Electroacoustic voices in vocal performance art

a gender issue?
THEDA WEBER- LUCKS ( TU Berlin)
Ackerstr. 40, 10115 Berlin, Germany
E-mail: primartic@aol.com
URL: http://www.primartic.de
In my dissertation Gender Perspectives in Vocal
Performance Art, I examine the history and aesthetics of
the genre. The core of my work is a vocal database that
focuses especially on the extended vocal techniques of the
natural voice. In this article, I concentrate on the
electronic aspect of vocal performance art. While I
provide a brief historical overview of the developments of
vocal performance art and its technological developments
from the 1970s to the 1990s, the central question of this
article is whether gender patterns exist when these
practices are combined with electronic sound
technologies.
1. INTRODUCTION
Vocal performance art could be seen as a new voice-
centred genre initiated in the 1970s by women singers
and composer-performers in the United States, such as
Meredith Monk, Diamanda Galas, Joan La Barbara, and
to some extent Laurie Anderson. This is the central
thesis of my dissertation Gender Perspectives in Vocal
Performance Art. Even early works, such as Monks
Education of the girl child (1972/73), La Barbaras Hear
what I feel (1974) and Galas Medea Tarantula (1977)
describe a new voice-centred type of performance art.
From a historical perspective, the genre evolved in the
context of Fluxus, happening, dance-performance and
body art. It bears stylistic relationships to expressionistic
mono-dramas and theatre, as well as to folk-song tradi-
tions, ancient ethnic vocal styles and new extended vocal
techniques. A central aesthetic component is the use of
the voice as an emotional or abstract language.
Very little research has been devoted to vocal per-
formance art. One reason might be the lack of a stylistic
or formal consistency among the genres central works.
In fact, the women who developed the genre continue
to work quite independently. In the early stages of its
development, they were not even aware of each other.
In contrast to earlier avant-garde artists, such as the
sound poets within the DADAist and Futurist move-
ments, the genre lacked a common identity or manifesto
that could connect its creators. Even the recently
founded Institute for Living Voice provides only a very
loose feeling of community. This might explain why the
central thesis of my dissertation has not yet been
Organised Sound 8(1): 6169 2003 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. DOI:10.1017/S1355771803001079
addressed. In fact, the suggested term vocal perform-
ance art simply functions as a construct to help illustrate
possible forms of coherence within these developments.
Accordingly, the rst question my dissertation asks is
whether vocal performance art can truly be considered a
new tradition originated by women. I provide an over-
view of the origins and developments of the genre. Its
historical and aesthetic contexts are compared to the tra-
ditions of sound poetry and new vocal music initiated
by men. The main results underline my central thesis,
and are found in the following section of this article.
The second question I raise is to ask how one can
develop a systematic approach for describing and ana-
lysing the various aesthetic aspects of vocal performance
art. As a rst step, I decided to focus on the sonic mat-
erial of the natural solo voice in vocal performance art
(i.e. the voice without electronic alteration). I developed
a prototype for a new kind of vocal database that func-
tions as a systematic tool to analyse and compare qualit-
ies and features of vocal sounds, as well as their related
vocal techniques. To accomplish this, I selected about
500 voice samples, taken from the solo works of six
female and six male performers of the rst and second
generation of US-American and European vocal per-
formance art.
As for questions of gender, I expected to nd specic
issues through an evaluation of the vocal database. The
result was interesting. The data clearly indicates that
women prefer working with all the types of nasal, gut-
tural and breathy sounds produced by the breast and
especially the head register. With these techniques,
women deliver a great variety of additional sound tex-
tures, such as trills, staccatos, coup de glottes, and jig-
glings. They also use vocal whistling tones, a sound
quality that is rarely found in mens repertoire. Men, on
the other hand, work with the upper and the lower regis-
ter, but to a much lesser extent and in equal parts. In
addition, they emphasise harsh or throaty sounds, voiced
and unvoiced noises and percussive sounds. And of
course they use a variety of sound textures, especially
staccatos and trills. A very large part of the sounds used
by women have a cantabile quality or consist of vocalis-
ations. One also nds sound gestures such as calls, scre-
ams and cries. By contrast, men seem to prefer speech-
like articulations as well as onomatopoetic sounds. In
62 Theda Weber-Lucks
equal parts with women, they use parlandos
(Sprechgesang) and screams.
