Amber Vistein

Qualifying Exam #1
History and Critical Theory

Listening to Opera in the Age of Cinema

Introduction

I was eight years old the first time I saw an opera. It was a school field trip to see
a local youth opera company. The plot revolved around ocean conservation: dolphins
sang about rising temperatures, fish regaled us with tales of escaping nets, crabs trilled
about walking through piles of refuse on the ocean floor, and at the center of it all: two
turtles. The most significant aria of the work (or at least the most significant one in my
memory) was the mournful song of a female turtle that had just lost her husband-turtle:
he had choked to death when a plastic bag wound ‘round his neck. I remember crying, the
spectacular artifice of this humble production had induced runny-nosed sobs. Like any
anonymous child who was raised next to the Gulf of Mexico, I loved sea creatures. I had
even escorted newly hatched sea turtle babies to the surf in the moonlight. But was that
what I immediately thought of faced with the melodious suffering of this grieving
animal? No. My first thoughts were of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Who I loved
equally, if not more than, their flesh and blood counterparts.
It would be sixteen years before I saw another opera in person—the Boston Lyric
Opera’s 2008 production of Les contes d'Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach. But in the
time intervening, I had already been captured by the medium. In rural Florida setting of
my teenage years, a live opera production wasn’t easy to come by. As a college student I
saw a few filmed versions of live operas (The Marriage of Figaro, Aida, Carmen), and a
few filmic productions of operas (Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute certainly stands
out, there was also Parsifal), but it was an opera that was (and remains) only available as
an audio CD that truly peaked my interest: Writing to Vermeer, a collaboration between
composer Louis Andreissen and writer-filmmaker Peter Greenaway with electronic music
‘inserts’ composed by Michel van der Aa. It was the first opera that fascinated (and
continues to fascinate me), but others followed: Wozzeck by Alban Berg, Peter Grimes by
Benjamin Britten, Doctor Atomic by John Adams, and more recently Song from the
Uproar by Missy Mazzoli, and Angel’s Bone by Du Yun.
 I do not indiscriminately enjoy opera: Donizetti, Rossini, and Janáček do not peak
my interest. I find them difficult to listen to. I don’t always find Verdi or Bellini
fascinating either—even if I respect their skill. Likewise, I rarely enjoy traditional
musical theatre (there are notable exceptions, of course) as singer-actors hop back and
forth between speaking and predictable, traditional song formats: verse-chorus-verse-
chorus... maybe a bridge...hooray—the tonic! The End. Something feels entirely too
abrupt about the sudden breaking into song that occurs in much traditional music theatre.
And yes, I mean more unnatural than in opera. The style and structure of musical theatre
songs can feel disconnected from the dramatic action and character development. Not
like Carmen. And I find little allure in the ubiquitous oft nasal, oft ‘belted’ vocal style of
Broadway. Most often, it is 20th and 21st century operas that I find compel and delight
me. And my instinct is that it all has something to do with the Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles.
Many of the operas that I have found myself drawn to have one feature in
common: they can be described as ‘cinematic’. But what does it mean for an opera to be
cinematic? And considering that many of these operas, ones that I both find compelling
and that are considered cinematic, are ones that I have only ever heard, only encountered
aurally—how does the description cinematic work? How might the influence of cinema
be heard to be at work? And what does it mean if this is in fact the case?
Following Nina Sun Eidsheim’s observation that “to focus analytically on the
listener allows us to read and interrogate the impact of a piece of music as it is
experienced by a listener who is encultured in a given way,”1 I will address these
questions from a perspective that privileges listening in an attempt to better understand
contemporary listening practices. I will use my own experiences as a kind of case study,
but also as ones that can be taken as representative of a more general ‘moment’ in the
history of listening. What I want to know is: how does listening to opera in the age of
cinema work? What are the most common modes of reception for this medium? What are
the bodily, perceptual, cultural, and conceptual components of the experience? What, in
short, what makes the listening experience what it is? I also want to recognize the
historical emplacement of the composer (who is of course also a listener): what

1
Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound : Singing & Listening as Vibrational Practice, Sign, Storage,
implications do these questions have regarding the composition of contemporary opera
that is taken in by contemporary audiences?
But I also want to understand the origins, production, and shifts in these
perceptual practices. This will necessitate taking a wider historical period into
consideration. Tracing out the historical development of listening and viewing practices
will allow me to better explicate sonorous aspects of opera’s relationship with cinema to
bring the co-ordination between technological development and perceptual reorganization
into focus. By tracing the history of mutual influence and emulation that occurs between
cinema and opera, I will indicate instances where the logic of cinema can prove a useful
tool in regards to the interpretation of recordings of contemporary opera (and vice versa,
when the logic of opera can illuminate cinematic choices). To engage these questions of
medium, reception, and mediality is timely considering the recent surge in the production
of new operas and the manifold experiments, extensions, developments, and permutations
swiftly arising in the field. Not to mention, the rapid expansion of technological
innovation occurring in the filed of cinema. Along the way, I will engage the questions:
How might it be possible for an audio recording to engage the multi-modal sensibility of
opera? How ought a listener to approach a recording of contemporary opera? And what
can this tell us about subjectivity—both how subjectivity is constructed within each form
and its relationship to the subjectivity of the listener?
But first, what is opera?

Opera
The word opera literally means work in the two-fold sense of labor and of a
work. From the Latin: work, labor, trouble, pains, exertion. It is also the plural of opus.
The Italian word (derived from the Latin) captures work in this sense but also refers to:
help, means, services. In the word itself we already have an indication of both the bodily
effort and the coordinated heterogeneity that characterize the medium. While providing
an exhaustive history of opera is neither feasible, nor desirable, within the scope of this
essay, I will quickly outline the most salient features of the medium.
Originating at dawn of the 17th century, opera became established as a sung
dramatic form2 distinguished from other sung works by the centrality it allotted to

2
Cannon, Robert, Opera. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 10.
narrative, characterization, and staging. Over opera’s four hundred year history there
have been many shifts, fractures, and developments within the medium itself. It has been
consistently vococentric, but there are ever-evolving tensions between the desire for
spectacle vs. clarity, virtuosity vs. storytelling, and the style(s) of vocal delivery—should
there be recitative? However, the close relationship between dramaturgy and music—the
coordination and co-development of the two with each other—as well as an emphasis on
staging remained intact.3 Indeed, dramatic staging is a central component of what
distinguishes opera from oratorio—a form with which it is otherwise nearly identical.
And historically, staging--and specifically what is appropriate to put on stage--has also
distinguished opera from other theatrical forms. Consider the performance practices of
the early modern opera age described by Viet Erlmann in Reason and Resonance:

While in spoken tragedy—Racine’s Phedre (1677), for instance—the supersensible realm is banned from
stage, opera thrives on presenting a world filled with supernatural characters, magic moments, and scene
changes, all made possible by intricate machinery and music.4

Erlmann identifies music as the key element enabling the spectacular to take place, to be
staged, in a credible manner:

In fact, in the eyes of some of the contemporaneous commentators, music’s role in the lyrical theatre was
essential to the privileged place of the spectacular. In the tragedie en musique, Jean-Francois Marmontel
wrote, “everything is false, but everything is in agreement; and it is this agreement that constitutes truth,
Music gives charm to the marvelous, the marvelous in turn gives credibility to music.”5

It is the thoroughgoingness of opera’s artifice ensures its success.

Furthermore, Erlmann links the rise of the operatic form with the development of
an “off-Cartesian”6 subjectivity. In contradistinction to the rational Cartesian subject (I
think, therefore I am) where the ‘I’ represents the rational mind, severed form the
physical body in a strict mind-body dualism, in early modern opera he observes a more
ticklish subjectivity.7 This subjectivity bridges the distance between “reason and

3
Cannon, Robert, Opera. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 13: “in true opera the music is an
integral part of the dramatic language, working from inside the action and the characters. It is the ability to
do this that marks the divide between...early proto-operatic forms and the opera itself.”
4
Viet Erlmann. Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality. New York Cambridge, Mass.: Zone
Books; Distributed by MIT Press, 2010, 88.
5
Erlmann, 88.
6
Erlmann, 77.
7
Erlmann, 101.
resonance”—mind and body—in moments of engagement with the marvelous or
spectacular elements of early modern opera.
For Erlmann, the bodily engagement of the listener in early modern opera
indicates a subject who comprehends through pleasure, eroticism, and ‘exteriorizing
identification’ that he compares with Rick Altman concept of point-of-audition (POA).
Wherein, “akin to the point-of-view shots ubiquitous in Hollywood cinema...POA sound
[is] sound that would be heard by a specific character” from within the film’s diegesis
and “as such, it is a common way of positioning the spectator in a specific relationship to
the plot on screen.”8 In this technique, “we are not asked to hear, but to identify with
someone who will hear for us.”9 For example, a shift in volume and/or reverberation
levels representing “the dwindling sound of an airplane motor in the distance” while the
camera shot is focused on Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings allows
the listener to identify with the on-screen characters and derive that the plane is moving
away from them. 10 “POA thus enables a widening of the subject’s sphere of
imagination”11 and loosens the certainty of exactly who occupies the position of the ‘I’
and how that position is attained (through rational or bodily-sensory means?).
Do we find similar points of resonance in the contemporary reception of this
durable artform?

