Voice: An imaginary figure of any thing
Dr. Elisabeth Laasonen Belgrano (vocal performer, researcher, Inter Arts Center, Lund University)
Dr. Mark D. Price (poet, composer, researcher, The Lenkiewicz Foundation)
Summary:
This chapter considers the operatic voice as inseparable from any bodily actions and matter. 'Body' and 'matter' are themselves vibrant, rather than being fixed elements of a substance ontology, and the voice emerges out of No Thing (Calcagno 2003). Though certainly not disembodied, the voice is not determined by gender, age, ethnicity or social class. Almost half a thousand years ago it was identified as “an imaginary figure of any thing” (Florio 1611), born only in a specific context and via unexpected encounters with whatever meaning there might be. This seemingly contemporary concept was developed in 17th-century Venetian music drama. Voice was considered a symbol for Nothingness, as specifically performed in operatic mad scenes (Rosand 1991; Belgrano 2011, 2016). 17th-century letters, words and poems inform us about how voice enacted All-and-Nothing in the same scene. It was the voice of Anna Renzi Romana, one of the first operatic actresses active in Venice around 1640. Renzi’s voice is silently sounding in our ears today. Its vibrations were contagiously fertile: her followers and admirers printed collections of poems celebrating the affects and acts shared between the singing actress and the audience (Strozzi 1644).
This chapter develops artistic research on ‘performing vocal Nothingness’ (Belgrano 2011). We apply a Baradian (feminist) diffractive methodology (Barad 2007, 2014), allowing vocal practice to intra-act with any matter or meaning encountered along the road, by “rediffracting, diffracting anew, in the making of new temporalities (spacetimematterings)” (Barad 2014:168). Through this performative approach we argue that vocal identity can be viewed as a fractal dance which cuts across and re-connects sound, thoughts, judgments, senses, matter, vibrations and so on, such that they cannot be separated from one another yet remain “endlessly open [...] to a variety of possible and impossible reconfigurings’” (Hinton 2013:182). The result of this cross-temporal study is a sensuous queering of vocality which allows individuals to experience voice as Any Thing or No Thing, forging novel connections to a discourse on Nothingness that had a fundamental impact on 17th century vocality and the birth of Western music drama (Calcagno 2003, Muir 2007).
“E in vero la Signora Anna e dalla natura fovorita, e dallo studio ammastrata sà adempier tutto quello, ch’alla perfetta azzione si richiede. L’azzione con la quale si dà l’anima, lo spirit, e l’essere alle cose, deve esser governate dal movimento del corpo, dal gesto, dal volto, e dalla voce, hora innalzandola, hora abbassandola, sdegnandosi, & tornando subito a pacificarsi: una volta parlando in fretta, un’altra adagio, movendo il corpo ho a questa, hor a quella parte, raccogliendo le braccia, e distendendole, redendo, e pienagendo, hora con poca, hora con molta agitation di mani: la Nostra Signora Anna è dotata d’una espresione sì viva, che paiono le risposte, e I discorsi non appresi dalla memoria, ma nati all’hora. In somma ella si trasforma tutta nella persona che rappresenta, e sembra hora una Talia piena di comica allegrezza, hora una Melpomene ricca di Tragica Maestà. Io la chiamarei la quarta Gratia, s’ella non fusse valevole d’insegnar gratia alle stesse gratie e il brio, e la leggiadra alla medesima Venere.”
A beginning….
Words pour out of my mind, heart and soul,
Transforms into sound
And I know nothing else…
It happens on stage.
In life.
In prayer.
It makes me both worried and safe.
You ask from where.
From the sun I will tell.
From the monstrous spirits
Encountered in every corner of life
(smiling)
Double headed demons.
Opening their mouths
Wanting to eat every being
Passing through.
If I try to fool you?
Why would I ever do such an evil?
I am telling the truth.
And my voice is the voice of a messenger.
Delivering holy water.
Living water.
Tears.
Laughter.
It all comes through seed.
Tiny seeds.
Slowing becoming fruits of imagined contemplations.
I would never know in advance.
They happen.
Connecting through the movements
of the stars in the sky.
All elements contribute to the sound of angels.
They call me my many names.
Siren.
Thalia.
Melpomene.
The Fourth Grace.
Lover.
Venus.
Soldier.
Helena.
A fool.
A monster.
A man.
A woman.
The monstrous Signora Anna Renzi romana.
A voice. A body. A human.
A God/ess carries many names.
