An Ear-splitting Cry: Gender, Performance, and Representations of Zaghareet in the U.S.
At the opening of a recent annual “Under a Desert Moon” concert presented by Sahara Dance, a belly dance studio located in Washington, DC, one of the teachers began by telling the audience that the dancers would appreciate vocal feedback during the show. Holding a microphone with one hand and the other in front of her mouth, she demonstrated the practice known in Arabic as zaghareet, asking audience members to imitate her sound. This pedagogical interaction with an ethnically and generationally diverse audience on the campus of American University illustrates some of the complexities of translating sonic practices across cultural and economic divides. Zaghareet carries very different weight in a Palestinian wedding in the West Bank, where it is one piece of a larger formation of celebratory experience, than it does in a belly dance performance in Washington, DC, where it is used in part to generate authenticity in a tradition both geographically and culturally removed from the Middle East.
Located somewhere between singing and yelling, ululation occupies a unique position in the spectrum of human vocality. The sound is created by touching the tongue either to the sides of the mouth or the teeth in rapid succession, and it is characterized by a piercing sound quality enacted in the upper vocal register.
Having taken belly dance classes in the U.S. and seen a number of performances, I thought I had a sense of what ululation was and what it represented. The more I ran across it in the course of my dissertation research, however, the more I wanted to know about its historical background and affective meanings across contexts. In other words, what are the cultural genealogies of zaghareet in the Middle East, and how has the sound been perceived and represented in the U.S.? Although ululation is performed in a range of locations in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), my research is on U.S.-Middle East sonic encounters, and thus I will focus primarily on that context in this post. In particular, I became interested in why female voices typically perform zaghareet, and how its circulation in U.S. media and pop culture fit into larger narratives about the Middle East before and after 9/11.
Zaghareet is auditorally conspicuous, and in U.S. during the postwar decades before 9/11, it was often framed as a sonic encapsulation of an Arab exotic. The sound itself came to invoke elements that constitute classic Western stereotypes about the region known as the Middle East: veiling, gender oppression, desert wandering, and pre-modern ritual. Its status as a primarily female practice made it appealing as a sign of difference, since the West has been notoriously preoccupied with the status of women in the Middle East (see Chandra T. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses;” Lila Abu-Lughod, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East; Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, among others). Zaghareet poses a contradiction to this orientalizing logic, as it works against the image of the oppressed Arab woman “silenced” by her surroundings. Instead, her voice takes on an uncanny resonance, indicating the tantalizing alienness of Arab culture. In a post-9/11 U.S. context, zaghareet become directly correlated with premodern barbarity, taking on more menacing anti-American associations. By taking a critical approach to the practice of zaghareet and its representations I hope to deflate some of these prevalent views and help to develop a new framework for thinking about aural exoticism.
Celebration of Egyptian revolution in DC, 2011, Image by Flicker user Collin David Anderson
Zaghareet’s combination of high pitch, loud volume, vibrato, and tongue oscillation contributes to its prominent, distinctive sound. In Jennifer Jacobs’ dissertation on ululation in the Levantine context (the term Levant refers to a region made up of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine/Israel, and other areas in the Eastern Mediterranean), “Ululation in Levantine Society: The cultural reproduction of an affective vocalization” she points out that zaghareet typically last approximately 3 1/3 seconds, which is longer than the articulation of most words in speech, but not beyond the length of a typical speech phrase (111). Thus, though it is not speech or singing, zaghareet is related to these vocalizations in the sense that it lasts approximately the length of one breath. The practice is most often performed by women, and its acoustic intensity is remarkable considering that in an indoor setting with the performer near the microphone it can reach 85 dB, a level that can cause hearing damage with prolonged exposure. These components highlight the significance of zaghareet as a primarily female performance, making the practitioners audible at a level that isimpossible to ignore.
