God in the body

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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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Scarlatti's cat

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When we speak of a sixth sense, we speak vaguely or mystically.  It is hard to extrapolate from the five senses we know, which each seems to be unique and incomparable.  In fact, they form part of a series, with a clear underlying logic.  The sixth sense exists and extends that series.

The first sense was touch.  When life began, its primary means of detecting the outside world was the press of molecule on molecule.  Touch grew into smell and taste: the ability to determine properties of distant objects through the odours and flavours they unleash into the wind and the water.  Hearing too perceives other entities by their effects on the environment.  It continues the progression of the senses by widening the cognitive reach of the organism from the adjacent to several hundred metres away.  But that world is still crudely described: it took the development of sight to add an epistemological richness of detail.

Sight allows us to perceive our universe to the depths of infinity.  But it is not the last word in controlling that universe.  The first five senses are passive: they arose to give the organism progressively better chances in the Darwinian contest through superior information.  The sixth is more active, and evolved with mankind's ability to use tools.

The sixth sense can best be described as an innate bodily awareness: put simply, we know where our body is without the need to look.  An easy test is to close the eyes and then to touch your nose with your finger: the movements are possible because in the absence of any other input you are aware of the relative disposition of limbs.  This sense comes into its own with tools: through it we can with practice manipulate objects without the need to watch every movement we make with them.  An example is driving a car: you soon learn to press the pedals, change gears and switch on lights and wipers with your eyes fixed on the road: you just know - through your body - where everything is.

Perhaps the most impressive manifestation of this skill is in music.  Many instruments - the voice, strings, keyboards - require the player to know without looking where notes are: for violinists or singers, there are no markers for each pitch which must be learnt as a bodily position.  Similarly the pianist is often called upon to make quickly large and accurate leaps with the hands.

This technique became a commonplace in the Romantic period, when it was used to impress; a more interesting case is that of the Italian Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti, who wrote over 500 sonatas for harpsichord.  Many of his pieces include the most extraordinary jumps for both hands.  One of his early works is a powerful fugue.  Although the sonata is without rapid leaps, its opening subject moves up the keyboard in a very unusual pattern.  Its oddness has led to the work being dubbed 'The cat's fugue' with the suggestion that the theme was produced by Scarlatti's cat walking across the keys.  The real reason is probably simpler: Scarlatti's delight in the physical sensation of keyboard playing meant that notes and themes placed awkwardly for the hands had for him a delicious extra dimension.  To some degree, we all have our own Scarlatti's cat.

(1990)

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Ludwig van who?

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In our apotheosis of the greatest artists we strip them of the very humanity that lies at the root of that greatness.  Too often we elide the life, thinking of the works, not the men and women who made them.  We may know in a purely abstract way that they were born on such a date, studied here, married there, produced this masterpiece under those conditions, but these remain disembodied statements: they have no person at their centre.

Because of our awe, we tend to think of Beethoven, say, as a kind of Platonic essence, the common divine factor to all his music.  We forget that he was ultimately a deaf, smelly old man who died in great loneliness.  More importantly, we forget that he was born at a time when the classical idiom in music was reaching its maturity; as a result, he happened to arrive on the scene when there was a perfect framework for the kind of compositional iconoclasm that forms the core of his achievement.  In a word, as far as timing was concerned, he was lucky.

This may seem an outrageous thing to say about one of the supreme musical masters; but it does not detract from that mastery: the music he wrote still required an incomparable genius to write it.  But the fact remains that just as his time needed someone with exactly his skills to produce the works he did, so Beethoven himself needed precisely that time.

Take the same man - the same physical and psychological make-up, though obviously with an upbringing changed in details - born now in the fourteenth century.  Music was fundamentally different in its sound, its structure, its scale, and in its performance.  A fourteenth century Beethoven might well have produced masterpieces within those conventions, but they would never have had the impact of works which could draw on the rich and complex possibilities of the classical language at its peak.

The same is true of all the greatest artists.  Shakespeare needed the English language to be poised exactly as he found it - a fresh and subtle blend of powerful Anglo-Saxon roots with infinitely variable Latinate extensions.  Born a hundred years later and his works for the stage would have been incomprehensible doggerel.  Rembrandt too absolutely required the Renaissance's anthropocentric assumptions, and his milieu's painterly techniques, to make the final searing self-portraits possible.  Picture him during the impressionist era, an eccentric and obsessive academician.

If the key creators are great partly because of their eras, it follows that there may well be hidden among us Beethovens and Rembrandts or equivalent figures, whose particular cast of genius is at odds with today's artistic currents; they are like powerful orators forced to use a bad phrase book to communicate awkwardly in a language not their own.

But we should not mourn these losses too much; after all, there are for certain greater tragedies.  For example, the millions of gifted children who will never realise or even discover their vocation, through being born in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in a desperate poverty which makes art a superfluity.  There are Beethovens out there, for sure; but we will never know their names.

(1989)

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