Image, Music, Text

Roland Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice," in Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 157. Translated by Steven Heath.

The Grain of the Voice (267)

Language and music

"Language" meaning words, sentences, paragraphs.

Language is inadequate as a system for the description, interpretation of music.

"translated into the poorest linguistic category: the adjective" (267)

"Are we faced with this dilemma: the predicable or the ineffable?" (268)

Barthes' response (limited to music in which "language encounters a voice" (269)):

rather than change the language in use
change the understanding of music, the "musical object"
embedded in both:
- theory: pheno-text, geno-text (Kristeva), and
- listening to favorite singers: Panzéra, Fischer-Dieskau

Grain: of the voice in double posture:

of music AND of language

A Russian bass

Listening to a Russian bass (270):

hearing "directly the singer's body"
not personal, not expressive, not original in voice
yet individual, a body without personality, identity
conveying significance, over intelligible or expressive

Theorizing the song

Pheno-song: all that derives from sung language

at the service of communication, representation, expression

Geno-song: material, signifying, embodied

volume of speaking + singing voice
a signifying function alien to communication/representation/expression
the diction of language

Examples

Fischer Dieskau

"never transcends culture"
"it is the soul ... not the body"
criticizes an emphasis on breath control (soul)
throat, facial mask as signifying instruments (enjoyment)
Dominant in the industry of recorded music at the time of this writing
- "if you like Schubert, don't like FD, Schu is inaccessible to you." (273)
- "positive censorship (by repletion) of mass culture" (273)

Panzéra

Skating over the consonants (those signal producing interventions)
Emphasizing the "admirable vowels"
- Less "functional", more signifying
Resisting "expressive reduction" of culture
Show "traces of signifying", escape "tyranny of signification"

Grain

Not only timbre

the friction between music and "something else", language (not message) (273)

Mélisande "dies without any noise ... in its cybernetic sense: nothing comes to disturb the signifier, and hence nothing compels redundancy." (275)

a music-language whose function is to prevent the singer from being expressive

Embodied in

singing voice
writing hang
performing limb

Barthes' critical declaration:

"I will not judge a performance according to the rules of interpretation, constraints of style" (pheno-song) (276-7)
I will judge "according to the image of the body which is given me" (277)

Auto-tune aside: "all [piano playing] is flattened out into perfection: there is nothing left but pheno-text"

how familiar to the crit of rent soundtrack using autotune (or country singers.)
rappa ternt sanga

Does musical "grain" lead to "another history music than the one we know"?

Pheno-geno instead of pheno-textual

Rasch (299)

"In Schumann's Kreisleriana ... I hear what beats the body, what the body beats, or better: I hear this body that beats" (299)

Schumann does not produce lengthy works:

(I like this aside: "A repressive criticism: what you refuse to do is what you can't do." (300))
"the Schumannian body does not stay in place ... not a meditative body." (300)

Intermezzo

Intoxicated, distracted
Disruption, functionally not distraction but displacement
Renewal, refresh
Interruption - the break
Never allowing a discourse to settle, harden

Paragram

a second text is heard
in addition to anagram ???

The Beat and the Body

The Beat aka the accent
Corporal
- "the body must pound, not the pianist" (303)
- "makes any site of the body flinch ... stretches, distends, extends" (304)
- Body "enunciates (musically)"
- It strikes, collects itself, explodes, divides, price, stretches out, weaves, speaks, declaims, doubles its voice, (says nothing)
Non-expressive
Never the the sign of a sign
the "anagrammatic network" (303)
beats are "executed" by the listener
- disolves distinctions among composer, interpreter, auditor
"Ecstatic recurrence" = "origin of the refrain" (303)

Note: intermezzo is the rupture, beat is the return

Figures of the body

Texture forms musical signifying
"No more grammar" (307)

Music is a field of signifying and not a system of signs

Referent is unforgettable, referent is the body
Musician is transgression, madness, unbound from meaning
- Writing can never be so mad as he is "condemned" to meaning (308)

And what about Tonality?

Language in two dialectical, contradictory roles:
- to serve the beats
- "to articulate the body not according to its own beats (articulations) but according to a known organization ... deprives subject of any possibility of delirium." (309)

Services performed by tonality:

Dissonance permits the beat to toll, tilt
Modulation (and return): to complete the figure of the beat, give it form
Ascent/Descent: necessarily embodied sensation (climbing stairs, approaching orgasm)
- "by traversing this scale ... beathlessness, haste, desire, anguish, approach of orgasm" (309)

Tonality can have an accentual function

participation in the paragrammatical structure of the musical text

Timbre: disappearance of tonality

assurance of the richness of embodied beats
beats then provide "transhistorical continuity" (310)
- how has the body uttered beats before?

Body and the written composition

Schumann extends the Italian code (presto, allegro, etc) for vernacular, e.g.,

Bewegt: "something stirs without direction"
Rasch: "directed speed, exactitude, precise rhythm, ..., the movement of a serpent through leaves." (311)

Benveniste

Two realms of signification:

semiotic: order of articulated signs each of which has a meaning (311)
semantic: order of discourse no unit of which signifies in itself, although the ensemble can signify

Music belongs to semantics

sounds are not signs
no sound in itself has meaning
music is a language with syntax, without semiotics

Music demonstrates the meaning of "signifying" w/r/t Text