Text and authority: issues of gender and
ownership in the work of Cathy Berberian
© Janet K. Halfyard
Paper
presented at International ASCA
Conference,
The history of music
has traditionally been a history of composers: this was only natural in a world
without recording technology, where what was preserved of music was the
composer’s score rather than the performance, but even in the era of recording,
while popular music is forming itself into a history of performers, art music
is only slowly beginning to interest itself in performances as sites of
investigation as interesting to music as the study of compositions. Given our historical fixation on composers
and scores, and the early twentieth century deep distrust of the virtuoso
performer by composers and music critics, there has been a tendency to lose
sight of the creative contributions made to compositional processes by
performers. In the relatively brief history of extended vocal composition, it
is also significant that many of those performers have been female, Cathy
Berberian being the first and still probably the best known.
There are two principal pieces
that Berberian made in the RAI studio with Berio, Thema (1958) and Visage
(1961), although she also did work there with the other composers, including
Maderna, Cage, and Nono. Berio has described Berberian’s voice as being almost
a second studio di fonolgia from him, allowing him to explore all the noises
and incidental yet fundamentally characterizing aspects of everyday vocal
behaviour that are conventionally eliminated from the classical singing voice.
Berio was not the only one to see Berberian herself almost as a piece of
wonderful equipment for the studio boys to experiment with. Marino Zuccheri,
the principal technician of the Studio has said that from 1957, they entered a
golden period, and one aspect of that was “the presence of Cathy Berberian and
her voice which had become the ‘tenth oscillator’ of the studio” (Scaldafferi,
2000).
This is one of the areas where the
performer as creative artist potentially gets written out of history. Underlying much of the writing for and representation of
women in opera and early twentieth century music-theatre is the Western cultural
identification of woman with nature and man with spirit, and idea that persists
from Classical Greek medical theory to medieval theology to a
proto-Expressionist writer such as Otto Weininger. This identification has
particular significance for the vocabulary of electroacoustic music and its
uses of the female voice. In this binary cultural construction, the female is
located in the body, in physical reality and her voice represents this reality,
concretely audible, a tangible human presence in the intangible realm of
musical sound. The male presence, spiritual, is therefore not represented in
concrete form but in the abstraction of the creative process, with which the
composer as author is identified, a construction found most explicitly in Visage.. This, however, leaves us with
something of an aesthetic, poetic and even moral tacngling when it comes to
attributing ideas of authorship and ownership to a piece. Undoubtedly,
composers have rights to their compositions as their intellectual and creative
property, and Cathy Berberian was not the composer of Thema, Visage or even Sequenza III, regardless of her
significant input to these pieces.. However, the position of a performer in
relation to the works created for, around and with her is not as straightforward
as the single authorial acknowledgement of the composer presupposes. In
electroacoustic composition the female vocalist is sometimes viewed as
‘material’ by both composer and potentially the audience; and in acoustic works
she is potentially ‘just the performer’. Neither identification necessarily
acknowledges the actively creative contribution that a performer may make to a
composition. The assumed model tends to be ,as shown in Figure 1, a process
where the composer is the sole and direct creator of the work, with the
performer ‘in parentheses’, as it were; and this is a model which does indeed
reflect real-world working processes.[1]
Figure 1
However, the second model
(Figure 2) is perhaps a more accurate representation of the situation which
occurs just – if not more – frequently, where there is a two way process of
creation occurring in the interaction of composer and performer, both therefore
contributing directly to the content of the final piece.
Figure 2
Certainly, in the case of
Berberian’s association with Berio, this second model seems to be a more
accurate description of their working process: in the tape compositions, hers
is not a neutral presence. Her reading of the James Joyce text for Thema is a performance, an
interpretation; and out of the vocal colours and nuances that she brings to
that reading, Berio built his composition which is itself a response to her
reading, as much as it is a response to Joyce’s text.
