The Decomposing Voice of Postmodern Music

Abstract

Western music has been formed around the dissension be tween music and voice. On the one hand, the human voice has provided the image of music itself, distilled, clarified, and personified. For the Greeks, the power of music is epitomized by the figure of Orpheus, in whom singing and playing are powerfully recipro cal actions. The lyre of Orpheus and Apollo comes to be m?tonymie of the voice itself; in the terms lyric and lyrical, the voice is represented by the instrument designed to accompany it, which has nevertheless been suffused with vocal tonality and action. And yet, there is also within the history of Western music, a struggle between the voice and musical sound as such. This struggle is encoded in the distinction between the Orphic or Apollonian lyre and the flute of Pan or Dionysus. Wind instruments come to be uniquely expressive of the voice because they share the voice's incapacity to play chords. Unable to organize sound synchronically, the voice organizes it temporally, through the movement of melody; but the openness to time of melody suggests the instability of those fixed relations of proportion which Greek musical theory be queathed to the West. When Apollo defeats Marsyas, it is a defeat of the aberrant powers of the voice. The flute-voice represents the power of the one to become many, moving ecstatically and unpredictably from place to place, and sometimes inducing panic and disorientation. The Apollonian lyre contains many voices, which it organizes synchronically. The one-becoming-many of the flute is assimilated to and subordinated by the image of the many-become-one represented by the lyre. Charles Segal finds a feminized version of this process in Pindar's twelfth Pythian Ode, written in 490 b.c. for the annual flute contest which took place in Delphi. The ode celebrates the fact that Athena, having rescued her