Only fools try to make anything reasonable about me.
It can’t be done.
Because No Body knows that will come.
Not even my self.
Not until it happens.
Now. Now. Now
Again. Again. And again.
This is
A confession.
A meditation.
A contemplation.
An act of transformation.
An imagination.
A time-space-travelling.
A performance.
A magical spell.
A wonder.
What is the purpose
For trying to define
Anything.
“an imaginary figure of any thing”
"a sensuous queering of vocality"
“seduced by the colours and acts”
“‘cross-tempo-relating’: a sensuous queering of vocality”
”the will-to-live as a precisely determined individual” (535)
Scene 1.
Words pour out of my mind, heart and soul,
Transforms into sound
And I know nothing else…
It happens on stage.
In life.
In prayer.
She was sitting at the kitchen table. Trying to focus. Trying to collect her thoughts that travelled faster then the speed of light. They appeared and left. Came and then were suddenly elsewhere. It had become her. A transient shadow of her physical body. Closing her eyes. Recalling her initial purpose. Smiling. She had in mind to explain. Explain without killing. It was the most challenging act.
Scene 2.
It makes me both worried and safe.
You ask from where.
From the sun I will tell.
From the monstrous spirits
Encountered in every corner of life
(smiling)
Double headed demons.
Opening their mouths
Wanting to eat every being
Passing through.
How can one explain the ‘wholeness’ (or even holiness) of moving between notes? Moving between worlds. Moving step by step without falling totally out of the self.
Scene 3.
If I try to fool you?
Why would I ever do such an evil?
I am telling the truth.
And my voice is the voice of a messenger.
Delivering holy water.
Living water.
Tears.
Laughter.
Scene 4.
It all comes through seed.
Tiny seeds.
Slowing becoming fruits of imagined contemplations.
I would never know in advance.
They happen.
Connecting through the movements
of the stars in the sky.
All elements contribute to the sound of angels.
They call me my many names.
Siren.
Thalia.
Melpomene.
The Fourth Grace.
Lover.
Venus.
Soldier.
Helena.
A fool.
A monster.
A man.
A woman.
The monstrous Signora Anna Renzi romana.
Scene 5.
A voice. A body. A human.
A God/ess carries many names.
Only fools try to make anything reasonable about me.
It can’t be done.
Because No Body knows that will come.
Not even my self.
Not until it happens.
Now. Now. Now
Again. Again. And again.
This is
A confession.
A meditation.
A contemplation.
An act of transformation.
An imagination.
A time-space-travelling.
A performance.
A magical spell.
A wonder.
Scene 6.
Monteverdi’s - Alchemy.
Born in the very act…..
Intra-action.
Diffracting patterns….
What is the purpose
For trying to define
Anything.
“an imaginary figure of any thing”
“‘cross-tempo-relating’: a sensuous queering of vocality”
”the will-to-live as a precisely determined individual” (535)
SEE Monteverdi's ''DUO SERAPHIM'' from the VESPERS .. a disharmonius
invocation, almost arabic-Spanish in places, utterly pious, but so
MATERIAL in its vocality . Repetition of seemingly nonsensical
phonemes, breathing patterns which would torture the lungs of all but
the most adept, Waves of painful and combatitive yearning towards a
crowning ''SANCTUS!'' , pushing the human material ( his perofrmers
and listeners) into entirely new territories.
Vocalising Heresy
Our aim here is not a robust ''masculine history'' presenting ''hard
facts''. Following the works of Morris Berman and Carlo Ginzberg we
acknowledge that oblique, intuitive, and ''feminine'' strategies are
required to understand a counter-history of ideas and arts which were
from the outset aberrant, heretical, and semi-clandestine. Ginzberg's
book on sixteenth century heresy opens with Celine's words
''Everything that is interesting happens in the shadows''. How could
this maxim fail to apply to a clandestine group calling itself ''The
Incogniti'', who worked with a counter-philosophy of Nothingness and
madness? What we know of their artistic, literary and social aims
indicate a project of somatic (which is to say,
radically political) resistance to the Logos and those who claimed to
be its earthly representatives. Writing anything that claims to be
clear, true, or univocal about The Incogniti involves a prejudice in
favour of the values they most opposed. Even so, readers might be
grateful for a sketch of the territory we hope to cover.
