"To Be Alone" - Hozier
And since the proper Dylan video won't attach due to copyright issues, here's a link:
"In My Time of Dyin'" - Bob Dylan
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x155k7t_bob-dylan-in-my-time-of-dyin-1962-digitally-remastered_music
“‘Grain’ - the singing voice is not the breath but indeed that materiality of the body emerging from the throat, a site where the phonic material hardens and takes shape.”
“This voice is not personal: it expresses nothing about the singer, about his soul; it is not original and at the same time it is individual: it enables us to hear a body which of course, has no public identity, no ‘personality’.”
“I will not judge a performance according to the rules of interpretation, the constraints of style...I shall not go into ecstasy over the ‘rigor,’ the ‘brilliance,’ the ‘warmth,’ the ‘respect for the score,’ etc., but according to the image of the body (the figure) which is given me...I know immediately which part of the body it is that plays...If on the contrary it is the only erotic part of a pianist’s body: the pads of the fingers, whose “grain” I hear so rarely....If we were to succeed in refining a certain ‘aesthetic’ of musical enjoyment, we should doubtless attach less importance to the tremendous break in tonality which modernity has produced.”
Upon listening to the first song, “To Be Alone”, the corporeality of the singer’s voice begins to emerges alongside the genotextuality of the song within the listener’s mind as we recognize the communicative effort of the artist isn’t found in voice but rather in the grain. A sort of kinesthetic hearing must be learned by the listener in order for the grain to be perceived and understood. This voice requires a lack of issuance of “personality” as it would so be perceived by the listener, and rather demands the receding of any initial impression of the artist as a body to be understood - by which one might wrongly attempt to be evaluate their artist’s music against. This wouldn’t be an accurate portrayal of the artist, but rather a construction of prior acumen of artists the voice might contain a resemblance of based on it’s depth, warmth, and lullabied quality. This personality of the voice, however, contains no identity or parallel to that of the artist no matter the soulfulness or authenticity felt. Is this soulfulness just a perceived depth of emotion that can somehow be seen or heard within the voice? Can it be fabricated through acting like within the emotions of an actor, and if so, does this diminish the music’s quality of soul? When describing something that has soul, are we describing it as something that is felt within our soul, something that is an experience of the listener’s whole body, or a perceived conveyance of the artist’s soul? An assemblage of adjectives is conjured as the voice empties itself of pain, craving, and acerbity while alleviation and quasi-atonement is found by the artist as his consummation with her becomes his form of worship - like that of a user to his drug. This attempt within the listener’s mind to define the voice’s tone, timbre, and individuality is vain in that the construction of Hozier’s voice resembles nothing of who he is. Rather, this voice develops its own identity and personage that gives way to the development of a being that simultaneously contains an anonymity (if the artist were not pictured) and a familiarity. The familiarity felt might be through its kinship with another artist’s style or intonation, but the familiarity is ultimately a falsehood that can only be rid by the listener’s choice to become accompanied with this voice. The familiarity is mere distortion until the voice and grain have been spent time with by the listening ear. This voice too, can’t be deemed original or individual despite a seemingly unprocessed authenticity. Influence on the artist comes from somewhere outside the artist himself, and the construction of his voice is not a construct of himself, but rather that by which he himself has been constructed. While listening to the second song, “In My Time of Dyin’”, we hear a likeness in the voice of Dylan and his song. Similar descriptives might be used to assimilate it to the listening experience to that of Hozier, yet the soul of his voice seems to be provided by a less perfectly atuned structure. The grain of his voice is harsher than that of Hozier’s, yet the grain of his guitar finds itself paralleled with the materiality of the voice through it’s more strident twang. While the voice and guitar cannot be said to carry the same qualities, they might be said to carry quite similar feelings which can be accounted for the sense of familiarity when listening to the second song after having played the first. In both, we find the eroticism Barthes speaks of coming through the fingertips of each artist, and the grain is seen to have a feeling of spontaneity and imperfection - leaving us to wonder if each song is replicated perfectly each time they’re played. The second song (which was released in 1962 as opposed to the 2014 release of the first) although comparable to “To Be Alone”, has much less of the perfect tonality that Barthes refers to within modern music and the grain depicts a more beaten and broken body, whether it be of the singer or of the personhood of his voice. The breaking and strain of the second voice gives grain to the voice that requires an aesthetic appreciation much more in alignment with Barthes’ view of musical enjoyment than that of the first. Dylan’s voice, containing a rough grain, causes a body to be formed within our mind that is of a bruised and beaten being. Hozier grain is found lacking of this thwarting and vanquishment due to its refinement and purity which stands in stark opposition to the lyricism of the song. The grain of Hozier’s voice is one that is more aligned with the message of Dylan’s song, while the grain of Dylan’s voice matches the mastered and controlled nature (by the subject of Hozier’s longing), in that of Hozier’s song.
No comments:
Post a Comment