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Roland Barthes and the Grain of Panzéra's Voice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jonathan Dunsby
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Abstract

Roland Barthes's perception of voice having a ‘grain’ is one of the best-known legacies of the last century's history of ideas, especially in discussions of popular music. His evidence, the singing of Charles Panzéra, compared with that of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, is explored and illustrated here in the context of a discussion of the origin of ‘grain’ and its wider implications. It is only rhetorically that one may consider the ‘geno’-song separately from the ‘pheno’-song, but the implied interplay of structure and effect is a powerful critical resource, neglected to date because Barthes's vision requires explanation, as proposed here.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 134 , Issue 1 , 2009 , pp. 113 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Musical Association

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Footnotes

Versions of this research were presented in 2007 at the University of Southern California Musicology Forum and at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, Baltimore. I am grateful to Nicholas Cook, Lydia Goehr, Robert Samuels and Arnold Whittall for detailed responses to earlier drafts.

References

1 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, i: Swann's Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (Harmondsworth, 1983), 20.

2 See Naomi Cumming, The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification (Bloomington, IN, 2000); Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge, 1994); Jonathan Dunsby, Making Words Sing: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Song (Cambridge, 2004); Lawrence Kramer, ‘Beyond Words and Music: An Essay in Songfulness’, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley, CA, and London, 2002), 51–67.

3 Julia Kristeva, ‘The Semiotic and the Symbolic’, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York, 1984), 19–106 (p. 24). Kristeva's section on ‘Genotext and Phenotext’ (pp. 86–9) is also to be found in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford, 1986), 120–3.

4 Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, Image, Music, Text, trans. And ed. Stephen Heath (London, 1977), 179–89. Barthes's essay ‘Le grain de la voix’ was first published in Musique en jeu, 9 (1972), 57–63, in a volume edited by Michel Schneider with the overall theme of ‘Psychanalytique musique’. The many quotations from ‘The Grain of the Voice’ which follow are all taken from the Image, Music, Text edition, and because, as with other Barthes writings from which I quote in this article, the items are so short, I shall not burden the reader with many precise page references. Among a number of reprintings of the English version of ‘The Grain of the Voice’ is that in Barthes's The Responsibility of Forms (New York, 1985), at present widely available in paperback (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1991), 267–77.

5 Roland Barthes, Le grain de la voix: Entretiens 1962–1980 (Paris, 1981).

6 Armine Mortimer, The Gentlest Law: Roland Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text (New York, 1989); Michael Szekely, ‘Gesture, Pulsion, Grain: Barthes's Musical Semiology’, Contemporary Aesthetics, 4 (2006), online at <www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=409> (accessed 30 March 2008); Elizabeth Tolbert, ‘The Enigma of Music, the Voice of Reason: “Music”, “Language”, and Becoming Human’, New Literary History, 32 (2001), 451–65.

7 Kristeva, ‘Genotext and Phenotext’, 88. Italics in quotations throughout this article are original unless identified otherwise.