In this article, these considerations and techniques are
used to focus on the electroacoustic aspects of vocal per-
formance art. I include a brief historical overview of
how vocal performance art developed and discuss its
technological evolution from the 1970s to the 1990s.
The principle concern is to determine whether gender
patterns exist when the practices of vocal performance
art are combined with electronic sound technologies.
The rst section summarises the beginnings of vocal
performance art in the United States, including its histor-
ical context and its relation to electronic music. The
second section introduces the electronic voice as rst
presented by the pioneers of vocal performance art in the
United States. The third section examines the European
pioneers of vocal performance art, with a specic focus
on the exponents of the electronic voice. The fourth sec-
tion provides an overview of additional developments in
the eld. The results are summarised in relation to
gender in section 5, and discussed in a broad context in
the nal section.
2. THE BEGINNINGS OF NORTHERN
AMERICAN VOCAL PERFORMANCE ART IN
THE EARLY 1970s
Vocal performance art arose in the 1970s as a new,
ground-breaking genre in the United States. It was cre-
ated mostly by women, such as Meredith Monk, Joan
La Barbara, Diamanda Galas and Laurie Anderson.
Already in the rst decades of twentieth-century
Europe and America, the experimental use of the voice
possessed an established, male-dominated tradition in
sound poetry. There was also an ongoing development
in new vocal music (also male dominated) on both sides
of the Atlantic. This was well before Arnold Schonberg
introduced the Sprechgesang in his monodrama Pier-
rot Lunaire (1912).
The origins of vocal performance art, however, are
different, since they evolved not only in music such
as in the work of Joan La Barbara but also in several
other artistic genres. From its beginnings, performance
art evolved in dance through the work of Meredith
Monk, in existentialist theatre and symbolistic poetry
through the work of Diamanda Galas, and in the visual
arts through the work of Laurie Anderson. These artists,
all from varying backgrounds, developed unique vocal
musics independent of each other.
As Sally Banes has noted in her brilliant synopsis of
American dance and performance art (Banes 1991),
these developments should be viewed against the histor-
ical backdrop of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and
what later unfolded. The second wave of feminism, the
protests against the Vietnam War, and the emergence of
the US civil rights movement produced a cultural dis-
course of bodily power. Its most powerful manifesta-
tions became evident not only in Fluxus and Happen-
ings, but also in dance and performance art. Dancers, as
well as visual artists and composers, began to explore
the pervasive issues of community, equality, freedom,
play and the resurrection of the body. Banes incisively
comments that, part of the way those liberating somatic
themes were expressed was in the very loosening of
boundaries among art forms, between performer and
spectator and between life and art (Banes 1991: 158).
In the 1970s, with the oil crisis, the revelations of
Watergate, the end of the Vietnam War, the decimation
of the Black Power Movement and the break-up of the
New Left, the mood of the United States was consider-
ably more sober, down to earth and ascetic. As in other
areas of American life, artists turned away from activist
collectives towards a new kind of professionalism. In
their projects, they worked much more isolated than
before, focusing on the development of their individual
aesthetic languages.
The liberating inuence of John Cage, and the new
possibilities of electronic sound technology, opened a
creative space, or play-ground, for a new aesthetic
approach. As the German composer Christina Kubisch
noted in a programme for a festival of womens music
(Kubisch 1984: 6), this freedom from, and absence of,
historical precedents, traditional rules and aesthetics,
seemed to be an invitation for women composers.
In this new world, electronic sound technologies not
only offered possibilities for empirical experimentation,
they also allowed for composition directly on tape. Pau-
line Oliveros was one of the rst women to replace the
traditional sheet of paper with a tape recorder. Her
uncompromising work returned our focus to aspects of
musical communication and was a major inuence on
the development of women in composition. And as
Gisela Gronemeyer documents in her portrait of the
composer, Oliveros realised her rst piece of electronic
music in 1962 (Gronemeyer 1984: 278). Oliveros use of
self-made cardboard lters and echoes from her bathtub,
illustrate how new and experimental electronic music
still was at this time. Shortly afterwards, she founded the
San Francisco Tape Music Center, along with Morton
Subotnick and Ramon Sender.
