Homer Simpson’s “Doh!” Singsong between Music and Speech

Albrecht Riethmüller, Berlin

The article examines sound phenomena situated between word and music, voice and noise, and singing and speaking. A theoretical exposition of three modes of com- munication – articulation, gesticulation and modulation – is followed by examples from the TV cartoon series The Simpsons, including Danny Elfman’s overture and Homer Simpson’s signature exclamation, “Doh!”.

A growing number of research projects on the subject of voice have recently gained international attention. As expected, the studies’ outcomes are trans- mitted by written and spoken words. No one would anticipate that the results be sung. Why are thoughts and ideas communicated by the spoken word and not by singing, even on questions concerning the voice itself? Why do we trust the persuasiveness of rhetoric1 above the expressiveness of emotion?

1. Complete and Incomplete Communication

In recent discourses on the phenomenon of voice, one repeatedly cited para- digm is the sound of the sirens, those same sirens created at the beginning of our written western tradition by Homer in his Odyssey (XII). A full library has been devoted to them over the ages, and countless writings speculate about how they might have sounded. The predominant general agreement is that the sirens probably uttered a type of singsong. This is also how Debussy set

1 Kant, in his Critique of Judgment (first published 1790), had second thoughts when it came to ars oratoria as it evoked in him “an unpleasant feeling of disapprobation of a treacherous art” (1951: 172; § 53, annotation). 216 Albrecht Riethmüller

them in his third Nocturne for orchestra entitled “Sirènes” (1897), where the women’s chorus adjacent the orchestra sings vowels, not words. And yet this consensus diametrically opposes Homer’s description. In the episode dealing with the sirens he clearly states that they imparted something to Odysseus. Homer refrains from telling us precisely what they said; from the context we can presume what the message might have been, but much more important is Homer’s emphasis on the fact that what was said was indeed meaningful, that the sirens’ voices contained a message.

Even at that point in history Homer had at his disposal an entire spectrum of terminology for acoustic phenomena, such as sound, note, and !oice. But in his poetic language one looks in vain for such terms, nor is it a poet’s task to delineate them. Posterity’s interpretation of the sirens evolved toward a vision of their voices as a singsong, void of articulation. For centuries music has been divided into two categories – vocal and instrumental. It is surprising when one realizes how late this distinction came into being, which was not before the late middle ages. Previous to this time, one merely referred to the dichotomy of natu ral and artificial music. While differences between speech and singing, that is, words and music, were never disputed, studies devoted to voice in music were not common, which is to say, no examples exist.

In the opening passages of James Joyce’s Ulysses, that early-twentieth-cen- tury Odysseus, the heroic anti-hero Leopold Bloom chats with his cat. And he does so onomatopoetically; Bloom and his cat converse on the same speech level. I have many colleagues, distinguished professors in different fields, who admit their disappointment at not having completed reading Joyce’s Ulysses. All the consonants, sound imitations, and senseless, invented words were too confounding, and they simply gave up. They seem to have been intimidated, or perhaps offended, by the plethora of words they could not understand. This entire issue has as much to do with the text itself as with our reading habits. If, alternatively, Bloom’s dialogue with his cat is listened to (from the audio CD by the Irish actor Jim Norton, for instance, in Naxos’s Ulysses Edition), the dif- ficulties one experiences when trying to understand the written text tend to evaporate. Instead of a stupendous modernist text one discovers a highly enter- taining, quickly grasped narrative. One might go so far as to claim Ulysses as a predecessor of the cartoon, or at least something akin to postmodern aesthet- ics – at any rate something closer to popular culture than avant-garde theorists