Opening
[Voicing Across Distance theme]
Masi: Hello and welcome to Voicing Across Distance. This is Episode 2: The Break, the Kaleidosonic, and the Lip Flubber. My name is Masi Asare.
[Voicing Across Distance theme ending]
Masi: There are 3 parts to this podcast, a reading from a theoretical text on voice, a conversation with a scholar on voices in our time of Covid-19, and practical vocal exercise from an expert. I’ll start today with a brief reading from a text by Fred Moten. Then I’ll be in conversation with radio historian and sound studies scholar Neil Verma. And my guest practitioner for this episode, voice and dialect coach Julie Foh, will help us wrap up with a vocal exercise tailored for this moment.
[voice theory intro chant: “theory theory theory theory voice theory”]
Reading
Masi: Well, it’s late at night and I should be in bed, so this seems an appropriate time to read an excerpt about Billie Holiday. And I want to read one of my favorite passages from a book by the brilliant scholar and poet Fred Moten, a book called In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. This book actually enters into its theorization by way of the voice. It’s how the book starts—by listening, with the 19th century black intellectual Frederick Douglass listening to his Aunt Hester, a slave woman, and her scream. But as I’m speaking on this episode today with an expert on radio and radio history, Lady Day, Billie Holiday seems an important voice to attend to. Her vocal technique, so suited to the microphone and broadcasts of both loneliness and intimacy, and her phrasing, that is, her relationship to time, a refusal to be hurried, seem especially necessary to me today. Fred’s book, Professor Moten’s book, takes the concept of the break as crucial for understanding blackness and black radical aesthetics...the break as a hermeneutic (and don’t stumble over that word, it means something like an approach to interpretation, a means of theorizing), a hermeneutic that is simultaneously broken and expanded. So with Professor Moten, we have a kind of listening that allows for an experience where breaking can be a deepening, a crack in the voice can be the place where the full voice widens and coheres.
So here is the quote. It’s a nice long one, so just settle in and let it wash over you.
“Lady in Satin is the record of a wonderfully articulate body in pain. It works in the way, or in the field, of a new ethics, perhaps even a new morality. The ancient tension between product and process, technologized into a new strife between the live and the recording, is smoothed by a sound that emerges from, among other things, massive loss and massive resistance, only in order to reproduce agony as pleasure differently with every listening. That tension is smoothed by a sound that is anything but, however, so that what the sound carries has itself been roughened, so that an irreducible pattern of wear, a disruptive and augmentative pattern of content, alters the surface of meaning. So that “You’ve Changed” is an iterable event of joy and pain, the extension of an event whose instantiation ruptures origin every time.
The lady in satin uses the crack in the voice, extremity of the instrument, willingness to fail reconfigured as a willingness to go past, though the achievement or arrival at the object is neither undermined by partiality or incompleteness nor burdened by the soft, heavy romance of a simple fullness. The crack in the voice is abundant loss, the strings a romance with what she don’t need and already has.”
[Reference: Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. University of Minnesota Press, 2003, p. 107]
[Music clip: “You’ve Changed” – Billie Holiday: You’ve changed / that sparkle in your eyes is gone / your smile is just a careless yawn / you’re breaking my heart / You’ve changed... ]
Guest Scholar Conversation
Masi: I'm so thrilled to welcome my first guest for this episode, Neil Verma! Neil Verma is assistant professor of sound studies at Northwestern University. His work focuses on the intersection of sound and narrative media, particularly the history of various forms of radio and audio drama. Neil has written or edited several books, including Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama, and the forthcoming Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship. He founded the Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies and serves as Conference Director for the Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress. Neil also maintains a practice in creative field recording, and his work has aired at radio art festivals around the world. So thank you so much, Neil, for joining me!
Neil: Thank you so much for having me.
Masi: You mentioned to me when we spoke last that this moment we're in right now, this current reality of living in social distancing, is producing what you called "a strange adjustment to time." And I have to say, a lot of people have been saying the same thing to me in informal conversations. And you spoke a bit when we last spoke about how you've been thinking about what that might mean for listening.
Neil: Yeah.
Masi: So I just want to ask you, to kind of jump into this, what have you been noticing about your relationship to and experience of listening, these past few weeks.
Neil: Well, partly because of my interest in field recording...I'm, you know, in a bunch of online groups of people who are thinking a lot about what it means to record the environments in which they, in which different recordists live at this time. And that sort of got me thinking a little bit about how the really transformed nature of our soundscape can't help but transform our sense of time around this.
Masi: Yeah.
Neil: I think last time, on your last episode, you had this reading from one of my favorite sound theorists, Jean-Luc Nancy.
Masi: Yes!