Firstly, a general survey of the relation between music and the
Catholic Church to show how closely the creators of early opera danced
with death. Secondly, an account of how madness was understood in the
Late Middle ages and Early Renaissance, and how it came to be used as
a method of artistic exploration, sometimes as a shield or disguise
for heretical ideas and practices. Thirdly, an examination of some
links between early Opera and the methods of spiritual and material
transformation found in alchemy and magic. Though highly risky, these
activities were not entirely outlawed. Church and State took a close
interest in both: often to better suppress them and sometimes to use
them for their own purposes. Finally, our reflections on the
continuing life of Nothingness, madness, and heresy which still
flourish in contemporary vocal practice
Religion Contra Music and the Sacred
Firstly, music: we can confidently say that the Church feared it. It
was at best pagan, and very
likely demonic. For as anyone who ever tapped their foot to a rhythm
knows, music is contagious. Its nature is to spread, to cross
boundaries and to connect seemingly unconnected bodies, infecting and
delighting them with strange feelings not their own. As early as the
third century AD Saint Cyprian decried the use of song in worship,
writing that voices, when heard at all, should be modest, quiet, and
clear. In the words of Monsigneur Charles Pope:
''Frankly, there was in the early Church a very persistent theme that
music itself was problematic. Many ancient bishops and Fathers of the
Church barely tolerated it, sought to limit its influence, and/or were
deeply suspicious of any singing at all. In his essay “On the
Theological Basis of Church Music,” Cardinal Ratzinger (drawing from
sources such as Pope Gregory the Great, St. Jerome, Gratian, and even
as recent as St. Thomas Aquinas) describes the rather negative opinion
in the early Church of any music involving instruments, harmony, or
anything deemed “theatrical.” He writes '' Instrumental music,
understood as a Judaizing element, simply disappeared from the early
liturgy without any discussion; the instrumental music of the Jewish
temple is dismissed as a mere concession to the hardness of heart and
sensuality of the people at that time.''.
(http://blog.adw.org/2017/06/sacred-music-history-complex-might-think)
The overwhelming concensus of Saints and Popes holds that if religion
really must have music, it should exclude plurality of voices, avoid
ambiguity, and it should be hostile to multiple interpretations. It
should evoke no emotional or somatic content except cool devotion. It
is interesting that those damned and ever-paradoxical Jews are
characterised as both sensual and hard-hearted in the above quote,
just as their religion is both necessary to Christianity and rejected
by it. But is it not the Jewish myth of the speaking serpent, subtle
and seductive, which goes to the theological root of the fear?
Temptation enters Eve through her ear: paradise is lost, and evil
blooms in human souls. Pagan images of Pan and his Satyrs with their
magic pipes were also easily recruited to anti-musical cause of the
Church, and informed much visual propaganda such as this anonymous
monstrosity from the 16th century.
Much more could be said on this topic, but let us conclude with the
observation that more than most arts, music breaks the easy
assumptions of hard barriers between separate bodies. It creates
somatic intimacy and in this sense it is sacred. The Catholic fear is
that music can do this without any reference to or regulation from the
'proper spiritual authorities'. Monotheistic religions seek to
monopolise contact with the sacred. The Catholic spiritual economy is
strict and simple: one God, one church, one body per life and one soul
per body. 'The sacred' is a restoration of intimacy which risks
dissolving these safety-barriers and edicts of the Divine Logos. As
Georges Bataille noted, the sacred is opposed to the religion of the
Logos because ''intimacy can not be expressed discursively'' (ToR, p.
50). Orderly religion can only give us the work of salvation, the
daylight of sanity and clear consciousness. But ''what is intimate, in
the strong sense, is what has the passion of an absence of
individuality''(Ibid). ''The sacred is exactly comparable to the flame
that destroys the wood by consuming it [...] it calls for the general
negation of individuals as such'' (ToR, p. 53). To be transported by
music, to feel a sacred union or emptying out of the ego is a mortal
danger to the monotheistic spiritual economy. What entities might
creep in when one's soul is out of its body? One might become a
monster with one's soul in several bodies, or with multiple 'selves'
in one body. As we shall see, this is precisely how the vocal practice
of many artists operates. (waits, galas etc)
Madness Before Medicalisation
There is extensive literature attesting to the different
interpretations of heightened and impassioned or aberrant mental
states before they were annexed by the medical sciences: which is to
say, before madness was madness: the bibliography of Foucault's
''History of Madness'' runs to nearly fifty pages. We can give only
the swiftest sketch of the situation in and around the birth of opera
in Renaissance Italy. It seems vanishingly unlikely that there was yet
a clear concept of mental illness. ''Strano'' meaning ''strange'' was
perhaps all that we might now consider a ''diagnosis'', though there
were a variety of terms in circulation: frenetici (frantic), deleri
(delerious) pazzia (madness, related to ''impasioned'') and of course
follia (folly or error). Nicole Cama offers a superb analysis of the
terms and issues in ''Defining the Strano: Madness in Renaissance
Italy''. https://www.nicolecama.com.au/project/madness-italy/
Apart from workmanlike innovations by battlefield surgeons, European
medicine had for centuries followed the long rut of the Hippocratic
tradition. Health was the result of a harmony between the four
humours, blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. These in turn
corresponded with the balances of nature: the four seasons and the
primary qualities of matter: hot, wet, cold, dry, which corresponded
to fire, water, earth, and air, the four cardinal compass points, and
so forth.
