NOTE 14 FEB 2014: This essay was written early in my career. It is, in many ways, reflective of its time both in my life and in theoretical construct. Although I did make minor edits prior to re-posting, it is a young person’s voice which I have left, at its essence, intact. The basic premises continue to ground my work decades later. -Zhenya
To subtitle this essay “The Singer’s Impulse to Song” implies a relationship between singer and Song that goes far beyond what, for a long time now, it has been considered: song, meaning a musical composition forming the setting for words; and singer, meaning one who uses the voice to utter said songs. This popular representation of the singer/song relationship, demanding the separation of the singer from Song, may be perfectly applicable and acceptable in today’s musical context, but today’s musical context—driven by institutionalization, corporatization, commerce—creates this separation. The institutions seek to define music for all of humanity; they tell us what song is, how it fits into the realm of music, how to create it, how to perform it, even how to listen to it—in fact, the musical institutions establish rules making music (Song) a phenomenon so complex and elite that it must be taught, that anyone wishing to engage in musical activity (of any worth, according to the institution) must come to the institution for guidance. But I do not accept the institutionalization of Song. I defy the establishment that separates me from my Song, for I know that it is my flesh, my own private organism, that sings—not my intellect or my ability to follow rules. I say that Song is as utterly accessible to every creature on this earth as breathing because the singer’s impulse to Song results from a much more primitive, essential need than any institution will allow. I suggest two things: that Song gives presence to singers just as singers give presence to Song and that when we become singers of Song, our whole understanding of the human relationship changes.
Note that I speak of Song, not song. To speak of song requires an article of definition, for a song, by its very nature, has been defined. When we speak of a song, or the song, or that song, we speak of a composition—a structured, precise ordering of tones recognizable as a unit. Renée Cox’s “Are Musical Works Discovered?” proposes that the word song usually delegates a “work as a ‘creation’ rather than as a discovery, selection, or arrangement” (Cox 370). Such a song has been composed from the innumerable possibilities of Song, but “the object [the song] does not await in limbo the order that will free it and enable it to become embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity; it does not preexist itself, held back by some obstacle at the first edges of light. It exists under the positive conditions of a complex group of relations” (Foucault 1133). This “complex group of relations” embodies everything I call Song. I agree with Cox’s position that songs have an historical context because they were written by a particular person at a particular time in history for a particular reason. I also agree that Song, a kind of “sound structure” accessible by individuals, “has being independent of any possible context in time and space” (Cox 369). By marking the distinction between song and Song, I do not judge their value, ordering them hierarchically according to some increasing importance; rather, I show preexistence. We create songs out of Song. This does not devalue songs since they represent points of departure for sincere singers to work toward reestablishing what part of the song originally arose out of Song and towards reconnecting life, songblood, to the song.
Although I believe the origin of all songs must have arisen out of Song, for the purposes of this essay I write specifically of folk-song: songs to which average people living average lives feel a tradition—a connection. How does this connection manifest itself? Singers feel as if the songs were written about them, for them. They feel as though they have a personal investment in the songs, as if they recompose them each time they sing them. This concept is not unbelievable. What gets written down or remembered of a traditional piece of music only represents a basic outline of the whole experience of the song. Music, in its entirety, cannot fully be captured on paper or even imitated from one person to the next because each person’ voice is different. Additionally, songs exist in two ways concurrently: as the sound emitted directly from the singer and as the echo of the song in space. If we add one further aspect—that song is “not the heard sound but that sound as amended in various ways by the listener’s imagination” (Greene 195-96)—we quickly understand that one person can never exactly repeat a song. The whole experience of songs, then results from a collaborative act between the singer and the song (recomposition) and the singer, song, and audience (interpretation). The song gains qualities of Song by means of very close, individual connections.
My song/Song distinction may be difficult for people new to this subject to process. This is no surprise since I am attempting to describe the indescribable. Language cannot contain Song because language represents a limited system—with a limited number of words and limited ways of combining them—while Song represents the limitless. Like the word Love, Song describes not something of the material but something of the ethereal. Ask a person to define Love and you either get a very broad, all-encompassing statement that tells very little about Love or many smaller statements that you must synthesize for yourself into the essence of that person’ definition. Therefore, I will rework my definition of Song in different terms so readers may, through a similar kind of poetic synthesis, intuit Song.
For everything we call a song, there must first have been an impulse on the part of the singer, some spark of songblood causing a fragment of Song to burst forth. This songblood allowed the singer to give birth to the origin of the song. Eventually, this origin can be located anywhere within the completed, composed song, but what we call the song does not represent Song—it contains elements of Song in its origin, and Song was vital to its inception, but the part has been separated from the whole. When the singer stops bodily overflowing with the impulse to Song, stops giving birth to the origin of the song, and begins consciously creating a song, the singer becomes a composer no longer driven by the songblood of Song.