Multimodality vs. Audio Recording

Let us begin at with two material facts at odds:

1) Contemporary opera is most widely disseminated in the form of audio recordings

2) Opera is a multimodal, multisensory medium

The multisensory nature of opera is obvious to anyone familiar with the form:
from Wagner’s notions of the Gesamtkunstwerke to contemporary calls to engage opera
as a multimodal practice12, the complex intersection of multiple media and sensory

8
Erlmann, 95.
9
Erlmann, 95.
10
Altman, Rick. Sound Theory/Sound Practice. AFI Film Readers. New York: Routledge, 1992.
11
Erlmann, 95-6.
12
Everett, Yayoi Uno, Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun. "Toward a Multimodal
Discourse on Opera." In Reconfiguring Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Opera: Osvaldo Golijov,
registers has long been a focal point of discussions surrounding opera. But in terms of
access, and thereby reception, the audio recording remains the most available way to
experience many (especially contemporary) operas. In privileging the perspective of the
listener, my attempt to isolate the sonorously cinematic elements of opera then leads me
to a focus that is perhaps unexpected: audio recordings of operas. Why?
As aforementioned, opera is strongly characterized by the integral relationship
between dramaturgy, music, and specifically staging13. An opera qua opera always
already anticipates a staging. An opera always already invokes the listener to imagine
one. Yet it would be difficult—even counterproductive—to codify any particular staging
of an opera as authoritative, necessary, or inviolable: in opera “musical interpretation...
has clear limits set by the score itself... the visual realization, on the other hand, is
unpredictable.”14 Thus opera maintains a degree of contingency, openness, and flexibility
that can perhaps be best compared to that of silent film (as will be explored below).
Alongside the anticipation of a staging, opera typically places a strong emphasis
on characterization through the use of monody and virtuosity. Each vocal role suggests a
character, and thus a unique15 embodied being situated within the diegetic world of the
opera16. The presence of their voice implies the world of the diegesis is inhabitable—in
that each voice suggests the activity of a subject17 in the throes of production18, the result

Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun, 1-40. Indiana University Press, 2015.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt17kmw6p.6.
13
Cannon, Robert, Opera. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 13: “in true opera the music is an
integral part of the dramatic language, working from inside the action and the characters. It is the ability to
do this that marks the divide between...early proto-operatic forms and the opera itself.”
14 Fryer, Paul. Opera in the Media Age : Essays on Art, Technology and Popular Culture. Jefferson, North

Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2014. (Bellemare, 186)

15
Adriana Cavarero and Paul A. Kottman, For More Than One Voice : Toward a Philosophy of Vocal
Expression (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005).
16
Robert Cannon, "Opera," (New York :: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 16.
17
Brandon LaBelle, Lexicon of the Mouth : Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary (New
York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 5-6.“It is my view that the voice is also a full body, always already a
voice subject, rich with intentions and meaning; sex and gendered, classed and raced, accented, situation,
and inflected by the intensities of numerous markings and their performance (inscriptions, erasures,
recitals…). I would argue that the voice is always identified (though not always identifiable); it is flexed by
the body, by the subject in all its complicated vitality. Someone (or something ) speaks to me, and it is not
the voice I hear, but rather the body, the subject; not a disembodied intensity, a speech without body, but as
someone that enters, intrudes, demands, or requests, and that also seeks…the voice, in this way, promises a
subject; it explicitly excites or haunts a listener to recognize in the voice a “someone.”
18
Ibid., 86.
of their labor being what is heard: “Listen, says a voice: some being is giving voice.”19
Moreover, the operatic medium’s emphasis on virtuosity implies its characters are meant
to be expressive and allows ample space for performers to do so. Hence, opera has
historically been deeply connected to notions of subjectivity, interiority, and
emotionality.
In a parallel discussion on the role of the voice in narrative film, in Moving Lips
Rick Altman writes: “in the narrative world, the right to speech invariably conveys... the
right to appear in the image... in general we may say that actors gain the right to a place
in the image by virtue of having previously obtained a spot on the sound track. I speak,
therefore I am seen.”20 Because no one staging of an opera can or should be taken as
authorial, the best—perhaps only—way to ensure that an event or action will occur on-
stage is to make sure it occurs in the score, to first ensure that it will be realized sonically.
Sound always already begs for explanation, emplacement, and interpretation and in opera
such explanations and emplacements are inherently multiple. Indeed such concerns have
led Pierre Bellemare, in an article devoted to the how DVD and Blu-Ray technologies
might contribute to opera, to declare that for opera enthusiasts: “chances are they will be
less satisfied with a DVD than they would had they bought an audio recording, even one
originating from the same performance,”21 as the DVD commits the listener to a single
interpretation of the work, one director’s vision, and one that may differ strongly from
their own.
Additionally, much has been written on the subject of staging and theatrical
realization of opera—while this is fascinating area of discourse, scores and sonorous
realizations are less often the focus of scholarship, perhaps because of ambiguity inherent
in the unstable relationship between score and staging. For me, this also belies a strange
ocular-centrism (one cinema also contends with) inherent in the discourse. Following
Michel Chion’s suggestion Three Modes of Listening that: “acousmatic sound draws our
attention to sound traits normally hidden from us by the simultaneous sight of the
causes—hidden because this sight reinforces the perception of certain elements of the

19
Steven Connor, Dumbstruck : A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford ; New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 4.
20
Rick Altman, "Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism," Yale French studies, no. 60 (1980), 68.
21
Fryer, (Bellemare, 186).
sound and obscures others,”22 I want to focus on what and how the ear contributes to the
reception and interpretation of these works.
To briefly sum up, after acknowledging the multi-modal, multi-sensory nature of
opera: why choose an acousmatic approach? Why focus on listening to a recording? For
several reasons: 1) to acknowledge and take up the mode of encounter most commonly
available to listeners, one that therefore, molds the contemporary ear, 2) to focus on what
and how the ear contributes to the reception and interpretation of these works, and 3) to
avoid the codification of any one particular staging. That being said, how might we begin
to reconcile the acousmatic—purely sonic—experience of opera with its multimodality?

Empathy: Body, Voice, Material, Expression

What Roland Barthes terms the grain of the voice engages the experience of
hearing: “the body in the voice as it sings.”23 Meanwhile, Kittler describes a noisy,
breathy, material real that emanates from the phonograph as it plays back a captured
voice.24 Both Kittler and Barthes seek to describe something they experience that is not
fully captured by musical notation or language, an experience of the voice that cannot be
reduced to structure, style, or semantic meaning. Of course, the voice can communicate
linguistically and musically. Even Fischer-Dieskau, Barthes’ example of a singer lacking
grain, can move us emotionally according to codified systems of expression. But the
voice also moves us in a very literal sense: through the sympathetic tensing of our throat
muscles, responsive quickening of our heartbeat, and many other infraempirical affective
responses.25
This fosters the possibility of an empathic listening response rooted in pleasure,
enjoyment, and “the materiality of the body.”26 In as much as voices originate from

22
Sterne, Jonathan. The Sound Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2012.
23
Roland Barthes and Stephen Heath, Image, Music, Text, Fontana Communications Series (London:
Fontana, 1977), 188.
24
Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Writing Science (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1999), xxviii. The real is in turn identified with phonography, which, regardless of
meaning or intent, records all the voices and utterances produced by bodies, thus separating the signifying
function of words (the domain of the imaginary in the discourse network of 1800) as well as their
materiality (the graphic traces corresponding to the symbolic) from unseeable and unwritable noises.
25
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual : Movement, Affect, Sensation, Post-Contemporary
Interventions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 16.
26
Barthes and Heath, 182.
bodies, the existence of a voice implies the existence of a body. And as listeners, we can
experience an empathetic relationship to a voice based on our sense of shared anatomy:
of sharing a body that is both sensed and sensing, one that receives sensory information
and is able to respond to that information in a sensorimotor feedback loop that connects
internal and external.27 That shared anatomy, in addition to codified systems of
expression that exist in a given context, sets up a relation between the body of the listener
and the body of the singer that thus both material and expressive or meaningful: “a
contraction of the throat, a sibilant emission of air between the tongue and teeth, a certain
way of bringing the body into play suddenly allows itself to be invested with a figurative
significance which is conveyed outside us.”28