Neil: And one of the things that Nancy, I always think is such a great occasion to think about, is that because he's really interested in sort of the moment before we come into listening in order to understand. Right? The moment that is prior to all of that. Which is the moment when we're kind of in listening, and we're kind of stretching at this edge, trying to know, trying to be a self, trying to know a relationality. So I feel like a lot of us are in that moment. And in a certain way, it's slowed down our rate of listening, so that we can more, I think, more sharply appreciate the very strange thing that happens before we understand. Especially when we're in situations of communication or situations of listening to the outside world. So what does that mean? I mean things like, you know, I live in the flight path of O'Hare International Airport. And one of the things that means is that I have, international flights go, you know, basically over my house [laughs] all the time. And I don't notice it. At all. But now, there are so few of those flights--maybe one of them will go by while we're on the line here--but there are so few of those flights that when I hear the very slow, low rumble of it coming kind of across my vocal, my auditory horizon, I have this spooky feeling, you know.
Masi: Oh, wow. Yeah.
Neil: Yeah. And so the thing that used to be the ground has become the figure. And there's an uncanny relationship I have with that, and it helps sharpen this I think Nancyian sense of listening.
Masi: That makes complete sense. Yeah, and you know, and listening to you explain that, I was thinking about, it's kind of, there's a sort of very simple thing about it which is that, when we hear sounds, we hear that things and people are in motion. And we are so much expecting, right now, for everything to be, or for so much to be still. And sort of, I guess part of what I'm hearing you account for is just being aware...almost the surprise of finding that things and people are still moving, when we hadn't expected to hear them.
Neil: Yeah, yeah. And you know, also, just the way sounds move are different. I stuck one of my recorders...I live in a six-flat condo building in Uptown in Chicago. And one of the things I do is just every now and then is I'll stick a recorder on the roof overnight and I'll pick it up the next day and just listen to what happened the night before.
Masi: Oh, wow!
Neil: If you put it in a digital audio workstation, you can kind of see the moments where there's something to listen to. [laughs] And just, it's amazing the way sound moves differently when spaces are kind of emptied. Especially things like sirens are very loud noises that are meant to penetrate kind of through bodies and through other moving objects. And with nothing like that, they kind of bend in these strange ways. They move kind of around buildings in a way that you're not used to. And so, it's a very peculiar, you know...especially now, because when you hear a siren these days, most of the time it means someone's going to the hospital. So, you know, it's not just a “city noise.”
Masi: And makes us so clearly aware of the time that we're in right now, to hear that and know what it means.
Neil: Yeah, yeah.
Masi: Well, let's talk a little bit more about voices. And I know, obviously listening is a huge part of voicing and can't be, sort of...they travel together.
Neil: Totally.
Masi: Yeah. But last week on this podcast I reflected a little bit on the glitchiness of a voice on a Zoom call. But you are the media studies expert and you work in a field that takes interest in how we can hear the texture of the media that's making itself known as part of what we're listening to or watching. So, knowing that you've done some work on this topic in the past, I wanted to ask: What are some ways that you are noticing this kind of sonic or vocal glitchiness coming up in recent performances, whether on TV, or online or in different forums.
Neil: Well, so I've thought a lot about the relationship between voices and media in the context of scream performances in radio drama.
Masi: Mm-hmm. You have this great article on that, I want to make sure we mention, in this really wonderful anthology...do you want to just say a little bit about the anthology?
Neil: Oh, sure. You know, it's edited by Judith Zeitlin and Martha Feldman, two scholars at the University of Chicago, where I taught before I came to Northwestern. And we were part of this project for several years called "The Voice Project," which, was kind of just...you know, there've actually been quite a few voice projects at universities in recent years. But ours was an interesting way of bringing together musicologists and sound scholars, like media sound scholars like me, who don't necessarily have a lot of interactions, to be honest. And it was such a rich and rewarding thing, and everyone's coming from different perspectives. But we produced this volume called The Voice as Something More, which was kind of a response to a very famous book by Mladen Dolar, who actually wrote for our book as well. And his book is called A Voice and Nothing More, which was kind of an attempt to look at what is this thing, this object, the voice. He's very much coming from a Lacanian perspective, so a kind of very specific--
Masi: Yep. Psychoanalytic.
Neil: Yeah. But anyway, so I was interested in a bunch of different scream performances, a few of them famous, so: Antonin Artaud's To Have Done With the Judgement of God, and Gregory Whitehead's Pressures of the Unspeakable, and then a few that are, you know, not quite so canonical, but are very famous in kind of radio lore.
Masi: Yeah, well I just loved how you were writing about the performativity of the scream and the way that it was containing within itself this knowledge of its being kind of a "take" on a scream, even while purporting sometimes to be otherwise.
Neil: Yeah, yeah. And you know, how do we put a kind of pressure on, not so much on the body but use the pressure of the body, and the pressure of, like, interior vocalization to make manifest the like large technological apparatus that conveys it to us. Right? And to me that's what scream performances always do, they're about kind of producing a kind of glitchiness. So the thing that I find interesting about the kind of glitchiness in voice performances that we're encountering now, and this is everything from, you know, the Saturday Night Live episode that was recorded from home, to, you know, the Lady Gaga "One World" thing that just happened, where I think she was actually singing into the wrong side of the microphone, is that, you know, it's revealing in the same way that...it has the rhetoric of reveal in the same way as "Stars are just like us." Or like seeing a famous movie star without their makeup on, or something like that. That there's a kind of peculiar pleasure you get out of the, like, you know, twenty dollar microphone setup that a lot of these folks have in their houses. Which is, you know, and many of them have very sophisticated material but they're not sound engineers.
Masi: Right. But the sound setup is not that sophisticated.
Neil: Yeah, and I don't mean to give anyone a hard time about that, it's just that it's a skill, and it's not one that you've had to acquire.
Masi: Yeah, no, I hear you. And I think part of what you're bringing up is that we start to hear the technology in the sound, it sort of, we start to hear it in the texture of these voices that are being sent to us from people's living rooms, or you know, quickly thrown together home studios...
Neil: Yeah, and it's also kind of wonderful, you know.
Masi: It also reminded me, thinking of that SNL episode, of also that Gal Gadot video "Imagine," that was put together you know, kind of early in our quarantine chapter here in the US. And um, there was...you could definitely hear that all the different singers on that were, you know, using different miking strategies.
Neil: Right.
Masi: But also very different keys! Like, so in my circles, in the music circles, all the musicians and the theatre people were like: Well, we're definitely hearing the glitchiness of musical key in addition to sort of technology as well.
Neil: Yeah, and, you know, there's so many of these now that they should really kind of form a sort of corpus, you know. There's the Lady Gaga show, Andrea Bocelli's Easter show, to some extent the Queen's speech, these different kind of, you know, specific kind of vocal performances. And one of the things that's struck me about those, is that they, I mean, Lady Gaga sang "Smile" of all songs.
Masi: Mm-hmm.
Neil: Bocelli had...he sang "Amazing Grace." The Queen alluded to "We'll Meet Again," which is a song by Vera Lynn from World War II, a very famous, important song from that period. But they're all these attempts at nostalgia, but they always seem like someone else's nostalgia. You know, they seem like a nostalgia that we kind of wish we had. You know?
Masi: Yeah, it's a sort of a borrowed nostalgia that we're trying to apply to this situation.
Neil: Right. Yeah, you know I think a lot about...Svetlana Boym passed away a couple of years ago, a kind of well-known theorist of nostalgia. And I reread her book on it, not too long ago, and it really affected me. And one of the things I was thinking about in these is her idea of a kind of future nostalgia, right? That sometimes we feel nostalgic towards, you know, a path that we diverged from but still seems kind of present to us, or in our possible futures. You know? It's a different...you know, nostalgia's always about a longing for home but this is about a longing for a kind of parallel temporal home from which we have wandered, and to which we can never return. You know?
Masi: Yeah. It reminds me, sort of in comic book world, of like, you know, of like Earth 2 or something like that.
Neil: Yeah. Totally, totally. And so I don't mean that in like a critical way, but it's noticeable. It's noticeable that, it's not like, I don't know that nostalgia is being promoted as the emotional cure for the situation we find ourselves in. But there is something about that that seems, that seems to offer like a warmth that we don't seem to be able to generate otherwise.
Masi: Yeah, yeah. No, I definitely hear you. I mean, there's something that we're hungry for and we're...I think, it’s kind of...everyone's improvising, under the circumstances.
Neil: Yeah.
Masi: More so than we might have otherwise, and certainly performers and artists. And so in that improvisation we're hearing the media present in the glitching voices. We're also hearing the affect that is sort of making itself known in these performances as well, the different kinds of feelings.
Neil: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, my period is the late thirties, early forties, so I think a lot about what what are the parallels, what are the ways in which they're similar and different. And one of the things that was very common in kind of 1930s popular culture was a sense of: Okay, now we redefine. Now we redefine who we are, we redefine where we're going, but we also redefine the past.
Masi: Are you speaking about sort of the history of radio in the US in that time period?
Neil: Well, let me give you an example. So, there's a well known show that many of your listeners might know called Cavalcade of America, which was produced by DuPont. And DuPont produced this show as part of a pretty broad, really, public relations campaign because they had made a lot of money off of the first world war, and it, you know, selling munitions and things like that. And so it made them strongly associated with what was, then, a very unpopular and controversial intervention that the Americans got involved in.
Masi: Yeah.
Neil: So DuPont created this show called Cavalcade of America. And Cavalcade of America is a historical show that usually picks two or three different episodes from the history of the United States, often kind of patriotic narratives about heroic figures. So, from journalists to politicians to people on the frontier, the inventors of the postal service, things like that. And they will, you know, each episode compares one or two of these episodes and notes a similarity about, you know, fortitude or something like that. But what's amazing about this show, and it changed of course when the war came, is that because DuPont didn't want to be associated with war, this is an anthology radio show about the history of America that involves no war.
Masi: Wow.
Neil: Yeah. Because they don't want anyone to think about that, right? So it's a really unusual approach, partly because, you know, it absolves America of so many of its sins.
Masi: Yeah, yeah.
Neil: But it also, you know, it purges it of many of the kind of historical nodes that give it a kind of like, you know, patriarchal, bellicose character. You know? And so it's a very bizarre show for that reason. But my point is, is that what it does is that it's trying to create a sense of rootedness, but in order to do that, it's reinventing what it is we're rooted in. And it's doing it with an agenda.
Masi: Yeah. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I was really struck that on March 20th, just about a month ago, there were over 160 stations in Europe that broadcast simultaneously the song "You'll Never Walk Alone," which is a Rodgers and Hammerstein song, and also the anthem of Liverpool Football Club. All these stations broadcast it simultaneously in solidarity, and there was this impulse, I think, to sort of feel like "We're all in this collective moment together," maybe as part of that redefinition that you're speaking about. But I'm wondering, could you say a little bit about how the time that we're in right now is similar to or different from past moments when radio created a sense of unity. Do you think that kind of shared listening and identity-building is something that could happen now?
Neil: Well, the quick answer is I don't know. [laughs] But let me give you like a little bit of perspective on that, just from my perspective as a radio historian. So when I teach the history of radio, it's very difficult to convey, but I think it's important to convey to my students just what the texture of what life was for Americans in the 1930s. There's a lot of it you know. First of all, it's mostly a rural nation. And that's really important. That means that your circle is pretty small. Most of your experiences with, you know, government for instance have to do with the post office or something like that. It's deeply segregated, in the same way it is now, but it's deeply segregated in different ways. It's a very religious country. And if you have electricity, and you know, not everybody does, and over the course of the decade is how that happens. If you have electricity, you have probably a light bulb, an iron, and a radio. And these are the things that connect you, you know, into what we think of as the world system. Now, you know, there were telegraphs before, there were newspapers before, there was literacy before. There's lots of things that connected you to the world. But this was immediate. You know? This was hearing people's voices right now, something that's happening everywhere. And there's only, by the late 30s, early 40s, there's only about three or four networks. And so they broadcast the same thing to everyone all the time. And so it becomes this...you know, Benedict Arnold has this idea of the imagined community, and people who study radio have really latched onto this, because that's what this is. This is an imagined community, this is convincing people that they have a connectedness with other people around the country. But, always remembering that there's an ideological dimension to that. That's an ideological project, it's not anything more than that, you know. So, whose point of view will be the one that gets the national voice? Well, it's probably going to be a white, cisgender male, right? [laughs]
Masi: Yeah. Yeah.
Neil: And this is one of the ways in which national identity gets formed, in real time for the first time. And so it's a nationalist project. So, how does that play out? Well, it's not a linear process. But one of the things that I think was interesting about that period was, how do writers and artists aesthetically respond to this mediating apparatus? And they respond in a number of ways, but one of the ways they respond, that I've written a little bit about and I think is relevant to many of the examples we've already talked about, is this style that I think of as the kaleidosonic style. And---
Masi: The kaleidosonic. Okay, great. Let's go.
Neil: Yeah. The kaleidosonic style which was very prevalent in the late 1930s, and early 1940s and during the war. And it's a style or an approach to making radio dramas, or radio poems, or radio songs--ballads, so you know, Paul Robeson's "The Ballad for Americans" is a good example of it.
Masi: Oh, I'm so glad you mentioned, Shana Redmond, who has a new book on Paul Robeson, is going to be on this podcast in a couple weeks.
Neil: Oh, that's great! That's very exciting. It's a fascinating piece. Well, I won't step on that, then.
Masi: No, no, go ahead!
Neil: But the thing about the kaleidosonic style is that what it likes to do is it likes to celebrate specific moments in the life of a nation. So, the anniversary of the Bill of Rights, or the ratification of a U.N. charter, or you know, Thanksgiving, or a daybreak. Very specific--
Masi: So these acts of kind of commemoration.
Neil: Yeah, acts of commemoration and acts of unity, temporal unity. And then it likes to look at a series of different perspectives on that moment. And to, you know, approach an individual, a voice, and say, you know, How does a farmer feel about this? How does a sharecropper feel about this? How does a worker feel about this? How does a bricklayer? How does a mother? Right? All these kind of typecast different characters. But the idea of it is to kind of propose that all these different people, who are like the nodes of a radio network, have some sort of common experience that we can capture through a kind of poetic imagination.
Masi: And the affective again, sort of, there's this shared affect, this shared feeling that drives this sort of production of what that commemoration is, I guess.
