We are drawn to song, which seems to cut right across so many of the dualisms that structure modern Western thought and practice: between text and melody, rationality and emotion, individual and collective, form and content. … Seemingly narrower than related concepts like music, voice or sound, song opens onto specific territories and questions of its own: What is a song? Where do its borders lie? How do we handle its powers and forces? What is it that allows song to so vastly exceed the sum of its constituent parts? How is it that so many disparate elements – rhythm, vibration, melody, language, narrative, image, culture, affect – can bind together in those malleable yet seemingly indestructible beings we call songs? Is there an indissoluble link between song and the human, or between song and life? We are pleased to offer here a collection of essays and interventions that explore these questions and more. Rather than providing answers, they offer glimpses and insights into possible worlds of song. If nothing else, these collected voices firmly refute the persistent idea that song consists of melody plus words. While there is no lack of engagement with the melodic and the textual, these pages are also filled with migration, translation, ecology, identity, place, ageing, politics, heritage, animality, materialisms, post-humanisms and many other key sites of contemporary contestation.
Our call for contributions began with the quotation above, a translation from the sixteenth-century manuscript Cantares Mexicanos. The strikingly concatenated adjectives that Tomlinson strings together to translate this Nahuatl invocation invite us to consider the extraordinary power of the written archive to outlast colonial destruction; the valuable but problematic work of the historical (ethno)musicologist who attempts to read and interpret lost song practices from a contemporary perspective; the much noted ephemerality of the song ‘itself’ as it vanishingly makes itself present through its poetry; the urgency of recentring indigenous conceptions of life and practice, both those that continue and those that have been lost; and the forcefully synaesthetic power that this particular song invokes. What can it be to turquoise-sunray-polish a song? The language of this song text tells us much about a possible way of working with song: to tzinitzcan-bird-feather-mount it; to precious-turquoise-scatter it. For this singer/author, the musicality and musicking of song – what Tomlinson calls ‘songwork’ or what we might also call songing – is an act that brings worlds into being. In this threading of voice, body, melody, words, sounds, images, rhythms, relationships and moments, we see a tender but vital key to the most urgent questions of humanity, culture, ecology and being.
The contributions to this issue could be arranged in many different ways. Here we draw out a few of the themes that connect them, without suggesting that these are definitive and while recognizing that many of the contributions touch upon more than one of them. These themes are, in an order assembled mostly by intuition: the theme of place and transmission; the theme of the non-lexical; the theme of the decolonial; and the theme of the non-human/post-human.
THEME OF PLACE AND TRANSMISSION
Rulers knew a people by the songs they sang. When Prince Ji Zha of Wu visited Sun Muzi he asked the latter’s singers to perform songs from each of the various states. Whereas he found the airs of Zheng
too refined and prophesied that Zheng would soon perish, he judged the songs of Qi to be ‘great airs’ (dafeng), giving voice to a state with unfathomable possibilities. Ji Zha presumably discerned in the airs of the various states the feelings and disposition of the people who sang them.
Shigehisa Kuriyama (Citation1999: 243)
The songs we hear in childhood stay with us forever. When we travel, we take them with us. But there can also be profound shifts in our songworlds: moments when a new kind of song finds us and takes up residence in our bodies, permanently transforming who we are; or when a genre or style of song suddenly finds itself abandoned, no longer needed or pertinent to our ways of living. It is a common idea that songs transmit culture, but in doing so they also contain and embody the specifics of place and the meaning of geography – whether at home, in transit or in exile.
In her article ‘Singing Our Place’, Danish theatre artist Katrine Faber gives a poetic account of working with communities in Denmark, Greenland and Iceland to encourage the use of singing and performance to reconnect with place, memory and identity. At the same time she examines the potential of using song to explore our relationship to nature and the wider ecology. The essay begins with individuals reaching for the freedom to find the songs within. Faber writes: ‘I have been impressed so many times by the enormous creativity of the human voice and the capacity of voice work to figuratively “bring us home” – to the body’. Later, her very personal narrative gives us an opportunity to gain an understanding of the practical and philosophical challenges of such work, particularly where the artists are working outside their own cultural boundaries and where the conditions that formed those communities may involve problematic cultural relationships and histories. Faber asks if it is still possible to regain the ability to feel deeply connected to the places most important to us and to nature:
Singing is something they do on television as milk is something you buy in the supermarket. The gift of the human voice could be this: to be the bridge of resonance that connects our inner world with the outer world. When we explore all kinds of sounds in the human voice, the civilized educated parts and the wild, raw instinctive parts, we can, in a very concrete way, bring together the fighting polarities in modern consciousness and create new connections.