Vocalic Bodies

Beyond implying the existence of a body, activating a bodily sense of pleasure, or

engendering an empathetic response from the listener—we can think of the voice as
capable of producing “autonomous voice-bodies29,” or what Steven Connor terms a
vocalic bodies:

The principle of the vocalic body is simple. Voices are produced by bodies: but can also themselves
produce bodies. The vocalic body is the idea.... of a surrogate or secondary body, a projection of a new way
of having or being a body, formed and sustained out of the autonomous operations of the voice.30

In Dumbstruck Steven Connor investigates the cultural history of ventriloquism,

and unearths many examples of these vocalic bodies in action. Among the most
fascinating instances he mentions are the ‘conspicuously successful’ 20th century radio
ventriloquists. How is the illusion of a secondary voice emanating from a dummy, or
from ‘elsewhere’ generally, sustained in the purely auditory medium of radio? The
illusion succeeds because two spatially distinct, vocalic bodies are successfully produced
in the listening experience. And, in that, the vocalic body of the ventriloquist and the
vocalic body of the dummy establish a space for their exchange. “The radio
ventriloquist... conjures with sound a visible scenario in which we can consent to be

27
Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment : Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2009), 108-10.
28
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London ; New York: Routledge, 1962), 225.
29
Connor, 35.
30
Ibid.
duped by the ventriloquial illusion.”31 The ability to interpret this auditory situation, as a
listener is reliant on at least two factors (in addition to the sense of a shared anatomy
capable of sensorimotor feedback): exchange across the sensorium, or across the senses,
in the unified body32 and the enculturation of the listening subject. Thus we come to hear
the knit brow of confusion emanating from the tense, rising pitch of a stuttered question
or the beaming smile of a felicitous exclamation.
The familiar experience of hearing one’s own vocalizations undergirds the
practice of listening more generally. In order to travel from the ‘within’ of vocal
production to the ‘without’ of my ear and the social world of listeners, of which I am also
one, as Connor observes: “the voice always requires and requisitions space.”33
Additionally, a normal speaking situation furnishes one, not only with the auditory
experience of one’s own voice, but with a range of tactile, gestural, kinaesthetic,
propriocentric, and vibratory sensations. In Connor’s words: “the exercise of the voice
animates the whole body”34. These sensory experiences do not preclude an absence of the
visual or spatial, but instead, through the unity of a body that sees and feels as well as
hears, one sense implicates the others. Connor is not alone in his observations in this
area: Rick Altman, Nina Sun Eidsheim, and Brandon LaBelle have all written extensively
on the interconnections and exchanges that occur within the body—across the
sensorium—and the implications of these exchanges.

31
Ibid., 22.
32
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lefort, The Visible and the Invisible; Followed by Working Notes,
Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy (Evanston Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1968), 144-45.The choice of the term unified body in this instance is inspired by Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s work in The Visible and the Invisible, especially the chapter The Intertwining--The
Chiasm wherein he describes the body in terms of a complex, multi-layered, crisscrossing network of
sensory information united through reversibility; that the touched hand can reverse its role and become the
touching, reversibility and reflexivity extend across the sensorium and characterize the interpersonal
sphere: “many gestures, and especially those strange movements of the throat and mouth that form the cry
and the voice. Those movements end in sounds and I hear them. Like crystal, like metal and many other
substances, I am a sonorous being, but I hear my own vibration from within; as Malraux said, I hear myself
with my throat. In this, as he also has said, I am incomparable; my voice is bound to the mass of my own
life as is the voice of no one else. But if I am close enough to the other who speaks to hear his breath and
feel his effervescence and his fatigue, I almost witness, in him as in myself, the awesome birth of
vociferation. As there is a reflexivity of the touch, of sight, and of the touch-vision system, there is a
reflexivity of the movements of phonation and of hearing; they have their sonorous inscription, the
vociferations have in me their motor echo. This new reversibility and the emergence of the flesh as
expression are the point of insertion of speaking and thinking in the world of silence”
33
Connor, 5.
34
Ibid., 10.
 The first we might mention is the exchange between senses in terms of parsing,
structuring, and interpreting sensory input: “In giving sounds a structure, we attempt to
fix and spatialize, perhaps by borrowing the visual power to segment and synthesize.”35
The ear, too, is entrained by the capacities of the eye. Schema for the interpretation of
visual information have been internalized, such as the ones devoted to the recognition of
structures, sequences, depth, and spatial gestures. Those schemas may then be taken up
other senses; adapted and tailored to the perceptual specialization of each sense.
This does not collapse the difference between the senses, but allows us to
conceptualize zones of exchange and influence36. The ear is not the eye, but borrows
from the eye, enabling us to use sensory information received by the ear alone to
generate, segment, visualize, and navigate space. Nina Sun Eidsheim expands upon these
ideas by drawing attention to the material, physical, spatial, and tactile elements of
listening that are often overlooked. She asserts the multisensory nature of the voice37 and
of sonic experience generally, writing: “not only aurality but also tactile, spatial, physical,
material, and vibrational sensations are at the core of all music.”38 The multiplicity and
interconnection that takes place in an embodied experience of listening is a major factor
in what allows a listener to decipher the radio ventriloquist act.

Cultural and Historical Specificity

Let us shift focus to another factor: enculturation. In order to make sense of the
radio ventriloquist act, the listener must have a grasp of the practice of ventriloquism and
knowledge of how radio programs function. The interpretation of vocalization implicates
not only the whole of the sensing body, but the socio-historical emplacement and
inflection of that body. Parsing out this listening experience posits an acquired set of
listening practices developed in tandem with the technology and media of the day that
direct the listener’s attention and allow them to make observations.39

35
Ibid., 17.
36
Ibid., 21. “It is possible for the ear to borrow and internalize some of the substantiating powers of the
eye, and to mold from them a kind of sonorous depth, a space sustained by and enacted through the
experience of sound and hearing alone.”
37
Eidsheim, 3.
38
Ibid., 8.
39 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past : Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke

University Press, 2003), 92. “If media do, indeed, extend our senses, they do so as crystallized versions
 Vocalization and listening both require the acquisition of cultural knowledge and
involve practiced technique meditated by technological circumstance. In Lexicon of the
Mouth Brandon LaBelle engages with the oral and material aspects of vocal production,
describing the voice as performative assemblage,40 one wherein the “articulations of the
voice are thoroughly interlocked with their movements through social life, and are always
conditioned by our family history, and by our place within particular environments.”41
The speaker’s embeddedness in a network of relations encompassing specific historical,
cultural, material, and technological aspects conditions their vocalization—and it also
conditions the listener’s perception, reception, and interpretation of their vocalization.
To quickly sum up: when I listen to a voice, I sense the activity of a being with a
shared anatomy (one that also experiences a sensorimotor feedback loop). Through my
listening to this voice both a vocalic body and a space from which this voice-body speaks
can be produced. The production of these elements is rooted in my experience of hearing
my own vocalizations (connecting inside and outside), the exchanges that occur between
the senses (or across the sensorium), and the inherently multisensory nature of sonic
experience itself. Furthermore, my perceptions are culturally conditioned and historically
specific, entailing that my ability to interpret and the kinds of connections that I am able
to make are also culturally informed, historically specific, and technologically mediated.