Woman at pro-Palestinian rally in France, Image by Flickr user lookingforpetry
Zaghareet takes place within a unique set of circumstances with a range of other sounds occurring simultaneously, and therefore should be conceptualized as part of a web of social meanings and practices, not as a discrete element to be observed on its own. The history of zaghareet (and ululation more generally) reaches back to ancient Greece, where the practice was referred to as ololuge, an onomatopoetic reference to the sound. In the 21st century Levant, zaghareet is often part of social gatherings where live music and dancing are also present. While most often situated in celebratory social settings, zaghareet can also take place in a variety of everyday circumstances, but in almost all cases it connotes farah, or joy. Performers generally do zaghareet to express their excitement, delight, and/or encouragement to others present. The practice tends to be contagious in that after hearing it others tend to join in, but the exact origins of the sound can remain mysterious due to the fact that most practitioners cover their mouths with their hands or clothing. This produces an omnipresent effect that both dislocates the listener and develops shared experience, and the collectivity of the performance magnifies its affective power. Jacobs writes, “When one person begins performing zaghareet, another person might join in; then, a third person might also join just as the first vocalist is dropping off. This overlapping of performances creates a perceptual experience of zaghareet as something layered, continuous, and emanating from different spatial locations, a haunting bodily experience, especially for a first-time listener” (75). This is complicated by broader soundscapes in which it is performed, which may include music, clapping, firing of guns, traffic, and other sounds.
In addition to performance setting, gender is a key component of zaghareet. While it is performed more often by women than men, in certain contexts and communities, men do participate. Jacobs describes one case in which men had demonstrated that they could skillfully perform zaghareet, but only minutes later jokingly denied that they knew how to do it when she asked. This emphasis on modesty is also apparent in the way that most female practitioners cover their mouths while doing zaghareet to hide the movement of the tongue, which tends to be considered immodest or impolite. In this Youtube clip, for example, the zaghareet performer covers her mouth with her hijab:
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And as is shown in the clip, zaghareet often takes place in homosocial environments where men are not immediately present, providing space for playful exchange between women in ways that heterosocial settings may not. The homosociality of the sonic practice is related to its affective reverberations, as the sound is used to convey bonds of attachment, conviviality and mutual appreciation between women. In this sense zaghareet embodies these interpersonal connections, and also reinforces them through its aural intensity.
In American and European popular culture, zaghareet has played a notable role in framing depictions of the Middle East, particularly through the female body. In the years following World War II, zaghareet samples often marked the Middle East as wild and exciting. Lebanese-born singer Mohammed El Bakkar, for example, used the sound of zaghareet on his song “Yalla-Yalla” from the 1958 album The Sultan of Bagdad, one of several albums he recorded for the Audio Fidelity label in the late-1950s marketed to a mainstream American audience.
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“Yalla-Yalla,” which translates loosely as “Come with me,” features finger cymbals, clapping, and female zaghareet, along with jovial calls from El Bakkar at the ends of phrases, conjuring a celebratory setting. All of these elements–along with the album cover photo that shows El Bakkar lounging on a cushion with two beautiful dancers standing over him–combine to create a quintessential exotic scene for many American listeners.
Although unintentionally kitschy at times, the 1962 British epic Lawrence of Arabia—a film which has the dubious distinction of having no spoken lines by a woman in its 3 1/2 hour running time—represents zaghareet quite seriously. The ululations first appear about half of the way through the film, where Lawrence and the Arab forces set off to fight the Turkish at Aqaba, and women provide blessings and encouragement.
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Lawrence of Arabia is a classically orientalist film about the scope of British empire, and in this instance, zaghareet accentuates the majesty of the scene where Lawrence rides beside his Arab counterparts through the desert with veiled women calling from the cliffs above. Like the previous example, the women here constitute part of a foreign landscape, and their cries of encouragement serve along with the visuals to construct a multi-sensory experience of otherness.
Zaghareet has taken on more explicitly violent associations in a post-9/11 American context, where it is often coupled with Arab depravity and linked to terrorism. Zaghareet was demonstrated in a newsclip aired on CNN, Fox, and several other news networks displaying Palestinians in the West Bank “celebrating after 9/11.” One woman in the clip briefly ululates in front of the camera, connecting the sound to perceived Arab hatred for Americans.