This is even more apparent in Visage where David Osmond Smith reports
that Berio dispensed with texts altogether and asked Berberian to improvise a
series of monologues each based on a repertoire of vocal gestures and phonetic
material suggested by a given linguistic model but without using any specific
words from that language. The result is a piece that is evidently built around
Berberian’s improvisations in response to Berio’s directions and histr ideas
about the formal structure of the piece; while at a local level, his piece can
largely be seen as a response to her improvisation. However, in terms of
authorship, this is an entirely electroacoustic work: there is no live
performer, only the tape: and everything on that tape is the text regardless of
whether it originated with the Berio or Berberian. The vocalist’s contribution,
in this case, does not appear to be simply ‘material’ but an essential part of
what might more accurately be viewed as a collaboration, even though it has
never been officially acknowledged as such. Hannah Bosma (1996) has noted this
and a variety of other examples of the complex relationship between
electroacoustic composer and female vocalist in the context of the latter’s
dual role as the traditional body-identified singer and also contributor and
collaborator in the male-identified creative process.
Berberian, in her work in the studio, has
usually been relegated to the position of an oscillator, a machine that is
programmed in the correct way to produce the required sound, but this is a drastic
oversimplification of her role in the creation of these works in particular
where her voice and her imagination, her creativity in improvisations, are an
essential part of the compositional process.
In the context of Sequenza III Istvan Anhalt (1984, 40) has described Berberian as
“the close collaborator (one is tempted to say co-creator)” of the piece, and
it has clearly been written around what she could do as an actress and vocalist
in realizing the emotional and narrative dimensions of what is still one of the
toughest vocal compositions of the 20th century. This is reflected
in Berio’s comment that “there have been a number of sad occasions,
when Cathy was not performing, on which I have been tempted to transcribe this
work for two or three voices.” (Berio, 1985, 96). However, it is fascinating
that given the importance that Anhalt attributes Berberian in both the
realization and, by implication, the creation of the piece, in his 14 page
essay on Sequenza III he mentions her
only once, in a single short sentence on the final page, and he relegates any
mention of her performance to a foot note, unlike Joke Dame who places
Berberian much more centrally in her reading of the text.
On some levels, the material
of Sequenza III is not obviously
ground-breaking, and is rooted in the way that Berberian herself vocalized: it
was this that inspired Cage’s Aria eight
years previously, and her performance of Aria
that in turn inspired other composers to write for her in this way, exploiting
her ability to shift between vocal characters and expressive states, as seen in
the 10 personalities of Aria, the
five of Phonemes pour Cathy, and so
on. In the Sequenza, the material can
be divided into roughly five character types (see Table 1), which might be
loosely described as anxious, tense, hyperactive, dreamy, and serene (an
extended vocal-version of the seven dwarves, perhaps)
Table 1
|
A ‘tense’ |
B ‘anxious’ |
C ‘hyperactive’ |
D ‘dreamy’ |
E ‘serene’ |
|
tense |
relieved |
witty |
distant |
noble |
|
urgent |
bewildered |
giddy |
dreamy |
joyful |
|
nervous |
whining |
ecstatic |
impassive |
serene |
|
intense |
whimpering |
excited |
wistful |
tender |
|
apprehensive |
anxious |
coy |
languorous |
calm |
|
|
gasping |
|
faintly |
|
|
|
desperate |
|
|
|
Likewise, as Visage and Maderna’s Dimensioni II
make great use of vocal characterizers, so too the Sequenza builds these sounds into the way the piece is written with
gasping, sighing and laughing forming part of the musical language.
Markus
Kutter’s text for Sequenza III is the
modular, nine phrase poem which starts “give me a few words for a woman to
sing” but, following on from Joke Dame’s observations, the piece is not a few
words for a woman but very specifically a few words for Cathy Berberian: the
piece could not have been written in the way it was without her. Moreover, the
actual form of the piece is, ultimately, a compromise between what Berio wrote
and what Berberian felt was practical to perform: in an interview given by
Berberian in 1981, she describes how the piece went through three scored
versions. The first was the one performed at Bremen in 1966, which she received
five days before leaving for Bremen, and which was not very well received.
