Aribert Reimann

FROM ‘MARA, MARIETTA’
Part Seven Chapter 2

FROM ‘MARA, MARIETTA’
Part Ten Chapter 13

Naked, the voice lays bare the soul as the naked body cannot. Listen! The poem conveys a feeling of life ebbing from the body, but the voice refuses the facility of illustration. Instead, as the singer moulds the air in her mouth, she gives it a cold, silvery shimmer. Taking the vampire by the hand, she adopts a stance of distance: Love is colder than death, and it’s not effusion of feeling that can capture that.

Listen! Now she’s repeatedly attacking the same syllables, she’s undermining naïveté. And thus once again she takes a detour to gain access: Her voice is a diamond that doesn’t blind with its sparkle, but shines with an inner light: The more I lay myself open to that light, the more present I am to myself; the more present I am to myself, the more I admire you. Silence. We rise to our feet together with all in the concert hall. In bestowing this lavish applause, to whom am I really giving thanks and praise?

In the earliest liturgical songs and the Gregorian monody that developed up to the ninth century in the Roman Catholic church, the recitatives had to articulate the sacred text intelligibly and to elevate the listeners spiritually. They were sung either by a choir in unison or by a soloist voice. The rhythm was based on that of the words and followed its natural complexity and flow. The line of the song was either unornamented and syllabic, highlighting the words, or ornamented and melismatic, developing an autonomous melody. These two constitutive aspects of the Gregorian chant—vocal simplicity for the sake of verbal clarity alternating with pure musical ornamentation—have perennially been the key question at the heart of vocal music.

In the fourteenth century, in France and Italy, musical writing tended toward ever-richer structures, with superimposed voices, words and complex rhythms. The Ars nova motets for three or four voices composed by Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut vie with each other in rhythmic invention, combining binary and ternary forms and attributing different words, both sacred and secular, to the superimposed voices. Verbal clarity was no longer the priority: music, its colors and rhythmic richness, took precedence. During the Renaissance, the motet developed further with Josquin Desprez and Palestrina, going from four to six, eight, twelve and even forty independent voices, as in the motet Spem in allium (1573) by the Englishman Thomas Tallis.

From the seventeenth century, in parallel with the development of the organ and the harpsichord, the tonal system, which divided the octave into twelve semitones, gradually became formalized. A new organization of sound became established, theorized by Bach and Rameau. At the same time, instruments hitherto used primarily to accompany the voice became independent, with composers developing a distinct repertoire for them. In vocal music, the polyphonic complexity that flourished during the Renaissance gave way to simpler writing as the intelligibility of words regained priority. The words were now sung by one soloist voice, tasked with expressing all the words’ subtleties, affects and emotional range. And thus it was that bel canto was born. Giulio Caccini, considered its founder, promoted a relatively unornamented singing style that, not diverging too far from the spoken word, gave the lyrics pride of place.

Out of this development came the oratorio, with Jacopo Peri. And with Claudio Monteverdi, the advent of a new genre, opera, in which the voices were accompanied by an orchestra of about thirty instruments. The expression of feeling became paramount, as much for the voices as for the orchestra. Monteverdi called upon instrumental effects not employed before, such as tremolos to express anger or pizzicati to evoke the clashing of swords. The blending of tone-colours and the greater role allotted to the larger orchestra changed the status of the voice, which now had to develop greater projection and power without sacrificing the clarity of its diction. Over the next centuries bel canto remained the principal technique, enabling the voice to follow the aesthetic evolution of opera singing without losing its essential characteristics: beauty of timbre, power of projection and maintenance of nuance across the dynamic range (a pianissimo must be audible above the orchestra), an extensive tessitura with a homogeneity of colour in all registers, agility in vocalise and suppleness in ornamentation, and sustainment of breath in the holding of a phrase.

During the seventeenth century the genre of opera evolved. The intensification of the Baroque sensibility and the taste for the prodigious led to the production of lavish spectacles with complex stage machinery, extravagant costumes, a profusion of effects and a vocal virtuosity that once again slighted the meaning of the words. Nevertheless, in an effort to maintain the story line, the recitative was invented, sung quasi parlando and supported by a harpsichord playing chords. The recitative alternated with the aria, which constituted a pause in the theatrical action wherein a pure demonstration of virtuosity took place. This was the era when the great castrati dominated the opera stage, outdoing each other in vocal agility and prowess. Bel canto had shed its initial simplicity and acquired its flamboyant aura. Not all composers, however, indulged in such a profusion of effects. To the excesses of opera seria as practiced by, for example, Handel, Pergolesi responded with opera buffa. Suppleness, cultivation of the natural, respect for the words, and the refusal of useless repetitions entailed a return of opera buffa singers to a more simple voice, closer to theatre. Mozart reconciled the two genres and the two types of voice, writing for a voice at once virtuosic and theatrical, ornamental and respectful of the words.

