Collecting Kundry’s Scream: The implications of recording and digital technology for the materiality of the scream in Wagner’s Parsifal
Paper presentation for Musical Materialities in the Digital Age, University of Sussex, 27-28 June 2014
As both an extreme vocal gesture and a powerful dramatic device, the scream holds a strange place in opera, being at once an extension of and departure from traditional techniques of operatic vocal production. For Berthold Hoeckner, the screams of Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin mark the very birth of music drama, setting into motion an aesthetic trajectory which extends at least as far as Lulu’s death cry in Alban Berg’s Lulu, considered by Michel Poizat to mark the death of opera itself.The aesthetics of the scream held a particularly important place in Richard Wagner’s creative process and examples of screams and cries are to be found throughout his operas.
Wagner was heavily influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, particularly as expounded in The World as Will and Representation: according to Schopenhauer, while other art forms expressed Ideas -- simulations of reality-- music was the most immediate expression of the central will, the unconscious force behind all things in nature, and therefore universally comprehensible outside the systems of language. Wagner’s ‘Beethoven’ essay brought together Wagner’s developing ideas about music, the unconscious, the dreaming body, and the scream: While sleeping, the consciousness of the dreamer is turned inward towards the will, and, according to Wagner: “from the most troubled of such dreams we awake with a shriek, a cry, in which the affrighted Will expresses itself most immediately, and thus enters at once and definitely, through the cry, into the world of sound, in order to manifest itself outwards”. The scream, then, is the most primal manifestation of the Schopenhauerian will in the waking, daylight world.
A defining moment in the use of the scream in musical contexts is found in the second act of Wagner’s opera Parsifal when the character Kundry wakes with a scream. Summoned by the dark lord Klingsor, Kundry is roused from the unconscious world of darkness into the conscious world of vision and light; she wakes, pushing out “a terrible cry” [Sie stößt hier ein gräßlichen Schrei aus] and Wagner's interpretation of the Schopenhauerian scream is transferred directly on to the operatic stage. Kundry’s scream is unique in that it is not a reaction to any physical or emotional stimulus provided by events on stage, it is the event on stage. This not a cry out to the surrounding characters or a response to exterior dramatic circumstances but a violent wrench from the deepest, most inaccessible haunts of the human consciousness. The importance attributed by Schopenhauer to the power and function of dreams and the unconscious life would have been all the more relevant to Wagner given the rise to fashion of the culture of psychoanalysis and the increasingly common diagnosis of hysteria in the late nineteenth century. Parsifal as a whole is drenched in hystericism as is well documented in numerous psychoanalytic readings of the opera: Wagner is a hysteric, Parsifal is a hysteric, the Quest is hysterical, the Voice is hysterical, the world of symbolic ritual is hysterical, but the most literal representation of ‘the hysteric’ is provided by Kundry: she writhes, she moans, she groans, she laughs, she screams.