Orthodoxy acknowledged different kinds of sanity, but these were
limited to four character types: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and
melancholic. Physical disease, emotional disorder and 'strano' were
largely figured as instances of dis-proportion and dis-harmony. It is
hard for us to imagine how strict were the patterns of the late
medieval imagination: it was insisted that planets move in perfect
circles, and even Hell was in good order, with precise categories of
sin punished in the correct departments, as we see in Dante.
To deliberately cause an imbalance or disorder in the system was to go
against the designs of God and Nature, at least from the orthodox
point of view. Two exceptions are notable, though both met with
resistance from the Church: romantic love and alchemy. The first
emerged as a mass phenomena in the land known as Occitane, now
Northern Spain and Southern France. Albigensians, Cathars, and
troubadours combined in a broadly Gnostic religious and cultural
movement ''from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. That phenomena
was the awakening of interiority, which includes the sermons of
Bernard de Clairveax on the Song of Songs, the redefinition of
friendship and piety, and the ''discovery of the individual'' [..]
which had romantic love as its most intense and obvious expression.
Paul Alphandery was certainly right when he said that the whole
development constituted a breakup of Church-feudal authoritarianism,
that mysticism ''penetrated the masses'' and that this mysticism
constituted a major step in the development of the human personality
in the West'' (Berman, p. 215).
The heresy was somatic more than doctrinal – it was centrally
concerned with the sensations of living union with the Divine and the
experience of 'soul-travel'. The Church of course did all it could
stamp out the heresy, and the Albigensian crusade was one of the most
brutal allergic reactions ever shown by Christianity. It was worse
than genocide. Genocide discriminates. The Papal Legate the Abbot of
Citeaux proudly reported the very first military action to the Pope as
follows: ''Our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age,
and put to the sword almost 20,000 people. After this great slaughter
the whole city was despoiled and burnt, as divine vengeance
miraculously raged against it''. Caesarius of Heisterbach reported:
''When they discovered [...] there were Catholics mingled with the
heretics they said to the Abbot "Sir, what shall we do, for we cannot
distinguish between the faithful and the heretics." The Abbot was
afraid that many, in fear of death, would pretend to be Catholics, and
after their departure, would return to their heresy, and is said to
have replied "Kill them all, for the Lord knoweth them that are His".
Long after the purge-fires died down it was realised that the Church
had acted too late: the ideals, art-forms and somatic experiences had
already escaped the confines of Occitania. Romantic love was
infectious and popular with all classes of people. It spread through
songs and stories, which are harder to kill than people. The bodily
and spiritual experiences of courtly and romantic love were in part
co-opted by the Church to fuel the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Berman,
Chapter 2, pp. 215-218) but secular, or more precisely ''sacred but
non-Church'' versions also proliferated. Wherever desire is suppressed
from the top-down it has a habit of squeezing out sideways, and it is
not too much to claim that the unforeseen consequences of the
Albigensian crusade included the further spread of tales of
uncontrollable love, leading towards such works as Ariosto's hugely
popular poem Orlando Furioso. (published in instalments from 1516
onwards). Romantic love became a form of (broadly) socially sanctioned
disorder which cut across social divisions and erased the hard borders
of body and soul, heaven and earth. It was acceptable, even desirable
or semi-divine to be violently unbalanced and sick, if one was sick
with love.