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The video went viral, and reactions to it exemplify the extent to which zaghareet has come to symbolize a new stereotype in the post-9/11 era: the depraved Middle Eastern Other. This formula collapses and combines the categories of “Arab” and “Muslim,” and, although it complicates the figure of the terrorist as male, since it is a woman who is shown celebrating after 9/11, it also reveals western anxieties about the power that Lawrence of Arabia represented as harnessed by colonial forces.
Screen shot by author
A parody of the viral news clip appeared on a 2004 The Simpsons episode entitled “Bart-Mangled Banner” in which Bart accidentally moons the American flag at a basketball game, and subsequently faces a public outcry from critics calling him anti-American. The nightly news shows the “overseas” response, in which a woman wearing niqab holds up a photo of Homer and says “Simpsons be praised! Praise be to Springfield!” and then performs zaghareet against a backdrop of celebratory gunfire. This satire hints at the absurdity of controversies over such displays, but it also reinscribes the idea of the Arab/Muslim female as a source of danger, a new element of anti-American hostility that became associated with the sound after 9/11.
Unlike previous impressions of zaghareet, which focused on the sound as part of an exotic terrain, post-9/11 visions tend to locate practitioners in a distinctly antagonistic matrix. The distinctive sonicity of zaghareet makes it particularly susceptible to portrayals that frame it as a sign of Arab barbarity. For certain performers, however, such as belly dance students in Washington, DC, zaghareet is not subject to this type of racialized logic, and is instead treated as an ethnic novelty. In American film, TV, music, and a range of other contexts, zaghareet is becoming increasingly audible, and it is a phenomenon that deserves thoughtful and critical attention.
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Meghan Drury is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies at the George Washington University. She received an MA in ethnomusicology from UC Riverside in 2006. She is currently working on a dissertation tentatively titled “Aural Exotics: The Middle East in American Popular Music 1950-2011.” This project examines the interplay between popular music and American cultural representations of the Middle East from the mid-20th century to the present, illustrating how music and sound acted a means of consolidating and disseminating a range of ideas about Middle Eastern culture in the American mainstream. She is particularly interested in the way that sound increased the visibility of Arab Americans both before and after 9/11, offering a space for negotiations of identity. More broadly, Meghan’s interests include sound studies, U.S.-Middle East cultural relations, and Arab American cultural performance.
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Aurally Other: Rita Moreno and the Articulation of “Latina-ness”–Priscilla Peña Ovalle
Beat-ification: British Muslim Hip Hop and Ethical Listening Practices–Jeanette Jouili
Tofu, Steak, and a Smoke Alarm: The Food Network’s Chopped & the Sonic Art of Cooking
On Sunday evening, Susan discovered the tofu had gone bad. Unfortunately, the entrée for the evening was to be tofu with sweet chili sauce. We connect on Skype at 3:30pm, as Susan is cutting up vegetables. Usually, she has classical music on while she cooks; it helps her concentrate. She’s cut up so many vegetables in her life, that she finds music sweetens the repetitive activity. However, today I hear only the rewarding sound of her knife bisecting baby bok choy.
Susan and I don’t talk about this sound, but it is certainly familiar. She says she cuts up the pieces small, as Mimi likes the chunks of bell pepper to be as little as possible.
My ethnographic work on cooking is birthed from a very personal place: Susan is my Aunt and Mimi my mother. They live together in Kingston, Massachusetts, where Susan’s cooking nourishes Mimi through her ongoing chemo and radiation treatments. Using Skype, I watched and asked questions remotely from Raleigh, North Carolina on three consecutive evenings during their dinner preparation in order to more deeply understand cooking as an art. From the first moment of preparation each night, Susan and I talked about the meal, the cooking techniques, and her feelings about cooking and eating–and I noted that sound emerged as central to her culinary process.
