers were
striving for their own language in the deepest sense, for creating moments
of incommensurable expression.
Of course it would be possible to argue that such works eliminated the
kind of emotionality commonly attributed to voices. Obviously this was
how composers such as György Ligeti, Luciano Berio, or Mauricio Kagel
felt when, from the late 1950s onwards, they created works that aimed at
a radical liberation of vocal expression, producing fancy theatrical effects.
These works, among them Berio’s Tema—Omaggio a Joyce (1958), Ligeti’s
Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures (1962–1965), or Kagel’s Anagrama (1957–
1958), are equally innovative, pursuing, however, an opposite intention.
Their eccentric outbursts are not unsimilar to what can be found in some
special forms of the Italian Renaissance madrigal, while their strong ten-
dency to “desemanticization” is historically unique (cf. Klüppelholz 1995).
Non-semantic vocal composition can be differentiated by isolating two
principal tendencies. The fi rst tendency, preshadowed by Stockhausen’s
Gesang der Jünglinge, desemanticized a given text, for example by dissolv-
ing it into phonemes. Many composers agreed that this technique func-
tioned particularly well when the text was widely known or presented in
its original form simultaneously, e.g., in a program book, or within the
composition itself. The second tendency presented syllables or phonemes
independently from a given text or language system. This method enabled
composers to create a “language” of its own—no discursive type of lan-
guage with distinct semantic contours, but a gestural language.
During this period only a minority of composers (among them Luigi
Nono) tried to legitimize their artistic approaches by references to music
history. Instead, the aspect of innovation was constantly at the center of
the discourse, despite the fact that references to historical examples of
desemanticization could have easily been found (the Queen of the Night in
Mozart’s Magic Flute essentially expresses herself non-semantically in the
coloraturas). An important inspiration for the new approach was provided
by James Joyce’s formula that “gesture, not music, not odours, would be
a universal language” (Joyce 1961, 432). This phrase implied that gestural
and affective activity might be far more relevant to the communication of
meaning than words or sentences.
This meant that the “loss of meaning” brought about by desemanticiza-
tion could be compensated by phonetic qualities in performance. Composers
such as Ligeti, Berio, Kagel, or Bernd Alois Zimmermann intensively and
systematically read Joyce in the 1950s and 1960s and reacted to the idea of
gestural composing by producing diverse concepts of Sprachkomposition. In
his Aventures pieces Ligeti created an artificial language that tried to estab-
lish an intense form of communication, entirely without any familiar words.
The grotesque and ironic twists appear like a persiflage of conventional ges-
tures in opera arias, which made Ligeti speak of an “imaginary opera” (Ligeti
1966, 197–198). Most other composers usually combined such a dissolution of
semantic contours with the incorporation of given texts.
It is important to emphasize that this tendency towards a dissolution—or
suppression—of semantics in new (Western) European music brings a
dimension to the fore which is often barely considered in musicological
accounts on music of this period: the ritual side of music. Composers like
Stockhausen and Boulez were sensitive for this dimension already in the
early 1950s, Stockhausen for religious or spiritual reasons, Boulez due to his
intense experience with Antonin Artaud’s concept of theater (Zenck 2003).
It is widely known and accepted that music generally involves ritualistic
aspects, but some examples of new vocal music lend a particular emphasis
to this dimension. Reconsidering the key paradigms and self-legitimizations
of this period we should not underestimate the relevance of this dimension,
even though it was barely publicly discussed during the 1950s.
It is of particular relevance here to observe that the growing significance of
the ritual dimension in parts of the Western postwar avant-garde was inwardly
connected to an encounter with non-Western cultures. These encounters crys-
tallized in an appropriation of East Asian musical and philosophical tradi-
tions, in many cases mediated by John Cage’s thinking and writings which
were prominently informed by his reception of Zen-Buddhism. This context
particularly helped many European composers to create a kind of music for
alternative types of musical performance beyond established social functions
and beyond the rituals of the concert hall. Olivier Messiaen also provided
impulses of central importance in this field.
All this provided the European postwar avant-garde with a strong sense
of alternatives to conventional musical settings of a text that had already
been widely common in musical modernism before 1950. In the years after
1950, many composers became aware that new possibilities were prone
in this area, despite some attempts of earlier avant-gardists (such as Kurt
Schwitters’s Ursonate [1923–1932], which was studied intensely by Ligeti
and Zimmermann), possibilities beyond established expressivity, and espe-
cially beyond the mere comprehensibility of a given text.
THE POWER OF THE ARCHAIC: GIACINTO

SCELSI AND HIS CANTI DEL CAPRICORNO
A highly significant example of non-semantic approaches to vocal music

that was formulated by referencing non-Western music is provided by the
collection Canti del Capricorno (Songs of the capricorn, 1962–1972) by
Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi. This work is representative for a com-
positional approach that has become indispensable in recent European art
music: the attempt to stretch the boundaries and widen the possibilities of
vocal music. In Scelsi’s case this also meant to cross the boundaries towards
an increasing ritualization of music.
In Rome, Scelsi had been in touch with John Cage and the American
avant-garde at a relatively early point in the 1950s. In the 1980s his music
was emphatically rediscovered in Western Europe as an alternative to the
historically established avant-garde (Metzger and Riehn 1983 is a document
of this rediscovery). His encounter with non-Western music and spirituality
had led Scelsi to draw a decisive consequence for his compositional practice
already since the late 1940s or earlier: he sought to unfold his improvisa-
tions on the piano and the ondiola, a monophonic electronic instrument
with continuous pitch, in an unfiltered, highly intuitive way, though recent
research has shown that in many cases Scelsi changed the original improvi-
sations by cutting, mixing, and juxtaposing recordings of different impro-
visations to the version that eventually served as basis for the written score
(Jaecker 2011). The major part of his works consists of “transcriptions” or
notational “interpretations” of these improvisations from tape. The influ-
ence of Asian cultures on his output is documented, among others, by his
Quattro Illustrazioni (1953) for piano, subtitled “Four representations of
a metamorphosis of Vishnu,” as well as by the fact that music for Scelsi is
basically “sonic entity, and [ . . . ] a projection of images or states of con-
sciousness” (Scelsi 2001, 261). Moreover, Scelsi was pronounced in reject-
ing the notion of a composer for himself (Scelsi 1999); he rather considered
himself a medium of a spiritual message, intentionally undermining key
principles of Western art music.
It is surely possible to argue that the figure Scelsi and his compositional
aesthetics entailed a considerable proportion of self-fashioning, manifest
in his widely accepted role of a “nonconformist” (cf. Zeller 1983), and
that this aesthetics represented an otherworldly, or at least non-European,
dimension which was much sought after during the early 1980s. But the
attractiveness and success of his music cannot be explained solely by its
correspondence with a general trend: his works were indeed widely received
by European audiences, his insistence on a non-conventional form of musi-
cal creation never seemed inauthentic, and, most importantly, the sound
results of his works certainly involve a particular intensity.
The last point in particular applies to a work such as Canti del Capricorno
that may be characterized as a Janus-faced cross between Asian thought and
Western music tradition and thus exhibits a peculiar hybrid identity. On the
one hand, it is strongly informed by the aura of ritualistic activity, though an
exact localization or external cause of this imaginary ritual is intentionally
concealed. On the other hand, the vocal techniques in this cycle in several
respects converge with the vocal music of the European avant-garde during
the 1950s and 1960s. The most significant difference between Scelsi’s work
and the European avant-garde is due to the improvisational character of Scel-
si’s music: “Do not concentrate on what is in the score. Do it how you feel
it” (Hirayama 2005), was the composer’s advice to Hirayama Michiko who
has been the single performer of this work up to the present. The close col-
laboration between Scelsi and Hirayama has triggered the speculation that
the sound result of these songs betray “certain parallels [ . . . ] with Japanese
vocal music” (Kirchert 1998, 92, see also Utz 2002, 189–190), although this
has been partly repudiated by Hirayama herself (2007, 16). In any case, this
close collaboration has also brought up the question of authorship: Hirayama
is considered a co-author of the Canti del Capricorno by some experts, a
question that has only tentatively been discussed in Scelsi research (see also
Chapter 3, Christian Utz’s contribution in this volume, 47–48).
The Canti del Capricorno, as most of Scelsi’s vocal compositions, are
not based on a given text, but instead make use of a variety of interwo-
ven non-semantic syllables. Scelsi’s œuvre includes vocal works displaying
a strong preference for consonants as well as vocal works with a greater
emphasis on vowel sounds. The Canti del Capricorno belong to the lat-
ter group. Dominant within this cycle are songs that are typified by the
monophthongs O and U and above all by the diphthongs Ü [y] and Ö
[ø]. Alternating central pitches are animated by microtonal inflections. The
resulting fluctuations are sometimes, but not always synchronized with the
change of the required vowels with the result that microtonal shifts and
vowel formants form two intertwined layers.
Almost throughout the 20 Canti del Capricorno, which are usually
performed in their entirety, the mode of expression has the manner of an
incantation. The addition of percussion instruments in a number of Canti
further emphasizes this tendency. Most specifically, the cycle as a whole has
an archaic and at the same time irritatingly innovatory effect. The music is
in itself highly varied: rough, almost abrasive songs are to be found along-
side more coaxing or evocative songs, while some songs work themselves
up to an almost ecstatic expressivity. Already at first hearing one is driven
to imagine some kind of ritual. The title lends weight to such an interpre-
tation. What manner of ritual and what secrets the enigmatic Capricorn
might hold, however, must remain a mystery—for the time being, at least.
And we can assume that this openness (or vagueness) is intentional, that
Scelsi explicitly wished to transform the cloudy, but not necessarily entirely
misleading image of a non-European ritualistic situation into a general ritu-
alistic character that would also be comprehensible for European listen-
ers. Such stylizations are well known from music aiming at intercultural
perspectives. But they also converge with those tendencies within Western
music that seek to turn rituals from religious contexts—including the com-
mon forms of mass and requiem—into concert situations.
It is not possible to imagine recent European music history without the
fascination for Scelsi and his compositional approach. Hans Zender, for
instance, whose own œuvre is equally strongly informed by the experience
with non-European cultures, has emphasized Scelsi’s “abandonment of all
kinds of motivic composition as well as rhythmical patterning” (Zender
2004, 32), concluding that “through this abandonment he does not risk
falling back into traditional European thinking, while no technical relation-
ship to non-European music cultures can be substantiated” (ibid.). It seems
that Zender sees something realized in Scelsi’s music that corresponds with
his own intentions as a composer. The basic flow of Zender’s own vocal
music, however, is kept less incantatory than Scelsi’s Canti del Capricorno;
the distance to actual ritual is more pronounced.
Scelsi is a special, in many respects exterritorial case in European music
history. But yet Zender’s Scelsi reception provides evidence for the fact
that Scelsi—who himself was probably much influenced by John Cage’s
experimentalism—provided significant impulses for the following genera-
tions. This applies even to situations where composers have not shared
Scelsi’s strong, wholehearted identification with other cultures, to which
a work as the Canti del Capricorno testifies, but have rather seen this
identification as a solitary or even venturous aspect of his music and not
as an exemplary model.
FROM “CULTURAL SHOCK” TO “BROKEN MAGIC”:

THE VOCAL MUSIC OF HELMUT LACHENMANN
The self-evidence in approaching elements of other cultures and their magic

which one can attribute to Giacinto Scelsi’s works can hardly be found
in Helmut Lachenmann’s compositional aesthetics. Lachenmann’s vocal
music is introduced here, somewhat more extensively, as a second case
study fi rstly since Lachenmann can be labeled one of the most influential
figures in today’s European music whose works have meanwhile found con-
siderable resonance worldwide, and, secondly, because he more recently
has particularly focused on the “magical” dimension of music, in part also
with respect to questions of cultural identity.
Particularly illuminating in this respect is a lecture given during the Darm-
stadt summer courses 2006, published two years later (Lachenmann 2008),
ironically entitled “‘East Meets West?—West Eats Meat’ . . . oder das Cre-
scendo des Bolero” (‘East meets West?—West eats meat’ . . . or the crescendo
of the Bolero). “Recollections of a Cultural Shock” is the subheading of a sec-
tion of this text in which Lachenmann reports on his first visit to the Darm-
stadt courses almost half a century earlier. In it we can read:
I will never forget my fi rst visit to the Darmstadt summer courses in

1957 in which one day started—I am improvising from memory—at
10 am with Stockhausen’s analysis seminar on Boulez’s Structures
Ia or on the transfer between micro- and macrotime in his Gruppen,
followed by Nono’s analysis of Schoenberg’s Variations for Orches-
tra at 2 pm, by four Adorno lectures on Criteria of New Music at 5
pm, and by a chamber concert at 8 pm featuring Henri Pousseur’s
Scampi for electronic sounds, Stockhausen’s Zeitmaße for five wind
instruments, Xenakis’s Achorripsis for ensemble, and Bo Nilsson’s
Quantitäten for piano. The day eventually ended with a concert
featuring musicians around Ravi Shankar, a musical experience that
was transfi xing us abruptly, turning time into a magic space, where
the total accordance of the musicians and their music lent intensity
to our experience of their sounding presence—we were feeling as
wide-eyed spectators of a happier culture, which was considering
and conducting itself intact, which obviously had neither problems
with its tradition nor with its “concept of material” and carried
us along, affecting and intoxicating us, embarrassing us, despite all
happiness, when we thought about the next morning and saw our-
selves tracing rows, parameter organizations, or undertaking any
sort of dissecting measurements of works, that must have appeared
like hollow handicraft products when compared with this experi-
ence of intoxication, as artifi cial operations, exerted on abstractly
construed objects—works that obviously did not qualify for the
term “music” but rather for the disdainful “structure.” For me, the
novice, who had never experienced “something like this” during the
morning session and the ensemble concert as well as during that late
midnight hour, both experiences meant a shocking transgression of
the horizon; both were a strange world for me: one experience repre-
sented and evoked a readily importable, but absolutely remote social
reality, the other experience represented a perhaps blasphemously
technical, microscopic, interior illumination of the familiar, alienat-
ing it by turning it into a “measured” world—the measuring and dis-
closure of which by information-strategic methods almost made me
feel my heart beat: tua res agitur [your case is being negotiated].
And so I also remember the stubborn enthusiasm that, after a bad
night’s sleep, made me resume the analytical and synthetical, quasi
chemical laboratory experiments and discovery exercises with dou-
ble commitment on the following day and in further consequence,
because I internalized the utopian dimension in these fi rst attempts
to dissect and re-defi ne the concept of music itself; I understood it as
an exciting challenge to physically and empirically re-determine the
structure of sound and its projection into a seemingly purified time.
For me there was no compromise possible between the authenticity of
the timeless music that had so thoroughly moved me the other night,
and the authenticity of searching lost music, and so I had to make a
decision: for a music which had been expelled from—or voluntarily
escaped from?—the paradise of happy intactness, which reflects on
itself, observes its own structure or structuredness. I recalled Lessing’s
thought that striving for insight was more important than insight
itself (ibid., 90–91).
Lachenmann has always subscribed to the magical dimension of music

and its strong, unmediated suggestive power, but he also makes a clear
distinction between a ritual type of non-European music that he appar-
ently considers “authentic” and art music in accordance with European
criteria. Magic—paraphrased from an ironical distance as a “paradise
of happy intactness” in the above quote—has remained a key aspect in
Lachenmann’s argumentation, particularly in recent years. Lachenmann
himself, however, strives for a “broken magic,” especially where his own
composing is concerned. In his 2006 Darmstadt lecture he described
enactments of “breaking” as crucial impulses in the tradition of Euro-
pean music. At the same time, however—and we can adequately assess
the dimension of “breaking” only from this perspective—Lachenmann
admits that he has been profoundly influenced by the contact with East
Asian thought:
Due to my individual biography, I myself live in close contact with phil-

osophical observations and maxims of communicatively involved Zen
masters and the philosophers of the Kyoto School. I read—sometimes
awkwardly—the texts of a Nishida, a Nishitani, Ueda, Teitaro Suzuki.
Precisely because they illuminate the inexpressable, even the unimagi-
nable through a discursively operating language, they invigorate me,
they stimulate my passion for creation, they encourage me, and they
also settle down in my religiousness (ibid., 86).
The dimension of astonishment, often grounded in spirituality, is impor-

tant for Lachenmann’s aesthetic concept. His music carries the ambition
to teach astonishment anew. This tendency can be traced in Lachenmann’s
vocal works in particular. Evidence for this can be found in the text design
of some works. Consolation II (1968) for 16 solo voices, for example,
begins with the words “Mir gestand der Sterblichen Staunen als Höchstes”
(This I learned among mortal men as the greatest wonder) from the Mod-
ern High German version of the Wessobrunn Prayer. The composer himself
has described this astonishment as the key topic of the work (Lachenmann
1969). A performance of Consolation II that successfully communicates
this dimension diminishes the risk that the vocal actions, unfamiliar in
the context of art music, are taken as cheerful or grotesque because they
remind of everyday vocalizations—it is precisely this tendency in many
examples of European vocal music since the late 1950s that Lachenmann
seeks to avoid. He strives for a kind of musical performance that evades all
ostensible effects.
The composition “Zwei Gefühle . . .”, Musik mit Leonardo (1992)
for reciter and ensemble, a vocal key work of Lachenmann, shows
programmatic traits concerning the question of astonishment. The under-
lying text by Leonardo da Vinci, with reference to Plato’s allegory of the
cave, illustrates the efforts that a marveling person takes to gain insight.
It describes the fascination of the new. This goes beyond the interpreta-
tion of astonishment as a state of ignorance, common during the Enlight-
enment era, and it also means more than the mere overpowering by
a sublime sight, as for instance described by Petrarca (Matuschek 1991,
121–122). 2
The second of the two sections from da Vinci’s Codex Arundel
chosen by the composer begins with the sentence: “Doch ich irre umher,
ge trieben von meiner brennenden Begierde, das große Durcheinander der
verschiedenen und seltsamen Formen wahrzunehmen, die die sinnreiche
Natur hervorgebracht hat” (Drawn from my vain reverie and desirous
of seeing the myriad varied forms created by fecund Nature, I wandered
[a moment amongst the shadowy rocks]). 3 The critical fi nal sentences
of this section then read: “Als ich aber geraume Zeit verharrt hatte,
erwachten plötzlich in mir zwei Gefühle: Furcht und Verlangen. Furcht
vor der drohenden Dunkelheit der Höhle, Verlangen aber, mit eigenen
Augen zu sehen, was daran an Wunderbarem sein möchte” (Soon, two
things rose up in me: fear and desire—the fear of the dark and threaten-
ing grotto, and the desire to see if there was nothing mysterious there).4
The music seems to aim at matching the joy of discovery that Leo-
nardo’s thinking embodies. Such self-refl exive moments are rendered
in a particularly approachable manner in the Musik mit Leonardo.
Lachenmann’s music here again and again and with changing means
calls for an aural voyage of discovery. These means include the implicit
invitation to performer and listener to go beyond the sensation of
merely astounding and curious sounds and to reconstruct, or at least
surmise their integration into structures. The composer has labeled such
a reconstruction of sound structures a “process of tactile discovery”
(“Abtastprozess,” Lachenmann 1988, 198, cf. also Neuwirth 2008).
This process is closely related to the synthesis accomplished by the lis-
tener during the interpretation of the verbal texts that in Lachenmann’s
works are most commonly split into syllables. All this reveals a search
for insight which generally characterizes Lachenmann’s aesthetic as
a whole.
Lachenmann presumes that the aesthetic experience that his music
aims to initiate, linked to this process of searching for insight, is an
“existential” experience, in correspondence with his repeatedly articu-
lated hope that music could “provoke a critical examination of itself”
(Lachenmann 1971/1972, 96). The listener is asked to change him- or
herself by a mental “work of accomodation” (Anpassungsarbeit), a term
familiar in research on the notion of astonishment. In order to under-
line this intention, the Leonardo piece introduces Nietzsche’s words
“O Mensch, gib Acht . . .” (“O man, beware . . .” from Also sprach
Zarathustra) in a distinctively solemn manner during a key moment of
the music. “Existential experience” here is synonymous with the lis-
tener’s commitment to the experience of the unknown. It goes with-
out saying that Lachenmann belongs to those multiple composers in the
twentieth and twenty-fi rst century that follow Nietzsche in attribut-
ing the central role and dignity of art particularly to its determination
towards self-renewal.
From the perspective of reception aesthetics, the moment of an aston-
ished realization of one’s own capability to sensitively experience this
unconventional art is especially significant. Indeed, it can be a highly
rewarding or even an existentially moving experience to follow the
impulse of astonishment and to accomplish the act of listening on the
high level of the artwork, sensing how the own experience is clearly
reaching beyond common conventionality. “What once has merely been
admired,” says Johann Gottfried Herder on this kind of experience, is
eventually “grasped by the spirit” (Herder 1978, 232). A basic motive
in Lachenmann’s music is to stimulate in this sense a “perception per-
ceiving itself” (Lachenmann 1985, 117). This presumes the confidence
that music has a twofold power: to make us forget ourselves, but also
to know ourselves. Just as for Aristotle astonishment is supposed to
be followed by an accomplished philosophical insight, an astonish-
ment-triggered insight can equally be considered an accomplishment in
art reception.
Without exposing Lachenmann’s work to unnecessary speculations or
fostering “sacral desires” (Wilson 1992), it can be argued that what has
been described above converges with a spiritual dimension in Lachenmann’s
music (cf. Hiekel 2005). This dimension, closely related to the concept of
self-awareness through music, is defi nitely significant in Lachenmann’s case,
though difficult to grasp. The composer himself is conscious of this difficulty
when in a comment on his orchestral work NUN (1997–1999/2002), which
includes references to Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō, he included a
remark directed against any kind of absorption or “sacral desires”: “But I
am not a Buddhist, and neither a Zen monk, but a beginner in everything”
(Lachenmann 2003). NUN is an unusual orchestral work as it integrates
eight male voices into the sound apparatus—on the one hand to expand the
spectrum of coloristic possibilities, on the other hand to embed the dimen-
sion of self-reflexivity so important to Lachenmann. Mu-sik are the fi nal,
clearly audible syllables of the piece, their articulation being based on the
confidence that raising the awareness of what music is and can accomplish
is always the main concern.
“Broken magic” in this sense ultimately means that music, during
making an effect on its listeners, aims to provoke a moment of dis-
tance—a distance that enables self-refl ection. For Lachenmann this kind
of distance doubtlessly is a key aspect of “European” identity and as
such leading away, at least temporarily, from the kind of commitment
which an “unbroken magic” would require. This point above all marks
the difference to the aesthetic of Giacinto Scelsi who sought to assert the
evocative power of music, a power which is particularly familiar from
non-European ritual music.
TEMA AS A POINT OF CRYSTALLIZATION
Lachenmann’s temA (1968) for flute, voice, and violoncello is a signifi -

cant early example for the composer’s integration of self-refl ection into
the musical fabric. The title temA is a permutated spelling of the German
word Atem (breath), and thus hints at the fact that the act of breathing
can be considered the “theme” (Thema) of this piece, particularly the
energy that is employed in the process of breathing. The images associ-
ated with the unfolding of this energy are also certainly important in the
piece—a point that entails manifold possibilities for performance.
Moments of “breaking” in the sense discussed above clearly emerge
during the listening process. Lachenmann himself, in commenting on this
work, singled out its individual form of “structural logic” as a factor that
unsettled many listeners (Lachenmann 1983). This irritation can in fact
be experienced during performances of temA until the present day, and
it is certainly due to the fact that the work is considerably removed from
any conventional musical dramaturgy familiar to us from centuries of
European tradition. This is interrelated above all to the ritualistic char-
acter of the work; “ritual” in this case means primarily that the actions
of the performers revolve unwaveringly around the work’s central theme,
namely that of breathing.
This theme of breathing is realized fi rst of all by the vocal part with
its many shades of timbre between toneless and tone-based articulation;
particular prominence is given to the actions of inhaling and exhaling, of
producing “choked” sounds, and of clicking with the tongue against the
palate, as well as to the act of singing or speaking while holding one’s
breath. It is also through the involvement of the other instruments that
the theme of breathing is explored. In the case of the flute this will hardly
come as a surprise, especially when one considers the plethora of breathing-
oriented music for flute instruments all over the world—in particular, of
course, the shakuhachi tradition.
The enormous variation of timbres produced by the flute, including
numerous different breath-tones, are created using a range of different
subtle devices. Several of these devices involve what might be character-
ized as a defamiliarization of standard musical performance practices.
The composer himself, in his preface to the score, refers to certain (pre-
cisely marked) notes of the flute part as being produced with a “dirty
attack.” This is followed by the explicit directive “to produce more
blowing noise than pitch.” Other notes, also precisely marked, are to
be produced by a thrust of the diaphragm. Equally included within the
extensive arsenal of timbral variations is the act of blowing into the flute
without mouthpiece.
Through the employment of these techniques, the timbres of flute
and voice are at times rendered indistinguishable from one another. The
boundaries are blurred further when the fl autist is instructed to produce
sounds without the use of the instrument (e.g., in m. 64, Figure 8.1).
Indeed, the aspect of an imperceptible transition from instrumental to
vocal articulations is of decisive importance in the aesthetic of this work.
This applies not only to the fl autist’s part, but also to that of the cellist:
fi rstly since the cellist also at times is being required to speak or whisper,
secondly because of the variety of extended techniques employed on the
instrument itself to produce significantly greater noise-value than the
usual bowed, “straight” tone. This is the area of sound production to
which Lachenmann refers as “musique concrète instrumentale.”
It is especially important to note that this vocal style, extending far
into the instrumental parts, is not conceived in pursuit of a “fullness of
harmony,” but with the aim of a fi nely nuanced spectrum of sounds that,
according to Lachenmann, are also characterized by their “dirtiness,”
including “noises” of various qualities. Among the numerous forms of
vocal delivery described by the composer in his preface two are especially
distinguished as they are produced by a tremolo during inhalation: a
“snoring” sound and a “rattling” sound (Figure 8.2).
In terms of language, temA is dominated by non-semantic gestures with-
out relation to any given text. There are, nevertheless, isolated text par-
ticles. The composer expressly states in the score that these passages “need
not be understood by the listener,” since, in Lachenmann’s own words,
they merely aid “the characteristic modification of the act of exhalation.”
These textual passages consist of half or full sentences, most of which
would appear to be little more than snatches of everyday speech without
any deeper meaning. “Da geht der Bua” (m. 62, “There goes the boy” in
Bavarian dialect), or “Das darf ja gar nicht wahr sein” (m. 70, “You’ve got
to be kidding”) are some examples.
Figure 8.1 Helmut Lachenmann, temA (1968), mm. 64. (Copyright © 1971 by
Musikverlage Hans Gerig, Köln, 1980, assigned to Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden.)
Two kinds of tremolo are called for when inhaling:
1. by snoring, 2. by a rattling pressure in the back of the throat (which is
also possible when exhaling and is also required there). They are indic-
ated as follows:
Snoring: Rattling:
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Figure 8.2 Helmut Lachenmann, temA (1968), performance instructions/vocal part (top); score, mm. 114–117
(bottom). (Copyright © 1971 by Musikverlage Hans Gerig, Köln, 1980, assigned to Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden.)
In respect of this textual component, it remains important to point
out that temA also contains a few lighthearted moments—more so than
the other works discussed above. It is, of course, a rather relaxed, alto-
gether unforced form of lightheartedness, not at all comparable with the
stridently grotesque speech-compositions that are familiar to us courtesy
of composers such as Ligeti. The serenity involved in this approach is
particularly significant here, as it seems that the aforementioned “ritual-
istic” side of temA is intrinsically related to this quality. Already at this
early point, it seems, the experience of a music that knows the “paradise
of happy intactness” has found its way into Lachenmann’s music. And
of course it is equipped with that “broken magic” so crucial to Helmut
Lachenmann and his music—a music which has escaped from paradise
consciously and deliberately.
NOTES
1. Translated from the German by Christian Utz. Some sections of this trans-
lation have been adapted from an English translation of a previous version
of this essay by Alwyn Westbrooke. Quotations from German sources have
been translated into English.
2. Matuschek (1991, 121–122) has demonstrated that Leonardo “devotes him-
self curiously to the charms of the world” where Petrarca still “remorsefully
returns to divine devotion.”
3. Translated by John Tyler Tuttle (CD-booklet, Helmut Lachenmann, Mouve-
ment (–vor der Erstarrung) and other works, Kairos, 0012202KAI, 2001, p.
11). This translation obviously was created from the Italian original, while
the German version, to which the piece is set, is based on a translation by
Kurt Gerstenberg which is less literal, most notably in the phrase that became
the title of the work: “zwei Gefühle” (two sentiments) is Gerstenberg’s/
Lachenmann’s chosen wording for Leonardo’s “due cose” (two things).
4. Ibid.
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Musik als existentielle Erfahrung, edited by Josef Häusler, Wiesbaden: Breit-
kopf & Härtel 2004, 191–204.
. 2003. “NUN (1999/2003),” program note, http://www.breitkopf.com/
feature/werk/1128 (accessed February 26, 2012).
. 2008. “‘East Meets West?—West Eats Meat’. . . oder das Crescendo
des Bolero: Materialien, Notizen und Gedankenspiele.” In Musik-Kulturen
(Darmstädter Diskurse 2), edited by Jörn Peter Hiekel, Saarbrücken: Pfau,
84–98.
Ligeti, György. 1960. “Pierre Boulez: Decision and Automaticism in Structure 1a,”
translated by Leo Black. Die Reihe (English edition) 4: 36–62.
. 1966. “Aventures und Nouvelles Aventures.” In Gesammelte Schriften
(Publikationen der Paul Sacher Stiftung Basel 10), vol. 2, edited by Monika
Lichtenfeld, Mainz: Schott 2007, 197–198.
Matuschek, Stefan. 1991. Über das Staunen: Eine ideengeschichtliche Analyse,
Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Metzger, Heinz-Klaus and Rainer Riehn, eds. 1983. Giacinto Scelsi (Musik-
Konzepte 31), München: edition text+kritik.
Neuwirth, Markus. 2008. “Kognitionswissenschaftliche Annäherungen an Helmut
Lachenmanns Pression und Allegro sostenuto.” In Musik als Wahrnehmungs-
kunst: Untersuchungen zu Kompositionstechnik und Hörästhetik bei Helmut
Lachenmann (musik.theorien der gegenwart 2), edited by Christian Utz and
Clemens Gadenstätter, Saarbrücken: Pfau, 73–100.
Scelsi, Giacinto. 1999. “Ich bin kein Komponist: Giacinto Scelsi 1987 im Gespräch
mit Franck Mallet, Marie-Cécile Mazzoni und Marc Texier.” MusikTexte
81/82: 64–70.
. 2001. “The Meaning of Music” [1944], translated by Gregory N. Reish.
In The Transformation of Giacinto Scelsi’s Musical Style and Aesthetic,
1929–1959, Gregory N. Reish, PhD diss., University of Georgia, 2001,
260–267.
Utz, Christian. 2002. Neue Musik und Interkulturalität: Von John Cage bis Tan Dun
(Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 51), Stuttgart: Franz Steiner 2002.
Wilson, Peter Niklas. 1992. “Sakrale Sehnsüchte: Der Scelsi-Feldman-Nono-Kult.”
MusikTexte 44: 2–4.
Zeller, Hans Rudolf. 1983. “Das Ensemble der Soli.” In Giacinto Scelsi (Musik-
Konzepte 31), edited by Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn, München: edi-
tion text+kritik, 24–66.
Zenck, Martin. 2003. “Artaud—Boulez—Rihm: Zur Re- und Trans-Ritualität
im europäischen Musiktheater des 20. Jahrhunderts.” In Musiktheater heute:
Internationales Symposion der Paul Sacher Stiftung Basel 2001, edited by Her-
mann Danuser and Matthias Kassel, Mainz: Schott, 235–264.
Zender, Hans. 2004. “Vermutungen über Giacinto Scelsi” [1989]. In Die Sinne
denken: Texte zur Musik 1975–2003, edited by Jörn Peter Hiekel, Wiesbaden:
Breitkopf & Härtel, 30–34.
9 The Notation and Use of the
Voice in Non-semantic Contexts
Phonetic Organization in the Vocal
Music of Dieter Schnebel, Brian
Ferneyhough, and Georges Aperghis
Erin Gee
In this chapter I examine the way in which Dieter Schnebel, Brian Fer-
neyhough, and Georges Aperghis develop “non-semantic” vocal music,
its consequences for vocal performance, and its implications for the per-
ception of the singer’s identity on stage. Dieter Schnebel and Brian Fer-
neyhough have used the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet
(IPA) as a means of codifying parts of vocal sounds in their pieces. By
using non-semantic text material, these composers were able to main-
tain flexibility and control over the vocal sound organization in their
compositions to a higher extent than with a prewritten libretto. The
IPA also gave them specifi c control over the individual vocal articula-
tors, signifi cantly increasing the number of vocal sounds at their dis-
posal, but also changing their approach to the human voice from a fi xed
sound source or human “character” to a disassembled machine with
a huge range of combinatorial properties. However, Ferneyhough and
Schnebel approach non-semantic vocal music from fundamentally dif-
ferent angles.
Aperghis uses non-semantic vocal structures to layer identity, to blur the
boundaries of a specific language, and to add multiple subtexts to a vocal-
ist’s line. He chooses not to use the IPA, and although this limits the speci-
ficity with which he can notate the vocal score, it also supports his desire
to build layered identities. The stratified “personae” in his vocal works
often have some link to a language (usually French) and their obscured
relationship to this language heightens the effect of their “otherworldli-
ness.” Isolated “human” sounds, such as a quiet sob, also appear in the
context of non-semantic vocal sounds, calling into question both the emo-
tion attached to the “vocalization” of a sob and the lack of semantic mean-
ing in the surrounding vocal sounds. This might motivate the audience to
look for non-meaning in the “sob” (“Was it just a ‘sound’ or did it contain
sadness?”) and, conversely, to search for underlying emotional meaning in
the non-semantic text.
176 Erin Gee
The notational choices that a composer makes, i.e., whether or not to
use the IPA and to what degree of specificity, usually stems from a precom-
positional aesthetics concerning the voice. Although the IPA is designed as
a universal method for transcribing vocal utterances, its use in a musical
context is still influenced by the “identity” within which composer and
performer are working. What kind of personal identity is expressed by
the performer on stage? How is this identity influenced by the composer’s
approach to non-semantic music?
Expressed and hidden identities manifest themselves, among others, in
the degree of control left up to the performer, in the choices the performer
makes within this realm of flexibility, and in “cultural clues” inherent
in the resulting vocal sounds. The decision whether to use the IPA sig-
nificantly influences the variety and number of interpretations that are
possible. Performance-related choices in non-semantic music are myriad
and not necessarily linked to the expression of a personal experience. The
audience thus is faced with a number of questions about the performer,
the fi rst of which may be, “Is it human?” or “Is this voice meant to be
linked to a person?”
Since all parts of the vocal tract can be specified with the tools of the
IPA, its use allows a composer to manipulate a singer’s vocal technique far
beyond classical Western vocal training. Furthermore, the sounds from all
known languages can be systemically notated and composers are able to
access sounds outside of their own culture, or any culture that they have
come into contact with. They are also able to use sounds about whose
original place or use in a language they often have no information. Devoid
of a semantic text and a classical Western vocal timbre, how do composers
conceptualize the role or purpose of the voice? What is the role of these
non-semantic vocal utterances once they have been removed from a seman-
tic and cultural context?
TRANSCRIPTION OF SOUNDS IN SEMANTIC

AND NON-SEMANTIC VOCAL UTTERANCES1
Phonetic Terms and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

The defi nition of a vocal “sound” differs depending on whether the sound
in question occurs within the sound system of a particular language or
not. The description of vocal utterances is dealt with in the branch of lin-
guistics called phonetics, while the sounds that occur within the sound
system of language are dealt with in the branch called phonology.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) was formed to be used as a
standardized tool for depicting the sounds of any language. Its symbols
were meant to represent vocal sounds and this representation is termed
The Notation and Use of the Voice in Non-semantic Contexts 177
phonetic description. However, the IPA can also be used outside of a pho-
nological system (a system of meaning within a language). The following
paragraph explains in greater detail the theory behind the description and
representation of vocal sounds:
Phonetic description is said to be based on the assumption that the

process of description does not require knowledge about the formal,
linguistic value of the event [ . . . ]. This forms the basis on which
descriptive phonetic theory can be regarded as a general theory
capable of application to the sounds of any language in the world
(Laver 1994, 29).
The following paragraph further explains the theory behind the IPA and
the intrinsic relationship between representation and analysis:
Although it might be thought ideal if the IPA provided a means of

representing phonetic facts independent of theoretical premises, it is
inevitable that any means of representation which go beyond simple
replication (as by a tape recorder) must be shaped by hypothesis about
the object being analyzed. Historically, the IPA has its roots in a tradi-
tion of phonology in which the notions of the phoneme, as a contras-
tive sound unit, and of allophones, as its variant phonetic realizations,
are primary; and in which alphabetic notation underlines the concep-
tualization of speech as a sequence of sounds (International Phonetic
Association 1999, 37).
All symbolic representation of sound implies analysis. Speech is represented

through alphabetic segmentation, based on the phonological structure of
a particular language. It makes sense then that non-speech should also be
represented by symbolic segmentation, although the underlying structure
would no longer be based on the phonology of a certain language. In a
musical context the structure of this non-speech or these non-semantic
vocal utterances would instead be determined by the composer and the
morphology of the piece of music.
In order to be able to embrace the IPA as a notational tool, one also has
to understand the concept of phonetic “sameness.” This means that two
people with different organic instruments (their voices) could theoretically
produce the same phonetic sound. Although a purely sonic perspective
would calculate a difference, phonetically these two vocal utterances are
recognized as the same: “Two spoken events can be phonetically identi-
cal but nevertheless sound acoustically different. [ . . . ] An assertion about
acoustic sameness between two sounds is an assertion of comparability of
particular abstract features in the sounds, rather than a claim about com-
plete acoustic identity” (Laver 1994, 28–29).
178 Erin Gee
Phonetic Transcription and Segmentation

During a series of vocal utterances, the parts of the mouth are in contin-
uous motion. The spectrogram shown in Figure 9.1 demonstrates why it
is d i f cult to create discrete segments in speech, to create segmentation.
The linguistic term for all sounds both inside and outside of a phono-
logical system is “sound segments.” It is a general term whose meaning
can also include allophones and phonemes, but which does not imply a
particular phonology. The problem of segmentation of vocal utterances
arises in phonetic transcription when the phonological system of a lan-
guage is not known. These are problems that a composer faces when
using the IPA for the accurate and highly specifi c notation of already
developed vocal sounds. This problem is addressed in the Handbook of
the IPA in relation to a spectrogram of the English word sleeting (Figure
9.1). The word is described as a sequence of six phonemes, although
the spectrogram shows “more than six identifi ably d i f erent successive
aspects” (International Phonetic Association 1999, 35). This is an exam-
ple of the d i f culty of aligning transcriptions to speech. Where exactly
does one sound end and the next one begin? Sounds are modifi ed by
their environments—that is, the sounds that come before and after. This
modifi cation is necessary and natural due to the physical structure of
the mouth.
6
frequency (kHz)
0
0.1 6.2 0.3 0.4
P 6.6 0.7 time (s)
11 i sh
s o
t I q
Figure 9.1 Spectrogram of the word sleeting illustrating the complex relationship
between acoustic patterns and phonemic segmentation (International Phonetic Asso-
ciation 1999, 35). (Copyright © 1999 by The International Phonetic Association.
Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press.)
Martin J. Ball and Nicole Müller further illustrate this point:
It is worth noting here that, from a phonetic viewpoint the idea of

individual segments is a convenient fiction. In fact, there are usually no
clear-cut boundaries between all the phonetic features of one segment
and those of a neighboring segment. However, we interpret speech as
if it were divided into segments, so we retain this approach out of con-
venience (Ball and Müller 2005, 104).
The Handbook of the IPA succinctly sets forth the problems of transform-
ing the continuous motion of the mouth into a series of discrete symbols:
“Users of the IPA should be aware that the analysis of speech in terms of
segments does involve an analytic assumption and that tensions between
the analysis and the data will arise from time to time” (International Pho-
netic Association 1999, 36). The very act of segmentation of a vocal sound
by the transcriber is, in itself, an act of analysis.
In non-semantic vocal music, notation of vocal sounds cannot rely on a
phonological system of meaning and therefore must constantly make nota-
tional decisions based on the musical context. Consideration of the priority
of some vocal sounds over others can be important for clear and efficient
notation. For example, if a large puff of air after one single [s] within a row
of fast syllables is vital to the vocal sound, then this of course should be
notated. But it has to be decided whether this extreme aspiration is merely
an accent, a fast transformation between the [s] and a voiceless fricative
(without stopping the airflow), or a separate identifiable air sound after the
[s]. In the fi rst case there is no segmentation, in the second there is a transi-
tion, and in the third there are two distinct sound segments. If merely the
accent is important then perhaps a musical symbol will suffice, and the rest
can be left to performer interpretation.
DIETER SCHNEBEL: FÜR STIMMEN (. . . MISSA EST):!

