Vocal Subjectivities

The failed rescue missions of the Iran hostage crisis, in particular, "Operation Eagle Claw," during which helicopters malfunctioned and eight American service members were killed, is the subject of Laurie Anderson's multimedia piece "O Superman" (1981). The piece featured the innovative use of an Eventide Harmonizer, a studio processor first released in 1975 with pitch-shifting, delay, and feedback capacities among other effects, and a vocoder, a speech synthesis encoder, which originated in Bell research laboratories and developed as a voice encryption military technology. The song charted internationally the year of its release and has continued to circulate widely and in uncommon settings to frame public anxiety regarding the intersection of technological advancements and international political strife, such as amassing attention again after the Iran-Contra affair in the mid-1980s and following the 9/11 attacks in NYC, and, in 1988, the Italian Health Ministry employed it in a television campaign for AIDS awareness and education. More recently, at the 2016 PEN World Voices Literary Festival in New York City, Anderson appeared alongside Chelsea Manning, queer and transgender rights activist and famed military whistleblower. While discussing Anderson's piece "O Superman," Manning suggested that Anderson's work encourages a necessary re-evaluation of past failures of the American government. 
This paper investigates "O Superman" as a case study to consider the genealogy of voice processing as a military encryption technology and the politics of failure from its inclusion on the album _Big Science_ (1982) to _Homeland_ (2010). Situating the piece within musicological discourse on the subversion of teleological forms (McClary 1991), the tension of drastic/gnostic divides (Abbate 2004), and voice as a mechanism of political constitution (Eidsheim, 2015, 2019; Ochoa Gautier, 2014) I take up "O Superman" through the lens of failure, both as a queer method (Halberstam, 2011) and a frame of war (Butler, 2009; Puar 2007, 2017). I re-evaluate the circulation of "O Superman" to demonstrate how failure is encrypted into expressions of national security and imperial logics in the context of public health, social hygiene, and the promise of endless war. 

How many voices do we hear in a five-voice madrigal?  The relationship of the polyphonic madrigal to the singular speaking subject of its lyric texts, and to the dramatically represented persona of opera, has long stood at the center of madrigal scholarship.  Recent studies have posited the madrigal's rendering of an individual subjectivity through the distinction of a single voice with register, texture, offset phrasing, and other means, sometimes interpreting these effects as quasi-dramatic and as prefiguring the motivations that led to opera and solo song. Others, however, have situated the genre in a lyric, Petrarchan, and sometimes pastoral court tradition in which the first-person voice represents a collective, plural identity.


This study further explores these questions of voice, perspective, and interpretation in the madrigal through a selection of revealing treatments of dramatic dialogues.Relatively few madrigals set texts that involve dialogue, and only a fraction of these dialogues come from dramatic texts. The task of treating texts with multiple speakers and psychological states seems to have posed distinctive challenges to composers, which they often handled not only with specialized compositional techniques involving texture, form, and mode, but also in certain cases by incorporating textual annotations both within and external to the musical works themselves for instructive purposes. These textual insertions, in effect, create an additional layer of dialogue between the printed work and its readers that serves to shape the performance and interpretation of the madrigal's rendering of its poetic discourse.  


This paper focuses on three selected examples of such dual-dimensional dialogues:  the settings of Tasso's _Aminta_ in Simone Balsamino's _Novellette_ (1594), and those of Guarini's _Pastor fido_ in Philippe de Monte's Second Book _a 7_ (1600) and Monteverdi's Fifth Book _a 5_ (1605). This analysis reveals how these works grapple with their dialogic texts musically and textually in very different ways, yet reinforce a common mode of realizing the subjective voices in a collective, lyric (i.e., non-mimetic) fashion.  Together, these works offer compelling, complementary new perspectives into the madrigal's means of conveying the first-person speaker and into composer's means of upholding this mode of interpretation in the unconventional setting of multi-speaker texts.

Max Kalbeck described Johannes Brahms's op. 31 vocal quartets as "higher entertainment-music or more properly chamber music for voice and piano." Kalbeck's description distilled a key strand of critical reception of all Brahms's vocal quartets: namely the conflict between the works' generic designation as Hausmusik, or works intended for domestic performance by amateurs, and the considerable technical demands and complexity that seemed to preclude such performance. Both positive and negative reviews consistently called attention to Brahms's difficult writing for the voices and the works' harmonic, formal, and contrapuntal complexity. What these writers seemed to object to was Brahms's use of chamber style in works understood to be Hausmusik, but more was at stake here than genre aesthetics. After midcentury an extensive published discourse in German-speaking lands connected Hausmusik to conservative conceptions of German identity, advocating for it as an alternative to Salonmusik and other domestic repertoires linked to cosmopolitan liberalism. Chamber music was similarly suspect because of the elite and liberal milieu associated with it. Within this context, criticism of Brahms's vocal quartets was a response not only to the works' thwarting of generic expectations, but more importantly, to the perceived intrusion of an elite, liberal musical style into what was regarded as a fundamentally conservative genre.
I begin with a summary of the distinction nineteenth-century authors made between Hausmusik and chamber music based on the genres' differing musical styles and their attendant social and political associations. Chamber music's refined style was connected to its origins in aristocratic courts and continued cultivation by connoisseurs whereas Hausmusik's simple musical language appealed to all classes. Next, I demonstrate how reception of Brahms's quartets emphasized musical features associated with chamber style seen as antithetical to Hausmusik and the political implications these aesthetic breaches had. Focusing on several particularly negative reviews, I explore how criticisms of Brahms's quartets as "artificial" and "decadent" reinforced associations between class, economic liberalism, and cosmopolitanism present in much discourse about Hausmusik. For these critics, Brahms's use of chamber style in his vocal quartets not only flouted generic and stylistic conventions, but also challenged their conservative conception of German identity.