Thread by @Delafina777

welp, I gotta edit a thing and I don't want to, so each time I finish a page, I'll be tweeting a few more tweets about something that's been fascination of mine since high school

the struggle for dominance between words and music in vocal music

So, when I was a freshman in high school, I read this book, and it made a LOT of stuff fall into place for me, as someone who grew up loving opera (but it goes way beyond that)

amazon.com/Angels-Cry-Bey…

so, the author set out to answer what is, on the surface, a pretty simple question: why do people cry during arias?

are they tears of joy? tears of sadness?

(you can see how this goes beyond opera)

in pursuing that answer, he explores two different forms of enjoyment in consuming art:

pleasure--defined by a *limit* to the intensity of the artistic effect on the audience

vs

jouisssance--a lot harder to define, characterized by emotional upheaval

the book is VERY French

lots of Lacan, lots of Freud, smokes an entire cigarette and waves a hand philosophically every paragraph or so

So, jouissance is characterized by transgression, here, a sort of complete emotional gratification that's also a sort of breakdown, that doesn't fit neatly into the categories of joy or sadness

There's probably a parallel here with the emotions evoked by Tolkien's eucatastrophe. tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Eucatastr…

In opera, Poizat argues, the mission of the diva is to dissolve the incongruity between singer and role, to become pure voice--self-annihilation, in essence, if only for a few seconds.

And there's a tension there between the word and the pure cry--between singing as a sort of stylized speech and singing as pure emotion.

And that's where it starts to get slightly paradoxical.

"It is not merely that textual intelligibility and meaningful comprehension do not contribute to the production of emotion; in fact, they ultimately limit or even cancel it altogether."

As a writer, I bristle a bit at that, but as a musician, there's something there.

(One thing I think Poizat understates is the importance of context. It's not wordless vocalizing that releases the waterworks--it's the *dissolution* of speech.)

For a *very* restrained example, check out the vocal break here:

It wouldn't work, obviously, if she devoiced the entire thing--it's the contrast, the loss of control (or rather the *perceived* loss of control--doing this sort of thing well actually takes a lot of skill) that's so emotionally evocative.

Or for an example that's likely more familiar to a lot of people than that one...

I'm going to bet if you cried during "Do you want to build a snowman?" from Frozen, you either teared up, or started crying harder, around 2:57.

And those moments in pop music are so effective because they're simulationist, naturalistic--they mimic what intense emotion does to people's speaking voices in real life.

They're still stylized somewhat, obviously--the singer doesn't actually break down sobbing--but.

Opera is much more stylized--it tends to portray intense emotion by getting more sing-y, not more talk-y.

So, the interesting thing here is how it got there. And while there are exceptions, of course, the evolution of opera is largely an evolution toward privileging high, female voices and the dissolution of words' intelligibility.

And some commentators have suggested that this is because of a taste for extremes, but then why didn't bass male voices receive similar spotlighted treatment?

(Semi-spoiler: this is actually about gender and the Church)

So you can't really talk about the evolution of Western classical music without talking about Western sacred music (specifically, Christian music; needless to say, Jewish music got nary a mention in any music theory or history classes I attended).

They evolved in tandem and in dialogue. Medieval plainchant's range rarely exceeded an octave. 1st recorded instance of high B (2 above middle C)? 1675.

Like, that's higher than I can sing, but not superhumanly high. Like, here's 50 singers doing it.

And the female voice was going to go even higher in 19th and 20th-century opera.

Whereas I think male voices didn't really go any lower in opera after Monteverdi's Orfeo, and that was in 1607.

So, why the fascination with high notes? And not just fascination, in the sense that one might enjoy a curiosity, but the privileging of high notes as the ultimate expression of strong emotion?

Well, the answer to that appears to be a mix of religion and physics.

So, the optimal range for intelligibility is below about 300hz. Most human speech is in the range of 50hz to 300hz.

Above about 660hz, vowel sounds become indistinguishable. (A high B like those sopranos were singing is 987.77hz.)

Also, most consonant sounds are made by obstructing the vocal passage, but good singing requires it to be open.

So just mechanically, there's already a potential tension between aesthetic requirements and linguistic intelligibility ones.

Additionally, an important component in intelligibility is scansion--the bits of silence between words. But again, part of singing well is usually bridging those silences.

Of course, traditionally, speech is the marker par excellence of humanity. Animals don't speak, and angels communicate without the medium of the word.

So do high notes bring the singer closer to being angel or being animal?

If a diva does it well, she gets the former.

If not, the negative comparisons tend to evoke the latter.

So, one can, without a lot of stretching, view the fundamental tension in opera as existing between a desire to make the words intelligible--to treat the melody, essentially, as a mere ornament...

...and, as Poizat puts it, "that element in opera which seeks to destroy the law of the written word and signifying scansion--that is, singing at its absolute limit, the cry."

A scholar named Jacques Bourgeois calls it a "pendular movement" in the history of opera, swinging back and forth between the dominance of the word (prima le parole) and music slipping those bonds (prima la musica).