And it was not long afterwards that the rediscovery
of the voice allowed Joan La Barbara to begin develop-
ing it as a sort of original instrument. This develop-
ment also allowed the dancer, Meredith Monk, to dis-
cover that the voice could be much more exible than
the spinal cord could ever be. These new approaches
allowed Diamanda Galas to conceptualise the voice as a
ghter, a weapon and a shield (Galas 2002). And for
Laurie Anderson, the voice became a playful tool to con-
fuse the male/female gender of the voice.
The rediscovery of the voice seemed to promise
women a way to nd their own path in a male-dominated
world of art and, above all, to create their own gender
identity. As far as the female body was concerned, the
voice seemed to hearken back not only to the beginnings
of human life and consciousness, but also to memories
Electroacoustic voices in vocal performance art 63
of tribal cultures and their male and female singing tradi-
tions. And, not least, the voice seemed to work well in
the experimental eld of electronic composition, both as
an instrument and as a source of concrete raw material.
Use of the voice centred these developments within
the context of the human body. Many developments in
vocal performance art thus bear close correlations to the
thought of the French philosopher Luce Irigaray (1991:
47). She is convinced that new orientations in the basic
concepts of our lives, not only derive from cognitive
processes, but also from processes of body awareness.
Searches for new languages, identities and aesthetics
must follow the language of the body.
3. THE ELECTROACOUSTIC VOICE IN
NORTH-AMERICAN VOCAL PERFORMANCE
ART
One of the rst to use electroacoustic technologies to
enhance vocal performance art was Joan La Barbara. In
close contact with the Sonic Art Union, and along with
composers such as Robert Ashley and Alvin Lucier, she
began to expand the vocal sounds she had discovered in
earlier experiments, by sending them through electronic
sound-altering devices. In her programmatic work,
Vocal Extensions (1976), released on her rst LP Voice
is the Original Instrument in 1976, she used a phase
shifter, pitch modulator and delay unit to create what
she describes on the record jacket as a sound fabric
based on the natural rhythmic ow of thought.
In the following years, La Barbara began to work with
the tape recorder even more extensively, composing sev-
eral multi-track pieces that were later collected in her
1990 CD Sound Paintings. One of the rst pieces was
Twelvesong, for twelve voices on tape a twelve-minute
sound tapestry composed in 1977 that focuses on her
circular-breathing techniques. In her programme notes
she describes this as a technique that engages the vocal
cords as the air passes in and out and through (La Bar-
bara 1979). Superimposed in three tracks or layers, the
continuing pitches create a world of rich, vibrating, ut-
tering sounds. Around this ground element, one hears
percussive gestures, staccato sounds, patterns of
repeated sounds, high vibratos or uttering sounds, glot-
tal stops and multiphonics. La Barbara sees this as a
visual approach to composition, commenting that,
Everything is put together as in a sound painting (La
Barbara 1979). After its premiere on Radio Bremen, La
Barbara decided to add a live vocal part to make it a live
performance work for voice with tape. In many respects,
the live solo voice added on top can be thought of as a
soloist performing in front of a virtual voice orchestra.
Almost concurrently, in 1977, performance artist
Laurie Anderson, who was already well known in the
avant-garde music scene for her legendary Tape Bow
Violin and her Self Playing Violin, began to experi-
ment with the stereo spectrum and her voice. In Stereo
Song for Steven Weed, she used two microphones and
two speakers on opposite sides of a small room. The
story told in the songs text suggested she turn her head
between two microphones every few words. This
allowed her to create a dialogue between a constantly
repeated no, while she sang and played the violin at
the same time. A few years later, she added a vocoder
to her work. She was not, however, the rst (in 1967 it
had been used much earlier in a group improvisation
piece called North American Time Capsule by Alvin
Lucier), but her approach to this technical device was
surprisingly new and led to her mega hit O Superman in
1981.
Along with the vocoder, and with a concept of andro-
gyny, Anderson played an irritating game with the ambi-
guity of sign systems. By electronically altering her
speaking and singing into male and female voices, she
deconstructed myths of modern life.
