The Decomposing Voice of Postmodern Music

Voice is a particular sound made by something with a soul; for nothing which does not have a soul has a voice.

Aristotle, De Anima ¹

Flute and Lyre

Western music has been formed around the dissension between 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 reciprocal actions. The lyre of Orpheus and Apollo comes to be metonymic 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 bequeathed 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 favorite, Perseus, from the Gorgon, invented the art of flute music, to preserve and to neutralize the horrifying, bestial cries of the Gorgon:

she fashioned the music of flutes
to imitate the piercing ululation
that came to her ears
from the fierce jaws of Euryale.
It was the goddess who invented it for mortal men
and called it the many-headed melody ²

"The aesthetic form of the ode," Segal concludes, "is itself a victory over Gorgonic dissonance; and the ode, like Athena, absorbs and neutralizes this dissonance by incorporating it into a larger design, much as the total musical and thematic structure of Mozart's Magic Flute absorbs and neutralizes the screaming arpeggios of the vengeful Queen of the Night" (33).

Composing Voice

This argument between voice and music took another turn in the eighteenth century in the musical quarrel of the ancients and moderns enacted between Rameau and Rousseau. Rameau took the view that the essence of music lay in harmonic proportion and relation. Although harmonic theory derived from ancient sources in Pythagorean mathematics, it reached its summit in modern, scientific systems of harmonic relationships, to which classical accounts of music such as Plato's, restricted as they are to considerations of melody, did not attain. Rousseau, by contrast, championed the claims of melody over harmony, and in the process rejected arguments for the superiority of the moderns over the ancients. Since the form and essence of music derived from the inflections of passionate human speech, Plato and other classical commentators on music were right to concentrate upon melos rather than harmonia. ³

Nineteenth-century music and music theory are conventionally thought to be characterized by the repudiation of the voice and its claims by the idea of instrumental or absolute music; both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche see the voice as a vulgar and gratuitous excrescence in music. And yet one must acknowledge that this apparent defeat of the voice is also accompanied by...