In cases of hysteria, an initial trauma becomes a malevolent and unknowable ‘thing’ in the mind, exerting its influence through impulse and emotion which can only be tamed through the controlling force of verbal expression, the most satisfactory treatment recommended by Freud being abreaction through verbal utterance. As Schopenhauer describes the external form and shape of music as the signifier, and the inner essence of music, the essence of the will, as that which is signified, it follows that the scream exists as pure materiality, that which is signified without the external framework of notated or codified musical systems to act as signifier. This holds true with Michel Poizat’s distinction between musicalized or melodic cry, which is notated, and within the bounds of musical expression and the pure cry: “But whenever I speak of a pure or sheer cry, I mean specifically a paroxysmal vocal emission beyond the range of music and out of reach of the word. This cry is therefore not supported by the musical notation, nor can it be accommodated on the staff”
The framing of Kundry’s scream as the primary action on stage, without any attempt to assimilate it into the surrounding action marks the scream’s status as an event, a singular, transitory moment which can be referred back to or mimicked, but never repeated. Placing the scream centre stage also draws attention to its materiality: further to the vocal object which is the focus of Poizat’s psychoanalytic approach, in which the voice becomes the object of a drive in the quest for vocal jouissance, the scream asserts a more basic and immediately palpable physical presence. As Poizat points out: “The cries, plaints, and moans of Kundry...are Wagner’s “theoretical” or even “metaphysical” cry made stunningly concrete.” This is an important point; the scream is not just an object, it is a thing. The term 'thing' is particularly useful for describing Kundry’s scream: the “suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power”, as described by Bill Brown’s explanation of ‘Thing Theory’, is exemplified in the physical force and sense of sudden ‘eventness’ which accompanies the experience of the scream while the scream’s enigmatic, transient nature answers fittingly to John Plotz's description of the ‘thing’:
“Thing" is far better than any other word at summing up imponderable, slightly creepy what-is-it-ness...Thing theory is at its best, therefore, when it focuses on this sense of failure, or partial failure, to name or to classify. Thing theory highlights, or ought to highlight, approaches to the margins-- of language, of cognition, of material substance”
Being an unnotated, or, to use Poizat’s terms, ‘pure’ scream, Wagner’s performance directions grant performers of Kundry great latitude to produce a unique and personal vocal expression. Kundry’s scream has the potential to be drastically different every time which makes it an unstable element, one that can only be known for certain in the real time of performance, or when captured by recording: Wagner provides the context but it is the performer who must produce the scream. As part of my research, which seeks to critically investigate the scream and its place in the aesthetics of modernism, I began to compile a digital archive of screams, beginning with a collection of Kundry’s screams: I collected 23 screams, organised chronologically from 1948 to 2013. The creation of an archive such as this, brings a range of recordings into close proximity in ways that challenge the supposed uniqueness of Kundry’s scream. Listening back to this collection I found that the singularity and ‘eventness’ of the scream was undermined as individual moments became but one of many; the emergence of a trend in performance suggested that the freedom of expression I had previously attributed to the scream was in fact subject to the heavy hand of tradition and formed patterns suggesting convention, habit and ritual.
[play] Kundry's Scream or on soundcloud
Singers show a preference for screams that tend to follow, or even cling to the accompanying clarinet part (for example the screams of Martha Mödl, Maria Callas, or more recently, Doris Soffel). These stylized screams inhabit an odd place where they are unique, up to a point, and certainly make sufficient departure from the ‘sung note’ to fulfil the terms of the ‘pure cry’, and yet they are at risk of becoming just another motif, an aural hieroglyph representing a scream rather than being a scream. What were unique ‘things’ in the original context of individual live performances are now just a series of objects, a set of abstracted digital traces. On the other hand, when isolated and placed in comparison with other screams, certain renditions seem to have some extra material quality which sets them apart from the more dramatic or stylized screams. A term that has been used to connote this quality in the voice is found in Roland Barthes’ essay ‘The Grain of the Voice’. In his comparison between a Russian church bass and an operatic baritone, Barthes describes the grain of the voice as something that is:
“there, manifest and stubborn (one hears only that) beyond (or before) the meaning of the words, their form…something which is directly the cantor's body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages... The 'grain' is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue: perhaps the letter, almost certainly signifiance.”
The grain of the voice corresponds to the palpable presence of the human body in the screams of performers such as Irene Dalis, Barbara Minton, or Gisela Schröter, which sets them apart from the more dramatic or stylized scream. If these ‘grainy’ screams point to the emergence of the text in the work, the inner signifiance , the stylized screams are more akin to symbols or signs, and a further gap is opened up between the thing and its representation.
Of course, Wagner does not specify that the singer should drop the operatic technique, and it seems unfair to write off the more conventional screams as somehow less interesting, but the development of a performance practice does challenge the historic understanding of the scream as an abstract aesthetic innovation, unique and unrepeatable. The tension between performative freedom and the weight of convention as highlighted by this archive touches on an important argument made by Rebecca Schneider. Schneider argues that although performance studies has traditionally emphasised the ephemeral and non-repeatable elements of performance, performance practice in fact depends heavily on repetition housed in memory and tradition as “the body ....becomes a kind of archive and host to a collective memory” My archive of screams makes explicit what Schneider presents as always having existed in the collective memory of a performance tradition.