Opening my ethnographic practice up to sonic analysis enables new definitions of both chef and kitchen as lively, complex sites, constantly negotiating with each other. Taking the role of sound into account in the practice of cooking allows me to construct new interpretations of cooking artistry that considers everyday negotiations and embodied limitations not as “threats” to the cooking art, but, instead, as elements that enrich its artistry.
My sonic analysis specifically chafes against dominant formations of ”cooking as art” in the contemporary moment, exemplified by reality television programs such as The Food Network’s Chopped, which constructs a static configuration of space with the cook as subject and the meal as art object. On Chopped, four chefs are given thirty minutes and four ingredients. Using these items, they must make a dish to be judged by a panel of food experts. These items are often strange or incongruous: on one episode, they had to make an appetizer out of frosted wheat cereal, baby red romaine lettuce, black garlic, and quahog clams. The success of a dish is measured by the chef’s ability to balance the necessary experimentation with an implied universal of good taste, texture balance, and pleasuring preparation. In other words, Chopped collapses art-making and capital into the “art object-meal,” reproducing a tired definition of “high art” that necessitates access to wealth and privilege, because the creation of “art” requires expensive foodstuffs, sophisticated kitchen technologies, and a highly controlled visual and sonic environment.
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In my Aunt Susan’s kitchen, there are a number of sonic and spatial negotiations that preclude her cooking from the singular criteria of artistry perpetuated by Chopped. Specifically, my Aunt Susan’s cooking does not meet Chopped’s standards because it requires negotiations related to her personal mobility and my mother’s health. My Aunt uses a wheelchair to get around her house, and, as a result, some kitchen appliances are harder to reach. My mother’s chemo and radiation treatments mean that she has both complicated limitations to her diet and fluid culinary desires.
In seeking to understand the fluid challenges of Susan’s cooking, I designed my virtual sensory ethnography by combining two methods, defined respectively by Sarah Pink and Jenna Burrell. In Sensory Ethnography, Pink proposes that the ethnographer is immersed in smells, tastes, sights, and sound during the ethnographic process. Things that might seem mundane such as the sound of onions being chopped, for example, can actually reveal a complex set of relations about the cook and their process. The cook might be listening to the chopping as a rhythm in her process, like background music: the pleasing sound as it hits the cutting board. But if the onion isn’t fresh, the sound is less crisp, less crunch, the sounds changes to speak of a different type of knowledge, and she must act differently in response. In “The Field Site as a Network,” Burrell proposes an understanding of the ethnographic field site as a network rather than a singular object. The field site, in other words, is a heterogeneous set of connections, always expanding. Using a technology like Skype to do ethnography is not “ethnography at a distance,” she implies, rather it is the field site manifested through a multiplicity of connections. It simply reflects the ever-changing set of relations that comprise our world.
Tools for the sensory ethnography of the kitchen. Borrowed from Travelin’ Librarian @Flickr.
After Susan has cut up all the longer-cooking vegetables and set the chili sauce to simmer, we disconnect. At 5:15pm, we connect again. Susan unwraps the tofu, and something isn’t right. She calls Mimi into the kitchen, and, after some deliberation, they decide that steak will need to replace the tofu. It’s a disappointment as the tofu would have tasted best with the sweet chili sauce.
The sonic landscape of Susan’s kitchen has been, up to this, point, fairly solitary and controlled. When Susan welcomes Mimi in, the kitchen becomes a lively space of conversation, interaction, and negotiation. The production of the sonic space in the kitchen, from solitary preparation to lively interaction, is a crucial part of Susan’s art. The kitchen has undergone what Brian Massumi, in his essay “Floating the Social,” calls a “modulation of the dimension of perception [rather] than an encoding of separate pieces of data or a sequencing of units of meaning” (41). Such a sonic modulation challenges the narrative of lone artist-chef creating object-meal. Rather than segmenting the meal into a set of data blocks (chef, food, preparation time, and eater), Susan orchestrates the art of cooking as participatory with Mimi.