In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélèn Cixous wrote,
I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst—burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. (1233)
Although in the context of her essay Cixous speaks directly to women about writing, her comments apply equally forcefully to all who believe they could never sing. The musical institution would have us believe that singing has become “too high” and “too great” for the average person—the untrained person—but we must destroy that misconception (Cixous 1233). Training and technique don’t “overflow” from the body, Song does. We have lost our connection with and acceptance of bodily functions and fluids, a connection and acceptance that Cixous demands we regain when she says “my body knows unheard-of songs” (1233).
Cixous reminds us that our bodies connect us to “beautiful,” “luminous torrents”—to “that other limitless country” where “the repressed manage to survive” (1235). While Cixous specifically places women in the category of “the repressed,” I put all of humanity in this category. Society’s institutions have separated us all from our bodies, making them nothing more than containers for transporting our brains. Even the most pumped-up body builders do little more than follow institutional rules dictating that bodies conform to an ideal; they sculpt their bodies according to society’s intellectualization of them instead of according to nature. While I will not further Cixous’ arguements repressor/repressed, I do argue that through repression we have all, men and women alike, lost our bodies. Furthermore, I argue that we can only survive or escape this repression by stripping away our institutionalized conception of our bodies and working through the “unconscious” (the “limitless country” of poetry and of Song). Walt Whitman also links the body/Song connection with the unconscious. In “Song of Myself” he proclaims, “I am the poet of the body, / And I am the poet of the soul” (37). As a necessary result of this connection, Whitman agrees that gender need not alter the Song experience: “I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, / And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man” (37), and he recognizes in this non-discriminatory, body/Song connection a returning-to something which preexists our current society. He wants humanity to remember and to say, “I speak the password primeval. . . . I give the sign of democracy; / By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms” (41), and, “Through me forbidden voices, / Voices of sexes and lusts. . . . voices veiled, and I remove the veil, / Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured” (42). Whitman and Cixous argue for a similar state wherein the body “transfigured” unleashes these powers.
Our flesh sings if we let it, but we have been led to believe that this breaks rules. Breaking rules and opening ourselves to intuition frightens us because the element of spontaneity makes uncertainties unavoidable and because the institutions have programmed our brains to rest securely in predictable rules. Uncertainty, however, does not imply free-for-all or danger. The singer must uphold a responsibility to Song. The singer learns how to unleash the spontaneous, intuitive self by unlearning all of society’s inhibiting rules. Harry Plunket Greene, in his book Interpretation in Song, offers a distinction between this kind of singer and what institutions call the singer, “The singer may, in short, give himself a free hand, break every rule and just sing; and yet he has a rhythm of his own so strong that it sets the heart of the trained singer leaping, so subtle that it defies imitation—wholly fascinating, wholly unlearnable. It is Nature as opposed to Art” (Greene 221). What “sets the heart of the trained singer leaping” and “defies imitation,” is the fleshy self that flies singers into Song—the strong rhythm is the pulsing of songblood. Trained singers whose emphasis remains on learning how to sing can only rarely give Song such presence because they only learn how to imitate instead of how to access songblood— “ ‘how it works’ in order to ‘make it work’” (Cixous 1241). If we sing our selves, though, we reclaim our bodies in new ways, we “dash through and . . . ‘fly’” (Cixous 1241), and we alter human relationships.
Herein lies the paradox: by singing our selves, we touch Song and reclaim our bodies, but we must reclaim our bodies without maintaining consciousness of them. In order to fully “penetrate” Song, to reveal ourselves completely, “The body must be freed from all resistance. It must virtually cease to exist” (Grotowski 36). How can this happen? When we cease to concern ourselves with the body as desirable or undesirable, similar or different, functional or non-functional, when the body becomes more than a thing we look at—when the body disappears—then we rediscover and reclaim it, and we relearn how to reveal ourselves completely. At the moment we access Song, we release the body as we know it, as society has trained us to “know” it, and we let it fly. Our bodies receive new presence at the same moment we give presence to Song.