Also in the mid-1970s, Diamanda Galas emerged in
the North-American music and performance scene. She
quickly became famous for her huge repertoire of vocal
sounds, including various high-pitched bird-like trills,
vibratos in belcanto style, rough screams with a gravely
voice and nasal cries. From 1975 onward, as she points
out in her book, The Shit of God, she had been develop-
ing a new kind of vocal music which employs an
unmatrixed production of vocal sounds as the most
immediate representation of thought (Galas 1996: 2).
Continuing this work, Galas realised her rst vocal
performance for solo voice, Medea Tarantula, in 1977.
And in her 1980 performance piece, Wild Women With
Steaknives, we see the rst appearance of her so-called
electronic voice. The work contains a theatrical con-
cept, described by Galas as a kinesthetic representation
of the mind diffracted into an innity of crystals . . .
(Galas 1996: 2). To realise this musical vision, she used
electronic sound-altering devices such as lters, delays
and reverberation techniques.
As an additional aspect of her timbral concerns, she
felt sound should be uttered with the most minimal or
the most maximal increment of timbral change over the
smallest unit of time (Galas 1996: 3). These experi-
ments also led her to develop a new kind of sonic per-
formance space, using ve microphones distributed
through a quadraphonic sound system. Of all these
developments, perhaps the most salient is that Galas was
the rst person to use the term electronic voice.
4. THE BEGINNINGS OF EUROPEAN VOCAL
PERFORMANCE ART IN THE LATE 1960s AND
EARLY 1970s
When Monk, La Barbara, Galas and Anderson began to
extend their vocal techniques as composer-performers in
vocal performance art, nothing similar existed in
Europe.
There was, of course, considerable experimentation
with the voice and electroacoustic vocal sounds in the
avant-garde music scene which began well before
64 Theda Weber-Lucks
Stockhausen composed his ground-breaking Gesang der
Junglinge in 1955/56. But those developments were still
male dominated, and mainly based on analytic composi-
tion methods as seen, for example, in the European
new music tradition of Schonberg and Webern. They
also followed the traditional, hierarchical partnership of
composer and interpreter.
These techniques began to change in the late 1960s
and early 1970s when, for example, the German com-
poser Dieter Schnebel worked out his collective com-
position process Maulwerke, rst presented in 1971.
While still analysing and dening each compositional
parameter, his interests returned to the primal functions
of articulation and communication. Maulwerke was
explicitly conceptualised for Artikulationswerkzeuge
[articulation tools] and not for singers.
It thus remained for the ground-breaking sound poetry
scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s to create the rst
truly exciting new type of vocal composer/performer in
the eld of experimental vocal expression. Interestingly,
this did not occur in a performance situation live on
stage, but in the electronic studio. A prime example is
the French Jewish poe`te sonore Henri Chopin. As
Michael Lentz points out in his ground-breaking doc-
toral thesis, Lautpoesie/-musik nach 1945 (Lentz 2000),
Chopin was one of the rst to use the montage tech-
niques of musique concre`te a technique that had been
developed by Pierre Schaeffer since 1948. As early as
1956, Chopin had composed an electronically manip-
ulated vocal sound collage, Rouge, on two-track tape,
which used lter and echo devices. He was also one of
the rst to abandon spoken words, especially in his
attempts to create a new genre he referred to as the
theatre du corps.
In the early 1970s, Chopin began working on a series
of audio-poe`mes to explore the various noises of his
vocal tract, using a microphone as a sort of sonic micro-
scope. One of these works, Extre`me Tension, composed
in 1974, is an electroacoustic decomposition of the
word air. Using a microphone in his closed mouth,
Chopin sang the vowel a, and the resulting sound con-
tinuum was directly recorded on tape. At the same time,
the noise spectrum in front of his mouth (breathing
noises) was recorded on a second track. Later, both
tracks were manipulated by lter techniques, pitch
modulation and delay. Five years later, in 1979, Chopin
recorded his Trio dEte, a vocal improvisation processed
by four microphones into two different rooms, where a
percussionist and an alphornist reacted to his breathing,
swallowing and gurgling noises (Lentz 2000: 55278).
In the 1970s, new music and sound poetry were still
male-dominated domains. In addition, there were no
European voice artists in sight, male or female, who
could be compared to the North-American vocal com-
poser/performer. The few European singers who began
to extend their vocal abilities were still related to male-
dominated traditions of music, such as Carla Henius in
new music, Maggie Nichols in free jazz, and Greetje
Bijma in modern jazz.