In the kitchen, Mimi also examines the tofu. She offers some information about it, and then joins Susan to figure out what other protein might work.
Once the steak is decided upon, Mimi exits and Susan works again at preparing dinner.
Susan’s sonic modulations, in this case conversation, allow for immersion and engagement in the lively sonic space of her kitchen. Mimi and Susan create a co-constitutive relationship between chef and eater. Unlike on Chopped, the eater is a participant rather than a judge.
Susan and I disconnect from Skype to give the steak time to thaw. We connect once again, at 6:20PM, once the steak has been properly thawed. As we discuss how Susan learned to cook, the smoke alarm suddenly comes to life.
An unplanned sonic intervention has occurred. The smoke alarm has its own desires; it insists on total control of the sonic space. Susan’s response is a necessary modulation. She counters the smoke alarm’s desire for sonic control with words, saying that it triggered accidentally because of the steak, sizzling in the pan. The interruption of the smoke alarm exemplifies how Susan’s cooking technique is not one of dominance. Rather than producing clear boundaries between chef and eater, the food and the preparation, the kitchen and its outside, Susan allows for fluid boundaries, welcoming chance and the unknown into her art.
Setting off the alarm image borrowed from Gwenaël Piaser @Flickr.
In the context of Susan’s kitchen, Massumi’s definition of modulation applies, however subtle. These domestic modulations are not a movement toward total control, but, instead, a lively negotiation with a set of partly unpredictable relations – an orchestration of the sonic space. The idea of sonic orchestration allows us to consider the complex set of possibilities existing between the choices made by the subject, here, the chef, and the presence of a set of potentialities, such as the smoke alarm. To Susan, the art of cooking is not the reduction or elimination of “threats”; her art is the negotiation of modulations. In contrast to Chopped, where careful boundaries are constructed in order to protect the privilege inherent in its definition of art, Susan’s art lies in her engagement with the lively potentialities of the sonic art of cooking.
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Seth Mulliken is a Ph.D. candidate in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program at NC State. He does ethnographic research about the co-constitutive relationship between sound and race in public space. Concerned with ubiquitous forms of sonic control, he seeks to locate the variety of interactions, negotiations, and resistances through individual behavior, community, and technology that allow for a wide swath of racial identity productions. He is convinced ginger is an audible spice, but only above 15khz.
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Radical Listening and the People’s Microphony: A Conversation with Elana Mann
Members and collaborators of ARLA (Paula Cronan, Juliana Snapper, and Elana Mann) participating in a General Assembly at Occupy LA City Hall, November 11, 2011
Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening–Pauline Oliveros
“CAN YOU HEAR ME?!” “I CAN HEAR YOU!!” “IT’S A VAN GOGH PARADE!!” . . .were some of the enthusiastic replies when artist Elana Mann, musician Juliana Snapper, and other members of ARLA (Audile Receptives Los Angeles) arrived on the scene at Occupy LA with giant hand-made ears. Mann co-founded ARLA in the Spring of 2011 with Snapper, filmmaker Vera Brunner-Sung, and choreographer Kristen Smiarowski. After studying scores and techniques on listening developed by composer Pauline Oliveros, ARLA developed a workshop geared toward Occupy LA that included a listening parade in which they held up the giant ears and protest signs with ears on them. Snapper recalls, “The simple physical presence of people carrying large paper-mache ears was met with a kind of hungry recognition…recognition of what it meant that we were holding the symbols (giant ears).” They led workshops, listening sessions, and discussion groups. They performed Oliveros’ sonic meditation “Teach Yourself to Fly” and a composition written by Mann and Snapper entitled “People’s Microphony.” And a project was born. Through personal interviews and audio-visual examples, I document, contextualize, and analyze its work. 