Acousmatic
Upon reflection, the experience of listening to voice points to how it may be
possible to resolve some of the tension between listening to an audio recording of a
contemporary opera and what we can readily acknowledge as the recording’s
incompleteness. But we also need to reflect on the structure of the acousmatic listening
experience itself. An acousmatic listening experience, listening without visual reference

and elaborations of people’s prior practices—or techniques—of using their senses.”
40
LaBelle, 91. “The mouth as an organ is not a single entity; rather, it is an elaborate system of parts, a
highly charged, flexed, and performing assemblage that extends from the lips down to the gut; though this
is already to limit its physical dimensions—we know well how the voice is already an expanded geography
pricked by an entire constellation of psychosocial, sexual, and linguistic elements, which would suggest
that the mouth equally starts and ends where our relationships take us. In this regard, the mouth is all
through the body.”
41
Ibid., 8.
to the source of a given sound, is characterized by underdetermination, by “a structural
gap”42 between what Brian Kane describes as a given sound’s source, cause, and effect:

I work with a model of sound that has three necessary components: source, cause, and effect. Sounds, as we
know, only occur when one object activates or excites another. For instance, a rosined bow is rubbed
against a string or cymbal; air is forced across a cane reed or a vocal tract (then shaped by a mouth, tongue,
and teeth); or a raindrop collides with a windowpane. The interaction of a source (cymbal, string, reed,
vocal tract, or windowpane) with a cause (rosined bow, moving air, raindrop) produces an audible effect.
We can formulate this as a proposition: Every sonic effect is the result of the interaction of a source and a
cause. Without this interaction, there is no emission of sound.43

A commonplace example of an acousmatic experience is hearing a bird sing in a

tree overhead without being able to see the bird, based on the sound or audible effect, I
generate an idea of the source of the sound and can fix it in space—but the lack of visual
confirmation leaves room for doubt: Is it a bird singing? Or is it a recording being played
back through a speaker someone has placed in a tree as part of an art installation?44
Because the source, cause, and effect are necessary and irreducible components of any
sound, if any one of the terms is not present or known, that does not mean it can be
eliminated from consideration. Instead, this ‘spacing’ produces a sense of
underdetermination that initiates a series of deferrals and referrals. The listener is drawn
into a contextually informed process of “imaginative projection”45 in order to resolve the
tension of underdetermination: configuring, reconfiguring, and inventing relationships
between the sound’s constitutive elements in accordance with their own personal
experiences, socio-historical emplacement, and perceptual conditioning. The listener may
cross-reference their auditory experience with the other senses, engage their memory, or
reflect on forms of technological mediation: it’s a chickadee.
The vocalic bodies produced in the radio ventriloquism act are also an example of
this process of imaginative projection aimed at resolving the underdetermination of an
acousmatic experience. A simplified version of this process goes something like: I hear
voices without being able to see their source(s). I feel that the underdetermination of
these voices without sources must be resolved. Based on my experience, I know that all
voices refer to a body (or bodies). I hear two distinguishable voices. These two voices

42
Brian Kane, Sound Unseen : Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (2016), 149.
43
Ibid., 7.
44
Ibid.
45
Ibid.
invoke two vocalic bodies. I can imagine whom these two voices belong to, envision their
vocalic bodies, surmise how they are related to one another, and fill out the space or
context in which they interact. Based on my knowledge of both radio programs and
ventriloquist acts, I determine that this interaction is best characterized as a ventriloquist
act. The acousmatic voice evokes a vocalic body and the listener’s knowledge of the
practice of ventriloquism, in addition to their familiarity with radio broadcasts, allows
them to clearly imagine (or imaginatively project) these vocalic bodies, assign them roles,
and construct a scenario that makes sense of what they hear: a ventriloquist and a dummy
are engaged in an exchange.
Not unlike ventriloquism, opera, as a medium, has a logic—it sets up a specific
set of expectations—the importance of staging, a strong relationship between music and
dramaturgy, and deep involvement of narrative and characterization are givens. In an
acousmatic situation, how might the listener take up the expectations put into place by the
medium—narrative, characterization, staging—and use them to interpret what they hear?
What role does the voice itself take on in this equation?
These are not new questions: the acousmatic encounter of opera is a situation is
not only one encountered by contemporary audiences, but one that has endured for over a
hundred years: a period of time that witnessed great transformation in the modes of
production, distribution, and reception of artworks as well as the transformation of
perception itself. As observed by Walter Benjamin: “Just as the entire mode of existence
of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of
perception. The way in which human perception is organized--the medium in which it
occurs--is conditioned not only by nature but by history.”46 From a historical perspective,
especially for American audiences, opera and acousmatic listening are deeply entwined.
Opera helped to condition listeners to the acousmatic situation by way of the phonograph
record.

A Hundred Years of Listening to Opera

The phonograph was invented in 1877. Thomas Edison screamed Mary Had a

46
Walter Benjamin, Howard Eiland, and Michael W. Jennings, Selected Writings : 1938-1940 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press, 2006), 255.
Little Lamb into his invention’s mouthpiece, and with the help of an assistant, a needle
etched the acoustic vibrations of his voice onto a thin piece of tin foil wrapped around a
wax cylinder. They then “moved the needle back, let the cylinder run a second time, and
the first phonograph replayed the screams.”47 Fast-forward a few years and shellac discs
quickly replaced wax cylinders as the preferred medium for recording and playback. In
the early days of the 20th century, one side of the average shellac disc held about four and
a half minutes of recorded sound.48 By 1903, the first recording of a complete opera,
Ernani, was released as a set of “forty single-sided disks.”49 And by 1925 thirty-seven
complete opera recordings were available.50
In the 20th century, the history of opera entwines with the history of phonography.
As phonographs proliferated, a new listening situation requiring new listening techniques
also proliferated and opera became one way of addressing this need. The unfamiliarity
and underdetermination of the acousmatic listening situation was initially disorienting for
many listeners:

The issue of concern is a voice in the absence of the body. In the early history of phonography, the lack was
sometimes acutely felt, and extreme measures might be taken to address the problem—as in the case of a
British listener who constructed miniature stages to look at while listening to opera recordings. 51

The impulse to construct a staging is justified in that a staging can always be expected of
opera as a historically grounded and defining feature of the medium. And audio
recordings of opera performances were missing a great deal: the opera house, scenery,
and lighting, not to mention the body of the singer. But precisely these absences helped to
clarify the prevailing listening practices of the day and to suggest how the problem of
acousmatic listening could be overcome.
The solution the phonograph companies devised was not to deny, but to engage
opera’s multimodality: colorful booklets illustrating the Great European opera houses,
with photographs of the lavish sets, detailed story synopses, and the ornate costumes
donned by the unmistakable Enrico Caruso—Victor Talking Machine Company’s most

47
Kittler, 21.
48
Richard D. Leppert, Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature : Opera · Orchestra ·
Phonograph · Film (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2015), 97.
49
Ibid., 108.
50
Fryer, Paul. Opera in the Media Age : Essays on Art, Technology and Popular Culture. Jefferson, North
Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2014. (Cannon, 107)
51
Leppert, 126.
prized, exclusively contracted singer—provided textual and visual aides to scaffold the
work of the imagination for these early listeners. The illuminated booklets performed
two-fold pedagogic function of both teaching a new audience about opera and instructing
them in how to listen in an acousmatic situation. The narrative, spectacular, and star-
powered nature of opera made it well suited to this function. And as a pedagogic tool,
opera exceeded its actual listening audience. “Edison and Victor alike spent enormous
sums of money advertising their classical catalogues, opera especially” and “consistently
positioned readers as avid operagoers.”52 Even for readers who did not actually purchase
opera recordings, the imaginative listening strategies suggested by opera recordings
provided a framework worthy of wide distribution and a generous slice of the advertising
budget. What made this framework successful?
Opera recordings simultaneously provide the listener with indexical specificity
and a wide imaginative birth. Indexicality in this instance refers to the central triad
consisting of symbol-icon-index in C.S. Pierce’s theory of signs. Signs always point
outside themselves, they always refer to an object—but sign and object are related to
each other in different ways. A symbol—for example, a written word or language more
generally, is sustained by a “habitual or law-like relation between itself and its object”;
while an icon, such as a picture or a graph, “resembles the object it signifies”; but the
index “signifies by virtue of an existential bond between the sign and its object”53: a
footprint, a trace, a bullet hole, a pointing finger, or the turning of a weathervane—all
indicate this, now, there. Indices work through contiguity; they are touched (“the light
rays reflected from the object ‘touch’ the film”54), or actually modified by their objects55
and are thus characterized by contingency and uniqueness. Through the direct connection
between the index and its object: “the object is made "present" to the addressee”56 in a
way that furnishes “positive assurance” of both its “reality and the nearness.”57
Although most commonly associated with photography, indexicality is an
important feature of phonography. The indexicality of a sound describes its material

52
Ibid., 102.
53
Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time : Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 92.
54
Ibid.
55
Ibid., 94.
56
Ibid., 92.
57
Ibid.
contiguity with its source; the ‘groove’ of the record bears the marks of the singing voice
and thus of the human body—of a unique, living, breathing being giving voice: Caruso.
Moreover, the mechanical nature of the phonographic recording guaranteed the likeness
based on the removal of a mediating subjectivity: “the frequency curves of noises
inscribe their wavelike shapes onto the phonographic plate.”58 There is a direct transfer
between the voice and the shellac substrate of the record. A phonographic recording is
sound that ‘writes itself’ and need not be interpreted by a human composer or musician
deciphering a dictation before being committed. Thus, providing the listener with direct
access to (who else?): Caruso.
But the index can also be brought to bear concerning another aspect of the
phonographic listening experience: surface noise, scratches, and static sounds signified
the material presence of the phonographic record itself. In other words, the sound quality
of early phonographic recordings was poor; they were hardly transparent media. The
resemblance, the iconic aspect of audio recording was therefore imperfect. The voice
captured on the record may be similar to Caruso’s, but even an early listener could detect
the difference. However, this very imperfection—another form of underdetermination—
actually prompted projection, participation, and construction on the listener’s part.
Imperfection “gives us what we are not and may not have, except in the vividness of our
imagination.”59
Incompleteness and imperfection became part of the pleasure of listening with the
strong indexical link to the singing voice of Caruso acting as a secure anchor (in other
instances, an anchor simply to a voice with a body). The richly illustrated, if fragmentary,
books accompanying the recordings provided scaffolding for the imagination and allowed
it to roam by establishing enough of a narrative and spatial grounding to prevent
disorientation. The modern history of listening to opera has always involved a call to
imagine. And it is opera’s very multi-modality makes absence so fecund a field for
imaginative projection. The richly costumed body of the singer is our guide through the
dematerialized diegetic world of the opera—although the name on the phonograph disc is
Caruso, he is dressed in the clothes of Ramades; one who already has a foot in both

58
Kittler, 11-12.
59
Leppert, 159.
worlds. A vocalic body sings to us from a fuzzily defined, almost mythic, setting.60
Throughout the 1910s and into the 1920s the illustrated booklets continued to
proliferate.61
Early advertisements of phonograph listeners often portray them sitting and
staring blankly into the phonograph horn or treating the phonograph’s playback of a disc
as a performance—the focus is primarily on the phonograph itself. Gradually, this
portrayal shifts towards listeners in more relaxed positions and listeners fulfilling
household tasks: the phonograph allowed for a private unruliness on the part of the
listeners. Advertisements began to display different modes of engagement and to take the
music’s effect on the listening subject into account displaying: mood alteration, physical
responses, and listeners in a state of imaginative revelry. In a period where time was
rapidly becoming increasingly standardized, rationalized, discretized, and regulated
(clock time, railroad schedules, hours of labor) the phonograph allowed its listener to
engage with an ephemeral, subjective temporality—a panacea for industrial, urban life.62
The subjective temporality of the phonographic listening experience creates a
counterpoint with the ‘ticklish subjectivity’ of the early modern operagoer described by
Erlmann, for whom pleasure, eroticism, and ‘exteriorizing identification’ with the
spectacular bring the rationalist conception of subjectivity into question. The operatic
recording thus provides an encounter with a temporality that privileges subjectivity in the
form of the spectacularly expressive, and expands the listener’s sphere of imaginative
possibility by providing a marvelous point-of-audition.
By 1929 the number of photographs and the length of descriptions diminished—
the logic of acousmatic listening had been absorbed as a familiar practice, one to which
listeners were now habituated; no longer alien and disorienting, but pleasurable.63
“Aesthetic pleasure...is acquired pleasure...it is the result of habituation and reflex.”64
And perhaps surprisingly, in many ways, opera also served as a model for early silent
film.

60
Yi-fu Tuan, Space and Place : The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1977), 86.
61
Leppert, 97-100.
62
Doane, 11-12.
63
Leppert, 156.
64
Erlmann, 108.
Silent Cinema
The Lumière Brothers made a public presentation of ten of their short films in
Paris on December 28, 1895 including the eponymous Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat—a
one-shot film depicting the arrival of a train into the station. From there the medium
would quickly proliferate. Films in the 1890s were generally less than a minute long and
consisted of one shot displaying a single authentic or staged scene. But it has been said
that cinema began with the first cut. George Melies is credited with having made the first
cut in 1896 in his film The Moon at One Meter: “we see an observatory and then cut to a
theatrical painting of the moon in close-up as if we are looking through a telescope.”65
Film, not unlike the acousmatic listening experience, required a period of
perceptual acclimatization alongside an ensemble of methods and techniques designed to
lend coherence and legibility to the new form. Around 1900 filmmakers began to develop
a cinematic language encompassing a range of basic editing techniques: the cut, pan, and
close-up among them. In 1901 George Albert Smith employed a close-up to show detail,
not initially apparent to the audience, in his film The Sick Kitten. No explanatory frame
equivalent to the telescope in The Moon is provided, but audiences readily learned to
interpret the sequence. From there, cinematic editing techniques quickly advanced:
dissolves, superimposition, slow motion, animation, and special effects were promptly
added to the mix.66
Early silent films have been characterized as a “cinema of attractions”67 where
narrative was second to exhibition. This can be observed in Georges Melies films
“intended to dazzle his audience with spectacular visual effects.”68 Such films reveled in
the possibilities made available by the movie camera. But as technology improved,
editing techniques became more sophisticated, the duration of films increased, and scenes

65
Fryer, 151.
66
Ibid.
67
Doane, 24. “Recent work on early cinema has tended to focus on its performative dimension. Gunning and
Andre Gaudreault, in their conceptualization of the "cinema of attractions": argue that early films were above all
a form of direct display to the spectator, of showing or showmanship. Unabashedly exhibitionistic, they differ
from the classical cinema in their direct address, their frequent recourse to a gaze aimed at the camera. The
"cinema of attractions," in its emphasis on theatrical display, is opposed to the diegetic absorption of the later
classical cinema. It is a confrontational cinema, emphasizing shock and surprise.”
68
Joe, Jeongwon, and Rose Theresa. Between Opera and Cinema. Critical and Cultural Musicology. New York:
Routledge, 2002, 9.
became more complex—both how to create cohesion within the films themselves and
how to hold the audience’s attention for increasingly longer periods of time arose as
issues. By 1902 narrative, alongside spectacle, begun to occupy a more prominent
position. And a filmic grammar or logic was developed to support narrative
comprehension: transitions, sequence, and causality took hold. By a cinematic logic, I
here mean to designate a set of habits, a habituation of techniques, methods, and means of
creation that create reliable expectations (and thereby create standards of legibility and
interpretation). Subjective point-of view shots enabled the viewer to share the perspective
of a given character, crosscutting allowed filmmakers to show simultaneous action taking
place in two or more locations, flashbacks and dream sequences revealed the inner lives
of actors. And by 1908 intertitles displaying dialogue and key information became a
fixture.69
Other explanatory devices were provided at the place and time of the film’s
exhibition. Within exhibition spaces of the silent film era, sound often provided the
connective tissue to ensure narrative coherence. Sync sound was a few decades off, but
an array of sonic practices developed in the era of silent cinema in order to lend cohesion
to the still fragmentary medium. In his book, Silent Film Sound, Rick Altman
exhaustively treats a variety of sonic practices that included the use of live narrators,
sound effect cues, and a range of live musical accompaniment options. He also observes
“the majority of early musical scores offered with films were borrowed directly from
opera.”70
In fact, opera was a popular subject for early silent films. Silent film versions of
Carmen (1910), The Merry Widow (1907), Tosca (1909), and Il Trovatore (1910) were
produced in quick succession and Gounod’s Faust enjoyed several cinematic
interpretations. 71 This may, at first, seem surprising—as opera is a pre-eminently sonic
affair—but when one takes into consideration that live music accompaniment was

69
Kathryn Marie Kalinak. How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007. Kalinka discusses several strategies director John Ford used in his
early films to control musical accompaniment. These included shots that clearly displayed sheet music
including the title of the piece, as well as shots of hands playing piano, and characters singing. He also
placed lyrics from songs directly into the intertitles making it very difficult for the venue pianist to choose
to play anything else.
70
Altman, Rick. Silent Film Sound. Film and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, 251.
71
Altman, 251-254.
commonplace during this period of the silent film era and that “musical scores for opera
and operetta films had the benefit of being virtually ready-made,”72 the choice of subject
seems less unusual.73
Moreover, in From Mephistopheles to Melies, Rose Theresa makes a compelling
argument that opera, with its need for compact narrative language and negotiation of
spectacle, can be viewed as a model for early silent cinema. While the medium of silent
film remained fragmented and mutable, opera was able to provide “a more flexible
model” than traditional theatre.74 Gradually, film companies expanded away from opera,
but its influence can still be traced through the use of “special music”75 original
compositions intended to accompany a specific film in support if its dramatic action and
narrative—that recall the close tie between music and dramaturgy that is such a defining
feature of opera.
The imprint of opera on film is not only something that can be traced to the
sounds associated with silent film. Gesture, bodily and facial, represents another regime
of techniques developed to ensure narrative cohesion and represent interiority. And it is
here that opera crops up yet again. Early film actors found a model gestural vocabulary
for silent film in opera. Sarah Bernhardt, perhaps the most famous of the early film stars,
was even conceived of by some audiences as “a kind of singer...four of Bernhardt’s
films—La Tosca, Queen Elizabeth, La Dame aux Camelias and Adrienne Lecouvrer—
had been performed as opera and the style of her performance was more akin to the
operatic stage than it was to the theater of her time” (Stern 47). If you watch Bernhardt’s
performance in the death scene of Queen Elizabeth—Bernhardt was famous for her
incredibly dramatic and drawn out death scenes—her gestures seem to take on a temporal

72
Altman, 251.
73
Altman, 251. Opera also represented an aspirational apex for early film. Edison’s silent film version of
Parsifal (1909) even included a complete musical score and: “so eager to identify the film with the staged
opera was Edison that in the New York Clipper advertisement for the film used as a selling point two
concurrent productions of Wagener’s opera, one at the New York Theatre on Broadway and the other at the
Metropolitan Opera House—productions that under any other circumstances would have been considered
competitors. In one sense, development of multi-reel films based on stage operas was quite predictable, part
of cinema’s very reason for being. Edison’s 1894 statement had stressed the ability of the new medium to
record and present grand opera “without any material change from the original, and with artists and
musicians long dead.” During the period when Edison was engaged in developing moving pictures,
published interviews with the Wizard of Menlo Park repeatedly evoked the possibility of using the new
device to present opera. For two decades, films based on operas recalled cinema’s highest aspirations.”
74
Theresa, 11.
75
Altman, 251.
dimension outside of ordinary quotidian, clock time. Berhardt, as Queen Elizabeth, is
flanked by an array of courtiers whose movements appear jerky and overly rapid
alongside her unnaturally slow, hauntingly smooth gestures.
The gestural vocabulary deployed by an opera singer while acting is restricted by
the required bodily support the voice and concerns to not distress the vocal cords. One
such example of this restricted repertoire is:

illustrated in an anecdote narrated by Norman Aryton (drama coach to Covent Garden in the 1950s) in
which he details how, along with Joan Sutherland, he developed what he calls her GPE or “General Pained
Expression” that she would put on in any moment of dramatic emotional tension. Her GPE and a mastery
of the art of falling down served as her repertoire of acting gestures…emotional intensity is valued over the
exigencies of real-time and coherence of characterization…these gestures, often held for an unnaturally
long time, or performed hyper-emphatically” are exhibitionist, non-natural, and determinatively
performative.76

Berhardt’s gestures are comprehensible as “Diva Gestures”77 that have “mobilized a

correspondence [with]...the affective force of operatic singing.”78 The highly dramatic
gestures of the silent film actress delight in the virtuosic and performative capacities of
the voice of the virtuosic opera star. Furthermoe, Stern argues that the imprint of opera,
which she terms operality, can be observed not only as traversing the bodies of silent film
actors, but in the dramatized movements of the camera itself.79 Not surprisingly, Queen
Elizabeth was among the earliest of the silent films to have original music composed to
accompany it. It also mobilizes a complex set of temporalities.

Cinematic Temporality and Indexicality

In that it is a medium born of the ‘cut,’ discontinuity and fragmentation are

central to cinema as a medium. Contrary to the ephemeral, subjective unfolding of time
characterized by opera, in Doane’s view cinema does not act as a panacea (or exception)
to the rationalized, regulated, and discretized temporality of the industrial era—it rather

76
Stern, 45-6.
77
Stern, 48.
78
Stern, 46.
79
Stern, 54. “Furthermore, as cameras became more mobile the extension and dramatization of gesture can
also be detected in the movement of the camera itself, seeing itself becomes subject to an operality: “In
staged opera, it is often as though the voice brings into being the body (rather than the other way around).
Similarly cinema…generates cinematic bodies (bodies figured out by the camera, lighting, framing, cutting,
music). The operatic mode tends to exalt the emotional, frequently to summon the most romantic of states,
synesthesia, and thus to privilege the intensity of the moment over the exigencies of real time; in other
words, emotional duration in the operatic often exceeds diegetic temporality.”
embodies it80. By way of Benjamin, Doane argues that: “the very rapidity of the changing
images in film is potentially traumatic [i.e. shock inducing] for the spectator and allows
the cinema to embody something of the restructuration of modern perception...shock is
not to be avoided or rejected...instead it must be worked through” 81 and cinema,
specifically, provides the modern subject with the opportunity to confront shock and
perhaps become better able to tolerate it. “The representation of time in cinema (its
"recording") is also and simultaneously the production of temporalities for the spectator,
a structuring of the spectator's time.”82
Not unlike the phonograph disc, the imagery of cinema is the product of a
mechanical process. Like photography, cinema produced images that draw themselves
without the subjective mediation of an artist. Thus the cinematic image promises
indexicality, a this-ness, the film having been touched by light reflecting off the objects it
has filmed (whether on a set or in the street). The indexical trace asserts that these people
and objects inarguably existed and were there before the camera. However, unlike the
temporality contained in the recording of an opera, that privileged an engagement with
subjectivity and sensuality, Donane argues that the temporality of the cinematic image is
characterized by its exteriority, a likeness to public time of industrial society, objectivity,
and ‘surface’ as opposed to depth (in that images proceed too quickly to allow
contemplative engagement).
Early cinema was a meeting point of multiples temporalities—shifting between
modern shock, surface, and discontinuity and borrowing from the subjective, sensual
temporality historically exemplified by opera—where the exaggerated gestures of silent
film actresses could be interpreted as a kind of singing. The combination of temporalities
perhaps allowed modern audiences to both work through shock, building their perceptual
fortitude, while simultaneously providing a refuge for pleasure and subjectivity. After
illustrating numerous approaches and meeting points between sound and silent cinema in
Silent Cinema Sound, Altman argues that cinema was never silent, merely “mute.” The

80
Doane, p. “The pressure of time's rationalization in the public sphere, and the corresponding atomization
that ruptures the sense of time as exemplary continuum, produce a discursive tension that strikes many
observers as being embodied or materialized in film form itself. For film is divided into isolated and static
frames-"instants" of time, in effect-which when projected produce the illusion of continuous time and
movement.”
81
Doane, 14.
82
Doane, 24.
bodies of the cinema spoke through borrowed voices, but that was about to change.
“The Jazz Singer [1927] is commonly acknowledged as the first sound film not
because it was the first to bring sound to film (Don Juan had done that a year earlier), but
because it was the first to bring synchronized dialogue, i.e. language, to film.”83 In 1929,
just as the richly illustrated books made to accompany operatic recordings began to
disappear, synch-sound films began to dominant the market. Film became vocoentric.

Sound, Film, Opera

The technological developments of the 20th and 21st centuries have contributed
significantly to the evolution of filmmaking and viewing. And the introduction of
synchronized sound is among the most significant developments. The now audible voice
revealed new sides of previously mute film actors: accent, socio-economic status, and
gender traits—aspects not previously considered, because they remained inaudible—
became sonic objects of consideration as voices attached themselves to the bodies of
actors. And the actorly and gestural techniques deployed by screen actors shifted towards
verisimilitude, pulled by the new synchronicity of image and sound.
A photo is both indexical (a trace) and iconic (it looks like what it represents).
Roland Barthes, one of the most influential scholars on photography, called the presence
of the body in the voice “the grain,” foregrounding its similarity to the grain that
comprises the receptive substrate of photography, one on which the medium’s claims to
indexicality are foregrounded. The singing voice occupies, what is in some ways, a
remarkably similar aesthetic situation: the indexicality of the singing voice bears the
marks of the human body, of a person, living, breathing, giving voice—as so unsettled
Kittler—this in addition to the ‘groove’ imprinted onto a record (or length of sound film).
At the same times a degree of iconicity inevitably sneaks in: the recording ‘sounds like’
Caruso (as the photo looks like him) and the contoured gestures of the singing voice
expressively reproduce the contours of affective or interior states (as onomatopoetic,
musical, stylized pronunciation and/or production). The sound film thus aligned the
indexical trace of the surface (photo) and the indexical trace of the interior (recorded
voice).

83
Altman, Moving Lips, 68.
 Meanwhile the ‘soundtrack’ multiplied the spaces of cinematic experience:
evoking both ‘the setting’ inhabited by the voices of the characters and anecdotal sounds;
and additional off-screen “sound spaces” 84 including the ‘imaginary space’ of
background music and off-screen commentary. Differing sound sources, with differing
temporalities could now be reliably layered within the film itself. But the imprint of opera
can still be detected in the vococentrism of film and the close ties between music and
dramaturgy, such as the dramatic musical swells of moments of intense emotion or
climax. The voice and the soundtrack remain fecund topics of research and
experimentation in contemporary cinema.

