Ingrid Sings

"The fundamental reaction against displeasure and anxiety has been, since the beginning of life, the scream. We are born screaming. The reaction we should expect for example from our dreaming Ingrid in her “primitive fear” which she compares to the “fear of newborn children” is the scream. But instead of screaming Ingrid sings.

In their physical aspect it is already evident that scream and song are intimately related. Tone — a basic element of song — is a scream of a specific character differing from the scream in the regularity of its vibrations, or expressed in psychological terms, differing in being submitted to a certain order. Tone compared to scream represents for this same reason, — always in its psychological aspect —, a renunciation of something instinctive (Triebverzicht). Instead of the unrestrained scream, which is on the one hand an aggressive expression of a respiratory-oral nature, arisen as a reaction or defense against the sufferings and anxieties caused by frustrations of instinctive needs, and which on the other hand is an expression of demand for the satisfaction of these instinctive needs, — instead of this unrestrained scream, the tone appears, which, physically, is a scream of regular vibrations and which psychologically we experience —compared to screaming—as being less aggressive, as a more erotic, less terrified, and less terrifying expression." - Heinrich Racker

"Music, then, is a sort of dreaming with the ear; and endless, subtly readjusting refinement of a shriek. At the beginning of any finite musical act there is pandemonium, a vast-omni-expressive noise in which are located all the  sounds that the ear can hear; the musician simply elects a few possibilites out of this confusion of all frequencies and amplitudes. What is yearning? -- weakened terror. What is exhilaration? -- weakened terror. What is the soft cooing of lovers? -- weakened terror. A chord, a timbre, a snatch of song, is moving to the degree that it can allude to the primal scream that lurks behind it." -- Daniel Albright


How close?