Neil: That's right, yeah. And so, you know, what do they sound like? Well, there'll be one big, loud, central voice, and then there'll be a series of passages that have these flurries of individuals giving perspectives on it. Which aren't that different from, you know, the Gal Gadot thing, or the Lady Gaga thing, or you know, the idea of a series of brief, shallow scenes that don't have particular duration and don't have psychological depth, but they convey perspective. It's about kind of agglomerating a series of perspectives and proposing that they share the same world.
Masi: Wow.
Neil: Yeah, the kaleidosonic style is something that a lot of people kind of reach for, since then, you know? It has the feel of a totalizing objective perspective, even when in fact it's privileging some voices over others.
Masi: Right.
Neil: Or excluding a whole bunch. But in the 30s, those styles, and the kind of masters of this, people like Steven Vincent Benét and Norman Corwin, who I've written a lot about...the masters of this, they would always blend it with a second style, which I always talk about as the intimate style. And that's the style where the microphone seems very close to a particular body who's moving through space, and who you experience duration with.
Masi: So you're getting both this sense of depth or breadth and also this sense of intimacy and closeness.
Neil: Correct. Yeah, yeah. So, like people often talk about radio as an intimate medium, and radio kind of had to become an intimate medium. It wasn't, it's not inherently that way. But using the intimate style is one way of producing that sense of false intimacy. You know? You move through the world and hear the world as the other person, so you have this kind of surrogacy of listening.
Masi: Wow, this is amazing.
Neil: Yeah, so the 30s style was about kind of blending those two things together. So the shorthand I use for this is that, you know, radio is often called the "theater of the mind" and what I think in the 30s is that it's really a "theater in the mind." It's imagining, like, how do we create spatial experiences using sound techniques. And vocal techniques. And, you know, writing techniques.
Masi: This is great.
Neil: And then I think it changes in the 30s. The way I put it is that in the 30s, we have a "theater in the mind" and in the 40s we have a theatre about the mind. It becomes much more psychological, the stories are much smaller, they involve fewer people, there's a lot of things like stream of consciousness and interior monologue. But those things don't really happen in the 30s. I feel like if I want to peg where we are media-wise at this moment, we're definitely in a kind of, you know, attempting this kind of 30s kaleidosonic "We are all on the same experience, we're all having the same thing." And then the first question you have to ask is, who is we? [laughs]
Masi: Right. Of course, of course. Such a vital question. This is great. And this kind of brings me to what I want to begin to wrap up thinking about, and this is a lovely segueway, in terms of how artists are now responding. And I think, I definitely agree with you on the sort of impulse toward that more 30s aesthetic of "We're all in this together, Here are all of the perspectives.” And at the same time, a lot of artists I know are being asked to write sort of these monologues, the viral monologues that are being done. Or a number of theatres, Playwrights Horizons, a wonderful off Broadway theatre has launched a series of podcasts. I just listened to the first one, which is kind of a musical...I don't know that I can really say it's a drama, but I guess I can say a musical, a scripted musical podcast. [laughs]
Neil: Right.
Masi: It's called Prime: A Practical Breviary, which, a breviary being a book of songs for prayer at different times of day. Anyway, it's very beautiful, and has some of that kind of I think maybe more--I hesitate to reach for this, but maybe more in that intimate style you were talking about. Anyway, so a lot of artists are being asked to, or it's being suggested that we will write audio work. And I don't know that we necessarily have thought about it that much or are prepared to turn to doing that. So, I guess, given your expertise in this area, and I know you've thought a lot about contemporary audio drama and podcasting as well, but for artists who are turning to radio or audio drama, or scripted podcasting, for the first time, do you have any advice that you might have? What it might be helpful for them to know or think about.
Neil: Well, um, I mean the first piece of advice I'd give, is kind of one that's already been taken, which is: Do something that's kind of out there and weird.
Masi: That's great.
Neil: I think one of the things about the kaleidosonic style is that it's very legible and it's very clear and it's very external, and it's very open. And it would be nice to kind of counterbalance that with something else. And I'm not sure what that "something else" will be for this generation. But one thing I'd say about the history of audio drama is...I'm writing this thing now where I try and characterize it kind of, its long history. And the term that I, or the way I think about it is I think about: audio drama has always been governed by what I call an aesthetics of amnesia. And what I mean by that is that, you know there are genres of art and art work that have an intense relationship with their pasts, right? And it's often very patriarchal, and you know, I'm thinking of things like lyric poetry or portrait painting, where you couldn't make one today without having a pretty clear understanding of its past. You don't have to like everything, but, you know. So, radio drama is the exact opposite of that. Most of the people who intervene in the field have almost no background in the medium. And they could probably name two or three famous radio plays, one of those will be The War of the Worlds...and so they don't have that kind of studied, scholarly weight on their shoulders.
Masi: Yeah.