Berberian made some suggestions and Berio made some alterations (and a second
score) for the second performance in
The last part of Berberian’s repertoire that I’d like to address is her own compositional work. It’s interesting that despite having established herself as a singer, she doesn’t appear in the Grove Dictionary of Opera, but she does appear in various dictionaries of composers, and all the main articles on her in Grove and the Oxford Companion mention give as much space to her composition as they do to her singing. She appears reluctant to describe herself as a composer – she refers to Strispody as a divertimento and, in interview, describes her compositions as gimmicks rather than real compositions.[3] They include the extraordinarily odd piano piece, Morsicathy, and her best known piece, Stripsody, which has been widely performed and recorded – there are at least three recordings by Berberian herself and, if Amazon.com is to be believed, even Jessye Norman has performed and recorded it.
However, there
are some curious features to her composition of this work. The Peters Edition
score, published in 1968, was not physically written by her. The title page
(Figure 3) clearly attributes the composition to her, but adds that the
graphics are by Roberto Zamarin. It is somewhat unusual for a composer not to
undertake the physical act of writing the score of her own music, particularly
in the case of a graphic score such as this, but here that act has explicitly
been performed by someone else. The fact that the score has been written out by
another is indicative that the performance preceded the score, rather than the
other way round: the score is effectively a transcription of Berberian’s
performance, probably closely based on her own performance notes and graphics.
Figure 3
The graphics make specific what is already
implicit in the various articulations, which is that this is a piece using the
gestures and characters of comic strips and cartoons: there are references to
some specific characters, such as Superman and Tarzan, to specific genres such
as Westerns, Gangsters and Romance and implied references to things such as Tom
and Jerry and the Peanuts comic strip. Again, writing for herself, Berberian
gives full rein to her abilities as an actress and her ability to adopted
highly characterized voices in order to bring the gangster and the love lorne
teenager to life, and as with other things written for her, she writes her own
musical history into this piece: one of extracts that the teenager hears on the
radio is She’s got a ticket to ride,
one of the Beatles songs that Andriessen famously set for her around this time.
The score is set up using three different
notational conventions. There is the main score, written on a three line stave
to indicate high, middle and low registers of the voice (see Figure 3). These
are continuous, almost stream of consciousness series of gestures following a
roughly alphabetical plan, starting with the Aaagh of Tarzan and ending with
the zzz of sleep and a buzzing fly. The second type of convention is roughly
the same in terms of the three line stave but abandons the alphabetical
ordering, and encloses all the material of a particular section between double
barlines, separating it out from the main score as a self-contained scene. In
this form, we find the specific genre episodes, such as the cat and dog fight,
the gangster scene (Figure 4) and the western.
Figure
4
The third category might be described as
inserts, in the Stockhausian sense of quite separate material placed within the
otherwise continuous score. These abandon the three line stave, always appear
on an entire, separate page and replace the gestures and characterizers of
comic strips with coherent sentences: You
stupid kite, get down out of that tree; my name is Freda and I have naturally
curly hair: do you like girls with naturally curly hair? Good grief (Figure
5); and Is it a bird, is it a plane, no,
it’s superman. In fact, there’s fourth quotation in the original recording
that doesn’t appear in the score: I can’t
stand it.
Figure
5
There is therefore a logic to why material
appears in three different ways, accounting for three different types of material:
comic strip gestures, comic strip genres and spoken interpolations that act
like comic strip quotations. It also reflects how Berberian thought about the
different types of material she was using, particularly as this score is a
transcription of piece she had already developed and performed. What is less
well known is that Berberian’s score is the 2nd printed version of Stripsody,
the first having been published in 1966 by the Italian artist, Eugenio Carmi,
with the first recording of Berberian’s performance attached. Umberto Eco’s
introduction to the score describes it as “a book to be looked at, a book to be
read, a book to recite and a book to be listened to.” He also describes how Stripsody
was written:
Berberian was looking for a text for one of her musical performances,
and thought of developing a kind of sound world using only the onomatopoeic
inventions of the comic strips. Gradually the idea grew that this musical
action had no need of music; thus, while Cathy began to sing these sounds, Carmi
went on to write the score. The two aspects of the work were born together, and
Cathy’s voice contributed more than one graphic suggestion while Carmi’s
imagination produced more than one vocal solution.