Alchemy was one other place where deliberately causing violent
imbalances was viewed as not entirely contrary to nature or the will
of God. The stages of the Great Work are disputed between alchemists
but there is a general agreement that it begins with deliberate
sickening and corruption. This initial ''nigredo'' or blackening phase
involves not only the degradation of the primum materium in the
alembic, it also requires and analogous or sympathetic degradation of
the alchemist's psyche. It is axiomatic that this is ''soul work'' as
well as ''matter work''. Images for this deliberate breakdown of the
self include kings being clubbed to death, being eaten by wild
animals, torture, mutilation, the sun turning black, the sun drowning
or putrefying. The disorder is material, cosmic, psychological, and
spiritual. And as Stanton Marlon's book ''The Black Sun: Alchemy and
Art of Darkness'' shows, this operation is desired as the alchemist's
basic starting point for the spiritual and bodily transformation.
As opposed to the smoothness of Gregorian music which aimed to humbly
imitate the perfection of God's design, the alchemist-musicians saw
themselves as co-creating a 'new nature'. The syncretic philosophies
of Marsilio Ficino and Pico Della Mirandola were crucial to the new
found sense that humanity was not a clod of clay at the mercy of
Divine Grace filtered through the Church. In the Hermetic tradition,
humanity was figured not as a 'child' of God but as brothers and
sisters of God, capable of sharing the Divine powers of creation.
Ficino's 1471 translation of the Corpus Hermeticum opened up a
world-view which was as beautiful as it was heretical. Even now,
reading it in English, half a thousand years after the fact of its
shocking novelty one can experience a somatic rush of cosmic optimism:
''Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God;
for like is not intelligible save to the like. Make yourself grow to a
greatness beyond measure; by a leap [of intellect], free yourself from
the body; raise yourself above all time, become Eternity; then you
will understand God.
Believe that nothing is impossible for you; think yourself immortal
and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature
of every living being. Mount higher than the highest height; descend
lower than the lowest depth. Draw into yourself all sensations of
everything created, fire and water, the dry and the moist, imagining
that you are everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the sky; that you
are not yet born, in the maternal womb, adolescent, old, dead, beyond
death. If you embrace in your thought all things at once-all times,
places, substances, qualities, quantities-you may understand God ''
(Corpus Hermeticum, 1- 11).
The Hermetic philosophy licences the translocation and transformation
of bodies and souls by the use of all contraries, even in a violent or
seemingly illogical manner. The creative classes of Italy were
delighted and energised by such invitations to actively seek out
paradoxes and experience the contraries as real sensations.
''The composers who 'invented' Baroque music- the Florentine Camerata,
Monteverdi and his contemporaries [...] worked with conscious intent,
using a combination of ancient wisdom, personal repeated effort,
observation and individual vision to achieve the transformation.
[Parallels can be found] in the generation of warring opposites. One
of the radical innovations of Baroque music is the deliberate use of
sharp successive contrasts to increase the tension and heighten the
drama of a piece […] In alchemy, early in the process, the First
Matter is violently split into two to release the dynamic polarities
within. This stage is often described as a battle or duel between a
pair of men, dogs or dragons. This energy can then be used to fuel the
alchemical transformation; in order to arrive at the final resolution
and transformation, conflict must be provoked. ''I was aware that it
is contraries that greatly move our mind, and this is the purpose
which all good music should have'' Moneverdi wrote, describing his
search to find a form of music fitting to represent warfare – a search
to which he [writes he applied himself] ''with no small diligence and
toil''' ' (Gilchrist, pp 78-79)
The transmission of ideas from the neo-Platonic, Hermetic, and
Pythagorean tradtions to the founders of opera are richly documented
by Dr Angel Voss in 'Magic, astrology and music: the background to
Marsilio Ficino's astrological music therapy and his role as a
Renaissance magus'. (1992). Ficino was hailed as 'the Second Orpheus'
by his contemporaties. For many who knew his work it seemed both
desirable and entirely possible that they could re-unite the lowest
worlds with the human world with the realms above and beyond. If. Of
course, the Inquisition did not catch them at it. To say they were
ambitious is an understatement. At one point, Giordano Bruno returned
to Rome with the intention of converting the Pope to syncretic
pagan-Hermeticism (Breman p.225). Had he suceeded, a magical-artistic
world-vew may have replaced the dogmatic religious one. The
Inquisition interrogated him for eight years before burning him
alive.Excuse the pun, but the stakes were high even for those who made
no theological or cosmological claims. Poetising or singing on behalf
of any Divinty except the one approved by the Inquisition was risky:
in Occitane... (executions for singing, find ref,)
''Podesta-troubadours'' were active in Italy in the mid-1200's
onwards,The first podestà-troubadour was Rambertino Buvalelli,
possibly the first native Italian troubadour, who was podestà of Genoa
between 1218 and 1221. Rambertino, a Guelph, served at one time or
another as podestà of Brescia, Milan, Parma, Mantua, and Verona. It
was probably during his three-year tenure there that he introduced
Occitan lyric poetry to the city, which was later to develop a
flourishing Occitan literary culture.