(MADRASHA II) (1958, 1967–1968)
Dieter Schnebel wrote several pieces that were strongly influenced by pho-
netic research including Maulwerke (1968–1974), written for “organs of
articulation” and “machines of reproduction.”2 Für Stimmen (. . . missa est)
:! (Madrasha II) (1958, 1967–1968, henceforth Für Stimmen III), was written
for three choir groups (SSAABB; SAATTB; SSTTBB) and tape ad lib. and is
the third part of the group of works Für Stimmen (. . . missa est).3 In Für Stim-
men III Schnebel organized the individual phonemes and symbols with the
help of the IPA to create shifting non-semantic vocal textures. Schnebel was
highly inspired by the IPA as an impetus for new compositional directions. In
particular, he was interested in using a greater number of vocal sounds and
in being able to define more exact phonetic variations than would have been
possible with the Roman alphabet. Schnebel described the music historical
situation that preceded full implementation of the IPA in detail:
180 Erin Gee
Serial music was conceived as an abstract music, like abstract paint-
ing, nonrepresentational painting. We [the composers] also worked
toward this. There were constructions and certain forms that we sim-
ply rejected. We didn’t want to write symphonies. We didn’t want to
write operas. Vocal music also was almost taboo, because vocal music
always has a text, and the text provides an emotional plan. The text
has its own progression of sound, but we wanted to compose the
sounds themselves. For this reason we turned to the phonetic script,
because we had the possibility to notate minute differentiations within
the [vocal] sounds (Schnebel, personal communication, May 25, 2006,
in Gee 2007, 281;4 translated by the author).
Notation with the IPA gave Schnebel the structuralist freedom that he desired.
His three main goals in using the IPA were (1) the increase in the number
of possible vocal sounds, (2) the ability to have maximum control over the
sound result, and (3) the possibility to notate minute phonetic variations.
Für Stimmen III marks the peak of Schnebel’s involvement with the
IPA and the score includes extensive performance instructions regarding
its use (Schnebel 1973). In many cases, the legend resembles a phonetics
textbook and there are several quotes from Sprachen (Wendt 1961), a stan-
dard book on linguistics and phonetics at the time. A fairly comprehensive
understanding of the IPA was essential to Schnebel and is necessary for the
performance of the work. Schnebel also worked with the booklet The Prin-
ciples of the International Phonetic Association, which was fi rst published
in 1949 and reprinted in 1975 (International Phonetic Association 1949).5
The score contains only relative pitch indications up to page 12, where
a mixture of relative and exact pitch notation is introduced. Where only
a relative pitch staff is used, three spaces (inside four staff lines) indicate
“high,” “middle,” and “low” register.6 Slight variations on this relative
pitch staff occur throughout the work. Dynamic indications are shown
graphically as bending lines above the staff. The score also indicates group
movements on stage at different points. These are notated in block and
show a bird’s eye view of the performers’ formation onstage and where they
should move. At irregular intervals, recorded sounds of animals are played
over loudspeakers.
In Für Stimmen III, Schnebel describes one performance practice to be
used throughout: the performers are instructed to use a large breath for
every passage consistently (Schnebel 1973, 8). Changes in dynamics are
always connected to the vocal register, the length of the phrase, or to other
necessary vocal considerations. All sounds of the IPA are placed under this
“umbrella” performance practice. This is an important clue to how Sch-
nebel approaches the human vocal apparatus. To some extent, it determines
the emotional tone of the piece by explicitly connecting the vocal perfor-
mance with physical breath limitations. All vocal music must deal with the
limitations of breath, but traditional performance practice requires that
these limitations do not affect emotional expression. Evenness of tone is
desired, regardless of register or length of phrase and tiredness should be
masked. In Schnebel’s work, however, the physical properties and limita-
tions of the breath are part of the expressive foundation of the piece, and
tiredness is a vital dynamic determinant.
Methods of Grouping Phonemes in Für Stimmen III

In Für Stimmen III, the basic unit is a single vocal segment expressed by
IPA notation. Considering the comprehensive approach of the legend to
the symbols of the IPA, how is this large set of symbols grouped and cat-
egorized? Without the structural backdrop of a phonological system, how
does Schnebel make decisions regarding the order and combination of these
vocal segments? Without the rules of a language, the means for structur-
ing vocal sounds must be developed by the composer. The structuring and
grouping of vocal segments is the main focus of the legend. It explains four
main methods that Schnebel uses to group phonemes in this piece:
1. by grouping consonants according to active articulator; sounds with

the same active articulator form a group
2. by creating chains of vocal segments
3. by creating series of gradually changing sounds
4. by combining and alternating two vowels.
In forming these groups of phonemes, Schnebel most often defi nes pho-
nemes by the part of the vocal tract that moves or where the articulation
takes place (method 1 above). Using this method, transitions between
sounds (methods 2–4 above) can be made smoothly and quickly, which is
an important aspect to the piece.
Schnebel approaches vowel sounds as “vowel processes,” and describes
ways to gradually change or transform them. For example, the legend
describes “tongue movements,” instead of merely “tongue positions” (Sch-
nebel 1973, 5). He diagrams the forward and backward motion of the
tongue on the x-axis and the up- and downward motion of the tongue on
the y-axis. Again, Schnebel addresses the intrinsic qualities of the vocal
apparatus, its natural qualities and limitations. Speech and vocal sounds
are always created in a fluid manner, and the tongue is constantly in motion
as it moves through different points of articulation. This aptly captures the
movements of the vocal tract and Schnebel embraces this trait in the struc-
ture of the work.
In many cases in Für Stimmen III, Schnebel used the organization of
the IPA chart as a means to organize vocal sound progressions. He chose
vowel sounds with reference to their placement on the vowel diagram in the
IPA chart. For example, fricatives were often grouped with other fricatives
that had a neighboring place of articulation. One example of the use of the
pre-existing order found in the IPA chart can be seen on page 1 of the score
(Figure 9.2).
182 Erin Gee
Figure 9.2 Dieter Schnebel, Für Stimmen (. . . missa est) :! (Madrasha

II), Tenor 1, m. 1 (p. 2): progression of fricatives. (Copyright ©
SCHOTT MUSIC, Mainz—Germany. Used with permission.)
This progression of voiced fricatives can be found in the same order in the
pulmonic consonants sections of the IPA chart (cf. International Phonetic
Association 2005). Although Schnebel is not interested in the exclusive use
of the organization provided by the IPA chart, these examples show that
Schnebel was conscious of the IPA organization and amenable to its use as
a precompositional means of linking phonemes within his work.
Grouping of Consonants according to Active Articulator

Schnebel often groups vocal sounds that have the same active articulators,
the part of the mouth that moves the most to create the sound; 7 fricatives
in particular are grouped in this way.8 This ensures that changes between
fricatives can take place rather quickly, because only one part of the mouth
moves signifi cantly. As a demonstration in the legend, Schnebel assigns one
line of thefive-line staf to each of the following fricatives: 9, s, J, ç, % (Fig-
ure 9.3). He then draws a wavy line from the bottom of the staf to the top
and back down to indicate a free but linear movement between them.
Moving from the top line of the staf down to the bottom line, the
tongue moves from articulating a fricative near the teeth [9] to one near
the back of the mouth [%]. In this example, the tongue is the active articu-
lator in each of these sounds, thus the sounds are grouped together by a
common active articulator.
or (lip actions)
(o, s, f qf x : are the most important types of articulation)
Figure 9.3 Grouping by active articulator in Für Stim-

men (. . . missa est):! (Madrasba II) (performance notes,
p. 7). (Copyright © with permission of SCHOTT MUSIC,
Mainz—Germany.)
Creating Chains of Vocal Segments

Another method of grouping is the fast successive alternation of sounds,
through which Schnebel builds “chains” of vocal segments. This is the
main method of binding groups out of only two or three sounds. Two
or three vowels are each assigned a line of a three-line staff. The per-
former is instructed to alternate between a consonant and one of the
vowels. The consonant remains constant while the vowel sound alter-
nates between the options given. A transcription of the example shown
in Figure 9.4 would begin in the following way:
tiθitiθitiθi . . . [i] → [ɑ] . . . tɑθɑtɑθɑtɑθɑtɑθɑ
Schnebel calls such chains “quasi-speech chains” (Schnebel 1973, 6)

and replicates the speech-like quality of gradual tongue motion by
notating the change between vowels gradually, through a curved line
on a graph. Changes in articulation of fricatives are also shown on a
graph to indicate gradual transition. These graphs are comprised of
sounds that belong to one region of the mouth—for example, frica-
tives which change due to tongue or due to lip position. The speed
and relative ease of the transition is important to Schnebel. Similar to
how a language is shaped by ease of pronunciation, Schnebel empha-
sizes these “human factors” in Für Stimmen III as well as in other
vocal pieces.
Creating a Series of Gradually Transforming Sounds

Several paragraphs in the legend of Für Stimmen III are concerned
with how vowels can be transformed or modified, for example through
nasalization. In this method of grouping, Schnebel does not seem to be
interested in successions of widely different vowel sounds, but rather
in the subtle, gradual modifi cation of individual vowels. By making
a vowel more nasal, one is gradually fi ltering out the lower frequen-
cies of the pitch. Lateralization (changing the airstream path with
the tongue)9 also provides selective fi ltering of the frequencies of a
s
s s ss s s
s
Figure 9.4 Dieter Schnebel, Für Stimmen (. . . missa est) :! (Madrasha
II), Alto 1, m. 18 (p. 5): progression of fricatives; the line above the
staff represents dynamics. (Copyright © SCHOTT MUSIC, Mainz—
Germany. Used with permission.)
184 Erin Gee
vocal sound. By such processes of transformation, Schnebel groups
sounds by linking them in a chain of minimal changes. Each sound
within such a chain is closely related to the sound that comes before
and after.
These transformations do not apply solely to vowels, and vowels can
be transformed into fricatives or other kinds of sustained sounds (“Fric-
ativisation,” Schnebel 1973, 6). In each case, there is a transformation
from a vowel into a sustained fricative or vibrant (r-sounds) that keeps
the mouth shape or coloring of the original vowel. These transitions or
transformations always refl ect changes in the physical fi lters of the fre-
quency spectrum of the sound. The fi rst page of the score introduces a
sequence of five very closely related nasal sounds. Schnebel here uses the
“nasal” quality of the voice to link the sounds together as he shifts from
nasal stops to nasalized vowels to regular vowels.
Combining and Alternating Two Vowels

There are three basic methods that Schnebel uses to group two vowels
together. Careful attention is given to transitions and “processes pro-
duced in quick succession” (Schnebel 1973, 5). The fi rst method is diph-
thong pairing (score, p. 7). Here, two vowels are combined into one vocal
sound and shown as rising or falling on a relative pitch staff (the three
staff spaces are indicated as high, middle, low). In the second method
(score, p. 11, Bass 2), two vowels alternate repeatedly, often including
“melismatic” writing, where several pitches are attributed to one vowel
sound. In the third method (score, p. 7, Soprano 1), the voice alternates
between two vowels in fast alternation with only one vowel per pitch, a
“syllabic” alternation of vowels.
In many cases where the third method is applied (two vowels alter-
nating in quick succession), the singer alternates between two vowels
that are near each other on the vowel chart of the IPA. This means that
while the mouth alternates between these two vowels, only one part of
the mouth moves and usually only by one “position”—that is, from one
region of the mouth to the next closest region in either direction. On
page 11 of the score, Tenor 2 , the vowel alternation is between [i] and
[e]. In the vowel chart from the IPA, these are both front vowels placed
next to each other at the “close” [i] and “close-mid” [e] position (Inter-
national Phonetic Association 2005).
The Four Methods of Grouping Vocal Segments:

Patterns of Use
Similar vocal material is often used predominantly within a single choral
group. For example, on page 10 of the score, quasi-diphthongs (category
4) are used in choral group 1, while speech-like chains (category 2) are
used in choral groups 2 and 3. Halfway through the page this relation-
ship reverses; choral group 1 uses speech-like chains and choral groups
2 and 3 use the quasi-diphthong material.
There are a few instances near the end of the piece in which all three
groups have different material. From page 18 to 20 of the score, similar
groups of vocal segments are continuously transferred from one choral
group or singer to another. For example, on page 19, as soon as the quasi-
diphthong material ends in Bass 1 of choral group 3, it begins in the Bass
1 and then Soprano 2 of choral group 1 (marked by arrows in Figure 9.5).
Simultaneously, modulating voiceless fricatives (category 1, grouping by
constant fricative) are transferred from Soprano 1 in choral group 2 to
Tenor 2 in the same group and then to Alto 2 in choral group 1 (marked by
arrows in Figure 9.5).
One could interpret these constant changes as an increase in the abil-
ity of the choral groups or singers to “communicate.” In the beginning
of the work, different choral groups simultaneously performed disparate
material, while towards the end, groups or individuals constantly trans-
fer materials to other groups or individuals. Increased cohesion between
the groups and greater individuation of each singer is apparent.
After page 8 of the score, there are several examples of how combi-
nations of IPA are used as inexact imitations of words. Lexical words
that occasionally appear (as references to religious contexts) are usu-
ally slightly transformed because they are notated with the IPA, not
with Roman letters. The word “jahweh” that appears on page 8 is fore-
shadowed from page 6 on in permutations of the syllable weh. Inexact
imitations of words can be found on page 14 where the words “Kyrios”
and “Jesus” are written in parentheses under a series of phonemes. The
words are intentionally disguised by the phonetic transcription, and
therefore it was necessary for the actual words to be written beneath
the IPA.
Schnebel uses the IPA to broaden his scope of the vocal sounds and
to create his own emotional trajectory by determining exactly which
vocal sounds follow one another. The composer is highly conscious of
the vocal tract as a human apparatus and deeply respects speech-like
processes. He understands that the mouth was designed to move quickly
through closely related movements of tongue placement. This speed, or
virtuosity, that is found in native languages, is something that Schnebel
seeks to maintain in his vocal compositions. His phonetic abstractions
are deeply embedded in the human aspect of vocal fluidity. Attention
to tongue motions, limitations of breath, and the easiest methods for
quick alterations between closely related sounds demonstrate that
his vocal writing is fi rmly grounded in the physical processes of the
human body.
186 Erin Gee
fit:
J)
%F I601
A
TB
TB
TB
TB
TB
TB
TB
TB
cntert
87 88 89 90
Figure 9.5 Dieter Schnebel, Für Stimmen (. . . missa est), :! (Madrasha II) (p. 19):
transfer of similar phonetic material (marked by arrows). (Copyright © SCHOTT
MUSIC, Mainz—Germany. Used with permission.)
BRIAN FERNEYHOUGH: TIME AND MOTION STUDY III (1974)
Brian Ferneyhough’s Time and Motion Study III is written for 16 voices
with amplification and percussion, and was premiered at the Donauesch-
inger Musiktage in 1975 by the Schola Cantorum Stuttgart, conducted by
Clytus Gottwald. The 16 voices are split into four groups, ideally spaced
in the four corners of a performance space. The loudspeakers are set up
quadrophonically, one per group, so that the corresponding loudspeaker is
placed opposite the group that it amplifies with the sound directed towards
the singers. The balance of the amplification is controlled live during the
performance. Live recording and playback is also incorporated into the
concluding section of the work. The percussion instruments are distributed
throughout the ensemble and are to be played by the vocal performers.
Time and Motion Study III is the third part of a trilogy written between
1970 and 1977, the fi rst part is scored for solo bass clarinet (1970–1977),
the second part for vocalizing cellist and live electronics (1973–1976). All
three pieces require a high level of performer expertise and are based on
high compositional density, two facets of the same approach to composi-
tional structure (Ferneyhough 1987, 112).
In the industrial workplace, a “time and motion study” would determine
the efficiency of a given tool in completing a task. This study would often
be linked to tool placement and examine if the tool increased productivity
enough to justify its purchase. In early sketches for the piece, Ferneyhough
used this defi nition: “Time and motion study—a term signifying the inves-
tigation of conditions for optimal coordination between workforce and
machines. A mutual adaptation. Not determined: the efficiency of the art-
work” (ibid., 115). This defi nition is important as it belies Ferneyhough’s
attention to the “machine” (see below).
On many levels, the IPA provided a perfect means for Ferneyhough to
incorporate aesthetic principles into the fabric of this dense vocal work.
It is a flexible system, yet specific enough for the precision and rigor that
Ferneyhough demands of his performers. The conductor of the premiere,
Clytus Gottwald, emphasizes the importance of the minute aspects of the
piece: “The coherent sum of the entire piece can only be achieved through
the meticulous attention to detail” (Gottwald 1977, 299; translated by
the author).10
Despite the huge number of complicated vocal sounds that make up this
approximately 22-minute piece, it is necessary for each separate sound to
be thoroughly understood and accurately portrayed in order to function
as a delicate expression of the whole: “For my part, I’m convinced that the
most straightforward manner of notating a given action does not necessar-
ily produce anything like the effect which a more detailed, deconstructive,
analytical image can achieve. It has to do, I think, with aura, presence”
(Ferneyhough 1988, 321).
188 Erin Gee
Throughout this piece, Ferneyhough uses a range of different staff s.
Exact pitches are notated on the standard five-line staff. Three-line
staff s are also used and have different defi nitions at different points in
the piece. In one instance where three staff lines are given, perform-
ers should choose three specifi c pitches from their high, middle, and
low registers to correspond to each staff line; notes slightly above or
below these lines indicate pitches that are one half-step above or below.
Another kind of staff indicates the interval space within which all of the
notated vocal actions should take place. Voiceless sounds are most often
notated in a relative “high” or “low” position within a space with no
staff lines.
The different forms of vocal articulation are notated by a large number
of altered noteheads, the text is rendered in IPA symbols. By using both
altered noteheads, which most often indicate voice quality, and the IPA
symbols, Ferneyhough is able to control the different parts of the mouth
(e.g., throat tension, lip position, and tongue position) separately. Note-
heads are sometimes combined to indicate simultaneous action in two parts
of the mouth.
The phonetic material for the singers is made entirely of disjointed
vocal utterances; Ferneyhough has eradicated all traces of semantic
meaning in the text. The IPA was essential both aesthetically and for the
practical notation of the work, as its structure and implementation paral-
lel Ferneyhough’s ideas on compositional and performative aesthetics.
The Precompositional Use of a Semantic Text

Although there is no use of texts with meaning in the fi nal score, pre-
compositional texts provided the sources for the phonetic material.
Text sources are varied and include segments from Doctor Faustus by
Christopher Marlowe, text fragments from Marcel Duchamp’s notes on
The Large Glass (Ferneyhough 1976, 93), as well as texts from Plato,
Leibniz, Augustinus, Boethius, Nikolaus von Kues, Walter Odington,
and Johannes Kepler (Gottwald 1977, 305). Ferneyhough describes the
selection of Doctor Faustus as “hinting at the ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’
aspect of the industrialization of humanity” (Ferneyhough 1976, 94).
Duchamp’s text fragments from The Large Glass contain the seeds for
the texts’ decomposition and segmentation as well as allusions to the mech-
anistic overtones of the title. The parallels between anatomical segmenta-
tion and the human-machine-paradox in Duchamp’s and Ferneyhough’s
work are highlighted in this description:
The nature of The Large Glass is that of a machine organism, sug-

gesting anatomical diagrams of the respiratory, circulatory, diges-
tive, or reproductive systems of higher mammals. Characteristic
of Duchamp’s “mechanomorphic” style, this work refl ects his dis-
tinctive technique of grafting machine forms onto human activity
(Rosenthal 2004).
The references to the theme of “machine-as-human” and vice versa, as

well as the anatomical references, are relevant to the vocal tract. The
Large Glass emphasizes the primary anatomical systems of mammals.
The vocal tract’s primary functions are life sustaining (respiration or
mastication), while speech and vocal articulation are secondary func-
tions. By using Duchamp’s text, Ferneyhough underlines the purely
“mammalian” aspects of the piece, theoretically uniting primary and
secondary vocal tract functions, bringing to light the idea of the “ani-
mal-as-machine,” and emphasizing the “mechanomorphic” ideas behind
the work. Texts from The Large Glass contain themes that directly cor-
respond to Time and Motion Study III: segmentation, both of language
and of the human body, and the degree to which this pushes human
action towards mechanization.
The transformative processes that the texts undergo before reaching
their fi nal state also reveal important information about Ferneyhough’s
processes of compositional transformation. Equally important are the
arguments of why the original semantics of the chosen texts was cru-
cial, and why it was important for the composer to “hide” them in the
fi nal score:
The textual substratum of the work deals with diverse aspects of the
armor-plated myth of technology. At the same time, it offers oppor-
tunity for a number of deformations of sensation and signifi cance.
Since the texts are, on the one hand, not audible as such; on the
other, serve as points of departure for many methodological excur-
sions, they exist basically as background matrix, thereby outlining
a myth whose meaning is, by nature, purely intrinsic to the work
The texts thus serve as the philosophical underpinnings of the piece.

Semantic understanding of the texts during the performance, however,
is not only impossible, it is also unnecessary. Ferneyhough recombines
the phonemes of the original texts with the aim of aff ecting the thought
processes of the performers; the resulting vocal actions and sounds were
specifically devised in order to create a specifi c mental attitude:
It was a question of taking the now deconstructed, mobile atoms of

articulation and recombining them into new, syntactically meaningful
synthetic units. By notating the tension of the throat muscles, position
of the tongue and the shaping of the lips, etc. as separately-rhythmicized
190 Erin Gee
parametric strands, I was implying to the performer that he or she
think themselves into the dynamics of the simultaneity as such, not
just reproduce a more or less complex action. I was, above all, look-
ing to generate a form of “mental polyphony” in the interpreters’
minds as an essential component of the expression (Ferneyhough
1988, 321).
The juxtaposition of vocal utterances in Time and Motion Study III and
the original texts highlight a splitting at a deeper level: a non-seman-
tic, yet structured ordering of vocal sounds is set against the eradicated
identity and silenced meaning of the original texts. Through a shift in
notation from alphabetic symbols to the IPA, the vocal segments of the
original texts have also changed their function. Due to their phonetic
restructuring and independence, these sounds gain new levels of extra-
musical meaning, located on the surface of a taciturn patchwork of
semantic phrases.
This splitting apart of the syntactic and semantic dimensions of speech

activity is deployed at a further axis. Affectively operative syntax (pro-
cessually combinatorial successions of sound) placed against semantic
emptiness: valid semanticity (texts in Latin, German and English), so
processually undermined as to lose all claim to independent existence
“Affectively operative syntax” here does not refer to language-related

syntax, but rather to a meaningful ordering of “successions of sound.”
The symbols of the IPA were designed as building blocks that can be
combined based on external laws, either phonological or otherwise. As
research in linguistics continues throughout the world, the full poten-
tial of their combinatoriality continues to be revealed. Ferneyhough’s
focus on “combinatorial successions of sound” is thus analogous to the
theories behind the IPA and confi rms the tight link between his compo-
sitional ideas and the use of the IPA.
The hidden semantics of the text fragments also relates to the title:
“These fragments are, however, so deeply embedded in the texture that
they are incomprehensible as such—another facet of the question of effi -
ciency” (Ferneyhough 1976, 94). In this sense, the hidden texts touch
on the notion of efficiency by their lack of it: efficient use implies clear
perception of objects. Ferneyhough pursued two ways in which the
original texts were hidden or buried to create the fi nal non-semantic
material:
I have two ways of manipulating text—one encountered in places

where text fragments are present in their totality, but so distorted
or compressed as to suppress their innate communicational poten-
tial; the other involves the generation of texts according to a priori
rules selected by me so as to reflect those animating the musical
construction, while still not containing semantically-referential
meaning (ibid.).
The fi rst method deals exclusively with mutation and diminution, but not
recombination. This would imply that Ferneyhough changed individual
vocal segments or phonemes in order to render words or sentences unrec-
ognizable. One possible transformative method involves changing the ratio
of the components involved in producing the sound. Since each phoneme
is made up of a number of parameters, distortion would require keeping
some parameters, while changing others, depending on the desired degree
of distortion.
The sound [s] shall serve as an example. This is a voiceless alveolar fric-
ative triggered by a pulmonic egressive airflow.11 Maintaining the place
of articulation, the alveolar ridge, distortion can occur on every other
level of the sound. The manner of articulation could change to a voiceless
alveolar plosive triggered by a pulmonic egressive airflow, making it now
a [t]. The airflow of the [t] sound could also change to glottalic egressive,
instead of pulmonic egressive, making the sound an ejective [t']. These
examples demonstrate how the IPA allows for a precise and systematic
method of distortion. This is due to the fact that every vocal parameter of
each sound has been separated and defi ned.
Though it would be difficult to fi nd such a clear example in Fern-
eyhough’s work, consonant transformation between phonemes can be
found frequently, as shown in Figure 9.6. In this passage there are three
types of dental-alveolar sounds, progressing from trill (“rr”), to stop
(“tpk”) and fricative (“θ”). A comparison can also be made between the
fi rst sound in this passage (“p-rr”) to the last (“f → θ”). In both sound
combinations Ferneyhough maintains the combination of a “labial” fi rst
segment ([p] is bilabial and [f] is labiodental) and a dental-alveolar sec-
ond segment ([rr] and [θ]).
The second method of text manipulation that Ferneyhough describes
is the “generation of texts according to a priori rules.” This method
provides evidence for the microcosm-macrocosm approach that Fern-
eyhough has used to build this piece. It remains clear that while the
actual relationship between the transformation of the text and the struc-
ture of the entire piece is not immediately comprehensible, it is vital
to understand that the phonetic construction of the individual vocal
parts maintains a close link to the underlying musical ideas. All indi-
vidual parts thus refl ect the musical aesthetics of juxtaposition and
splitting that characterize Ferneyhough’s Time and Motion Study III as
a whole.
192 Erin Gee
Figure 9.6 Brian Ferneyhough, Time and Motion Study III (1974), rehearsal no. G, Soprano 2 (p. 5). (Copyright © 1974 by Hinrichsen,
Peters Edition Ltd., London. Edition Peters no. 7148.)
GEORGES APERGHIS: RÉCITATIONS (1978)
Georges Aperghis wrote Récitations for solo voice in 1978 using and recom-
bining syllables and phonemes from the French language. Each of 14 short
pieces, entitled Récitations 1–14, uses a different process of deconstruction,
mutation, or recombination of French words and vocal sounds. The pieces do
not use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), but continue to use letters
from the French alphabet (including letters with French diacritical marks) even
when the relationship of the sounds to the French language becomes more and
more abstract. Each piece is between one and four minutes long, although the
time can vary depending on certain performance decisions.
A more comprehensive look at how Aperghis approaches the voice must
include his fascination with the actual sounds of languages, apart from
their content. In Récitations, words from the French language are often
used for their sound quality rather than as carriers of meaning. Because of
this, Aperghis’s music is strongly connected to the individual sound seg-
ments that constitute the French language: the syllable and the phoneme.
Through the tools provided by phonemic segmentation, Aperghis arrives at
the vocal sounds explored during the composition of Récitations:
The basic idea of 14 Récitations is to work with syllables and phonemes

as if they were notes or pitches. Instead of only using pitches to create
melodies I work with syllables and phonemes, the building blocks of
our language. This principle is comparable to Anton Webern’s “Klang-
farbenmelodie”: A melody made of colours, of values of sounds with
all their richness. Although the syllable material is derived mainly from
the French language, I think that the mental midget stories created
in Récitations are also accessible for people who do not understand
French (Aperghis 2006, 22).
This piece therefore does not fall into either the “semantic” or “non-semantic”
category. The French language exists on both intelligible and unintelligible
levels within the work. Syllables from the French language are recombined to
create French-sounding words with no meaning (for example in Récitations 1
and 5), and French words are spoken with sudden breaks of intonation within
the word (for example in Récitations 4) rendering them useless as meaning-
carriers within a normal sentence. Many pieces also link a specific pitch to a
certain vocal sound for the duration of the piece, consciously subverting any
sense of familiar speech melody (Récitations 5, 6, 7, 12, and 13).
Syllables and Phonemes in Récitations in the

Context of the French Language
The use of the word “phoneme” may seem inappropriate to describe the vocal
music of Aperghis because the vocal sounds no longer exist in a phonological
194 Erin Gee
context. However, the term is adequate when describing Aperghis’s process of
composition as these vocal sounds result from a recombination of French pho-
nemes and syllables. Aperghis begins his compositional work with a French
text; he uses French phonemes to create his work, but in their final state, the
sound segments no longer function as phonemes.
By setting the piece in a French lingual context, French and non-French
sounds provoke a theatrically “normal” and “abnormal” perception of the
vocal performer respectively. This is the desired effect, although Aperghis
states very clearly that no “intentional” theatricality should be added dur-
ing performance: “I like that the action arises from the music itself. There
is no theatre to be played in addition to this music. There is only the score,
and the realisation of it creates the theatre. The worst that can happen to
these pieces is an addition of theatre” (Aperghis 2006, 24).
Aperghis’s Récitations create an intertwining of clear French words and
vocal sounds with a changing relationship to the sounds of French. The
action and theatricality arises from the interaction between the sounds
and their French lingual context. Aperghis’s application of compositional
processes to the French language creates a tension between lingual “nor-
mality” (a smooth and understandable oral expression of ideas within the
French language) and “abnormality” that takes the listener into and out of
certain kinds of mental situations. This is why he refers to these pieces as
“mental miniatures” (ibid., 22):
Technical obstacles are applied very consciously in 14 Récitations. The

order of syllables, the progression of colours, the combination of vocal
expressions I choose form a barrier and are a hassle to perform, and
these difficulties in turn create little musical and theatrical situations
which distinguish the work. We see and hear a singer realising a musi-
cal score, but at the same time we witness somebody who can’t speak
properly, someone who is very nervous, restless or hunted, etc. That
is the human dimension of this work. We see people in their daily life
struggle, people who are fragile, people who have trouble expressing
themselves—elusive mental portraits en miniature. I had many such
imaginary stories in mind when I wrote 14 Récitations. A free floating
chain of associative stories, just as our mind happens to create them
(ibid., 23).
In Récitations a listener can hear the connection to the French language,

and immediately the question arises, however consciously or uncon-
sciously, “Why is this person not communicating in French?” There is
of course no answer to this question given during the performance, and
the disorientation felt by the audience is both a tool for the composer
and a liability.
There are a few instances where Aperghis broadens the context of the
French language; he notates sound segments that are not part of French
phonology. One example is the notation of the ingressive and egressive
(inhaling and exhaling) pronunciation of a sound such as ach in Récita-
tions 4. Inhalation and exhalation commonly do not change the meaning
of a word in any language. The standard IPA chart therefore does not
include symbols for inhaling or exhaling. Such symbols appear, however,
in the chart of the extIPA Symbols for Disordered Speech (International
Phonetic Association 2002): an upward arrow for egressive, and a down-
ward arrow for ingressive, airstream—the same signs that Aperghis uses
in his score.
The use of inhalation and exhalation in Récitations 4 is theatrical and
possibly represents someone who is out of breath, with something very
important to tell. Aperghis does not add an explanation in the score. In
accordance with Aperghis’s intention, the theatricality of the “ach” passage
results “from the music itself;” it stems equally from the syllable chosen and
the repetition of this sound.
The connection between ingressive or egressive airflow and a sense of
theatricality or a specific emotion, as suggested by Récitations 4, seems
to be highly culture-specific. Indeed, in some rare cases the ingressive air-
flow can also be a constituent of lingual phonology as in a “subdialect” of
the Austronesian Tsou people in Taiwan (Laver 1994, 168–169). The two
sounds spoken with an ingressive airflow in this dialect are on [f] and [h].
The ingressive airflow here creates an allophonic variation of a phoneme,
which means that the change in airflow does not change the meaning of the
word in which it is used, while it is constitutive for the correct pronuncia-
tion of the word within the phonological system of the dialect. However,
the sound resulting from the ingressive airflow, in and of itself, is devoid of
meaning.
Cross-cultural linguistic research provides many examples for vocal
sounds that are not innately laden with emotional content. Rather the
emotional content of particular vocal sounds commonly is determined by
the social context that surrounds them. A quick inhale contains different
meanings in different cultures and in different languages, as the compari-
son of the ingressive airflow in Aperghis’s music and in the Tsou dialect
demonstrates. Perspectives from linguistic research can thus broaden our
understanding of the cultural and linguistic foundations that make us attri-
bute meaning to sounds.
Récitations 4
Récitations 4 is the most abstract piece of Aperghis’s cycle and has the least
connection to the French language; many single, isolated phonemes are
placed next to each other. In the score, no full French words can be identi-
fied. The score is organized in 56 short episodes or measures. According to
the performance instructions in the score, each measure is meant to have a
mean duration of about 30 seconds, although Donatienne Michel-Dansac,
196 Erin Gee
who has closely cooperated with the composer, performs each “measure”
for only about seven seconds in her recording of Récitations (see Discog-
raphy). There are vocal sound segments indicated above and below each
measure. The sounds written below are held for the entire duration of the
episode, while the sounds written above may be inserted at the beginning,
middle, or end of the episode. The performer should interject the sounds
written above the staff into the held sounds, which are written below. The
decision of when to switch from the sounds below the staff to the ones
above, and when to switch back again to the sounds written below, is left
up to the performer. Additional instructions that accompany each episode
refer to the interpretation and the choice of timbre (active, passive, hot,
cold, proximal, distant, etc.).
From the fifth episode onwards, the German word ich [I] repeatedly
occurs above the staff in many phonetic transformations. Of course we can
infer from Aperghis’s remarks about the relevance of the French language
that Récitations must also be accessible for people who do not understand
any German. However, I do think that it is important that the performer
recognizes the word ich and its meaning. In fact, this word is a further clue
that Récitations can be understood as a personal narrative about the vocal
performer. The ways in which the word appears and is changed, mutated,
or deconstructed, is analogous to psychological processes of the identity of
the “story-teller,” the performer. The composer’s instructions surrounding
the mutations of the word ich become humorous and story-like: the word
is used to conjure up the sound of a beating heart, a knock on a door, the
sound of a boxer fighting, etc.
Michel-Dansac’s recording of the piece creates another level of com-
plexity (see Gee 2007, 176–178 for a comprehensive phonetic transcrip-
tion of this recording). She constantly varies the pronunciation of the /ch/
and the /R/ sounds. The /ch/ is pronounced alternately as [ ʃ], [ʒ], [ç], and
[χ]. These different pronunciations seem to intentionally obscure most, if
not all reference to the German word ich. This is an interpretative choice
that is defi nitely within the realm of the notated score. The /R/ sound is
pronounced as the normal French r, as well as a uvular trill. The sounds
written above the staff are sometimes pronounced with full voice, some-
times voicelessly. Through these performance decisions, reference to the
languages German and French are hinted at, then hidden, as the per-
former adds and removes the sound qualities that act as cultural triggers.
This choice helps to focus the attention on the individual, the psychologi-
cal world of the performer.
Each individual episode in Récitations 4 provides a broad number of
possibilities for interpretation and performative choices. The ambiguity of
phonetic pronunciation and articulation and the playful associations with
(and masking of) language- or culture-specific pronunciation and meaning
form the most vital part of this performative variety.
CONCLUSION
The three composers introduced here tackle the challenge to cross-relate

non-semantic phonetic material with issues of bodily, verbal, and cultural
semantics and identities in a highly personal, idiosyncratic manner. Sch-
nebel approaches non-semantic music from the physical, bodily processes
of speech. He acknowledges the physical limitations of the vocal tract
and strives for virtuosity of articulation through fluidity of tongue move-
ments. Physical limitations such as the duration of the breath cycle receive
particular compositional attention. In other words, Schnebel approaches
non-semantic sounds through the angle of the physical human body. He
emulates the qualities of language by employing structural characteristics
such as vowel-consonant-alternations in his “quasi-speech” chains, which
only temporarily culminate in a phonemic representation of lexical words.
Ferneyhough conceives non-semantic music through the lens of crafting
and constructing a machine. He exhausts (and possibly repeatedly over-
stretches) the physical limitations of vocal performance, reaching out into
new performance dimensions through the extreme difficulty of superim-
posed and newly combined movements of vocal articulators. Using the vocal
tract in difficult and awkward ways creates new forms of vocal virtuosity.
By recombining the abstracted properties of vocal articulators—testifying
to an intentionally “mechanistic” approach to the vocal tract—Ferney-
hough strives toward the ineffable.
Aperghis, in turn, focuses on the innate theatricality of human action and
of the voice in particular. He does not add extra-musical instructions to Réci-
tations but relies on the juxtaposition of vocal sounds, the—sometimes more,
sometimes less—liminal use of the French language, the control of breath, and
the oblique reference to emotional sounds to build a unique web of emotional
content. The vocal actions and their resultant sounds contribute to a height-
ened awareness of the vocal performer as individual, centering on the very
personal, often intimate nature of the human voice. Aperghis does not present
a theatrical “character,” but creates a series of vocal scenarios in which emo-
tional struggles are apparent, but just beyond our comprehension.
NOTES
1. Throughout this text I will be using the standard means of phonetic tran-
scription where the phonetic transcription of sheer sounds are enclosed
in square brackets [p] and the phonemes in a particular language are put
between slanting brackets /p/.
2. Maulwerke was strongly influenced by illustrations from publications on
extended linguistic and anatomical research including Jörgen Forchham-
mer’s Allgemeine Sprechkunde (Forchhammer 1951). Forchhammer’s illus-
trations showed visual depictions of the physical processes of the vocal tract
that take place during the production of different vocal sounds.
198 Erin Gee
3. The piece received its premiere by the Schola Cantorum Stuttgart, conducted
by Clytus Gottwald, in 1968 at the Tage Pro Musica Nova Festival in Bre-
men. The two other works sharing the same title are entitled Für Stimmen
(. . . missa est) dt 31,6 for 12 vocal groups (1956–1958), and Für Stimmen
(. . . missa est) amn for seven vocal groups (1958, 1966–1967).
4. “Die serielle Musik sollte eine abstrakte Musik sein, wie abstrakte Malerei,
gegenstandslose Malerei. Und das haben wir auch angestrebt. Es gab Konstruk-
tionen und bestimmte Formen, die wir einfach abgelehnt haben. Wir wollten
keine Symphonien schreiben. Wir wollten keine Opern schreiben. Vokalmusik
war auch fast verpönt. Weil Vokalmusik ist ja immer mit Text, und der Text
liefert einen emotionalen Ablauf. Der Text hat auch selber einen Klangablauf,
aber wir wollten die Klänge selber komponieren. Deswegen sind wir auch auf
die phonetische Schrift gekommen, weil wir da die Möglichkeit hatten, die
Klänge sehr differenziert zu notieren” (Schnebel in Gee 2007, 281).
5. This publication contained all charts of phonetic symbols for consonants
and vowels which were later modified and reprinted in The Handbook of the
International Phonetic Association, published in 1999.
6. These lines are marked with “h” for high, “m” for middle, and “t” for low
(tief in German).
7. In the English sound /f/ the lower lip is the active articulator. In /s/ it is the
tongue.
8. A fricative is a consonant which is produced by forcing breath through a
constricted passageway in the mouth. In the English fricative /f/ air is forced
through a small passage between the lower lip and the upper front teeth.
9. “Laterals” are consonants (in particular [l], a lateral approximant), in
which the airstream is forced along the sides of the tongue making use of
two parallel resonance chambers there.
10. “Daß die Subtilität der Partitur nicht über die Interpretation sich handfest
dem Hörer mitteile, kann—zumindest zu gewissen Teilen—an der Interpre-
tation liegen, die vergröbernd dem Ungefähr der großen Linien nachhorcht,
wohl vergessend, daß das große Ganze zuweilen in der akribischen Beach-
tung des Details nur zu haben ist” (Gottwald 1977, 299).
11. Alveolar fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through the nar-
row channel between tongue and alveolar ridge.
REFERENCES
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col legno, WWE 1CD 20270.
Ball, Martin J. and Nicole Müller. 2005. Phonetics for Communication Disorders,
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Ferneyhough, Brian. 1976. “Epicycle, Missa Brevis, Time and Motion Study III
(1976).” In Collected Writings, edited by James Boros and Richard Toop,
Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers 1995, 86–97.
. 1987. . “The Time and Motion Study Cycle (1987).” In Collected Writings,
edited by James Boros and Richard Toop, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic
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. 1988. “Interview with Philippe Albèra (1988).” In Collected Writings,
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Forchhammer, Jörgen. 1951. Allgemeine Sprechkunde, Heidelberg: Carl Winter
Universitätsverlag.
Gee, Erin. 2007. “The Relationship of Non-semantic Vocal Music to the Inter-
national Phonetic Alphabet and Research in the Phonetic Sciences: Brian
Ferneyhough, Georges Aperghis and Dieter Schnebel,” PhD diss., University of
Music and Dramatic Arts Graz.
Gottwald, Clytus. 1977. “Brian F. oder Von der Metaphysik des Positivismus.”
Melos/NZ 3/4: 299–308.
International Phonetic Association 1949. The Principles of the International
Phonetic Association, London: Department of Phonetics, University College
London.
. 1999. Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press (for audio recordings cf. http://web.uvic.ca/ling/
resources/ipa/handbook.htm; accessed May 1, 2012).
. 2002. extIPA Symbols for Disordered Speech (revised 2002), http://www.
langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ExtIPAChart02.pdf (accessed May 1, 2012).
. 2005. The International Phonetic Alphabet (revised 2005), http://www.
langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/IPA_chart_(C)2005.pdf (accessed May 3, 2012).
Laver, John. 1994. Principles of Phonetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Rosenthal, Nan. 2004. “Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968).” In Heilbrunn Timeline
of Art History, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. http://www.met-
museum.org/toah/hd/duch/hd_duch.htm (accessed May 1, 2012).
Schnebel, Dieter. 1973. Performance instructions. In Für Stimmen (. . . Missa est) :!
(Madrasha II), Mainz: Schott, 5–12.
Wendt, Heinz F. 1961. Sprachen (Das Fischer-Lexikon 25), Frankfurt: Fischer.
DISCOGRAPHY
Aperghis, Georges. 2006. 14 Récitations, Donatienne Michel-Dansac, recorded

2001, col legno, WWE 1CD 20270.
Ferneyhough, Brian. 1996. Time and Motion Study III, Schola Cantorum Stut-
tgart, conducted by Clytus Gottwald, recorded 1975, on 75 Jahre Donauesch-
inger Musiktage 1921–1996, CD, col legno 31899.
Schnebel, Dieter. 1994. Für Stimmen (. . . missa est), :! (Madrasha II), Schola
Cantorum Stuttgart, conducted by Clytus Gottwald, on Atelier Schola
Cantorum (1), Cadenza LC-06474.
Part III
Voices of/in Popular Music

and Media Art
10 A “Digital Opera” at the
Boundaries of Transnationalism
Human and Synthesized Voices
in Zuni Icosahedron’s The Memory
Palace of Matteo Ricci
Samson Young
As a Hong Kong Chinese Australian who has lived the majority of his life
outside of China, I have many tales of the lived interiority of ethnicity to
tell. The vast majority of these tales recount the dynamics between my
ethnic body on the margin and the institutions of whiteness at the center,
but one such tale that involved my grandmother reveals the possibility of
an opposite structure. Multiculturalism and the policy of assimilation were
fi rmly on the social agenda in Australia of the 1990s. At the high school
I went to, Asians who only made friends with other Asians were frowned
upon as self-segregating and unwilling to blend into local culture, so I made
quite a conscious effort to befriend a roughly equal number of white Aus-
tralian and Asian Australian friends. My grandmother on the other hand
lived happily in Australia for over a decade not speaking or knowing a
word of English. She did all her grocery shopping in Chinatown, socialized
with Chinese-speaking friends, watched Chinese language-drama on TV,
and got around town on the train by memorizing the color of each station’s
platform. One afternoon, my grandmother fl ipped through my yearbook
and tried to name all of my friends by their faces. She had a recollection of
all Asian faces, but failed to recognize any of my white Australian friends.
I reminded her that many of these white Australian friends actually came
around to the house frequently, to which she replied, “but I cannot tell them
apart, their faces are the same, and their voices sound the same to me!”
The face is among the most commonly referred to features of the stereo-
typical Chinese body on the school playground and elsewhere—the slanted
eyes, the wide cheekbones, and the flatter facial features. While the face
carries physiological features that mark one’s ethnicity, the voice suggests
ethnicity through invisible mechanics such as subtleties of accent, word
choice consistent with dialects, and tonal inflection. The derogatory term of
“Ching Chong Chinaman” for instance refers explicitly to the sound of the
Chinese language. There is evidence suggesting that the voice as a marker
of identity operates outside of language and speech. A number of studies
propose that the formant structures in the voices of English speakers of
204 Samson Young
different racial backgrounds may be distinguishably different (Walton and
Orlikoff 1994, 738; Purnell et al. 1999; Thomas and Reaser 2004), although
one study from the University of Florida suggested the contrary (Sapienza
1997, 410). In any case, the face and the voice remain highly charged ter-
ritories in racial politics, so much so that the mere mentioning of them
might offend many. In 2011, Australia cable network anchor John Mangos
made international headlines with explicit descriptions of a Chinese man’s
facial features. Mangos reported on a Chinese lottery winner who wore a
Spiderman mask to conceal his identity while collecting his reward. Man-
gos remarked that he did not understand why the man bothered to wear
a mask, as his “straight black hair [ . . . ], squinty eyes and yellow skin”
clearly betrayed his Chinese identity (Ramadge 2011). In the news footage
the lottery winner’s eyes were not visible, so there was no way of telling
whether his eyes were in fact slanted. In any case, for a news story that took
place in mainland China, Mangos’s comments were redundant to say the
least. Mangos’s remarks triggered an immediate public outcry, which led to
an official apology from the network on the next day, and Mangos’s even-
tual dismissal from the station soon after. Another tale involves American
conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh, who imitated a speech in
Chinese given by the Chinese President Hu Jintao at the White House in a
childish manner that resembled the “Ching Chong Chinaman” stereotype
(Khan 2011). Limbaugh’s actions were swiftly denounced by a number of
politicians of Chinese ancestry, including House Representative David Wu,
and California State Senator Leland Yee.
The two tales demonstrate the significance of the face and the voice as
sites where collectivity, individuality, and anonymity are constantly negoti-
ated. In the fi rst tale, the Chinese lottery winner might have succeeded in
masking his individuality, but as a result of the act of masking, his ethnicity
became the primary instrument of identification; his face was both physi-
cally and metaphorically “lost.” In the Chinese language, the face also car-
ries a socio-psychological dimension. Gei mianzi (literally “giving face”)
is to show respect, and to willingly subsume oneself under another in the
social hierarchy. Shi mianzi (literally “losing face”) on the other hand refers
to lost honor, damaged reputation, or public humiliation. The Chinese
socio-psychological face is a commodity that can be gained, lost, or oper-
ated upon like a tangible object.1 In the words of famed Chinese intellectual
and scholar Lin Yutang, “[The Chinese face] can be ‘granted’ and ‘lost’ and
‘fought for’ and ‘presented as a gift.’ [ . . . ] It is the most delicate standard
by which Chinese social intercourse is regulated” (Lin 1935, 199–200).
If identity may also be operated upon like commodities, what is at stake
and what is gained when it is masked, downplayed, or conveniently for-
gotten? The face and the voice are important instruments for personal
identification, but also political minefields. That much acknowledged, by
concealing distinct faces do ethnic bodies on the margin then become inte-
grated, easily tolerated or domesticated by the institutions of whiteness at
A “Digital Opera” at the Boundaries of Transnationalism 205
the center? What hidden power structure does the act of masking reveal?
These are some of the issues surrounding my analysis of Hong Kong mul-
timedia troupe Zuni Icosahedron’s multimedia opera The Memory Palace
of Matteo Ricci (2010). The purpose of this article is to deconstruct the
various ways by which the identities of the characters in this opera are
obscured. By doing so, I hope to confront a problem in the recent studies of
contemporary Chinese music, namely, an overtly optimistic celebration of
transnational impulses that run the risk of neglecting hidden power struc-
tures and oversimplifying the music.
THE MEMORY PALACE OF MATTEO RICCI: A “DIGITAL OPERA”
Zuni Icosahedron (Zuni) has been at the forefront of Asian experimental

theater for nearly three decades. Founded in 1982 in Hong Kong, Zuni has
since staged more than 150 productions internationally. It is now one of
the eight flagship performing arts organizations that receive annual institu-
tional funding from the Home Affairs Bureau of Hong Kong. A signature
of Zuni’s productions is the troupe’s seamless integration of moving image,
dance, theater, and experimental music into rich multimedia experiences.
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci was commissioned by the 2010 New
Vision Arts Festival and produced by Zuni to commemorate the 400th
anniversary of the death of Matteo Ricci.2 Based on Jonathan D. Spence’s
book of the same title, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci was labeled a
“digital opera” in the publicity materials, with a libretto by Diana Liao and
a score by emerging Hong Kong composer Steve Hui Ngo-shan (b. 1974).
Liao is an established writer, translator, and librettist who has worked with
a number of important Chinese composers and stage artists of the “New
Wave” generation, including Tan Dun, Guo Wenjing, and Shen Wei. Liao is
experienced in topics that deal with cultural border crossing. In 2004 she
assisted Dutch filmmaker Frank Scheffer in translating his documentary
on Tan Dun’s opera Tea (2002). In a biographical sketch she mentions a
“life long fascination with words in various languages and their relation-
ship with perceived realities” (Liao 2009, 14). Hui on the other hand is
a younger and emerging figure. Born in Hong Kong in 1974, Hui gradu-
ated from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts with a degree in
composition and electronic music in 2010. Before his entrance into the
academy, however, Hui was already maintaining an active and high-profi le
career, producing music for various commercial and artistic projects. Hui
has worked closely with Zuni since 1999, and has previously collaborated
with the local popular music label People Mountain People Sea (PMPS). In
addition to his work as a composer, he is also a member of the Hong Kong
electronic music group VSOP, and a resident DJ at the underground elec-
tronic dance event Headroom. Before completing The Memory Palace of
Matteo Ricci, Hui had produced three orchestral pieces, one of which was
206 Samson Young
Re-Autumn scored for laptop and orchestra, which received its premiere by
the Hong Kong Sinfonietta in 2004.
Hui’s unusual background, particularly his interest in and engagement with
popular and electronic dance music, led naturally to experiments in the imple-
mentation of music technology in the classical concert hall. One of the most
striking features of The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci has been the techno-
logically mediated virtual presence of the various characters that Matteo Ricci
encounters. The protagonist of the story, Matteo Ricci, was portrayed by Bei-
jing native “basso cantante” Tian Hao Jiang. Tian’s voice was in fact the lone
human singing voice in the entire opera. All the other vocal parts were “sung”
by digitally synthesized voices, which were rendered using Yamaha’s Vocaloid
voice synthesis technology. On stage, these synthesized singer-characters were
represented by large-scale computer-generated “talking heads” created by
German video artist Tobias Gremmler, which were projected onto the back of
the performance space. A number of non-singing characters also appeared in
the opera, including members of the Taiwanese puppetry troupe The Puppet
& Its Double Theater, and Japanese dancer-choreographer Takao Kawagu-
chi. The non-singing characters wore masks throughout, so that Ricci’s was
the only visible human face in the entire production. It is precisely through the
use of technology that the production team was creating a space of fantasy
in The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, establishing a situation in which the
borders of cultures and the definition of opera as understood in the classical
tradition are brought into question.
VOICE, TECHNOLOGY, AND DECENTERED SUBJECTIVITY
In an interview by local press, Steve Hui spoke of his vision for the opera
and a creative space that exists beyond the boundaries of classical and non-
classical, Western and non-Western:
Opera as an art form is seductive, but I could never write a traditional

opera, the kind of opera Mozart has composed. It is impossible for me
and I am not interested in it. The structure and format of traditional
Western music is very rigid, and that’s where the fun is, since my work
is about the exploration of the boundaries of Western music, and I
think about the world that exists outside of these boundaries (Chan
2010, 90, translated by the author).
In the printed concert program to The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci,

Hui puts his intention to challenge the tradition and institution of Western
opera in even more unambiguous terms:
Opera as a genre has a long history in the world of Western classi-

cal music [ . . . ] [It] has been strictly defined by tradition as to what
does and what does not constitute an opera. Electronic music, however,
with its decades-long[-]only history, is a relatively new form of expres-
sion made possible by science and technology. Its aesthetics, techniques
and skills as well as parameters are still evolving. Interactive dialogues
between electronic music and traditional opera offer ample room for
dialectical exchanges, both as a challenge and reaction to established
forms of musical expressions and as an inspiration for us to test the
limits of crossing over and enriching two totally different disciplines
(Hui 2010, 13).
Many Chinese composers of the “New Wave” generation who came to

international prominence in the 1980s had also spoken publicly of their
vision of a music that transcends cultural boundaries, in which there is
no East or West (Lipsyle and Morris 2005, Chang 2007, Smith 2009).
Commentators of contemporary Chinese music have also advocated
looking beyond the “East meets West” binary in the reading of music
by Chinese composers (Utz 2003, Lau 2007, Mittler 2008). While this
point is well taken, and composers’ individual impulses must certainly
be respected, what is sometimes unclear is how exactly the music itself
transcends culture when the composer employs musical elements with
explicit cultural meanings (folk songs or elements of regionally Chi-
nese opera, for example) or musical genres with a perceived historical
lineage (operatic and orchestral music of the classical concert hall tra-
dition, for instance). Despite composers’ best intentions, musical ele-
ments and genres may still exert a persuasive cultural force that frames
the responses of listeners. Here I refer to what Jeff rey Kallberg calls
music genre’s “horizon of expectation” (1998, 7). According to Kall-
berg, musical genre is not simply a category for classifi cation. Genre
is a communicative concept and “a social phenomenon shared by com-
posers and listeners” (ibid., 243). This communicative concept actively
frames responses to a piece of work, for it evokes a set of expectations
and cultural meanings that are in turn based on some social, historical,
and contextual constructs associated with the genre. When a composer
chooses to evoke a particular genre, he or she is willingly entering into a
“generic contract” (ibid.) with the audience, under which the composer
agrees to adhere to certain conventions, while the audience agrees to
interpret the composition under certain specifi c conditions necessitated
by the genre in question. 3 How do composers deal with the persuasive
force of musical genre, or the cultural meaning of musical elements in
the age of transnationalism?
Composers and commentators have advocated frameworks that
emphasize transnational impulses: fusion, syncretism, and hybridity have
been suggested at various times—and sometimes interchangeably—as
ripostes to the essentialization of China. But could we also confront the
many assumptions about the West with equal rigor? Where is a truly
208 Samson Young
transnational music to be found? Debunking the “East meets West”
binary involves not only a destabilization of the essentialized concept
of China, but also an equally rigorous interrogation of the essentialized
concept of the West. How do we take seriously the question of “how
these two large geo-cultural regions of the world end up coinciding”
(Lau 2007, 586)?
It seems to me that whether or not it is explicitly acknowledged, at
the center of many discussions regarding the nature of border crossing in
music is the question of inclusion into and exclusion from musical tradi-
tions. To create and then label a musical production an “opera” is an invi-
tation to be considered as belonging to and/or in tension with a specific
history of music making. In the context of The Memory Palace of Matteo
Ricci, what is the nature of opera’s seductive aura that Hui spoke of in the
interview quoted above? Given the subject matter and the libretto’s strong
focus on border crossing, Hui’s approach to the whole issue of culture is
quite unusual. Instead of identifying with a specific cultural origin, he
sidesteps the question by identifying with the “decade-long only history”
of electronic music and technological advancement in the concert hall.
“Digital opera” could then be seen as a strategy intended at destabilizing
the defi nition of opera as taught in textbooks of Western music history,
and as exemplified by the operatic canon that continues to circulate in the
concert halls and opera houses.4 This also allows Hui’s music to maintain
an abstracted distance from the common understanding of opera, and to
approach the established musical form with an attitude of playfulness. As
we shall see, this abstracted distance between the music and genre or style
that the music is referencing is maintained by the act of identity masking
in Hui’s score.
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci depicts the life and works of
Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), the Jesuit priest who went on a mission to
China in the sixteenth century. It is scored for the Chinese mouth organ
sheng, viola, piano, percussion, and electronics. In the opera, Ricci recalls
pivotal events in his life by journeying through an imaginary memory
palace, in which people and events are represented by biblical images
and Chinese ideograms. Ricci made every effort to blend into Chinese
culture: he dressed in Chinese robes as a display of humility, observed
Chinese social customs, and mastered the Chinese language in both its
spoken and written forms (Scene 3). In order to earn the trust of Wanli
(1563–1620), the emperor of China, Ricci taught his scientific expertise
to the Chinese. While Wanli eventually did grant Ricci patronage in rec-
ognition of his scientific knowledge, Ricci was kept out of the Forbid-
den City’s innermost chambers, and he never met the emperor in person
(Scene 5). The rich European culture that Ricci represented might have
gained currency among the Chinese, but the price of admission was the
exclusion of his foreign body.
The opera’s narrative is structured around four Chinese ideograms and
three biblical images (Table 10.1).
Table 10.1 Structure of The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
Section Title Ideogram
Prologue Building the Palace
Scene 1 The First Image: The Warriors Wu 武
Scene 2 The First Picture: The Apostle in the Waves
Scene 3 The Second Image: The Huihui Yao 要
Scene 4 The Second Picture: The Road to Emmaus
Scene 5 The Third Image: Profit and Harvest Li 利
Scene 6 The Third Picture: The Men of Sodom
Scene 7 The Fourth Image: The Fourth Picture Hao 好
Epilogue Inside the Palace
As explained above, Ricci’s voice, sung by Tian Hao Jiang, is the only
human voice in the entire production and the other vocal parts are “sung”
by Yamaha’s Vocaloid voice synthesis technology. The use of Vocaloid is
central to the claim of the production being a “digital opera.” Vocaloid
was jointly developed by Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain)
and the Yamaha Corporation in 2005. To synthesize singing, the user
enters the lyrics and the corresponding pitches into a piano-roll-style
editor that is typical of software music sequencers. 5 Score information
is passed into a synthesis engine, which will then select the appropriate
singer library for voice generation (Kenmochi and Ohshima 2007).
The resulting sound is reminiscent of the human voice, and at times
the realism is uncanny. The synthesized voice certainly takes on an eerily
cyborg quality, but in Hui’s digital opera its pure tone and lack of vibrato
also provided an intriguing contrast to Tian Hao Jiang’s more typical oper-
atic singing. The Vocaloid makes its fi rst appearance in the opera in the
fi rst scene. Here, the synthesized voice of a character named “the mother”
is doubled by the solo viola and answered by the sheng, against a drone-like
ostinato provided by the piano (Figure 10.1.).
The personal identity of the mother is uncertain at this point. The char-
acter could be at once referring to the Virgin Mary, Ricci’s mother, or sim-
ply a pacifying and nurturing spiritual presence. We are also unsure of her
ethnic background. She is devoid of a body, and the computer-generated
singing voice possesses a generic English accent. On stage she is represented
by a large computer-generated talking head, which has facial features that
could be Asian or Western. The use of the synthesized voice also renders the
character somewhat sexually ambiguous. The Vocaloid software provides
a number of parameters for vocal quality adjustment including “breathi-
ness,” which controls the amount of artificial breathing heard in the voice,
and timbral parameters such as “brightness” and “opening.” One of the
more interesting parameters, however, is the “gender factor.” The higher the
gender factor, the more masculine the synthesized voice would supposedly
210 Samson Young
30
3
Tape
3
-3- 3
Up and down high and low. One fine day we'll ar
30
Sheng
30
Vla.
3 3
3 3
30
Pno.
Figure 10.1 The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Scene 1, mm. 30–34. (Copyright
© Steve Hui Ngo-shan. Used with permission.)
become. That said, it is sometimes unclear to the ear at which point does the
voice cross over from the female range into the male range, particularly at
the extreme ends of the pitch spectrum. This confi guration presents gender
not as a binary, but as a continuum. As a character, the mother is deprived
of personal characteristics and her identity is deliberately masked. The act
of masking provides the basis of the reimagination and reconfi guration of
identity later in the scene. In the next section, the mother’s lullaby breaks
into a primal, rhythmic, and highly syncopated dance that is reminiscent of
Stravinsky’s orchestral music (Scene 1, mm. 69–128). The synthesized voice
soon enters again, this time to represent a fellow priest who brings the news
of King Sebastian’s demise (Figure 10.2). 6
F [Priest]
Tape
^ ^
Bad news, Bro - thers! Our pa - tron King Se - bas ti-am of Por tu-gal,
129
^ ^
Pno. f
^ ^
129
Perc. ^ ^
f
Figure 10.2 The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Scene 1, m m . 129–131.