The eighteenth century saw the rise of massive instrumental groupings and very large choirs. At the end of the century, for example, imposing compositions accompanied the ceremonies of the French Revolution. The orchestra and the choir no longer showcased the soloist singers but became fully fledged players themselves. The open-air concerts held during major celebrations required an increase in the power of the orchestra, entailing the reinforcement of the brass and percussion sections. The bourgeoisie came to constitute a new audience, mirroring the growth in public concerts, and the young printing industry accelerated the dissemination of music among the public. During the nineteenth century, the classical orchestra continued to grow in size and to elicit an ever-growing repertoire. With the advent of industrial manufacturing, instrumental sonorities became standardized and instrumental production accelerated. A new virtuosity developed along with a refinement in technique. Most notably, this was the era of the great pianists. Gradually music freed itself from its traditional social functions—masses, celebrations and ceremonies. With Beethoven, the composer no longer felt constrained by non-musical concerns. Supported by a patron, he could create for the sake of creation and make his personal, psychological and aesthetic concerns his primary motivations, thus asserting the autonomy of the artistic work. The concert became a new social ritual, and engendered a more contemplative mode of listening.

At the opera, the voice kept its prerogatives, but the greater volume of the augmented orchestra forced it to develop ever-more power. Vocal power thus became an essential parameter of bel canto. Verdi confronted the voice with a vigorous orchestral ensemble, with strong bursts of violence and dramatic intensity. As for Wagner, in the Ring cycle (1876) he had the voice up against an orchestra of over one hundred musicians deploying an extremely rich and dense mass of sound. Gigantism was the order of the day when it came to sonic amplitude, orchestra and concert hall size, vocal power and audience numbers. Bel canto singing became athletic: performances were appreciated in terms of decibels and high notes, with the intensity of the applause corresponding to the assessment of the quality. In this profusion of excess, the singing voice tended to forsake the intelligibility of words and to sacrifice its art of becoming one with instrumental colours. A voice does not blend into a hundred-strong orchestra: it either rises above or sinks in it.

During the twentieth century, many composers—and many singers—turned their backs on this competitive-style voice to embrace an aesthetic closer to Baroque or medieval singing: a supple, instrumental voice, colorist in character, with an open relation to words, but always a vector for subtle emotions. Already at the end of the nineteenth century, Debussy, with his opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1893), signalled the arrival of composers who required a voice in which color was more important than density. As for the orchestra, what was required of it were subtle sonorities that served as a showcase for the voice.

Composers, after having explored the languages of monody, then of modal music and polyphony, adopted, in the eighteenth century, the tonal system. This system, objective and defined, acquired the status of a universal language that remained dominant until the end of the nineteenth century. Early in the twentieth century, however, it seemed as if the very perception of the real underwent a profound transformation. The traditional aesthetic canons were no longer suited to expressing the upheavals taking place in the world, upheavals reflected in the disruptive work of artists. Composers endeavored to stretch the limits of—and indeed to go beyond—the strict framework of the tonal system. Wagner and Liszt, for example, used chromaticism and modulation to create ambiguous harmonies and suspend the feeling of rest and finality linked to tonality. The structures were fluid, with endless melodic lines suggesting perpetual metamorphosis.

With Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894), Debussy expanded the framework of tonality and abandoned imposed forms, adopting instead a flexible structure that mirrored the ebb and flow of the poem on which it was based. In Pelléas et Mélisande he challenged the traditional model of the operatic voice and caused a scandal with his melodic simplicity and quasi-spoken vocal aesthetic. Schoenberg went even further in his challenge to tradition, inventing a new system of writing. He developed the the principle of atonality with his String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10 (1908). Leaving the ‘home’ of tonality, his twelve-tone system inaugurated serial music. Schoenberg was also one of the first to take the voice off the beaten path, employing in his compositions a ‘speaking-singing’ technique (Sprechgesang), derived from the cabaret, that he developed into a fully fledged style in Pierrot lunaire (1912), a 37-minute work for voice and instrumental ensemble.