Neil: And there's two ways you can react to that. So, part of me thinks, oh, well you should...now is the best time to study the history of radio drama, we have more stuff out there on the internet than ever. You should listen to the Columbia Workshop, you should listen to Studio One, you should listen to Earplay, Yuri Rasovsky's work, and then I can rattle off like a whole syllabus of stuff. That's one impulse. But the other impulse is, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute...This is exactly audio drama's strength. That it isn't oppressed by its own history. You know, I can show you writers from five years ago and 20 years ago and 50 years ago and 70 years ago who all felt that they were starting a medium fresh. And that's the thing that gave them energy. You know, no one has ever become wealthy making radio drama or audio drama of any kind. But what they have been able to do was to be incredibly experimental. And I think part of the reason is because they don't have this, you know, heavy weight of their, you know, patriarchal antecedents. They don't feel like they have to make a piece that replies to the work of Yuri Rasovsky. Or John Dryden. Or you know, even that they have to, you know, reply to them at all. Now, that comes with its problems. That means that there's great work that has been written by people like, you know, Amiri Baraka or Sylvia Plath that has been produced once and then been completely forgotten. But, and so, and there's stuff from other parts of the world, there's great classical radio dramas and experimental radio dramas in--everywhere...Germany, Cuba...
Masi: Sure.
Neil: And so, we don't bring them over and translate them and process them and think them through and reinvent them for our...for new circumstances. And it would be great if that happened. So, there's a kind of trade-off. So I guess you know, the number one thing I'd say is, you know, remember to...being experimental and not necessarily knowing the kind of, you know, heavily thought-through history of the medium, its canon, can be incredibly useful.
Masi: That's great. I love that. And I think that's especially useful, because there can be an impulse to sort of turn to audio drama now as a kind of substitute--not kind of, an actual substitute for live theatre, and to focus on the ways that it's kind of doing its best to do an impression of the theatre. And I think that kind of an approach would really limit experimentation. And so your encouragement to really think about what can be done with the form, what it offers, what it affords that other kinds of performance might not, I think is really well taken, and good advice for us all.
Neil: Let me give you a pretty concrete instance of this. So in the 30s, one of the things that happened was many of the people who came into radio and kind of made the most interesting experimental work...most of them were from the theatre. Not all of them, but a lot of them were from the theatre, and a lot of them were poets and people like that. And so when they made radio dramas, they were thinking very much about, Okay, I'm making a play, it has to have a sense of stage. So people have to know what's happening in the left and the right and the near and the far, and what's in focus and what isn't in focus, and that's one of the reasons why it's such a spacial theatre. But one of the things that they discovered over the--and you see this in the literature--over the course of about ten years or so, is a lot of people who sort of approached it as a kind of theatre like in the proscenium arch sense, is that a lot of them became gradually disenchanted with this idea. They think that they were making a mistake. They think that making radio drama, or making audio drama was less like going to a theatre and more like reading a novel. In the sense that theatre is about being in public with strangers. But when you're listening to an audio drama or a radio drama at that time, you were usually alone, or at home, or with your family, or in that kind of an environment. And so the kind of experience you have of reading a novel, this kind of solitary experience--even though everybody's having it at the same time--isn't the same as being in the presence of others. So it can't be...in their mind, in the mind of this generation, it couldn't be a substitute to being in the presence of others, being in the presence of a public. And so they shifted their metaphor from the metaphor of the theatre to the metaphor of the novel. I'm not saying that's how everyone would do it, but the fact that they felt that kind of framing other presence or framing other medium helped them conceive of their theatre. I think that's something that maybe people today could think of as well.
Masi: That's so practically helpful. And really thought provoking. Like I wouldn't have thought about that. But again, because I'm coming from this sense of like Okay, well if I were going to write a musical, [laughs] given that I'm supposed to be writing several, and instead were to write it for a scripted audio piece, it's just really practically helpful to think of it from such a different zone and considering the listener and the audience member in such a different way than I might have otherwise. So that is so, so very helpful. And thank you! I think we've kind of come to the end of my questions. We've traveled such amazing ground and I just want to thank you again for making the time to come and chat with me.
Neil: It's my pleasure. And, if I can very briefly out you, I want to say Happy Birthday!
Masi: Oh, [laughs] thank you! I'm going to post this on Thursday when it will be post-my-birthday. But yes, this has been a lovely way to wrap up my birthday.
Neil: It's been a lovely way for me too. And thank you so much for including me in this project. I'm really glad that you're making this podcast and I look forward to listening to future episodes.