(Copyright © Steve Hui Ngo-shan. Used with permission.)
Ricci’s brief encounter with the virtual priest is soon answered by the
voice of a slave from Africa. Synthesized in the male vocal range, the
slave sings about his longing for Africa and his mother. The construction
of the slave’s vocal line is the least “human-like” of all vocal timbres
thus far, with leaps of up to a major seventh (Scene 1, m. 168) and a large
range of three octaves and an augmented fourth. Here, the slave refers
to his “teary mother in Mozambique” (Scene 1, m. 167), which further
obscures and confuses the true identity of the mother who appeared ear-
lier in the scene. Towards the end of the passage, the slave laments that
he will soon “die in peace [ . . . ] nameless, faceless, penniless” (Scene 1,
mm. 168–174; see Figure 10.3).
The slave’s aria is swiftly interrupted by another episode of synco-
pated dance. This time the ensemble is heard in rhythmic unison, com-
bining into clusters of tones that “mask” the timbre of the individual
instruments (Scene 1, mm. 178–188). The next section features a care-
fully engineered transition from the sheng’s cluster chords (Scene 1, m.
188) to an improvisational sheng solo that repeatedly ascends to D5
(Scene 1, mm. 194–206), which acts as a bridge to the electric organ’s
drone on a low D3. The effect is one of a smooth timbral modulation,
from the rich and complex overtones of mouth organ clusters to the
purity of a single note on the organ. Ricci’s voice enters against this
sustained drone with a prayer to Virgin Mary before the synthesized
voice of the mother returns in the female vocal range (Scene 1, m. 225),
joining Ricci in a duet—the fi rst time that human and synthesized voices
are heard together in the opera.
Throughout this scene, cultures and identities are presented on a
network of overlapping continuums: the movement of the synthesized
voice from the feminine to the masculine vocal range; the modulation
of the Chinese mouth organ into the electric organ; the human voice
set in tension with the synthesized voice. Musical elements move back
and forth on these continuums with a high level of mobility. Sounds
and musical gestures are continuously reconfi gured, and the movement
between one “node of identity” to another is seamless. This mobility is
activated, to a large extent, by the process of identity masking in Hui’s
score. The ambiguity of the synthesized voice and of the raceless, gen-
derless computer-generated talking heads turns the operatic stage into
a space of fantasy, where groups of very unequal power relationship
and background may coincide. The perceived origins of these groups
are individually acknowledged, and each is given a musical-theatrical
nod as it were: Africa, Europe, China; male, female; humans, puppets,
cyborgs; classical opera and electronic music. Each of these “nodes of
identity” is deliberately and consciously masked, obscured, and down-
played. This act of identity masking is achieved through technological
means. To gain further understanding of these gestures, I refer to Alluc-
quére Rosanne Stone’s The War of Desire and Technology at the Close
212 Samson Young
167
Tape
tea - ry m o-ther in Mo - zam-bique! Let me die in peace, like so ma-ny be-fore me.
167
Sheng
167
Vla.
167
Pno.
167
Perc.
171
Tape
Name-less, face - less, pen - ni - less.

171
Sheng
171
Vla.
171
Pno.
171
Perc.
Figure 10.3 The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Scene 1, m m . 167–174.

(Copyright © Steve Hui Ngo-shan. Used with permission.)
of the Mechanical Age (1995) in which she discusses the new forms of
identity that emerge from complex human-machine interactions. Cyber-
spaces, according to Stone, can be thought of as social spaces inhabited
by “refi gured humans” (Stone 1995, 34). The original bodies of these
refigured humans are parked in the normal physical space. The interac-
tions between persons and their refi gured identities in cyberspaces are
disruptive of traditional attempts at categorization and identifi cation.
Specifi cally, identities that emerge from these interactions are decen-
tered and pluralistic:
The identities that emerge from these interactions—fragmented, com-

plex, diffracted through the lenses of technology, culture, and new
technocultural formations—seem to me to be, for better or worse,
more visible as the critters we ourselves are in the process of becoming,
here at the close of the mechanical age (ibid., 36).
While face-to-face meetings (in which the body is in plain sight) and
telephone conversations involuntarily reveal aspects of identities such
as gender, age, and ethnicity, virtual identities allow for simultaneous
presences in multiple contexts. The reproduction of the self in the tech-
no-social space is devoid of a body, and affords the new possibility of
continuous reinvention. The reconfigured body maintains an abstracted
distance from the physical body. Subjectivity is decentered, and fluidity
is foregrounded. The Vocaloid-synthesized voices and the computer-gen-
erated talking heads in The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci also afford
this possibility of identity reinvention and reimagination. Here, identity
markers are acknowledged only as nodes of contradictions, and authen-
ticity is no longer held to the highest esteem: “Complex virtual identities
are real and productive interventions into our cultural belief that the
unmarked social unit, besides being white and male, is a single self in a
single body” (Stone 1995, 75).7
In this sense, the metaphysical and musical “losing” of faces and voices
in The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci are necessary steps in redefi ning
the operatic stage as a space where fantasies in ethnicity, gender, centrality,
and marginality are played out. In this space of sanctioned fantasy, unequal
powers collide on equal footings. Virtual characters embody multiple per-
sonalities, to challenge the notion that there is an unproblematic and singu-
lar “I” within each of us.
The lone human voice of Ricci’s explicitly sympathizes with this
notion of identity reimagination in the third scene. In one of the most
lyrical passages in the opera, Ricci sings a duet with a synthesized voice
that represents a woman of the Hui ethnic minority in China.8 Ricci
introduced her as “a Christian, a Jew and a Muslim [ . . . ] all in one”
(Scene 3, mm. 29–35). Historically, the people of the Han majority in
China made little distinction between foreigners of diff erent geo-po-
litical origins. The synthesized voice addresses Ricci also as a “fellow
foreigner” (Scene 3, mm. 59–60) against a background of constantly
sliding tones of the viola and a tonally ambiguous ostinato in the piano
(Figure 10.4).
While the synthesized voice is often rendered to perform humanly
impossible leaps or angular vocal lines elsewhere in the opera, the
214 Samson Young
54
Bar.
^ ^
Tao-ist? To the Chi-nese I am what they see a Hui-hui!
54
Tape
^ ^ ^
Do
54
Sheng
^ ^ ^
p f
54
^ ^ ^
Mrb.
^ ^ ^
pp
f
E 105
Tape
not des pair, my fel low fo - reig-ner, This land is huge,

58
Vla.
mf
58
Pno. mf
Figure 10.4 The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Scene 3 , mm. 54–62. (Copyright
passages that are sung by the virtual Hui woman and the mother from
the fi rst scene represent some of the most lyrical and melodic writings in
the entire production, featuring a smooth contour with stepwise motions
and small leaps. The scoring is sparse, and the sound world is bright and
consonant, with perfect fourths and octaves in the accompaniment.
THE SINISTER RESONANCE OF CULTURE
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci is the product of a predominantly

Hong Kong-based creative team. It was commissioned by a publicly funded
festival of art in Hong Kong. In the program notes, Diana Liao, the librettist,
spoke of her vision for a Hong Kong production that is “proud and honored
to have its world premiere in Hong Kong, [ . . . ] able and willing to compete
on the world stage” (Liao 2010). In our reading of The Memory Palace of
Matteo Ricci, it is also important to address the contexts out of which the
production arose.
Hong Kong, a former British colony and now special administrative
region of the People’s Republic of China, is an open and international
city. The inhabitants of Hong Kong have for decades consumed a vast
amount of imported culture. Some of its oldest institutions of Western
classical music date back to the nineteenth century.9 Despite its histori-
cal reliance on imported culture, the city manages to yield an impressive
repertoire of unique cultural artifacts through the process of system-
atic hybridization and strategic reconfiguration. According to cultural
critic and writer Chan Koon Chung, at the core of Hong Kong’s creative
impulses is the desire to replace foreign imports with localized hybrids
(Chan 2007, 102). Historically, this desire to replace foreign imports
was in many instances motivated by the need to provide access to acts
of cultural consumption and production for local people. The tea food
hall (cha chaan teng) style of “Western” cuisine is one such example.
Tea food hall serves a Western-food-inspired menu. In its heydays in
the 1950s, tea food hall provided affordable alternatives to the novel
“Western”-style cuisine served in up-market establishments, which were
patronized mostly by foreigners and explicitly excluded the locals (Hong
Kong Heritage Museum 2004, Wu 2001, 71–80). To this end, local chefs
reinterpret—and “misinterpret”—imported food culture. The tea food
hall experience is activated and mediated by the seductive aura of “West-
ern” cuisine executed according to regional habits of cooking. Tea food
hall may be conceived of as a cross-cultural contact zone and a desig-
nated space of fantasy, where essentialization of the West serves a prag-
matic purpose. We could similarly see composition as a designated space
of fantasy, and the act of composing as a free cross-cultural play. In The
Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci border crossing is specifi cally activated
by the use of technology. It is also further enabled by the seductive aura
of the operatic tradition, which is to say, the privileged position that
opera occupies in Western music tradition.
When a Hong Kong-born composer is commissioned to write an opera,
is she or he automatically granted access to this very specific mode of
cultural production? And if so, what is the price of admission? These are
perhaps important questions, but they are also misleading as they draw
attention away from movements, currents, and fluidity in actual compo-
sitional practice. Seeing composition as a free cross-cultural play has the
distinct advantage of sidestepping these questions altogether, without
ignoring the pressure that cultures and histories exert on composers. In
such acts of free play, cultural gestures are detached from the origin to
which they refer and become acts of reconfiguration and misconfiguration.
216 Samson Young
This is in line with what Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Infl uence calls
“creative misreading”—the way by which a poet clears imaginative space
for oneself through deliberately and creatively misreading a precursor
(Bloom 1973). Theorist Ien Ang described such an instance of cultural free
play. In 2001, the Art Gallery of New South Wales mounted a large-scale
exhibition of Buddhist art. The presenter vacated a spacious “Wisdom
Room” in the middle of the exhibition space where Buddhist commu-
nities from various backgrounds were invited to put their living culture
on display for one week at a time (Ang 2005, 316). Participating groups
included Taiwanese monks, Tibetan Gyuto monks, and the Vietnamese
Buddhist community. According to Ang, the Wisdom Room turned into
a “cross-cultural contact zone” where encounters between groups with
unequal power took place: “Groups who normally exist out of sight from
the dominant culture gained visibility—if only temporarily—in a very
privileged site of that dominant culture itself” (ibid., 314).
Within such a cross-cultural contact zone, essentialization of culture
serves a pragmatic purpose—to enable participation and to allow mar-
ginalized groups to temporarily reclaim cultural spaces. Simultaneously,
a composer’s precursors might be Western, Chinese, the institutions of
classical music, popular, or electronic music. When these precursors are
summoned as musical gestures, these gestures are likened to acknowl-
edgments or “musical nods.” The composer reconfi gures culturally ref-
erential musical materials to evoke a horizon of expectation, while at
the same time maintaining an abstracted distance from the source itself.
These “musical nods” may depart signifi cantly from the source that is
being referred to. Departure and reconfi guration are creative gestures,
which serve to maintain a buffer between acts of appropriation and
their precursors.
There are many such moments of “musical nods” in The Memory Palace
of Matteo Ricci. The opera begins with a prologue performed on the toy
piano. The prologue is written in a carefully constructed two-part harmony,
and accompanied on stage by the movements of three puppeteers (Figure
10.5). The puppeteers represent a trio of children, to whom Ricci would
introduce the art of memorization. Hui’s contrapuntal writing points to the
music of the baroque period (possibly alluding to the style Ricci, who intro-
duced the clavichord to China, grew up with), but when combined with the
timbre of a solo toy piano and an unusual phrase structure (5+6, 4+3), the
resulting sound is stylistically intentionally vague.
Another moment of musical tribute happens in the fourth scene, in a
passage labeled “baroque.” The passage begins with the Chinese mouth
organ outlining the theme of a quasi-fugue (Scene 4, mm. 1–6). Soon
the mouth organ is joined by the viola (Scene 4, m. 6) and later by the
keyboard-player performing on a synthesized harpsichord (Scene 4,
m. 20, Figure 10.6). This unconventional baroque trio continues for
another 80 measures.
60
Toy Piano
^
3
7
3
14
Figure 10.5 The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Prologue, mm. 1–18. (Copyright
19
Sheng
19
Via.
19
[SynthesizFer Harpsichord]
Pno.
22
Via.
22
Pno.
In the second scene Ricci recounts his missionary expedition to India.

Here Hui refers to the sound of Indian music with a strange trio of taped
drone, bongos, and sliding viola solo (Figure 10.7).
Towards the end of Scene 6 Ricci encounters a beggar, who is per-
formed by a masked dancer. Although the composer labeled the passage
218 Samson Young
B 85
18
Tape
Indian drone fade in
18
Vla.
18 [Bongo]
Perc.
mf
24
Vla.
mf
24
Perc.
“kunqu,” he used only minimal musical means to invoke the impression

of regional Chinese opera, while the dancer attempts to vocalize in a
style that is vaguely reminiscent of kunqu singing (Figure 10.8).
It is of course entirely uncertain which India, which baroque, what
kind of kunqu singing, and which period of Western classical opera is
being referred to in Hui’s score, but to ask such questions is to miss
the point. It is not the precursor or the origin of culture itself that is
being called upon in these musical gestures. What is invoked is the
haunting of a culture, an aura, a sinister resonance. In this sense,
misreading and essentialization are both sanctioned and necessary as
they allow the music to maintain a certain abstracted distance from
the perceived source of culture. This abstracted distance resonates with
the technologically mediated multiple selves of the virtual characters
in The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, and the possibility of iden-
tity reinvention that this fl uidity a f ords. There is no unproblematic
and singular “I,” only multiple avatars. While maintaining this dis-
tance, Hui is able to reinterpret and “misinterpret” cultural artifacts
within a very privileged site of cultural production that is known as the
opera. To label The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci a “digital opera”
is therefore to acknowledge an a r t form and its contradicting set of
histories, conventions, and assumptions, to give opera a “nod.” It is
also to give oneself permission to misread, misinterpret, and reinter-
pret, and by doing so, reclaim opera as one’s own. Through the act
of creative misreading, marginality and centrality may be reimagined,
albeit temporarily.
B
[Kunqu 1]
16 Free tempo 72
^
Bar ^
time...
16
Tape 4
1'30" tape music
16
^
Pno.
^
16 [Chinese small gong] damp
Perc. ^
22 -3.
Beggar
^ ^ ^ ^
[Change to Xiao]
22
Sheng
^ ^ ^ ^
^
PP w
22
Perc.
^ ^ ^ ^
29
3
Beggar
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
29
Sheng
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
29
Vla.
^ ^ ^ î 1
^ ^ ^
mf
AT THE BOUNDARIES OF TRANSNATIONALISM
As conceptual fashions come and go, various frameworks have been

suggested by both commentators and composers of contemporary Chi-
nese music in place of the “East meets West” model, sometimes as a
way to highlight the individual faces and voices of composers. While
the progressive potential and theoretical necessity of these frameworks
220 Samson Young
are acknowledged, an overwhelmingly positive celebration of transna-
tional impulses also runs the risk of ignoring the rich contradictions
that fuel the act of border crossing, which are nonetheless evident in
the “grounded practices of everyday life” (Dirlik 2010). In the words of
Arif Dirlik,
Transnationalism [ . . . ] shares with globalization a propensity to an

exaggerated emphasis on flows, border crossing and cultural hybrid-
izations against [ . . . ] the proliferation and reifi cation of boundaries,
and the persistent attachment to real or imagined cultural identities.
The oversight raises questions about the ideological biases built into
the concept, as with globalization, which has ignored the margin-
alization of populations as they were left out in its processes. The
consequences are problematic intellectually and politically (ibid.).
Border crossings are about movements and mobility of the individual, but
they are also about the extremities that activate these processes in the fi rst
place. We must respect and acknowledge a composer’s agency and debunk
any framework that attempts to lump individuals into one-size-fits-all iden-
tity markers, but we must also interrogate, with equal theoretical rigor, the
political implication of Chinese composers’ engagement with the Western
music tradition. Music that transcends culture need not become an empty
and hegemonic concept, or a convenient sleight of hand for an unchal-
lenged assumption about the tradition of Western classical music. Analysts
should be mindful not to perpetrate the presupposition that Western music
is the “musical universal.”
In a discussion about Hong Kong rap music, cultural theorists Chan
Kwok-bun and Chan Nin commented on the danger of accepting trans-
nationalism and hybridity as new forms of unchallenged solidarity, for it
masks hidden power structures and renders the cultural products of eth-
nic artists culturally indistinct and critically uninteresting. It is some-
times fruitful for theorists and artists to italicize the distinction between
East and West in acts of creativity. That said, if we then view these cre-
ative acts only through ready-made artistic formulae that are assumed to
be culturally neutral, the resulting discussion may warrant little critical
interest (Chan and Chan 2011, 26). While transnationalism, hybridity,
agency, and individualism are all very useful and progressive frame-
works, it is my opinion that they do not fully explain the forces that
continue to fuel the creation of contemporary Chinese compositions in
our age of globalization. They also do not help to grasp “the persis-
tent attachment to real or imagined cultural identities” (Dirlik 2010)
that seem to be evident in works by artists of Chinese backgrounds.
This is particularly so if one takes into account the lived interiority of
race and ethnicity, the “grounded practices of everyday life” as it were,
which arose out of local and specific contexts. By way of conclusion, let
me quote extensively a remark by Allen Chun in his controversial essay
“Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Iden-
tity” (1996):
What appears at the global level to be a contest of identities inevita-

bly becomes transformed at the local level into a contest of meaning
that pits the desirability of one set of values over another [ . . . ] more
important than the notion of multiple identities, which represents a
loose code word for counterhegemonic discourse of various sorts, in
my opinion, is the need to articulate the various contexts (of speech
or practice) wherein facets of identity (such as ethnicity) are deemed
to be relevant. That is to say, what kinds of contexts demand that
one speaks from a position of identity, and what contexts do not?
(Chun 1996, 134).
Chun’s insights from nearly two decades ago still ring true in the new
millennium. Today, Chinese composers are certainly more than just
Chinese, “Eastern,” or oriental. Ethnic artists are undeniably respected
agents with individual artistic impulses. But now that these points are
self-evident, where do we go from here? Chinese composers might have
found their voices, but are they speaking in their own transnational
language? If not, then what are the operational logics of Chineseness,
under the new circumstances brought about by globalization? To take
seriously the question of how two large geo-cultural regions of the
world end up coinciding (Lau 2007, 586) is to reconsider Chun’s ques-
tion on the politics of identifi cation with renewed critical rigor. I hope
that my analysis of The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci has shown that
at the boundaries of transnationalism, it might be possible to derive
explanations for acts of identifi cation that will open new doors for
critical inquiry.
Perhaps the loss of face and voice is not such a negative event after
all—it signifies the beginning of a strategic resistance, an unwillingness
to be integrated, “tolerated,” or domesticated. At the limits of transna-
tionalism, such a loss affords new and exciting opportunities for central-
ity and marginality to be reconfigured within the dominant culture itself,
and offers new tools for commentators and composers alike to account
for the peculiar contradictions of our times.
NOTES
1. The notion of a socio-psychological face is not unique to the Chinese. In

Kondo 1997, the face was referred to as a stereotypical oriental trope that
signifies “a presumed Asian preoccupation with social reputation” (24).
222 Samson Young
2. The New Vision Arts Festival is a publicly funded, bi-annual festival of per-
forming arts that is directed by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department
of Hong Kong (LCSD). The festival features experimental and adventurous
performing art productions staged by both local and international perform-
ing art groups.
3. For a more detailed discussion of the cultural and social weight of musical
genre, specifically in relation to compositions by contemporary Chinese com-
posers, see Young 2009.
4. I am referring to the operatic warhorses that are most frequently performed
by the major institutions of opera, ranging from works by Mozart, Verdi,
and Puccini to Zemlinsky and Wagner. According to a statistical study of
the operatic canon by Siobhan McAndrew for the UK Treasury, the United
States currently has world leadership in the production of new opera (McAn-
drew 2006, 21). Despite the continuous creation of new works, the top 148
most frequently performed operas comprise 81.3% of all operatic produc-
tions around the world (ibid., 15).
5. See the Wikipedia entry “Vocaloid,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocaloid
(accessed July 30, 2012).
6. Sebastian was the king of Portugal and the Algarves from 1557 to 1578.
He was killed in battle during a crusade to the Kingdom of Morocco in
1578.
7. Stone is referring to the generic body in cyberspace, which is often assumed
to be white and male, possessing a singular biological body. In my opinion,
Stone’s story of multiple virtual selves may also help to undermine “the story
of the straight, white, Judeo-Christian, heterosexual man of property as the
ethnical universal” (Spivak with Rooney 1989, 146).
8. In the opera the Hui woman was called a “Huihui.” The term was originally
used only to label Muslims residing in China, but later the Chinese labeled
all foreigners of all religions “Huihui,” regardless of their ethnic origins and
religious beliefs. See Leslie 1986, 195.
9. The Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra (HKPO), one of the oldest institu-
tions of classical music in Hong Kong, was fi rst established in 1895 as an
amateur orchestra.
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11 “Voices of the Mainstream”
Red Songs and Revolutionary Identities
in the People’s Republic of China
Andreas Steen
We can sing about the wonderful life of the New Era, about China’s
impressive achievements during the Olympics and the Asian Games;
about national sentiments and brotherhood. All these topics can
become the content of Red Song performances in the New Era. This
kind of Red Song serves the aesthetics of the times much better, and
they are catchy (Chen Sisi, singer and actress; Qi 2011, 7).
The color red has always enjoyed a positive and meaningful reputation
in China. As an emblem of joy and symbol of virtue and sincerity, it has
been employed for all festive occasions in the traditional context (Williams
1974, 76–79). In modern China, since the rise of socialism and the Chi-
nese Communist Party (CCP), it has also been identified with revolutionary
fervor, socialism, and the color of the national flag. In addition to being a
color, red is used as an adjective in the sense of “being popular” (hong).
This triple meaning of “red” was particularly felt in winter 1991, when
propaganda songs of China’s socialist revolution, so-called “red songs”
(hongse gequ), climbed to an unexpected popularity—the Shanghai Music
Bookstore had ordered a thousand copies of the cassette tape The Red Sun:
Odes to Mao Zedong Sung to a New Beat (Hong taiyang: Mao Zedong
songge xin jiezou lianchang) which were sold out in two days. The Red Sun
turned out to be a bestseller, and by 1993 reportedly 14 million copies had
been sold (Barmé 1996, 186).
About twenty years later, in 2011, the CCP celebrated its 90th anniver-
sary, and red songs were presented as a vital component of today’s popular
(red) culture. China’s news agency Xinhua speaks of a “red song enthusi-
asm” to be heard in public parks, on university campuses, in concert halls,
and on TV channels (Xinhuanet 2011a). Re-edited and modernized revolu-
tionary songs and operas are only two genres of the red wave as Xinhua’s
webpage underscores; other fields include red movies, dramas, and “red
tourism”; one can also add red restaurants and a general trend towards
appreciating “red items” from the Mao Zedong era (Xinhuanet 2011a,
Schrift 2001). Since too much emphasis on the color red can easily arouse
226 Andreas Steen
distrust among critics and foreign observers, officials like Wang Xiaohui,
Deputy Director of the International Department, CCP Central Commit-
tee, are quick to point out: “The cultural life in our society is very color-
ful. Some like singing red songs. Some like pop songs, and some like rock
music. It has nothing to do with ‘turning left’ or ‘turning right,’ politically”
(Xinhuanet 2011b).
The recent hype about red songs is the result of many factors, among
them an emphasis on patriotic education since the early 1990s, the accep-
tance of new content and new performance styles, commercial incentives
as well as several anniversary festivities related to China’s revolutionary
history. China Central-TV (CCTV), for example, aired a special documen-
tary for about ten days, entitled 90 Years of Red Songs (Hongge 90 nian),
to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party,
founded in July 1921. In ten episodes, the documentary offered more than
170 red songs, among them also 36 newly composed songs, the composi-
tion and selection of which began in 2010.
“Red Songs represent the voice of the mainstream [zhuliu shengyin],”
said TV producer Zhu Hai in an interview, while in charge for selecting
the material for this documentary (Chen and Jiang 2011).1 The officially
approved red songs are defi ned by the slogan “six good, one strong” (liu
hao yi qiang) which specifies the six “good” aspects that combine to the
strength of red music: the Chinese Communist Party, socialism, Open Door
Policy, the Great Motherland, People of All Nationalities, and the People’s
Liberation Army. Furthermore, red songs are required to express a strong
sense of the time and should be easy to sing along with (ibid.).
This chapter looks into the repertoire and popularity of red songs since
the 1990s. Due to the genre’s close relationship to the CCP, Chinese history,
and cultural production, a broader perspective on China’s “mainstream
voices” is appropriate:
In China much debate has centered on the questions of which voice of

the people is the “right” one and which vocal qualities and forms best
express the spirit of the nation. Joined with the “to the people” cam-
paigns in the early twentieth century, song movements embraced two
missions: to learn from and to teach the people. These missions reflect a
tension found throughout the century in the dual goals of representing
and transforming the people (Tuohy 2001, 115).
For many decades, the synthesis and double strategy of learning and teach-
ing was realized in “revolutionary songs” (geming gequ), a musical genre
born in the tumultuous 1920s guided by clear intentions: the songs were
anti-imperialist and anti-Japanese, nationalist and socialist, they were per-
formed in mass choral singing events, inspired by Russian worker songs,
adapted melodies and characteristics of minority and rural folk songs, and
were also performed as “solo songs,” later also in orchestra compositions
“Voices of the Mainstream” 227
and in Beijing opera style. The so-called “red classics” (hongse jingdian)
are commercially successful, and some observers speak of a “red song busi-
ness” (“hongge jingji,” Huang and Ding 2011, 15). In the large music sec-
tion of the Foreign Language Bookstore in Beijing one fi nds them in shelves
entitled “Revolution.”
The popular transition from revolutionary to “red,” however, is of more
recent origin and ambiguous, not the least because the label “red” includes
cultural products of nearly a century of revolutionary struggle and socialist
experience. Red songs, also called “main melody songs” (zhu xuanlü gequ),
are a substantial part of “red culture” (hongse wenhua). Other expressions
often used to refer to this phenomenon include “mainstream culture,”
“central culture” or “official culture,” “Maoist culture,” “the culture of the
party”: “Official culture consists of the myth, discourse, language, and ide-
ology of Maoism, the communist revolution, and to a lesser degree the leg-
acy of the May Fourth Movement” (Lu 2001, 204). This myth corresponds
with China’s nationalism, emotional nostalgia, and a state propaganda that
seeks to give voice to the importance of the CCP in a vastly expanding
cultural consumer market. Its popularity is related to the ambiguity and
the contradictions of China’s postsocialist condition, characterized by the
fact that “both the state apparatus and the mass populace participate in
cultural production and perception” (Cui 2003, 72).
Red song culture is of political, cultural, and economic relevance; it also
proves to be adaptive and flexible to absorb other styles. Distributed and
consumed in various musical genres and formats, a certain “revolutionary
spirit” is kept alive and widely accepted, disseminating messages of patrio-
tism and nationalist pride. The strategy offers “musical workers” fi nancial
benefits and stardom, and it even helps to incorporate voices that were
previously considered “non-mainstream” (fei zhuxuanlü) such as the rock
singer Cui Jian and other protagonists of China’s musical underground.
Red songs are a powerful cultural source in present-day China, and due
to official recognition and promotion also among the commercially saf-
est products in a highly controlled cultural market: “Music industries and
their commodities in China are both serving and subservient to the state,
and even in contemporary China it is difficult to fi nd popular music that is
discordant with state ideologies” (Fung 2008, 45).
This chapter argues that the musical category of “red songs” is both
popular and contradictory, yet it is not “revolutionary,” since “radical art
forms that oppose or ignore the structures of domination can never be
popular because they cannot offer points of pertinence to the everyday life
of the people” (Fiske 1989, 161). Red songs, old and new, are performing a
widely accepted dual goal of learning and teaching, representing and trans-
forming the people. However, today’s “revolutionary” identities are com-
plex and pragmatic, making it difficult to differentiate between the “voice
of the people” and the “voice of the Party.” The phenomenon can be inter-
preted as the result of patriotic education and ideological relaxation, as a
228 Andreas Steen
mass-mediated compromise of an ongoing struggle between the CCP and
“the masses” about voice and representation, and as a new “mainstream”
entertaining program increasingly accepted among younger audiences.
THE CLASSICS: VOICES OF THE PAST,

VOICES OF THE REVOLUTION
Inspired by red songs’ present popularity, mass-mediated performances,

and singing contests, various experts, veterans, and political, educational,
as well as media institutions in China feel inspired to positively comment
on the revolutionary songs’ history and social importance (see, e.g., Wang
Ling 2011, Chen and Jiang 2011). The TV documentary 90 Years of Red
Songs is only one voice that links China’s anniversary celebrations musi-
cally to the revolutionary spirit of the May Fourth Movement in 1919 and
the founding of the CCP in Shanghai’s French Concession two years later.
Chinese commentators agree that red songs were born in those years, and
that they were instrumental in promoting a progressive consciousness and
revolutionary fervor (see, e.g., Chen and Gui 2011). Revolutionary songs
(geming gequ) had to fulfill (and were composed for) practical purposes;
their message was easily comprehensible in order to promote certain types
of action and to mobilize the people. Due to these characteristics, differ-
ent periods of musical production are distinguished that reflect the politi-
cal guidelines of Chinese revolutionary history, both in content and music.
Huang Wenhao and Ding Huifeng (2011) identify three larger periods:
China’s revolutionary struggles until 1949, the socialist period of building
a New China (1949–1976), and the decades following the reform policy
until today. To better grasp the variety and meaning of red songs circulat-
ing in China’s cultural sphere today, it is important to briefly look at their
origin, socio-political value, and meaning before moving to the “new era.”
The first period began with the May Fourth Movement, 1919, China’s first
nationwide nationalist revolution that inspired the use and the production
of protest songs. The first Collection of Revolutionary Songs (Geming geji)
was a booklet published in December 1926, containing 15 songs including
“The Internationale” (Guoji ge), “National Revolutionary Song” (Guomin
gemingge), “Anti-imperialist Song” (Fan diguozhuyi ge), “The Marsailleise”
(Masai qu), “Remember May 1st” (Jinian wuyi ge), etc. (Wang Fengqi 1984,
118). In the years of the land revolution (1927–1935) “red ballads” (hongse
geyao) became popular in the Soviet regions of Jinggangshan (Judd 1983).
In Shanghai, social critique and anti-imperialism were expressed in the com-
positions of Nie Er (1912–1935), Ren Guang (1900–1941), and others. The
best-known song is probably Nie Er’s “March of the Volunteers” (Yiyongjun
jinxingqu, 1935), a film song that was quickly banned by KMT authorities
and in 1949 became the national anthem of the PRC. The next two phases
were determined by the war of resistance against Japan (1937–1945), the
“War of Liberation” (1947–1949), and the communists’ experience of sur-
vival and resistance in Yan’an. In this period, Mao Zedong’s famous “Talks
at the Yan’an Form on Literature and Art” in May 1942 marked a turning
point, also for musical composition. Henceforth the CCP provided and con-
trolled the standards of socialist cultural production, which was determined
to serve as a weapon in the revolutionary and anti-imperialist struggle, and
to focus on peasants, workers, and soldiers, and their political education.
Famous songs of those years are “The East Is Red” (Dongfang hong, 1942),
a song that praised Mao Zedong and was based on a Shaanxi folk song,
Xian Xinghai’s (1905–1945) “Yellow River Cantata” (Huanghe dahechang,
1939), and “Nanniwan” (literally “Muddy bay,” 1943), a song that praised
the achievements of the Red Army.2 Concluding in more general terms, Hung
Chang-tai (1996, 925) divides the communist war songs between 1937 and
1949 into two broad categories: anti-Japanese music and praises of the CCP
and its leaders.
The founding of the PRC in October 1949 marked a significant break
in the production and promotion of revolutionary songs. Now, and for
the fi rst time in modern Chinese history, the CCP had unlimited access
to musical production facilities, namely to those that were left behind by
the three record companies operating in Republican Shanghai: American
RCA-Victor, British EMI-China, and the only Chinese-owned company
Greater China (Dazhonghua). Until then, only a few dozen acceptable
fi lm songs composed for the left-wing movies had been put on record,
especially those of Nie Er. 3
After the music industry was reorganized into the state-controlled
China Record Corporation (Zhongguo Changpian Zonggongsi), the sec-
ond period of red songs saw the nationwide spread of pre-1949 revolution-
ary songs, including compositions like “The Sky in the Liberated Areas”
(Jiefangqu de tian) and “The Army Is Marching Forward” (Jundui xiang
qianjin).4 The selection criteria followed Mao Zedong’s “Yan’an Talks.”
The new repertoire of this period consisted of patriotic songs in different
styles that pursued the aim to raise enthusiasm for building a new China,
to glorify the successful revolution, to strengthen the unity among Han
Chinese and the recognized national minorities, to inspire patriotism and
active participation in particular campaigns, to praise the motherland, the
CCP, and Mao Zedong and his “Thoughts.”5 One example would be Jie Fu’s
(1913–1976) composition “We Are Marching on a Big Road” (Women zou
zai dalu shang) which is still famous in China today. Written in 1962, the
song strengthened national unity in times of crisis and praised the socialist
vision of “infi nite happiness and infi nite glory” (Dong 2011).
During the decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) all (cultural)
activities focused on Chairman Mao to support the personality cult. In
those years, Mao turned into “the Red Sun that will never fall,” a metaphor
supported particularly in the field of music. Chen Feng describes this period
as one of unprecedented destruction and humiliation. “After all art-like
230 Andreas Steen
lyrics had been eliminated from people’s lives by employing Fascist meth-
ods of cultural tyranny under the Gang of Four, only one subject matter of
production was left that would still receive green light on its journey: lyrics
that would praise the ‘red sun’ of Chairman Mao Zedong” (2006, 44–45).
Another important musical contribution of those years were the revolution-
ary “model operas” (yangbanxi) created under the guidance of Mao’s wife
Jiang Qing, that focused on the military and revolutionary struggles before
1949 (Mittler 2010, Roberts 2010).
One popular song that did not fit into the general repertoire of those years
but reflects the variety of “voices” as well as their ambivalent survival and
tenacity until today was the children song “I Love Beijing Tian’anmen” (Wo
ai Beijing Tian’anmen). In 1970, the music was composed by Jin Yueling, a
19-year-old apprentice at the No. 6 Glassworks Factory in Shanghai; the lyr-
ics were written by the 12-year-old pupil Jin Guolin. In September the song
appeared in the collection “Songs of Red Little Soldiers” (Hongxiao bing
gequ), published in Shanghai. While schoolchildren all over the country sang
that song, it quickly entered larger collections like “New Battlefield Songs”
(Zhandi xin ge, 1972) and even the “Collection of Sentimental Songs” (Shu-
qing gequji), published in 1981 in Guangzhou. Jin Guolin later enrolled at the
Central Music Conservatory in Beijing and became a well-established com-
poser, who also contributed two to three hundred sentimental songs, some
of which received awards on national music contests (Baidubaike 2010). “I
Love Beijing Tian’anmen” is still very popular; its title provided the name for
a fictional movie (2005) and a TV drama series (2009). Its short lyrics clearly
transfer the message of the revolutionary period, connecting the image of the
rising sun with Chairman Mao (see Xiao and Jiang 1992, 661–662).
With the end of the Cultural Revolution, the popularity of “red culture”—
revolutionary operas and songs—declined. In 1979, the CCP began to with-
draw items from the stores that once had promoted the Mao cult (buttons, the
Little Red Book, records). Statistics, however, gave officials reason for con-
cern, because they demonstrated that in the realm of drama and opera tradi-
tional plays had overwhelmingly reoccupied the stages in Beijing and Shanghai
(Mackerras 1984). Besides, people felt increasingly attracted to sentimental
love songs that poured in from Hong Kong and Taiwan, especially those of
the songstress Deng Lijun (1953–1995): “The soft, sentimental, private and
humane melodies found in popular culture struck a note that contrasted with
the official language of revolution and class struggle. [ . . . ] However, the offi-
cial media quickly adopted measures to alleviate the impact of popular cul-
ture by incorporating and using elements from it” (Lu 2001, 198).
NEW VOICES: NOSTALGIA, PATRIOTISM, AND PROFITS
At the beginning of China’s reform policy in 1978, in public people had

been exposed to at least thirty years of revolutionary musical practice and
propaganda. Due to the many uncertainties of China’s reform program,
underscored by news about nepotism and corruption, popular interest in
Mao Zedong and his period had begun to rise beginning in the mid-1980s.
Several biographies and revealing articles were published during those
years, yet the real “Mao fever” (Mao re) only started after the democ-
racy movement on Tiananmen Square had been forcefully repressed in June
1989. Among the many new voices of this period, three trends need to be
highlighted because of their lasting impact on the repertoire of red songs
until today: the creation and acceptance of a popular music style, the popu-
larization of China’s revolutionary classics, and the adaptation of revolu-
tionary elements in rock music.
During the 1980s, the PRC authorities had to cope with the growing
impact of Mandopop (Taiwan) and Cantopop (Hong Kong), the most pop-
ular songs of which carried nationalist messages, e.g., Wang Mingquan’s
“Be a Brave Chinese” (Zuoge yonggan de Zhongguo ren, 1983; Ho 2006,
444). In their effort to minimize this influence, “all the participating songs
in officially organized competitions and other musical events had to be sung
in either bel canto style or artistic folk/national singing style” (Barano-
vitch 2003, 18). In 1986, the situation began to change with the fi rst offi-
cially organized popular music concert in Beijing. The new singing style
was called tongsu (literally “popular”), made use of Western instruments
like keyboards, guitars, drums, etc., and adapted the popular singing style
(liuxing changfa) from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Female singers of the time,
e.g., Mao Amin, Na Ying, and Wei Wei, had powerful voices and became
famous because they “conformed to the orthodox communist, masculine
female image, which the state still propagated in the 1980s” (ibid., 145).
Equally strong voices were to be heard in a style called “northwest wind”
(xibeifeng), born in Northern Shaanxi province in the mid-1980s, and
reflecting the harshness of life in a rhythmic music style with coarse mascu-
line voices. In summer 1989, these and other sounds and voices—old and
new, local and international—were performed during the democracy move-
ment on Tiananmen Square, where “we heard demonstrators concerned
with China’s future [ . . . ] perform the ‘Ode of Joy,’ ‘The East is Red,’ ‘The
Internationale,’ music from earlier social-political movements, contempo-
rary Chinese rock music, and regional folksongs” (Tuohy 2001, 125).
Deng Xiaoping was convinced that the “events” of 1989 were caused by
a severe lack of ideological education and two years later officially launched
the Patriotic Education Campaign (Aiguozhuyi Jiaoyu Yundong; Wang
2008, 790). Since moral education via music had long been on the agenda
of the CCP, it came as no surprise that this tool was again effectively put
into practice. Obviously inspired by the campaign, the wave of nostalgia,
and commercial prospects, the tape The Red Sun: Odes to Mao Zedong
Sung to a New Beat, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, was suc-
cessfully released by the Shanghai Record Company in late 1991. In the
following year, the CCP commemorated the 50th anniversary of Mao’s
232 Andreas Steen
Yan’an Talks, and 1993 saw the 100th birthday of Mao Zedong, trigger-
ing the “Mao fever” and the “Red Sun phenomenon” (Hongtaiyang xian-
xiang): “Mao, a strong leader who in popular imagination was above
corruption and a romantic unfettered by pettifogging bureaucratic con-
straints, was for many the symbol of an age of economic stability, egali-
tarianism, and national pride” (Barmé 1996, 15). Equally important were,
however, changes in musical style, as mentioned by the Shanghai reporter
Yang Jianguo in a meeting in January 1992:
One of the reasons for its [The Red Sun’s] success is that the new
arrangement is entirely in keeping with the sentiments, musical tastes,
and up-beat attitude of today’s audiences. The songs make you feel
good; they allow you to recall all the good things about your youth
and relive the past in a new and positive way. Young listeners enjoy the
songs not simply because they are used to Canto Pop and a Euro-Amer-
ican style of singing, but also because The Red Sun exudes a romantic
spirit that they crave (quoted after Barmé 1996, 189).
Adding to the “romantic spirit” of The Red Sun were anthologies such
as Unforgettable Songs: The Essence of Revolutionary History Songs
(Nanwang gesheng: Geming lishi gequ jingcui),6 published in April 1992,
which demonstrate the quantity of the repertoire. The collection starts with
“The Internationale” (1921), and contains 307 songs with simple notation
on 677 pages. Of these songs, approximately one half relates to the years
prior to 1949, whereas the second half belongs to the “Period of the Social-
ist Revolution and Socialist Construction” (1949–1992). Included is also
the popular tongsu song “The Valiant Spirit of Asia” (Yazhou xiongfeng,
1990), composed for the Asian Games held in Beijing and performed by the
famous duo Wei Wei and Liu Huan (Jones 1992, 49).
At the core of this new trend was a metanarrative of revolution and prog-
ress, led by the CCP, which in the early 1990s paved the way for “increas-
ing investment in cultural productions that glorified the past and present
contributions of the ruling party, creating a new cross-medium genre called
‘the mainstream melody’ (zhuxuanlü)” (Wu Jing 2006, 361). Mao’s words,
poems, and legacy, representing a strong leader and a simple but stable life,
quickly enriched this “melody.” The Chairman was, however, much more
than this, as his image had turned into a “floating sign,” into “a vehicle for
nostalgic reinterpretation, unstated opposition to the status quo, and even
satire” (Barmé 1996, 16).
Another trend was expressed in Beijing’s emerging rock ‘n’ roll under-
ground, starting with Cui Jian and his album Rock ‘n’ Roll on the New
Long March (Xin Changzheng lushang de yaogun, 1989). Cui did not only
reflect the revolutionary period in his lyrics and visual imagery, he also
employed the CCP rhetoric by including the metaphor of the heroic Long
March: to spread rock music in China will be a long-time struggle, and
while “liberated areas” will be established, revolutionaries should be pre-
pared to make sacrifices. Cui employed this image throughout the 1990s,
wrote ambiguous lyrics such as those in “Having Nothing” (Yiwu suoyou)
and “A Piece of Red Cloth” (Yi kuai hongbu), and even sang the revolution-
ary classic “Nanniwan.” The latter aroused the anger of a party official so
that Cui was forbidden to perform in Beijing. Other examples of the early
1990s include the album “Red Rock” (Hongse yaogun, 1992), recorded
by Hou Muren and the Modern Band, featuring among others a distorted
rock version of the classical song “The East Is Red,” and China’s success-
ful heavy metal band Tang Dynasty, which recorded “The Internationale”
(Guoji ge) for their fi rst album (1992).
Since the mid-1990s, revolutionary symbols and images have turned into
popular and attractive consumer items, not necessarily related to “socialist”
content, but for mocking and subversive purposes. Revolutionary design
came to be associated with Chineseness and resistance, also offering visual
assistance to express one’s attitude and identity in times of globalization.
In general, images were often chosen solely for their commercial attractive-
ness. While the “underground,” however, tended to use these images in a
creatively ironic if not provocative manner, “official” usage was marked
by socialist realism and propaganda style with a clear political message.
The album The Red Sun, which appeared with the Tiananmen Square on
the front cover, was a clear example for this “official” usage. Until 1996,
when vol. 5 of The Red Sun was released, all editions presented different
versions of “The Square” on the cover, echoing the song “I Love Beijing
Tian’anmen” and CCP control of the Square. Musically speaking, however,
the revolutionary repertoire underwent major changes, often characterized
by a shift to softer sounds and voices, including melodies played on a saxo-
phone in smooth jazz “Kenny G” style. This modernization of red songs
was a necessity in a highly competitive market, where young audiences
increasingly spent their money for Mando- and Cantopop’s messages of
loneliness and isolation, performed by feminine and often androgynous
voices (Moskowitz 2010).
PROMOTING RED MUSIC, EDUCATING