Mp3=The People’s Microphony Camerata performing “Teach Yourself to Fly” Pauline Oliveros
I am happy that Elana Mann chose to use my Sonic Meditations for the People’s Microphony project. These pieces are meant for anyone that wants to perform them regardless of musical training.” –Pauline Oliveros
For Mann, active listening is “a process of tuning in simultaneously inward and outward. Active listening allows for an awareness of and an opening up to sounds around me and also a digestion of what is happening inside of me in relation to these sounds.” Much of the recent focus on this practice comes from the music and sound art worlds, as well as acoustic ecology, a field formed from the overlapping area between science and art that concentrates on the importance of experiencing and investigating our sonic surroundings with detailed care and respect to understand its importance on our world and our place within it. Mann’s work addresses a unique angle at the intersection of these fields: listening’s empathetic effect on those whom you are listening to, a consideration arising from a project she worked on between 2007-2010 with Iraq war veteran Captain Dylan Alexander Mack, called “Can’t Afford the Freeway.”
. “Can’t Afford the Freeway” highlights how her collaborations emerge as conversations between involved artists as well as the audience. Speaking to Mann about the project, she stated,Alex created some recordings for me and I kept listening to them over and over again trying to figure them out. I eventually produced more interviews with him and realized that he needed his story to be heard and I needed to try and understand his story. So I created a project in which I attempted to listen as best I could. Listening to his recordings made me feel close to him, but I also recognized that no matter how many times I heard his words they were still foreign to me. Still the very act of me struggling to listen was important for both of us, and I think this is true of many interpersonal/political and social situations. You can never experience what it is like to be someone else, but active listening opens up a space of empathy and connection. I also think we can see how a lack of active listening is affecting the political landscape in the United States so negatively, by producing a highly polarized and vitriolic environment.
And what about at Occupy LA?
At Occupy LA I was hopeful that there would be a place for listening to voices that had not been heard before and sometimes that happened. Other times people used the space for projecting, not receiving. I think that there needs to be strong voices making themselves heard, but I don’t want to lose the other part of that equation, which is those voices being quiet and listening to others, and themselves.
ARLA Ear Strengthening Workshop, Occupy LA site, November 11, 2011, Photo by Carol Cheh
Mann, thinking and researching about social, aesthetic, and political points of listening and voicing, felt there was something to be considered about the “radical receptivity and the core message of the OWS movement” and its global amplification of voices struggling to be heard. In the Spring of 2012, she formed The People’s Microphony Camerata with Snapper, a radical experimental choir based in Los Angeles exploring the process of the People’s Microphone. The exact history of the “People’s Microphone,” or “People’s Mic” is unclear, but its use in the Occupy Movement has already become iconic. Ted Sammons discusses the implications of the People’s Mic for communication in his October 2011 post, “‘I didn’t say look; I said listen’: The People’s Microphone, #OWS, and Beyond.” The human microphone is a way to deliver one person’s message to a large group of people in situations where amplification tools, such as bullhorns, are either not allowed or unavailable, or if the acoustics of a space distort amplification. The speaker calls, “mic check!” to alert their intentions. Those around them call back, “mic check!”, until the gathering understands something will be said. The speaker breaks their statement into short sentences, pausing to allow those around them, or the “first wave,” to repeat them in unison. They then pause for those further away, or the “second wave,” to repeat again…and so on until those in the back of the gathering have heard the statement.
Members of People’s Microphony Camerata rehearsing in Los Angeles, April 15, 2012, Photo by Jean-Paul Leonard
The group’s trademark intensity sometimes carried over to the audience. Mann discovered such transference often had to do with prior associations with a location or context. Mann recalled a particular performance at the Occupy movement called “Chalkupy” that was formed in response to a protest running simultaneously with the LA Art Walk, in which activists had handed out chalk and told stories of police repression while chalk drawings were created on the walkways. The police shut down the art walk and a violent struggle ensued. The Occupy LA movement called for people globally to take to the street with chalk in protest, and the day was called “Chalkupy”. The audience of protestors was mixed and tense, and when the PMC began their performance of a highly emotive score called “Sob-Laugh” by Daniel Goode, people were either drawn to or repelled by the performance.