Our argument, more of a suggestion (?) is that the ''heretical
doctrines'' ( lexical content) brought to Northern Italy - by Jews,
Cathars, troubadours, the ancient books translated by Pico Della
Mirandola, and so forth – are not so important as the somatic
TECHNIQUES OF ECSTASY ....or ''KATABASIS AND ANABASIS''...these may
have been passed on from such visitors, or re-discovered from pagan
manuscripts, or, very possibly, partly developed from indiginous
Italian sources ( folk songs and folk magic?) and partly created by
the ingenuity, enthusiasm, and creativity of the artists themselves.
At any event, the marriage of Animus and Anima is the constant theme
of Baroque opera, serious and comic alike. Here pagan mythology
survived, with all its profound psychological insights; here the gods,
heroes and heroines of classical legend came to life in defiance of
their Christian conquerors—so much so, that in Italy, the libretto
would carry a disclaimer to the effect that the author had no truck
with these pagan beliefs in Fate, the gods, etc., but was a good
Catholic. Then he was free to exploit the psychological truths
embodied in polytheism, and to show his characters motivated by every
good or evil impulse without having to conform to Christian ideas of
virtue and vice; while as the mainspring of their activity he used
sexuality, in all its noble and ignoble forms. For musical and
mythological reasons, women play as important a part as men in these
dramas, wielding an influence that they seldom enjoyed in society.
Sexual ambivalence is rife in the multiple travesties, disguises, and
in the regular casting of men (the Castrati) in female roles, and
women in male ones. And above all, there was the spectacular element,
which made the designer of scenery and machines often the highest-paid
contributor to the enterprise. It was his illusionary skill that, like
the conjuration of a magus, summoned the archetypal beings and their
worlds into sensible existence. (Josceylin Gowin,
https://hermetic.com/godwin/opera-and-the-amorous-initiation)
As we suggest in what follows, the exiled heretics of Occitania
brought more than love songs to Italy: there was a body-politics and
resistance to authority built into the narratives.
In Fifteenth and Sixteenth century Italy one could take an interest in
Jewish and Pagan ideas, and even demonology, but the only halfway safe
way to do so was to (at least publicly) declare that one did so only
to condemn them. Even this was risky. For example, Strozzi Cicogna's
work the Magiae omnifariae (circa 1600) was the most detailed taxonomy
of spiritual entities in Europe, discussing magic, the heirachies of
the angels, no less than one hundred and twenty three demons and their
interactions with humans. The author took the precaution of dedicating
the work to Cardinal Santori, head of the Inquisition and a key player
in heresy trials against Giordano Bruno and King Henry IV. But one
problem with sucking up to an organisation that can lawfully torture
and murder you is that the managers whose protection you shmoozed are
periodically replaced. This inevitably happened, and in 1623 Cicogna's
works were placed on the Vatican's list of banned and heretical books
with a recommendation they stay banned forever. Had the new boss taken
a harder line, the books and the author would have been burned.
'The Palace of the Enchantments' or 'the Palace of Incantations' (
Palagio De Gl'Incant, 1605)
Vernacular songs were a powerful medium of communication. In Occitane
after the Albigensian crusade, people were prosecuted, punished, and
even executed for singing troubadour songs.
Vocal lamentation is as close as anything one could name as a
''cultural universal''. Obviously its form and content differs between
the Ancient Babylonians, the Jews who wrote Jeremiah, pre-Columbian
Indians, and contemporary Japanese, but the expression of deep sorrow
as a body-song with specific rhythms and cadences is ubiquitous.
Perhaps there one existed cultures without laments, but they would be
as strange to the rest of humanity as a culture without tears.