8 Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, ‘The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy, and Other Mythologies’, Black American Literature Forum, 15 (1981), 133–46, states that ‘at the conclusion of his comparison of the singing of the German operatic [sic] singer Fischer-Dieskau and the Russian [sic] Panzéra, it would appear that all that Roland Barthes had achieved in this laudable exercise has been already summed up in the American black vocabulary – one has soul, the other does not’ (p. 140). Despite the careless scholarship, and elsewhere in Soyinka's article the apparent lack of close reading, let us not throw out the baby with the bathwater. I want to quote at length Soyinka's note 11: ‘Like all culture-originated metaphors, “soul” is now employed to capture the “ineffable” values of experiencing in other cultures, most significantly in music. Inevitably, categorization tends to be subjective. Mine includes, among others, the music of Amalia Roderiguez (Portugal – Fado), Russian folk music, a somewhat smaller proportion of Irish music, Fatima (Senegal), Brahms’ German Requiem (unlike Verdi's or Fauré's), Edith Piaf (France), Manitas de Plata (Spain – flamenco guitar), a vast number of Egba and Ekiti dirges, Nelly Uchendu (Nigeria – when she is not singing pop), and the majority of the blues greats, of whom Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith and Ella Fitzgerald remain without equal. For all of these, I would also employ, interchangeably with “soul”, Barthes's most felicitous expression “grain”’ (p. 146). This is but one of many possible examples of how Barthes's idea of grain was seized, not long after he first aired it, and, as suggested at the opening of this article, mythologized. His vision of embodiment and cultural alienation (Panzéra as ‘marginal’ even in his own time; see below) would be appropriated, colonized even, by the 1980s fashion for what are more or less their opposites – ‘soul’, I guess, is pretty much what Barthes was complaining of in superstar classical-music vocality of the 1960s and 70s, and the musics lauded by Soyinka are presented as cultural sites of self-evident signification, the kind of signification that, as we shall see, is what Barthes deplores, albeit quixotically. Barthes has been harshly criticized and rejected in various quarters; but it is in the Barthes industry that I find sophistry and delusion, not in his own work, which is marked by outstanding integrity and sincerity, as has also been recognized over the decades. The following paragraph will consider some of the realistic defence that might be needed of Barthes in the new millennium, to support the kind of rereading to which the present article is devoted, and which writers such as Soyinka seem to have made all the more necessary.

9 For a modern example of specific reference to Barthes's ‘grain’ extended to instrumental music, see Caryl Clark, ‘Voice and Vocality in the Late String Quartets, or Putting the Body Back in Beethoven’, Studies in Music, 19–20 (2000–1), 161–79. As is commonly found, Clark does not explore Barthes's idea but adopts it as what was called above a ‘slogan’; nevertheless her brief ‘reading’ of Barthes is helpful and convincing.

10 Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1977), 56.

11 Kramer, Musical Meaning, 147.

12 Barthes on music history and on performance evidently come together in Nicholas Cook's mind, when he observes that Barthes ‘ends with a speculation about how different the history of music would be if written around the grain of the voice (which is almost to say if written around performance rather than composition)’. Nicholas Cook, ‘Uncanny Moments: Juxtaposition and the Collage Principle in Music’, Approaches to Meaning in Music, ed. Byron Almén and Edward Pearsall (Bloomington, IN, 2006), 107–34 (pp. 131–2). Certainly Cook shares with Barthes a focus on the categorical actuality of music in performance, as the former's major study Music, Imagination, and Culture (New York, 1990) revealed some years ago.

13 Introduction to Part 5: ‘Musicology and Semiotics’, On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London, 1990), 275–6 (p. 276).

14 Peter Dayan, ‘La musique et les lettres chez Barthes’, French Studies, 75 (2003), 335–48, and ‘“Song Must Write”: Roland Barthes's Hallucinations’, Music Writing Literature, from Sand via Debussy to Derrida (Aldershot, 2006), 97–112.

15 David Headlam, ‘Does the Song Remain the Same? Questions of Authorship and Identification in the Music of Led Zeppelin’, Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz since 1945, ed. Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann (Rochester, NY, 1995), 313–63 (p. 322).

16 Richard Taruskin, mentioning ‘The Grain of the Voice’ in passing, says that Barthes's ‘whole essay […] could be read as an improbable gloss au sérieux on the old radio announcer's blooper, “you've been listening to the mucus of Clyde Lucas”’. See ‘She Do the Ring in Different Voices’, review of Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1991), Cambridge Opera Journal, 4 (1992), 187–97 (p. 189).

17 Lise Helmer Petersen, ‘Aspekter af Le grain de la voix: Stemmens krop’, Caecilia, 5 (2002), 149–62.

18 50 mélodies françaises: Leçons de style et d'interprétation, ed. Charles Panzéra (Brussels, 1964; parallel text in French and English).