For those who have been displaced, music, and especially songs, are an important connection to home and a sense of identity. In ‘Welcoming Voices: Memory, Migration and Music’, Dominic Symonds analyses the responses of Polish and Lithuanian migrants who have recently settled in Lincolnshire. Here it is not so much participating or performing that is the focus of the study as listening. As Jakub, one of the respondents says, music ‘is one of those things that you can take with you without a suitcase; it is part of who you are, I guess, like your identity’. But Symonds reveals that the migrants he interviewed also spoke of listening to voices on a global scale and of the need to hear songs that once evoked freedom and another way of life, when they were still living in their home countries. Now in the UK, these songs are familiar and important to many migrants, but the study explores the difference between these and songs and musical influences that recall the respondents’ own cultures. Song in this context is bound up not only with identity but with comfort, loss, political courage, religion and freedom.
There has been much discussion in recent years about song in the context of health and well-being. As an understanding of the role of ‘implicit musical memory’ in the elderly and those with dementia has progressed, methods of using music and song with such patients have been explored. (The proliferation of dementia choirs are just one example.) In ‘Striking a Chord: Dementia and song’, daughters Prabhjot Parmar and Nirmal Puwar, based in Canada and the UK respectively, offer personal and detailed accounts of their own engagements, through song, with a parent suffering from dementia. This is examined within their particular cultural contexts. As Puwar uses Punjabi women’s songs, gestures and dances from important social interactions such as weddings to give pleasure and ignite recollection in her mother, we also hear how Parmar helps her father recall the melodies he once played on his harmonium and the songs he loved from films and other Punjabi and Urdu-Hindi sources. These moving, individual accounts are used with candour and sensitivity to illuminate a range of neuroscientific studies that have direct bearing on our understanding of how music, movement and especially song are deeply interwoven with memory and culture. The two interconnected accounts also offer insight into the potential practical application of these understandings in future.
It is the potential of the visual representation of song and language that Enrico D. Wey takes as his inspiration in constructing his artist pages ‘fertile fields’, an experimental form of song score. On these pages he uses Mandarin pictograms to create a score that might be interpreted in a similar way to notation on a chromatic staff. As he explains: ‘The notated score serves to highlight the capacity for pictographic languages to influence song in ways that alphabetic-based languages might not’. Wey has in mind to use this song to begin a process of understanding the structure of language within a song, including how language shapes the capacity for interpretation as well as how the performative act of song relates to memory and landscape. There have been many well-documented experiments in musical scoring for voice or instruments, some of which are now established and used regularly. This transcription as mnemonic and visual text is an emerging contribution to notation as an ever evolving field of research and practice. It concludes a first set of contributions touching on themes of place and transmission, translation and adaptation.
THEME OF THE NON - LEXICAL
There is evidence that early human species were able to dance and sing several hundred thousand years before homo sapiens sapiens emerged with the capacity for speech as we now know it.
John Blacking (Citation1987: 22)
While it may be impossible to prove definitively that song predates speech, there can be no question that the meaning conveyed by the voice far exceeds that which is transcribed in written language. The vocal sounds and utterances that we call ‘non-lexical’ are those that have no definitional meaning as words, but which may nevertheless convey the embodiment, musicality, intention, affect and identity of the singer. Many of the contributions in this issue touch upon the non-lexical and demonstrate that, although these aspects of song may not be strictly lexical in the sense of having an entry in some dictionary, they are nevertheless brimming with significance. More than what Roland Barthes called the ‘grain’ of the voice, we are talking here about a universe of vocal sounds that range from conscious to unconscious, from individual to culturally formed, and from the beautiful or harmonious towards what is perceived as noise.
Patrick Campbell’s and Gelsey Bell’s contributions examine the non-lexical in European and American artistic practices that go beyond the song ‘proper’ as a transmissible form to consider how it lives viscerally and physiologically in the bodies of performers. In ‘Disciplining the Scream: Third theatre praxis and song-action in the work of Altamira Studio Theatre’, Campbell begins by offering a sophisticated contemporary take on the well-known work of Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret, before turning to focus on the much newer Altamira Studio Theatre company, which has grown out of it over the past decade. Acknowledging the complex cultural politics that attend much post-Grotowskian song-based theatre – discussed also in Spatz’s contribution below – Campbell maintains that ‘the ethical significance of embodied craft and labour’ in these practices cannot be reduced to a simple act of appropriation. Altamira Studio’s approach to layered musicality goes even further than that of Odin when it comes to the incorporation of popular music and culture, allowing Campbell to conclude with a consideration of how its members work to maintain ‘a Third Theatre ethos while surviving financially as young migrant artists living in Denmark’.