Systems of political command and control typically target areas which
are deep in the biology of the subject-populace. Restrictions of food
sources, sexual pleasure and language-use are key territory. In the
Christian world, another
The widespread phenomena of lamentation suggests that the need to talk
to the dead is as ''natural'' as the need for air, food, sex or
language. There was very little doubt that it was possible. King Saul
did it (1 Samuel, 28:7) and the gospel of Luke (9:29) tells us Jesus
did it, but as with vexing the bankers in the temple, this is an
example the Church strictly forbade people to follow. Early
authorities such as Lactantius (circa 300AD) and Tertulian (circa 200
AD) offered stern warning against practices “in which the demons
represent themselves as the souls of the dead” (Tertullian, De anima,
LVII, in P.L., II, 793). The persecution of sorcerers and witches did
not become truly ferrocious until the fifteenth century. In 1484 Pope
Innocent VII issued a bull to combine spiritual and secular laws
concerning communication with disembodied spirits. This document
helped pave the way for the witch-mania about to engulf Europe. The
Pope's words were somewhat duplicitously used as a preface to the
Malleus Maleficarum (The 'Hammer of the Witches', 1486), which
declared withcaft and sorcery to be worse than heresy. Talking with
the dead, visiting other worlds, or allowing 'spirits' to speak
through oneself were activities likely to get you killed.
Italy was not as dangerous as France or Germany for the sorcerously
inclined, but it was by no means safe. Among the charges for which
Giordano Bruno GO TO LOWER PARAGRAPH
Early opera presented pagan gods, illicit sexual relations, sorcery,
spirits of doubtful sanctity, gender swapping and madness. Sacrati's
La Finta Pazza (1641) had most of those elements. Monteverdi's Orfeo
involves communication with the dead. Public presentation of this new
vocal art was more than artistically courageous: it was a high-stakes
gamble against the powers of the Church, who were unlikely remain
neutral in their response. Had the temper of the age been slightly
different the Sacrati, Monteverdi and Strozzi families and all who
sang with them would have been in mortal danger. As the dice fell, the
works found a powerful supporters. The public loved it, and were moved
to tears. The commercial classes saw huge opportunities and invested
in purpose-built opera-houses. The Church was utterly bi-polar.
Cardinal Mazarin was pivotal in organising the performance of La Finta
Paza in Paris in 1645.
''Sorcery, witchcraft, and superstition accounted for approximately
one-eighth of the cases in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth
century, fifty percent of the cases concerned witchcraft''. Pp9- 10 in
Pullan, Brian, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice
1550–1670 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983) ISBN 0631129790
This makes it all the more remarkable that Monteverdi was utilizing
alchemical ideas to develop modes of vocal expression which were
shockingly agitating to the listeners of his day. His claim was that
he was following nature (see the letters of the 1530's) but he is
working from a very different model of nature than the late medieval
one [a monophonic deity and the orderly choirs of angels ''singing
with one vocie'.]. Monteverdi's use of discord expanded the
possibilities of expression and reconfigured what music was and could
do. His music rattled the 'great chain of being' so violently that as
early as 1600 cultural power-brokers such as Giovanni Artusi
(reference) devoted time and money to condemning him in print.
MONSTROSITY and ''femininity''? His first public Opera was a descent
into Hell (Katabasis).
Kabbalah and techniques of ascent: In ''Coming To Our Senses'' Morris
Berman documents heretical techniques of spiritual development which
were prevalent enough to require suppression by the Inquisitors of the
Catholic Church. Busy ports with at least some resistance to Papal
authority - such as Venice - were havens for refugees such as
mystically-inclined Cathars, some of whom fled to Italy in the 1200s
and 1300s (Berman p. 192). Venice's growing Jewish population was
relatively unmolested until the edicts of 1516 when they were
restricted to the the 'geti' but still allowed freedom of religious
practice. The Venetian word 'geti' means foundry or forge. For the
Venetians, metalurgy was seen as Jewish work, and still inseparable
from magic and alchemy, 'the great work' of material and spiritual
transformation. Along with the neo-Platonism of Marsilo Ficino and the
newly invigorated Hermetic tradition, the Cathar and the Jewish
importations of mystical chanting are but two of the provable 'occult'
precursors to the 'great work' of Venetian Opera. It is well
documented that Monteverdi was involved in practical and theoretical
alchemy: there are letters in which he bemoans the problems of finding
rarer metals such as mercury, but we do not know if or to what extent
his investigations brought him closer to the forges and mysticism of
the Venetian Jews. However, we know his conductor for at least one
opera was Jewish.... see
https://www.wfmt.com/2017/09/19/from-ghetto-to-palazzo-how-a-jewish-composer-in-renaissance-italy-harmonized-two-worlds/
Jews were often close to powerful patrons because of their link to
metalurgy. Somebody had to make all the crowns, ceremonial swords,
rings and chains of office. Salomone da Sesso was one of the main
goldsmiths and jeweller to the Gonzago and Borgia families. (Herzig,
2019). See - ''A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in
Renaissance Italy” Harvard University Press. Converted to chritianity
to save his life, but still persecuted.