There are two possible exceptions, the rst being the
Armenian-American singer, Cathy Berberian, who lived
in Italy and was married to the Italian composer, Luci-
ano Berio. By the 1970s, she was already well known
for her performances of Aria a work John Cage com-
posed for her in 1958. Even though she composed and
performed her own pieces, such as Stripsody in 1966,
and Morsicat(h)y in 1969, she is still mostly known
today as an interpreter of Cage and Berio. The focus of
her career was not as a vocal-composer-performer.
The second exception might be the Egyptian-born
Greek singer and voice artist, Demetrio Stratos, who also
lived in Italy. After international success with his pro-
gressive rock band Area, he emerged in the European
and American scenes of new music, sound poetry and
vocal performance art, as a brilliant interpreter of Cages
Sixty-Two Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham. This was
in 1974, as documented in Janete el Haoulis book
Demetrio Stratos (el Haouli 1999: 736). Only two years
later he released his rst solo LP, Metrodora, which was
followed in 1978 by his second solo album, Cantare la
Voce. Stratos did not experiment with electronics in his
artistic work, but he was the rst vocal-composer-
performer to explore the human voice scientically with
electronic means. In collaboration with Franco Ferrero,
a member of the Centro di studio per le ricerche di fonet-
ica presso (C.N.R.) Padua, he produced a series of sound
spectrograms of his bi-, tri- and quadrophonic vocal
sounds before he died in 1979 (Janete el Haouli 1999:
7995).
5. DEVELOPMENTS IN EUROPEAN VOCAL
PERFORMANCE ART SINCE THE EARLY 1980s
If one could speak of the 1970s as a time of different
parallel lines the male-dominated traditions of experi-
mental vocal composition and sound poetry on the one
side, and the female-dominated traditions of vocal per-
formance art on the other then this somehow began to
change in the 1980s.
As the inuence of the North-American vocal per-
formance scenes grew in Europe,
1
the different vocal art
traditions began to intermingle with each other. A new
generation of vocal-composer-performers men and
even more women appeared in the eld, and their dif-
ferent backgrounds became more and more irrelevant.
As in the beginnings of American vocal performance art,
most artists developed their natural voice before they
entered the world of the electroacoustic voice. The latter
development is especially observable in a large number
of pieces emerging in the 1990s.
Sainkho Namtchylak had already established her
career as a Tuvan folk singer when she began to develop
1
Many worked in Berlin through the auspices of DAAD scholarships.
Electroacoustic voices in vocal performance art 65
a more individual singing style, a combination of ancient
throat singing and modern vocal sound production. After
Namtchylak left her small homeland in Central Asia in
1989, she went to Russia, where she collaborated for a
short time with jazz musicians before she moved into
the West, where she met Peter Kowald and immediately
started developing her own, unique vocal style in the
experimental free music scene. Her previous works
reected very strong ethnic inuences, and her appear-
ances with the Russian Tri-O used vocal elements that
were decorative and exotic. Her rst solo-CD, Lost
Rivers (1992), in contrast was a spontaneous, expressive,
rich, intense vocal improvisation without electronics,
using a variety of shamanistic bird, animal and nature
sounds created by pressed screams with coup de glottes,
nasal cries and calls that engaged the throat and whist-
ling voice.
Her electroacoustic solo voice rst appeared, as far as
I know, on her CD Naked Spirit in 1998 a multi-track
sound mix, produced in overdub studios in Milan and
Florence. Here, she uses the same vocal techniques as
in Lost Rivers, but supports her natural voice with rever-
beration, echo and delay as well as with short, repeated
samples or looped recordings of her voice and additional
percussion, piano and mouth harp sounds. In most of
the pieces, she combines a variety of her different vocal
techniques. In Inuit wedding, for example, she superim-
poses high nasal and middle-high breathy vocalisations
with Tuvian throat singing techniques, piercing bird
screams and low-frequency sounds of the gravel voice
or vocal fry.