The singer doesn’t just plunge into the wild world of spontaneity and impulse without learning how to get there, but I will not prescribe new “rules” to institutionalize spontaneity and impulse. Each singer faces unique tasks of unlearning, and each singer must face these tasks as an individual. I cannot say, “Do this and you will move closer to the bodily connection with unconscious impulses that will fly you into Song.” But I can say, “let everything go that interferes with it [Song]” (Greene 201). It is an inductive technique. Singers working to unlearn rules quickly discover limits—perhaps not all at once—which they then can seek to eliminate by developing exercises and techniques to plunge themselves through their limitations and, thereby, beyond them. For instance, something as simple as breathing may pose a great problem for the person who has forgotten how to breathe most effectively (like a child). Years of slouching in chairs, or wearing body slimmers or girdles, or of smoking, to name only a few contributors, inhibit correct breathing by collapsing the rib cage and impeding the air flow. We say that “Correct breathing is perfectly simple. It should not present the smallest difficulty to anybody,” and we are correct in saying that it should not. Unfortunately, ineffective breathing usually poses the first limitation that singers discover they must eliminate. Cixous alerted us to the problem when she wrote “Censor the body and you censor breath” (1236). Here is a simple test to determine whether breathing limits you: lie on the ground, placing one hand on the chest and the other on the abdomen. If when breathing in the hand on the abdomen isn’t raised before the one on the chest, and if the movement doesn’t transfer smoothly and continuously, a breathing problem exists (Grotowski 148-49). Once a singer recognizes a breathing problem, he or she must ask what contributed to the problem and how to reverse it. Any number of possibilities could arise at this point. If poor posture contributes to the difficulty, perhaps conscious reminders to sit up straight will suffice, or perhaps a series of exercises to loosen and strengthen the spine must be employed. Holding tension in the back of the neck or in the jaw closes the larynx and inhibits breathing, so the sufferer of TMJ has a big physical obstacle to overcome before even addressing the vocal apparatus. The point is not to explore all the possibilities here but to emphasize the deep-rooted complexity of our bodies’ inhibitions. Learning how to pay attention to our bodies allows us to recognize our own limitations and determine how to eliminate them. As a result of eliminating our limitations, the “physical use” of the voice becomes an “unconscious response” to impulse (Greene 4). “[T]his [vocal] apparatus must be able to produce sound reflexes so quickly that thought—which would remove all spontaneity—has no time to intervene” (Grotowski 35).
And so we return to the problem of accessing the spontaneous unconscious. Rather than being frightened by uncertainties, we must begin by learning how to pay attention to certainties. We start with what’s around us. For example, many of us spend most of our time within classroom or office walls without every paying close attention to the space itself. If I were to try to focus the sound of my voice on the tray of a dry erase board, what would I discover? Would the tray ring, echoing my vocal vibrations, or would it absorb the sound? If I listen for the silence of the room, can I hear the hum of fluorescent lights or the rumblings of cars on the street outside or the echo of a door clicking shut down the hallway? How would my voice react to each of these sounds if I simply let it utter whatever unusual sound it desired? Making simple tasks helps to alleviate the “I have no idea what to do” syndrome and also helps to understand that it’s not a matter of doing but of allowing. These tasks must aim at “spontaneous vocal reactions” rather than ending with the “calculated” tasks, though. For instance, use the voice against objects:
Use your voice to make a hole in the wall, to overturn a chair, to put out a candle, to make a picture fall from the wall, to caress, to push, to wrap up an object, to sweep the floor; use the voice as if it were an axe, a hand, a hammer, a pair of scissors, etc. (Grotowski 166)
Above all, remember to respond to the echo of your voice, not to its actual sound, or you will close of the larynx and create a new limitation. It all sounds strange—and it will feel strange at first—but confronting the discomfort, learning what causes the discomfort, helps eliminate another limitation.
Do we really need to get into all this to access Song? Yes, for if we must access our unconscious spontaneity, we must learn new ways of paying attention to how to respond instantaneously with our entire bodies before our thoughts interfere. Only by eliminating everything that hinders our bodies—by stripping away all that society has done to them—can we regain them: pay attention to them.
The same necessity of stripping away applies when singing a song if the singer wishes to create something inimitable. The singer’s very self, when stripped of its habits and limits, cannot be imitated because it does not imitate. Meeting the song and getting to know it with the self, the singing flesh, means first discovering the origin of the song. There is no certain path or shortcut to accomplishing this. If you are truly paying attention and engaging all of the body, you will “know” when you have discovered the origin of the song. A song may be sung fifty times or fifty years before the singer even starts the journey to meeting the song. Once the songblood is discovered, however, the song will seemingly recompose itself, transcending everything represented by the simple ordering of tones—it touches Song.
Unlike composition, where deadlines control your work, Song knows no boundaries in time. You have your entire life to fly in Song. Eugenio Barba wrote of his Odin Teatret, ”All the . . . performances finish with [S]ong, whether collective or solitary, as if the human voice embodied an appeal, a necessity for presence and relationship” (Barba 79-80). It does. The end of the performance represents a change in the very special actor/audience relationship, a change the actor as singer regrets because it marks a return of the audience to institution, order, rules. The actor/singer’s body reacts. It responds with Song, appealing to the audience: “The performance may be over, but there’s so much more to explore together.” In the Odin Teatret experience as well as in life, Song seeks to change the very nature of the human relationship. It changes presence by changing how we pay attention. Words fail where experience carries me. I can lead my readers no feather. Come and experience the journey to Song with me.
Works Cited
Barba, Eugenio. “Voice, Sound, Music.” Beyond the Floating Islands. New York: PAJ Publications, 1986. 76-81.
Cixous, Hélèn. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” In The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford Books, 1990. 1232-45.
Cox, Renée. “Are Musical Works Discovered?” The Journal of Aesthetics in Art Criticism 43.4 (1985): 367-74.
Foucault, Michel. From The Archaeology of Knowledge. In The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford Books, 1990. 1130-54.
Greene, Harry Plunket. Interpretation in Song. London: Macmillan, 1966.
Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968.
Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” Walt Whitman: Selected Poems. New York: Gramercy Books, 1992. 15-85.