AND ENTERTAINING THE PEOPLE
These musical products and trends evolved during the 1990s, a dynamic
period that was further characterized by two overlapping developments:
fi rst, China’s rapidly changing economic environment, social insecurity,
globalization, and new means of communication, all of which had a tre-
mendous effect on the rise of materialist values and individualism among
the young generation. Economically successful personalities like Bill Gates
and foreign stars in film and sports became the new models to emulate,
threatening the survival of Chinese socialist culture. Secondly, and partly
234 Andreas Steen
as a reaction to this development, the CCP had launched the Patriotic Edu-
cation Campaign in 1991 (see above) and one year later agreed to an impor-
tant ideological shift that was also approved for textbook use: “The official
Maoist ‘victor narrative’ was superseded by a new ‘victimization narrative’
that blames the West for China’s suffering” (Wang 2008, 792). The effects
of the new nationalist discourse became largely visible with the publication
of the bestseller China Can Say No! (Zhongguo keyi shuo bu!, 1996), but
also affected the cultural industry in the realm of both pop and rock. Anti-
foreign tones, patriotic sentiment, and frustrated rebellion were widespread
by the end of the 1990s (see Barmé 1995, Fung 2007, Hao 2001, Ho 2006,
Tuohy 2001).
Based on new official directives, patriotism and nationalism became edu-
cational goals, also to be pursued via music and singing. Emphasis was put
on four musical categories that were regarded as suitable for national educa-
tion and representation: Chinese traditional music, ethnic minority music,
a selection of Western music, and the large repertoire of the PRC’s musical
heritage. The latter also included “praise songs” (song ge) that praise “the
party leaders for guiding citizens in building a beautiful home country, a
well-established society and a fortunate new life. The songs affi rm the love
and enthusiasm of the masses for the Communist Party, as well as their
self-confidence and social responsibility” (Ho 2010, 76). Discussions about
“the importance of an all-round moral, intellectual, physical, and aesthetic
education” (ibid.) involved President Jiang Zemin as well as the various
institutions of higher education. In this context, authors generally stressed
the educational value of red songs (Sun 2011) and the way they strengthen
the listener’s patriotic spirit and improve aesthetic values and a collective
identity. Choral singing, in addition, has a positive effect on the pupil’s over-
all character. It is, therefore, considered important to promote red songs in
primary and secondary school classrooms (ibid.). Similar arguments are
put forward when talking about the usefulness of red songs for the educa-
tion of university students (Zhu 2009). Predictable challenges, as Zhu Kai
(ibid.) admits, derive from an increasing gap between individualism, plural-
ism, and diversity in expression on the one side, and the dogmatic format
of red song activities on the other. Students seem to agree that universities
and institutions of higher learning need to increase the promotion of red
culture.7 Statistics do, however, also reveal that only 10.14% of them fre-
quently visit websites related to red culture (Zhou 2011, 23). To minimize
this gap, China’s cultural authorities engage in numerous activities, among
them also the fruitful cooperation with (foreign) music companies/promot-
ers like MTV-China, in order to promote accepted musical content in an
international setting (Fung 2006, 2008). Here, it should be sufficient to
point at two examples that illustrate official engagement in red song promo-
tion and packaging: Red Jazz and the Song Collection of China.
The emergence of Red Jazz (hongse jueshi) in 2000 was a novelty, ini-
tiated by powerful players in China’s music industry, the state-owned
companies. Red Jazz was released as a set of three CDs by the Shanghai
Record Corporation (2000–2003), introducing the genre as “Chinese jazz”
(Zhongguo jueshi) and “memorable jazz” (nanwang jueshi). All songs
were related to China’s revolutionary history and were performed in an
instrumental smooth-jazz format, with the piano at its center. The style
was defi nitely innovative, including “memorable” melodies such as “The
Sky in the Liberated Areas” (Jiefangqu de tian), “Nanniwan,” “The Red
Sun Shines at the Frontier” (Hong taiyang zhao bianjiang), and “Our Hon-
orable Chairman Mao Zedong” (Zanmen de lingxiu Mao Zedong). The
front covers strengthened the revolutionary aspect by combining images
of the red sun with wartime photographs. Although it remains difficult to
estimate the popularity of red jazz, the production itself was a clever move
that also underlines changes in society and cultural production. Such a
synthesis of revolutionary music and jazz would have been unthinkable in
twentieth-century China. Red Jazz demonstrated considerable adaptability,
flexibility, and creativity and also reflected the state’s dedication to actively
raise its voice in the field of music and popular culture.
This was further emphasized in 2002 by the publication of the Songs
Collection of China (Zhongguo gedian), which was released on ten CDs
to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the PRC. Each decade was repre-
sented by two CDs, whose cover-images were designed to illustrate the rise
of China and the collective efforts under the rule and guidance of the CCP.
The images were painted in a combination of Soviet-style socialist realism,
earlier propaganda posters, and modern pop art. The CD-box proposed a
convenient historical periodization in five decades, which focused on pro-
gressive socialist advancement and strength, eliminating discontinuities
and periods of crisis or protest. Altogether, it provided an official selection
of accepted “red” PRC-Pop. It used popular songs of previous decades,
induced sentimental feelings for the past, and stimulated a historically posi-
tive and uncritical listening habit among consumers. It is not surprising that
the only song with a certain affiliation to rock circles was Zang Tianshuo’s
notorious pop-ballad “Friend” (Pengyou), which was widely circulated.
Both Red Jazz and the Song Collection anticipate what was stated in
an official document in 2004, namely that officials should try to “make
entertainment a medium of education” (Wang 2008, 796). The promo-
tion of revolutionary classics, however, was by no means confi ned to state-
owned enterprises. The CD My Homeland (Wo de zuguo), for example,
was released by the private and independent company Taihe Rye Music
Co., Beijing, in December 2005.8 Though specialized on Mandopop and
promoting itself with the slightly altered but still recognizable slogan of
the Mao era “Serving the Entertainment of the Masses” (Wei renmin de
yule fuwu), the music company had provided a CD with a selection of ten
songs from different periods after 1949. All songs were rerecorded with
new accompaniment and new sound, sung and played by various popular
singers and musicians, which unite under the heading “Sanlitun Music”
236 Andreas Steen
(Sanlitun yinyue)—obviously a reference to the well-known entertainment
district in Beijing. The recording promotes patriotism (aiguozhuyi), as one
can read on the cover, and the design reminds of the propaganda posters
from the Great Leap Forward period (1958–1960), except for the imple-
mentation of modern satellite antennas. Indeed, the CD was released to
commemorate the successful victory over fascism and Japanese imperial-
ism 60 years earlier.9 My Homeland is only one example among many that
illustrates the tendency of pop singers and private companies to benefit
from revolutionary nostalgia and patriotic sentiment.
“RED SONG CONCERTS”: VOICES UNITED
State-sponsored concerts and singing competitions have always been an

important aspect of talent search and official propaganda work in the PRC
(Baranovitch 2003, 213). In 2006, Jiangxi Satellite TV decided to com-
memorate the 70th anniversary of the Long March (Jiangxi Province is
considered the historical center of the Chinese revolution), and on that occa-
sion organized the music competition “Sing Loudly Jinggang Mountain”
(Fangge Jinggang). The winners of that competition were invited to perform
at the “China Red Song Concert” (Zhongguo hongge hui) together with
professional singers and other stars. Following a sold-out stadium concert
and the overwhelming success of this program, Red Song Concerts turned
into national annual events, with live-broadcast competitions held in vari-
ous cities and a promotional Internet presence, also for online registration
(Gan 2010, Yuan 2011).10 Everybody at the age of 18 is invited to display
his/her musical talent in front of a committee and is evaluated by audience
response. The competition is not confi ned to one singing style or “voice,”
it is the multiplicity of styles under the heading “Red Song Concert” that
attracts participants from 18 to over 80 years of age. As explained in the
concert-related entry on the Internet platform Baidu, red songs
are mainly red classical songs, e.g., army songs, anti-Japanese songs,
songs of the liberation era, various healthy progressive songs of the
socialist and the reform period as well as outstanding minority songs.
Additionally, they also include classical songs of the various nations
around the world and English language songs (Baidubaike 2012).
The success of this program can not only be attributed to the popularity of
red song’s lyrical content, music, or revolutionary memory and nostalgia.
It is undoubtedly also related to its format, inspiration for which perhaps
came from neighboring Hunan province. In April 2004, Hunan TV, China’s
second largest broadcasting network after CCTV, had launched the highly
successful singing contest and TV program Supergirl (Chaoji nüsheng).
The program is often seen as the Chinese version of the British series
Pop Idol.11 It is said that the fi nal episode in 2005 drew more than 400
million viewers and thereby turned it into one of the most popular shows
in Chinese broadcasting history. Supergirl was a media spectacle, carried
out in six provinces over several weeks. Every young woman was allowed
to participate, no matter of her looks, age, education, or hometown. The
show, therefore, stood in stark contrast to official music events, which offer
a platform for a selected number of talented beauties. Its nationwide attrac-
tiveness is further attributed to democratic audience participation, because
audiences select their stars until the fi nal round via text messages. The
unpredictability of the winner, democratic experience, and identification
with the presumed “star” led to a voting euphoria which in 2005 turned Li
Yuchun, 21, a young woman, into a Supergirl who “is almost the antith-
esis of the assembly-line beauties regularly offered up on the government’s
China Central Television, or CCTV” (Yardley 2005). The show was, how-
ever, cancelled by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television
(SARFT) in 2006, and again in 2011, due to exceeding broadcasting time
limits and official critique of “violating moral virtues” (Bristow 2011).
Jiangxi Satellite TV, in contrast, clearly was on the safe side with its concept
of Red Song Concerts, both morally and politically. In 2007, the Red Song
Concert commemorated the 80th anniversary of the Red Army and the Har-
vest Uprising. The first competition was held at Beijing University, to remind
people of where the “May Fourth spirit” (wusi jingshen) was born.
In Nanchang, the popularity of red songs now also inspired the rerelease of
Red Ballads (Hongse geyao 2007), a song collection originally released in 1959
containing songs from the Jinggangshan period of the 1920s. In 2008, the
concerts followed the slogan “Concentrate Power—Sing Red Songs” (Ningju
liliang changxiang honge), in order to strengthen and mobilize people for res-
cue work after the Sichuan earthquake and to support the Beijing Olympics.
The event’s national and political significance was clearly emphasized this
time, as the main concert was held in the Great Hall of the People, Beijing. In
2009, the concerts commemorated the 60th anniversary of the PRC, promot-
ing patriotism under the slogan “Loving my China—Sing Red Songs” (Ai wo
Zhonghua—changxiang hongge). In 2010, China had to face several natural
disasters and the concerts were held under the slogan “China, Go On—Sing
Red Songs” (Jiayou Zhongguo changxiang hongge). This time, “red foreign-
ers” (hong laowai) participated in the competition and concerts were even
held in Sidney to include overseas Chinese. In 2011, concerts commemorated
the 90th anniversary of the CCP, inspired by the theme song “If You Sing
Songs, Sing the Reddest Songs” (Changge jiu chang zui hong de ge).12
Within five years “more than one hundred competitions were carried
out nationwide, attracting the direct participation of 400,000 lovers of red
songs [during each concert today]. Through the broadcasting of Jiangxi
Satellite TV an audience of about 1.2 billion people saw the ‘Red Song
Concerts,’ starting a wave of loving and singing red songs all over China”
(Yuan 2011, 80). The concerts and competitions are seen as the embodiment
238 Andreas Steen
of a “healthy” and all-embracing national moral and spirit, loved by cadres
and the masses, artists and journalists alike (Gan 2010, 9). The overall
impact of the spectacle can hardly be overestimated and it comes as no
surprise that red songs are also promoted as an effective weapon against
the “three vulgars” (san su) that are supposedly “contaminating” China’s
entertainment world and cultural standards, namely yongsu (vulgar), disu
(low), and meisu (appealing to vulgar taste, usually for quick profit) (Wang
Hao 2011, Zhang Jianguo 2011).
Today, Red Song Concerts are an institution that also provides a career
path for young musical talents (Huang and Ding 2011). Even more impor-
tant, audiences participate via text messages and, supported by a commit-
tee consisting of music experts and lay persons, select their favorite “stars”
and red songs. These examples testify to the cultural and social significance
of red songs though it is difficult to estimate whether the actual people “on
stage” are motivated by their patriotic spirit or rather by public attention
and the possibility of a career in the music business. The programs’ orga-
nizers realized already in 2007 that many of “the young participants have
absolutely no knowledge of red songs,” that they are very amateur-like, and
some come from poor families (ibid., 13). This notwithstanding, the show
clearly succeeded in the nationwide promotion of—and popular identifica-
tion with—socialist and patriotic pop music.
REDEFINING RED SONGS:

THE MANY VOICES OF THE MAINSTREAM
China’s specialists often express that the repertoire of red songs in the third
period, beginning in 1978, adapted to the new situation and requirements
of the reform policy. The recent hype further stimulated the discourse about
the songs’ “usefulness,” general character, and transformation. The demand
for popularity is reflected in a broader defi nition of red songs guided by the
obvious aim to increase their appeal and ensure widespread participation,
especially of younger audiences. “A good red song has to be an extremely
humanist natural expression,” says Wu Songjin, a Cantonese musician who
had also been in charge of Red Song Concerts, and adds that the repertoire
of red songs should include topics such as the love of the working people
and—as stylistic extension—sentimental love songs (shuqing gequ, Huang
and Ding 2011, 13). He is not the only critic suggesting a reform of the
genre, which explains the ideological shift in its defi nition and content. The
lyrics, however, remain the key point in the concept of “red songs,” while
the musical style is subject to changing musical preferences.
Under these conditions, the spectrum of songs accepted in the realm
of red songs increased considerably. Sometimes included are, for example,
older popular songs such as “Ancestors of the Dragon” (Long de chuan-
ren, 1979), originally sung by Li Jianfu, with lyrics written by the famous
Taiwanese musician Hou Dejian, who played an active role in the democ-
racy movement on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, and “My Chinese
Heart” (Wo de Zhongguo xin, 1984), recorded by the Hong Kong art-
ist Zhang Mingmin. While these voices from outside the PRC obviously
qualify as singers of red songs because they glorify Chinese culture, pride
of being Chinese, and a sense of belonging, others are incorporated for
their spiritual wisdom and model character. Even songs of Taiwan’s latest
superstar Jay Chow (Zhou Jielun), who is extremely popular on the Main-
land, contribute to the red repertoire and qualify for this genre. In March
2005, Chow’s song “Snail” (Woniu) was selected as a patriotic song by the
Shanghai City Education Committee. “The lyrics tell of Jay’s pursuit of his
dream: to achieve a goal or satisfy desire, one has to learn from a snail that
‘climbs up [the social ladder] step by step’” (Fung 2009, 297).
Less surprising is perhaps that young pop stars in Mainland China like
Hu Yanwen and Huang Wenfu have joined the patriotic wave and added
red songs to their repertoire, even recording CDs devoted to a whole set of
red songs. Joining the “mainstream” guaranties publicity and is commer-
cially attractive, also for celebrities such as Chen Sisi (b. 1976), who is a
recognized singer and actress, and—in the rank of colonel—Deputy Head
of the Art Troupe at the Political Department of the PLA Second Artillery.
She is also one of China’s new leaders in the field of folk songs. Her latest
song “Prime” (Fenghua zhengmao) was a gift to celebrate the CCP’s 90th
anniversary: “The song mainly expresses the vital and vigorous spirit of
modern people and their love to the Motherland. The music is very modern,
as it carries elements of popular music, and contains the spirit of national
minorities and red songs. It is a typical new red song (xin hongge)” (Qi
2011, 4). Chen Sisi sings praise songs for the CCP and for the Motherland,
and in June 2011 promised to release a CD with red songs by the end of
the year. Two years earlier she gave a successful solo concert in Taiwan; she
also joins Jacky Chan on stage and rumor has it that she will soon cooper-
ate with Jay Chow. She is, above all, a strong voice in the red song reform
debate, repeatedly stressing the importance for red songs to adapt to the
spirit of the times (shidai jingshen).
These examples already show the sometimes heterogeneous origin of
today’s red songs. How complex and professional the production process has
become reveals a closer look at the popular song “Do Not Forget the Memo-
rial” (Buneng wangji de jinian). The song was composed to commemorate the
150th anniversary of Yuanmingyuan’s, the Old Summerpalace’s destruction
and looting by British and French troops in 1860. The lyrics were written by
CCP member Wang Pingjiu (b. 1971), who joined Beijing Television after ten
years of military service and later became a famous event manager for the Bei-
jing Olympics and the Shanghai Expo. Most important in this context, Wang
enjoys a reputation as a “new mainstream lyric writer” (xin zhuliu cizuojia),
who contributed the lyrics to many popular songs, also those related to the
Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan province (2008).13 The music, however,
240 Andreas Steen
came from the Taiwanese composer Chen Huanchang (b. 1958), known as
“Xiaochong” (Little insect), and one of Taiwan’s three most famous compos-
ers in the realm of popular music.14 The song was recorded and performed by
the male-female duo Han Geng (b. 1984) and Tan Jing (b. 1977), both famous
Mainland singers and film actors.
The result of this cooperation is a slow and dramatic sentimental song
in Mandopop style, based on a melodic piano line and heavy orchestral
strings in the chorus. The two voices cling to the typically soft and emo-
tional singing style of the genre. However, in this case typical melodramatic
expressions of love, loneliness, and longing for the partner were replaced
by grief and love for China’s past treasures and the conviction of a bright
and positive future. This meaning is further emphasized in the music video,
which shows the duo strolling amidst the ruins of Yuanmingyuan, while
singing demonstratively passionately and seriously. Screenshots highlight
groups of visitors and young pupils who are informed about the palace’s
fate; meanwhile, a PLA soldier is advancing towards the camera, gaining
full prominence in the end, underlining the role of the CCP in overcoming
the age of imperialism.15
Such a division of labor has always been a typical feature of popular music.
Interesting is, however, the participation of high-level entertainment celebri-
ties and their “transnational” cooperation in circulating patriotic messages,
all of which underscore the attractiveness of the “red” mainstream melody
and attest to the economic importance of China’s music market.
Rock music, by contrast, has often been seen in opposition to the main-
stream, yet this musical style also provides ambiguous material to the larger
discourse on red culture. A close look at the repertoire reveals that a rework-
ing of images and content from the revolutionary past is not restricted to com-
pilations of propaganda and red music (De Kloet 2005, Steen 2008). Images
of socialist and revolutionary China on CD covers are widespread. The front
cover of the CD compilation SCREAM for the Chinese Rock’n’Roll Yester-
day (Nahan—weile Zhongguo cengjing de yaogun, 2003) shows an image of
Red Guards, now often instrumental to support the rock ’n’ roll revolution,
while the compilation includes Chinese rock music produced around 1990
and a documentary on VCD. Another example offers the punk CD Punk
Party: Rock & Frog (Yaogun qingwa, 2005), released by a band called Work-
ers & Soldiers (Gongbing yuedui), which plays with the image of a Red Guard
who holds the Little Red Book. The names chosen for performance venues in
Beijing, China’s capital of rock music, attest to the same tendency: Mao Live
House, Nameless Highland (Wuming gaodi), and Yu Gong Yishan, the latter
referring to an old parable of a foolish man called Yu Gong who succeeded
in removing two mountains that blocked his village. Mao Zedong later used
this metaphor in a well-known essay to mobilize people to remove the “two
mountains” called imperialism and feudalism (Steen 2011, 141).
Recent debates about red songs, then, seem to pull Chinese rock out
of its underground existence and place it into the larger discourse of red
culture. “Pop can be ‘red,’ Rock can also be ‘red,’” writes the critical news-
paper Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern weekly) with reference to the estab-
lished music critics Jin Zhaojun and Song Xiaoming, who claim that the
rock spirit and the red spirit share a blood relationship of being subversive.
As Jin stresses, some of Cui Jian’s songs particularly demonstrate a strong
social sense of responsibility (Chen and Jiang 2011). The journal Liuxing
gequ (Popular Songs) makes this shift even more explicit. It speaks of Cui
Jian as a formerly “non-main melody musician” (fei zhuxuanlü geshou), but
then refers to Jin Zhaojun’s arguments and points at Cui’s record Rock ‘n’
Roll on the New Long March, his interpretation of “Nanniwan,” and his
use of the word red in many song titles (Huang and Ding 2011, 13–14).
This discourse is intriguing, because it seeks to integrate rock music into
the realm of red songs, acknowledging its patriotism and “usefulness” for
the state. In autumn 2009, Cui Jian held several concerts in China entitled
“Rock ‘n’ Roll on the New Long March” to celebrate the 20th anniver-
sary of China’s fi rst rock recording. The visual arrangement was dominated
by large images of Mao Zedong and revolutionaries, so that the concerts
looked actually quite similar to popular red song gatherings.16 One year
later, Cui gave two concerts at the Workers’ Stadium in Beijing, the “New
Year’s Concerts of Rock Symphony.” Cui and his band joined the stage
with the prestigious Beijing Symphony Orchestra, his former work unit,
performing selected songs of his “revolutionary” repertoire. Notwithstand-
ing the motives on either side for participating in this event, the realization
of the project remains ambiguous. It can be interpreted as a success for
Cui Jian’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll on the New Long March,” but simultaneously
demonstrates the flexibility, attractiveness and cooperative power of the
“mainstream melody.”
RED SONG ENTHUSIASM
Anthologies of red songs start with “The Internationale,” and critics do

not hesitate to refer to China’s early heavy metal band Tang Dynasty when
writing about this hymn today. People enthusiastically sing the songs of
nearly a century of socialist struggle and experience, quotations from anti-
imperialist and anti-Japanese songs are common knowledge, and young
pupils grow up with singing “I Love Beijing Tian’anmen.” Red song cul-
ture, by means of education, propaganda, and mass media repetition, is
deeply engrained in the modern Chinese mind and culture. Its ongoing
popularity is contradictory, yet it is not only based on propaganda efforts,
but on a history and memory of survival, guidance and control, incentives,
identification, and success.
The CCP’s control of cultural production began with Mao Zedong’s
“Talks at the Yan’an Forum” in 1942, and it continues until today. Revo-
lutionary songs have turned into red songs and are now at the core of the
242 Andreas Steen
“main melody,” supported and promoted by politics, mass media, the music
industry, Chinese singers, musicians, celebrities, and a large audience. The
broadening of repertoire, both in content and style, is a necessary concession,
enforced by young audiences, new social needs and practices, globalization,
its communication possibilities, and a competitive market. Today’s red songs
may even be composed and produced in cooperation with professionals out-
side the PRC, thereby corresponding to Anthony Fung’s (2008, 177) observa-
tion that the CCP seeks to create a new (national) culture, which “combines
a sense of Chineseness with Western modernity and [ . . . ] is characteristically
devoid of any strong political values.” In its essence, however, Chinese pop
culture is “deemed to strengthen people’s identification with their own cul-
ture, state, and nationalism” (ibid., 195). The cooperation of the CCP and
the mass media may not be free of tensions, but their combined “control over
music in social settings is a source of social power; it is an opportunity to
structure the parameters of action” (De Nora 2000, 20). The CCP exercises
this power; enthusiasm and affirmation echo the metanarrative of revolution
and progress (Wu Jing 2006). Deeply rooted in modern history and due to
their overall presence and repetition, red songs are persuasive. They actively
(and optimistically) supported and accompanied China’s economic rise and
international recognition; they also proved to be flexible and were adapted
to new performance programs. For the individual, their meanings may be
as manifold and/or simple as those of the “multiple Maos in China today,”
which according to Timothy Cheek (2010, 19) share one underlying theme:
nationalism. Red song enthusiasm expresses identification with the nation,
the Party, and trust in the future: “Our identities may seem grounded in the
past, but they are also about becoming who we want to be or being who we
think we should be in particular contexts” (Storey 2003, 86).
Red songs, old and new, are enjoyed for different reasons and in different
settings. People may also hesitate to participate, criticize, and even reject the
songs (Demick 2011). Older generations seem to form the stronghold of the
fan community because of nostalgic emotions related to their youth. Younger
generations may lack any knowledge of these songs, but still feel attracted to
them, either because of curiosity, patriotism, or/and perspectives of a profit-
able career in the media world. This is also reflected in the large variety of
cover-versions (fanchang), which keep the original melody but change sing-
ing style, musical genre, harmony, musical accompaniment, etc. Wang Ling
(2011, 92) sees this as a positive development, first because it demonstrates
red songs’ superiority over many “garbage songs” (lajige) produced today and,
secondly, because it keeps the songs alive and contemporary.
Generalizations should, however, be avoided, not least because widespread
support of the “mainstream melody” is also connected to commercial con-
siderations on the important China market. The “red song phenomenon”
(hongge xianxiang) and the mainstream are highly debated topics in the PRC
today, focusing on the songs’ cultural value as well as on their future role in
society (Zhang Jianguo 2011). For a thorough understanding of China’s red
song culture much more research needs to be done. The ambivalent popu-
larity of red songs may be summarized in an often quoted comment on the
Chinese web written by He Bing, a law professor at the Chinese University of
Political Science and Law: “This is a very absurd time: they encourage you to
sing revolutionary songs, but don’t encourage you to have a revolution; they
encourage you to see the movie ‘The Founding of the Party,’ but don’t encour-
age you to found a party” (quoted in FlorCruz 2011).
However, large parts of China’s population enthusiastically enjoy red
songs and the “main melody.” The CCP has successfully uplifted and pro-
moted its musical standard by making it attractive and flexible enough to
incorporate various voices and music styles. Each era is supposed to have
its own red songs—though we shall not forget that this is only one voice of
a specific era in China’s rich musical world.
NOTES
1. All quotations from Chinese sources in this chapter are translated by the
author.
2. On these compositions, their composers, and history see Qu 2011, Wei Luxi
2010, Wu Zhifei 2011, Xiao Hen 2011.
3. On left-wing initiatives in China’s early recording industry see Jones 2001,
Steen 2006, and Ge Tao 2009.
4. Jiefang ribao, June 4, 1949. See also Steen 2006, 468.
5. On China’s musical production of this period see Kraus 1989, Mittler 1997,
Baranovitch 2003, Melvin and Cai 2004.
6. Edited by Xiao Huang and Jiang Zhensheng.
7. A survey among 1860 students of 13 institutions in Chongqing proved that
63% emphasize the need for a stronger promotion of red culture and red
spirit (Zhang Shaorong 2011). However, with Mayor Bo Xilai’s particular
emphasis on the campaign, Chongqing may not be a representative case
study (Xinhuanet 2009, Branigan 2011, Liu 2011).
8. Chin. Taihe maitian yinyue wenhua fazhan youxian gongsi. Taihe Rye Music
was originally founded as a sublabel of the Warner Music Group (1996). In
2004 it became an independent label in China and turned into one of China’s
biggest entertainment companies. See Montgomery and Fitzgerald 2006 and
http://www.trmusic.com.cn.
9. See http://www.trmusic.com.cn/main/83/category-catid-183.html (accessed
November 15, 2011).
10. http://hgh.cjxtv.com.
11. Pop Idol started as a British TV series in October 2001. In June 2002, the
Fox Network began with American Idol: The Search for a Superstar.
12. For more information see Qiu 2010, Gan 2010, Yuan 2011, Wang Hao 2011,
and the very detailed summary provided at Baidu, http://baike.baidu.com/
view/1015900.htm (accessed March 12, 2012).
13. Wang Pingjiu wrote, among others, the lyrics for “Country” (Guojia), “Life”
(Shengming), “Taking You Home” (Jie ni hui jia), “People’s Livelihood”
(Minsheng), and “Great Love” (Da ai). For more information see http://
baike.baidu.com/view/1814495.htm.
14. Chen Huanchang (Johnny Cheng) is mentioned together with Luo Dayou and Li
Zongcheng (Jonathan Lee). See http://baike.baidu.com/view/30486.htm.
244 Andreas Steen
15. The music video is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
i7WC1fSY0L8 (accessed December 14, 2011). For general information about
“Do Not Forget the Memorial” see http://baike.baidu.com/view/4410610.
htm (accessed December 14, 2011).
16. See Steen 2011 and Cui Jian’s homepage www.cuijian.com.
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DISCOGRAPHY
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rock & frog], Scream Records, ISCR CN-A51–05–304–00/A.J6, Beijing.
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Mao Zedong sung to a new beat]. 1992. China Record Corporation, SCD-9201,
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to Mao Zedong sung to a new beat, vol. 5]. 1996. China Record Corporation,
ISRC CN-E01–96–0124–0/A.J6, Shanghai.
Hongse jueshi [Red Jazz]. 2000. Shanghai Listen Audio & Video Co. LTD, ISRC
CN-E03–00–443–00/A.J6, Shanghai.
Hou Muren & Xiandairen. 1992. Hongse yaogun [Red rock], Shenzhen Jiguang
Jiemu, SC-92–035, Shenzhen.
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roll yesterday]. 2002. Jingwen Records Co., LTD, ISRC CN-A51–03–387–
00/A.J6, Beijing.
Sanlitun yinyue [Sanlitun music]. 2007. Wo de zuguo [My homeland], Taihe Rye Music
Co. (Taihe Maitian Yinyue), Beijing, ISRC CN-C18–05–401–00/A.J6, Beijing.
Tang Chao [Tang dynasty]. 1992. Tang Chao, Rock Records & Tapes (Magic
Stone Co.), RD-1183, Taipei.
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poration, ISRC CN-G01–02–324–00/A.J6, Chengdu.
12 Asagi’s Voice
Learning How to Desire with
Japanese Visual-kei
Oliver Seibt
The usual defi nition of fantasy (“an imagined scenario representing the
realization of desire”) is [ . . . ] somewhat misleading, or at least ambig-
uous: in the fantasy-scene the desire is not fulfi lled, “satisfied,” but
constituted (given its objects, and so on)—through fantasy, we learn
“how to desire” (Slavoj Žižek 1989, 132).
Like Odysseus who had to be bound to the pylon of his ship to withstand
the chant of the sirens, you would have to tie up Maria to prevent her from
traveling to every city where her favorite band D is giving a concert. Why
you should do so? At least, it would save her a lot of time and money. Maria
lives in Sweden, while D is a visual-kei band from Tokyo, Japan, that until
very recently has never performed abroad.
In the opening paragraph of Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social
Thought, Clifford Geertz mentions stylistical genre mixing that had become
increasingly characteristic for written ethnographies by the time he pub-
lished his essay in 1983 in the same breath with another significant coeval
development in the social sciences: “Many social scientists have turned
away from a laws and instances ideal of explanation toward a cases and
interpretations one, looking less for the sort of thing that connects planets
and pendulums and more for the sort that connects chrysanthemums and
swords” (2000, 19).
The same logic initially applied to my research on the global spread of
Japanese visual-kei documented in this chapter. Irrespective of Jacques
Lacan’s infamous assumption “that because of the inherent nature of their
language, the Japanese were neither in need of psychoanalysis nor ana-
lyzable” (Shingu 2010, 264), Lacanian structural psychoanalysis in prin-
ciple seems to claim general applicability. However, I was not looking for
a musical “instance” that fits with Lacan’s “theory of desire.” It was the
“case” of visual-kei and the striking international success of this genre,
unprecedented in the history of Japanese popular music, that led me to
Lacanian theory. But as soon as the link between the visual-kei “case”
and the “laws” of structural psychoanalysis was established, a dialectic
Asagi’s Voice 249
seesaw between the “case” and the “laws” of theory unfolded that guided
the course of my further research and analysis.
While trying to understand Lacan’s “graph of desire,” I stumbled over the
term “the voice” that takes a prominent position in the second of the four
manifestations of the graph (Lacan 2005, 234, see below). Only then I real-
ized it made perfect sense that a lot of the European and American visual-kei
fans I had interviewed during my three-months research stay in Tokyo in 2010
had told me that the voice of the singer of their favorite visual-kei band was
one of the main reasons for their fascination for this particular type of Japa-
nese popular music. The complex implications of Lacan’s “graph of desire”
proved to be extremely helpful in interpreting and making sense of these state-
ments. In this chapter, I will first introduce the cultural phenomenon of visu-
al-kei—that in fact is much more than just another genre of Japanese popular
music. Explaining the two Lacanian concepts “desire” and “object (petit) a,”
essential for understanding the role of “the voice” within the architecture of
Lacan’s structural psychoanalysis, will then provide the basis for an applica-
tion of Lacanian theory to explain the importance of the voice in visual-kei.
I first met Maria on April 1, 2010 at a so-called “in-store event” of D at
the Tower Records chain store in Shinjuku, Tokyo. At 7 p.m. an estimated
200 fans had gathered in between the CD shelves on a closed-off part of the
J-Pop sales floor. Like me, they previously had invested ¥4,000 (approxi-
mately $43) for a special edition of D’s latest album 7th Rose (Avex Trax),
not least because its purchase was the precondition for attending this pro-
motional event. Some 20 minutes later, the five band members showed up
in their fantastic stage costumes they would never doff in public in order to
maintain their performance persona. As all visual-kei bands do on the occa-
sion of a new album release, D would also dress up in new outfits that the
musicians present on stage as well as in the visual paratexts orbiting the new
record, the cover artwork, the music videos called piivii by visual-kei fans
(a Japanese-English abbreviation for “promotional video”), and the photo
series that the band’s management agency launches for marketing reasons
in one of the glossy visual-kei magazines like Shoxx, Fool’s Mate, or Cure.
Thematically and stylistically harmonized, the elaborate costumes worn by
the musicians together with the laborious make-up form the main instrument
for the bands to evoke those fantastic imaginary worlds that for their fans
serve as an escape from their everyday lives. For their latest release, 7th Rose,
D had chosen a somehow Spanish imagery, eclectically combining Flamenco
paraphernalia with some black leather and lace lingerie and—as the title
wants it—a lot of red roses.
The band members took a seat on five barstools arranged in a row in the
same order that they generally are positioned on stage: from left to right
rhythm guitarist Hide-Zou, bass player Tsunehito, vocalist Asagi, drum-
mer Hiroki, and lead guitarist Ruiza (like their everyday outfits, also the
real names of visual-kei musicians usually are concealed from their fans).
For about half an hour, the musicians took turns according to the seating
250 Oliver Seibt
arrangement in answering a set of appointed questions posed by a Tower
Record official who acted as the host of the event. Then the fans lined up
to defile along the row of musicians, who were now shielded from direct
contact with their fans by a line of intermediary tables, whereby each of
the fans was allowed to talk—“Don’t touch!”—to each of the musicians
for about ten to fi fteen seconds, before some female Tower Record assistant
standing behind the fan’s queue fi rmly pushed them forward. Since I had
come to Japan to do research on the reasons for the recent success of visual-
kei on the European and American music markets, I waited at the exit to
catch every “Western-looking” fan—there were six of them that evening—
and ask them for an interview. Maria, looking downright happy after meet-
ing the band members, fortunately was among those who agreed.
The term visual-kei (with the kanji kei meaning “system,” “order,” or
“origin”) was established in the early 1990s to designate a new form of
Japanese rock music that was heavily influenced by Western hard rock and
glam metal bands like Kiss, Twisted Sister, Hanoi Rocks, or Mötley Crüe.
In the late 1980s and during the 1990s, Japanese bands like Dead End,
Buck-Tick, or Luna Sea performed in elaborate make-up and sumptuous
stage costumes, some of them selling millions of records. The most suc-
cessful and influential of these bands certainly was X Japan. The genre
label visual-kei is actually said to be coined with reference to the slogan
“Psychedelic violence—Crime of visual shock” written on the cover of their
second album Blue Blood (CBS/Sony) that climbed up to number six in
the Japanese Oricon charts in 1989. The following three albums Jealousy
(1991), Art of Life (1993), and Dahlia (1996) all went directly to number
one. But by the end of the millennium, a number of events seemed to herald
the end of visual-kei: X Japan disbanded in 1997, the band’s guitarist Hide,
who had become one of the key figures of early visual-kei, died the follow-
ing year, and in April 1999 the extremely successful band L’arc~en~ciel
publicly distanced themselves from the genre on the NHK music program
Pop Jam, when they refused to play a second song and angrily left the show
after its host had repeatedly referred to them as a visual-kei band. Finally,
the fi nancial returns of visual-kei releases were no longer meeting the high
economic expectations of the Japanese music industry and thus most major
companies backed out of the genre.
But this was not yet the end of the story. Since the millennium turn,
a second generation of visual-kei bands has emerged and performs in
visual-kei-specific live houses like the Takadanobaba Area or the Meguro
Rockmaykan in Tokyo, marketed by management companies such as PS
Company or Maverick DC that specialized in visual-kei. However, there is
a number of notable differences between the fi rst- and the second-genera-
tion visual-kei bands:
• Following their Western role models, bands of the fi rst generation

played straightforward hard rock or glam metal, while the second
Asagi’s Voice 251
generation bands are much more multifaceted in terms of musical
styles. In fact, it has become impossible to pin down any particular
musical style that is common to all the bands that are marketed under
the label visual-kei today, with their music stylistically ranging from
brute death metal to cute Europop, with an admitted focus on more
heavy rock genres.
• Though they also wore elaborate costumes, the fi rst generation of
visual-kei bands more or less adhered to the established gender con-
ventions of rock music and accentuated masculinity. For the second
generation, gender ambiguities are of central importance for their
stage (and off-stage) appearance.
• While some visual-kei bands of the fi rst generation were highly suc-
cessful in Japan, they remained more or less ignored by Western
audiences. In contrast, the second generation of visual-kei bands
economically is not very significant, measured by the totality of the
still-flourishing Japanese record market. But during the last ten years
contemporary visual-kei became the fi rst genre in the history of Japa-
nese popular music that really succeeded on an international scale.
According to a recent survey on the globalization of visual-kei (see Pfeifle

2011) conducted by JaME World, an online magazine dedicating itself to
“spreading the popularity of Japanese music to the people of Europe and
America,” the biggest fan communities in terms of numbers of participants
are found in the United States, Germany, Poland, Russia, France, and Brazil,
while countries where visual-kei has exerted the biggest impact in relation to
the overall population include Poland, Finland, Chile, Sweden, Germany, and
France. In Germany, for example, one can read the latest news on Japanese
visual-kei artists in German magazines such as Peach or Koneko. There is a
CD label called Ganshin marketing visual-kei record releases to the European
markets. A German youth subculture known as “Visus” (short for “visuals”)
has developed in direct response to the fascination for Japanese popular cul-
ture in general and visual-kei bands in particular. There are even some Ger-
man bands like Cinema Bizarre that have their roots in this youth subculture
but hesitate to call what they do visual-kei, because in their eyes one has to
be ethnically Japanese to “really be visual-kei,” as Strify, vocalist of Cinema
Bizarre, remarks in an interview (JRIG Project 2007). Given that Japanese
popular music was largely ignored by US-American and European audiences
until the late 1990s (Seibt 2012), the fact that today’s Japanese visual-kei
bands of the second generation function as role models for Western musi-
cians and are adored by considerable numbers of European and American
fans—to the point where some of them, like Maria, travel to Japan to experi-
ence their idols at close range—truly constitutes a notable development. My
fieldwork in Japan was to understand how this process actually evolves and
why young Americans and Europeans have been fascinated by this kind of
Japanese popular music.
252 Oliver Seibt
One week after the in-store event, I met Maria in the central Tokyo
area Shinjuku for the fi rst of two interviews we did. During our two-
hour conversation, Maria told me that she had been interested in Japan
ever since she had seen the TV series Shogun as a teenager. After she had
fi nished school, she started studying cultural anthropology and Japa-
nese at Stockholm University. Because she found the textbooks used in
her language courses uninteresting, she started to read manga and to
listen to Japanese anime music to improve her language skills. In 2006
she came to Japan for the fi rst time as an exchange student. After she
had returned to Sweden, a fellow student gave her a mixed CD with
Japanese music he downloaded from the Internet that also included a
song by Dir en Grey, one of the most internationally prominent second
generation visual-kei bands. Maria had listened to heavy rock by bands
like Pantera or Type O Negative before, but during the last years she had
grown tired of it. She told me that this song by Dir en Grey had reawak-
ened her love for rock music because it sounded “fresh.” Since she was
not well acquainted with the Internet, she asked her fellow students for
more visual-kei or J-Rock, as she prefers to call it because “it’s the music
for me mainly.” Among the songs her fellow students presented to her
there was also one by D, “Yami-yori kurai dōkoku no akapera to bara-
yori akai jōnetsu no aria” (An a cappella of lamentation, darker than
darkness, and an aria of passion, redder than roses) from their debut
2005 album The Name of the Rose (God Child Records). As Maria
puts it:
It’s a rock song with operatic elements. It was the fi rst D song that I
heard [ . . . ] and [ . . . ] it was like “Oh! This I like!” because [Asagi]
could use his voice like. . . it has growling elements but it also has
this really, really high falsetto element. [ . . . ] And it is rock but it
is melodic rock. I was kind of hesitant to like it, but I felt that I
liked it. And it’s a bit like that with D all the time: These guys, they
know what they are doing! They are too beautiful for me but I can’t
resist them, I can’t resist them! (personal communication, Tokyo,
April 8, 2010)
The following year, in 2007, Maria returned to Japan on her own expense
just to see as many concerts by visual-kei bands as possible. And of course
D was among those bands she was keen to see live.
I made sure to see one of their lives at least, and that’s when I became
a fan. [ . . . ] At that time, I bought lots and lots of CDs from what-
ever band that seemed interesting. [ . . . ] For a while, I liked a few
bands but the more I listened to D the more I focused on them. So
I started quite wide and then . . . somehow . . . now I just follow
this band (ibid.).
Asagi’s Voice 253
In 2008 Maria returned to Japan again, and this time it was just to follow
D from city to city to attend all the concerts of the band’s last tour as an
independent act, fittingly entitled the “Follow Me Tour.”
It costs a lot of money [ . . . ] and it’s taking up all my vacation time.

I’m not kidding! I work extra to save some money and to save time to
be able to come here. And I arrange all my holidays according to their
tour schedule. My friends, my colleagues, they think I’m crazy, I guess,
I don’t know, very passionate and I also think I’m passionate (ibid.).
In April 2010, when we did the interview, Maria again had come to Japan
just to follow a tour by D, this time it was the “7th Anniversary Tour.” And
without me having to ask what it is exactly that makes her so passionate
about the band, Maria explained:
I fell in love with [Asagi’s] voice right away. Somehow I was edged
towards the singer, to focus more on the vocal thing. I love the music,
too, but the voice is so particular! Somehow I’ve been focusing more
and more on the vocalist, and to me he has become the most . . . he also
is the one who writes most of the music and the lyrics . . . so to me he
has become the most important part of the band (ibid.).
Obviously, nobody had felt responsible to bind Maria to a pylon or what-

ever to prevent her from following the alluring call of Asagi’s voice.
Many of the Western fans of Japanese visual-kei bands I interviewed dur-
ing my three-months stay in Tokyo had similar stories to tell. Several times it
was the singer’s voice that was mentioned as the most important reason for
the fascination the fans felt for the respective band. To understand Maria’s
fascination for Asagi and/or his voice, I attended the final concert of D’s
“7th Anniversary Tour” that was scheduled for April 25, 2010 at the Stel-
lar Ball in Shinagawa, Tokyo. With an audience consisting of at least 3,000
fans, this wanman (one man), as visual-kei fans used to call those concerts
where only one usually prominent band is playing, was by far the biggest
visual-kei event that I have ever attended. (In the smaller live houses that
are specialized on visual-kei events and give room to not more than 200
or 300 fans there are usually up to ten bands performing on the same eve-
ning.) Asagi’s vocal capacities were indeed impressive. For more than two
hours he constantly switched from a heavy metal desuvoisu (death voice) to
a melodic singing style reminiscent of some more conservative kayōkyoku
(mainstream Japanese popular music) to a high-pitched operatic falsetto and
back to death voice, without ever missing a note or losing his vocal intensity.
Like Maria, when her fellow student in Sweden introduced her to D, I had
heard Asagi using his voice like this on CD before. But in order to under-
stand the role that the singer’s voice plays in visual-kei, it is indispensable
to consider and therefore to experience the setting and the dynamics of a
254 Oliver Seibt
visual-kei concert. As Maria enthusiastically underscored, when I asked her
if listening to a CD would not be a better way to enjoy Asagi’s voice due to
the good sound quality from the recording:
OK! We now came to the religious part! [ . . . ] I can’t explain it another

way: I’m not religious as such, so I hope I don’t offend you by making
this comparison . . . These tour trips are my pilgrimage! I live to go to
these lives because at the lives, I feel alive. I don’t care about time. I
don’t care about anything . . . At the lives, when you’re [ . . . ] close to
the stage, not when you’re at the back so much, but when you’re close
to the stage, you feel their energy, and the music and the voice just go
through your body. It is just ecstasy for me. I just can’t explain it any
other way. [ . . . ] I just live for those moments. I’m just sucked into it!
[ . . . ] Have you ever been to a visual-kei concert in Japan? [ . . . ] I’ll tell
you this, because this is one of the fi rst things that I noticed [ . . . ] The
audience is a lot different from Western audiences, more coordinated in
a way. There is a huge difference! (ibid.)
Indeed there is! Contrary to huge events like D’s tour fi nal in the Stellar Ball
in Shinagawa, the smaller live houses like the Takadanobaba Area in Tokyo
(Figure 12.1) are very good places to experience this difference.
Figure 12.1 The “Super Live Theatre” Area established 1997 in Takadanobaba,
Tokyo. (Photo: Oliver Seibt, May 20, 2010.)
Asagi’s Voice 255
The fi rst thing you will notice when you enter the concert hall after
descending a dark stairwell completely plastered with posters announc-
ing bygone visual-kei events (Figure 12.2) and transcending an equally
dark and plastered entrance area where several fans hang around mak-
ing fi nal preparations for the appearance of their favorite band on stage
is that you are almost exclusively surrounded by young women.
I never went to a show where more than roughly 3% of the audience
was male, whereas almost all visual-kei musicians are men. That is not to
say that men generally do not listen to visual-kei music. You will encoun-
ter quite a few male customers at record shops like Closet Child, Like an
Edison, or Pure Sound in Nishi-Shinjuku that specialize in selling visual-
kei recordings and merchandise, though also here females account for the
majority. However men usually do not show up at concerts that not only
Maria but all the female fans I spoke to consider the most important sites
with regard to visual-kei. In the concert hall, the spatial distribution of male
and female agents is quite clear: male musicians on stage, the bangyaru
(Japanese-English for “band girl”), as their female fans call themselves, in
front of it. The fact that the few male visual-kei fans that also come to the
shows are called bangyaru-o, literally meaning “band girl man,” testifies to
the unambiguousness of the spatial gender arrangement within the frame-
work of a visual-kei event.
Similar to Maria, who came to Japan just because of D, most of the fans
attend the event that features the stage appearances of up to ten visual-kei
Figure 12.2 Descending the poster-plastered stairwell of the Takadanobaba Area.

