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Jenny Johnson: “Example in a Single Voice”

From the album Vox Humana: Alfred Wolfsohn’s Experiments in Extension of Human Vocal Range (1956)

Traumatized by his experience at the front in World War I and deeply disturbed by the oppressive employment of the voice in Nazi propaganda, the German voice teacher Alfred Wolfsohn (1896-1962) developed in the 1950s a unique approach to vocal pedagogy that sought to help singers discover their voice as a means of therapeutic self-realization. Wolfsohn’s method was inspired by the belief that all people, barring physical disability, were capable of using their voices to create a wider range of sound than is customarily thought possible. He dismissed the conventional division of human vocal ranges, arguing that such designations are meaningless if singers can be trained to produce over a nine-octave range. (He also rejected the idea of a significant difference in capabilities of vocal production between men and women.)

Wolfsohn’s experiments are documented on this 1956 release, part of a remarkable series of albums of experimental and electronic music put out by Folkways Records from the 50s to the 80s. (These albums have since been digitized and are available as reasonably priced downloads from Smithsonian Folkways, complete with the original liner notes.) On this record one can hear Wolfsohn’s singers’ remarkably extended vocal range, from a croaking mega-bass to an uncanny sopranino that resembles nothing so much as the electronic keening of the Theremin. The singers also experimented with tone production, learning to mimic the timbres of familiar instruments: one track on the album features four women singing an excerpt from a string quartet.

The record comes complete with an imprimatur in the form of an introduction by Henry Cowell, the high priest of the American musical avant-garde. In his introduction, Cowell hails the possibility not merely of vocal imitation of known timbres, but of the discovery and compositional exploitation of new timbres by the liberated voice—an ideal quite similar to that pursued contemporaneously in electronic music studios. Cowell sees Wolfsohn’s work as heralding a “modern sort of English madrigalism,” a prophecy that would be fulfilled by the radical vocal compositions of Berio, Stockhausen, and others in the 1960s. But perhaps the most direct connection to Wolfsohn’s methods is in the solo vocal work of Demetrio Stratos, whose Promethean efforts to extend the limits of his voice were rumored to have caused his early and unexpected demise.

March 03, 2011, 5:02pm

Mouth Music (Blaine Dunlap and Sol Korine, 1981)

Weird music can come from the most unexpected places. This ethnomusicological documentary video, which first aired on PBS in 1981, explores the remarkable phenomenon of “mouth music,” the bizarre and varied vocal practices of the residents of the American South. Communicative bird-calls and hollers, silly syllabic rhyming songs, and the virtuosic, rapid-fire delivery of auctioneers are just a few of the amazing sounds to be heard in this rare document of what critic Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America.”

“Years and years ago, the people who settled this country of ours used their voices in all kinds of unusual and wonderful ways. They sang work songs in the field to help pass the time, they taught rhymes and chants to their children, and they made their own entertainment, with ballads, nonsense songs, and crazy mouth sounds. Their music was as much talking as it was singing, and if you had to call it anything, today you’d call it mouth music.”

March 01, 2011, 1:17pm

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Luciano Berio: A-Ronne, part 5 (1974-75)

From the album A-Ronne / Cries of London

It is an unforgivable cliché to speak of some innate lyricism in connection with Italian composers, as it is to speak of French sensuality, German rigor, or (perhaps worst of all) American earnestness.  But Luciano Berio—who happens to be an Italian composer—is without quarrel one of the greatest vocal composers of the 20th century.  Berio explores the full diapason of the human voice: from guttural murmurs and throat noises to precise rhythmic utterances and undulating, inflected verbalizations that sound like some invented language.  Sometimes, he even has his singers sing.  

Like its predecessor, Cries of London, which also appears on this disc, A-Ronne is actually among the most traditionally lyrical of Berio’s vocal works: there are entire passages in which the ensemble intones in gorgeous madrigalian harmony. Berio always knows when to lay on the sweetness, and (more importantly) when to let it curdle.

A-Ronne (the name is an old Italian idiom meaning “from A to Z”) is based on a short text by the poet Edoardo Sanguineti, with whom Berio worked on a number of projects, including Epifanie (1959-60) and Labyrinthus II (1965). Sanguineti’s poem is a patchwork of short, fragmentary phrases, quotations, and allusions to sources such as Dante, Goethe, T. S. Eliot, the Bible, and the Communist Manifesto. 

Berio described A-Ronne as a “documentary” on Sanguineti’s text, a “theater of the ear,” in which, according to Nina Horvath, ”disparate vocal and textual elements combine into a unified whole, just as the many sides of a theatrical piece (such as staging, actors, lighting, and scenery) are synthesized to generate a total sensory experience.”  Commissioned by the Dutch radio station Hilversum, the work was originally written for 5 voices and radiophonic effects.  Berio later rewrote the piece for 8 voices, which is the version performed here by the Swingle Singers.

November 10, 2010, 11:48pm

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Karlheinz Stockhausen: Stimmung (excerpt; 1968)

From the album Stockhausen: Stimmung, performed by Singcircle, dir. Gregory Rose

While Stockhausen’s avowal of a pantheistic spirituality in his writings is sometimes difficult to take seriously, his 1968 composition Stimmung seems explicable only as the ecstatic credo of a devout postmodern universalist.

Stimmung is a German word rich in connotation, but most often meaning “tuning,” “mood,” or “atmosphere.”  The tonal spectrum of the work is generated from the overtones of a single low B-flat, to which the singers’ voices are anchored by an electronically-generated drone that they alone can hear.  Shifting vocal colors and gently pulsing rhythmic patterns shimmer across this sturdy harmonic edifice: the rhythmic profile and vocal timbre of each part is precisely notated, the latter using the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

The “score” for Stimmung is essentially an assembly kit comprising 51 short sections (or “moments,” as Stockhausen calls them) that are ordered uniquely for each performance, with certain limitations imposed by an overarching “form-scheme.”  Improvisation comes into play as the singers respond in various ways to the introduction of new material and determine the moments of transition to new sections.  The music is punctuated by the invocation of 29 “magic names” of divinities from various world cultures and snippets of erotic poetry penned by Stockhausen himself.

For the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Stimmung was presented in a spherical concert hall—another of Stockhausen’s brainchildren.  It was performed there 72 times:

Stockhausen designed [the hall] in conjunction with an architect and he placed fifty speakers around the hall so that the audience was surrounded with a circle of sound. He controlled the spatial quality of the sound from the desk on the platform in the centre of the sphere and he was able to make a sound mill that revolved around in circles over the audience’s heads. The spatial movement of the sounds became equally important as the other parameters of the sound such as duration and dynamics. (Rory Braddell)

In spring of 2003 I had the good fortune to hear New Music New College give three performances of Stimmung over the course of a week. The sustained, concentrated experience of these sounds created a wonderful effervescence in my head that lasted for days. This is transformative music.

April 09, 2010, 10:15pm