In just a few years a major revolution took place, opening the way to a frenzy of exploration, with the invention of new languages in all artistic domains. Cinema shifted time for the first time in 1895, miraculously reproducing past events in present time. The phenomenon of speed made its appearance, in transportation as well as in the industrial techniques of standardization and mass production. The very perception of the course of events was shaken up. In Italy, the Futurist movement drew inspiration from the new machinery and noise entered the world of art with the painter and composer Luigi Russolo, author of the manifesto The Art of Noise. The unconscious, with its own, subterranean logic, appeared with Freud’s discoveries in psychoanalysis. Both psychiatrists and artists took great interest in the art produced by the mad and the marginalized, which became a source of inspiration for the surrealists. Artistic creation found itself at the heart of these great changes: a modern world capable of inventing both electricity and political utopias, of abolishing distance and globalizing war; a prodigious, unstable world that radically threw into question the centuries-old established order. Creative people glimpse new possibilities, making abstractions from the real, distorting it, splitting it up, in order to investigate its fundamental nature, beyond the visible. Beyond meaning, language itself became a subject of investigation. With Pierre-Albert Birot’s Poèmes à crier et à danser (1921) and Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate (1922-1932), phonemes became sound-objects, unorganized into words, and the voice became noise-like and percussive.

During the twentieth century composers, each in their own way, explored the fundamental elements of musical language—timbre and spectrum, pitch and melodic contour, dynamics and intensity, duration and rhythm, harmony, density and texture. They worked on these elements as elements-for-themselves, often in a disassociated fashion, ignoring the organization and hierarchy of the tonal system. The reversion to the use of micro-intervals, not used in the tempered system, is a prime example of this exploration at the very heart of sound. In the USA, Charles Ives stands out as a brilliant precursor who, right from the beginning of the century, explored all these parameters, prefiguring the revolution in sound that occurred during the latter half of the century. These explorations and revolutions often took place at the level of the isolated individual, sometimes creating movements, affiliations across borders or periods, but rarely fully fledged schools. The reassuring unity of the classical paradigm no longer held sway. Around the world composers frenetically innovated, often pursuing the same intuitions without being aware it. They revisited the foundations of classical music, their work being called ‘modern’ up to 1959, then ‘contemporary’.

These revolutions in sound gradually established themselves. They could not have done so without the direct contribution of musicians who, for their part, endeavored to develop instrumental technique. In the first half of the twentieth century, the innovations composers offered to instrumentalists concerned mainly the structures of musical language. The atonality of Debussy, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, the polytonality and polyrhythms of Milhaud and Stravinsky, the micro-tonality of Wyschnegradsky and the modal music of Messiaen offered alternative conceptions of musical language and new orchestral colours. If, however, the conception and organization of sounds changed and required musicians to adapt their technique to sometimes totally new melodic, harmonic and rhythmic pathways, individually, instrumental sonorities remained relatively unchanged. The classical orchestra was given new mixtures of colour, thanks largely to the addition of new instruments such as Asian percussion, the saxophone, ondes Martenot and the theremin. Nevertheless, until the 1950s, the techniques of instrumental sound respected the aesthetic canons of the late nineteenth century.

The same applies to the voice. Composers worked on vocal color, using foreign or archaic languages and popular or folk music, and mixing them with new orchestral sonorities. Thus, in Ecuatorial (1934) for bass voice and ensemble, Edgard Varèse used the Popol Vuh, a sacred Mayan text, to colour the voice in exotic sonorities and to suggest an archaic, savage vocality. He associated it with the orchestral timbres he had been renovating since the 1920s, using percussion, the extreme registers of wind instruments, and the electric sonorities of theremins. Olivier Messiaen, in Harawi (1945) for soprano and piano, mixed words from the Quechuan languages of Peru with vocables of his own invention, unfolding his melodies over unstable rhythms that accentuated the simultaneously cultivated and crude dimension of a song from some imaginary ritual. In his work, we already find a will to lead the voice to new sonorities. All the same, as was the case for instruments, in this first half of the twentieth century singing technique remained, on the whole, within the classical aesthetic and rarely ventured into other modes of phonation.

The revolution in sound intensified after WWII. Composers such as Giacinto Scelsi, György Ligeti, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and lannis Xenakis investigated, modified, and fabricated tone colours by immersing themselves in the sound material itself, manipulating the ‘grain’, the resistances and the colours of sonic energy. The emergence of electronics engendered new sonorities that composers integrated into their compositions and drew on for their instrumental writing. For musicians, the challenge was to extend the range of sonorities produced by the instrument and to integrate these new colours into the musical gesture. For the voice, the changes in artistic language are mainly operative in two domains. First, the structure of the text and its intelligibility are no longer the only bases for song. Isolated from any semantic context, phonemes, syllables and words become pure elements of music. Distancing itself from the word, the voice changes status, becoming an instrument of musical abstraction for which one strives to develop sonic resources. This in no way obliges it to abandon its emotional and communicative power: that remains intact, but is no longer limited to the word alone. Second, unicity of timbre is no longer the priority. The voice expands it sonic palette by exploring modes of phonation derived from songs from other eras and traditions, be they folk or sophisticated. It takes advantage of its full potential in song and beyond song, and includes screams and clearing of the throat, laughter and coughing, the play of breath, imitation of instrumental and electronic sonorities, and controlled variations of vibrato, from straight tone to the most ample of ondulations. The voice becomes polymorphous as it borrows from all styles to constitute a rich sonic vocabulary.

