Yuwei Pan
12/10/2016
From Cage to Glass and beyond
Second paper
Between the Female Voice and the Machine: Laurie Anderson We recognize and judge people largely according to their voices, whether they are intelligent or dull, sane or insane, female or male, good or evil, friend or enemy. Anne Carson writes that Aristotle found “the highpitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices.” The judgments can happen brutally quickly, and thus language and voices are devices traditionally used in theater to create believable characters. The voice itself is a form of language because it delivers to listeners something about the speaker. Performing artists like Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson explore language in not just the use of words but …show more content…
In 1912, Arnold Schöenberg used Sprechstimme in Pierrot Lunaire, a set of poems that the vocalist shifts between singing and speaking. Like in speech, the vocal speed fluctuates from rapid to slow and the vocalist’s voice slides between notes. The “human but not quite human” sounds create an eerie mood and show the dark sides of human emotion in an expressionist way. Later on, New Vocalism rose out of works like Luciano Berio’s Circles (1960), in which he manipulated the rhythm of his wife Cathy Berberian’s voice like percussion instruments and used laughing, crying, humming and whistling as projectors of expressions. Later in Berio’s Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) and many of La Monte Young’s drone music, composers began to use tape to electronically manipulate human voices. Following the precedents and active in the avand-garde New York art scene of the 1970s, Laurie Anderson began working in the seventies and eighties as a multi-medium artist with access to technologies for sound
12/10/2016
From Cage to Glass and beyond
Second paper
Between the Female Voice and the Machine: Laurie Anderson We recognize and judge people largely according to their voices, whether they are intelligent or dull, sane or insane, female or male, good or evil, friend or enemy. Anne Carson writes that Aristotle found “the highpitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices.” The judgments can happen brutally quickly, and thus language and voices are devices traditionally used in theater to create believable characters. The voice itself is a form of language because it delivers to listeners something about the speaker. Performing artists like Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson explore language in not just the use of words but …show more content…
In 1912, Arnold Schöenberg used Sprechstimme in Pierrot Lunaire, a set of poems that the vocalist shifts between singing and speaking. Like in speech, the vocal speed fluctuates from rapid to slow and the vocalist’s voice slides between notes. The “human but not quite human” sounds create an eerie mood and show the dark sides of human emotion in an expressionist way. Later on, New Vocalism rose out of works like Luciano Berio’s Circles (1960), in which he manipulated the rhythm of his wife Cathy Berberian’s voice like percussion instruments and used laughing, crying, humming and whistling as projectors of expressions. Later in Berio’s Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) and many of La Monte Young’s drone music, composers began to use tape to electronically manipulate human voices. Following the precedents and active in the avand-garde New York art scene of the 1970s, Laurie Anderson began working in the seventies and eighties as a multi-medium artist with access to technologies for sound