One Cathar practice warrants attention: the 'elect' or 'Perfected
Ones' of this heretical tradition utilised vocal meditation ''to bring
about a state of trance, and there is some contemporary testimony
regarding this. To the Perfect alone, also, was granted the right to
recite the Pater Noster, which they did numerous times each day in
long, repetitive chains called the double or dobla, that in effect
amounted to a hypnotic mantra'' ( Berman pp197-198). Jewish vocal
techniques for ecstatic experience date back at least as far as the
apocryphal '' Ascension of Isaiah'', compiled around 200 AD but
certainly deriving from much older sources. Berman writes:
''The text repeats formulas that were recited to generate a successful
[spiritual] ascent, and has long discussions of the proper way of
recitation. These prayers typically involved long strings of nonsense
words chanted in highly repetitive patterns, which would put the
speaker into a hypnotic state. [Other earlier sources] describe the
ascent techniques quite explicitly. These included the use of music
and breathing exercises, the repetition of divine names, and
meditations on colours. Subjects reported seeing flashes of light, the
appearance of an ether or aura, and also the appearance of an inner
spirit guide'' (Berman pp. 199-200).
Trance, repetition, nonsense, migration of the soul, conversations
with invisible entities: to the uninitiated this would look and sound
like madness. Or worse: something demonic. The cities of Northern
Italy were relatively cosmopolitan and intellectually busy but one had
to remain careful. Giordano Bruno was arrested by the Inquisitors of
Venice in 1592, carted off to Rome and burned for heresy and blasphemy
in 1600. Monteverdi's son Massimiliano was detained by the
Inquisitionin Mantua in 1627 for reading forbidden literature.
According to the historian Luigi Firpo, the charges for which Bruno
was executed included ''claiming the existence of a plurality of
worlds, and their eternity'' (Il processo di Giordano Bruno, 1993). If
theoretical claims on the existence of extra-normal places and times
were enough to be killed over, then practicing techniques of ecstasy
which might make other worlds and other times accessible to experience
would need to be kept entirely out of sight and hearing, or, perhaps,
made public only in heavily discguised form. All of which adds up to
an embarrasing evidential impase: if the composers and performers of
dramatic invocations and MAD SONGS were influenced by ''genuinely
daemonic' traditions, they would probablly take great care to make
sure there would be at best ambigous evidence of such influence. ( see
Gilchrist pp- 81 onwards, where I feel she overstaes the certainty of
her case)
KEY REFERENCES
Barad, Karen (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the
entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke Univ. Press, Durham & London.
Barad, Karen (2010). Quantum entanglements and Hauntological Relations f Inheritance: Dis / continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldingsm and Justice-to-Come. Derrida Today 3.2, pp. 240-268.
Barad, Karen (2014). “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart.”
Parallax, 20, 3:168-187.
Belgrano, Elisabeth (2011). ”Lasciatemi Morire” o farò “La Finta Pazza”.
Embodying vocal NOTHINGNESS on stage in Italian and French 17th century
operatic LAMENTS and MAD SCENES, ArtMonitor Ph.D. diss. No 25, University of
Gothenburg.
Belgrano, Elisabeth (2016). “Vocalizing Nothingness: (Re)configuring vocality inside
the spacetime of Ottavia”, Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, Vol. 1 Number
2:183-195.
Calcagno, M. (2003). ‘Signifying Nothing: On the Aesthetics of Pure Voice in Early
Venetian Opera’, The Journal of Musicological Society, Vol. 20, No. 4: 461-497.
Florio, J. (1611). Italian/English Dictionary: Queen Anna’s New World of Words,
int (Accessed 28.08.2018).
Hinton, Peta (2013). The Quantum Dance and the World’s ‘Extraordinary Liveliness’:
Refiguring Corporeal Ethics in Karen Barad’s Agential Realism. Somatechnics,
3.1:169-189.
Muir, Edvard (2007). The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines
and Opera, Harvard Univ. Press.
Rosand, Ellen (1991). Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice. The creation of a genre.
University of California Press.
Strozzi, Giulio (1644). Le Glorie della Signora Anna Renzi romana, Surian, Venice.
In: Florio 1611 (http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/florio/