(Photo: Oliver Seibt, May 20, 2010.)
256 Oliver Seibt
acts only to see their favorite band. While the other bands perform on stage,
many fans inattentively linger around the rear of the concert hall or in the
entrance area of the live house.
But during the short break before their favorite band will enter the stage,
the bangyaru will hectically take their allotted position in front of the stage,
which ideally is that in front of their favorite band member, and as soon as
the music begins, they will start to collectively follow the thoroughly pre-
scribed behavioral patterns that constitute the ritual of attending a visual-
kei concert. To every song a visual-kei band performs on stage, there are
prescribed movements called furi that the bangyaru have learned by heart.
During the melodic, moderate tempo chorus, they will wave their arms
alternately from side to side in a very elegant, almost lady-like movement
called tesensu (literally “arm fan”). During the slowed-down instrumental
breaks they will do gyakudai (short for “reversed dive”) that means they
will bow down very fast to the fi rst beat of every bar and then slowly lift the
upper part of their body again. With the signal from the double bass drum,
they will sway their heads with the long black hair very fast from side to
side and call it hedoban (“headbang(ing),” Figure 12.3). And to show their
admiration to the kamite, the lead guitarist, they will spread their arms and
hold them up in the air in a furi called saku (literally “to bloom”), often
accompanied by sakigoe which means shouting the musicians name with a
high pitched voice while doing saku.
Figure 12.3 “Headbanging Ringelreih’n.” Two bangyaru performing a “furi à deux”

in the Takadanobaba Area’s concert hall. (Photo: Oliver Seibt, March 24, 2010.)
Asagi’s Voice 257
But there are also some sections of a song for which no prescribed furi
exist. Then, the romping jouren, as members of the inner circle of fans are
called who attend almost every gig of a band, will suddenly stand still as
if someone had removed their batteries . . . no cautious nodding of heads,
not a single foot tapping to the beat, no absent-minded swaying of the
upper part of the body from one side to the other with closed eyes that
many Western fans love to perform during the more settled parts of a rock
concert . . . nothing but latent abidance before the jouren will blast into the
next prescribed furi in unison.
Strictly choreographed and collectively executed, these concerted move-
ments do not seem to contribute to any feeling of togetherness among the
female fans. Unlike in Germany, where the fascination of mostly young
German women for Japanese visual-kei has resulted in the formation of
the “Visu” youth subculture, there is no higher collective identity shared by
the fans of the different visual-kei bands in Japan. Being a bangyaru, i.e.,
being a fan of a specific visual-kei band, of course constitutes some form of
shared identity, but though all bangyaru behave in the same manner at the
same time, the most prominent feeling among them does not seem to be that
of sympathy and togetherness but rather that of competition for the atten-
tion of the male musicians on stage. The elegance with which they perform
the tesensu, the gracefulness of their fi nger posture, the cuteness of their
sakigoe, or the fury with which they perform the gyakudai or the hedoban
are the most important arms with which this competition is fought.
There are quite a lot of visual-kei-specific terms that give proof of that
general competiveness. Tsubushi is the word used for the act of harassing
another fan so much that she stops coming to the shows. If a fan is consid-
ered a nerai (literally “aim”) because she apparently is wooing one of the
musicians, she will run the risk of sarasu, which means that some disad-
vantageous personal information about her will be revealed through some
public Internet or mobile phone forum. The “Visujisho,” an online visual-
kei dictionary in English language (see Larocca 2010), lists the term anpin-
tai, meaning stabbing other fans with safety pins during a concert. And
the overall activity of going to a concert is called sansen, literally meaning
“going to war.”
On the surface, all of this competitive behavior of the female fans seems
to point to the bangyaru’s apparently sexual desire for the male musicians
on stage. But despite all the competitiveness among the girls, all the fans I
interviewed placed high emphasis on the importance and necessity of delib-
erately abiding to the unwritten laws of visual-kei etiquette. When I asked
her if the band members of D recognize her as one of the few Western fans
who follow the band throughout their tours, Maria told me:
I don’t know if they recognize me, but you would think that maybe
they do. But, you know, they have lots of fans, and they don’t show it.
They are there for all their fans. And the fans deserve equal attention,
equal respect for loving the band.
258 Oliver Seibt
[Question:] And they would be offended, if the band members would
highlight you by recognizing “our gaijin (foreign) fan”!??
Oh yes! In Western rock, it wouldn’t be like that . . . I mean, if a band

member would want to . . . like, you know . . . show appreciation for
one of the fans it would be no problem. But I think in Japan . . . it seems
like they can’t, or . . . they don’t want to . . . I don’t know. The band
members don’t show anything. That’s why I don’t actually know if they
recognize me or not (personal communication, Tokyo, April 8, 2010).
Even the jouren as the inner circle of the bangyaru are not allowed to have per-
sonal contact with the band members. They are not even allowed to approach
the stage without doing shikiri, i.e., without signing up for one of the well-de-
fined and named positions in saizen, as the row in front of the stage is called.
The entire visual-kei etiquette seems to exist for no other reason but to tame
the fan’s desire and to prevent any girl from fulfilling it.
Another aspect that calls the sexual nature of the bangyaru’s desire in
question and that maybe is the most obvious instance of the general ambiv-
alence of all aspects of visual-kei culture is the consciously displayed femin-
ity of many visual-kei musicians of the second generation. In this respect,
D’s vocalist Asagi is not even an extreme example of what visual-kei fans
call an onnagata (female role), following the terminology used in traditional
kabuki theater. Musicians like Hizaki, lead guitarist of the band Versailles,
Ryōhei of Megamasso, or vocalist Mashiro of the band Himeyuri are much
more explicit in their personification of female characters.
But what is so fascinating for adolescent women of 15 or 20 years of
age about a twenty-something-year-old male dressed up in luxurious and
playful female wardrobe, weaving oversized artificial red roses in his flow-
ing long hair, and screwing up his voice to the dazzling heights of a prima
donna? Do they want to be with him, do they want to be his sexual partner?
Given the competitive behavior of the visual-kei fans, the sexual momen-
tum in their adoration for the musicians is hard to ignore. But the rules in
visual-kei culture effectively prevent them from fulfilling this desire. And
the fans submit themselves to these rules as willingly as the musicians who
obviously try hard to pay equal attention to all the girls in the audience and
not to favor any of them. Do the girls want to be like those onnagata? At
the tour fi nal of D at Shinagawa’s Stellar Ball, there were indeed some fans
who were cosplaying Asagi’s current outfit as well as former ones. But if
the bangyaru were looking for an idol to follow suit, why should they turn
to men dressed up as women? When in an interview I asked Inoue Takako,
one of the four co-authors of the only academic publication on visual-kei
so far (Inoue et al. 2003), how to understand the relationship between
the bangyaru and the effeminate male musicians, she pointed me to the
interest among young Japanese girls in yaoi manga, a subgenre of Japa-
nese comic books mostly created by female authors that are dedicated to
Asagi’s Voice 259
male homosexual love stories, sometimes explicitly pornographic (personal
communication, Saitama, April 7, 2010). If you look at those homoerotic
acts visual-kei musicians from time to time perform on stage (kissing other
band members, suggesting oral sex, and the like) that the bangyaru call
fan sābisu (“fan service,” a term borrowed from manga culture where it
designates those elements that are unnecessary to tell the story but designed
to please the audience with sexual connotations), Inoue’s reference to the
young girl’s consumption of yaoi manga proves to be perfectly justified.
What this hint made me understand is that the bangyaru’s apparently
sexual desire is not intended to be fulfilled. The feminine outfits of the
musicians and their homoerotic acts rather point to its latent character.
What the girls want of the male musicians on stage apparently is neither sex
nor identification, neither to be with nor like them. What is desired by the
bangyaru, then, is not the musician himself, but his desire, a logic clearly
reminiscent of Lacan’s famous dictum that man’s desire is the desire of the
other: “Man’s desire fi nds its meaning in the other’s desire, not so much
because the other holds the keys to the desired object, as because his fi rst
object(ive) is to be recognized by the other” (2002a, 222).
For Lacan the human condition is characterized by an unappeasable
lack. The premature and helpless newborn is dependent on an other to
have its bodily needs (which Lacan assigns to the order of the real) ful-
fi lled. Because the object that satisfies the infant’s needs is provided by an
other (usually by its mother), it takes on the added significance of being
a proof of the other’s love. While its needs are fulfi lled by its mother,
the child develops a demand for love that fi nds its expression in its pre-
linguistic scream when she is absent (and which Lacan assigns to the
order of the imaginary). What the infant demands for is not only the
satisfaction of its needs, but the child uses its needs to force the mother to
express her love. Since the demand always exceeds the biological needs,
there is always a deviation that is left over after they are fulfi lled. This
is what Lacan calls desire and in contrast to the biological needs, desire
(which he assigns to the order of the symbolic) cannot be appeased. It
becomes a condition of life that all of us have to cope with as long as we
live. To desire, unlike to need, is nothing that we instinctively know how
to do but something we have to learn. As Slavoj Žižek has repeatedly and
convincingly shown, the products of popular culture often function as a
means to teach us how to desire (see Žižek 1991 and 1993 for example).
And this seems to be one of the main functions of the cultural institu-
tion visual-kei, too: to constitute a training ground for the inescapable
process of learning how to desire.
As Dylan Evans puts it, in Lacanian psychoanalysis there “is only one
object of desire, OBJET PETIT A, and this is represented by a variety of
partial objects in different partial drives. The OBJET PETIT A is not the
object towards which desire tends, but the cause of desire. Desire is not a
relation to an object, but a relation to a LACK” (Evans 2006, 38). Evans
260 Oliver Seibt
lists five “complementary ways” of understanding Lacan’s formula that
man’s desire is the desire of the other:
“1. Desire is essentially ‘desire of the Other’s desire’, which means both
desire to be the object of another’s desire, and desire for recognition
by another” (ibid.).
Though the bangyaru often come to the lives in smaller groups, the pre-em-
inent relationship among the fans is not that of a shared identity but that of
competition. Therefore, one will often fi nd that those bangyaru who come
to the shows together in small groups dispense their interest on different
band members. Accordingly, the highest degree of competitiveness usually
reigns among those fans that adore the same band member (and usually
do not come together to the shows). Though their desire surely features a
pronounced sexual component, what they actually compete for is not to
become a literal sexual partner of that particular musician. In this respect,
visual-kei fans very much differ from those female fans of Western rock
musicians that are often referred to as “groupies.” The bangyaru seem to
know that if “it” really would happen, it would destroy the cultural institu-
tion visual-kei constitutes that supplies them with a space to cope with the
necessity to desire and to learn how to do so. This threat not only explains
why the bangyaru so willingly submit themselves to the strict visual-kei
etiquette, but also why the musicians would never doff their costumes in
public and why their private life is so consequently concealed from the fans.
What the bangyaru compete for—beyond a position in saizen directly in
front of the particular band member they adore while doing shikiri—is
the musician’s attention. According to all the fans I interviewed, the most
important moments during a concert are those when the musicians look
at them, point their fi nger towards them, or touch their hands or heads,
though all those gestures usually happen in a very restrained and ephemeral
manner and often are allotted to several fans simultaneously.
“2. It is qua Other that the subject desires [ . . . ]: that is, the subject desires
from the point of view of another. The effect of this is that ‘the object
of man’s desire . . . is essentially an object desired by someone else’
(Lacan 1951, 12). What makes an object desirable is not any intrinsic
quality of the thing in itself but simply the fact that it is desired by
another” (Evans 2006, 39).
The competition for the musician’s attention among the bangyaru seems to
be the price they have (and are willing) to pay for the affirmation of their
objectal choice and of the way they desire. The more fans desire a certain
musician, the more desirable it is to be desired by him. Lacan distinguishes
between the ideal-ego (the image of the perfect self) and the ego-ideal
(the symbolic authority from which you are looked at). The ideal-ego of a
Asagi’s Voice 261
bangyaru is to be the one who is recognized and desired by the musician
(who in Lacan’s terminology is a little other), but it is the (big) Other, which
in the context of a visual-kei event is impersonated by the fellow bangyaru,
that functions as ego-ideal for whom she wants to be the chosen one.
“3. Desire is desire for the Other (playing on the ambiguity of the French
preposition de)” (ibid.). While the small other is someone else who
as a projection of the subject is conceived as akin to the moi, the ego
of the imaginary order, the (big) Other (the Other with a capital O)
surely is one of the most central and complex concepts in Lacanian
psychoanalysis. It
designates radical alterity, an other-ness which transcends the illu-

sionary otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated
through identification. Lacan equates this radical alterity with lan-
guage and the law, and hence the big Other is inscribed in the order
of the symbolic. Indeed, the big Other is the symbolic insofar as it
is particularised for each subject. The Other is thus both another
subject, in his radical alterity and unassimilable uniqueness, and
also the symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that
other subject (ibid., 136).
In accordance with Lacan’s terminology, the musicians as well as the fel-

low fans represent (small) others that are of the same imaginary order and
therefore akin to the bangyaru itself. But at the same time, they are radically
different and collectively impersonate the big Other, the symbolic order of
visual-kei as a cultural institution that the individual bangyaru desires to
relate herself to. As Evans puts it (citing Lacan 2002b): “The Other is also
‘the Other sex’ [ . . . ]. The Other sex is always WOMAN, for both male and
female subjects; ‘Man here acts as the relay whereby the woman becomes
this Other for herself as she is this Other for him’” (ibid.).1
“4. Desire is always ‘the desire for something else’ [ . . . ], since it is impos-
sible to desire what one already has. The object of desire is continually
deferred, which is why desire is a METONYMY” (Evans 2006, 39).
If the bangyaru would obtain what at fi rst sight she seems to desire, i.e.,
a real sexual relationship with her favorite musician, if she would fi nally
have “had” him, he would no longer be able to function as the object of
her desire given the general metonymic character Lacan assigns to desire.
So the visual-kei etiquette, which the bangyaru as well as the musicians
deliberately and consequently submit themselves to, serves to foreclose such
occurrences. “Real sex” would necessarily destroy what seems to be the
ultimate function of visual-kei, to procure a cultural arena for desiring as
an ineluctable imperative of human existence, a social space that molds
262 Oliver Seibt
desire as an end in itself. This of course is not to say that visual-kei provides
the ultimate solution to this human predicament.
“5. Desire emerges originally in the field of the Other; i.e. in the uncon-
scious. The most important point to emerge from Lacan’s phrase is
that desire is a social product. Desire is not the private affair it appears
to be but is always constituted in a dialectical relationship with the
perceived desires of other subjects” (ibid.).
Since for Lacan “the unconscious is the discourse of the other,” it follows
that if desire emerges from the unconscious it is a social, not an individual
product, even though we have to individually learn how to cope with it.
For this purpose, society provides cultural training grounds, among them
visual-kei (which is certainly not the only one!).
That desire emerges in the unconscious of course does not mean that
the subject, here the bangyaru, is not aware of the fact that it/she desires,
even if most visual-kei fans are rather reluctant to talk about their desire.
A certain degree of unconsciousness with regard to the nature of this desire
and the way the cultural training grounds function where desire is learned
might probably enhance the latter’s effectiveness. Of course, none of the
girls I interviewed used Lacanian arguments to explain visual-kei-related
behavior. But that does not necessarily mean that Lacanian psychoanalysis
cannot be helpful to explain this behavior. The reluctance of the young
women to talk about their desire (that might well have been amplified by
the fact that they were talking to a senior male ethnographer) or rather
their unconsciousness about its nature certainly pose serious troubles to
conventional ethnographic methodology (on the problematic relationship
between psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology see Heald and Deluz
1994). Surely, ethnography in general and the ethnography of popular cul-
ture in particular cannot ignore the fact that social actors are not always
aware of all the motifs for their (musicking) behavior (Small 1998).
So what has all of this to do with Asagi’s voice as the primary motive for
Maria to spend a lot of time and money to repeatedly come to Japan? What
role does music in general and the singer’s voice in particular play within the
cultural arena that visual-kei provides for the fans to cope with desire in terms
of Lacanian psychoanalysis? In his book A Voice and Nothing More, Mladen
Dolar worked out a full-fledged Lacanian theory of the voice (Dolar 2006). In
the second of the four manifestations of the “graph of desire” (Lacan 2005,
234) that Lacan had first introduced in his seminar in 1957 and published
in The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian
Unconscious in 1960 (Lacan 2002c), the term “voice” appears at the end of
the horizontal vector proceeding from left to right that represents the sig-
nifying chain.2 Entering the order of the symbolic, the (barred) subject has
to “weave through” the signifying chain, whereby it retroactively produces
meaning by temporarily arresting the continuous metonymic slippage of the
Asagi’s Voice 263
signifier in the point du caption, i.e., the particular moment when signifier
and signified are knit together (see Žižek 1989 for a detailed explanation of
all four manifestations of the graph).
Dolar writes:
There is the signifying chain [ . . . ] which yields, as a result or as a left-

over, the voice. [ . . . ] It looks as though there is a reversal: the voice is
not taken as a hypothetical or mythical origin that the analysis would
have to break down into distinctive traits, not as a diff use substance
to be reduced to structure, a raw material to be tamed into phonemes,
but, rather, the opposite—it stands as the outcome of the structural
operation. [ . . . ] So why is there the voice as the outcome? Why does
the signifier run out into the voice as its result? And which voice do
we fi nd there—the one that phonology has killed? [ . . . ] Maybe we
can sum up this recurrence into a Lacanian thesis: the reduction of the
voice that phonology has attempted [ . . . ] has left a remainder. Not as
any positive feature that could not be entirely dissolved into its binary
logical web, not as some seductive imaginary quality that would escape
this operation, but precisely as the object in the Lacanian sense (Dolar
2006, 35–36).
The voice is what is left over when signification is subtracted from the
speech act. The voice is the carrier medium of speech, but in being so, it at
the same time is “what does not contribute to meaning” (ibid., 17). Accord-
ing to Dolar, the voice is “one of the paramount embodiments of what
[Lacan] called objet petit a” (ibid., 127). And as such, as Evans had put
it (see above), the voice is not the object of desire, but its cause. That is to
say, it is not the siren’s/Asagi’s voice that Odysseus/Maria desires, but their/
his voice(s) make Odysseus and Maria desire! While Odysseus had made
some arrangements to protect himself from the siren’s invocation by asking
his crew to bind him to the pylon, Maria defi nitely is not able to resist the
appeal of Asagi’s voice. (As if I had needed a fi nal proof for her devoted-
ness, I met her again in Cologne, Germany, where D gave a concert on May
15, 2011 during their fi rst European tour.)
In a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fließ dated May 2, 1897, Sigmund
Freud wrote:
Phantasies arise from things heard but only understood later (Freud
1977, 196). In “Draft L”, dated the same day, he wrote: “[The phanta-
sies] are related to things heard in the same way as dreams are related
to things seen. For in dreams we hear nothing, but only see” (ibid.,
pp. 197–198). [ . . . ] The basic insight points in one direction: first, the
voice, the noise, things heard, are at the core of the formation of fan-
tasy; a fantasy is a confabulation built around the sonorous kernel, it
has a privileged relationship to the voice, as opposed to dreams which
264 Oliver Seibt
are, supposedly, visual, as if the two modes of psychic functioning
required two different types of objects (Dolar 2006, 135–136).
Lacan, who always understood his work as “a return to Freud,” worked

this idea out: the voice, conceived as what is left over by the signification
process, does not contribute to meaning itself and initially is not under-
stood. According to the retroactive character of signification, and due to
the inability to understand what is heard, the voice (or the things heard)
initiate fantasy that aims at a provisional understanding (Lacan represents
this dimension by a second layer that he adds to the “graph of desire” in its
third and fourth manifestations; see Lacan 2002c and Žižek 1989).
But the trouble is that the moment for a proper understanding never
arrives; it is as if it were infi nitely deferred. The time between hearing
and understanding is precisely the time of construction of fantasies,
desires, symptoms, all the basic structures which underlie and orga-
nize the vast ramifications of human enjoyment. [ . . . ] When the sub-
ject does fi nally understand, at the supposed moment of conclusion,
it is “always-already” too late, everything has happened in between:
the new understanding cannot dislodge and supplant fantasy—on the
contrary, it necessarily becomes its prolongation and supplement, its
hostage. The true sense, the proper sense, is always preceded by the
fantasmatic sense which sets the stage, takes care of the scenery, so
when the supposed lead actor fi nally appears, he is framed: no matter
what he says, the stage has been set and the setting overdetermines his
words (Dolar 2006, 137).
This is what Žižek means by writing that “through fantasy, we learn ‘how
to desire’” (1989, 132). According to this logic, it is the “phoninary,” “audi-
tive” instead of the imaginary, visual dimension of visual-kei, the musical
sound, and most of all, at least in Maria’s case, the singer’s voice that ini-
tiates fantasy. What is heard is not understood—one might well assume
that the fact that Japanese, the language of most visual-kei lyrics, is not
Maria’s mother tongue even amplifies this effect. The imaginary dimension
of visual-kei that is reflected in its visual paratexts furnishes this fantasy
that spans the time period from the very moment the sounds are heard to
the ever-deferred moment when they are “understood.” It might well be the
inbuilt mechanisms of deference, the strict rules that hinder the fans to act
out their desire, that make visual-kei such an efficient and demanded train-
ing ground for learning how to desire.
Of course, visual-kei cannot provide a fi nal solution to this lifelong
necessity. Due to the general metonymic character of desire (and also due
to social pressure that will arise when an individual fan is considered too
old by her fellow bangyaru) it is quite likely that one day Asagi’s voice
will lose its appeal for Maria and the musicians’ desire will no longer be
Asagi’s Voice 265
what the bangyaru desire. The moment came, when Odysseus’s ship had
passed by the siren’s island, when the lure of her voices elapsed, and the
crew could unbind him from the pylon. But that was not yet the end of the
odyssey. Like the bangyaru, Odysseus was obliged to desire and to fi nd
ever-changing objects to aim his desire at until the end of his days. But from
his encounter with the siren’s voices, from living through the fantasy they
induced, he learned a lot about how to desire.
NOTES
1. It would lead too far at this point to deepen the discussion of the gender-
specific relationship of the subject with the symbolic order as conceived by
Lacan, but in the face of the common occurrences of onnagata in visual-kei
this statement seems worth pursuing; see Seibt in preparation.
2. The graph can be accessed online at Tristam Vivian Adams’s blog Mladden
Dolar—Notes and thoughts from Vocalities blog: http://notesfromthevomi-
torium.blogspot.ch/2011/12/mladden-dolar-notes-and-thoughts-from.html
(accessed July 30, 2012).
REFERENCES
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London: Routledge.
Freud, Sigmund. 1977. The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess,
New York: Basic Books.
Geertz, Clifford. 2000. “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought.” In
Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, 3rd edition,
New York: Basic Books, 19–35.
Heald, Suzette and Ariane Deluz, eds. 1994. Anthropology and Psychoanalysis:
An Encounter through Culture, London: Routledge.
Inoue Takako, Murota Naoko, Morikawa Takuo, and Koizumi Kyōko. 2003.
Vijuaru-kei no jidai: Rokku, keshō, jendā [The age of visual-kei: Rock,
make-up, gender], Tokyo: Seikyūsha.
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mentary in three parts, Kehl: Jugendkeller St. Nepomuk (accessed December
19, 2011).
Part I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrLSkHhhTuM
Part II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lqTFF-JNc0&feature=related
Part III: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpSduaOfQ-w&feature=related
Lacan, Jacques. 1951. “Some Reflections on the Ego.” International Journal of
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. 2002a. “The Function of the Field of Speech and Language in Psycho-
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. 2002b. “On an Ex Post Facto Syllabary.” In Écrits: The First Complete
Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink in collaboration with Héloïse Fink
and Russell Grigg, New York: Norton, 602–609.
266 Oliver Seibt
. 2002c. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the
Freudian Unconscious.” In Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans-
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York: Norton, 671–702.
. 2005. Écrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan, London: Routledge.
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results.html (accessed December 19, 2011).
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an einer Gitarre nun doch cool aussehen.” In Musik und kulturelle Identität,
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. In preparation. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about visual-kei
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Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, London: Verso.
13 Voicing Body, Voicing Seoul
Vocalization, Body, and Ethnicity
in Korean Popular Music
Michael Fuhr
INTRODUCTION
During my research on the multiple conjunctures and disjunctures of

national identity and popular music in South Korea, I came across a fake
online celebrity music video clip (Capable 2008) that piqued my interest.
The video shows the flamboyant concert opening of American female R&B
singer Beyoncé, who appears as a glamorous pop diva, drenched in star-
glittering lights and synthesizer fanfares with her large-scale band, while
directing a histrionic welcome phrase toward the cheering stadium crowd.
Her strong and sonorously belting voice dramatically raises audience cheers
to the peak. The band begins to play, the camera pans out, and then the
singer turns around to climb a small stairway as she rhythmically shakes
her hips to the beat. Suddenly it becomes obvious that something is wrong.
Although the band members are synchronizing their movements to the beat
of the music, I felt slightly confused about the unexpected and stark duple-
meter rhythm, accentuated by the alternating bass melody, the unpreten-
tious happily sounding saxophone tune, accompanied by synthesizer string
ornamentation, as well as about the entire lo-fi sound quality. But it is the
vocal part, as soon as it begins, that suddenly makes me laugh and that
clarifies the situation. Viewers can see Beyoncé’s lips move, but instead of
hearing the unique “African American female” timbre, they hear an Asian
female voice in a much higher register, employing a more nasal sound along
with a wide range of vocal inflections. The voice belongs to Korean t’ŭrot’ŭ
singer Choo Hyun Mi (b. 1961), and the title is “Sinsa-dong kŭ saram”
(The man of Sinsa Street), a t’ŭrot’ŭ classic from her second studio album
in 1988 (see the third section for further details on the t’ŭrot’ŭ genre). The
video is obviously doctored and was posted by an Internet user who had
skillfully cut and edited the concert video sequences by synchronizing the
dance choreographies and gestures of Beyoncé and her musicians with the
audio sequences of the t’ŭrot’ŭ recording. Numerous online comments that
accompany the video clip (on the same website) praise its humorous effect.
What creates this humorous effect? Why do we laugh? The answer lies
in the betrayal of our senses, in the mismatch between visual and aural
268 Michael Fuhr
expectation, between gaze and voice. More precisely, the acousmatic error
arising from the discrepancy between listeners’ expectations and their per-
ceptions takes the form of parodic montage by juxtaposing two different
musical idioms, genres, aesthetic practices, languages, and vocal styles. In
addition, the humor derives from the betrayal of racial stereotypes (i.e.,
“African American singers produce a ‘black’ voice”) that reveals the pow-
erful entanglement of voice, body, and ethnicity, a bond which appears as
an inextricable and deeply essentialized relation within musical processes
(Radano and Bohlman 2000).
The assumed unity of the vocal sound and a singer’s ethnic identity has
become one of the basic ideological underpinnings of musical genres, pro-
duction modes, and listening behaviors. Pop singers who successfully trans-
gress racial boundaries in local music industries and who became celebrities
in their countries, such as Charley Pride, Roberto Blanco, or Jero,1 are
exceptions that testify to the prevailing notion that vocalization itself is
strongly tied to racial stereotyping and cultural essentialism. The t’ŭrot’ŭ
song in the video is well chosen, because Choo’s voice not only epitomizes
the genre’s typical vocal style, it also indicates its close relation to vocal
techniques in Korean traditional music genres, i.e., the highly inflected and
harsh vocalization in minyo (folk songs) and the high-pitch vibrato female
voice in kagok (classical lyrical songs), thus producing a sound which many
Korean listeners perceive as essentially “Korean” (and which many Western
listeners perceive as an “oriental Other” of the soul vocal idiom prevalent
in international pop music).
The assumption that only Korean singers accomplish a unique way of
expressing Korean songs and feelings through their voice has been often
reiterated in the discourse of Korean pop music and in my numerous con-
versations with cultural workers, entrepreneurs, and fans in the field. The
voice is perhaps one of the most distinctive features in defining a pop sing-
er’s identity. Singers known to their audience are immediately recognized
by their voice, which appears to be intimately entwined with the singer’s
personality. But whose voice do we hear? Does the voice belong to an indi-
vidual (singer, composer, or producer) or to a collective (nation, age, or
ethnic group)? Does it mark the presence or absence of its owner? Is the
voice just the audible excess of a corporeal body or does it serve as a signi-
fier? How does technology engage the listener with the interplay of voice,
body, and signification?
In this chapter, I attempt to probe the role of voice in contemporary
Korean popular music by viewing vocalization as a performative and mate-
rial practice. I argue that understanding voice as a performative phenom-
enon helps to unravel and denaturalize the close entanglements of voice
(especially vocal timbre), body, and ethnicity. The fi rst part of this essay
briefly situates the pop voice within theoretical contexts and proposes the
concept of voice as a material practice, viewing singing and speaking as
processual enactments of bodily formations in the sense of what Roland
Voicing Body, Voicing Seoul 269
Barthes called “geno-song” (1977, 182). The second part discusses how
voice is racialized by performing the ethnic Korean vocal body in recorded
pop songs. The third part, on the contrary, discusses a variety of vocal
deliveries in Korean pop songs that construct vivid alternatives to the ethnic
Korean vocal body and thus prove the essentialized voice-ethnicity nexus
to be untenable. In doing so, this chapter contributes to recent discussions
about the relationship between voice and (ethnic) identity in the context
of Asian popular music (Baranovitch 2003, Eidsheim 2009, Groenewegen
2010, Lancefield 2005, Wong 2004).
POPULAR MUSIC, VOICE, AND BODY
The centrality of the voice in popular music has been supported by a rich
number of scholarly accounts highlighting its innate connection to the pres-
ence of the human body. Richard Middleton, for example, describes the
voice as “a mark of a certain ‘humanizing’ project,” grasping it “in its
commonly understood significance as the profoundest mark of the human”
(Middleton 1990, 262). He continues:
An unsounding human body is a rupture in the sensuousness of exis-

tence. Undoubtedly, this is because vocalizing is the most intimate, flex-
ible and complex mode of articulation of the body, and also is closely
connected with the breath (continuity of life; periodicity of organic
processes) (ibid.).
The specific character of the pop voice as being “personally expressive”

(Frith 1996, 186) binds the ephemerality of the voice to the personality of
singers, thus corroborating their status as a unified subject that appears as
individual, autonomous, and authentic. It is reflected in the listening behav-
ior—“We immediately know who is speaking” (ibid.)—as well as in the
production of pop singers. Antoine Hennion emphasizes the importance
of the vocal personality in the production of the star persona: “Having a
‘voice’ in pop music terms does not mean possessing a vocal technique or
systematically mastering one’s vocal capacities. Instead, a voice is an indi-
cation of one’s personality” (Hennion 1990, 165).
Popular music’s drive to utilize the recorded voice as the warrant for
bodily presence seems to compensate the absence of the body on sound
carriers, creating a substantial gap since pop music is extensively shaped
by recording technologies and tied to phonograms, LPs, CDs, hard disks,
etc. Friedrich Kittler explored this internal contradiction in the circula-
tion of disembodied voices through phonograph and gramophone by con-
necting it to figures of the non-present (death, memorial, supernatural)
and the birth of Freudian psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury (Kittler 1999, cf. Middleton 2006, 50). This “paradox of a present
270 Michael Fuhr
non-presence” (Dieter Mersch, Chapter 2 in this volume, 32) marks an
inherent feature of the voice that exists even prior to external recording
technologies. In this sense, Mladen Dolar writes: “It is something that
cannot itself be present, although the whole notion of presence is con-
structed around it and can be established only by its elision” (Dolar 2006,
42). His Lacanian conceptualization of the “object voice” as a zone of
intermediacy, located between the voice as a carrier of meaning and as a
fetishized object, stems from this kind of in-betweenness that is character-
istic to the “ventriloquized” voice, a voice that “speaks by itself” (Žižek
2001, 58). It is exactly this in-betweenness, the tension between significa-
tion and materiality, sound and body, presence and absence, that turns the
voice into a performative phenomenon.
Doris Kolesch and Sybille Krämer outlined five dimensions of the voice’s
performativity: the event character (a voice transcends the moment of its
vocalization), the performance character (a voice is performed in co-pres-
ence of speaker and recipient), embodiment (the voice as a trace of indi-
vidual and social bodies), the voice’s subversive and transgressive potential
(a voice can work against its own semiotics), and the voice’s intersubjectiv-
ity (a voice bears an “instinctive sociality” which can form and dissociate
communities) (Kolesch and Krämer 2006, 11). Understanding voice in its
performativity by enacting forms of embodiment is helpful to describe the
relationship between vocalization and ethnicity not as naturally given but
as something made, produced, and performed by social agents.
Roland Barthes’s concept of the voice as “geno-song” is connected to a
theory of pleasure. In his essay on “the grain of the voice” (Barthes 1977),
Barthes contrasts the pleasure of jouissance emerging from geno-song with
plaisir that derives from “pheno-song.” Geno-song exists beyond social
conventions of form, style, and coloratura, and does not work on levels of
communication, representation, or expression. It is the “grain” of the voice
that creates jouissance, the erotic overwhelming pleasure that deconstructs
the subject. It is
manifest and stubborn (one hears only that), beyond (or before) the
meaning of the words, their form (the litany), the melisma, and even
the style of execution: something which is directly the cantor’s body,
brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down
in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages, [ . . . ] as
though a single skin lined the inner flesh of the performer and the music
he sings. [ . . . ] The “grain” is that: the materiality of the body speaking
its mother tongue (ibid., 181–182).
On the contrary, the pheno-song is bound to language and to the structure

of signification, and it is subject to meaning, classification, ideology, social
control, and to the institutionalizing and disciplining forces organized around
the myth of respiration and thus “never exceeds culture” (ibid., 183). Barthes’s
theory has influenced many popular music scholars for its explicit focus on
pleasure, desire, and body—aspects which they considered particularly cen-
tral in African American popular music. His insight into the material condi-
tion and constitution of the voice provides a framework to investigate the
voice as being processed in corporeal (i.e., gestural, timbral), performative,
and discursive tactics irreducible to semantics, beyond authorial intent and
lyrical content.
The performative and material character of the voice is essential to all dis-
cussed accounts and forms the theoretical basis of the following discussion; I
will focus on the question of how vocal sounds in recorded Korean pop songs
are produced and connected to specific discursive functions, and, in particu-
lar, how they are utilized to construct ethnic Korean identity.
SIGIMSAE AND THE PRESENCE OF THE

KOREAN ETHNIC VOCAL BODY
Choo Hyun Mi’s music marks a significant turn in the history of t’ŭrot’ŭ music
(c. 1900–present). She is renowned for her personal vocal style and for rein-
venting the genre by conveying a fresh and positive feeling. Instead of songs in
slow-tempo and minor keys that are full of sorrow and lament, and that con-
stituted the genre’s standard before, she introduced cheerful up-tempo songs
with major diatonic melodies and joyful lyrics, such as the hit “The Man of
Sinsa Street” (1988). Although she shifted the aesthetic paradigm in t’ŭrot’ŭ
music from han (sadness) to heung (ecstasy), both of which are key concepts in
indigenous Korean aesthetics, it is notable that Choo retained, and even exag-
gerated, the vocalization principles of earlier t’ŭrot’ŭ style based on variation,
ornamentation, and inflection.
Falsetto, vocal breaks, nasal sound, and vibrato belong to the wide range of
vocal techniques Choo artistically employs in her songs. “She never sang a sin-
gle note without changing its vocalization,” wrote Son Min-Jung in her study
on Korean t’ŭrot’ŭ (2004, 195). Son emphasizes the significance of these vocal
techniques in t’ŭrot’ŭ music (in particular of the kkŏngnŭn sori—the vocal
breaks produced by grace notes) and their relevance within a traditionalist
and nationalist discourse. This discourse connects them to vocal practices in
Korean minsogak (folk music, i.e., minyo, p’ansori2) and chŏngak (aristocratic
music, i.e., kagok) traditions (Son 2004, 42–49). Such practices of vocal orna-
mentation have been legitimized as uniquely Korean because of their com-
mon reference to sigimsae, a generic term in traditional music discourse that
is related to the concept of “universal vitality” (him). Hwang Byungki defined
sigimsae as a basic aesthetic principle and related it to the taste-making process
in Korean food culture, such as to the pickling of kimch’i:
First, each musical sound must carry a powerful, vibrant tone color
[ . . . ]. Second, each musical sound must be dynamic, varying delicately
272 Michael Fuhr
in tone color, volume, and pitch. What gives such variation to one sound
or one voice is called sigimsae—the term indicates something that “fer-
ments” a sound in order to make it flavorful (Hwang 2001, 815).
Sigimsae can be understood as “idiomatic stylized embellishment,” as Kim

Hee-Sun notes, that “renders certain shapes of microtonal shadings.” It is
“the aesthetic foundation of all Korean music genres,” differing “largely by
region, genre, instruments, gender, as well as by the interpretation of indi-
vidual musicians” (Kim 2009, 31). Different forms of vocalization emerge
from the social distinction drawn between aristocratic and folk music tra-
ditions as well as between male and female singers, as Um Hae-Kyung has
argued. While male singers in classical and ritual songs primarily use the
chest voice with wide and slow vibrato to express elegance and majesty,
female singers in the same genres tend to use a high-pitched voice with
nasal quality, narrow vibrato, and frequent shifts from head to chest voice
(i.e., a yodelling effect), to express femininity (cf. Um 2001, 818).
Folk songs employ a much wider array of vocal techniques. Depending
on the region, a nasal head voice, a falsetto with narrow vibrato, or a husky
chest voice with expressive vibrato can be found. By referring to these tra-
ditional vocal idioms, famous t’ŭrot’ŭ singers like Choo Hyun Mi or male
singer Na Hoon A (see Son 2004, 45) have established the vocal standard
in the genre. The vocal body they perform, however, is not only “personal,”
but equally “collective,” a sonic embodiment of Korean ethnicity, autho-
rized through references to aesthetic principles such as sigimsae or han.
The latter can be described as the Korean pathos of sorrow and suffering,
which can refer to the pain of an individual as much as to the suffering of
the Korean ethnic group caused by invasions, colonialism, or economic
struggles. In the epic song form p’ansori, singers express han through the
timbral qualities of a raucous, raspy, and rough voice, which is performed
with harsh attacks, the use of vibrato, a marked pronunciation, and micro-
tonal melodic contours (Willoughby 2000).
The musical construction of Korean ethnicity through vocal timbre,
vocal techniques, and aesthetics from folk music traditions is not restricted
to t’ŭrot’ŭ. Cho Yong-Pil’s fi rst official studio album, released in 1980,
contains the well-known folk song “Han obaengnyŏn” (500 years long),
a minyo (folk song) originating from the Northwestern Kyŏnggi area. His
version keeps the typical 12/4 chungmori rhythmic cycle to which spare
instrumentation is added. The snare drum and cymbals slightly accentu-
ate a steady 3/4-beat and electric bass and guitar lay out a minor chord
on the fi rst beat with constant repetition (altering the harmony only once
in a cycle). An analog synthesizer spreads the melody over the slow and
monotonously pulsating cycle. During the instrumental parts, such as
the introduction, the synthesizer emulates the rich vibrato and glissando
sound of a traditional string instrument, recalling the spike fiddle haegŭm
and wind instruments such as the transverse bamboo flute taegŭm. The
modest play of the instruments creates a calm and majestic atmosphere
leaving ample space for Cho’s vocal performance. His vocal style is a ren-
dition of p’ansori singing with its multifaceted and wide-ranging orna-
mentations and inflections. Starting with a razor-sharp, upward-sliding,
husky sound, his voice continues with maximum tonal and timbral modu-
lation through vibrati, glissandi, crescendi and decrescendi, vocal breaks,
and other forms of inflection. In employing sighing, whining, groaning,
and crying, Cho communicates a wide spectrum of sorrow and human
sentiment from different parts of his body: torso, larynx, lung, tongue,
etc. The “grain” of his voice is palpable. Tradition and ethnicity are audi-
ble. In presenting a wide spectrum of his vocal abilities, the song features
Cho as a versatile singer and musician. This is true for the whole album,
which combines songs of various genres, such as t’ŭrot’ŭ, disco, and rock.
Cho’s p’ansori voice in the folk song is, however, the most obvious marker
of Korean ethnicity in the album.
The raspy timbre and harsh vocalization of a p’ansori singer seem to
parallel the vocal practice of rock singers, as Lee Kil-Yŏng, singer of the
Koguryo Band, demonstrates. The band’s name explicitly refers to Koguryŏ,
one of the Three Kingdoms in ancient Korean history, a regional power in
Northeast Asia from 37 BC until 668 AD. While his bandmates cover the
classical rock instruments e-guitar, bass, drums, and keyboard, tormenting
them in the noisy and energetic manner that typifies the heavy metal genre,
Lee’s voice signifies ethnic tradition. In the song “Change the Korea” from
their fi rst album Chusaek manch’an (Dinner wine and women), he switches
playfully between a heavy metal-like, high-pitched screaming voice with
wide vibrato and a deep, rough, and vigorous voice that engages in p’ansori-
like story-telling with its rapid timbral and rhythmic changes. His highly
inflected vocalization is aimed at a particular explicit goal, namely, to pro-
mote “global” awareness of Korean traditional music. In contrast to Cho
Yong-Pil’s, Lee’s voice is utilized within an explicit globalization strategy
that highlights ethnic and national tradition using rock music as a vehicle:
Rock and roll has the characteristic of being approachable and is famil-
iar to almost everyone all over the world. Bringing Korean traditional
music forms through rock and roll could more effectively popularize
our ethnic music. [ . . . ] Using only our traditional instruments, such
as the percussion instruments of samulnori, limits promoting global
awareness of our nation (Yoo 2010).
Similarly, although arguing from the opposite end, singer Yoon Do-Hyun
from the rock band YB states that traditional music may be helpful to pro-
mote a more unique rock sound:
You know, all over the world there are so many rock bands, but their styles
are very similar. In case of the Warped Tour [name of YB’s concert tour
274 Michael Fuhr
in the USA], a lot of bands’ styles are emo-core and punk, that’s it. So we
need more unique music, that’s why we tend to traditional music. We are
Koreans (Yoon Do-Hyun, personal communication, August 3, 2009).
The opening sequence from “88 Manwŏn-wi Losing Game” (The ‘880,000
won’ generation’s losing game), the fi rst track of YB’s eighth album Co-
existence (2008), prominently features Yoon’s voice emulating the p’ansori
style, accompanied by guest member and professional percussion ensemble
samulnori player Yang Sŏk-Chin. The distinct vocal qualities of p’ansori,
which express “the soul, the Korean soul,” as Yoon puts it, here connect
the collective sentiment of han with the precarious economic situation of
South Korea’s lower class and youth facing hardships through unemploy-
ment, low incomes, or unstable jobs (ibid.). Here, the blending of rock and
p’ansori voice is employed to articulate a socio-political stance, becoming a
mouthpiece of those being oppressed by political and economic forces.
Korean pop ballads demonstrate another perspective on the practice of
vocal ornamentation. In general a pop ballad is the musical genre for stories
around unfulfilled love, desire, grief, and the absence of a beloved person.
The claim that singers should be able to express deep emotions through their
voice appears to be universal in international pop music. In the Korean con-
text, however, ballads require a specific vocal technique—the so-called ppong-
style or “mute-style”—that represents the collective sentiment of sorrow, han,
and thus turns the voice into an audible signifier of Korean identity. Ppong is
an unofficial term that music producers and artists sometimes use during the
recording process to make songs sound “Korean,” a strategy used to attract
Korean listeners. Although, in practice, the term is used vaguely and with dif-
ferent meanings (e.g., in ppongtchak, a synonym for t’ŭrot’ŭ, or relating to
the melodic structure in t’ŭrot’ŭ), it can also include several forms of vocal
techniques. The pop duo Fly to the Sky opens their 2007 album with the song
“Saranghae” (I love you), a sentimental piano ballad that highlights the emo-
tional intensity in the voices of its two male singers. During the chorus, the
two members, Hwanhee and Brian Joo, alternately sing the essential line of the
refrain “Saranghae na ttaemune ul chi marayo” (I love you, don’t cry because
of me) with great poignancy. Brian Joo explains the role of ppong as follows:
You could just sing “Sarang hae” [he sings with a soft timbre and clean
vocal attack], but in order to make it ppong or “mute-style,” you have to
sing “Sarang hae” or “na ttaemune ul chi ma” [he sings with the same
timbre as before, but with switching between breathy and hard glottal
attacks in-between and with heavy tremolo at the end creating a whin-
ing sound], you know? It’s got that posy feel, and that’s kind of ppong-
ish. [ . . . ] You could even sing it in a Western pop song, for example, in
Whitney Houston’s song: “And aah-i-yai will always love you” [he emu-
lates Whitney Houston’s vocal style]. And to make it Koreanized: “And
aah-i-yai will always love you” [he exaggerates the vocal inflections sung
by Whitney Houston by singing each syllable with a hard vocal attack
making a kind of “gurgling” sound]. It’s the way you emphasize emotion!
[ . . . ] I never received p’ansori training, so I don’t know, but I guess [the
“Koreanized” vocal technique] derives from the traditional Korean style
(Brian Joo, personal communication, December 6, 2010).
Although the reference to ethnic tradition is not as explicit and program-

matic as in rock music, ballad singers use vocal embellishments (though to
a lesser extent and with a softer timbre) as a means of emotional expressiv-
ity and ethnic identification.
The examples suggest that the basic aesthetic principle of musical orna-
mentation, conceptualized as sigimsae in the traditional music discourse,
has in varying degrees openly or implicitly penetrated into the realm of pop
music voices spanning diverse genres such as t’ŭrot’ŭ, rock, and ballad.
Singers employ these techniques and timbres to create a vocal body that
is broadly conceived as traditionally and ethnically Korean. That the rela-
tionship between vocalization and ethnicity is, however, not innate at all
is supported, among other things, by the simple fact that the p’ansori voice
requires a long period of intensive training and sculpting of the vocal body.
Furthermore, pop singers have—and make use of—the option to switch
between different vocal techniques from both traditional Korean and West-
ern pop genres. Their obvious lack of professional training in Korean tradi-
tional music practice notwithstanding, they adopt (some of) its iconic vocal
features to signify Koreanness. Korean pop voices are, however, in no way
limited to articulating merely an ethnic Korean body. They are rather man-
ifold in nature, performed and embedded in multiple and shifting contexts
from which they can also yield diverse and alternative forms of engaging
with presence and absence. In the following section, I discuss the perfor-
mance of Korean pop voices beyond the scope of Korean ethnic traditions.
MATERIALITY OF THE VOICE—

