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STRIVING FOR THE UNDERNEATH: BODY AND PATHOS IN CHAYA CZERNOWIN'S COMPOSITION FOR VOICE IN INFINITE NOW AND HEART CHAMBER

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2023

Sarit Shley-Zondiner
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Abstract

In her two recent operas, Heart Chamber (2017–19) and Infinite Now (2015–16), Chaya Czernowin uses vocal ensembles to embody a single character. In a 2016 article, she explained that she wanted to liberate the individual voice from its fixed emotional, social and individual conventions (especially its ingrained pathos), and to work with the voice as a free imaginative sonic material, using the ensemble technique to achieve this. This article argues that the voice ensemble technique amplifies and intensifies the pathos of the voice rather than eliminating it. Recognising that the voice has strong somatic qualities since it is produced in the body, I suggest a material-musical analysis, based on the theories of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Brian Massumi, that focuses on the body, the sensual experience and the physical space, and rejects the hermeneutic tradition that refers to meaning and interpretation only. What emerges is that the voices, instrumentation and electronics of the ensemble are designed to embody the inner body and the outer space at the same time. The voice ensemble may split and produce multi-layered mental–physical states, and express how traditional dichotomies, such as culture/nature, body/mind and subject/object, can meld into multi-perspective processual movements. It is in this intersection of sound and drama, manifesting the corporeal, that the unique power of opera is evinced.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Information
Tempo , Volume 77 , Issue 305 , July 2023 , pp. 44 - 59
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 An earlier version of this article was presented at the July 2022 Tzlil Meudcan Musicological Roundtable.

2 Czernowin, Chaya, ‘The Primal, the Abstracted and the Foreign: Composing for the Voice’, Contemporary Music Review, 34, nos 5–6 (2015), pp. 449–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Ibid., pp. 450–52.

4 Ibid., p. 449.

5 Ibid., p. 452.

6 Grossman, David, See Under: Love, tr. Rosenberg, Betsy (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989)Google Scholar.

7 Feldman, Yael, ‘Whose Story Is It, Anyway? Ideology and Psychology in the Representation of the Shoah in Israeli Literature’, in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, ed. Friedlander, Saul (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 223–26Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., pp. 235–8.

9 Czernowin, ‘The Primal’, p. 454.

10 Shelleg, Assaf, ‘Composition in the Aftermath of Hebrew Culture: The Musics of Betty Olivero and Chaya Czernowin’, Israel Studies, 28, no. 1 (2023), p. 211Google Scholar.

11 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, ‘Production of Presence, Interspersed with Absence: A Modernist View in Music, Libretti, and Staging’, in Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity: Essays, eds Berger, Karol and Newcomb, Anthony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 343–45Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., pp. 346, 348–50.

13 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 66–72Google Scholar.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., pp. 72–73.

16 Gumbrecht, ‘Production of Presence, Interspersed with Absence’, pp. 252–353.

17 Ibid., p. 355.

18 Chen, Jianguo, ‘The Aesthetics of the Transposition of Reality, Dream and Mirror: A Comparative Perspective on Can Xue’, Comparative Literature Studies, 34, no. 4 (1997), pp. 348–75Google Scholar.

19 Chaya Czernowin, Infinite Now: Perusal Score (Mainz: Schott Music, 2017) https://www.schott-music.com/en/preview/viewer/index/?idx=MzIzNzEw&idy=323710&dl=0 (accessed in May 30th, 2023), p. 70.

20 Ibid.

21 Massumi, Brian, Parables for the Virtual (London: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 48–51, 57–58Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., p. 67.

23 Ibid.

24 Accornero, Guilia, ‘What Does ASMR Sound Like? Composing the Proxemic Intimate Zone in Contemporary Music’, Contemporary Music Review, 41, no. 4 (2022), pp. 337–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Czernowin, interviewed in the article above, said that this kind of subtle, intimate expression is present both in her instrumental and vocal compositions.

26 Chaya Czernowin, Heart Chamber: Perusal Score (Mainz: Schott Music, 2019) https://www.schott-music.com/en/preview/viewer/index/?idx=Mzc0OTQz&idy=374943&dl=0 (accessed in May 30th, 2023), pp. 91–99.

27 Czernowin, Infinite Now: Perusal Score, pp. 188–193.

28 Ibid., pp. 188–192.

29 This also happens with the mezzo-soprano and countertenor in bars 1554–65: ‘a smile flickers on a pillow, white, blinding, burning, and I die of it’.

30 This reoccurs later between the soprano and the contralto, in bars 1548–55, when the entire scene seems to take on the hallucinatory state of Can Xue's text: ‘as if we don't exist’.