Sirens/Cyborgs: Sound Technologies and the Musical Body Lucie
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Sirens/Cyborgs: Sound Technologies and the Musical Body Lucie Vágnerová Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Lucie Vágnerová All rights reserved ABSTRACT Sirens/Cyborgs: Sound Technologies and the Musical Body Lucie Vágnerová This dissertation investigates the political stakes of women’s work with sound technologies engaging the body since the 1970s by drawing on frameworks and methodologies from music history, sound studies, feminist theory, performance studies, critical theory, and the history of technology. Although the body has been one of the principal subjects of new musicology since the early 1990s, its role in electronic music is still frequently shortchanged. I argue that the way we hear electro-bodily music has been shaped by extra-musical, often male-controlled contexts. I offer a critique of the gendered and racialized foundations of terminology such as “extended,” “non-human,” and “dis/embodied,” which follows these repertories. In the work of American composers Joan La Barbara, Laurie Anderson, Wendy Carlos, Laetitia Sonami, and Pamela Z, I trace performative interventions in technoscientific paradigms of the late twentieth century. The voice is perceived as the locus of the musical body and has long been feminized in musical discourse. The first three chapters explore how this discourse is challenged by compositions featuring the processed, broadcast, and synthesized voices of women. I focus on how these works stretch the limits of traditional vocal epistemology and, in turn, engage the bodies of listeners. In the final chapter on musical performance with gesture control, I question the characterization of hand/arm gesture as a “natural” musical interface and return to the voice, now sampled and mapped onto movement. Drawing on Cyborg feminist frameworks which privilege hybridity and multiplicity, I show that the above composers audit the dominant technoscientific imaginary by constructing musical bodies that are never essentially manifested nor completely erased. Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii Introduction 1 Chapter One w Joan La Barbara’s Cyborg Manifesto 15 The Vocal Body 17 Sirens, Cyborgs, Talking Dolls 23 Berberian, La Barbara, and the Female Vocal 34 La Barbara’s Mother Cyborg 51 Chapter Two w Voicemail and Anti-Mediation in the Music of Laurie Anderson 59 Concerts, Publics, Listening Regimes 60 Vocal Gender and Other White Coats 66 Anti-mediation and the Answering Machine 75 Listening and Emergency 79 Mic Check 91 Aural Regimes as a Feminist Issue 97 Chapter Three w Queering Disembodiment: Vocal Synthesis, Wendy Carlos, and Stanley Kubrick 99 Disembodied Sounds 101 Early Modes of Vocal Synthesis 111 Wendy Carlos, Astronaut, Alien 119 Synthesizing Beethoven 127 March in A Clockwork Orange 138 A New Universal Brotherhood 141 i Chapter Four w Denaturalizing Musical Gesture: Laetitia Sonami and Pamela Z 144 Keyboards vs. Composed Instruments 150 Gesture, Nature, Normalcy 160 Video Games and Sign Language in the Work of Laetitia Sonami 172 Prostheses and Extensions 188 Digitality and the Body in the Work of Pamela Z 193 Hands and Voices 201 Conclusion: Listening and Labor 205 Works Cited 215 Discography 240 Video and Film 241 ii Acknowledgements I have been lucky to formulate questions and hypotheses about how we listen to electronic music amidst a remarkable academic community. I am indebted to academic and personal mentors, writing coaches, intellectual allies, and sparring partners, who provided me with the tools to research and write, and whose impression will continue to be felt in my future work. I am especially grateful to my dissertation advisor Ellie Hisama, whose guidance and advice on matters academic, musical, ethical, formal, and personal has been vital to this project, my entire graduate career, and my life for the last seven years. Her music seminars taught me just how accessible and manifold music analysis can be, and her encouragement to join the intellectual community of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality (IRWGS) set the tone for this dissertation as a feminist project. I am also thankful to George Lewis, whose one-time question ‘what about sound?’ will continue to anchor my writing. His seminar on Sound Art introduced me to a vibrant body of literature that helped me ascertain my own interdisciplinary direction. I am also indebted to the other three members of my dissertation committee: A meeting in 2012 with Alondra Nelson about Cyborg frameworks and the music of Pamela Z influenced my choice of dissertation topic. Her thoughtful advice and kindness was energizing, and I am thankful for her periodic advising over the last couple years. I am also thankful to Ana María Ochoa, whose groundbreaking work on sound is increasingly iii influential on my own. Last but not least, I thank Benjamin Steege for his encouragement of my work on Wendy Carlos, and his support and kindness during the finishing stretch of writing. Two rewarding seminars I took in 2011 provided me with a vital foundation for thinking about musicological approaches to performance, voice, and body: one was Karen Henson’s seminar on opera, the other was Annie Randall’s seminar at New York University on transatlantic popular music and dance. I am thankful for Karen Henson’s generous mentorship and for Annie Randall’s introduction of non-sedentary, dancing musicology to my life. I needed both that year. No fewer than three professors at the Department of English and Comparative Literature – Marianne Hirsch, Stathis Gourgouris, and Matthew Hart – encouraged me to develop budding chapter topics in their seminars on intimacy, theatricality, and exterritoriality respectively. Their early feedback and advice bore greatly on the final project and I cannot thank them enough. I also thank Elaine Sisman and Susan Boynton for salient feedback on an early chapter draft presented at a dissertation workshop, and Walter Frisch and Giuseppe Gerbino for their academic guidance throughout graduate school. Aaron Fox frequently encouraged my work on women in electronic music and kept my Inbox full of articles that animated my thinking, and Brad Garton kept me up to speed about goings-on at the Computer Music Center. A number of my peers at Columbia have been generous sounding boards over the years. I thank Zosha Di Castri, AJ Johnson, Kate Heidemann, iv Will Mason, Maeve Sterbenz, Marc Hannaford, Didier Silvain, and Jaime Oliver La Rosa who crossed paths with me at the Department of Music for sharing their work, commenting on mine, and working through the ideas of other scholars with me. There is also Erica Richardson, Nicole Gervasio, Alyssa Greene, Andrea Crow, Grace Delmolino, Victoria Wiet, and Elizabeth Dolfi who, like me, found a home away from home at IRWGS. These friends provided thoughtful feedback on several portions of the dissertation, and helped me understand my work in conversation with other disciplines. During the last two semesters, my self-titled Writing Accountability Partner Jennifer Chu motivated my writing process and proofread my work. I am also thankful to my friend Ramona Bajema for getting me through several crises of confidence. Equally, my friend Colleen Conway has been a wonderful dissertation coach, generously sharing writing strategies and approaches to the study of gender on early morning bike rides in Central Park. Finally, I am grateful to Gabriela Kumar, whose intelligence, kindness, and pragmatism energize and anchor me. I am most indebted to my mother Helena and father Martin, who conducted their doctoral research in the natural sciences in Czechoslovakia of the late 1980s, a country with closed borders and a heavily censored music scene. Still, they made sure my brother and I grew up surrounded by experimental music, theater, and literature. I have been incredibly lucky to have their unwavering support, selfless encouragement, and generosity as I carved out a path of study that had not been possible in their time. v For my grandmother Milada vi Introduction As Jonathan Sterne reminds us, “the history of sound provides some of the best evidence for a dynamic history of the body because it traverses the nature/culture divide.”1 The body in music has been a topic of rigorous musicological inquiry only since about 1990 but there are still few models addressing its various encounters with technology. In writings on electronic music in particular, the body is frequently concealed under a rhetorical apparatus that covers up muscular and choreographic processes, technological circuits, and computer algorithms, not to speak of musical decisions, interactions, and forms. Scholarship on electronic music is full of extended, embodied, disembodied, mediated, inhuman, prosthetic, intuitive, and natural systems of technologized music-making. This language not only reflects but also modulates how meaning emerges between bodies, sounds, and listeners and so it requires critical attention. In this dissertation I demonstrate how these terminologies reproduce deeply embedded epistemological approaches to bodies and technologies stemming from diverse extra-musical contexts in the twentieth century. The study brings together critical histories of sound, audio, and technology on the one hand and feminist musicology interested in the relationship between voice and body and the role of electro-bodily performance on the other. The 1 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural