We are Sonorous Beings!
Let’s talk about bodies!
And voices!
— with a Misha Music Video Mini, ta boot!
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A Series of Posts: Thinking About Voices & Bodies
SONOROUS
from Latin sonorus ‘resounding’ from sonor ‘sound, noise,’ from sonare ‘to sound, make a noise’
Ok, so, there was this very cool guy—now dead, rest his soul—who died at a pretty young age, like in his early 50s—anyway, his name is Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He was a French philosopher in the mid-20th century and was on the radio(!) when philosophers did such things. He was kinda pop, really. And his ideas have been all the rage in the humanities and performing arts since then (and for probably too long). But I digress.
My work with the voice and body is related to Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of embodiment: the experience of being a body, that is, the idea that we are not separate mind-entities inhabiting bodies. In The Phenomenology of Perception (1945) he writes, ‘I am not in front of my body, I am in it, or rather I am it’ (173). In my work (and life), I experience this inseparability of the body, vocality (all the wondrous things the voice does), and singing:
I am not in my body
I am my body
And so, I am my voice:
voice & body united
voice-body-body-voice
‘The world is not what I think, but what I live through’.
(also from The Phenomenology of Perception, xviii-xix)
Merleau-Ponty had a lot to say about poetry and visual art, and some things about music—but one of the coolest ideas in that the timbre, or sound of language is its essential meaning and poetry ‘is a creation of language, one which cannot be fully translated into ideas’ [(Merleau-Ponty [1948] 2004, 100). Other folks have said similar things about language, but I’ll save some of that for a later post].
A Misha Music Video Mini - 18 seconds —
A setting of Merleau-Ponty’s words from The Visible and Invisible (1964):
Why sing if one can simply speak?—because it is the form that is paramount and not the function: ‘poetry’s first function…is not to designate ideas (100). If singing is an expression of embodied poetry, then singing’s first function is also not to ‘designate ideas’. As the poet Paul Valéry wrote in the early 20th century, ‘If a bird could say exactly what he sings, why he sings it, and what, within himself, is singing, he would not sing’ (Gilbert 1970, 18). I love that SO MUCH. Vocality, then, is its own radical, sonorous landscape wherein functional meaning and linear narrativity is exceeded.
I’m now gonna throw Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero (2005) into the mix here, whom is neither dead nor a guy. She has lots of groovy things to say about poetic language and sonority—about the resonant sphere of language that is ‘pervaded by a musical rhythm’ where ‘vocality explodes…comes to the surface, and commands the meaning’ (137). She asserts that sonority ‘disturbs the system of reason’ (118) and exerts a disorganizing effect on languages (132). I hitch my wagon to Cavarero’s ideas, as she beautifully expresses my views on vocal expression-composition and its potential to subvert denotative meaning. Her theories speak deeply to my creative process and the resulting works: the voice is not so much a medium of communication and oral transmissions, but is ‘bound to the rhythms of the body’ in a way that destabilizes the rational system of speech (11). Nom! Nom! Nom!
It is with this approach that I set text for my own voice, allowing vocality—my voice-body—to drive the trajectory of a creative project.
We are sonorous beings!
Yeah!
This post is a (very!) revised and slightly irreverent (and thus, reader-friendly) fragment from my recently approved doctoral thesis, ‘Vocality as / in Composition: solo and collaborative creation of new postopera works’. Bath Spa University, UK.
Cited Sources for The Inquisitive, Bored, & Indifferent
Cavarero, Adriana. 2005. For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Translated by Paul A. Kottman. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gilbert, Stewart, translator. 1970. Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Volume 14. Analects. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 2002. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London, New York: Routledge Classics. First published in French as Phénoménologie de la perception, 1945 by Gallimard, Paris.
––––––––. (1948) 2004. The World of Perception. Translated by Oliver Davis. New York: Routledge. Originally published in French as Causeries, 1948 by Éditions du Seuil, Paris.
––––––––. (1964) 1968. The Visible and Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Originally published in French as Le Visible et l’Invisible, 1964 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris.
Penton, Misha. 2021. ‘Vocality & Embodiment’ in ‘Vocality as / in Composition: solo and collaborative creation of new postopera works’, 25-7. PhD Diss. Bath Spa University, UK.