PRESENCE/ABSENCE OF THE BODY
Croaking
The croaking voice of folk singer Hahn Dae-Soo (b. 1948) has become an
aural trademark of his music and to a certain extent a trademark of the
1970s Korean protest folk song era. His bluesy folk songs were written
in Korean but combined with vocal style, guitar techniques, and lyrical
realism drawn from American singer-songwriters, such as Bob Dylan. As
quickly as they gained popularity within dissident student circles, his songs
were banned by the authoritarian Park Chung-Hee government (1961–
1979). On his fi rst album Mŏlgomŏn Kil (Long, long way to go) in 1974,
one can hear his raspy timbre as a signifier for discontent and resistance
276 Michael Fuhr
(even though the lyrics do not contain openly rebellious messages). The
song “Mul Chom Chuso” (Give me some water) seems to celebrate the
“grain” of his voice in an “unhealthy” manner. His croaking and growling
voice becomes physical and his inner sound-producing organs (e.g., throat,
larynx, and lungs) seem to be palpable. His voice is a musical instrument; it
performs a solo during the third verse by croaking and growling the vocal
melody without text, fully exposing its throaty timbre. It resembles the
timbral quality of a kazoo, which appears as the second solo instrument
after the fourth verse. Since the 1970s, Han’s voice, signifying political
oppression and tied to political and musical “underground,” has turned
into a symbol for the dissident people and social commentary—an obvious
reason why the song became a reference for many contemporary indie rock
bands in South Korea.
Screaming
The oppositional stance towards hegemonic structures appears as intentional
and programmatic in punk music. The rebellious habitus of its protagonists
goes along with a range of stylistic features and techniques, which aim at
undermining and reversing the semiotic codes of mainstream culture. Scream-
ing is not limited to punk music, but has remained a central vocal technique
in punk as it subverts any institutionalized practices of vocal training. Since
vocalization is genre-bound, screaming in Korean punk is not different from
screaming in British or in other local punk cultures as far as its vocal produc-
tion is concerned. In the initial phase of the Korean punk scene, following
the opening of the live club Drug in 1994, located in Seoul’s vibrant Hongdae
university district, the bands’ spontaneous, uncontrolled energy, paired with
rough sounds and unrefined vocal and instrumental techniques, evoked highly
affective responses by their fans. Screaming, crying, shouting, out-of-tune
singing, and collective dissonant chanting belong to the common repertoire
of vocal techniques in Korean punk, best demonstrated in early classics, such
as “Mal-Tallicha” (Let’s gallop a horse) by Crying Nut, and “Pada Sanai”
(The seaman) by No Brain. Both songs (1997) feature a characteristic mix of
raucous voices, ragged instrumentation, and switch from single to high-speed
double-time beats, from lilting solo verse to frenzy chorus shouting. The former
is overly punk-style driven by the pulsating beat of rumbling drums, whereas
the latter is held in a mellow laid-back ska beat, before both shift into a col-
lective screaming jumble. The screaming voices in these songs, and in many
other punk songs, have two functions: first, bands refer to the Anglophone
punk tradition and employ the screaming style in order to express anger and
discontent with established identity representations in Korean society, pro-
viding a means to redefine Korean identities during increased globalization
(Epstein 2006). Second, screaming is also crucial to the responsive crowds at
the shows. As a vocal technique it helps to establish group identity. It embodies
the collective sentiment of Korea’s punk subculture and bestows agency upon
the youth. Most enthralling for many punk fans is the engagement in intense
bodily activities, such as jumping, moshing, crowd surfing, and head bang-
ing. In a similar manner, screaming elicits specific somatic processes, as it is
regarded a highly effective means to relieve stress. Screaming in Korean punk
not only exemplifies another facet in the plethora of Korean pop voices, but
it also shows that vocal techniques in Korean pop music can also be adopted
from global pop genres instead of being limited to discourses of Korean tradi-
tion and ethnicity.
Grunting
Deep guttural vocals have become an intrinsic aesthetic feature of heavy
metal subgenres, such as death metal and black metal. Instead of singing, the
vocalist employs a range of harsh guttural sounds, like grunts, roars, growls,
snarls, and low gurgles to support images of death and violence along with
dark, chaotic, and horrific scenarios, as depicted in song lyrics, music videos,
and album iconographies. The 1994 song “Kyosil Idea” (Classroom ideology)
from hip hop pioneers Seo Taiji and Boys introduces a so-called “death grunt-
vocalization” to a wider pop mainstream audience by featuring guest vocalist
Ahn Heung-Chan from the death metal band Crash. The song’s aggressive
sound, the fusion of hardcore rap and heavy metal and its provocative lyrics
about the Korean educational system, were received as novel and controversial
(Jung 2006, 113–114). Ahn’s deep roaring voice in the beginning and middle
sections of the song complements the shouting passages of Seo and his group
mates, consequently stressing the critical lyrics in a dark and morbid man-
ner: “Blocked, completely locked, blocked from all sides; the class room is
swallowing us. It’s too bad to spend my young life in this dark classroom”
(Mak’in kkwak mak’in sapang-i mak’in / Nŏl kŭrigon tŏpssŏk modu-rŭl
mŏkŏ samk’in / I sik’ŏmŏn kyŏsil-esŏ man / Nae chŏlmŭn-ŭl ponaegi-nŭn
nŏmu akkawŏ). Seo Taiji shouts in the first section. Ahn’s death grunt voice
reinforces the claustrophobic impact of the lyrics by merging the addressed
issues of imprisonment and alienation with death metal–specific notions of
mental illness and bodily decline. Here, grunting authorizes social criticism
in a specific manner: it evokes images of the dead or dying body; the harsh
metal voice needs to sound like a “dying old man,” as an online blog recom-
mends to its readers (wikiHow 2012). The decaying body may be imagined as
the singer’s body (his present vocal body as well as his memorized body as a
pupil), the schoolchildren’s body, the school body, or the educational system
of an ill-minded state body. The metal voice gives presence to these deteriorat-
ing figures that in Korea had been largely absent in prior musical as well as in
social and political discourses.
Speaking
Speech-like singing, Sprechgesang, embraces a multitude of vocal articula-
tions, tonal inflections, rhythmic and pace alterations, and timbral shad-
ings, and it is closely entangled with traditional story-telling and the notion
278 Michael Fuhr
of authenticity, suggesting, for example, the “purity” of folk music, or the
“realness” of hip hop. “Speaking” vocalists often take the role of social
commentators, using their voices as vehicles for a message they seek to con-
vey. Furthermore, the voice supposedly proves the vocalist’s integrity as an
artist and individual, and grants him authority over the intoned words (even
if the singer did not write the song) and establishes a coherence between the
roles of songwriter, singer, star persona, and lyrical I.
A compelling example of unconventional talk-singing and rapping beyond
hip hop may be the vocal style of indie musician Jang Ki-Ha. Together with
his band the Faces he gained wider attention, even in mainstream circles,
with their fi rst single “Ssaguryŏ K’ŏp’i” (Cheap coffee) in 2008. The song
features his quirky vocals and quaintly unemotional lyrics in a retro-folk
pop style, reminiscent of Korean 1970s folk rock bands, such as Sanullim or
Songolmae. His vocal delivery constantly oscillates between speaking and
singing, characterized by constrained intonation and subtle timbral and
prosodic variations. Jang’s lukewarm prose about experiences in normal
and absurd daily life situations indicates personal realism and selfhood.
“Individuality” is crucial to his vocal performance and musical concept,
and it is a quality that Jang considers essential for being an artist and creat-
ing meaningful music (Jang Ki-Ha and the Faces n.d.). Unlike previously
discussed vocal techniques, such as screaming and grunting, Jang’s utter-
ances are clearly comprehensible. Throughout the song “Ssaguryŏ K’ŏp’i,”
his voice remains a medium of the textual narrative and a supporter of the
words and their intended meaning(s).
The opposite effect can be grasped in Outsider’s voice. Coined by the
media as “Korea’s fastest rapper,” he released his single Alone in 2009.
This mid-tempo ballad, with 4/4-disco-beat and fi lm-music-like classical
piano-cum-string arrangements, impressively exposes his speed-rapping
style. Whereas his utterances are moderate in the fi rst verse and chorus, he
accelerates the word flow in the second verse to the point of incomprehen-
sion. With his ability to rap 17 syllables per second (Star Focus: Outsider
n.d.), his voice produces a seemingly infi nite high-speed array of vowels
and consonants with a machine-gun-like sound that renders words and
syllables incomprehensible. The gust of utterances disrupts the signification
process. Signifier and signified collapse; their morphological and syntacti-
cal structure disappears together with the meaning of the words and the
words themselves. Communication in the linguistic sense comes to an end.
What remains audible is the plain phonetics of the Korean language shaped
by the materiality of his voice.
Squeaking (Voicing Aegyo Cuteness)

Female pop idols and groups are prolific in the Korean music market. Their
voices largely follow the cultural standard dominant in international pop
music industries as well as in Korean society and other Asian countries, where
a high-registered voice signifies femininity. The voice also connotes “cute-
ness,” a characterization more specific to Korean female pop that has been
dominant since the first Korean female idol pop group S.E.S. emerged in
1997. This style of singing has gained new significance and great visibility
with a plethora of new groups entering the scene since 2007. Among them
is the nine-member group Girls Generation who made the cute concept pro-
grammatic in its 2009 hit single “Gee.” Their music video presents the nine
teenagers as mannequins in a colorful boutique dancing in high-heeled shoes
and performing exaggerated gestures, along with wide eyes, mouth agape, a
pneumatic pout, finger-on-cheek, and palm-on-cheek that confirm the cute
image. Their “naturally” high and squeaky girlie voices are congruent with
this gestural repertoire, framed by a “dreamy innocent” recitative in the intro-
duction and girlish giggles at the end of the song. Slight articulative and tim-
bral nuances between the singers’ voices and high-pass filtering support the
intended “Lolita” image and its lightheartedness. Additional acoustic markers
for the presence of the female teenage body include technically manipulated
voices through extreme high-pitch shifting, as well as digital sound gimmicks,
bleeps and clicks, which emulate or supplement the female voice at specific
points during the vocal parts. The vocal and behavioral codes for Korean
cuteness, which Western audiences hastily tend to interpret as infantile and
as evident signs for female oppression and disempowerment in Korea’s patri-
archic society, may instead be better viewed from the perspective of the term
aegyo that sheds light on the ambiguity and complexity of the phenomenon.
Aegyo literally means “behaving in a coquettish manner,” a term frequently
used in fan discourses to discuss the affectionate speaking and gestural styles
of young female pop idols (encompassing their empowering function for
women who use aegyo as a means to manipulate men). Baby talking, tweety-
bird-like speaking, and girlish squeaking and giggling all belong to the vocal
repertoire of “aegyo cuteness” and thus shape the underlying discursive and
performative basis for “cute” voices in pop songs.
Whining
In Korean pop ballads, singers are regarded as talented when they not merely
sing but whine by injecting great pathos in their voice. Beside the ppong-style,
which refers to discourses on Korean ethnicity, ballad singers frequently use
other forms of vocalization such as sounds of crying, sighing, sobbing, and
whispering to express deep sentimental feelings or to intensify the dramatic
effect. Singers adopt a whiny timbre with varying volume and intensity. For
example, Park Hyo-Shin’s husky voice in “Nun-ŭi kkot” (“Snow flower,”
the theme song for the 2005 TV drama Mianhada saranghanda [I’m sorry,
I love you]) features Park switching from low crooning with breathy vibrato
to high trembling, pulling out all the stops to draw forth the plot’s tragic sad-
ness. The story line is typical for Korean melodramas, which mostly revolve
around issues of unfulfilled love, orphanage, terminal illness, tragic death,
280 Michael Fuhr
self-sacrifice, or amnesia. The body in these romantic dramas is either pre-
sented as distorted, harmed and ill, or absent due to death or treachery. The
ballad voice caters to these figures of decomposed and absent bodies in a very
different manner than those in death metal songs, namely not through growl-
ing but through a whining sound.
Disembodied Voices
Finally, Korean pop voices can challenge the notion of bodily presence by
complicating the relation between the voice and the singer’s body. Three
very different forms shall be briefly discussed here. First, voice manipulation
through technical devices, such as vocoder and autotune, 3 is widespread
in the dance pop genre. These synthesized voices, mostly accompanied by
techno sounds, electro beats, and techno-oriental visual aesthetics in music
videos, bear notions of absence and alienation. They appear as evocations
of the dehumanized, de-ethnicized, or simply desired body. The three-mem-
ber girl group SeeYa uses extensive digital voice effects in their smash hit
“Kŭ nom moksori” (“Voice of a bad person,” 2009) to portray the yearning
for the irresistible voice of an ex-lover. The confl ict between the voice as the
desired object and the undesired words that this voice conveys is the para-
mount theme in the song. A heavy vocoder-manipulated female voice in
the beginning sings the line: “Even though I heard your obvious lies, your
voice made me wanna believe them” (“Nŏmu ppŏnhaessŏttŏn kŏchinma-
rŭl tŭrŏdo mitgoman sip’gehan kŭrŏn moksori yŏssŏ”). The voice of an ex-
lover can be bittersweet, both a blessing and a curse. The telephone motif in
the video clip is used to signify the gap between the absence of the lover and
the presence of his voice. Electronic voice manipulation supports this motif
on the sound level, because the female singer’s digitalized voice sounds like
a voice that one hears through a telephone.
Second, the mismatch between the voice and the lips of the singer can
be often seen in its most prominent form—lip-synching. Many singers and
groups pretend to sing on stage by only moving their lips synchronically to
the recorded song. Live singing is faked even though the recorded voice and
the singer’s voice are principally identical (in most cases). The split voices in
boy and girl groups with many members demonstrate a different take on the
lip-synch phenomenon, which is primarily known in the context of live per-
formances. In the case of Girls Generation, for example, all nine members
lip-synch the chorus melody, whereas the audio track contains only the voices
of a few members. Only the most talented singers in the group, three or four
members, record the hook melodies of the songs. Their vocal tracks were
doubled, edited, and accordingly mixed in the studio to create the illusion of
the total number of group members without losing the strength and coherence
of the vocal sound. Reduced and split voices thus represent the multiplicity of
group members.
Third, a subliminal voice is evident to the escapist attitude in indie music
genres. Reverb, delay, and echo are the common sound effects that exaggerate
a voice in order to make it appear spatially distant to the listener. The shoe-
gazing band Vidulgi OoyoO creates a wall of sound with noisy guitar feed-
back loops and hammering bass and drums, interspersed with the ethereal
sounds of a high crystal-clear female voice. The opening track “Siren” of
their 2008 album Aero presents the voice not as foreground but embedded
in the sound of the instruments. Infinite sustain seems to drive the sounds.
Words are hardly comprehensible, the sound of the Korean language can
only be sensed in some moments. The voice presents itself as disembodied,
non-human, and rather feathery and angel-like, a voice not of this world.
CONCLUSION
Due to the increased influx of foreign musical styles, practices, and technolo-
gies into Korea since the early twentieth century, a multiplicity of vocal aes-
thetics, styles, and practices has penetrated into the realm of Korean popular
music. Despite the variety of styles, the primordial notion of Korean identity
in which ethnicity and vocalization is seen as essentially interlinked is still
pervasive in many pop-music-related discourses. This article has sought to
challenge this notion by considering the voice as a performative phenom-
enon. A closer inspection of the entanglements of voice, body, and ethnicity
in recorded pop songs has demonstrated the extent to which they are con-
structed in different contexts by different singers. Voice is neither neutral nor
biologically determined. The vocal body, as Nina Eidsheim stressed in her
attempt of “decolonizing vocal timbre,” is “the vocal apparatus as it is fash-
ioned through repetition of particular sounds, rather than the inner struc-
ture of an essential phenotype” (Eidsheim 2009, 10). I have argued for an
approach to consider the voice’s performativity, its transgressive potential
for constructing bodily presence and absence, and more broadly its “in-be-
tweenness.” By highlighting the material condition of the voice, the physical
production of vocals sounds in Korean popular songs and its relation to the
discursive production of vocalized bodies was shown.
Many Korean pop singers construct the presence of the ethnic Korean
vocal body by applying vocal techniques that refer to the discourses of tra-
ditional music (kugak). The most obvious signifiers for Korean ethnicity are
embellishments and tonal inflections, known as sigimsae, as well as harsh,
raucous timbres, principally embodied in the p’ansori voice. Conspicuously,
singers across genres (e.g., t’ŭrot’ŭ, rock, and ballad) utilize these acoustic
markers to underline their Korean identity. Some forms have even become
idiomatic in certain pop genres as demonstrated, for example, by the use of
vocal breaks in t’ŭrot’ŭ music and the ppong-style in ballads. Vocalization
in Korean pop music is, however, not exclusively shaped along the trajec-
tories of ethnicity. A variety of vocal styles engages in vivid alternatives to
the construction of an ethnic body. The relationship between vocalization
and bodily presence and absence takes shape in very different and some-
times contradictory ways, often depending on respective genre conventions.
282 Michael Fuhr
Hence, the screaming voice in punk, for example, creates the presence
of the rebellious punk subject as well as of the subcultural collective; the
whiny voice in ballads engages with the absence of the desired body; and
cute voices carry the ambivalent notions of the female teenage body. Vocal
deliveries manifoldly address bodily presence and absence. They also take
on a variety of functions, oscillating between signification and sound. As a
vehicle of meaning (of the lyrics) or as a pure-sounding entity, pop voices
perform the full range of mixtures possible within these two extremes.
The fact that the ethnic Korean vocal body is only one configuration
among a rich diversity of vocal styles in Korea’s contemporary pop music
has become evident. The sound of a voice is not essentially linked to an
(ethnic) body, it is rather always performed and stabilized within specific
contexts of power. Western mainstream pop has standardized the soul
voice, essentializing the image of African American singers. This racial con-
struction is challenged by the fake video of Beyoncé with Choo’s t’ŭrot’ŭ
voice in a parodic manner. Its mimicking effect is based on the hegemonic
power of Western pop and at the same time prompts us to continue the
decolonizing project of the voice. We do not fi nd it strange anymore when
today’s Korean pop idols employ a belting soul voice. It remains an open
question, however, if and when African American pop singers will employ
a “Korean” voice. We continue to wait for Beyoncé singing t’ŭrot’ŭ music.
NOTES
1. Charley Pride (b. 1938) is one of the few successful African American coun-
try music singers in the United States. Roberto Blanco (b. 1937) is a German
Schlager singer of African Cuban descent. Jero (b. 1981) is an enka singer of
African American and Japanese descent.
2. P’ansori is a drama-like narrative song form performed by one singer and
one barrel drum player. It is widely known for the singer’s skillful vocal
treatment and for the broad range of employed vocal embellishments and
voice colors, of which the husky and raucous timbre is most prominent. See
Chapter 7, Heekyung Lee’s contribution to this volume, for further details.
3. A vocoder is a technical device that alters the original sound of a voice or an
instrument through band-pass filtering and merges the processed sound with
the input signal. Initially designed for speech synthesizing, the vocoder has been
used as a sound effect tool in pop music production since the 1970s. Autotune
is a real-time audio plug-in that is able to correct intonation problems of vocals
and instruments while retaining all other parameters of the original signals. It
became prominent through the altered vocal effect in Cher’s 1998 song “Believe”
(henceforth also known as “Cher-effect”), created by intentional misuse, an
extreme pitch correction speed setting that let her voice sound automatic.
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14 Afterword
Giving Voice to Difference
Nicholas Cook
This is a book about shifting and contested boundaries, and the role that
music can play in their construction and negotiation. The voice, its osten-
sive topic, stands like an earthquake belt at the junction between multiple
tectonic plates, where deeply embedded cultural values grate against one
another. On the one hand the voice is a biological and cultural given. Like
our faces, our voices mark out who we are, not only as individuals—the
products of personal life histories—but also in terms of the problematically
essentialized categories of the social and political order: white, black, Cau-
casian, working class, C1. As Frederick Lau says in his contribution to this
book, the voice is enmeshed in a politics of sound. Writing proclaims its
artifactual status, as does instrumental music, but by contrast, speech and
vocal music encode naturalness. That makes the voice the perfect instru-
ment of ideology, as illustrated by the story—told here by Andreas Steen—of
the “red songs” of revolutionary and postrevolutionary China, at one time
the vehicle of a xenophobic nationalism but more recently deployed for
purposes ranging from nostalgia to the assertion of a transnational Chi-
nese identity. A perhaps even more spectacular example of the possibility
of political change through song is the “Singing Revolution,” the series of
mass demonstrations that began in Estonia during 1987 and eventually led
to the three Baltic states gaining independence from the Soviet Union. It
is not just a matter of constructing community through singing together:
the singular power of the voice derives from the qualities of tradition, self-
evidence, and facticity that it gives to cultural and political beliefs.
But the very possibility of effecting political change through song reveals
the other side of the coin. More easily than the face, the voice can tell tales.
More obviously than the face, it is socially constructed. The voice is mal-
leable, an instrument of agency. We use it not just to say who we are, but to
make ourselves who we are. As Christian Utz remarks, through vocal qual-
ity and content we switch identities and personae—not only on the musical
stage but also in everyday life. And what applies at the level of the indi-
vidual applies equally to that of the group. Michael Fuhr’s essay on what,
as K-pop, has become a global brand revolves around “the musical con-
struction of Korean ethnicity through vocal timbre, vocal techniques, and
286 Nicholas Cook
aesthetics from folk music traditions” (Chapter 13, 272), but its focus is not
simply historical. The underlying question—equally present in Heekyung
Lee’s study of contemporary Korean art music—is what the voice may con-
tribute towards the redefi nition of “Koreanness” in a world that is not
only becoming increasingly globalized but is experiencing radical shifts
of economic and political power. Old identities are obsolete but new ones
are slow to emerge. New identities build on the past, but transform it in
unpredictable ways. The musical voice furnishes a concrete demonstra-
tion of how traditional ethnic markers can be transformed in light of new
cultural and economic circumstances. In this way it can serve as not just a
metaphor for, but a metonym of, national identity. Many things will con-
tribute to the creation of the future Korea, and one of them will be singing
it into existence.
Samson Young raises similar issues in the Chinese context, asking how
we might “explain ‘the persistent attachment to real or imagined cultural
identities’ [Arif Dirlik] that seem to be evident in works by artists of Chi-
nese backgrounds” (Chapter 10, 220). The context of Young’s question is
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, a “digital opera” staged by the Hong
Kong-based experimental theater company Zuni Icosahedron, in which the
apparent fi xities of facial and vocal identity production are deconstructed.
The use of masks and voice synthesis creates an arena of what Young terms
“free cross-cultural play” (215), within which traditional markers become
destabilized or neutralized, and identities can be negotiated or renegoti-
ated. It is customary to deplore the cultural gray-out of globalization, but
perhaps, Young suggests, “the loss of face and voice is not such a negative
event after all”: it may afford “new and exciting opportunities for central-
ity and marginality to be reconfigured within the dominant culture itself”
(221). Indeed, he adds, the very genre of “digital opera” represents a rene-
gotiation, through the vehicle of technology, of a hegemonic cultural tradi-
tion, a “creative misreading” through which relationships of center and
periphery can be reimagined. Such work falls into a long tradition in which
music has served as an agent in the transformation of Hong Kong from ori-
ental sweatshop to international economic and cultural center: the presence
of Hong Kong composers at international festivals throughout the years has
contributed to a decisive change of image, and changing the image is one of
the most efficacious means of changing the reality. In such a context artistic
practice does not just reflect larger cultural, economic, or political trends.
Rather it stages them, performs them into being.
I have spoken of music and artistic practice more generally, but the voice
embodies the performance of identity in its most concentrated form. It is
the most intimate embodiment of subjectivity, literally part of ourselves,
but, at the same time, to speak or sing is to enter the public domain: you
hear my voice as well as I do, I have no privileged access to it. In speaking I
constitute the other whom I address, even when the other is myself: in this
way, as Dieter Mersch observes, “With the fi rst word language is coupled
Afterword 287
with the structure of alterity and thus fi nds itself already in the social hori-
zon” (Chapter 2, 37). If writing is assertion, then speech—as Mersch goes
on to say—is testimony, or to put it another way, to speak is to perform.
And the insight that, in speaking, singing, playing, or dancing, we do not
simply reproduce existing meanings but generate new ones is the founda-
tion of interdisciplinary performance studies, a field that has developed
from its origins in theater studies and anthropology to encompass the entire
domain of cultural practice. Ritual, for example, may be seen as the repro-
duction of tradition, but it is at the same time its continued asseveration, an
act of constantly renewed commitment: when, in widely differing contexts,
Utz, Fuyuko Fukunaka, and Jörn Peter Hiekel all refer to the ritualistic
qualities of vocal performance, their point is that meaning is being created
on the fly, in the very act of singing. That is the point of Mersch’s reference
to “moments of emergence” (33).
Mersch also quotes Antonin Artaud’s call for words to “be joined again
to the physical movements that gave them birth,” and Artaud continues,
“Let the discursive, logical aspect of language disappear beneath its affec-
tive, physical side, i.e., let words be heard in their sonority” (32). His “disap-
pear beneath” needs careful reading. What gives the voice its special power
in the performance of cultural identity—what, in the words of the book’s
subtitle, renders it “unlimited”—is precisely the fact that the discursive,
logical aspect of language continues to run beneath the performing voice,
resulting in a counterpoint of performative and discursive meanings. But a
Western or Westernized culture that prioritizes writing above speech—the
discursive, logical side of language above its affective, physical side—has
oversensitized us to the one and desensitized us to the other. That is why,
as Mersch puts it, we require “special methods to bring the voice as such
to light, to literally expose its meaning” (28). And one such method, obvi-
ously, is to focus on the corporeality of the voice, the classic formulation
of which is the concept of “grain” that Roland Barthes explained through
contrasting the singing of two classical baritones, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
and Charles Panzera.
For Barthes, Fischer-Dieskau’s vocalization represented the epitome of
the pheno-song, in which the voice is employed as a medium for semantic
content, while Panzera—with whom Barthes took lessons—stood for the
geno-song, the signifying of the voice in its fleshy materiality. (Utz com-
ments acidly on this “polemic polarization of French and German aesthetics
of classical singing” [Chapter 3, 68–69], observing that the explorations of
the borderline between song and speech discussed in his article would make
much better examples.) Fukunaka extends Barthes’s distinction to an instru-
mental context when she writes of a flute piece by Hosokawa Toshio that
“one is encouraged to hear not the melody per se but the physical mechanism
that [ . . . ] turns the abstract breath-work into a heavily bodily labor” (Chap-
ter 6, 120). And Mersch follows his reference to moments of emergence by
dwelling on those commonly filtered-out vocal episodes through which the
288 Nicholas Cook
geno-song emerges—“stuttering or interruptions, [ . . . ] whistles, scratches,
or coarseness”—and comments that “here significance is not meaning, but
rather something that jumps out and appears” (33). The same might be said
of the “dirtiness,” “snoring,” and “rattling” sounds that Hiekel identifies in
Helmut Lachenmann’s temA, as well as the croaks, grunts, growls, snarls,
and low gurgles that Fuhr detects in Korean pop vocalization.
In this way, Mersch continues, the voice represents “a surplus, which
cannot be domesticated by any censure or production,” and he concludes:
“This intensity of surplus is the reason why the voice involves us and in
the moment of communication appeals to us and compels us to respond”
(33). This characterization of voice as surplus is echoed by Oliver Seibt,
for whom “the voice is what is left over when signification is subtracted
from the speech act” (Chapter 12, 263). And it is Seibt who most vividly
illustrates Mersch’s “intensity of surplus,” together with the qualities of
appeal and compulsion that it engenders. The context is visual-kei, which
might be described as a peculiarly Japanese recreation of aspects of punk
and glam rock: it is directed at a mainly female, teenage audience, but has
developed an international fan base. A Swedish fan, Maria, describes the
effect that the lead singer of the group she follows, D, has on her: “I fell
in love with [Asagi’s] voice right away. Somehow I was edged towards the
singer, to focus more on the vocal thing. I love the music, too, but the voice
is so particular! [ . . . ] When you’re close to the stage, you feel their energy,
and the music and the voice just go through your body. It is just ecstasy for
me” (254). As Seibt argues, the voice generates desire (it is, in his words,
“its cause”), but at the same time the highly developed concert etiquette
of visual-kei channels and disciplines this desire: it is in this way that the
genre fulfi lls the role of social education hinted at in Seibt’s title. Tracing
how this concert etiquette developed would make a fascinating research
project in its own right.
If a focus on corporeality is one way to bring the voice to light and expose
its meaning, another is a careful survey of the fault lines between its per-
formative and discursive meanings. Georges Aperghis’s Récitations (1977),
one of three case studies featured in Erin Gee’s contribution to this book,
is explicitly designed as an exploration of this unstable terrain. Aperghis
dissolves the French language into phonemes, creating shards of sound and
connotation, rather than—in the manner of a conventional song text—
articulating a pre-existing semantic content already constituted by other
means: “The vocal actions and their resultant sounds,” Gee comments,
“contribute to a heightened awareness of the vocal performer as individual,
centering on the very personal, often intimate nature of the human voice”
(Chapter 9, 197). Performative meaning, then, dominates, with discursive
meaning being reduced to a dimly perceived or inchoate supplement, in
this way reversing the traditional emphasis of Western musical aesthetics.
Similarly Hiekel, who as I said emphasizes the ritual dimension of contem-
porary music with reference to Lachenmann and Giacinto Scelsi, ascribes
Afterword 289
this to the “tendency towards a dissolution—or suppression—of semantics
in new (Western) European music” (Chapter 8, 161).
But as the book makes clear, this is a more widely distributed tendency
than the citation of one or two European examples might suggest. After
referring to composers such as George Crumb and Luciano Berio who aim
to “disrupt the traditional role of the voice by using it as both carrier of
sound and carrier of meaning” (Chapter 5, 106), Lau draws a comparison
with the Hong Kong-based composer Chan Hing-Yan. As Lau explains,
Chan’s choral composition Lachrimae Florarum (2001) draws on a tra-
ditional Chinese recitation style but adds a range of extended vocal tech-
niques, and the result is that “the coherence of the composition lies in the
recurring use of vocal devices that straddle traditional recitation of Chinese
ci-poems and contemporary voice” (106). Utz, too, identifies East Asian
models for the role of the voice in generating performative meaning, and
uses them as a basis for analyzing the “vocal-cultural hybridity” character-
istic of contemporary composers—such as Tan Dun—who draw explicitly
on these traditions. He focuses in particular on the montage-like effects
that result from constant changes in vocal quality and implied persona, so
establishing a link to Fukunaka’s analysis of the role of similar techniques
in destabilizing the linear narratives that characterized the largely Western-
ized Japanese opera of the postwar period. And Utz hints that larger issues
of aesthetic ideology are involved when, invoking Carolyn Abbate, he refers
to “the idea of competing voices of diverse origin that might support, but
sometimes also contradict the ‘monologic’ authority of the composer and
the confi nements of musical structure” (69).
What is at stake in the distinction between performative and discursive
meaning comes into sharpest focus, however, in relation to notation. It is
not surprising, in a book that focuses on the performative dimension of
the voice, that Derrida gets a bad press: Mersch, for example, speaks of
the “fatal theoretical bias” that has “limited the investigation of the voice
to the mediality of the sign” (29), in other words to its role as a vehicle for
semantic content. And his references to “scripturality” nicely capture the
religious dimensions of the prioritization of text that has long been a fea-
ture of Western conceptualization. There is a sense, however, in which the
important thing is not so much text as such but the epistemology in terms
of which it is approached. Writing of one kind or another is commonplace
among the world’s musical traditions, alongside other representations such
as mnemonic syllables and codified gestures, but what is not so common
is for it to be seen as Christian fundamentalists view the Bible, or as tra-
ditional Western aestheticians view the score: a text that is replete with
inherent meaning, and accordingly calls for reproduction in performance.
That is the way of thinking that reduces the voice to the mediality Mersch
referred to, and the history of musical modernization outside Europe and
North America provides many examples of its consequences. Lau refers to
the “school songs” movement of early twentieth-century China (in effect
290 Nicholas Cook
the prehistory of the “red songs”), which did much to eradicate traditional
practices of vocalization. Lee tells a similar story about Korea—though tra-
ditional Korean vocalization was not so much eradicated as marginalized
in relation to a mainstream, Westernized musical culture.
But it is in the context of the attempt to preserve tradition that the scrip-
tural approach becomes most jarring. Lee struggles to do justice to Kim
Dong-Jin, who recognized the value of the p’ansori tradition at a time when
few did, and expended great labor in transcribing and arranging record-
ings. All this, says Lee, is admirable. And in the context of mid-twentieth-
century modernization, it is understandable that Kim would seek to ensure
the future of p’ansori by placing it within the context of the Westernized
mainstream, writing for Western-trained singers and Western instruments.
But Kim’s indifference to traditional performance practice went further
than this, or than his opinion that the peculiar vocal production of p’ansori
was “unscientific.” The basic problem is that he identified the musical con-
tent with the notes on the page, and just the notes on the page, and as a
consequence (in Lee’s words) saw “most p’ansori melodies as monotonous
and simple, only distinguished by their texts” (Chapter 7, 138). In short,
Kim understood music to be a textual product to the exclusion of performa-
tive process.
“Analysts,” remarks Young, “should be mindful not to perpetrate the
presupposition that Western music is the ‘musical universal’” (220). We
might say that the problem with Kim lies in the fact that he perceived no
problem in what he was doing. In other contexts, however, what Utz refers
to as the voice’s “resistance against codification by musical notation” (47)
has been perceived as deeply problematical, and a range of possible solu-
tions attempted. The first and most obvious option is to avoid the voice and
instead compose for instruments. As Utz says, many postwar composers,
both within and outside Europe, steered clear of vocal composition, on the
grounds that “vocal timbres and techniques [ . . . ] were particularly imbued
with historical and cultural aesthetics of sound” (46): they were too strongly
marked by emotional qualities and associations that, in the years after 1945,
seemed deeply suspect. Hiekel, too, speaks of the voice representing “a sub-
versive and uncontrollable element opposed to serialist construction” (159),
though his point is that, for just this reason, the voice became the focus of
an oppositional countertendency to thematize what he terms the “auratic.”
In the same way, Utz traces the processes through which, by the 1980s and
1990s, music for voice had come to play “a key role in the musical self-defi-
nition of the young generation of Chinese composers” (47).
Some composers took a second option: to treat the voice as an instru-
ment. Traditionally you wrote for the piano or violin (instruments), but for
a singer (person). The new way was to write not for the singer but for the
voice. And a radical illustration of this is provided by Brian Ferneyhough,
whose Time and Motion Study III—as Gee explains—uses the Interna-
tional Phonetic Alphabet to break speech down into “mobile atoms of
Afterword 291
articulation” that are then recombined into “new, syntactically meaningful
synthetic units” (189). The quotes are from Ferneyhough, but it is what
he refers to next that is crucial: “Notating the tension of the throat mus-
cles, position of the tongue and the shaping of the lips, etc. as separately-
rhythmicized parametric strands” (quoted in Chapter 9, 189–190). There is
a sense in which Ferneyhough might be seen as scoring directly for the vocal
organs, bypassing the singer as individual, and Sandeep Bhagwati sees this
as a distinctively old-world approach: borrowing a term from George E.
Lewis, he writes that “singing eurological new music today means virtu-
ally the same as playing an instrument, namely, to command and control
each element of the vocal tract in a quasi-independent, technical fash-
ion” (Chapter 4, 81). The picturesque tale of Louis XI’s pig-organ, which
Bhagwati invokes to dramatize the violent wresting of musical sounds from
nature, might also be seen as saying something about how performers have
frequently been represented within the Western aesthetic tradition.
There is however a third, quite different option, one that entails a non-
scriptural approach to the musical text and is also documented in this
book. Perhaps the most telling illustration, because it stands in maximal
opposition to Kim Dong-Jin, comes from a later Korean composer, Lee
Donoung, whose Hansori (1984) is scored for p’ansori singer, alto saxo-
phone, and orchestra. As Lee explains, referring to the practices of orna-
mentation characteristic of traditional Korean singing, “The composer
only indicates basic melodic lines, allowing for the vocalist’s unrestrained
sigimsae; collaboration with the performer in conceiving the lines creates
maximum improvisation opportunities” (150). More radically than in the
Western tradition (at least since the ideology of performance as reproduc-
tion became entrenched), this is an example of writing for the singer rather
than the voice, and it exhibits two identifying features. The fi rst is the
use of some kind of minimalist notation, the purpose of which is not to
provide a comprehensive specification of the intended sound, but rather to
“plug into” a distinctive performance practice possessed by the singer. The
second is implicit in the fi rst: collaboration with the performer. Music of
this type often results from a composer’s long-term relationship with a par-
ticular singer. Lee discusses the role of Hong Sin-Cha in the realization of
compositions by Hwang Byungki and Kang Sukhi, while Utz refers to the
impact of performers as various as Roy Hart, Cathy Berberian, Hirayama
Michiko, and Susan Botti. “In some cases,” Utz adds, “these collabora-
tions have challenged conventional concepts of authorship as the performer
acquired a role as co-composer” (48).
Of course the distinction between the second and third compositional
options I have outlined is not as clear-cut as I have made it appear. Yet it
is underpinned by a contrast in aesthetic ideology that results in quite dif-
ferent approaches to intercultural composition. On the one hand we have
the score as scripture, aspiring to exhaustive specification of sound and
consequently demanding faithful reproduction in performance. This is the
292 Nicholas Cook
tradition of Western aesthetics based, to repeat Utz’s words, on the “‘mono-
logic’ authority of the composer”: sound becomes a medium of intelligent
design. Elements with different historical or ethnic origins may be incorpo-
rated within this design, and contribute as symbols to a work’s meaning.
(A stereotypical example might be fully scored compositions that combine
Western and traditional Chinese instruments, with everyone playing from
staff notation, reflecting the essentially Westernized curriculum that under-
lies all performance studies in Chinese conservatories.) On the other hand
we have a relational approach, in terms of which music is a performative
process that creates, and expresses, social relations between its participants.
Meaning is not so much inherent in the score as prompted by it, created
in the real time of performance. In the intercultural context, a particu-
larly clear example—not described in this book—might be the music of the
Malaysian composer Valerie Ross (b. 1958), written for ensembles compris-
ing members of different ethnic or cultural groups, such as Malay, Chinese,
Indian, or Western musicians: her relatively schematic scores function as
frameworks for negotiation between different musical traditions, result-
ing in a metonymical performance of the multicultural national identity to
which many in Malaysia aspire. This provides an example of compositional
approaches that originally developed in Europe or North America in the
context of technical experimentation, such as the use of graphic or aleatoric
scores, taking on new dimensions of meaning in intercultural contexts.
These contrasted aesthetic ideologies weave in and out of the music dis-
cussed in this book, and form a backdrop to the issues of future musical
developments in East Asia that are posed most sharply in Lee’s contribu-
tion. As Lee describes it, the work of Kang Joon-Il broadly illustrates the
second ideology. Works like Sin Hyangga represent yet another attempt to
embrace p’ansori vocalization within a contemporary art music context,
and reflect Kang’s encounter with the traditional singer Chŏng Hoe-Sŏk.
Sin Hyangga is scored for soprano, p’ansori singer, haegŭm, and strings: as
the line-up implies, it stages an encounter between different musical worlds,
and Lee refers to “the active role of the performers as participants in the
process of moving beyond conventional performance practices” (149). (The
fact that it incorporates a seventh-century hyangga text means that dis-
junctures of time as well as space are being bridged.) At the same time, Lee
sees the dependence on traditional singers as a limitation, perhaps repre-
senting a “transitional stage” pending composers’ full internalization of
traditional vocal practices. That might suggest a movement in the direc-
tion of the fi rst ideology, the evolution of a new style that transforms “the
performativity and orality of Korean musical tradition” in such a way as to
integrate it within an exhaustively authored text. Yet at the same time Lee
recognizes that performativity and orality cannot be fully contained within
the traditional conception of “vocal music,” and considers the potential of
a more broadly defined “media art” in which composition is transformed
into the designing of performances, or—in a phrase that Lee borrows from
Afterword 293
Pedro Rebelo—“performance-centric composition” (156, note 35). And yet
that only opens up new questions: “Could the performative act of tradi-
tional vocal practices be relocated to a totally new context? [ . . . ] How
could traditional vocal practices be reimagined in this high-technology era?
[ . . . ] Is ‘performance-centric composing’ viable?” (152). Returning to my
opening remarks, these are precisely the kind of questions through which
national identities are made and remade.
I have approached this book as it presents itself, a study of the voice
that thematizes the shifting and contested boundaries with which it is
enmeshed: between speech and writing, performative and discursive mean-
ing, body and mind, tradition and modernization, and of course East and
West. Obsolete as what Young refers to as “the ‘East meets West’ binary”
may be, it is inevitable that this particular boundary—if that is the right
word for it—should be a constant presence in a book whose geographi-
cal spread is matched by its multinational authorship. Indeed it would
make just as much sense to think of it as a comparative study of music in
East Asia and the West, with a particular focus on the voice. Reading the
juxtaposed accounts of both art and popular music in Korea, Japan, and
China underlies the similarities of historical development across the region,
regardless of whether the history in question is postcolonial, postimperial,
or postrevolutionary: the extensive and long-standing contacts between
these countries reveal the limitations of current Anglophone literature that
mainly restricts its purview to their individual relations to an often ill-de-
fi ned West, rather than thematizing their relations with one another. At the
same time the cross-cultural perspective focuses attention on commonali-
ties between the East Asian and Western (which in this book mainly means
European) experiences.
One of these is the desire to make a new beginning—in Lau’s words
to “generate a clean slate” (112)—that was felt in so many places in the
aftermath of the Second World War, but has had continued relevance as
cultural identities have been incessantly renewed in response to techno-
logical, economic, social, and political change: Lau is actually talking
about new accommodations with traditional “Chineseness” that date
from the turn of the twenty-fi rst century, something akin to the neutral-
ization of established ethnic markers which Young invokes with refer-
ence to an opera premiered in 2010. That in turn opens up the broader
issue of how the traditions that encode cultural identity are to be rec-
onciled with the institutions and practices of the contemporary world,
avoiding the loss of vitality that results from embracing them within a
museum culture on the one hand, and the dilution that results from the
various different approaches to modernization on the other. The question
of how to maintain a consumer base for Western art music without a
self-defeating degree of dumbing down—in other words, how to estab-
lish a stable niche for it—is as pressing in Europe and North America as
similar questions relating to traditional musics are in East Asia (where,
294 Nicholas Cook
ironically, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western art music contin-
ues to enjoy a mainstream status it has lost in North America and much
of Europe). Again, areas such as the impact of technology and the opera-
tion of copyright furnish promising opportunities for comparative study
between geographically distant cultures. And all these issues have direct
ramifications for the music business and education.
To research these issues is to explore the impact in the field of music of
broader socio-economic factors: at the macrolevel music is molded by the
impress of cultural change. Such research is intrinsically valuable, as each
perspective helps to throw the underlying factors into sharper relief, but
there is another approach that is adumbrated in this book. It is primarily
at the microlevel that music creates its own motivations—in Seibt’s terms,
causes its own desires—and in this way acts as an agent in the choreo-
graphing of social action and the generation of cultural meaning. And it is
this level that grounds the “intercultural music historiography” proposed
in Utz’s contribution, the basic method of which he characterizes as “con-
tinuously returning to those elements in the musical microstructure that
construct and trigger crucial components of musical meaning” (69). At first
sight the result looks like something out of Late Junction, in its own words
BBC Radio 3’s “laid-back, eclectic mix of music from across the globe”: one
section of Utz’s chapter offers an “intercultural trajectory” from Takahashi
Yūji (b. 1938) to Jacopo Peri (1561–1633) and back (or rather forward) to
Salvatore Sciarrino (b. 1947). But unlike Late Junction’s “Your 3” feature,
where listeners submit a sequence of three recordings that creates “an excit-
ing yet smooth musical journey,” Utz’s playlist is based on sophisticated
analytical criteria: the link is different ways in which the voice can act as
“a platform for a liberation from rigid structural codification” (66), par-
ticularly in the domain of pitch. One might see this as the fi rst sketch of an
intercultural theory of recitative.
Utz’s contention is that “vocal music of diverse cultural and histori-
cal origin can be reasonably discussed within a common methodological
framework” (69), and obviously judgment has to be exercised in selecting
comparisons that bring into focus those elements of musical microstruc-
ture that trigger meaning, as Utz puts it: the knack is to fi nd a dimension
that combines broad applicability with local specificity, and that is exactly
what the voice does. Other scholars are beginning to explore the same
kind of intercultural analytical comparison, a prominent example (whom
Utz mentions) being Michael Tenzer. The wonder is that such approaches
have taken so long to arrive, or perhaps one should say to come round
again, given the extent to which intercultural comparison was built into
musicology as formulated in the German-speaking countries at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century. Traces of this approach remain in the pres-
ent-day practices of systematic and cognitive musicology. But it became
marginalized with the development of ethnomusicology, which viewed the
comparative approach as complicit with colonialism and the racial music
Afterword 295
historiography of the 1930s, and so redirected attention to the study of
individual musical traditions within their own cultural contexts. Com-
parison became both suspect and unfashionable. The consequence is that
the new cross-cultural analysis—if it is not too early to give this develop-
ment a name—fits awkwardly into the current disciplinary map. Perhaps,
then, the fi nal boundary this book will help to bridge is between different
musicological traditions.
Contributors
Sandeep Bhagwati is an award-winning composer, theater maker, and

media artist. He studied at Mozarteum Salzburg (Austria), Institut de
Coordination Acoustique/Musique IRCAM Paris (France), and gradu-
ated with a Diplom in Composition from Hochschule für Musik und
Theater München (Germany). His compositions and comprovisations
in all genres (including six operas) have been performed by leading
performers at leading venues and festival s worldwide. He has directed
international music festivals and intercultural exchange projects with
Indian and Chinese musicians and leading new music ensembles. He
was a professor of Composition at Karlsruhe Music University, and
composer-in-residence at the IRCAM Paris, ZKM Center for Arts
and Media Karlsruhe, Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, Institute for Elec-
tronic Music Graz, CalArts Los Angeles, Heidelberg University, and
Tchaikovsky Conservatory Moscow. He also was a guest professor
at Heidelberg University in 2009 and has been invited as a visiting
research fellow to the University of Arts Berlin in 2013/2014. As Can-
ada research chair for Inter-X Arts at Concordia University Montréal
since 2006 he currently directs matralab, a research/creation center
for intercultural and interdisciplinary arts. His current work centers
on comprovisation, intertraditional aesthetics, the aesthetics of inter-
disciplinarity, gestural theater, sonic theater, and interactive visual
and non-visual scores. From 2008 to 2011, he also was the director
of Hexagram Concordia, a center for research-creation in media arts
with a faculty of 45 artist-researchers and extensive state-of-the-art
facilities. http://concordia.academia.edu/SandeepBhagwati, http://
matralab.hexagram.ca
Nicholas Cook is 1684 professor of music at the University of Cambridge.