[Music clip: Masi at a flamenco singing class]
Guest Voice Practitioner and Vocal Exercise
Masi: All right! I’m so excited today that my guest voice expert is Julie Foh, assistant professor of voice and speech at the School of Fine Arts at the Unversity of Connecticut! Julie Foh is a voice, speech, and accent specialist. She holds an MA in Voice and Speech from the American Repertory Theatre’s Institute for Advanced Theatre Training. She has coached projects for BEDLAM, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Tectonic Theater Project, NY Stage & Film, Second Stage, New Georges, A.R.T., The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, American Players Theatre, Studio 42, and others. And she’s taught all over the place—at Penn State (that’s in my hometown!), Rutgers, A.R.T. at Harvard (another place close to my heart—I’m really messing up this bio today...), the Moscow Art Theatre School, Webster University, the National Theater Institute—so many places. She also holds a BA in Theater Studies from Duke University and is an Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework® and a Certified Teacher of Knight-Thompson Speechwork. Julie is a member of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association and a fully-vetted coach at Dialectcoaches.com.
Welcome, Julie, thank you so much for doing this!
Julie: It’s such my pleasure.
Masi: Fantastic. I would love it if you could open by just telling us a little bit about some of the methods that you work in—Fitzmaurice and Knight-Thompson. How do some of those methods affect your own teaching?
Julie: Sure. I’ll start with Fitzmaurice Voicework, which is the methodology that I found first, before Knight-Thompson Speechwork. Catherine Fitzmaurice is a woman who trained at the Cental School for Speech and Drama in London, and has been teaching and working with the voice for decades now. She developed an approach to voice training, primarily for ractors, though it could be useful for anyone who uses their voices in a professional capacity. It’s a physical approach to voice training, which has made a lot of sense to me as both a learner and a teacher—since voice is a physical action, to work on it in that way. There are two main components in Fitzmaurice Voicework. There’s something called “destructuring,” which is a word that Catherine made up—I love it.
[laughter]
Masi: Why not?
Julie: Yeah. But it has to do with the removal of the structure of unnecessary muscular tension in the body, tension that might be limiting how much breath capacity a speaker has, and might also be limiting the conduction of the sound wave of the voice through the body, so resonance and then sympathetic resonance, vibration in bones throughout the body. And then the other component of Fitzmaurice Voicework is “restructuring,” so we’ve got that pattern in the vocabulary—destructuring and restructuring. And that has to do with learning a breath support choreography, really, thinking about how the muscles are working in a way that supports the voice in a healthy way, and in a way that can be observed in nature. You can see this muscular pattern in animals when they make sounds—when lions roar or dogs bark, or even when babies babble or cry, you can see this breath support system happening in humans at a young age. And it still allows for spontaneity in terms of using the voice and in terms of how the person is breathing, that impulse for the breath in that the speaker will then communicate on.
Masi: This is so great! You didn’t know that I was asking you to come in and give us a whole lecture, but it’s fascinating, so thank you. And I think especially good to remember before we get to the exercise that this is work that involves the body, and I know there’s kind of some gestural work in the exercise we’re going to do today, so just kind of keeping those things in mind I think is useful going forward. And do you want to say a little bit about the other method as well?
Julie: Sure. And then Knight-Thompson Speechwork was developed by two, actually two of Catherine’s first students in her pedagogy, Dudley Knight and Phil Thompson. And it’s also a physical approach to speech work so it focuses on the vocal tract, the space between the larynx and the voicebox, and the mouth and the nose, where speech sounds are shaped, where vowel and consonant sounds are shaped. So, like I said it focuses on how the muscles of articulation—like the lips, the jaw, the tongue, the soft palate (which is that thing at the back of the mouth that lifts when we yawn)—how those muscles interact to make speech sounds.
Masi: Beautiful! Thank you, thank you. Ok, good! So I’m so excited, let’s get right to it, now that we have all that, I made you do all that intro. Let’s do your exercise—does it have a name? I should have asked you that before. Do you want to make up a name in the tradition of Catherine Fitzmaurice?
Julie: Yeah, I’ll make up a name, well maybe not make up a word, but make up a name right here on the spot! Let’s call it "Landed Lip Flubber."
Masi: Yes! I love it, Landed Lip Flubber, here we go.
Julie: So, I was inspired to show this exercise by the title of your podcast, Voicing Across Distance. So I’ll describe each component of this exercise individually, because I can’t really speak while I’m doing it.
Masi: Okay, cool.
Julie: So we’ll start with the lip flubber part. So what that is, is sending a strong flow of art out on an exhalation so that the lips will sort of flubber on the wind of that exhalation. Some other maybe cultural references for this action is...you might think of it as “blowing a zerbert” at someone, or a “raspberry,” those words are meaningful to anyone out there. So if I just do the lip flubber on its own on breath, it would sound like this: [flubber sound]. And that sort of tapping you might hear are my lips flubbering against each other because I’m exhaling in a strong way and letting the lips relax.
Masi: Mmhm, we sometimes call that a “lip trill” in singing training—is that kind of the same thing or do you understand that to be different?
Julie: No, it’s absolutely a trill. The technical term would be an “unvoiced bilabial trill”...bilabial meaning that you’re using the two lips and it's unvoiced because it's just breath.