In personal correspondence with me, she characterises
the style she develops in these works as a blend of very
old and avant-garde techniques of singing, building a
kind of bridge from the syncretism of shamanistic and
lamaistic ceremonies to multi-medial performance art,
from trance and visual ways of expression to simultani-
ous high-tech interactivity.
Figure 1. Palimpsiesta.
Fatima Miranda had already earned a doctorate in art
history when she joined the Fluxus-inspired improvisa-
tion group Taller de Musica Mundana in the 1980s and
discovered her voice as an object trouvee. She has since
developed her vocal abilities without any use of sound
technologies, studying with, among others, the classic-
ally trained Japanese singer, Jumi Nara, the Mongolian
singer, Tran Quan Hai, and the famous Indian Dhrupad
singers of the Kadhar family. She transformed the vocal
techniques gained from these studies into her own sound
vocabulary, which offers an exceptional variety of col-
ours and textures in the head and whistling register.
For her rst CD, Las vozes de la voz (1991) (which
was made after creating her rst multi-media
performance) she produced a large number of multi-
track tape and video compositions. Her voice is multi-
tracked, but she does not alter or stretch the voice with
electroacoustic techniques. Like Joan La Barbara, she
became interested in sound paintings that create an
orchestra out of the many colours of her voice, but she
has not been interested in stretching or expanding her
voice through electronics. This can also be seen in her
most recent solo performance ArteSonado (2000),
released on CD in 2000. Here she creates and orches-
trates with her voice an entire instrumental and poly-
phonic world of subtle, interwoven sounds, simply by
working with a multi-track recorder. Miranda is capable
of vocal techniques that completely replace electronic
sound effects such as echo and reverberation. An inter-
esting example is her fourteen-minute work, Palimpsie-
sta an imaginary, dreamy sound tapestry with whis-
pers, microtonal glissandos and bird-like cries which
appear to be sampled and electronically altered sounds,
but which are actually her voice recorded in real time.
These seemingly electronic sounds employ, to a consid-
erable degree, her so-called crystal voice of her whist-
ling register, an ultra-high register that is one or even
two octaves higher than the normal soprano tessatura.
66 Theda Weber-Lucks
The Dutch sound poet, vocal artist and jazz saxophon-
ist, Jaap Blonk, was a student of mathematics when he
became involved with sound poetry, free music and
vocal performance art. Inspired by DADA as well as by
Futurism and Fluxus, he became a sound poetry per-
former, reciting Kurt Schwitters, as well as Hugo Ball
and Antonin Artaud. In the mid-1980s, not long after
Blonk had begun his rst vocal improvisations, he disco-
vered the North-American vocal performers of his gen-
eration, such as the percussionist and vocalist, David
Moss, the Canadian sound poet, Paul Dutton, and his
ensemble, The Four Horsemen (19701989), which
were a central part of the Canadian sound poetry scene
(Dmitry Bulatov 2001: 358).
Through this contact, Blonk realised that he was not
alone in the eld and felt encouraged to step forward.
He began to write his own sound poems, and developed
the ambition to create a large speech-sound continuum.
In 1993, when he edited his rst solo CD, Flux de
Bouche, he also edited his rst two phonetic etudes,
Rhotic and Frictional. Both pieces focused on the sound
world between different versions of one consonant.
After his second solo CD, Vocalor, and his third
phonetic etude Labior (mouth sounds drawn from
cheeks and lips) had appeared in 1998, Blonk began to
experiment with the electroacoustic voice. In the Spring
of 2001, he presented his rst electroacoustic vocal per-
formance at the pol-festival in Frankfurt a. M. and
released a CD with electric solo improvisations entitled
AVERSCHUW a Dutch-sounding neologism that asso-
ciates the meanings of timid and shy. The CD contains
a series of eleven pieces in which live voice articulations
are electronically altered to an unrecognisable level. In
each piece, Blonk experiments with a different cong-
uration of sound equipment. He uses samples,
algorhythmic sequences, ring modulation and vocoding
as well as reverberation, delay and distortion techniques.
Just like Joan La Barbara in the mid-1970s, Blonk inten-
ded to record pieces that would stay close to the simpli-
city and clarity of a solo voice improvisation, but at the
same time offer a greater range and density of texture
than the human voice is capable of (Averschuw 2001:
CD-booklet).