19 Louis-Jean Calvet, Roland Barthes: A Biography (Oxford, 1994), 42–3.

20 Philip Thody, Roland Barthes: A Conservative Estimate (London, 1977), 139 (my emphasis).

21 Martin Grisel, ‘L’écriture de l'imaginaire: Note sur la musique selon Roland Barthes’, Barthes après Barthes: Une actualité en questions, ed. Catherine Coquio and Régis Salado (Pau, 1993), 51–62.

22 Steven Ungar, Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire (Lincoln, NE, 1983), 75.

23 Roland Barthes, ‘La musica, la voce, il linguaggio’, Nuova rivista musicale italiana, 12 (1978), 362–6 (pp. 364, 366).

24 Timothy Scheie, Performance Degree Zero: Roland Barthes and Theatre (Toronto, 2006), 129.

25 See Barthes's comment in the following paragraph about Panzéra not being ‘recognized or even simply perceived’.

26 Carlo Caballero, ‘Charles Panzéra: Mélodies et airs’, ARSC Journal, 25 (1994), 226–33 (pp. 227–30).

27 By ‘slash’ I refer to Barthes's device in S/Z (London, 1974) for conveying what he calls a ‘panic function’, which, in the context of the Balzac story that he is analysing, represents ‘the slash of censure, the surface of the mirror, the wall of hallucination, the verge of antithesis, the abstraction of limit, the obliquity of the signifier, the index of the paradigm, hence of meaning’ (p. 107).

33 Roland Barthes, ‘Responses: Interview with Tel Quel’, The Tel Quel Reader, ed. Patrick ffrench and Roland-François Lack (London, 1998), 249–68 (pp. 250–1).

28 Charles Panzéra, ‘Masters of French Song’, Schumann Dichterliebe, with Alfred Cortot (piano), CD0205770, BD10 Dutton Laboratories (original recording, June 1935, HMV, matrix number 2LA566–573); Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Schumann Dichterliebe, with Jörg Demus (piano), CD0185630, originally DG4635052.

29 Information from the British Library Sound Archive catalogue.

30 As a matter of interest, Panzéra was Swiss, born in Geneva in 1896, and raised in a multilingual environment, although he went on to study at the Paris Conservatoire. For basic biographical information see André Tubeuf and Alan Blyth, ‘Panzéra, Charles’, Grove Music Online, available at <www.grovemusic.com> (accessed 11 December 2008).

31 Schenker's term Meisterwerk has been translated, repeatedly and conspicuously, as ‘masterwork’; however, both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam–Webster Dictionary prefer ‘masterpiece’ in general, and it seems to me that using the musical term ‘masterwork’ in Schenker translations is a regrettable, intrusive mystification comparable in its deception to the hallowed use of pseudo-scientific Latin terms in Freud translations. Further comment here would be irrelevant, other than to note that Thomas Pankhurst, one of the foremost Schenker practitioners of our age, in his ‘Desiring Closure, Yearning for Freedom: A Semiotic Study of Tonality in Three Symphonies by Carl Nielsen’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Manchester, 2004), refers to Nielsen's ‘masterpieces’ – not surprisingly.

32 Calvet, Roland Barthes, 43.

34 What may be recalled, here, is not necessarily any published analysis but the reader's own, if by chance this example has been worked from Allen Cadwallader and David Gagné, Student Workbook to Accompany Analysis of Tonal Music: A Schenkerian Approach (2nd edn, Oxford, 2007).

35 Allen Forte, ‘Schenker's Conception of Musical Structure’, Readings in Schenker Analysis and Other Approaches, ed. Maury Yeston (New Haven, CT, 1977), 3–37 (p. 21).

36 The second and third lines are ‘Die Lilie soll klingend hauchen / Ein Lied von der Liebsten mein’ (‘The lily shall breathe / a song about my beloved’). Robert Schumann, Dichterliebe: An Authoritative Score, ed. Arthur Komar (New York, 1971), 22. There is a vital poetic moment, one of those blissful verbal touches of Heine, in the exhortation to ‘breathe a song’ (which is not idiomatic in German). What some may call crude in Panzéra's singing here, especially when it is recorded and so going to be heard again and again, others may call a bold example of the genius of vocality, where the meaning of ‘hauchen’ is literally embodied by the singer.

