Now Everybody Sing: The voicing of dissensus in new choral performance

Abstract

This paper explores how emergent forms of participatory singing and/or choral works in contemporary performance, provide opportunities for heterogeneous and discordant voices to come together through structures of collaboration, self-organisation and social interaction. Rather than the production of a homogenised voice based on consensus, the works discussed present various mechanisms for voicing dissensus and critique through an uncommon voice. Perhaps they push Roland Barthes' ‘grain of the voice’ (Barthes 1996) to its limit, to redraw the professional/amateur distinction away from the singularity of virtuosity and to attune our ears to the uniqueness of each voice going through the participatory efforts of communicating. Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen's conceptualisation of the Complaints Choirs (2006) have spread worldwide as self-initiated choirs and events, with recent mutations such as the Payed not Played protest choir at the ICA (2010). Bill Drummond proposes a resistance to traditional and historical forms of music-making with the conceptual choir The 17 (2005). Phil Minton's Feral Choirs (2006) explore a non-verbal and spontaneous ‘vocal technique’ to create choral works around the world, which encourage unique differences of voices to emerge and come together through ordered structures of cacophony, dissonance and polyphony. The essay explores how these works take up Jean-Luc Nancy's challenge to trace a different line of community's formation (Nancy 2006) through structures of synchronisation that involve architectural and architemporal logics of incompletion, indetermination, interruption and fragmentation, instead of production and completion.