One year later, he created a new quadraphonic per-
formance space for his acoustic voice. This can be heard
in Mundrundum, a seventeen-minute piece for six micro-
phones, four speakers and solo voice, premiered in
Donaueschingen in 2002. While Blonk eliminated elec-
tronic altering devices, he concentrated on the sur-
rounding space in which his music was performed. As
with Diamanda Galas, he structured space by using
phase differences of overtones and amplifying them
through multiple microphones. As basic material, he
used unvoiced lip and cheek sounds developed earlier
in his third phonetic etude Labior in 1996. Along with
multiphonics and sound modulation techniques, Blonk
replaced electronic sound-altering devices in a new,
unorthodox and original way. An example is his
Backen-synthesizer (cheek-synthesizer), which enables
him to play up to four different tones simultaneously by
modulating the ow of air with the thumbs at his cheeks
and the ngertips at each corner and the middle part of
his lips.
6. RESULTS
The central theme of this article has been to determine
if manifestations of gender exist in the electroacoustic
technologies of vocal performance art. I have thus tried
to outline chronologically the developments of vocal
performance art, with a special focus on vocal-
composer-performers who use the electroacoustic voice.
The results can be summarised as follows. There is
no specic gender issue in the use of electronic sound
altering devices. Women, as well as men, have used
multiple microphones and multiple-speaker systems,
multi-track tapes and signal processing since the early
1970s. One can also observe that: (i) electroacoustic
sound-altering devices are used to expand or stretch
vocal abilities according to individual poetics or aesthet-
ics (La Barbara, Galas, Anderson, Blonk, Chopin); (ii)
multiple-microphone and speaker systems are used to
structure and create the acoustic dimensions of the per-
formance space according to individual aesthetics or
poetics (Chopin, Galas, Anderson, Blonk); (iii) multi-
track tape is used to combine the rich sounds, colours
and noises of a vocal orchestra created by one voice (La
Barbara, Namtchylak, Miranda, Chopin).
We see, however, that there are more women than
men in vocal performance art. As I explained, a female-
dominated tradition arose in North America, developed
by, among others, Joan La Barbara, Meredith Monk,
Diamanda Galas and Laurie Anderson, and it was fol-
lowed in Europe by Fatima Miranda and Sainkho
Namtchylak. Henri Chopin and Jaap Blonk are the only
male vocal-composer-performers who have used elec-
tronics and seem to be inuenced by both sound poetry
and vocal performance art. Demetrio Stratos employed
electronic techniques only to analyse his vocal sounds.
He never used them on stage.
A second gender issue appears if one compares the
vocal material. La Barbara, Galas, Miranda and Namtch-
ylak use continuous pitch glissandos, bird cries, high
vibratos in belcanto style, rough screams, throat voices,
coup de glottes, biphonic sounds and whispers. By con-
trast, Chopin and Blonk seem to focus on the use of
speech sounds, including noises from their vocal tract,
their upper and lower larynx, and their tongues. To my
knowledge, there are no female vocal-composer-
performers who employ breathing, swallowing and lick-
ing sounds drawn from cheeks and lips to the extent
of Blonk and Chopin. This is especially notable if one
Electroacoustic voices in vocal performance art 67
Figure 2. Labior.
compares male and female vocal performers who do not
alter their voices electronically.
2
7. DISCUSSION
If the musical materials of a work of art are central to
its aesthetics, then one should give close attention to
2
One exception might be Amanda Stewart, an Australian sound poet
and vocal performer who uses speech sounds and noises to a great
extent. I did not mention her for the following reasons: her aesthetic
interest focuses on the creation of poetry, not music. Although she
has worked with musicians for years, she is still primarily considered
a sound poet. And if one observes the huge sound poetry scene today,
even more women appear in the eld. In most respects, my intention
in this article is the introduction of a genre, vocal performance art,
which emerged in the early 1970s. Vocal performance art is, indeed,
vocal sound variation and related techniques in vocal
performance art. This is especially necessary if one is
examining the work in terms of gender. Obviously, the
voice and body are strongly connected with each other.
The sound of the voice is the result of bodily movements
in their most subtle form. But the performers choice of
vocal techniques can be discussed aesthetically in terms
of gender
3
according to their personally chosen sound
spectrum.
closely connected to sound poetry, and it is sometimes quite difcult
to draw a line. But the distinction makes a difference, especially in
terms of gender.