He was formerly professorial research fellow at Royal Holloway, Univer-
sity of London, where he directed the AHRC Research Centre for the His-
tory and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), and before that taught
at the universities of Hong Kong, Sydney, and Southampton, where he
also served as dean of arts. A musicologist and theorist, he holds separate
298 Contributors
degrees in music and in history/art history. His articles have appeared in
leading British and American journals, and cover topics from aesthetics
and analysis to psychology and pop. His books, mostly published by
Oxford University Press, include A Guide to Musical Analysis (1987);
Music, Imagination, and Culture (1990); Analysis through Composi-
tion (1996); Analysing Musical Multimedia (1998); and Music: A Very
Short Introduction (1998). Cook co-edited Rethinking Music (with
Mark Everist, 1999), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century
Music (with Anthony Pople, 2004), and The Cambridge Companion
to Recorded Music (2009). His latest book, The Schenker Project: Cul-
ture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (Oxford 2007),
received the Wallace Berry Award of the Society for Music Theory in
2010. He is a fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of
Europe. http://www.mus.cam.ac.uk/people/academicstaff /njc69/
Michael Fuhr is a doctoral student in ethnomusicology at the University

of Heidelberg, where he received a fellowship of the Cluster of Excel-
lence “Asia and Europe: Shifting Asymmetries in a Global Context.”
He is currently working on the (trans)national agenda of South Korean
idol pop (K-pop). He received his MA in ethnomusicology, philosophy,
and art history from the University of Cologne and worked as a lecturer
and research assistant at the Berlin Phonogram-Archive, Humboldt Uni-
versity Berlin, and the University of Cologne. In 2009/2010 he was a
visiting fellow at the Institute for East Asian Studies at Sungkonghoe
University (Seoul). His research interests include issues of identity and
globalization, (Korean) popular music, aesthetics, cultural theory, and
the history of ethnomusicology. Publications include Popular Music
and Aesthetics: The Historic-Philosophical Reconstruction of Disdain
(Bielefeld: transcript 2007; in German) and “Performing K(yopo)-Rock:
Aesthetics, Identity, and Korean Migrant Ritual in Germany” (Inter-
Asia Cultural Studies 11/1: 115–122, 2010).
Fuyuko Fukunaka, a native of Tokyo, has a BM in performance (piano)

from Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo, an MFA in performance and
musical literature piano from Mills College in Oakland, CA, and a PhD
in historical musicology from the Graduate School of Arts and Science,
New York University, with a doctoral dissertation on the music of Wolf-
gang Rihm. Her publications include “Operatic Process, Operatic Nar-
rative: Post-1945 Opera and ‘Truth’ Revisited” (The Institute of Theatre
Research VI, 2005); “A Japanese ‘Zero-Hour’?” (Music of Japan Today
2008); “The Death of Opera? Voice, Narrative, and Anti-opera” (co-ed-
itor, The Horizons of Opera Studies 2009); and a chapter in a book on
the music of Toshio Hosokawa, Lotus: La musica di Toshio Hosokawa
(2012). She has taught at New York University’s Faculty of Arts and Sci-
ence, Keio University, and Meiji Gakuin University, and is now associate
Contributors 299
professor of musicology at the Tokyo University of the Arts. http://www.
geidai.ac.jp/staff /fm092e.html
Erin Gee is assistant professor of composition at the University of Illinois,

Urbana-Champaign. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in
piano and composition, respectively, from the University of Iowa, where
she studied with Réne Lecuona, Lawrence Fritts, and Jeremy Dale Rob-
erts. In Austria and Germany, she studied composition with Beat Fur-
rer, Mathias Spahlinger, Chaya Czernowin, Richard Barrett, and Steve
Takasugi. She completed her PhD in music theory from the University
of Music and Dramatic Arts Graz in 2007. Gee’s awards for composi-
tion include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, the 2008
Rome Prize, Zürich Opera House’s Teatro Minimo, and the Interna-
tional Rostrum of Composers Picasso-Mirò Medal, among others. A
regular performer of her own work for voice, Gee’s music has been per-
formed by the Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna, Klangforum Wien,
Ensemble Recherche, the Zurich Opera House with the opera SLEEP,
the American Composers Orchestra, Vokalensemble Zürich, Los Ange-
les Philharmonic New Music Group, and many others. She has had per-
formances at the Wittener Tage für Neue Musik, Musikprotokoll im
Steirischen Herbst, Klangspuren, Ars Musica in Belgium, the Züricher
Tage der Neue Musik, and was featured at the 8020 Festival. Gee has
been a fellow at the Montalvo Arts Center, the Akademie Schloss Soli-
tude in Stuttgart, and Civitella Ranieri. http://www.erin-gee.com
Jörn Peter Hiekel is professor of musicology at the Hochschule für Musik

Carl Maria von Weber Dresden and senior lecturer at the Hochschule
der Künste Zürich. Since 2005 he has been director of the Institut of
New Music at the Dresden Music Academy and vice-chairman of the
Institut for New Music and Music Education (INMM) in Darmstadt.
He has also coordinated symposia at the Internationale Ferienkurse
fuer neue Musik Darmstadt from 2004 to 2008. Hiekel is author
and editor of books and numerous articles on contemporary music
and a member of the Saxonian Academy of Arts. Selected publica-
tions: Bernd Alois Zimmermanns “Requiem für einen jungen Dich-
ter” (Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 36; Stuttgart 1995);
Orientierungen: Wege im Pluralismus der Gegenwartsmusik (editor,
Mainz 2007); “Harmony between Human Beings and Nature: Reflec-
tions on Wind from the Ocean” (with Toshio Hosokawa), in Kom-
ponieren der Gegenwart (ed. Hiekel, Saarbrücken 2006); “Kulturelle
Entgrenzung in der Musik der Gegenwart—einige Ausgangsfragen,”
in Musik-Kulturen (ed. Hiekel, Saarbrücken 2008); dictionary entry
Postmoderne, in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Supple-
mentband (2008). http://www.hfmdd.de/studium/dozenten/prof- dr-
joern-peter-hiekel-musikwissenschaft
300 Contributors
Frederick Lau is the chair and professor of ethnomusicology at the Uni-
versity of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. A musician of diverse musical interests,
Lau received his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a performance diploma from
the London Guildhall School of Music. Lau has received numerous
research grants from agencies such as the National Endowment for
the Humanities, the Scholarly Communication with the PRC, and the
German Academic Exchange (DAAD). His areas of research include
Chinese and Western music, particularly on issues related to identity,
nationalism, modernization, politics, and globalization. Lau has con-
ducted research in the PRC, Thailand, Singapore, San Francisco, and
Hawai‘i. He is author of Music in China (Oxford University Press
2008) and co-editor of Locating East Asia in Western Art Music
(Wesleyan University Press 2004). His articles have been published in
journals such as Yearbook for International Council for Traditional
Music; Ethnomusicology; Asian Music; British Forum for Ethnomu-
sicology; Journal of Musicological Research; Sojourn; and as book
chapters in collected volumes. His current research deals with musi-
cal hybridity and Chineseness and performance. Lau is currently the
director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Hawai‘i
and president of the Society for Asian Music. http://www.hawaii.edu/
uhmmusic/faculty/Lau.htm
Heekyung Lee is adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Communi-

cation and Arts, Yonsei University, and lecturer at the Ewha Womans
University. She received her BM and MM in musicology from Seoul
National University and a PhD from the Berlin University of the Arts
(UdK Berlin) with the support of a DAAD scholarship. Her doctoral
dissertation explored the new concept of form in György Ligeti’s works.
Lee was a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Korean Studies.
Her major publications include György Ligeti: Music of the Transver-
sal (Seoul 2004) and Conversations with the Composer Sukhi Kang
(Seoul 2004). She has also written various articles on Ligeti’s music,
Korean contemporary composers, and East Asian composers who refer-
ence local traditions in their music. Her current research interest encom-
passes transcultural or “in-between” discourses that confront tensions
between the traditional and the modern as well as between the global
and local. She is a founding member of Aksang (Imagining music), a
music research group in Korea.
Dieter Mersch is chair of media theory/media sciences at the Institute for

Art and Media (European Media Studies) at the University of Potsdam.
His research focuses on media philosophy, philosophy of art, semiot-
ics, philosophy of language, and aesthetics. At the Technical University
Darmstadt, he received his doctoral degree in philosophy in 1992 with
a dissertation on Umberto Eco’s semiotics, rationality, and rationality
Contributors 301
critique, and his habilitation in philosophy in 2000 with a study on
Materialität, Präsenz, Ereignis: Untersuchungen zu den Grenzen des
Symbolischen. From 2003 to 2005 he was head of the German Associa-
tion for Semiotic Studies. His publications concentrate on performativ-
ity, media theory, and posthermeneutics, and include the books Ereignis
und Aura: Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen (Frank-
furt: Suhrkamp 2002); Medientheorien zur Einführung (Hamburg:
Junius 2006); and Posthermeneutik (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 2010).
http://www.dieter-mersch.de
Oliver Seibt is an ethnomusicologist with a focus on cultural theory and (Jap-

anese) popular music. After studying musicology, cultural anthropology,
and Japanese studies at the University of Cologne, he worked as an assistant
professor at the Department of Ethnomusicology at Cologne University and
at the Department for Cultural Anthropology of Music at the University of
Berne. He received his PhD from the Hanover University of Music, Drama
and Media. In 2010 he published the book The Meaning of the Moment:
Reflections on a Musicology of the Everyday (Bielefeld: transcript; in Ger-
man). He is currently working on a monograph on the global spread of
Japanese visual-kei based on three years of research he conducted as a
postdoctoral research fellow at the Cluster of Excellency “Asia and Europe
in a Global Context” at the University of Heidelberg. He is co-editor of the
volume on ethnomusicology within the book series “Kompendien Musik”
(Laaber-Verlag) edited by the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung and mem-
ber of the editorial board of the Norient Academic Online Journal (http://
norient.com/tag/norient-academic-online-journal).
Andreas Steen is associate professor of modern Chinese history and culture

at Aarhus University, Denmark. He studied modern Chinese language,
literature, and history at Fudan University, Shanghai, and Free University
Berlin, where he also received his doctoral degree in 2001. His research
concentrates on topics related to Sino-foreign relations, postcolonial-
ism, cultural transfer, as well as Chinese popular culture and music. In
addition to numerous articles on Chinese rock music, he published the
books The Long March of Rock ’n’ Roll: Pop and Rock Music in the
People’s Republic of China (1996; in German) and Between Revolution
and Entertainment: Gramophones, Music Records and the Beginning
of China’s Music Industry in Shanghai, 1878–1937 (2006; in German).
At present he is preparing a new project entitled “China Sound: Culture
and Politics from the Gramophone to MP3.” http://pure.au.dk/portal/
en/persons/id(31810fd2-c462–4bcc-a26b-58d83bd79315).html
Christian Utz was born in Munich, Germany, and studied composition,

piano, music theory, and musicology in Vienna and Karlsruhe. In 2000,
Utz received his doctoral degree from the Institute for Musicology of
Vienna University with a thesis on New Music and Interculturality. From
302 Contributors
John Cage to Tan Dun (Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2002). Since 2003
he has been professor for music theory and music analysis at the Univer-
sity of Music and Dramatic Arts in Graz/Austria. In 2007/2008, he was
visiting professor at the National Chiao-Tung University (Xinzhu/Tai-
wan) and at the University of Tokyo. He has co-edited Traditional Music
and Composition (the world of music 45/2, 2003); Lexikon der System-
atischen Musikwissenschaft (Laaber-Verlag 2010); and Lexikon neue
Musik (Metzler/Bärenreiter 2013). Since 2007 he has been editor of the
book series “musik.theorien der gegenwart” (vol. 1/2007 on music and
globalization; vol. 2/2008 on compositional aesthetics and technique in
Helmut Lachenmann’s music; vol. 3/2009 on theories of transition in
music and other arts; vol. 4/2010, Music Theory and Interdisciplinar-
ity). Since March 2012 he has been director of the research project “A
Context-Sensitive Theory of Post-tonal Sound Organization” (CTPSO),
funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). His research fields include
theory, analysis, and history of eighteenth- to twenty-fi rst-century
music, timbre-pitch relationships in post-tonal music, music perception,
intercultural history of composition, and new music in East Asia. Utz’s
compositions have been performed by leading ensembles and musicians
worldwide. Two CDs with his music for Asian and Western instruments
and voices have been released in 2002 (Site, Composers’ Art Label)
and 2008 (transformed, Spektral-Records). http://www.christianutz.net,
http://musiktheorie.kug.ac.at
Samson Young is composer and researcher and currently teaches as assis-

tant professor for Critical Intermedia Art at the School of Creative
Media, City University of Hong Kong. Young’s works are fundamentally
informed by an engagement with new cultural-technological paradigms,
yet deeply grounded in the classical musical tradition. Young belossngs
to a new breed of composer-artists whose work speaks to communi-
ties across disciplinary divides. In 2007, Young became the fi rst from
Hong Kong to receive the Bloomberg Emerging Artist Award with his
audio-visual project “The Happiest Hour.” Young was Hong Kong Sin-
fonietta’s artist associate in the 2008/2009 season, and since then he has
maintained a close relationship with the orchestra, working in the capac-
ity of composer-director in a range of multimedia productions. Young
is presently completing his PhD fellowship at Princeton University. As
a scholar, Samson Young’s research focuses on Chinese music in the
postcolonial era, and the music of video games. His publications include
“Reconsidering Cultural Politics in the Analysis of Contemporary Chi-
nese Music: The Case of Ghost Opera” (Contemporary Music Review
2007) and “The Voicing of the Voiceless in Tan Dun’s The Map: Hori-
zon of Expectation and the Rhetoric of National Style” (Asian Music
2009). http://www.thismusicisfalse.com
Index
90 Years of Red Songs (Hongge 90 Ainu, 71