New York based performer Gelsey Bell examines a different corpus and lineage of experimental performance in ‘Gestural Song Form in Experimental Vocal Music’, which considers the work of artists such as Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara and Alvin Lucier, as well as a younger generation including Odeya Nini and Bell herself. Across this diverse body of work Bell traces contributions to what she argues should be regarded as a new form of ‘gestural’ song. She develops this idea by analysing these examples in terms of their methods of composition, notation and potential for repetition, as well as a detailed exploration of the vocal qualities employed in the creation of such songs. In Bell’s own ‘embodied songwriting’ practice, ‘musical structures – rhythmic, melodic, lyrical – act in concert with the movement or posture of [her] performing body and their emotional resonances’.
A very different but perhaps complementary approach to complex musicality is offered by Mahesh Radhakrishnan in ‘Musicolinguistic Approaches to the Study of Song’, a short but densely referenced introduction to more formal musicological and musicolinguistic methods of song analysis. In the included sample of Radhakrishnan’s own multilayered notation, which he calls a ‘musicolinguistic graph’, conventional Western staff notation is placed alongside insider systems of notation where available (in this particular case South Indian Carnatic swarams), linear depictions of melodic contour, durations of phrases to objectively capture pacing, text in an accessible and conventional roman-based orthography and also international phonetic alphabet, translation and a fieldnote.
Making explicit one of the key themes throughout this issue, these contributions demonstrate just how much more is incorporated in song than the combination of melody and words.
THEME OF THE DECOLONIAL
Where shriek turns speech turns song – remote from the impossible comfort of origin – lies the trace of our descent.
Fred Moten (Citation2003: 22)
The contributions in this section continue to explore lexicality and non-lexicality, positioning these not only as sites for experimental and non-conscious meaning but also as tools or battlegrounds in decolonial struggles. We are reminded by these articles that what appears to be non-lexical in one context may be emphatically lexical in another.
In ‘Decolonizing the Mind Through Song: From Makeba to the Afropolitan present’, Quintina Carter-Ényì and Aaron Carter-Ényì draw attention to the ‘priming’ and ‘framing’ devices used by Miriam Makeba to draw connections between the singing of songs in her own language of Xhosa and the ongoing violence of the apartheid regime in South Africa. In the context of the Black Power movement in the United States and global resistance to anti-black racism, Makeba found it essential to underscore precisely the lexicality of the language in which she was singing. Through verbal introductions, ‘Makeba primes her varied audiences to hear her performance as a product of human language, not gibberish’. Further, Carter-Ényì and Carter-Ényì take their consideration of the use of African languages forward through a number of contemporary artists, arguing that current musical practice draws more on Makeba’s ‘Afropolitan’ approach – which ‘embraces the innate cosmopolitanism of Africa’ – than on the Pan-Africanism championed by her contemporary Fe.lá Kuti.
Ben Spatz also attempts to identify decolonial potential in acts of singing – this time in the context of contemporary Jewish identity and its complex relationship to whiteness, colonialism and academia. In ‘Molecular Identities: Digital archives and decolonial judaism in a laboratory of song’, Spatz analyses a series of choices made in the framing and implementation of the research project Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Song-Action. Through these methodological choices, Spatz aimed to engage practically with contemporary theories of race and religion, drawing on critical race studies and post-structuralist theories of identity to reimagine the theatre laboratory as a site in which identity can be not only explored and examined but also discovered and invented. Engaging with many of the same issues raised by Campbell’s study of Altamira Studio Theatre – but here grounded in an academic context of embodied and artistic research – Spatz argues for a ‘politics on the laboratory floor’ based on ‘reontologizing identity at the molecular level’.
The same questions underpinning the Judaica project – What is a song? and Who owns a song?, the latter suggested during the research by Nazlıhan Eda Erçin – are used by Spatz as starting points for a series of short interviews with seven contemporary artists who are working on, through and out of song in challenging and exciting ways. ‘What Is a Song?’, by Gey Pin Ang, Massimiliano Balduzzi, Ditte Berkeley, Daniel Alexander Jones, M. Lamar, Samita Sinha and Tatyana Tenenbaum with Ben Spatz, offers a series of glimpses into the authors’ diverse lines of research. Additionally, the selection of contributors to this piece draws an explicit bridge between two communities that have most often developed along parallel lines and which in various ways have had tremendous influence upon the practices shared and discussed throughout this issue: those working in a post-Grotowskian milieu and those working in the milieu of contemporary performance centred in New York City.