Masi: Drop the knowledge. Yes, ok good! [laughs]
Julie: So then the next step is probably to add some voicing to that so rather than just breath on the exhale, some voice, which would sound something like this: [flubber with voice]. So we get a voiced bilabial trill, or lip trill. And the pitch of the voice doesn’t matter really for this exercise, you can be wherever is comfortable for you in the moment for your pitch range, or you can play around going up and down in your pitch. This can be really relaxing for lip muscles if there’s any tension there and also can help reestablish equilibrium in terms of—this is really technical, but—air pressure outside the neck and throat and inside the neck and throat. So sometimes, especially these days, I feel sometimes a little bit of a tightness in my throat and we have sort of these colloquialisms, like “I’ve got a lump in my throat” or “something is caught in my throat,” and this can help relieve that sensation and maybe open up more space in the throat.
Masi: Wonderful.
Julie: So then the landed part of this is the idea—more than idea, it’s a physical truth—of sending the sound waves of your voice out into the space around you, across distance. I don’t know if you’ve ever been at a concert and maybe you felt maybe the vibration of the heavy bass or loud bass, that’s the sound wave traveling from the source into your body, so we can do that with hour voices too. And sometimes adding a gesture that physicalizes the traveling of that sound wave can help the sound wave move across more distance! So the gesture is to bring one arm up and bend the elbow so that your hand will rest on the shoulder: so I’m using my right hand resting on my right shoulder, and my right elbow is up just a little bit. And the hand is going to trace the trajectory of the lip flubber, so the hand will travel up from the shoulder and then out towards some focal point in front of you or next to you—something that you might like to look at and think about landing your voice on.
Masi: Okay, it feels like I’m unfolding my hand, almost like I’m going to unfold my voice toward wherever I want to go.
Julie: I love that, yeah! “Unfolding.” Unfolding the arm and the voice follows, love that. So I’m going to choose—I’m looking at a painting right now of my mother-in-law when she was a young girl. I’m going to look at that painting and I’m going to land my lip flubber on my mother-in-law with this unfolding arm gesture, which will go something like this: [flubber sound].
And so my gaze was on—my eyes were on the painting, my hand was reaching out towards the painting, and then the voice will hopefully follow those two gestures of looking and reaching.
Masi: Beautiful. Can we do it one more time? I’m going to try it too. Can we do it together?
Julie: Yeah, and if you do it more than once you can choose different pitch if you want to!
Masi: Okay, cool.
Julie: Let’s do it together.
Masi: All right.
[combined flubber]
Masi: Okay, can we do it again, because I wasn’t focusing enough.
Julie: [laughs] Sure!
Masi: One more go, one more go.
[combined flubber]
Masi: That was awesome. Thank you so much, Julie, I really appreciate it! And I was thinking, we were talking a little bit also earlier and I just wasn’t sure if we should mention this: just about how the experience of teaching now—I know you do a lot of coaching by video and videoconference already, and so you’re very prepared for this moment we’re now in—but it still can feel a little bit different, you were saying. Do you want to just say a little bit about what you’re noticing?
Julie: Yeah. So, talking about teaching group classes in an online platform, and I’ve been using Zoom for my classes at UConn. And the thing that’s been sort of jarring to me about that, that I didn’t anticipate is sort of overload—the audio overload of a group of voices on software. So if I’m leading a group voice exercise and all of my students have their mics on, it’s too much information for the software to process.
Masi: Yeah.
Julie: And so I’ve been asking my students to mute themselves—in a voice class!—so that the software program can, you know, so that they can hear me more clearly and we can be more in-sync in terms of those group exercises. But I can’t hear them, which is so different from being in the same space together.
Masi: Yeah, yeah. No, I thank you for telling that story and I think it’s important for us to acknowledge: you know, we may not have a magical answer, “Well that means that this! And they get to have a more personalized experience.” Like probably there are benefits to these things that we might not know or feel, that we may not notice at this time, but just to acknowledge the differences that our world now has I think is important and valuable. And so I thank you for sharing that story, and I’m sure your students are learning so much nonetheless, like we have from you. So thank you, Julie, really appreciate it!
Julie: Thank you so much, Masi! My pleasure.
Closing
[Voicing Across Distance theme]
That’s it! Thanks for listening. Hope you’ll listen in next week for Episode 3, where I plan to host two more professors as guests, voice studies pioneer Nina Sun Eidsheim, Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the wonderful voice teacher Jeremy Mossman, assistant professor of music theatre at Carthage College, with a vocal exercise for us all. Until then!
[Voicing Across Distance theme ending]
About this Transcript:
This transcript is provided for reference purposes, and should not be taken as a literal performance score of every “mm-hmm” and “yeah”and “um” and stutter and laugh that transpired in the course of conversation. The Voicing Across Distance theme music and “Voice Theory” chant are written and performed by Masi Asare.