Why the swings?

Take a guess. The church has generally been on the side of the primacy of the word--the primacy of the Word, in fact--and has often been nervous about art slipping any sort of bonds.

And while a lot of Western classical music has its origins within church music, and the lines between liturgical music and secular entertainment weren't exactly bright in Europe, in *general* music in the church has served the word.

But of course, the movement away from the word wasn't erasing it completely--as I mentioned above, for the dissolution of language to be effective, it has to be just that: dissolution, not instant and total obliteration.

As with almost everything aesthetic, the contrast here is what's key.

But if you think about it--I'll get into examples--the fact that What Opera Singers Were Doing With Their Voices was so often cast in moral or ethical terms is... decidedly odd.

In other words, singing, for much of the historical development of Western music, was very much under surveillance.

There have been kind of an absurd number of edicts, bulls, and full-on church councils about what sort of singing was acceptable.

The Church wanted to ensure that the text, their divine Word, was transmitted accurately to listeners, and perhaps to beautify its recitation.

So early Church music was completely subservient to the word.

Now, this isn't a new thing: people have been singing words to learn and remember them pretty much since humanity got started.

And in the case of the church, they'd inherited a text--the Jewish Tanakh (Christian Old Testament)--that came with a musical tradition attached. Jewish cantillation preserves grammatical information, dramatizes the text, and so on.

And the "melody" of that cantillation is completely subservient to the text. It's dictated by the grammar. (It's still musical, but it's not structured the way most melodies are.)

So early Christian plainchat or plainsong isn't all that different. The tropes are different, and it's in Latin, of course, but it's a similar system of melody generation, based on the grammar of the text.

At the same time, they wanted people to pay attention to the chanting--singing could prove powerful in getting people to engage with the text--but as soon as you go there, you risk the question of how much beauty is distracting.

I mean, after all, the context of this discussion is intense emotion, even ecstasy, evoked by music. And the Church has always had a fraught relationship with ecstasy.

On one hand, there's a sense that the human encounter with the divine SHOULD be ecstatic, but on the other, mysticism has always been dangerous to The Establishment. Most mystics--even those later canonized--have been suspected of satanism/paganism/what-have-you by contemporaries

Similarly, the diabolical is always lurking in music, which is why a few of those councils and bulls and edicts revolved around what aspects of music were unholy and unacceptable, such as the infamous tritone, the diabolus in musica.

Anyway, one thing you'll notice about both the Jewish Torah trope and the Catholic plainchant linked above is they're monophonic/homophonic--that is, there's no harmony. The voice (whether solo or choral) is only singing one pitch at a time.

Eventually, the Church unclenched enough to allow polyphony--harmony, multiple pitches sung at the same time.

And that's where you ultimately get a lot of those really extraordinary chants.

The form reached its apotheosis, in my opinion, with Thomas Tallis's "Spem in alium," a motet for 40 separate voices, supposedly written to tacitly plead for acceptance and mercy for Catholics under the rule of Queen Elizabeth.

Apparently, there is still chanting (in English!) in the Catholic church, which I was today years old when I learned.

But anyway, polyphony!

And the beginning of the development of classical music!

But also the beginning of tension between aesthetics and utility, which is a knife-edge to walk. (The Puritans, for example, just gave up and prohibited religious music entirely.)

By the way, this nervousness about Serious Music becoming too aesthetic wasn't limited to the Catholics. 3000 years before Jesus was even born, Emperor Shun of China was worried about the same thing:

"Let the music follow the sense of the words; keep it simple and ingenuous. Vain, empty, and effeminate music is to be condemned."

That "effeminate" bit is going to come back to haunt us in European music, all the way to Wagner's "Music is a woman."

Outside the church, various authorities were still worried about music getting out of control, but they usually solved the problem not by regulating the music itself so much as the people who wrote it, making them dependent on the king, court, state, etc.

And on one hand, this may seem obvious: those in power always want to control art. But the moral valence of all of this is less intuitively obvious than it is with visual art or literature--music doesn't necessarily *represent* anything.

It's one thing for the moral police to want to regulate depictions of the human form, for example, but it gets weirder when what they're claiming is immoral is a *musical interval.*

But anyway, church music was rocking polyphony by the time opera got started.

And opera got started following a bunch of Florentine philosophers hanging out and attempting to revive ancient forms of artistic expression, like Greek tragedy.

They were not down with polyphony, oh no, they wanted the word restored to complete primacy, and no "rolls, trills, passages, and exclamations" by singers. (Preface to Gagliano's Dafne, 1608)

The point of music was to "sculpt the syllables to make the words well understood."

So along comes Monteverdi, arguably the founder of opera, who's very good at operating within those constraints... and also at subverting them at times.

Like, the melody here is very much dictated by the rhythms and pitch patterns of speech, but in the moments of high emotion (Euridice's first moan of despair), it's trying to break out of that.

but it's late and I'm going to bed, so more later