God in the body

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

To say that a musician's style is cantabile is one of the highest forms of praise.  We mean by this 'singable' that it is as if the instrument were an extension of the player, another voice through which can be expressed plangency or exultation as directly as human sobs or shouts of joy might.

At the root of this phrase is a recognition of the primacy of the voice, that all music continues to aspire to its original condition of singing.  And rightly: if playing any instrument is a marvellous undertaking - producing infinitely subtle gradations of sound from mere wood and metal - how much more miraculous is the process whereby the singer's body itself becomes the instrument, both player and played.

The vocalist's pre-eminence is hard-won.  Unlike flutes or pianos, no two bodies are the same; learning to sing means gaining intimate knowledge of the body's deepest recesses and cavities, for it is these - in the chest and the head - that lend the weak vibrations of the throat their character and their impact.  The situation is complicated by the fact that singers rarely hear an accurate representation of this sound: conduction through the skull to the ear means that in singing as in speaking we are always listening to an internal impostor.  Hence the perennial disbelief we feel upon hearing our unfamiliar external voice relayed by a recording.

The coincidence of the vocalist's body and instrument means that in our inevitable identification with a singer - as with any artist - we feel the notes doubly within us: both metaphorically as the ersatz performer and literally as a physical object responding to the waves of varying pressure we call sound.  No wonder, then, that the voice dominates every musical culture - ethnic or eclectic, from the most cravenly populist to the most disdainfully high-brow: all are hopelessly and helplessly swept up by the imperious power of the the singing body and its resonance.

This explains in part the pull of grand opera, even for those who are otherwise quite unmusical.  Aside from its seductive glister, its residual social cachet and its blatant display of privilege, the real draw of this deeply implausible form is the concentration of good voices singing music designed specifically to show them off to the best advantage and to move us as directly and shamelessly as possible.  And just as the voice seems to be a stage past that of any mere instrument, so there are singers whose vocal gifts seem to exceed all human norms.  These are the voices the sheer sound of which send deep, delicious shivers down the spine, the voices everyone recognises as supremely great simply as voices.  They are the names which are exempt from ordinary fashion; they are the Carusos, the Callases, the Pavarottis.

We worship them not just for this frisson; we recognise something beyond their artistry or our pleasure.  In their singing they transcend their mortality because they are living triumphs over their bodies.  They have turned muscle and bone and sinew into a divine machine that seems to deny the brutish facts of life.  In the sublime sound they produce we sense something that surpasses the mundane: we hear the god in the body.  In this greatest of singing we bear witness to a redeeming theophany.  

(1990)

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Chiral asymmetries

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The word 'sinister' says it all: it means, originally, left, and its unabashed negativity stands in stark contrast to the positive connotations of 'dexterity', which derives similarly from the Latin word for 'right'.  But it is no wonder: Nature itself discriminates.  If it were literally even-handed, there would be as many people born with hearts on their right as those with them on the left; in fact this reversal of all the body's organs is extremely rare.

Chirality - that is, handedness - is altogether a mysterious business.  Consider the mirror:  facing it, your right side becomes your left, and your left, your right; and yet top does not swap places with bottom.  Actually, nothing swaps over; it is simply that chirality is intimately bound up with the 'sense' of space - a sense which the mirror reverses.  Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for such a profound concept, chirality crops up frequently in the world of sub-nuclear physics.  Handedness goes to the heart not just of life, but of reality too.

Mysterious it all may be as a philosophical abstraction, but the many practical consequences of Nature's unfair habits are not in doubt.  Since there can be no compromise between right and left, the sinister part of the world loses out in a vote decided by a crude show of hands.

We dextrists may take corkscrews for granted; imagine, though, if the turn went the other way.  Handles in general presuppose that your right arm is the stronger; if it is not, you are faced by a difficult choice: a weak, but natural action, or a strong, unnatural one.

Things are improving.  As the world population has increased, so has the viability of catering for the minority group of the left-handed.  Consequently, many everyday objects that imply or have acquired a handedness can be obtained in a mirror-image form.  Leaving aside the joke left-handed teacups, there are now scissors for the left-handed, as well as flutes, violins and guitars.  At least the widespread availability of the left-handed pen nib, along with writing tools that assume no one chirality, has brought equality to a crucial area; after all, Arabic script is produced right to left with the right hand - an equivalent situation to that of the sinistrist scribe in a dextrist writing system.

But there remains one domain that is stubbornly handist, with little hope of any remedy: that of traditional Western art.  Representational paintings expect to be read from left to right.  Typically an optimistic image will rise across the canvas, a gloomy and despondent one fall.  Thus, like chirality, the mood of a picture also is reversed in its mirror-image.  That this was explicitly understood is proved by the habit of composing subjects with the emphases switched in the other direction when painting cartoons for tapestries, for example in Raphael's great series.  Transferring the cartoon image to the tapestry reversed the sense, and so restored the traditional chirality and created the intended effect.  As a consequence, for those with a leftish take on the world most of the greatest masterpieces of Western art must seem subtly but irredeemably flawed; no sinister plot, for a change, but a dextrist one.

(1989)

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