The "Relevance" of Opera: Let's Define Relevance

Reports about new Universal Music CEO Max Hole's views on classical music's future launched another round of debate about classical music's relevance. Many raised excellent points; many others recycled inaccurate and unhelpful clichés as justification for either modernization or preservation, such as tales of old-fashioned and stuffy symphonic halls, intimidating clapping etiquette, and the superiority of live video in engaging fans. Though supposedly all steering toward a future of greater relevance, commenters displayed wildly different assumptions about what that even means. With so many paddling in opposite directions, it's no wonder classical arts are as stuck as ever in unsustainable models.

Discussion of the arts' future, whether by Mr. Hole or others, often make a dubious link between 'relevance' and ticket sales, scrutinizing top-selling musical acts for strategies orchestras might employ. Rarely is it asked whether the tactics which generate high ticket-sales for Lady Gaga should, or even could, generate ticket sales for orchestras and opera companies. Mr. Hole describes, among other things, how he'd like to "jump on [his] feet and shout and yell" for Beethoven, but alas, protocol forbids this. So let's say we take his advice and loosen up: does following his implications to a future of commemorative-t-shirt-clad teens tweeting and texting about Christian Tetzlaff seem like a plausible trajectory for classical music? Importing the trappings and protocol of arena concerts won't change the fact that the triggers for excessive spending on Bieber memorabilia simply may not exist in the classical world.

When music execs complain of a lack of emotion shown by orchestras or a lack of Jumbotrons magnifying a conductor's minutest exertions, they show the same lack of imagination that Stephen Fry criticized in his eloquent defense of classical music. They can't imagine people enjoying 200-year-old music with no visual aspect, so instead they catalogue the differences between the symphony and the Celine Dion Spectacular, and call that a path to classical music's salvation. And this is hardly a surprise, given their usual lack of exposure. Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating recently sounded off that most politicians have not had a meaningful moment with the arts, emphasizing that the way to appreciate music is to spend time with it, one-on-one, as a listener or a performer. Background music doesn't cut it: real art requires real concentration. Mr. Hole himself claims to have liked the "bits" of classical music he's heard. Are "bits" enough to convey the grandeur of any art form?

To discuss the arts' relevance to today's audiences, we first need to understand entertainment commodities and artistic experiences as wholly distinct entities.

The use of the word "audience" is already a clue. Audience can simply mean the group of people watching something, but it can also be used to indicate a brewing mob mentality, as in, "The audience demands blood." Many of Mr. Hole's suggestions assume this second sense, where the audience is hostile, doesn't want to be there, and needs to be convinced that what they are about to see and hear might have value. But art shouldn't be about convincing the hostile that they haven't wasted their time; it should be about great work, and that's it. I know nothing about jazz, but if I go see the greatest jazz guitarist in the world, I'm not going to berate him for failing to teach me the basics instead of transporting the people who actually know a thing or two about the art form.

But an entertaining TV show is supposed to do exactly that, which is one major difference between art and entertainment media. Whatever you know and feel at the beginning of a TV episode, by the end, you should feel better and have a general sense of the characters and plot lines. Performing this service better and faster gets people to choose a show over its competitors, and it survives in the marketplace. The audience gets its itch scratched and the show's producers cash in: win-win. In other words, an entertainment commodity's 'relevance' to an audience absolutely involves ticket sales (or the equivalent), as the audience is paying for a fairly well-defined service.

Art does no such thing. It needn't make you feel better (though it often does), it needn't inform you of anything (though it often does)--it need only be good art. Rather than debate what art should or should not be, suffice it to say that the collective definitions, from the broadest to the most personal, greatly exceed the dual tasks of captivating minds and improving moods. Great art forms possess infinite depth: the more you learn and appreciate, the more you realize you have yet to explore. I love Homeland as much as anyone, but admit it doesn't quite make me feel that way.

Art's relevance, then, comes from this place of infinite depth, of its ability to be so many things to so many people. Great art opens itself to anyone, absolutely anyone, who seeks it. Whether its seekers number too few to make art a valuable addition to Mr. Hole's portfolio says nothing about relevance, just marketability. Though funding the arts is indeed a major obstacle, I remain unconvinced that wannabe copycatting of the wealthy entertainment world will build the audiences classical arts need to survive intact.

The Voice Within the Voice

There is a memorable line in David Mitchell's novel, Cloud Atlas, when a fugitive human clone, Sonmi-451, is taken to the "facescaper," ne plus ultra of plastic surgeons, to alter her well-known cloned features. This particular facescaper is regarded as the best in the business, which she attributes to her ability to "see the face within the face." I thought of this recently when trying to describe a quality which I believe many of the most memorable voices have: they reveal the "voice within the voice".

This is the voice beyond the meaning of the words spoken and beyond the aesthetic qualities of the voice heard. In his excellent monograph, A Voice and Nothing More, Mladen Dolar calls this the "object voice,"  and delineates the two ways we lose or mask it: either we over-focus upon what a person is saying (the message), or we over-focus on the quality of the sound, as when we listen to a singer (the aesthetics). Both paths lead us to miss the object voice, which becomes completely covered by sound or meaning.

