Benjamin Ory, The “In Between” Generation: Mid Sixteenth-Century Polyphony and the Long Shadow of Early Twentieth-Century German Historiography
Discussions of mid sixteenth-century polyphony continue to reverberate with narratives set in motion by early twentieth-century German scholars. Joseph Schmidt-Görg and Hermann Zenck pioneered research on Nicolas Gombert and Adrian Willaert, respectively; Heinrich Besseler delved into matters of historiography in his influential Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance. Recent work by Pamela Potter and Thomas Schipperges has offered insight into how these scholars used their political and institutional power to foster nationalist agendas in the Weimar Republic and during the Third Reich. But we have yet to fully appreciate the long shadow early twentieth-century German scholarship continues to cast on the historiography of mid sixteenth-century music, above all its tendency to lump together and give short shrift to a heterogeneous collection of composers. Indeed many scholars continue to skip over this period or characterize it mainly as building on Josquin and preparing the way for Palestrina.
I argue that a confluence of factors catalyzed the notion of an “in between” generation ca. 1515– 1555. A longstanding cultural program devoted to promoting Luther’s Protestant contemporaries led Schmidt-Görg and Zenck to deemphasize the aesthetic value of music by Catholic musicians such as Gombert and Willaert. Alongside religious politics, nationalist agendas caused what would have been groundbreaking critical-edition projects to be placed on the back burner. Besseler, too, neglected the music, both because he drew his conclusions from a mere handful of examples and because he prioritized teleological and organicist historiographical models that he would later reject.
After the war, younger German scholars seeking to break with the past largely avoided sixteenth-century topics; in the United States, by contrast, German émigrés picked up where Besseler and his colleagues had left off, with scholars such as Edward Lowinsky adopting—and amplifying— many of their negative judgments. All of this invites a new interpretation of mid sixteenth-century polyphony alongside a historiographical critique. By placing the writings of Zenck, Schmidt-Görg, and Besseler in dialogue with the historical materials they studied, I reveal the enduring influence of early twentieth-century German scholarship on the discipline.
Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit, Listening to the Imperial Other at the Colonial-Liminal: Voice, Animality, and the Figure of the Human in Nineteenth-Century Siam
Upon their visit to the Paris Opéra in 1881, the princes Prisdang and Sowathisophorn of Siam were so awestruck by the singing of Henri Sellier in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell that they barged backstage to bestow upon the tenor “The Most Exalted Order of the White Elephant.” While the princes expected this honor would be received with gratitude and humility, their attempted display of royal power backfired. Their conduct backstage was so boisterous that the Opéra’s administration demanded “the monkeys be taken to the Jardin des plantes.” At play in this theater of colonial relations are overlapping lenses that transform the contested figure of the human through the emblem of animality. The princes found Sellier’s novel expression of the French voice so magnificent they deigned to mark it with the pride of Siam’s forests, the white elephant; but in doing so, their misfired theater-etiquette became marked with the monkey, their conduct suitable not to the opera house but the zoological exhibit. In this colonial-liminal, a racist Darwinism superseded the Siamese cosmological ordering of life.
My paper explores the relationship between vocality and animality as ciphers through which imperial actors – both European and Siamese – negotiated their understanding of humanity and civility as contested categories in the decades around the Franco-Siamese War (1893). Across the colonial nineteenth-century, European officials constructed an acoustic regime of knowledge in which “the proper human voice” served as an index of humanity (Ochoa 2014). The European traveler’s dehumanizing description of the ape-like native, his voice an untamed howl, is a well-worn trope of the colonial archive. I invert such predictable zoological dynamics to juxtapose two figures in foreign lands: the noisy European and the listening Siamese. Bringing together traces of European singing and Siamese listening from travel narratives, ethnographic reports, and lurid newspaper accounts, I illustrate the Siamese elite’s negotiation of the colonial encounter in their understanding of European vocality through animalistic comparison. Such competing conceptions of humanity – civilized and savage, singing and howling, elephant and ape – served as an overlapping relational politics in which imperial actors constituted their place in the colonial-liminal through acts of listening.
Michael Kinney, The Life Course of a Voice
In his collection of stories Evenings with the Orchestra (1852), Berlioz paints a bleak image of vocal aging. In his fictional depiction of an aging tenor, the voice is described as a “fragile instrument,” the singer a tenuous deity reducible “to mortal ranks” as he ages. Some 170 years later, contemporary voice medicine and pedagogy continue to echo Berlioz’s attitudes, categorizing aging as a vocal pathology. Vocal qualities associated with aging— breathiness, uneven vibrato, and reduced resonance— are heard as deficits to operatic vocality. This listening paradigm is shaped by modern biomedicalized concepts of the life course that emerged in the nineteenth century and figure aging as a process of decline. The aging voice in opera is often reduced to an abject sonic entity.
This paper explores ageist and ableist logics of the contemporary classical vocal life course in literature from voice pedagogy, voice studies, and vocal arts medicine. Decline narratives are the dominant modality for conceptualizing vocal aging in these fields of discourse and, together, constitute a listening culture where aging “disables” singers. Aging’s stigmatized position in operatic aurality has led to an imperative among singers and other voice professionals to seek out rehabilitative therapies to maintain what I call a “requisite operatic vocality.” While these therapies prolong careers, they simultaneously erase aging voices from operatic soundscapes. Turning to Nina Eidsheim’s listener-centered vocal analysis (2019), I explore how aging voices are shaped in professional discourse by early gerontological knowledge of the aging body as a site for medical inquiry.
Voices that do not alter their life course, I argue, are heard to be “out of time” with the narrow line of acceptable operatic vocal timbres and are, therefore, deemed artistically irrelevant. This introduces an important temporal dimension into understandings of operatic vocality. Drawing on disability aesthetics and age studies, I explore how the vocal life course defines ideas of artistic competence, aging, and beauty, which expose the neoliberal logic of operatic singing. Probing the effects life course ideologies have on listening, I consider how the fetishization of youthful voices comes at the cost of limiting opera’s aurality.