37 Schumann could have written bars 9–16 as a formal repeat, with first- and second-time bars differentiating bars 7–8 from bars 15–16, and the repeat beginning on the downbeat of bar 1.

38 See my analysis in Making Words Sing, Chapter 2: ‘A Love Song: Brahms's “Von ewiger Liebe”’, 33–56.

39 I mean ‘intention’ in precisely the sense outlined by William Wimsatt in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, KY, 1954), 3–18. Those who refer to an ‘intentional fallacy’, implying that we cannot gain access to any intentions of a poet, and by extension any creative artist, have got the wrong end of the stick if they think they are rehearsing known arguments.

40 Soffel's recording of ‘Von ewiger Liebe’, on CD CAP21602, is available online in the Naxos Music Library, <www.naxosmusiclibrary.com>. While an example of the sheer power of the ‘grain of the voice’ is relevant and, all being well, memorable, this is not the place for it to be recommended as an interpretation, nor am I claiming to read the interpreter's mind. Suffice it to say that Barthes would probably have enjoyed hearing an authoritative singer throw her body into one of Western art music's moments of supreme passion. It must be for the informed reader to decide whether this really is an example of what Barthes meant by ‘grain’; what is maintained here is that if the Panzéra breath is such, then this can be too.

41 Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Robert Schumann: Words and Music (Portland, OR, 1988), 83.

42 In Schenkerian jargon, the structure as Fischer-Dieskau understands it is not ‘interrupted’.

43 For instance, an amazingly slow, operatic rendition by the great Richard Tauber is available in various media, including on commercially available CD, ‘Great Singers, Richard Tauber’, Naxos Historical Catalog, 8110739.

44 Philips 416352–2.

45 Kristeva, ‘Genotext and Phenotext’.

46 The evidence in the essay on third meaning is, as stated in its subtitle, ‘several Eisenstein stills’. The word ‘obtuse’ was eventually enshrined in the title of the French collection in which the essay ‘The Third Meaning’ appeared in book form, L'obvie et l'obtus (Paris, 1982). For the English version, see Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, 41–62. In ‘Uncanny Moments’ Cook specifically links ‘third’ and ‘obtuse’ meaning with ‘grain’, which he calls a ‘connection in Barthes's own mind’, bearing in mind also that ‘music plays a foundation role in Eisenstein's thinking’ on film (pp. 131–2): the priorities and hierarchies of Cook's authorities are not ideally clarified in his article.

47 Also in Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, 299–312.

48 John Daverio, Robert Schumann: Herald of a ‘New Poetic Age’ (Oxford, 1997), 168. Leon Botstein is almost equally dismissive in ‘History, Rhetoric, and the Self: Robert Schumann and Music Making in German-Speaking Europe, 1800–1860’, Schumann and his World, ed. R. Larry Todd (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 3–46, and specifically sidelines Richard Leppert's physical trope of Schumann-inspired contemporaneous art in The Sight of Sound: Music Representation and the History of the Body (Berkeley, CA, 1994), 230–3, on the grounds that such an extension of supposedly Barthesian thinking is an imposition (pp. 41–3). For Botstein, Barthes himself was already part of a ‘legacy of modernist and postmodern enthusiasm for Schumann’ that needs to be set aside (p. 4).

49 Although it may not be highly significant, it is of some interest that even Michel Schneider, in a brief booklet on Schumann's piano music (La tombée du jour: Schumann (Paris, 1989)), summons Barthes only briefly, and just to refer to Barthes's idea of ‘madman's pain’ (p. 56). One may raise an eyebrow at this, since Schneider must have known very well that in ‘Loving Schumann’ Barthes goes on to observe specifically that ‘such pain cannot be expressed musically’ and that (deliciously from the musician's point of view!) what we have to listen to instead is Schumann's tonality.

50 Roland Barthes, ‘Voice’, The Pleasure of the Text (New York, 1975), 66–7 (p. 67).