Opera in Cinema

Opera continues to be useful for contemporary filmmakers and the numerous

examples of opera in recent cinema include:

Serpico, The Killing Fields, The Witches of Eastwick, A Room with a View, Godfather III, Pretty Woman,
Fatal Attraction, Moonstruck, Awakenings, Jennifer 8, Heavenly Creatures, New York Stories, The Age of
Innocence, M. Butterfly, Philedelphia, The Shawshank Redmeption, The Fifth Element, Magnolia, and the
House of Mirth.85

But one could ask, along with Marc A. Weiner: Why Does Hollywood Like Opera?86 In
Moving Lips, Altman argues that film performs a kind of ventriloquism, de-centering the
oft ocular-centric mode of analysis relied on in the interpretation of films: “The moving
lips which anchor the sound on the image track, and which appear to be producing the
sounds we hear, simultaneously permit the cinema to constitute its own unity by
identifying the two tracks of the cinematic apparatus with two well known aspects of
human identity.”87 This intriguing proposition is perhaps best illustrated in a cinematic
moment, not of ventriloquism, but of lip-syncing.
Jonathan Denme’s 1993 film Philadelphia “relates the story of Andrew Beckett
[played by Tom Hanks], a gay man fired from his position with a prestigious law firm

84
Altman, Moving Lips, 72. For example: “At the beginning of the film Rohmer establishes with the
camera two loci, one diegetic, the other the place where sound effects and music are produced. As the
movie proceeds we often cut-or even pan-from the diegetic space to the "sound" space, as if to explain the
source of the many aspects of the sound track unexplained by the diegesis”.
85
Theresa, Rose, and Jeongwon Joe, 75.
86
Ibid. , Marc Weiner’s essay entitled Why Does Hollywood Like Opera appears in this volume on pages
75-91.
87
Altman, Moving Lips, 71.
because his employers discover he has AIDS. Beckett decides to take the firm to court for
wrongful termination and hires Joe Miller [played by Denzel Washington] to represent
him.”88 The two men could hardly be more different: Beckett is a white, homosexual,
upper middle-class, opera-lover. Miller is an African-American sports fan, portrayed as
an ‘ambulance chaser,’ who also happens to be homophobic. While Miller is at Beckett’s
apartment to discuss his case, Beckett puts on a recording of diva Maria Callas in the role
of Maddalena singing the aria “La Mamma morta” from Andrea Chenier. He begins
narrating the piece as it unfolds, translating, and explaining expressive details to Miller
(and to himself). Gradually, Beckett merges with the voice of Maddalena, becoming
thoroughly identified with her, and intermingling their tragic stories (Beckett is dying of
AIDS, Maddalena suffered the horrors of Revolution). Until “Beckett’s voice is replaced
with that of he diva at the moment in which he lip-synchs the final high note of the aria,
silently mouthing the words that Maria Callas sings.”89
In that moment, the camera shifts and the room fills with pink light—transporting
us into a space that reflects not reality, but Beckett’s interiority or in Weiner’s words
enacts the “dramatization of interiority.”90 Our ordinary sense of temporal progression, is
disrupted: “time appears to move ever more slowly,” and bodily and facial gestures
unfold at a rate to match.91 This intrinsic heightening promotes “the dissolution of
objective reality and the move towards subjectivity, toward a psychological space of
rapturous interiority” and fantasy.92 We could also think of this episode, this insertion of
opera into film, as a kind of re-staging of the opera, one that opera as a form historically
authorizes in its openness to visual reinterpretation. The opera is ‘staged’ through the
staging of Beckett’s interiority. It enacts the close association of music and dramaturgy,
as well as the comingling of the vocalic body of Maddalena the cinematic body of
Andrew Beckett. The contrast and crosscutting afforded by putting the two media directly
into conversation with one another expands and problematizes the construction and
representation of subjectivity. After the aria has finished, a new sense of empathy exists
between the characters of Miller and Beckett.

88
Theresa, Rose, and Jeongwon Joe, 76.
89
Ibid., 83.
90
Ibid., 79.
91
Ibid., 79-80.
92
Ibid., 79.
Cinema in Opera
Many of the innovations of sound cinema are reflected in works of contemporary
opera. In his article Cross-Cuts and Arias, Kevin Stephens provides many illustrations of
cinema’s impact on opera.93 For example, the quick transitions emulating filmic cuts in
Alban Berg’s Wozzeck were difficult to stage, but important for maintaining the flow of
the narrative. And the composer himself described instances where he sought to create
musical close-ups in the opera.94 Slow cross-dissolves link the many short scenes that
comprise Krzysztof Penderecki’s The Devils of London. And the third act of John
Adams’s Nixon in China can be seen to emulate cinematic cross-cutting techniques with
rapid shifts between different conversations at a party scene and plays with the line
between diegetic and non-diegetic sound. The action of three separate events occurring
simultaneously along with differing three kinds of music, in Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten
compresses both space and time in a way that emulates split-screen technique or
montage.
Stephens offers a straight-forward theory as to what enables these cinematic
techniques to have been incorporated successfully: “viewers of film have become adept at
reading the system of marks used in film, and composers are included in those
audiences.”95 The perceptual acclimatization of mass audiences to film provides a
reservoir of readily legible techniques, tactics, and logics to contemporary opera
composers. (These will be explored in greater depth and detail in my accompany
Analysis essay.) When contemporary opera composers draw strategies to incorporate new
kinds of sounds and alternate organizational principles specifically from film, it helps to
ensure legibility for a contemporary public steeped in cinema. Many contemporary opera
composers have allowed a cinematic logic to inform how spatial relationships are
defined, how their works unfold temporally, and to inflect affective dimensions that
propel narrative. And with that I believe we have arrived back to the affective experience
of an opera I encountered by as an eight year old, which I believe was legible to me

93
Fryer, Paul. Opera in the Media Age : Essays on Art, Technology and Popular Culture. Jefferson, North
Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2014.
94
Ibid. 155.
95
Ibid., 150.
largely through my familiarity with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And to the first
opera that ever fascinated me Writing to Vermeer—that deeply incorporates cinematic
logic into the aural construction of both space and narrative.
Moreover, through the unity of the body and exchange that occurs across the
sensorium, that blending of logics (operatic and cinematic) is one that can be heard and
experienced in an acousmatic situation—similar to the way Leslie Stern reads operality in
the gestures of silent film actors. In contemporary opera, the listener will often find their
self in a situation similar to one I have experienced: holding an audio CD package that
will likely contain the libretto, perhaps a few production photos, and a synopsis of the
work. If I look on-line, I can find a few images, some reviews, maybe an interview or a
video snippet. But, for many contemporary works, it would be unlikely that you could
easily locate more than that. Opera, as a multi-modal discipline, always already implies a
staging; even when in its mode of presentation or reception remains entirely within the
realm of the aural (as in the case of an audio recording). The rest invites me to use of
imagination, my memory, and entrained sensory logic(s) to scaffold, interpret, and
ultimately understand the work. And today, for many contemporary listeners, the
aesthetic logic that is most ready to hand to deal with a multi-modal, narrative medium is
that of cinema.

Are we still ticklish?

Medium is intimately tied to material, which makes it intimately tied to

technology. As opera, a long-enduring form, confronts emplacement within a different
technological situation—it hardly seems unexpected or incoherent for both opera
composers and listeners draw from the closely related, familiar, and more thoroughly
technological medium of cinema. With recent technological developments, sound can
work differently in the opera of today than in the past—in a way that more closely
resembles how sound operates in film. Sound in opera (for example, the relationship
between diagetic vs non-diagetic) has been problematized by the expansion of spatial,
temporal, and affective possibilities made possible through developments in technology
and made legible through the mass enculturation of the public to cinematic logic. Louis
Andriessen’s Writing to Vermeer (1999), Missy Mazzoli’s Song from the Uproar (2009-
12), and Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone (2016) each incorporate aspects of cinematic logic in
different ways (and in the context of a live performance of these works, they are able to
aurally unfold in real time by incorporating technologies of amplification, processing,
and playback). Moreover, the re-staging of opera that occurs in films perhaps anticipates
future trends in opera, as techniques once only possible in post-production become
available in live production environments.
In a time when listening to the full album or long-playing record are more rarity
than norm; where listening often exists as a mix of jostling fragments in juxtaposition,
but long-form television, multi-part cinematic epics, and two-hour films are (still or)
increasingly commonplace, cinema has much offer in terms of cultivating listening
techniques: how has our attention been cultivated to adhere for the duration of a film?
Where are empathy, resonance, and interest developed? What holds us and it (the film)
together? Cinema and its logic now instruct us as to how to deal with—perceive, process,
interpret—other time-based medias. But as individual film scenes become shorter and
shorter (“from about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds”96 in 2010) opera—with its
ability to suspend time, virtuosity, and spectacle—offers film viable models for how to
slow down, to hover, to sink in, and get lost in a perceptually engrossing manner based
on bodily empathy and imaginative projection.
Opera could also been seen as a site to re-engage aspects of cinema (especially
vococentrism) in new contexts, from new perspectives, to question the role of cinematic
convention, and engage the details of cinematic logic. Consider Philip Glass’ “operatic
exploration of cinema”97 in works such as La Belle et la Bête (1994), where all the
original sound from Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film of the same name was removed and a new,
meticulously synched, operatic score was composed to accompany the work in a live
context—spacing and multiplying the ‘source’ of the voice and sound generally. Or
Michael Gordon’s recent opera Acquanetta (2018), inspired by 1940s horror movies, the
work proclaims itself to be a “one-act deconstruction of the genre” and to examine “the
ways the movie camera manipulates how we see and are seen.”98 The historical record of