Thanks to the imagination and shared experiments of composers and singers, this multiple voice came fully into being during the second half of the twentieth century. The mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian and the composer Luciano Berio were pioneers of what they called ‘nuova vocalita’. To her extensive musical culture, her passion for opera and the Baroque which she also practiced, Berberian added an insatiable spirit of experimentation and invention. She shared her explorations with composers of her generation, who wrote for and with her works that have become classics, including Aria by John Cage (1958), Pièces de chair by Sylvano Bussotti (1960), Séquenza III by Luciano Berio (1965) and Phonèmes pour Cathy by Henri Pousseur (1967). These works, among others, testify to the emergence of a new vocal aesthetic, one rich in dramatic and emotional possibilities.

This new vocality in contemporary music is not incompatible with our classical heritage. The technique of bel canto—the foundation of opera singing since the Baroque era, assuring the comfort, agility and suppleness of the voice—remains an indispensable foundation. Tried and tested by generations of singers, bel canto today is complemented by a phoniatry that confirms the excellence of the tradition. It is still a question of developing the voice with a view to assuring its amplitude, power and virtuosity, as well as its health and longevity. The variations in tone colour and the succession of large intervals that characterize contemporary music must not alter the basics of vocal production and expression and the freedom of the larynx. The great contrasts in dynamics, the alternation of speaking and singing voices, the exploration of modes of phonation from other traditions, the outbursts of laughter, sighs and screams that one finds in certain scores must be inscribed in the continuity of the vocal line. The singer works on these techniques that they may find their place and prosper in an overall vocal gesture, without restricting or diffracting it.

Stringing together highly contrasting vocal and instrumental gestures is, indeed, an unprecedented practice in Western music. The rationale for this practice is of primary importance. It cannot be realized without a vision of the piece and the musical gesture to be achieved. The singer must be able to go from one mode of singing to another without disrupting the discourse, without losing the thread that gives coherence to the whole. This requires a constant back-and-forth between work on isolated elements of the piece—a singular sound, a rhythm, a particular vocal action—and the perception of the whole that gives contrasting gestures their efficacity. It also requires the ability to discern in the music its expressive potential, its power to communicate an emotion, a state of being, be it spiritual, dramatic, light, sensual or comic. Indeed, if musical languages have evolved, composers have not stopped trying to express a way of being in the world, of apprehending it, of grasping it in the subtle and material impalpability of sound. Even though in contemporary music the work of homogeneity and harmony takes different routes, it remains of primary importance. The work no longer focuses on the unicity of tone colour but rather on the continuity of energy, on the flow of the musical idea, on the vocal gesture that conveys the coherence of the work inherent in its very contrasts and ruptures. In contemporary music, harmony resides in the fluctuating play of colours into which the voice slips, resists, superimposes itself, and melts.

What did your experience as a violinist contribute to your singing?

For a singer, phrasing and breathing are fundamental, just as for a violinist they are the foundation of good technique. And then there’s control—absolutely essential—of intonation, which is common to the two disciplines. I learned to play the violin only to be able to work in an orchestra, because my parents felt that alongside singing lessons—which could lead to an exciting but uncertain future—it would be advisable to learn a stable profession.

What is your relationship to contemporary music?

For me it’s a music like any other. It’s never been something apart. What’s important is that the composer know particular voices. I’ve just sung in the first production of Rihm’s Dionysos. He knows my voice well and his music integrates it perfectly.

In Antwerp, your recital began with Debussy. That’s rather unusual.

Yes, but with melodies of a rare delicacy, melodies full of colour, before shifting into Mozart’s limpidity. Things get more complicated afterwards when Schumann takes up Goethe’s Mignon and Richard Strauss Shakespeare’s Ophelia. And then I finish with Heine—Ollea—a solo sequence of thirteen minutes written in 2006 by Aribert Reimann, who wrote so well for Fassbaender and Fischer-Dieskau. He knows the voice better than anyone.