But there is the additional problem that this is an archive of recorded screams. Schneider states:
“To consider the live a record of precedent material flips on its head the supposition that the live is that which requires recording to remain…the same could be said for… any inscribed set of performatives written to require repetition where repetition is both reiteration of precedent and the performance of something occurring “again for the first time”
Applied to Kundry’s scream, this account of the problematic relationship between record and event emphasizes tensions already inherent in the scream as event. First, there is the tension between event and context: Kundry’s scream is at once connected to the musico-dramatic context as a suitably hysteric outburst from the opera’s most quintessentially hysteric character and detached from it: framed as a distinct event, a vocal gesture which draws attention to performer and her voice as being in a separate space and time from the surrounding narrative world of the opera. In the archive, the tension between event and context is heightened as each scream is detached from its original context and placed in uncomfortable proximity to multiple versions of itself: the uniqueness of each scream is at once accented as we pay greater attention to the individual characteristics and vocal detail of each scream and attenuated as the repeated scream becomes but one among many of its kind: heard again and again and again for the first time.
Second, the archive highlights the competing versions of ‘materiality’ already present in the scream: while the act of recording, isolating, re-recording, and collating screams into a digital archive removes the scream from the immediate physicality of the live body and seems to rob it of any sense of eventness or the enigmatic, transient qualities previously associated with the scream, within the artificial construct of the archive, other dimensions of the scream’s materiality become more palpable.
In his introductory article to Thing Theory, Bill Brown describes how the interruption of looking through windows as transparencies, enables us to look at the window itself. Similarly, the interruption of the ‘eventness’ of the dramatic context allows us to look at the scream in its opacity: removed from the live human body, the traces of the body in performance, as captured by the notion of the grain of the voice become more striking and ‘thing’ like. Even those screams that have fallen into patterns of convention, which I suggested represent a scream, rather than being one, gain a new dimension of materiality: In his discussion of the relationship between things and words, Peter Schwenger points out that while the naming of a thing can in a sense destroy the thing, replacing it with its symbol or sign, these representations have a thingness, a materiality of their own. Similarly, the screams that have fallen into pattern or convention, or even mimicry, gain their own materiality, and, through repetition, a ‘strange thingness’ of their own. Schwenger reminds us of Heidegger’s remark that "the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extra-ordinary, uncanny" and there is an uncanniness about the conventional screams that makes them unique, yet one of many; fleeting, yet robust, capturable and repeatable as the archive as a whole becomes an object in itself.
Playing and listening to this archive as a whole and experiencing the draining succession of 23 screams in a row has a performative ‘eventness’ of its own. The jarring juxtaposition of so many screams in varying sonic qualities grants the collection a strangeness and a thingness: for this is not only a collection of voices, but a collection of recordings of voices, haphazardly patched together in a Frankenstein’s playlist of remnants from recordings past of performances past. And so, what about the digital dimension of my archive? Doesn’t this generate yet another remove from the grain of the voice, the eventness of the scream, the materiality of the body? Sure, I could have very diligently compiled this collection with a record player, CD player and tape recorder yet I wonder if it’s precisely the thingness of the digital object that is most telling here. That, to return to Schwenger, the digital object is a representation of the recordings, a cheap copy that is specifically digital:both in the way it was compiled - using Spotify and Google as my main research tools, and in its easy manipulation and dissemination as I cut, copy and paste scream onto scram- already there exists at least three slightly varying versions of this archive, two of which are available online - the one which you heard and an earlier version on my soundcloud account. I would suggest that the thingness of this digital representation is an audible quality: it doesn’t sound like a thing on tape, it doesn’t sound like a record, it sounds like a digital thing.
Considering the scream as portrayed by the digital archive, renders the historical understanding of this vocal gesture more symbolic and ideal than previously understood and yet, the scream becomes more ‘thing-like’ and material than ever as the archive gains its own thingness and its own materiality as both a sonic event in itself and as a digital gallery of sonic materials, a collection of materialities.
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