96
Greg Miller, Data From a Century of Cinema Reveals How Movies Have Evolved, Wired Magazine,
https://www.wired.com/2014/09/cinema-is-evolving/. Accessed on March 28, 2018.
97
Theresa, Rose, and Jeongwon Joe, 61.
98
http://prototypefestival.org/show/acquanetta. Accessed on March 28, 2018.
exchange, modeling, and borrowing that has occurred between the two mediums, the
salient features they share (multi-modality, close tie between music and dramaturgy,
vococentrism, reliance on narrative and characterization), and the points where they
diverge (privileging of interiority vs. exteriority, post-production vs. production elements,
traditional stability of connection between sound and image in sound synced films) create
the circumstances for each of these two mediums to productively interrogate, investigate,
and incorporate elements from the other in a profoundly nuanced manner. As we move
forward into the digital era these areas of convergence and divergence serve as compass
points for critical reflection—and remind us to listen as well as look.
In to Four and Half Film Fallacies Altman turns his eye to towards the process of
production, expanding upon how technological advancement smears the line between
post-production and ‘live’ production, and drawing our attention to film’s (increasingly
less) mechanical core.99 The half fallacy bespoke in the essay’s title concerns the
aforementioned indexicality of film. Film, as a medium, is defined by ‘recording’, but
Altman insists: “we must recognize that three-quarters of a century of electronics has
radically desacralized cinema, substituting circuitry for direct contact, constructed
iconicity for recorded indexicality, and the infinite imagined possibilities of the keyboard
for the restricted immediacy of recording reality.”100 In the digital era computer-
generated imagery, special effects, and post-production processes have destabilized the
referential, indexical core of the medium—its film-based process of mechanical
reproduction—inciting much discussion, debate (and occasionally panic) across the film
community.
Technology itself, the camera, is no longer able to ensure likeness or to guarantee
fidelity on its own, instead this has to be assured through context and convention101 —
what are the circumstances of production? Who is doing it and why? What are the
specifics? Likewise, with an audio recording of opera, we refer to the specificity of the
medium to ensure a sense of fidelity. Opera, as a medium, is a form of composition
intended for live performance that always already anticipates a staging, and foregrounds
displays of virtuosity in its performative conventions. The indexicality of performance

99
Sterne, Jonathan. The Sound Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2012, 233.
100
Ibid., 233
101
Mary Ann Doane, The indexical and the concept of medium specificity, 136.
recordings (and to a lesser extent studio albums) is guaranteed, not specifically by
technological or mechanical process, but by context and convention. Even with an opera
recording, it is implicit that what you are hearing has (and could again) taken place live,
on stage, and in real-time. The connection between the recording and the performability
of the work enacts what Doane terms: “the dialectic of the trace (the “once” or pastness)
and deixis (the now or presence) produces the conviction of the index.”102 Similar
situations pertain in the filmic medium: documentary cinema, through the requirements
of genre, implies reliability and correspondence between the images projected on the
screen and (past) reality. And instances of structural or hand-made cinema—often
spectacular in a way that shows seams—proclaim their indexicality through their
materiality, construction, and ethic. Both enframe themselves, both draw attention to the
aesthetic frame (the medium, conventions, expectations) that supports them.
In her essay The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity Mary Ann
Donae meditates on the relationship between deixis and indexciality in structuralist films
such as Mike Snow’s So Is This (1982)—where through use various forms of deictic
‘shifters’ (I, this, here, now), linguistic devices that can only be understood within a
specific spatio-temporal context (i.e. while watching the film), the film shifts its indexical
focus away from the trace (of whatever the recorded image might be) and towards the
event of viewing itself (this, now, here). She writes:
The rejection of the indexicality we usually associate with the cinema allows the film to generate a lie, as in
the statement, “This film will be about two hours long” (it is, in fact, forty-three minutes long). However,
the film activates indexicality in other ways as well, ways that are more reminiscent of the effects of the
trace, presenting shots of the words projected on a screen, manufacturing flashbacks of its own earlier
discursive events, and often calling attention to the fact that the words appear on celluloid through recourse
to flash frames and color changes.103

The film draws attention to the aesthetic frame that demarcates it (flash frames,
color changes, flashbacks) and also recasts itself as event (now, here). In so doing, this
also recasts the subjectivity of the viewer as event: you. Both aspects of indexicality, the
pastness of the trace and the now-here-ness of the ‘shifter’ result in the inclusion of a
certain historicity. Both thereby engage identity as relational and contextual. In drawing
attention to the aesthetic frame, attention is drawn, not to the unmediated image that

102
Ibid. 140.
103
Ibid., 137.
‘draws itself’ in light, but specifically to the mediation and mediators of the image (or
sound) that frame contains—and to sensory experience itself. And here we should note
that these would not exempt a digital poetics that embraces the glitch104, the artifact, or
the deterioration of transcoding—nor ignore the tactile dimension of the digital in the
original sense of the word: the digit105, the finger, the discreet tickling finger. Through
historicity, the production of meaning becomes context-dependent, multiple, incomplete,
and contingent.
Brain Kane also points out the intriguing use of linguistic shifters in early
phonograph recordings. Speaking in the first person, the voice issuing from the horn
declares, “I am the latest born of Edison”106 problematizing the identity of the speaker in
the spacing of the voice from its source. It enacts a playful deceit in that “we must take
the “I” to be a sign of the machine’s impossible self-reference.”107 The vocalized “I”, the
pointing finger, the gasp, and the cry—like the written shifter—also function according to
deictic principle; they shift our attention and are anchored to a specific context. And, in
the case of the phonographic voice, may invoke a vocalic body and invite the listener to
imaginatively project in order to resolve the underdetermination of the listening situation,
while still remaining grounded in the listener’s bodily experience of voice (and their own
vocalizations).
If the fidelity of the indexical trace is always already problematized by the
(potential) mutability of digital recording, should this shift our understanding of how
indexicality functions—what is it a trace of? What is its temporality? And what unique
role might the voice have to play when we consider the multi-sensory nature of sound
described by Eidsheim and the autonomous production of the vocalic body described by
Connor? In the age of prosthesis, cyborg bodies, and augmented reality—“a world filled
with supernatural characters, magic moments, and scene changes, all made possible by
intricate machinery”108 —might we not detect something of the early modern opera’s
thorough-going, spectacular falseness and the enjoyment of a subject, who through

104
Matthew Wilson Smith; Gesamtkunstwerk and Glitch: Robert Lepage’s Ring across Media. Theater 1
May 2012; 42 (2): 65–77. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-1507793
105
Peter Szendy and Will Bishop. Phantom Limbs : On Musical Bodies. First edition. New York: Fordham
University Press, 2016.
106
Kane, 183.
107
Kane, 184.
108
Erlmann, 88.
exteriorizing identification anchored by the voice, imaginatively adapts marvelous points
of audition?
The very activity of imaginative construction, the exteriorizing labor of the
imagination, that takes place in a digital cinema—where images can be merged, drawn
together from several sources, or completely fabricated resonates with the exteriorizing
identification (with the spectacular) enacted through bodily engagement by Erlmann’s
ticklish subject. A subject who is alternately tickled by the grain, the glitch, and labor of
imagination—buts remains grounded in the experience of the voice. The grounding and
mode of identification that exists in opera specifically is unique based on an inherent
underdetermination, mutability, and multiplicity (exemplified in the acousmatic recording
and instability of the relationship between sound and staging in opera). In opera, have we
located a model that is flexible enough not only to accommodate acousmatic listening
and silent film—but also a model for approaching the infidelity of the digital in cinema
through taking up, repositioning, and restaging cinematic logic?
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