THEME OF THE NON - HUMAN / POST - HUMAN
As for the nightingale’s song, it has always had for me the extra resonance of oratory. It hovers on the edge of speech, of dramatic monologue.
Richard Mabey (Citation1997:29, emphasis in original)
The final set of contributions emphasizes a growing recognition that, while song can be figured as quintessentially human, it also cuts across species differences and materialities, compelling us to recognize our inextricability from animals, with the earth and with our own constructed technologies. Emma Bennett’s beautifully written account of her research practice reveals the frustration of attempting to capture birdsong with her own voice and on paper, but it is also an examination of the long-standing human fascination with birdsong. In ‘Bird Talking? Finding speechfullness in the songs of birds’, we follow Bennett’s struggle as a practitioner: to reproduce the sounds she can fleetingly discern yet which seemingly escape her, but equally to understand the significance of pause and silence within song.
At the scene of the performance, though, it may be that the strongest impression is made by silence. Thought to be listening pauses, suggestive of reciprocal communication between birds, the Robin’s silences last several seconds. It feels, during these pauses, that the bird is not so much awaiting an answer as demonstrating his mastery as a performer: manipulating my attention, making me wait, heightening my awareness of the fact that he is the one doing it.
Bennett’s journey takes us into the world of birdsong heard through theories ranging from the scientific and poetic, to musical and philosophical, all of which allows us to reflect on the human voices and the sounds and songs through which we communicate daily – often, again, without a word being spoken.
Sam Lee is renowned for his innovative, contemporary interpretations of traditional folk songs from the UK and Eire. His conversation with Joan Mills, ‘Tending the Flame’, also begins with birdsong – in this case the nightingale’s – and our relationship as humans to nature. But it returns eventually to where this editorial began, with issues of place, memory, transmission and how tradition may be renewed and illuminated through innovation. Lee’s personal history – and particularly his relationship with British traveller families such as the Robertsons, from whom he inherited many ancient songs – is explored and, in doing so, the nature and purpose of song itself is examined. Lee’s Singing with Nightingales project is discussed in this context, along with the question of legacy, approaches to performance, and the qualities that allow the singing of certain songs to bring us into metaphysical regions.
From live creatures and performance we turn to ‘Dead Animals: Ontologies of recorded songs through the analogue of taxidermy’. In this article, songwriter Johny Lamb offers a series of challenging considerations on the nature of recorded song. He asserts: ‘A stuffed bird is at once a real bird and not a real bird, as produced music is at once a real performance and not. Playing live and producing recordings become related but very different disciplines’. In developing the theme of taxidermy, Lamb makes use of Poliquin’s writing in The Breathless Zoo, as well as Barthes’ Camera Lucida and other thinkers including Paul Théberge, Kim Cascone and Evan Eisenberg. Through the taxidermy metaphor, Lamb sheds light on the ontological complexity of recorded song.
A final contribution, from Sissi Liu, makes explicit a theme that appears throughout many of the articles: namely the inextricable link between technological developments and ontological shifts in our understanding of what song is and what it can do. In ‘Everybody’s Song Making: Do-it-yourself with and against Artificial Intelligence’, Liu begins by offering a valuable overview of the history of audio recording technologies since the phonograph. She then goes on to consider the most current innovations in ‘DIY’ song creation, which include two distinct strains: one in which Artificial Intelligence is positioned as surpassing and supplanting human creativity; and another in which new technologies are incorporated into a renewed politics of humanism. Drawing on data studies as well as the economics of software distribution, Liu reminds us of the extent to which contemporary data infrastructure ‘reproduces and reinforces oppressive infrastructures through coding and tool-building’. In contrast, Liu defends an approach in which
human DIY song making retains its pivotal value in producing new sounds that defy past algorithms and patterns, giving attention to under-represented voices, and desisting from data-centric cultural production endeavours through humanist sounds of the future.
We are grateful to each of the contributors for entrusting their work to us, as we now entrust the reader to the care of their rich and multiple voices, offering one final bit of guidance:
‘Read this book like a song.’ (Tinsley, Citation2018:1)
REFERENCES
- Blacking, John (1987) A Commonsense View of All Music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Mabey, Richard (1997) The Book of Nightingales, London: Sinclair-Stevenson Limited, 29.
- Moten, Fred (2003) In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Shigehisa Kuriyama (1999) The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine, New York: Zone Books.
- Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha (2018) Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining black queer genders Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 1.
- Tomlinson, Gary (2007) Translation of Cantares Mexicanos, in The Singing of the New World: Indigenous voice in the era of European contact, New York: Cambridge University Press.