The Primal, the Abstracted and the Foreign: Composing for the Voice

Abstract

While I love the voice and have used it often in my work, it has always been very difficult for me to write for it. In this essay, I try to work through some of the reasons for this difficulty. Some of the main characteristics of the voice—its fixed identity, the fact that it communicates on an instinctive level, the urgency of speech's semantic level, and the primal function of song as a collective place for the sharing of emotions—give the voice it is very special identity, importance, and urgency. We listen from inside our body. This makes the voice and ‘instrument' that is much more powerful than any other. While it contains an endless range of expressions, the voice is so strongly contextualized that it is difficult to transform, abstract, or radically individualize. It is hard to escape the immediate signature of its unique identity. In six ‘interventions,' I present six attempts at rethinking my automatic impulses with regard to the voice, addressing a different fixated area in each instance. The paper closes with a perspective on my work with the voice today, in which the development of earlier approaches crystallizes into a poetic proposition where the sound of the breath is an equal partner to that of the voice. This encourages the release of the nodes of our vocal fixation, and might uncover the possibility of an even stronger mutation.