Joseph’s BrainWeek [08/17/20]
WATCHING:
The Salzburg Festpiele is celebrating it’s 100th season and they’ve revised their programming for covid but have still managed to produce tons of high quality stuff, as usual. It’s no secret that I LOVE Sonya Yoncheva (and have forever, fight me - I was on this way before you). Here is a particularly cool excerpt from her concert with Cappella Mediterranea. Quito Gato’s arrangements throughout are amazing - here’s the entire concert on YouTube. I’m still trying to put my finger on what makes me so crazy for Sonya - to put it simply I think it’s authenticity. It seems to me as if she always sings with her whole self; she somehow has access to soul at all times. I’ve loved watching her make career choices. She seems fearless to me and I admire that. An article I read this week (two actually - see below) relate to how I feel she generally performs but also to this specific performance. Check it out:
READING, ACTUALLY ITS ALL CONNECTED:
This piece by Clair Wills in the New York Review of Books about dance (and connection and self-consciousness and the language we have to talk about it, and and and) is a) beautifully written b) transferrable to singing in my view c) full of references I had to look up, which I love to do. Tons of quality quotables from this piece, but here she references the work of Roland Barthes:
When we try to describe how it feels to dance—in the kitchen, on the dance floor, or on the street—we are stuck with externals. Adjectives like energetic, romantic, joyful, liberating are as much about what we hear as about what we feel, and sometimes they are about what we see—although we can’t see ourselves dance. Even if we look in a mirror, we are watching ourselves watching ourselves dance.
It is the problem of the predicate, memorably summed up by Roland Barthes in his impatient dismissal of the way we talk about the singing voice. “Are we doomed to the adjective?” he asked. “Are we faced with this dilemma: the predicable or the ineffable?” Barthes’s discomfort with description extended as far as objecting to human relationships being figured in language: “A relationship which adjectivizes is on the side of the image, on the side of domination, of death.”
Roland Barthes wrote an essay called “The Grain of the Voice” [pdf linked] that is entirely too smart for me “the ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.” - reddit helped a little - BUT it’s very interesting - in it he juxtaposes the singing (he’s especially focused on French Art Song) of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with Charles Panzéra (whom I had somehow never heard before, have you?!)
“…Fischer-Dieskau is certainly an irreproachable artist; everything in the (semantic and lyric) structure is respected; and yet nothing seduces, nothing persuades us to enjoyment; this is an excessively expressive art (the diction is dramatic, the caesuras, the checks and re- leases of breath intervene as in the upheavals of passion) and thereby it never transcends culture
…[JL: i’m skipping a lot of heavy stuff about soul as breath vs. body as grain - we don’t seem to agree on our use of the word soul]…
In Fischer-Dieskau's performance, I seem to hear only the lungs, never the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the sinuses, the nose. Panzera's entire art, on the contrary, was in the letters, not in the bellows…”
from The Grain of The Voice, Barthes (1972)
THIS made me think of my inexpressible idea of body authenticity and Sonya Yoncheva. I hear more in her art than just a control of the bellows. In my own singing, inspired by Yoncheva (and apparent impossibility of escaping my corporeal form), I’ve been trying to implement the idea of “radical acceptance.” This is my body, these are my given bones resonating; I accept them, manipulate them, maximize them but I don’t try to change them into something they are not. It’s not going great but it’s a good idea, right? HA.
The internet is an amazing place and somewhere in the rabbit hole of researchlearning I also came across this related personal essay by Rebecca Lentjes which contains a link to Meredith Monk’s piece, Hocket, which is very weird and cool (Barthes would HATE my adjectivizing).
FROTH:
I love Miley Cyrus - this is her new single and self-directed video:
