We Go to the Opera to Eat Voice 1

Notes 1 Introduction: Voice, Queer, Technologies 1. Operatic and other highly trained professional singers are often heard to talk about “the voice” as opposed to “my voice,” imply- ing that they perceive the voice as an instrument that is not exactly and entirely part of them. In listening, however, the overriding discourse is of the voice as emerging not only from the body but also the very being of the singer, something explored in further detail below. 2. See also Michel Chion on the acousmêtre and the acousmatic voice (1999). 3. One very clear example of the confusion to be found in “The Grain of the Voice” is Barthes’s asking his readers to allow the following three statements to coexist: the grain is “the body in the voice as it sings” (188); he hears the lungs in Fischer-Dieskau’s singing (183); and Fischer-Dieskau’s art is “borne by a voice lacking in any ‘grain’ ” (185). 4. Oxford English Dictionary. 5. One notable exception to this rule of thumb is Lynne Huffer’s Mad for Foucault (2010), in which the author calls upon scholars to notice the importance of Foucault’s earlier History of Madness (2006) in the genealogy of queer theory. 6. Oxford English Dictionary. 7. I intend this to be both adjective and noun. 8. See also Carolyn Abbate’s Unsung Voices (1991, 11–12), Edward Cone’s The Composer’s Voice (1974) and Heidi Epstein’s Melting the Venusberg (2004, 6). 2 Identification: We Go to the Opera to Eat Voice 1. It would require much more work than there is space for here to determine the true comparability of miming air-reliant instruments 166 NOTES and singing; my instinct is that the separation of air production from the fingering of the instrument means that there can be a lower expectation for the miming party to simulate air production than there is with singing, where the relationship of air to mouth movements is essential and easily perceptible. It is also worth noting that, while the overwhelming majority of people are practised at controlling their own voices and have some experience of singing even if they choose not to engage with the act, playing any instrument is a more specialized and rarer skill. 2. “A registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons.” See Edison 1888. 3. Italy has a similar show (Sei un mito, Canale 5), as does Sweden (Sikta mot stjänorna, TV4). New Zealand has run the same pro- gram with the same name since 2008 (TVNZ). 4. The piece was reissued in 1965 with a brief caveat by the author about the changes in technology after its original publication, and some edits to the language, and it is this reissue from which I work. 5. This possibility is facilitated within Lacan’s model of the objet voix; the desire for the voice put in place by the objet voix’s being always-already lost may be, on the one hand, an eroticized desire, or it may be the desire to take up the subject position that pro- duces the voice. 6. The surprise of this anticlimax is noticeable enough that my youngest son, at six years old, drew my attention to it in the car one day, assuring me that it was “stupid” because “it sounds like it’s going to be a really big noise and then it isn’t”. We talked about how that surprise could be precisely the purpose of the musical moment, and that is my point here. 7. A French term meaning “deceive the eye”, trompe l’oeil is an art technique in which an illusion of three-dimensional spaces and objects is created in a two-dimensional space. 8. The association between a flat line and death—the flat line rep- resents an asystolic state, cardiac standstill—may also be worth noting here; in the putative flat line at the extreme end of this diagrammatic system is the death of the original voice, V0. 9. The similarity between his voice and Presley’s proved to be something of a double-edged sword for Ellis, when seeking out his own independent career during Presley’s lifetime: see http:// www.orionjimmyellis.com [Accessed March 19, 2010]. 10. Jarrow Elvis, so named because of his origins in the north-east England town of Jarrow, was a bizarre phenomenon, building up NOTES 167 quite a cult following despite (or, more likely because of) his poor vocal performances that almost exactly do not resemble Presley’s. Interested readers should turn to Facebook’s “The Jarrow Elvis Appreciation Society,” which hosts links to some videos of Jarrow Elvis in performance. 