nian, TV documentary), 226 Aischylos. Prometheus Bound, 34
ākāśa (space), 87
A Akutagawa Yasushi (1925–1989).
Abbate, Carolyn, 4, 46, 69, 289 Kurai Kagami (The dark mirror,
Abbé de Baigne, 77 1960), 131
abstract music, 180 aleatoric, 292
abstract painting, 180 alethinos logos (faithful language), 35
Abtastprozess (“process of tactile dis- alienation, 85–86, 88, 93, 277, 280
covery”), 167 allophonic, 195
acousmatic, 88, 268 alterity, 9, 25–26, 28, 36–38, 88, 93,
act, 1, 3–4, 11–12, 14–17, 25, 31, 261, 287
36, 38–40, 53, 68, 76–77, 82, amalgamation, 11, 85–87, 90, 117, 125
84, 100, 121, 123, 128–129, ambiguity, 7, 10, 34, 45, 53–54, 196,
140, 152, 156, 168–170, 179, 211, 221, 227, 251, 261, 279
196, 204–205, 208, 210–211, Anderson, Laurie, 92
215–216, 218, 220–221, 253, Ang, Ien, 216
256–257, 259, 261, 263–264, anime, 252
287–288, 293–294 annexation, 85–86
actors, 7, 38, 45, 117, 121, 127, 240, 262 Anpassungsarbeit (“work of accomo-
Adele, 79 dation”), 167
Adler, Christopher, 90 Antares Auto-Tune, 88
Adorno, Theodor W., 19, 165 anthropotechnics, 11, 84–85
aegyo (cuteness), 278–279 Aomori, 62
aesthetics, aesthetic, 1, 4, 7–8, 12, Aperghis, Georges (b. 1945), 15,
15, 17, 32, 46, 53, 58, 61, 68, 175; Récitations (1977), 7, 86,
70–71, 76, 80, 83–84, 90–92, 193–197, 288
100–101, 108, 110, 112, Appadurai, Arjun, 2
119, 133, 138, 143, 146, 151, appropriation, 9, 11, 17, 32, 37, 40, 49,
153, 155, 158–159, 162, 164, 134, 137, 151–152, 161, 209,
166–170, 176, 187–188, 191, 216, 226
207, 225, 234, 268, 271–272, archaic, 71, 91, 134, 155, 163
275, 277, 280–281, 286–292; Aristotle, 168
aesthetic distance, 160 Aristoxenos. Elementa Harmonica, 66
Africa, 211; music, 77 arpeggione, 87
agency, 113, 220, 225, 249, 276, 285 Art Gallery of New South Wales, 216
Ahn Eak–Tae (1906–1965), 154 art music, 6, 8, 11, 14–16, 18, 47, 76,
Ahn Heung–Chan, 277 79–80, 85, 87, 116, 162, 166,
Ahn Ki–Young (1900–1980), 154 286, 292–294
304 Index
Artaud, Antonin (1896–1948), 32, 42, Baranovitch, Nimrod, 3–4, 112, 231,
161, 287 236, 243, 269
articulation (metaphorical), 10, 38, Barbara Fei Mingyi (b. 1931), 111
48–49, 68–69 Bardi, Giovanni, 66
articulation (philosophical), 27, 29, 33, Barmé, Geremy, 225, 232, 234
120, 269 baroque music, 10, 76, 82, 216, 218
articulation (technical), 1–3, 15, 54, Barrière, Jean Baptiste (b. 1958), 92;
58, 60–62, 64, 66–67, 83–84, Chréode (1983), 92
100, 102, 123–124, 138, 168– Barthes, Roland, 6–7, 10–11, 27, 33,
170, 179, 181, 183, 188–189, 42, 68, 80, 82, 84, 91, 99–100,
191, 196–197, 277, 291 117, 120–121, 123, 146,
Asagi (visual–kei singer), 249, 252– 269–270, 287
254, 258, 262–264, 288 basso cantante, 206
Asian Games Beijing, 225, 232 Bavarian dialect, 170
assemblage, 8, 88, 134 Beck, Ulrich, 2
assimilation, 203 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 158
astonishment, 166–168 Beijing Olympics, 237
Atem (breath), 169 Beijing opera (jingju), 56, 58, 69, 71,
ātman (individual soul), 87 79, 101–102, 109, 227
auctioneering, 49–50 bel canto, 12, 79, 110–111, 133, 231
audience, 8, 15–16, 35, 39, 41, 47, 102, Berberian, Cathy (1925–1983), 47, 92,
105, 108, 119, 122, 124–125, 291; Stripsody (1966), 32
127, 129–130, 133, 135, 143, Berio, Luciano (1925–2003), 161, 289;
153, 162, 175–176, 194, 207, Sequenza III (1966), 6, 47, 86,
228, 232–233, 236–238, 106; Tema—Omaggio a Joyce
242, 251, 253–255, 258–259, (1958), 160
267–268, 277, 279, 288 Beyoncé, 267, 282
Augustinus, 188 Bhagwati, Sandeep (b. 1963), 1, 6–8,
aura, 1, 10, 14, 32, 66, 160, 162, 187, 10, 92–93, 291; Atish-e-Zaban
208, 215, 218 (2006), 11, 88–90; Limits
authenticity, 1, 7, 11, 18, 25, 30, & Renewals (2011), 8, 88;
34–36, 38, 40, 78–85, 91, 111, Ramanujan (1998), 88
113, 165–166, 213, 269, 278 Bhawalkar, Uday, 93
authority, 1, 25, 46, 48, 69, 126, 260, Bible, The, 289
278, 289, 292 Björk, 86
authorship, 30, 35–36, 38, 48, 163, black Americans, 49–50
291, 293 Blanco, Roberto, 268, 282
autonomous, autonomy, 45, 49, 269 Blonk, Jaap, 92
autotune, 280, 282 Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Infl u-
avant-garde, 5, 9–10, 45, 121, 141, ence, 216
159, 161–163; music, 5, 141, Blumenberg, Hans, 31
153; vocalists, 11, 45; Western, Bo Xilai, 243
11, 136, 153, 155 body, 7, 9, 11, 15, 17–18, 25, 27–29,
31–33, 38–41, 49, 69, 80–88,
B 90–92, 99–100, 117, 120–121,
Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 158–159; 123, 150, 185, 189, 197,
Gellert-Lieder, 158 203–204, 208–209, 212–213,
Baecker, Dirk, 87 222, 254, 256–257, 268–273,
baihua (Chinese vernacular), 112 275, 277, 279–282, 288, 293
Ball, Martin J., 179 Boethius, 66, 188
bangyaru (“band girl”), 17, 255–262, Bollywood, 79
264–265 bol-syllables (Indian oral percussion
bangyaru-o (“band girl man”), 255 notation), 88, 93
bara (Korean brass cymbals), 141 bordercrossing, 2
Index 305
Botti, Susan (b. 1962), 56, 58, 71, 291 Chan Koon Chung, 215
Boulez, Pierre (b. 1925), 159; Le Chan Kwok-bun, 220
marteau sans maître (1952–55, Chan Nin, 220
revised 1957), 164; Structures Chan, Jacky, 239
Ia (1952), 119, 161 changbai (singing and reciting), 56
boundaries, 2–3, 6, 26, 48–49, 70, changduanqu (Chinese poetry patterns
112, 159, 162, 170, 175, 179, of variable line-length), 105
206, 221, 268, 293, 295; con- chant, 25, 49–51, 58, 62, 82, 93, 99,
tested, 285, 293; cultural, 19, 105, 152, 248
207; national 17; reification/ Chao Mei-Pa. See Zhao Meibo
proliferation of, 2, 220 Chao Yuan Ren. See Zhao Yuanren
breath/breathing, 6, 8, 25, 28, 32, 46, Cheek, Timothy, 242
53, 62, 64, 84, 120, 144, 169, Chen Feng, 229
180–181, 185, 195, 197–198, Chen Huanchang (b. 1958), 240, 243
209, 248, 269, 287 Chen Huanchang (Johnny Cheng),
broken magic/unbroken magic, 14, 240, 243
166, 168, 172 Chen Shi-Zheng (b. 1963), 56
Buck-Tick (Japanese band), 250 Chen Sisi (b. 1976), 225, 239
Buddhism, 141, 143, 161 Chen Yi (b. 1953), 12, 19, 112; Chi-
bunraku, 7, 51, 53–54, 71, 118, 130 nese Poems for a Six-Girl Cho-
Bush, Kate, 86 rus (Zhongguo gushi hechang
wu shou, 1999) 101–105
C Cheng, Johnny. See Chen Huanchang
Caccini, Giulio (1551?–1618), 10, 67; Chikamatsu Hanji (1725–1783). Imo-
L’Euridice (1600), 66; Nuove seyama onna teikin (“Mount
Musiche (1602), 66 Imo and Mount Se”), 54–55
Cage, John (1912–1992), 119, Chile (Northern Chinese minority),
161–162, 164; Aria (1958), 47; 104
Empty Words (1973–1976), 28 Chin Kyu-Yung (b. 1947), 154
Cantonese, 106, 112, 238 China Can Say No! (Zhongguo keyi
Cantopop, 231, 233 shuo bu!, book, 1996), 17, 234
Carnatic music, 100, 113 China Central-TV (CCTV), 226,
Cassiodorus, 79; Expositio in Psalte- 236–237
rium (c. 545), 79 China Record Corporation (Zhongguo
castrati, 7 Changpian Zonggongsi), 229
cathexis (allocation), 41 China Red Song Concert (Zhongguo
Cavarero, Adriana, 4 hongge hui), 236–238
Central Music Conservatory Beijing, China, 12, 16–18, 101–102, 104–105,
230 108–112, 114, 203–204,
ch’ang, 133 207–208, 211, 213, 215–216,
ch’anggŭk, 137 222, 225–243, 285, 289, 293
Ch’angjak Akdan (Contemporary Chinese Communist Party (CCP),
Kugak Orchestra), 155 225–235, 237, 239–243
ch’angjak kugak (creative traditional Chinese jazz (Zhongguo jueshi), 235
music, Korean contests, 1974–), Chinese opera “recitative”, 49–50
136 Chinese poetry, 102, 105
ch’ŏngusŏng (clear, springy voice), 154 Chinese work songs (haozi), 102
Ch’unhyangga (Song of Ch’unhyang; Chineseness, 112, 221, 233, 242, 293
p’ansori piece), 137 Ching Chong Chinaman stereotype,
chamber music, 78 203–204
Chan Hing-Yan (b. 1963), 12, 105, Cho Kongnye (1930–1997), 133, 152
112; Lachrimae Florarum Cho Yong-Pil (b. 1950), 137, 154,
(Si hua hai si fei hua, 2001), 272–273
105–108, 289 Choi In-Chan (b. 1923), 153
306 Index
Choi Sŏng-Gu (?–1974), 153 conservatories, 110, 230, 292
Chŏng Hoe-Sŏk (b. 1963), 149, 155, 292 container-theory, 2
Chŏng Kwon-Jin (1927–1986), 137, contemporary music, 4, 7, 18, 68, 117,
145, 149; Simch’ŏngga, 137, 135, 137, 153, 155
145, 149; Sugungga, 149 Cook, Nicholas, 5, 18, 70
chŏngak (Korean aristocratic music corporeality, 4, 9, 28, 31, 35, 124,
traditions), 17, 271 287–288
chŏngga (Korean singing style in the countertenor, 7
music of courts and scholars), cover-versions (fanchang), 242
133, 137, 144, 146 Crash (Korean band), 277
chŏngganbo (Korean mensural nota- criticism, 46, 49, 78, 108, 118–119,
tion), 13, 144 135, 277
Choo Hyun Mi (b. 1961), 271–272; croaking, 17, 87, 275–276
“Sinsa-dong kŭ saram” (The cross-cultural analysis, 295
man of Sinsa Street, 1988), 267 crossover, 9
chorus/choir, 7, 12, 17, 79, 88, 101, Crumb, George (b. 1929), 106, 289;
105, 108, 110, 151, 155, 179, Ancient Voices of Children
184–185, 226, 234, 240, 256, (1970), 106
274, 276, 278, 280, 289 Crying Nut (Korean band), 276; “Mal-
Chow, Jay (Zhou Jielun), 239; “Snail” Tallicha” (Let’s gallop a horse,
(Woniu), 239 1997), 276
Christou, Jani (1926–1970), 61 crying, 1, 18, 87, 273, 276, 279
Chung Hyun-Sue (b. 1967), 144–145; cucao (rustic), 108
Cold Rain Song (2009), 144; Cui Jian, 17, 227, 232, 244; “A Piece
Gong Yang (2008), 144; Lotus of Red Cloth” (Yi kuai hongbu),
Song (2007), 144–145; Sich’ang 233; “Having Nothing” (Yiwu
(Poem song, 2007–2009), 144 suoyou), 233; “Nanniwan,”
chungmori (Korean rhythmic cycle), 272 233, 241
ci (type of Chinese poetry), 105–106, cukuang (rough), 108
108–109, 289 culture, 1–5, 8–9, 11–12, 15–16, 19,
Cinema Bizarre, 251 25, 34, 38, 41, 45–46, 48–49,
Cixous, Hélène, 42 58, 66, 68–70, 76, 78–79,
class, 12, 54, 100, 109, 111, 230, 274, 81–85, 87, 90, 93, 99, 102,
277, 285 105, 108, 112, 117, 133–136,
classical singing, 7, 69, 92, 287 140–141, 143, 151–152,
cluster, 211 155, 161–162, 164–165, 176,
codification, 10, 47, 90, 290, 294 196–197, 203, 205–208, 211,
Cohen, Leonard, 79, 81–82, 87 213, 215–216, 218, 220–222,
Cohen-Levinas, Danielle, 82, 87 225–230, 232–235, 238–243,
Collection of Sentimental Songs 249, 251–252, 258–262,
(Shuqing gequji, 1981), 230 270–271, 276, 278, 285–287,
colonialism, 100, 113, 154, 272, 294 289–290, 292–295; -(d) bodies,
comedy, 127 100; -specific, 1, 7, 17, 101, 104,
commercialization/commercial music, 195–196; mass, 69
15, 18, 78–79, 86, 92, 205, cultural: essentialism, 18, 268; imagi-
226–227, 231, 233, 239, 242 nation, 113; shock 164
commodification, 11, 18, 77–79, 204, cyberspace, 212, 222
227
common speech, 67 D
comparative musicology, 49 D (Japanese band), 249, 253–254, 258
composer-performer, 10, 47, 61 dage (genre of the Chinese Dong
composer-performer collaborations/ minority), 109
interaction, 10, 47–48, 56, 61, Dan Ikuma (1924–2001). Yōkihi
150–151, 163, 291 (The Yōki princess, 1977), 131;
Index 307
Yūzuru (The evening crane, domestication, 1, 11, 18, 77
1952), 116, 118–119 dominance, 2
Daoist ritual music, 56 Dong (Northwestern Chinese minor-
Darmstadt Summer Courses, 5, 14, ity), 109
164, 166 Dröscher, Daniela, 42
Davies, Peter Maxwell (b. 1934). Eight du (read), 102
Songs for a Mad King (1969), 47 Duchamp, Marcel, 188–189; The
db boyko, 92 Large Glass, 188–189
De Nora, Tia, 242 Dylan, Bob, 79, 86, 275
Dead End (Japanese band), 250
death metal, 251, 277, 280 E
decentered voices, 69 East Asia, 3, 9, 12, 15, 18, 292–293
declamation, 10, 51, 58, 61, 67, 71, East Asian music, 15
118, 121, 124 East Asian thought, 166
defamiliarization, 169 East is Red, The (Dongfang hong,
Deleuze, Gilles, 42 1942), 229, 231, 233
democracy movement (China 1989), East meets West, 141, 164, 207–208,
231 219, 293
Deng Lijun (1953–1995), 230 Eco, Umberto, 12, 118; The Name of
Deng Xiaoping, 231 the Rose (1980), 117, 252
de-referentializing, 108 ecstasis, 33
Derrida, Jacques, 9, 11, 34–35, 38, Edgerton, Michael Edwards 6, 81, 91;
40–42, 45, 70, 78, 289; Of Friedrich’s Comma (1999), 81,
Grammatology, 30, 33; Speech 91; Taff y Twisters (1997), 91
and Phenomena, 30–31; Writ- ego-ideal, 260–261
ing and Difference, 31 egressive, 191, 195
desemanticization, 45, 160. See also Eidsheim, Nina, 18, 269, 281
semantic/semantics Eigentlichkeit, 38
desire, 6, 11, 17, 27–28, 30, 77, 84, 86, eishō, 51, 54
125, 167–168, 175, 211, 215, ejective, 191
239, 248–249, 257–265, 271, electroacoustic music, 76, 82, 92–93
274, 288, 293–294 electronic dance music, 16, 206
desuvoisu (death voice), 253 electronic music, 11, 14–16, 86, 144,
DeVol, Luana, 131 159, 162, 165, 187, 205–208,
dhrupad, 93 211, 216, 280
diastematic/continuous singing (Jacopo embellishments, 17, 272, 275, 281–282
Peri), 66–67 embodiment, 4, 6, 11, 13, 26, 41,
digital instruments, 77 80–81, 83, 90, 99–101, 113,
Ding Huifeng, 228 121, 125, 143, 152, 167, 213,
Dion, Celine, 78 237, 263, 270, 272, 276, 281,
diphthong, 163, 184–185 286
Dir en Grey (Japanese band), 252 emergence, 12, 33, 78, 109–110, 234,
Dirlik, Arif, 220, 286 287
dirtiness, 170, 288 emic, 49
discursive meaning. See musical EMI-China (record company), 229
meaning enka, 113, 282
disembodiment/disembodied, 6, 13, Enlightenment, 1, 26, 167
45, 121, 124, 269, 280–281 ephemerality, 39, 143, 260, 269
disgust, 27–28 erhu (Chinese fiddle), 85, 156
disjunctures, 267, 292 erhuang (Chinese tune-type), 71
diversification/diversity, 18, 45, 76, erotic being, 9, 28
159, 282 erotic, eroticism, 9, 27–28, 33, 80, 270
Dolar, Mladen, 4, 17–18, 262–263, errentai (Chinese folk song genre), 102
265, 270 essentialism, 2, 6, 18, 86, 268
308 Index
essentialization, 3, 8, 12, 17, 58, figuration, 16, 40, 83, 149, 215, 282
100, 207–208, 215–216, 218, fi nding one’s voice, 1
268–269, 282, 285 fioraturi, 67
Estonia, 285 Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich (1925–2012),
ethicity, 9, 26, 35, 39–42 80, 91, 287
ethnic, 2, 9, 18, 100–102, 108, Fließ, Wilhelm, 263
112–113, 203–204, 209, 213, flow, 76, 128, 141, 149, 164, 220, 278
220–222, 234, 268–269, fluctuations, 47, 123, 163
271–273, 275, 281–282, 286, Fly to the Sky (Korean pop duo), 274
292–293 folk rock. See rock music
ethnicity, 12, 16–17, 100, 108–109, folk songs. See European folk songs;
111, 113, 203–204, 213, min’ge (Chinese folk songs);
220–221, 268–270, 273, 275, minyo (Korean folk song)
277, 279; construction of, 101, folk tunes, 118
272, 281, 285 folktales, 116, 119, 154
ethnicization, 2, 18 Forchhammer, Jörgen, 197
ethnomusicology, 3, 49, 294 Fox, Aaron, 99–100, 108, 243
eurological composition, 11, 81–82, fragmentation, 10, 53, 56, 60–61, 66
85–87, 90, 93, 291 Freud, Sigmund, 31, 263–264
Europe, 7–8, 12, 85, 91, 111, 117, 119, fricative, 15, 179, 181–185, 191, 198
159, 162, 211, 251, 289–290, fricativisation, 184
292–294 friction, 123
European folk songs, 109 Frith, Simon, 108, 112
Evans, Dylan, 259, 261, 263 Fuhr, Michael, 9, 17–18, 285, 288
everyday speech, 50, 62, 66–67, 101, Fujiwara Opera Company, 118
158, 170 fujo (Japanese women shamans), 64
evolutionary musicology, 45 Fukunaka Fuyuko, 7–8, 12–13, 287,
existential, 167–168 289
exoticism, 85 Funa Benkei (nō-play), 62
experimental music, 88, 153, 205 Fung, Anthony, 234, 242
experimentalism, 164 furi à deux, 256
expression, 1–2, 4–6, 18, 30, 32, futozao-shamisen, 53–55
35, 38–39, 41, 45–46, 53, 82,
87, 99, 101, 105, 112–113, G
129, 133, 135, 140, 144–146, Gabor, Dennis, 85, 91
149, 151–152, 159–160, 163, Galas, Diamanda, 92
176, 180–181, 187, 190, 194, Galilei, Vincenzo, 66
207, 227, 234, 238, 240, 259, gamaks (short ornaments, khyal), 88
269–270, 272 gamelan, 77
extended vocal technique(s), 6, 106, 289 Gee, Erin, 5, 7, 11, 15, 48, 70, 86, 288,
290
F Geertz, Clifford, 248, Blurred Genres,
falsetto, 7, 128, 252–253, 271–272 248
fan sābisu (“fan service”), 259 gei mianzi (lit. “giving face”), 204
Farinelli (fi lm, 1994), 93 geming gequ. See revolutionary songs
Feld, Steven, 100 gendai nō, 121
femininity, 272, 279 gender, 12, 16, 54, 84, 100, 209–210,
Ferneyhough, Brian (b. 1943), 47, 213, 255, 265, 272; ambiguity,
175, 188, 197, 291; Time and 251; antagonism, 7; conven-
Motion Study III (1974), 15, tions, 251; stereotypes, 7
187, 189–192, 290 geno-song, 6, 84, 99, 269–270,
Ferrari, Luc (1929–2005), 80 287–288
Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, 131 geographical context, 3
fetish, 18, 270 Georgia, 106
Index 309
Gerstenberg, Kurt, 172 Hagen, Nina, 86
gestural language, 5, 160 Hahn Dae-Soo, 275; “Mul Chom
gesture, 13, 16, 28, 34, 46, 65, 69, 93, Chuso” (Give me some water,
99, 102, 104, 117, 119–120, 1974), 276
124, 128, 130, 140, 143, 145– hakase, 65
146, 149–151, 155, 160–161, Hall, Edward, 99
170, 211, 215–216, 218, 260, Hamann, Johann Georg, 36
267, 271, 279, 289 han (sadness, sorrow), 18, 271–272, 274
Gibbs, Barry, 86 Han Byung-Chul, 3
gidayū-bushi, 10, 51, 53–54, 56, Han Geng (b. 1984) & Tan Jing
61–62, 69 (b. 1977), 240; “Do Not Forget
ginshō, 51, 54 the Memorial” (Buneng wangji
Girls Generation (Korean pop group), de jinian), 239, 244
280; “Gee” (2009), 279 Han Obaengnyŏn (Korean folk song),
glam rock. See rock music 154, 272
glam metal, 250 hanguk kagok (Korean art song), 133,
glissando, 104, 106, 272 135, 146, 154
globalization, 3–4, 8, 48, 69–70, 113, Hanoi Rocks, 250
220–221, 233, 242, 251, 273, harmonia, 26
276, 286; grassroots globaliza- Hart, Roy, 46–47, 291
tion, 2; musical globalization, Hartberger, Sven, 126
45, 49; reflexive globalization, Harvest Uprising, 237
2, 18 Hayashi Hikaru (1931–2012). Aman-
Globokar, Vinko. Voix Instrumentalisée jaku to Uriko-Hime (Amano-
(1973), 92 gnome and Princess Uriko,
Gluck, Christoph Willibald. Orfeo ed 1958), 131
Euridice, 118 Headroom (Hong Kong underground
Goehr, Alexander, 19, 70 electronic dance event), 205
gomaten, 65 heavy metal, 233, 241, 253, 273, 277
Gottschewski, Hermann, 70, 114 hedoban (“headbang(ing)”), 256–257
Gottwald, Clytus, 187, 198 hegemony, 2
grain, 6–7, 11, 27, 33, 38, 68, 80, 91, Heidegger, Martin, 26
99–100, 120–121, 146, 270, heightened speech, 49–50, 58
273, 276, 287 heikyoku, 51–53, 69
gramophone, 269 Hennion, Antoine, 269
Great Leap Forward, The (1958–1960), Herder, Johann Gottfried, 36, 168
236 Hesiod. Theogony, 25
Greater China (Dazhonghua, record heterogeneity, 11, 88, 145, 149, 239
company), 229 Hétu, Joane, 92
Greek tragedy, 127 heung (ecstasy), 271, 277
Gremmler, Tobias, 206 Hiekel, Jörn Peter, 5–6, 8, 14, 46, 48,
Groenewegen, Jeroen, 4, 100, 269 62, 92, 287–288, 290
grunting, 18, 277–278 Himeyuri (Japanese band), 258
Guangzhou, 230 Hindustani music, 88
Guo Maoqian, 101 hip hop, 277–278
Guo Wenjing (b. 1956), 205 Hirano Kenji, 51, 54, 71
gyakudai (“reversed dive”), 256–257 Hirayama Michiko, 14, 47–48, 62, 92,
163, 291
H hiroi, 51
Habermas, Jürgen, 36 Hirsh, Shelley, 92
habitus, 18, 86, 100, 113, 276 Hirst, Linda, 92
Hadot, Pierre, 35, 42 historiography, 47–48, 294–295
haegŭm (Korean fiddle), 8, 14, 149, history, 1, 3–5, 7–8, 16–17, 38–39,
155–156, 272, 292 85, 100, 108, 113, 118, 128,
310 Index
143, 153–154, 158–160, hyangt’o kagŭk (Korean “indigenous
163–164, 206–208, 215, 218, opera”), 154
226, 228–229, 232, 235, 237, hybridity, hybridization, 2, 11, 14, 45,
241–243, 248, 251, 271, 273, 49, 51, 58, 68–69, 88, 108, 124,
285, 289, 293 162, 207, 215, 220, 289
Hobsbawm, Eric, 3 Hykes, David, 92
homogenization, 2, 45, 112–113 hyperculturality, 3
homosexuality, 123, 259 Hyun Je-Myung (1902–1960).
honchōshi, 53 Ch’unghyangjŏn (1950) 154
Hong Kong, 12, 16, 105, 111, 203,
205, 214–215, 220, 222, I
230–231, 239, 286, 289 I Love Beijing Tian’anmen (Wo ai
Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra Beijing Tian’anmen, Chinese
(HKPO), 222 children song), 230, 241
Hong Kong Sinfonietta, 206 ibushi (“oxidation”), 53
Hong Sin-Cha (b. 1940), 143, 291 ideal-ego, 260
Hongdae university district (Seoul), 276 identity/identities, 4, 9, 12, 14, 25–26,
Hopi (Native American people), 42, 48, 86, 88, 90, 101, 108,
49–50; laváyi (speech), 49; táwi 112–113, 137, 149, 158, 168,
(song), 49; tí:ngava (chant on 177, 190, 196–197, 203, 205,
two reference pitches), 49 208–210, 212, 218, 221, 233–
Hosokawa, Toshio (b. 1955), 12, 19, 234, 242, 257, 260, 268–269,
117–119, 125, 287; Danshō I 271, 274, 276, 281, 285; contem-
(Fragment I) (1988), 120; Hanjo porary, 3; cultural, 2, 8, 18, 141,
(2002), 13, 120–122, 124, 126, 164, 220, 287, 293; deconstruc-
129–131; Matsukaze (2011), tion of, 16, 286; hidden, 15, 176;
120; Sen I (1984), 8, 120; hybrid, 162; imagined, 2, 220;
Vision of Lear (1998), 120 layered, 7, 175; national, 45, 136,
Hou Dejian, 239 143, 267, 286, 292; redefinition
Hou Muren and the Modern Band. of, 6, 15, 213; revolutionary, 227;
“Red Rock” (Hongse yaogun, simulated, masked, transcended,
1992), 233 2, 32, 46, 100, 134, 204, 206,
Houston, Whitney, 274–275 211, 220, 286; virtual, 213
Hu Jintao, 204 Im Chin-Taek. Ojŏk (Five bandits),
Hu Yanwen, 239 153; Sorinaeryŭk (The history
hua’er (Chinese folk song genre), 102 of a sound), 153; Ttongbada
Huang Wenfu, 239 (The sea of excrement), 153
Huang Wenhao, 228 imaginary ritual, 3, 162
Huang Zi, 110 imaginary, the, 259, 261, 264
Hui Ngo-shan, Steve (b. 1974), 211, Imai Kengyō Tutomu, 53
216, 222, 236, 243; Re-Autumn immediacy, 38, 61, 93
(2004), 206; The Memory Pal- impurity, 13, 113, 124
ace of Matteo Ricci (2010), 16, incommensurability, 6, 46, 160
205–221, 286 India, 85, 217–218
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 36 Indianness, 100, 113
Humperdinck, Engelbert, 58 indie rock. See rock music
Hung Chang-tai, 229 individual, the, 1, 36, 220, 242, 285
Husserl, Edmund, 30 individualism, 220, 233–234
Hwang Byungki (b. 1936), 136, 153, individuality, 1–2, 8, 11, 26, 39, 45,
271, 291; The Labyrinth (1975), 48, 51, 56, 62, 69, 77–80,
141, 143 82, 84, 87, 92–93, 100, 133,
Hwang Sung-Ho (b. 1955). Hyungsan 166, 169, 175, 179, 183, 185,
(2000), 144 191, 193, 196–197, 204, 207,
hyangga, 149–150, 292 211, 219–221, 261–262, 264,
Index 311
268–270, 272, 278, 288, 291, jazz, 86, 91, 233–235
293, 295 ji iro, 51, 52
Indonesia, 77 ji, 51, 52, 54
inflection, 92, 99, 101–102, 105–106, Jiang Qing, 230
203, 267, 273, 277, 281 Jiang Zemin, 234
Inner Mongolia, 112 Jiangxi, 236–237
Inoue Takako, 258 Jiangxi Satellite TV, 236–237
Inständigkeit (Heidegger), 26 Jie Fu (1913–1976). “We Are March-
Intangible Cultural Properties (Korea), ing on a Big Road” (Women zou
134, 152–153 zai dalu shang,1962), 229
interconnectedness, 4, 48 Jin Guolin, 230
intercultural/crosscultural dialogue, 2 Jin Yueling, 230
intercultural compositional aesthetics, 8 Jin Zhaojun, 241
interculturality, 2–3, 8, 10, 14, 18, jingju. See Beijing opera
47–48, 66, 93, 105, 108, 163, Jinmu (mythical emperor), 65
291–292, 294 Joo Hwanhee, 274
intermediacy, 270 Joo, Brian, 274–275
intermediality, 31 Joplin, Janis, 79
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), jōruri, 53
15, 48, 175–182, 184–185, jouissance, 270
187–188, 190–191, 193, 195 jouren (members of the inner circle of
International Phonetic Association, visual-kei fans), 257–258
178, 198; extIPA Symbols for Joyce, James, 5, 160–161
Disordered Speech, 195; The J-Pop, 249
Principles of the International J-Rock, 252
Phonetic Association, 180 jumping rope rhymes, 49–50
Internationale, The, 228, 231–233, 241 juxtaposition, 62, 149, 190–191, 197
intersubjectivity, 270
intertextuality, 119, 127 K
intertraditional musical experiments, 88 kabuki, 119, 130, 258
intonation, 31, 66, 68–69, 71, 123, Kagel, Mauricio (1931–2008), 119,
146, 156, 193, 278, 282 161; Anagrama (1957–1958),
invention of tradition, 3 160; Blue’s Blue (1981), 91;
Irino Yoshirō (1921–1980). Sonezaki Exotica (1972), 91; Tower of
Shinju (1977), 131 Babel (2002), 91
iro, 51, 54 kagok, 12, 133, 137, 144, 146,
Isherwood, Nicolas, 92 151–152, 156, 268, 271
Isukeyorihime (empress-consort of Kainz, Josef, 58
Jinmu), 65. See also Jinmu kakari, 51, 54
iterability, 30, 38 kakegoe, 62, 101
Izawa Shūji (1851–1917), 12 Kaldi, Yohanan, 126–127, 131
Kalitzke, Johannes, 131
J Kallberg, Jeff rey, 207
Jagger, Mick, 79 kami, 54
Janáček, Leoš, 158–159 kamite (lead visual-kei guitarist), 256
Jandl, Ernst, 28 Kammer, Salome, 92
Jang Ki-Ha and the Faces (Korean Kang Joon-Il (b. 1944), 136; Aurŭm
band). “Ssaguryŏ K’ŏp’i” (Embracing, 2001), 155; Hae-
(Cheap coffee, 2008), 278 maji Gut (A Shaman Perfor-
Japan, 8, 12, 51, 64, 109, 116–119, mance to the New Sun, 2001),
121, 128, 130, 137, 228, 248, 155; Han-Gŏ-Sa-Rak (Four
250–255, 257–258, 262, 293 pleasures living in a sequestered
Japanese school songs, 109 place, 2004), 155; Man-ga
JayZ, 79 (Funeral song, 1982), 143; Sin
312 Index
Hyangga (2007), 14, 149–150, Komoda Haruko, 51, 53
292; Sogŭmgok (A simple string Kong Ok-Jin, 135
piece, 2003), 155; Sori-Kŭrimja Korea, 9, 12–13, 18, 133–137, 139,
II (Shadow of sound, 2004), 155; 141, 143, 146, 152, 154, 267,
Sori-Tarae for Kuŭm (Sound- 273–274, 276–279, 281–282,
bunch for kuŭm, 2003), 8, 146, 286, 290, 293
148–149 Korean Composer Group (Hanguk
Kang Sukhi (b. 1934); 19, 135–136, Chakgokga Hoe), 153
140, 153, 291. Buru (1976), Korean Royal Ancestral Shrine Ritual
141–143, 155; Dalha (1978), Music (chongmyo cheryeak), 146
155; Yebul (1968), 155; Koreanness, 275, 286
Kang Youwei (1858–1927), 109 kosu (p’ansori drummer), 149
Kanze (nō-school), 121 kotoba, 51, 54
katarimono, 51, 70–71 kotoba-nori, 51
kayagŭm (12-stringed plucked Korean K-pop, 137, 285
zither), 136, 141, 155 Krämer, Sybille, 4, 41, 270
kayōkyoku (mainstream Japanese Kraus, Karl, 58, 243
popular music), 253 Kristeva, Julia, 82
kazoo, 276 kudoki, 51, 53
Keene, Donald, 121 Kues, Nikolaus von, 188
Kepler, Johannes, 188 kugak (traditional Korean music),
khyal, 11, 90, 93 135–136, 155, 281
Kim Chi-Ha, 153 Kuhl, Patricia K., 83
Kim Chung-Gil (1934–2012), 136, kunqu, 109, 218
140; Ch’uchomun for eight tra- kut, 133, 135, 141
ditional instruments (1979), 155 kutkŏri changdan (rhythmic cycles), 155
Kim Dong-Jin (1913–2009), 13, kuŭm (Korean traditional mnemonic
136–137, 140, 153–154, practice), 8, 13, 146, 148–149,
290–291; Hyosŏngŭi Norae, 155
139; Simcheongjŏn, 138–139 kyōgen, 121
Kim Duk-Soo Samulnori Band, 155 kyōjo-mono (mad-woman prototype in
Kim Hee-Sun, 272 nō-theater), 121
Kim Ik Doo, 154 kyokusetsu (melodic formula), 51, 70
Kim Jin-Hyun, 156 Kyŏnggi, 272
Kim Kyung-Hee (b. 1961), 149
Kim So-Hee (1917–1995), 138 L
Kim Sun-Nam (1917–1986), 136 L’arc~en~ciel (Japanese band), 250
Kim Swoo Geun (1931–1986), 153 La Barbara, Joan, 71, 92
Kim Yong-Bae, 153 labiodental, 191
kimch’i, 271 Lacan, Jacques, 17, 31, 248, 259–261,
Kitamura Suehiro. Roei no Yume 263, 265; graph of desire, 249,
(Dreams at a bivouac, 1905), 130 262, 264; The Subversion of
Kittler, Friedrich, 4, 269 the Subject and the Dialectic of
kkŏngnŭn sori, 271 Desire in the Freudian Uncon-
Klangforum Wien, 126 scious, 262
Klein, Richard, 4, 7 Lachenmann, Helmut (b. 1935), 15,
Klüppelholz, Werner, 4, 47, 160 85, 91, 159, 164; Consolation II
Koguryŏ (ancient Korean kingdom), 273 (1968), 166; Das Mädchen mit
Koguryo Band (Korean band), 273 den Schwefelhölzern (The Little
Kojiki (c. 712, compiled by Ō no Match Girl, 1991–1997/2001),
Yasumaro), 65, 71 46, 121; Les Consolations
Kolesch, Doris, 4, 41, 270 (1967–1968/1977–1978), 92;
Komatsu Kōsuke. Hagoromo (1906), NUN (1997–1999/2002), 168;
118 temA (1968), 8, 169–172, 288;
Index 313
“Zwei Gefühle...”, Musik mit the body is bound to the earth,
Leonardo (1992), 14, 166–167, 1979), 150
172 Lee Young Jo (b. 1943), 136; Kyŏng
lajige (“garbage songs”), 242 (Sutra, 1975), 155
language, 3, 9–10, 12, 15–17, 27–29, Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 120
32–42, 45–47, 49, 51, 62, Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 188
67–68, 70, 82–84, 91–92, leshka, 79
99–102, 105, 108–110, Lévinas, Emmanuel, 29, 32, 41
112–113, 117–120, 128, 138, Lewis, George E., 91, 291
140–141, 143, 151, 159, 161, Li Bo (701–762), 101; “The Cataract
166, 170, 175–178, 181, 183, of Mount Lu” (Wang Lushan
185, 189–190, 193–197, 203– pubu), 104; “Night Thoughts”
205, 208, 221, 227, 230, 236, (Ye si), 104
248, 252, 257, 261, 264, 268, Li Jianfu. “Ancestors of the Dragon”
270, 278, 281, 286–288. See (Long de chuanren, 1979), 238
also gestural language; universal Li Shutong (1880–1942), 109
language Li Yuchun, 237
languages, 3–4, 8, 10, 70, 91, 176, Li Zongcheng (Jonathan Lee), 243
185, 193, 195, 205, 268; Asian, Liang Qichao (1873–1929), 109
101; Chinese, 12, 56–57, 62, Liao, Diana, 205, 214
92, 102, 105, 108–112, 141, liberation, 1–2, 10, 66, 160, 294
203–204, 208, 289; English, 84, libretto, 13, 116–119, 121–122,
121, 126, 128, 178, 190, 198, 126–131, 175, 205, 208, 214
203, 209, 236, 257; French, Lied, 110, 135, 158
15, 175, 193–197, 261, 288; Ligeti, György (1923–2006), 92, 172;
German, 13, 128, 166, 169, Aventures (1962/65), 160–161;
190, 196, 198; Indian, 91; Ital- Le Grand Macabre (1974–1977,
ian, 66–67, 172; Japanese, 62, rev. 1996); Nouvelles Aventures
64–65, 71, 118–119; Japanese- (1962/65), 160; 32
English, 249, 255; Korean, 144, Limbaugh, Rush, 204
278, 281; tonal, 56–57, 105, Lin Yutang, 204
108; Western, 4, 8, 101 linguistic anthropology, 45
language-specific, 7, 15, 17, 46, 196 List, George, 49, 51, 92, 257, 260
Lansky, Paul (b. 1944). Idle Chatter Literaturoper, 119
(1994), 92 Little Red Book, 230, 240
Late Junction (BBC Radio program), Liu Han. See Wei Wei & Liu Han
294 liuxing changfa (popular singing style),
lateralization, 183 231
Lau, Frederick, 3–4, 12, 70, 207, 285, Liuxing gequ (Popular Songs, Chinese
289, 293 journal), 241
Lautdichtungen (sound poems), 28 live-synthesis, 77
Lee Chan-Hae (b. 1945). P’ansori localization/localism, 2–3, 8, 10, 45,
Remix (2005–2009), 145; To 48, 69, 105, 203, 205, 221, 294
Hwang Seong (2001), 145 logocentricity, 119–120
Lee Dong-Baik (1867–1950), 137 Louis XI of France, 77, 291
Lee Donoung (b. 1954). Hansori Luna Sea (Japanese band), 250
(1984), 150, 291 Luo Dayou, 243
Lee Geon-Yong (b. 1947), 136, 153 Luzerner Theater, 126
Lee Heekyung, 8–9, 13, 135, 153–154, lyrics, 99–100, 106, 108, 112, 209,
282, 286 230, 232–233, 238–239, 243,
Lee Kil-Yŏng, 273 253, 264, 271, 276–278, 282
Lee Kwang-Su, 153
Lee Sŏng-sŏn (b. 1941). Mom ŭn M
Chisang e mukkyŏdo (Although Ma, Yo-Yo, 155
314 Index
madanggŭk (Korean outdoor theater), Mei, Girolamo, 66
134 Meiji Restoration, 8
madrigal, 100, 160 meisheng changfa (beautiful singing
magic, 14, 27, 45, 62, 87, 99, 160, method), 12, 110–111
164–166, 168–169, 172 melisma, 82, 100, 270
mainstream melody (zhuxuanlü, Chi- memorable jazz (nanwang jueshi), 235
nese popular music genre), 232, menari-tori (Korean melodic mode),
240–242 141
Malm, William P., 54–55, 65 Mercury, Freddie, 78
Mandarin (putonghua), 58, 106, 108, meriyasu (shamisen solo melodies in
110 gidayū-bushi), 53
Mandopop, 231, 233, 235, 240 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 27
manga, 252; yaoi manga, 258–259 Mersch, Dieter, 9–10, 15, 18, 270,
Mangos, John, 204 286–289
Mao Amin, 231 Metamusik Festival Berlin, 141
Mao fever (Mao re), 231–232 metaphor, 1, 7, 26, 40, 49, 77, 99, 113,
Mao Zedong, 225, 229–232, 235, 204, 229, 232, 240, 286
240–242 metonym, 261–262, 264, 286, 292
Maori (New Zealand). haka (narrative Mianhada saranghanda (I’m sorry, I
form with mixed styles), 49–50, love you, Korean TV drama),
65; karakia (ritual chant), 49; 279
koorero (speech), 49; waiata Michel-Dansac, Donatienne, 195–196
(song), 49 microtonal shadings, 272
marginalization, 6, 13, 15, 18, 90, microtonality, 62, 85, 163, 272
134–135, 216, 220, 290, 294 Middle Ages, 7
Maria (Swedish visual-kei fan), Middleton, Richard, 100, 269
248–255, 257, 262–264, 288 mimesis, 35
Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faus- min’ge (Chinese folk songs), 108
tus, 188 mind-body split, 81
masculinity, 251 minsogak (Korean folk music), 271
Mason, Luther Withing (1818–1896), 12 minyo (Korean folk songs), 137, 154,
mass media, 241–242 268, 271–272
Matsudaira Yoritsune (1907–2001). Miranda, Fatima, 92
Genji Monogatari (The tale of Mishima Yukio, 13, 121–123, 125
Genji, 1990–1993), 119 misreading, 3, 216, 218, 286
Matuschek, Stefan, 172 missionary, 16, 154, 217
May Fourth Movement, 110–111, Mittler, Barbara, 3, 207, 243
227–228 mnemonic device, 48, 93
May Fourth spirit (wusi jingshen), 237 Mo Wuping (1958–1993), 56
Mayuzumi Toshirō (1929–1997). Mochizuki Misato (b. 1969), 8, 12,
Kinkakuji (Golden Pavilion, 19, 117–118; Die große Bäck-
1976), 130 ereiattacke (2005–2009), 13,
McNabb, Mike, 88 126–130
media, 15, 34, 38, 40, 228, 230, 237, model opera (yangbanxi), 230
241–242, 278, 292; media modernism, 47, 161
theory, 4, 31, 151–152; medial- modernity, 2, 111–112, 242
ity, 28–29, 31–32, 34, 39–40, modernization, 2, 9, 12–13, 133–137,
151, 289 140, 144, 151–154, 233,
media art/multimedia, 8, 15–16, 151, 289–290, 293
205, 292 modes of listening, 3, 8, 137
medieval music, 51, 76, 121 Monk, Meredith, 92
meend (glissandi, khyal), 88 monologic, 12, 46, 69, 119, 289, 292
Megamasso (Japanese band), 258 monophthong, 163
Meguro Rockmaykan, 250 monotone recitation, 50
Index 315
montage, 54, 58, 68, 268, 289 145, 150, 153–154, 196, 208,
Monteverdi, Claudio, 66, 158–159; 234, 278, 282, 289
Orfeo (1607), 6, 118 nasal, nasality, 15, 91, 109, 111, 113,
morphology, 177 183–184, 267, 271–272
Moss, David, 92 National Center for Korean Traditional
Mötley Crüe, 250 Performing Arts Seoul, 155
Motokiyo Kan’ami (1333?–1384?), 121 nationalism, 2, 8, 17, 112, 226–228,
Motokiyo Zeami (1363?–1443?), 121 231, 234, 242, 271, 285
Mozambique, 211 nation-state system, 2
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 158, 206, Nāṭyaśāstra, 87
222; Magic Flute, The, 160 neo-nationalism, 2, 17
MTV-China, 234 netzzeit, 126
Mudgal, Shubha, 93 Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, 92–93
muga (Korean shaman song), 151 New Battlefi eld Songs (Zhandi xin ge,
mugen nō, 121 1972), 230
Müller, Heiner, 128, 131 New Village Movement (Saemaŭl
Müller, Nicole, 179 Undong), 134–135, 153
multiculturalism, 3, 11, 85, 203, 292 New Wave (xinchao, generation of Chi-
multimedia. See media art. nese composers), 47, 205, 207
Murakami, Haruki, 13, 127, 129; nian (speak), 102
“The Bakery Attack” (1981), Nie Er (1912–1935), 228–229
126; “The Second Bakery Nietzsche, Friedrich. Also sprach
Attack” (1986), 126; A Wild Zarathustra, 167–168
Sheep Chase, 131; Dance, Nihon Sengo Ongakushi Kenkyukai,
Dance, Dance, 131 3, 130
music historiography, 48, 294 Nilsson, Bo (b. 1937). Quantitäten
music theory, 49, 76 (1957), 165
musical analysis, 8 Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), 166, 168
musical meaning, 69, 294; discursive Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990), 166
meaning, 5, 287–288, 293; per- nō, 13, 62, 65, 100–101, 119, 121–122,
formative meaning, 6, 288–289 124, 126, 131
musical text, 4, 48, 291 No Brain (Korean band). “Pada Sanai”
musicological traditions, 295 (The seaman, 1997), 276
musicology, 4–5, 45, 49, 294 noise, 6, 33, 84, 91, 169–170, 263
musiking, 76–79, 81–82, 87, 91, 262 Nono, Luigi (1924–1990), 92, 160,
musique concrète instrumentale, 85, 165; Il canto sospeso (1955/56),
170 5, 159
muttering (tsubuyaki), 64 non-semantic syllables, 102, 163
My Homeland (Wo de zuguo, CD, non-semantic vocal music, 5, 175, 179.
2005), 235–236 See also semantic/semantics
North America, 84, 91, 289, 292–294
N notation (musical), 5, 8, 10, 13, 42,
Na Hoon A, 272 47–49, 53–54, 56, 61, 65–66,
Na Ying, 231 68–69, 88, 90, 93, 138, 144,
nāda (sonic resonance), 87 156, 177–181, 188, 190, 195,
nagaji, 54 232, 289–292
Namagiri (Indian goddess), 88 Novalis (band), 78
Namchylak, Sainkho, 92 Nozawa Kizaemon, 55
namsadang (itinerant music groups of Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn (1948–1997), 133
strolling male players), 134, 153 Nyangumarta (Australian ethnic
Nanniwan (lit. “Muddy bay,” 1943), group). wangka (speech), 49
229, 233, 235, 241
narrative, 2, 12, 47–49, 51, 53, 56, O
109, 117–121, 126, 133, 138, object petit a, 249, 259, 263
316 Index
object, 1, 18, 27, 91, 165, 177, 190, melody to poetry, lit. “path
204, 248–249, 259–261, toward artistic harmony”), 13,
263–265, 270, 280 144, 155
Ode of Joy [Ode to Joy], 231 Paik Byung-Dong (b. 1936), 136, 140,
Odington, Walter, 188 153, Chŏngch’ui for kayagŭm
Odysseus, 248, 263, 265 (1977), 155
Okinawa, 71 Palau/Micronesia, 49–50
Oldfield, Mike, 78 Palm, Reinhard, 126
Ong, Walter, 11, 78–79, 151, 155 Pan Music Festival (Seoul Contempo-
onnagata (female role), 258, 265 rary Music Festival), 135, 141,
onsetsu (syllable), 70 143
opera buffa, 50 Panzera, Charles, 27, 287
opera singers, 45 Park Chan-Sŭk, 153
opera, 8, 10, 12–13, 45–46, 49–50, Park Chung-Hee, 134, 153, 275
56, 58, 68–69, 71, 79, 88, 92, Park Dong-Jin, 13, 136–140, 153–154,
101–102, 109, 112, 116–117, 290–291
119–120, 122–124, 126–131, Park Hyo-Shin. “Nun-ŭi kkot” (“Snow
137–138, 154, 158, 180, flower,” 2005), 279
206–207, 211, 213, 215–216, Park Tae-Jun (1900–1986), 134, 136,
222, 225, 227, 230, 289, 293; 140, 144, 153–154, 225, 275, 279
digital opera, 16, 205, 208–209, Park Yong-Gu (b. 1914), 154
218, 286; imaginary opera, 161; parlando, 50
postwar Japanese opera, 7, 118 parodic, 268, 282
Operaturgie, 117 parrhesia, 38–42
operetta, 127 Parsons, Alan, 78
orality, aurality, 8–9, 35, 47–49, 51, party-state (China), 112
56, 61, 68–71, 78–80, 88, 93, passagi, 67
111, 134, 140, 143, 151–152, passibilité, 37
154–156, 167, 194, 259, 267, pathetic speech, 58
275, 292 Patriotic Education Campaign (Aiguo-
Orang Asli (Native Malaysian people), zhuyi Jiaoyu Yundong), 231
64 patriotism (China; aiguozhuyi),
originality, 36, 100, 102, 112, 140, 149 227, 229, 231, 234, 236–237,
ornamentation, 138, 149, 154, 267, 241–242
271, 273–275, 291 pentatonic, 101–102, 104–105
other, otherness, 6, 25–29, 32–42, People Mountain People Sea (PMPS,
88, 90, 125, 259–262, 268, Hong Kong popular music
286–287 label), 205
Our Honorable Chairman Mao People’s Liberation Army (PLA),
Zedong (Zanmen de lingxiu 239–240
Mao Zedong), 235 performance practice, 11, 61, 76, 144,
Outsider (Korean rapper). Alone 149, 169, 180, 290–292
(2009), 278 performance-centric composing/com-
position, 152, 156, 293
P performative, 18, 27, 37–38, 47–48,
P’ansori Narratives, Five (P’ansori 56, 61, 69–70, 81, 128–129,
obat’ang), 145 140, 143, 152, 156, 188,
p’ansori, 9, 13–14, 17, 133, 135, 137– 196, 268, 270–271, 279, 281,
138, 140, 143–145, 149–155, 287–290, 292–293
272–275, 281–282, 290–292 performative meaning. See musical
p’ungmul (percussion band music), meaning
134–135 performativity, 9, 37–40, 128, 134,
p’ungnyu (Korean traditional man- 140, 143, 151–152, 270, 281,
ner of instantaneously adding 292
Index 317
Peri, Jacopo (1561–1633), 10, 61, 67, ppong-style (“mute-style,” Korean
69, 294; Le musiche, sopra popular singing style), 274
l’Euridice (1601), 66 ppongtchak, 274
persecution, 26, 41–42 Pradhan, Aneesh. Samagam (2003), 93
Petrarca, Francesco, 167, 172 pragmatics, 13, 36–38, 66, 119,
pharmakon, 34 215–216, 227
phenomenology, 27 presence, 8–10, 18–19, 26–32, 34–36,
pheno-song, 82, 84, 99, 270, 287 38–41, 45–46, 49, 54, 61–62,
philosophical aesthetics, 8 69, 117, 123, 125, 130, 140,
phonation, 83 165, 187, 206, 209, 213,
phoné, 30, 35 268–271, 275, 277, 279–282
phoneme, 56, 62, 106, 160, 177–179, present non-presence, 18, 32, 269–270
181–182, 185, 189, 191, Pride, Charley, 268, 282
193–195, 197, 263, 288 pronounciation, 10, 56, 58, 69, 80,
phonetic abstraction, 185 123, 162, 164, 196, 260
phonetic organization, 5 psalmodic intonation, 123–124
phonetic transcription, 178, 185, psychoanalysis, 4, 17, 31, 61, 248–249,
196–197 259, 261–262, 269
phonetics, 10, 47, 176, 180, 278 Puccini, Giacomo, 222; La Bohème,
phonocentrism, 11, 78 118; Madama Butterfly, 116
phonograph, 269 pulmonic consonants, 182
phonology, 176–178, 195, 263 punk rock. See rock music
physicality, 9, 27–29, 31, 38, 117–120, pyŭngshinch’um (deformed dance),
123–124, 128 135
physis/polis, 41
pig organ legend, 11, 77, 291 Q
piivii (“promotional video”), 249 qieyin (segmented pronunciation), 56
Pink Floyd, 78 Qing (Chinese dynasty), 109
Pintscher, Matthias, 93 Qu Xiaosong (b. 1952), 56
Plato, 34–35, 38, 40, 188; allegory of quotation, 13, 51, 126–127, 129–131,
the cave, 167; Phaedrus, 33 241
plosive, 128, 191 qupai (labeled tunes), 105
polycultural, 8
polylogic, 13, 124 R
pŏmp’ae, 133, 141, 151, 156 racial, 204, 268, 282, 294
Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona), racialization, 100, 111, 269
209 Rahman, A. R., 79
pop ballad, 274, 279 rasa, 76, 92
Pop Idol, 237, 243 RCA-Victor (record company), 229
pop music, 17–18, 112–113, Rebelo, Pedro, 293
238, 268–269, 274, 277, recasting (“Umbesetzen,” Hans Blu-
281–282 menberg), 31
popular music studies, 3 reception, 3, 8, 14, 69, 108, 110,
Porter, Cole, 131 160–161, 164, 168
Posŏng Sori (p’ansori style in the recitative, 10, 49–50, 67, 279, 294
region of Posŏng), 155 reciter, reciting, recitation, 7, 10,
postcolonial, 100, 293 49–51, 53–56, 58, 61–62, 66,
postdramatic theater, 120 71, 102, 105–106, 108, 166,
post-hermeneutics, 9 289
postwar, 4, 7–8, 13, 46–47, 62, 116, Red Army, 229, 237
118–119, 128, 130, 137, 159, Red Ballads, 237
161, 289–290 red classics (hongse jingdian), 227
Potter, John, 1, 4 red culture (hongse wenhua), 227, 230,
Pousseur, Henri, 165 234, 240, 243
318 Index
Red Guards, 58, 240 288; Western rock, 258,
Red Jazz (hongse jueshi, CD-Set, 260
2000–2003), 234–235 rock ‘n’ roll, 129, 232, 240–241
red song business (hongge jingji), 227 Rockmaykan (Tokyo), 250
red song phenomenon (hongge xian- role model, 153, 250–251
xiang), 242 rōshō, 51, 54, 62
red songs (hongse gequ; hongge), Ross, Valerie (b. 1958), 292
16–17, 225–229, 231, 233–234, Rossi, Rett, 41
236–243, 285, 290 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Essay on the
Red Sun phenomenon (Hongtaiyang Origins of Languages (Essai sur
xianxiang), 232 l’origine des langues, 1781), 70
redemption, 11, 77–79, 81–82, 127 Royal Ancestral Shrine Ritual Music
re-ethnicization, 2 (chongmyo cheryeak), 146
refigured humans, 212 Royal Opera House, 126
reflexive modernization, 2
register notation, 56, 66 S
Rehnquist, Karin (b. 1957). Davids S.E.S. (Korean pop group), 279
nimm (1984), 92 śabda (sound), 87
reification, 2, 11, 18, 87, 220 saizen, 258, 260
relational musicology, 5 sakigoe, 256–257
Ren Guang (1900–1941), 228 saku (“to bloom”), 256
Renaissance, 66, 160 sampling, 77
representation, 18, 29, 32, 35, 41, samulnori, 135, 137, 143, 153, 155,
82, 85–86, 99, 140, 144, 162, 273–274
176–177, 197, 228, 234, 270, sangzi (voice), 56
276, 289 sanjo, 137
resonance, 27, 83–84, 87, 198, 218 sanjū, 51, 53
respiration, 83–84, 189, 270 Sanlitun Music (Sanlitun yinyue), 235
response, 26, 28, 33, 37–41, 130, 207, Sanskrit, 62, 76
236, 251, 276, 288 sarugaku, 121
responsivity, 9, 26 sasayaki, 64
reterritorialization, 2 satirical, 91, 127, 135, 232
revolutionary songs (geming gequ), 16, saying, 8–9, 25, 30, 38, 168, 291
226, 228–229, 243 Scandinavian, 84
rhetoric, 32–33, 35–36, 39–40, 232 Scelsi, Giacinto (1905–1988), 61, 159,
rhyme, 49–50, 102, 106 169, 288; Canti del Capricorno
Ricci, Matteo (1552–1610), 16, 205, 208 (1962–72), 14, 47, 92, 162–164;
Rihm, Wolfgang (b. 1952). Die Ham- Quattro Illustrazioni (1953), 162
letmaschine (1986), 128 Schaeffer, Pierre (1910–1995), 85, 91
ritual, ritualization, 3, 5, 14, 17, Scheffer, Frank, 205
49–50, 56, 61–62, 99, 101, 120, Schnebel, Dieter (b. 1930), 15, 61,
133, 135, 141, 143, 146, 152, 70, 175, 184–185, 197; Für
155–156, 159, 161–164, 166, Stimmen (. . . missa est) :!
169, 256, 272, 287–288 (Madrasha II) (1958, 1967–
Roads, Curtis, 85, 91 1968), 179–183, 186, 198; Für
rock music, 4, 17, 129, 226–227, Stimmen (. . . missa est) dt 31,6
231–235, 240–241, 250–252, (1956–1958), 198; Für Stim-
257–258, 260, 273–276, 281, men (. . . missa est) amn (1958,
288; Chinese rock, 240–241; 1966–1967), 198; glossolalie
folk rock, 278; glam rock, (1959/60), 6, 46, 92
17, 288; heavy rock, 251–252; Schoenberg, Arnold (1874–1951), 49,
indie rock, 276; Japanese 53, 56, 71, 159; Erwartung op.
rock, 250–251; punk rock, 18, 17 (1909), 6, 46; Pierrot Lunaire
240, 274, 276–277, 282, op. 21 (1912), 10, 47, 50, 58,
Index 319
60–61, 68, 70, 158; Variations Sharma, Prem Lata, 86
for Orchestra op. 31 (1926–28), Shen Wei, 205
165; Von heute auf morgen op. Shen Xingong (1869–1947), “Ticao”
32 (1928–29), 117 (“Physical exercise,” 1902),
Schola Cantorum, 187, 198 109–110
Schubert, Franz, 158 sheng (Chinese mouth organ), 208–
Schwitters, Kurt (1887–1948), 28; 209, 211, 236
Ursonate (1923–1932), 161 shi mianzi (lit. “losing face”), 204
SCREAM for the Chinese Rock’n’Roll Shimizu Osamu (1911–1986), 131;
Yesterday (Nahan—weile Shuzenji Monogatari (The tale
Zhongguo cengjing de yaogun, of Shuzenji, 1954), 116
CD-compilation 2003), 240 Shimoyama, Hifumi (b. 1930), 10, 61,
screaming, 1, 17, 77, 150, 273, 66; Breath (1971/1977), 62–64;
276–278, 282 Monolog (1991), 62
scripturality, 30–33, 38, 289 shin kugak (new traditional music)
Sebastian (King of Portugal and the (Korean contests, 1962–), 136
Algarves, 1557–1578), 210, 222 Shinagawa (Tokyo), 253–254, 258
secondary vocalization, 5–6 Shinjuku (Tokyo), 249, 252, 255
SeeYa (Korean pop group). “Kŭ nom shirakoe, 51, 53
moksori” (“Voice of a bad per- shoegazing, 281
son,” 2009), 280 Shogun (TV series), 252
Seibt, Oliver, 17, 251, 254–256, 265, shōmyō, 51, 62, 65
288, 294 shuilongyin (water dragon chant,
self-positing, 9, 38–40 labeled Chinese tune), 105
self-realization, 1 shuochang (Chinese narrative genre), 109
self-segregation, 203 shuqing gequ (sentimental love songs),
semantic, semantics, 5, 10, 15, 36–37, 238
48, 68, 82–83, 85–86, 102, si (type of Chinese poetry), 109
105–106, 151, 156, 160–161, Sidney, 237
163, 170, 175–177, 179, 188– sigimsae (idiomatic, stylized embel-
190, 193, 197, 271, 287–289. lishments in traditional Korean
See also desemanticization; non- music), 17–18, 138, 144,
semantic vocal music 146, 150, 271–272, 275, 281,
senritsukei (“melodic type”), 51, 70 291
Seo Taiji and Boys (Korean hip hop sign, 7, 25, 29–30, 32, 34, 40, 77, 111,
group). “Kyosil Idea” 195, 232, 279, 289
(Classroom ideology, 1994), 277 significance, 1, 6, 25, 29–30, 32–33,
Seoul, 135, 153–155, 276 40, 54, 99, 123, 189, 288
sequencing, 77 signification, 10, 12, 17, 30, 36, 68,
serialism/serial/serialist, 5–6, 62, 70, 101, 112, 263–264, 268, 270,
92, 159, 180, 290 278, 282, 288
Serres, Michel, 27 signified, 263, 278
Shaanxi, 102, 229, 231 signifier, 11, 25, 29, 79, 109, 112, 263,
shaman/shamanist music, 10, 56, 64, 268, 274–275, 278, 281
134, 141, 143, 151, 155 sijo, 144
shan’ge (mountain songs), 56, 58 Silk and Bamboo music, 76
Shanghai City Education Committee, 239 sillabazione scivolata, 10, 67–69
Shanghai Expo, 239 Simch’ŏngga (Song of the filial daughter;
Shanghai Music Bookstore, 225 p’ansori piece), 137, 145, 149
Shanghai Record Corporation, 229, 235 sinch’angak (Kim Dong-Jin), 13,
Shanghai, 111, 225, 228–232, 235, 137–138, 140, 154
239 Sing Loudly Jinggang Mountain
Shankar, Ravi, 165 (Fangge Jinggang, Chinese
Shanxi, 102 music competition), 236
320 Index
singing, 1, 4, 6–7, 10–13, 17, 25–26, sōsaku operas (creation operas),
41, 45–46, 56, 58, 66–67, 69, 118–119, 130
78–84, 86–88, 90–93, 100, sound design, 79
102, 106, 109–113, 118, 121, Soviet Union, 285
123–125, 128–130, 133, 137, SPACE Love (Konggan Sarang, Korean
140–141, 144, 146, 150, 152– performance venue), 135, 153
156, 158–159, 169, 206, 209, speaking with one’s own voice, 1, 30
218, 226, 228, 231–232, 234, speaking, 1, 9, 25, 28, 30, 36–37, 42,
236–237, 240–242, 253, 268, 58, 79–80, 83–84, 87, 100,
273, 275–280, 282, 285–287, 108, 120–121, 125, 127, 154,
291; ideologies of, 1 169, 203, 221, 233, 268–270,
situatedness, 2, 17 277–279, 286–287, 294
ska, 276 spectral fusion (Mike McNabb), 88
skin, 80, 204, 270 speech tones (Chinese), 104, 106, 112
slapstick, 127 speech vs. song, 3, 10, 45, 48–49, 51,
Sloterdijk, Peter, 11, 84 53, 68–70, 287
sobbing, 18, 279 Spence, Jonathan D., 205
social agents, 270 Sprechstimme/Sprechgesang, 49–50,
social communities, 2 56, 58, 60–61, 69, 71, 106, 121,
social order, 108 158, 277
socio-cultural difference, 69 sprezzatura ([noble] negligence), 66–67
sŏdo sori (Northwestern Korean vocal Staatstheater, 117, 119
style), 144 standardization, 12, 140, 176, 282
Sōgetsu Concert Series, 119 Steen, Andreas, 16, 112, 240, 243–
Son Min-Jung, 271 244, 285
Song (Chinese dynasty), 101 stereotype, 7, 17, 91, 160, 204, 268
song (recite), 102 Stockhausen, Karlheinz (1928–2007),
song ge (“praise songs”), 234 5, 119, 161; Gesang der
Song Xiaoming, 241 Jünglinge (1955/56), 159–160;
song, 3, 10, 26, 28, 45, 47–51, Gruppen (1955/56), 164; Zeit-
53–54, 56, 58, 65–66, 68–70, maße (1955/56), 165
78, 87, 93, 101–102, 113, Stone, Allucquére Rosanne Stone, 212,
133, 135, 137–138, 140–141, 222; The War of Desire and
143–146, 149–155, 158–159, Technology at the Close of the
162–163, 207, 285. See also Mechanical Age (1995), 211
geno-song; hanguk kagok story-tellers/story-telling, 45, 118, 124,
(Korean art song); pheno-song; 127, 273, 277
red songs; revolutionary songs Stravinsky, Igor, 210
(geming gequ); speech vs. song; structure, musical, 16, 48–49, 69, 145,
xuetang yuege (Chinese school 159, 289
songs); yishu gequ (Chinese art stylization, 17, 32, 50, 54, 58, 68, 109,
song) 124, 159, 163, 272
Songs Collection of China (Zhongguo Su Dongpo. See Su Shi
gedian, CD-Set, 2002), 3, 101, Su Shi (Su Dongpo). “Willow Catkins”
120, 140, 228, 230, 234–235 (Ci yun Zhang Zhifu yanghua
Songs of Red Little Soldiers (Hongxiao ci), 105
bing gequ, song collection subdialect, 195
1970), 230 subjectivity, 25, 36, 113, 213, 286
sŏngŭm (vocal quality), 154 subliminal, 280
sonority, 32, 45, 120, 128, 143, 149, Super Live Theatre (Tokyo), 254
263, 287 Supergirl (Chaoji nüsheng), 236–237
Soongsil University (Pyongyang), 137, suppression/oppression, 134, 161, 276,
154 279, 289
Sŏp’yŭnje (fi lm, 1993), 143 surisŏng (husky voice), 154
Index 321
sutra, 141, 155 Temiar (Western Malaysia, Orang Asli
Suzuki (heikyoku), 51, 53 aborigines/Senoi group), 64
Suzuki Tadashi, 131 Tenzer, Michael, 49, 294
Suzuki Teitaro, 166 tesensu (“arm fan”), 256–257
syllables, 28, 56, 66, 102, 106, 123, teshka, 79
146, 155, 160, 163, 167–168, testimonial, 38
179, 193–194, 278, 289 text and music, 5, 70
symphonia, 26 text-setting, 112
symphonic music, 78 texture, 14, 62, 86–87, 99, 120, 145,
Sze, Arthur, 57 149, 179, 190
Thailand, 49
T Thamus (King), 34
t’alch’um (Korean mask dance drama), The Army Is Marching Forward
134–135 (Jundui xiang qianjin), 229
t’oesŏng (gliding tone)., 155 The Puppet & Its Double Theater
t’ungso (Korean long vertical bamboo (Taiwanese puppetry troupe),
flute), 144 206
t’ŭrot’ŭ (Korean popular music genre), The Red Sun Shines at the Frontier
17, 267–268, 271–275, 281–282 (Hong taiyang zhao bianjiang),
taans (long ornaments, khyal), 88 235
taegŭm (Korean long transverse bam- The Red Sun. Odes to Mao Zedong
boo flute), 144, 155, 272 Sung to a New Beat (Hong tai-
Taihe Rye Music Co., Beijing, 235, 243 yang. Mao Zedong songge xin
Taiwan, 70, 195, 230–231, 239–240 jiezou lianchang, cassette tape
Takada Kazuko, 62 1991), 225, 231
Takadanobaba Area, 250, 254–256 The Sky in the Liberated Areas
Takahashi Yūji (b. 1938), 10, 19, (Jiefangqu de tian), 229
61–62, 66, 71, 294; Unebiyama The Valiant Spirit of Asia (Yazhou
(1992), 64–65 xiongfeng, 1990), 232
Takao Kawaguchi, 206 Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie
Takemitsu Tōru (1930–1995), 47 (Brussels), 131
Takemoto Gidayū, 53 Theuth (Thoth, Egyptian deity), 33–34
Takemoto Sumitayū, 55 Third Generation (Che Sam Sedae,
tam-tam, 141 Korean composers’ group,
Tan Dun (b. 1957), 19, 53, 69, 289; A 1981), 13, 136, 155
Sinking Love (1995), 92; Fu, three vulgars (san su), 238
Fu, Fu (1982), 56; Marco Polo Tian Hao Jiang, 206, 209
(1991–95), 10, 58–59, 71, 92; Tiananmen Square, 230–231, 233,
Nine Songs (1989), 56; On 239, 241
Taoism (1985), 56; Silk Road to mythodes (wonders), 35
(1989), 56–58; Tea (2002), 205 Tokyo Music School, 118
Tan Jing. See Han Geng & Tan Jing Tokyo University of the Arts, 118
Tang (Chinese dynasty), 101 tongsu (Chinese popular singing style),
Tang Dynasty (band), 241; “The Inter- 231–232
nationale” (Guoji ge, 1992), 233 tou, fu, wei (head, waist, tail). See
tanso (Korean small vertical bamboo fl qieyin
ute), 144 Tower Records, 249
Taoism, 56, 141 tradition, 3, 6–18, 35, 38, 41, 45,
Tawada Yoko, 42 47–49, 51, 53–54, 56, 58, 62,
tayū, 53–54, 68 64–66, 68–69, 71, 76–79,
technē, 34 82, 85–88, 90–91, 100–102,
technology, 16, 34, 78, 80, 152, 189, 105–106, 108–114, 117, 119,
206–207, 209, 211, 213, 215, 124, 130, 133–138, 140–141,
268–270, 281, 286, 293–294 143–146, 149, 151–156, 158,
322 Index
160–162, 164–166, 169, 177, 133–134, 137–138, 141, 143–
180, 206–208, 213, 215, 220, 144, 149, 151, 156, 158–159,
225, 230, 234, 258, 268, 161–163, 166, 175, 179–180,
271–277, 281, 285–293, 295 285, 292, 294
transcription, 53–55, 138, 154, 156, vocal styles, 2, 6–8, 10, 12, 18, 48–49,
162, 178, 183, 185, 196–197 51, 53–54, 56, 58, 64, 66–69,
transnationalism, 2, 207, 220–221 79, 93, 100, 102, 109, 133,
trouser roles, 7 144, 146, 158, 170, 268, 271,
Tsou (Austronesian ethnic group), 195 273–275, 278, 281–282
tsubuyaki, 64 vocal timbre, 10, 18, 46, 53–54, 88,
Tsugaru, 62 105, 108, 111–112, 144, 176,
tsugaru-jamisen, 62 211, 268, 272, 281, 285, 290
tusangzi (earthbound voice), 111 vocal utterance, 78, 83, 101–102,
twentieth-century music, 85 176–178, 188, 190
Twisted Sister, 250 vocality, 14, 47, 79, 91, 99–101, 108,
134, 137, 146, 265
U vocalization, 5–6, 12, 14, 45, 67,
Ueda Shizuteru (b. 1926), 166 80, 100, 112, 138, 140, 144,
Um Hae-Kyung, 153, 272 146, 149, 151–152, 154–155,
Unforgettable Songs. The Essence of 166, 175, 268, 270–273,
Revolutionary History Songs 275–276, 279, 281, 287–288,
(Nanwang gesheng. Geming 290, 292
lishi gequ jingcui, song anthol- Vocaloid (Yamaha voice synthesis
ogy, 1992), 232 technology), 206, 209, 213, 222
United States of America, 50, 91, 105, voice/voices, 1–2, 5, 9–10, 12–13,
251, 289, 292–294 15–18, 25, 28–30, 32, 34,
universal language, 160 37, 39, 41–42, 45–48, 53–54,
universalism, 60, 67, 160, 176, 220, 56, 58, 61–62, 64, 66, 69, 71,
222, 271, 274, 290 78–79, 81–84, 86–90, 92–93,
urban areas, 111 101, 105–106, 108–112, 114,
Utz, Christian, 3–4, 6–7, 10, 92, 114, 117, 119, 123–126, 128–129,
163, 172, 285, 287, 289–292, 133, 141, 143–145, 147–149,
294 151–152, 154–156, 160, 166,
168–170, 175–177, 184, 187–
V 188, 193, 196–197, 203–204,
Verfremdungseffekt (Bertold Brecht), 206, 209–211, 213, 219, 221,
117 226–228, 230–231, 233,
verismo, 119, 126 235–236, 239–240, 243, 249,
Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 35, 37 252–254, 256, 258, 262–265,
Versailles (Japanese band), 258 267–269, 271–272, 274–275,
Vidulgi OoyoO (Korean band). “Siren” 277–282, 285–286, 288–291,
(2008), 281 293; androgynous, 7; research/
Viñao, Alejandro. Chant d’Ailleurs ethnomusicology, 3, 49, 294;
(1992), 93 research/historical studies, 4;
Vinci, Leonardo da. Codex Arundel, research/in East Asian music,
167 4; research/monographs, 4;
Vishnu, 162 research/philosophy, 3, 14, 31,
visual-kei, 17, 248–262, 264–265, 288 35–36, 40; research/popular
vocal authority, 1, 18 music, 3; research/psychoana-
vocal genres, 47–48, 102, 109, 112, lytic approaches, 4; unlimited
133, 143, 151, 155 voices, 3, 287
vocal music, 3–6, 14–15, 18, 45–48, voicelessness, 87, 179, 185, 188, 191
51, 53, 66, 68–70, 78, 86, 90, vowel, 15, 28, 106, 163, 181, 183–184,
99–100, 108, 110, 113–114, 197–198, 278
Index 323
VSOP (Hong Kong electronic music work-concept, 19
group), 205 Workers & Soldiers (Gongbing yuedui,
vulnerability, 29, 40 Chinese punk band), 240
writing, 9, 27–28, 30–35, 38–40, 285,
W 287, 289
Wagner, Richard, 222; Flying Dutch- Wu Jing, 238
man, The, 127; Götterdämmer- Wu Songjin, 204
ung, 127, 131; Tannhäuser, 127 Wu, David, 237
Waits, Tom, 79, 86
Wakabayashi Ichirō, 118–119 X
wakauta, 65 X Japan (Japanese band). Blue Blood,
wanch’ang p’ansori (a p’ansori perfor- 250
mance in its entirety), 153 Xenakis, Iannis (1922–2001). Achor-
Wang Hao, 243 ripsis (1957), 165
Wang Liu, 101–102, 104, 110, 226, xenophobia, 285
228, 231, 238–239, 242–243 Xian Xinghai (1905–1945), 110; “Yel-
Wang Mingquan. Be a Brave Chinese, low River Cantata” (Huanghe
231 dahechang, 1939), 229
Wang Pingjiu (b. 1971), 239, 243 xibeifeng (“northwest wind,” popular
Wang Xiaohui, 226 singing style), 231
Wang Zhihuan (688–742), 101; “Up Xinhua (China’s news agency), 225
the Crane Tower” (Deng guan xini (refined), 109
que lou), 102, 104 Xinjiang, 112
Wanli (Chinese emperor, 1563–1620), xintianyou (Chinese folk song genre),
208 102
Warnaby, John, 120 xipi (Chinese tune-type), 71, 102
Wei Wei & Liu Han, 231–232; Yazhou xiqu (Chinese opera), 109
xiongfeng (The Valiant Spirit of xuetang yuege (Chinese school songs),
Asia, 1990), 232 12, 109–110, 112
Weidman, Amanda, 100, 113
Wen Deqing (b. 1958), 56 Y
Wenchuan earthquake (Sichuan, Yamada Kósçak (1886–1965), 51, 54,
China, 2008), 239 128; Ochitaru Ten’nyo (Fallen
Wendt, Heinz F. Sprachen, 180 angel, 1912), 130; Yoake—
wenya (civil), 109 Kurofune (The dawn—the black
Wessobrunn Prayer, 166 ships, 1940), 116–117
Westbrooke, Alwyn, 172 Yan’an Talks (Mao Zedong), 229, 232
Western music, 8, 12–13, 111, 133, yang (foreign), 111, 144, 232, 274, 289
135–136, 138, 140, 154, Yang Jianguo, 232
161–162, 206, 208, 215, 220, Yang Sŏk-Chin, 274
234, 290 yangak (Western music in Korea), 135
Western spoken drama, 49 yangbanxi . See model opera
Westernization, 12–13, 62, 133–134, Yano, Christine, 112–113
136–138, 140, 287, 290, 292 YB (Korean band), 273–274
whispering (sasayaki), 64 Yi A-Mi, 146
whispering, 1, 18, 33, 62, 64, 87, 279 Yi Man-Bang (b. 1945), 136; Akjang
Wichmann, Elizabeth, 56 (2001–2003), 146–147
Wiener Mozartjahr 2006, 126 yishu gequ (Chinese art song), 12,
Winehouse, Amy, 79 109–110
Wishart, Trevor (b. 1946). Red Bird yodelling, 272
(1978), 92 yogika (yogic), 87
Wolf, Hugo, 58 Yoon Do-Hyun, 273–274
Wolfsohn, Alfred, 46 Young, Samson, 16, 286
Wolgan Ŭmak (Korean journal), 153 youya (elegant), 109
324 Index
yukara (Ainu), 71 Zeng Zhiwen (1879–1929), 109
Yun Isang (1917–1995), 19, 135–136, Zhang Jianguo, 238
155; Collection of Early Songs Zhang Mingmin, 239
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Z zhuxuanlü, 227, 232, 241
Zang Tianshuo, 235 Zimmermann, Bernd Alois
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Vocal Music and Contemporary Identities (Christian Utz, Frederick Lau)

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Vocal Music and Contemporary Identities

Looking at musical globalization and vocal music, this collection of essays

Frederick Lau is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Hawai’i

1 Music, Science, and the

2 Bodily Expression in Electronic

3 Vocal Music and Contemporary

Edited by Christian Utz and

NEW YORK LONDON

ISBN13: 978-0-415-50224-5 (hbk)

Printed and bound in the United States of America on sustainably sourced

List of Figures and Tables ix

1 Introduction: Voice, Identities, and Reﬂexive Globalization in

2 Presence and Ethicity of the Voice 25

3 The Rediscovery of Presence: Intercultural Passages through

4 Imagining the Other’s Voice: On Composing across

5 Voice, Culture, and Ethnicity in Contemporary

7 Reconsidering Traditional Vocal Practices in Contemporary

8 Escaped from Paradise? Construction of Identity and Elements

9 The Notation and Use of the Voice in Non-semantic Contexts:

10 A “Digital Opera” at the Boundaries of Transnationalism:

11 “Voices of the Mainstream”: Red Songs and Revolutionary

12 Asagi’s Voice: Learning How to Desire with Japanese Visual-kei 248

13 Voicing Body, Voicing Seoul: Vocalization, Body, and Ethnicity

3.1 The three heikyoku styles shirakoe, kudoki, sanjū in a

3.1 Classiﬁcation of Intermediate Forms between Speech and

1. To avoid misunderstandings, all names in this Acknowledgments section

Raising one’s voice to “articulate” oneself by speaking, singing, whisper-

In the context of new music, secondary vocalization provided a large variety

The crossroads of individual and cultural identities, intersecting in the

1. A more elaborate discussion of the work-concept is beyond the scope of the

It is the chant of the muses with which Hesiod’s Theogony begins, or

MOMENT AND PHYSICALITY OF THE VOICE

In order to ﬁ nd a pathway through the labyrinth and different characters

THE TRACE OF PRESENCE

In a peculiar way the unnamable start of speech thus seems to be bound to

BEYOND THE MEDIAL

METACRITIQUE OF DERRIDA’S CRITIQUE OF PLATO

MIMESIS AND THE POWER OF SPEECH

TESTIMONIAL AND PARRHESIA

Language is thus never one’s own; it is the language of others in numerous

Aischylos. 1995. Prometheus Bound, translated by Georg Thompson, New York:

THE VOICE IN TWENTIETH- AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY MUSIC

I have always paid special attention to familiar musical genres—in a para-

Lachenmann has explained further that his compositional practice, developed

VOICE ARTICULATION AND CODIFICATION:

Table 3.1 Classifi c a t i o n of I n t e r m e d i a t e F o r m s b e t w e e n Speech a n d Song

intonation/range: expansion reduction

expansion of I reduction of\

no kotoba j sashi i kakaru] tsuyogin ryowagin

shomyo', sashigoe kirigoe hikigoe

song inherent to many elaborate vocal styles. This obvious shortcoming

Fragmentation and Montage (gidayū-bushi, Tan Dun, Schoenberg)

(Hn»43) ON — NA-KA FU - WA NO SE - Kl TO M TO'[line 46 KH - TA o IA - YD -N

NA - m AU KO - TO - SA - E MO K A - T A - I - T O NO HA-WA-SA-MA-E (fern (RneSt)SA-KA-t NO KA-WA Nt HEDATE-

Qbwt^MU-SU-BO-RE -TO - KE-NU WA - GA O - MO-1 - RA-RE (Una ») MO - NO H — KA-WA-SU KO - TO

KO-I - SHI YU - KA - SHI - I Kl - YO - FU - NE - SA- MA 8A- E MO NA - RA - NU WA - QA — Ml

(Nr»4S) KO-NO-YA-MA NO A - NA TA NO MA - MA NA - RA NU(Hn«S3) I - MA WA NA-KA-NA-KA

a eh war zen, hoch hei li gen Waaeh . tisch dea