Eco studiously avoids referring to Berberian as a composer, and manages to perpetuate the old Western association of the female and her body-identified voice and the male with his spirit-identified imagination.[4]
It is peculiar that there is no mention
whatsoever of Carmi in Berberian’s score, as the spellings of the words appear
to be his, (for example, scranchete,
as seen in Figure 6a); the appearance of the words on the page of the Berberian
score often closely resembles Carmi’s graphics (for example, the way figures
burst through the line and are positioned on page, as seen in Figure 6b), and
the body of the score, following the alphabetical route from A to Z mirrors
that construction of Carmi’s text.
Figure
6a: Berberian’s ‘scranchete’ and Carmi’s ‘scranchete’
Figure
6b: bursting through lines
It’s also a very Italian alphabet –
there’s no letter J or X in either version. The material in the genre episodes
and inserts is almost entirely absent from Carmi’s version: they are something
unique to how Berberian was working, bringing her own knowledge of comic strips
into the piece. However, one of the inserts, the one present in the original
recording but missing from Berberian’s score and later recordings, does in fact
appear in Carmi’s, on the back cover (Figure 7).
Figure
7: Back cover of Carmi’s book
The relationship between the two works is
highly unusual, and represents a completely different idea of collaboration
from the one we are used to, where two or more artists work to produce a single
piece – here, they produced what are effectively two parallel versions of the
same work – I’m curiously reminded of Berio’s own approach to composition,
where constellations of works cluster around a single body of material, as in
the Sequenza for viola and the various
Chemins pieces written drawing on the
same musical substance. Here there is a single root but two quite different
works that have grown from it. Although Carmi is absent from Berberian’s score,
his work was not, in fact, absent from her performance: when she performed it,
she had several enormous blow ups of pages from Carmi’s book as her backdrop.
However, there is another parallel: I have
known of Stripsody and been
performing it for almost 20 years – I hadn’t even heard of Carmi’s book until
three years ago. He has been rendered invisible by Berberian’s score, which
fails to mention him, in the same way that she was rendered invisible by the
failure of various composers to consistently and openly acknowledged her
contributions to their work. In the sleeve notes of the original commercial
release of Visage, for example, Berio
talks about ‘the voice’ but never actually mentions that it is a female voice,
much less whose voice it is.
However, in conclusion, returning to my
original point, ours is a history of composers, and the whole idea of
collaborative practice is something that sits uncomfortably with our latent
Romantic ideology of the work of art as the expression of the creator’s inner
reality, their soul laid bare. In this view, musical composition is seen as
being, by necessity, a solitary act of purely personal creativity.
Collaboration, therefore, is historically distrusted on the grounds that this
cannot be the composer’s true voice if it has been diluted and confused by the
voices of others. Berberian the composer ironically appears to fall into
exactly the same pattern as other composers of not fully acknowledging the
contribution of another artist to her own work. Berberian the singer suffers
from that same lack of acknowledgement in the extent that her contributions to
her repertoire were not officially recognized, for the fact remains that
regardless of whether she wanted to be acknowledged, she played an active and
formative role in defining the nature of extended vocal technique and the
extended vocal repertoire.
References
Anhalt, Istvan, (1984). Alternative
voices: essays on contemporary vocal and choral composition.
Bosma,
Hanna (1996) Authorship and female voices
in electrovocal music http://www.hum.uva.nl/~hannah/icmc96.htm
Dame, Joke, (1998). “Voices Within the
Voice: Geno-text and Pheno-text in Berio's Sequenza III” in Adam Krims
(ed.), Music/ideology
: resisting the aesthetic.
Osmond-Smith, David, (1991). Berio.
——— “The Tenth Oscillator: the work of
Cathy Berberian, 1958-1966.” Tempo 58, 2-13.
Scaldafferi, Nicola, (2000). “Bronze by
Gold, by Berio and Eco: a journey through the Sirensong” in Veniero
Rizzardi and Angela Ida de Benedictis (eds) Nuovo Musica alla Radio:
esperienze allo studio di fonologia della RAI di Milano 1954-1959.