11. For example, Brown’s album Gravelands (1998) features Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and Nirvana’s “Come As You Are”; on his follow-up Return to Splendor (2000) we find the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under The Bridge,” and the Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant.” 12. We could also recall Mud’s “Lonely This Christmas” (1974), such a convincing tribute to Presley’s ballad style (particularly “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”) that I once had to point out to an eminent colleague that it was not, in fact, a Presley recording. At the time of writing, it is also listed on YouTube as a Presley recording. 13. To be specific, I mean Dion herself probably in a performance of the same song (I say probably because a generalized aural image of Dion emerges from across her work), and probably in the version in most common circulation, which is probably (but not certainly) the single release or album version. 14. Cathexis, in psychoanalysis, is the process of investing mental and/or emotional energy into something, in this case an object but in others a person or idea. 15. The ego is “in” the oral phase of development inasmuch as it has regressed to this stage as part of its melancholic state. 3 Karen Carpenter: America’s Most Defiant Square 1. The initial blindness of the speakers to the point of gender was particularly interesting given that, in the previous year, their own journal had published an article critiquing North American rock criticism in terms of its gendered characteristics. See Mcleod 2001. 2. Guilbert 2002; Fouz-Hernández and Jarman-Ivens 2004; Frank and Smith 1993; Schwichtenberg 1993. 3. Mellers’ choice of title—Twilight of the Gods—adopts a doubly worshipful stance in relation to the Beatles, naming them as Gods and suggesting a comparison to Wagner through a reference to Götterdämmerung. 4. For those who wish for a short explanation, in the early 1970s, Chas Hodges and Dave Peacock moved away from the English rock scene to create novelty material inspired stylistically by 168 NOTES cockney music. They established their own label—Rockney, a word alluding to their musical style—and enjoyed a handful of UK chart hits including “Rabbit” (1980) and “Snooker Loopy” (1986). They had a rare hit in the United States in 1998 with “Flying.” Only in September 2009 did the pair announce the end of their career together. 5. Joseph Lanza identifies certain common sonic elements of what he calls “vanilla pop,” which certainly makes up a subset of the music commonly vilified (2005, xiv). Indeed, one could easily enough set out certain key sonic qualities of any given genre, but the point here is that the genres being dismissed are not necessarily connected musically. Furthermore, Kembrew McLeod notes that “some of the qualities used to describe critically hailed and despised artists are quite similar in nature, but they are imbued with different values. For instance, RUN-DMC’s “brutal simplicity” is praised, but the Carpenters’ “saccharine simplicity” is damned. Further, there is a clearly demarcated line that separates, for instance, the “advanced sophistication” of critics’ darlings and the “slick profes- sionalism” of pop artists (2001, 55). 6. See “From This Moment On” (Live at the Palladium, 1976), draw- ing explicit attention to Cole Porter’s appropriation of J. S. Bach’s Prélude No. 2 from Das Wohltemperierte Klavier. Mabel Mercer’s 1955 recording makes an allusion to the Bach Prélude, but only a fragmentary one, and other recordings tend to ignore the connec- tion altogether. See also “Intermission” (A Song For You, 1972), an amusing adaptation of the Baroque motet “Crucifixus” by Antonio Lotti. 7. Karen introduces this on the record as being an example of Richard playing “grown-up” music, although its legitimacy in the classical concert repertoire is somewhat marred by its having been com- posed for a film score (Dangerous Moonlight, known in the United States as Suicide Squadron, dir. Hurst, 1941). According to John Tobler, the performance “was not a big hit with fans, and the word ‘pretentious’ has been mentioned in this context” (1998, 76). 8. See also Jarman-Ivens 2007. 9. A particularly audible example of this influence is found on that album in “Baby It’s You,” a song originally recorded by the Shirelles in 1961. The Carpenters’ version of “Baby It’s You” is strikingly different from the Shirelles and early covers (such as that by the Beatles in 1963), being significantly slower in tempo and using maudlin and (emotionally) unstable harmonies. The parallels with the style of the Beach Boys are particularly audible in the second and third refrains, where we hear the thickest use NOTES 169 of choral overdubbing on this track, providing moments that are reminiscent in some ways to the verses and choruses of the Beach Boys’ “In My Room” (1963) and perhaps to the refrain of “You Still Believe In Me” (1966).

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