We seem aware that the voices have the power to affect our minds independent of text and aesthetics, and we can see this power in examples from religious or mystical rituals to fiction and Hollywood. Call-and-response patterns in a ceremony, especially with a well-known text, let us feel how vocal sound can penetrate the mind when text has lost all surprise, but beauty of sound has no relevance. To be affected by an outside voice makes us aware of voices' special access to our psyches, to comfort but also to hurt or control. In the sci-fi novel Dune, a caste of witch-nuns called the Bene Gesserit study the psychoacoustic properties of voice in such detail that they can use "the Voice," a special way of speaking which allows one to control the listener like a puppet. No less disturbing are the real cases of schizophrenics powerless to resist the demands of voices in their heads.

Horror movies' numerous demonic possessions, and even Gandalf showing his otherworldly side, use technological tricks to depict this excess of voice beyond sound and meaning, where the voice itself can command power over others. Perhaps it is necessary to alter the actor's voice electronically or by mixing it with another actor's voice because, as Dolar suggests, the excess of voice over sound and meaning is also its excess over and separation from the body. David Lynch depicts this in one of my favorite scenes from Lost Highway, where the Mystery Man has literally too many voices, but also a voice which exceeds the bounds of time and space.

What about voice divorced from body completely? A famous example of this uncanny effect, which Dolar cites in his book, is the mother's voice in Psycho:

[Think] of Hitchcock's Psycho, which revolves entirely around the question "Where does the mother's voice come from? To which body can it be assigned? We can immediately see that a voice without a body is inherently uncanny, and that the body to which it is assigned does not dissipate its haunting effect. (p. 61)

Horror movies also frequently use this "voice without a body" trope (Dolar's book, incidentally, is where I found the title for this blog) in menacing phone calls. Imagine the lack of chills had the opening of Scream been filmed this way instead, or handled via text message.

In music, both technique and technology can be used not just to amplify the voice, conform to a style, or create innovative sound colors (this would keep us within the aesthetic dimension of the voice), but to amplify this sense of the voice's excess over body, and thus give us a peek at the object voice. In The Knife and another solo project, Fever Ray, singer and composer Karin Dreijer Andersson often uses extensive electronic processing of her vocals, the goal being, according to interviews, is to remove the audience's identification with a personality via the voice; ironically, Karin's voice (with or without processing) is the most striking thing about her records. Selective and creative use of electronic processing not only provides aesthetic variety, but creates a mutating voice which belongs to no one. Another famous Anderson made her career in the early 80’s on the same insight: clever and targeted use of technology can create an overall context in which even the plain spoken voice no longer sounds everyday.

The great vocal traditions of the world, of course, had no such technological resources to create a mutating voice, and draw very real boundaries of style which may seem to contrast with the supposedly limitless colors electronic processing can achieve. How is it that vocal technique might also reveal the voice within the voice? Horkheimer and Adorno write:

In every work of art, style is a promise. In being absorbed through style into the dominant form of universality, into the current musical, pictorial, or verbal idiom, what is expressed seeks to be reconciled with the idea of the true universal. This promise of the work of art to create truth by impressing its unique contours on the socially transmitted forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical.... Yet it is only in its struggle with tradition, a struggle precipitated in style, that art can find expression for suffering. The moment in the work of art by which it transcends reality cannot indeed, be severed from style; that moment, however, does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable unity of form and content, inner and outer, individual and society, but in those traits in which the discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 103)

I believe a similar point should be made about the voice: in the "passionate striving" for mastery of a vocal style, a the "discrepancy" of the object voice emerges, and "what is expressed" can be recognized with the idea of the "true universal," a voice within the voice. This implies two things:

First, dilettantism is impossible. While technical perfection, stylistic purity, or other "questionable [unities] of form and content" cannot be the whole goal, the performer's "passionate striving for identity" must include fidelity and respect to the tradition. If a singer stops practicing and declares himself "good enough," this is not a "necessary failure" but a chosen one. There should instead be no end to the striving.

Second, the limits of commercialized music become clear. Passionate striving to attain mastery of a style, as just noted, is about trying and failing for perfection, about Martha Graham's "queer, divine dissatisfaction". Neither the logic of selling infinitely more nor the logic of having sold enough can motivate this passion; striving for commercial success is about commerce, not art. It may be satisfying and one may be good at it, but it's not divine. 

The Best Online Introduction to Opera

Just a brief post to say that if you're someone interested in learning more about opera, YouTube is a treasure trove of mind-blowing singing performances. The best education in opera appreciation is to listen to a lot of great singers and see what you like, what you start to notice, etc.

To that end, one of the best YouTube channels created by any opera fan belongs to Onegin65. Check it out here. With almost 60 million views to date, he/she must be doing something right!