3
Along with M. A. J. Biemans, and numerous other scholars, I consider
sex and gender as two relatively distinct concepts. Sex can be seen as
a biological division (nature). Gender can be seen as socially con-
68 Theda Weber-Lucks
As I noted in my introduction, the results of my dis-
sertational research demonstrate that gender differences
play a role in the choice of vocal techniques and their
related spectrum of voiced and unvoiced sounds and
noises.
Interestingly enough, this gender issue seems to disap-
pear when electroacoustic techniques come into play.
One reason might be that women and men can use the
same electroacoustic technologies, whereas their natural,
embodied voices are limited to their individual biolo-
gical, physical and emotional condition. Through elec-
troacoustic technologies we are not bound by the same
physical or biological contingencies. As is commonly
known, computer music is notable for its concepts of
disembodying music.
On the other hand, many performers who work in the
eld of electronic music complain about how aesthetic-
ally limited they feel through using the same technical
devices and even the same brand-name instruments.
This seems to change now that vocal-performance-
artists have begun to use institutions such as STEIM in
Amsterdam, a live electronic music centre exclusively
dedicated to the performing arts. Their electronic spe-
cialists work closely with performers to develop indi-
vidualised electronic instruments. Recently, for example,
the Swiss vocal-composer-performer, Franziska Baum-
ann, has developed an interactive SensorLab-based cyb-
erglove that enables her to control her live voice and
prepared sounds in real time via gesture and movement.
Her interests focus on using the natural energy ow of
movements to produce the sensation of touching sounds.
This enlarges her ability to experience and shape the
near-eld sounds around her body, even allowing her to
shape sounds with her hands and feet.
However, a comparison of electroacoustic technolo-
gies with extended vocal techniques shows that elec-
troacoustic technology is in many respects still consider-
ably inferior to the extraordinary resources of the body
voice. Perhaps for this reason, all of the vocal perform-
ance artists I have discussed developed their individual
spectrums of naturally created vocal sounds well before
they investigated electroacoustic technologies. Through
their voices, they were automatically placed within a
rich eld of contextual meanings, because the voice con-
tains an embodied and gendered knowledge that
hearkens back to the very beginnings of our cultures.
Interestingly, seemingly old-fashioned dichotomies
structed concepts of masculinity and femininity. Gender is not dened
by biology, but by social, cultural and psychological attributes. In her
doctoral thesis Gender Variation in Voice Quality (2000: 5/6), Biem-
ans notes: Gender is not a xed dichotomy, it is variable. There is
not a strict division into two separate and unchangeable gender
groups, not on a socio-cultural level and not on a biological level.
Socially, the interpretation of gender is subject to change over time
(. . .) and between cultures (. . .). Biologically, the way in which the
distinction between female and male bodies is conceptualised changes
over time. Moreover, the existence of intersexed individuals (. . .)
points to the hazy boundaries of the two prevailing sexual categories.
begin to appear, such as the essentialising formulations
that mind, composition and speaking are male, while
body, performance and singing are female. Certainly,
women performers are composing and at the same time
redening the process of composition. In the end, the
elements of expression are present in both genders but
seem to come from different needs, However, this will
require a more detailed discussion in the future.
For now, in place of a conclusion, I would rely on the
hypothesis William Osborne and Abbie Conant pose at
the end of their review of the ICMC 2000: In contrast
to what technology seems to say, we may nd that there
is no quick path to putting the body in music, and that
without the long, existential process of making an instru-
ment and the body-mind one, we weaken cognitive
structures that are essential to musical meaning.
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Weber-Lucks, T. 2002. Metamorphosen einer Stimme. Die
spanische Vokalperformerin Fatima Miranda. Deutschland-
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Blonk. Lautdichter, Improvisator, Vokalist. Deutschland-
funk Koln, 12.10.2002, 22.0522.50 Uhr, Atelier neuer
Musik.
Weber-Lucks, T. 2003. Die Vokalperformerin Meredith Monk.
Deutschlandfunk Koln, 7.6.2003, 22.0522.50 Uhr, Atelier
Neuer Musik.
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