The PMC performing “Sob Laugh” at the “Chalkupy” protest in downtown Los Angeles, Image by Daniel Goode
I think there was some fear about the vulnerable revelation of emotions in the space of the protest. Many of the Occupy LA protests were so risky that everyone had to be extremely tough to exist in that activist space. I respect that. Still I think there are other things that can happen in a space of protest that bring out different feelings. Some activists wanted us to be more musically conventional, “why can’t you just sing some folk songs like normal protest choirs,” we were asked. But we really were not into that kind of thing. . .
In most protest situations, the audiences welcomed their activities. Many shared that it opened up a new space where people could meet each other as humans rather than adversaries or collaborators. Mann edited and published a monochromatic grassroots songbook with the various scores the PMC received for performance, opening up the circle for anyone and everyone to perform and feel that closeness.
Sometimes it was hard to translate a piece that worked during a group rehearsal to something for an audienceperformer situation. . .The PMC never fully developed how to deal with audience participation, but this is something I have been developing on my own in working with students on PMC materials. The scores from the People’s Microphony Songbook and the techniques Juliana and I developed when we first formed the PMC create an immediate closeness within a group, which is remarkable.
From the “People’s Microphony Songbook”: Many voices that were once silenced are now resonating through large crowds, not only of activists, but ordinary people all over the world, assisted by internet networks, and a simple technology called the People’s Microphone. The People’s Mic expressed the interrelated desires of collective and individual voices to speak and be heard, to hear one’s words spoken back through different mouths, and to digest someone else’s words through one’s own body. Beyond projecting an individual’s voice further then it can resonate on its own, the People’s Mic has implications for all of the bodies in its vicinity. It energizes listeners in ways the microphone or megaphone cannot by making listening active, vocal, and embodied. The project, like the Occupy movement, holds all the complexity, beauty, and drive of being human, whether you consider it “working” or not. When I asked Mann about how changes within and towards the Occupy Movement affected the choir, and whether they were winding down or taking a new form, she answered:
I think more than anything else, our group faced a lot of the same challenges that the Occupy Movement faced challenges in horizontality, in the push and pull between interior and exterior exploration, in the sometimes painful vulnerability of investigating the intimate personal and political space with others. I think the project is still developing. The choir still communicates, and some members are currently collaborating with composer Daniel Corral, but the PMC does not meet and rehearse like we used to I think it will continue to wax and wane. In the meantime, I am still working on ideas of active listening. I am currently creating a project called “Listening as (a) movement” within an under-served neighborhood in Pasadena, CA, exploring ideas of radical listening within a specific neighborhood.
In an age of constant bombardment of stimuli, our heads scream with thoughts, opinions, arguments, and expressions. With our current technology, our input and output can be a constant rush of snap reactions and impulses, which has a profound effect, of course, on our day-to-day lives, on our culture(s), on our politics. But these circles cannot be affectively complete without the other side. We need someone to hear us, and, more then that, we need someone to listen to us. And we, in turn, need to listen to them.
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Maile Colbert is a multi-media artist with a concentration on sound and video who relocated from Los Angeles, US to Lisbon, Portugal. She is a regular writer for Sounding Out!
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“Within a Grain of Sand: Our Sonic Environment and Some of Its Shapers”–Maile Colbert
Queer Timbres, Queered Elegy: Diamanda Galás’s The Plague Mass and the First Wave of the AIDS Crisis
Welcome to the final week of our February Forum on “Sonic Borders,” a collaboration with the IASPM-US blog in connection with this year’s IASPM-US conference on Liminality and Borderlands, held in Austin, Texas from February 28 to March 3, 2013. The “Sonic Borders” forum is a Virtual Roundtable cross-blog entity that will feature six Sounding Out! writers posting on Mondays through February 25, and four writers from IASPM-US, posting on Wednesdays starting February 6th and ending February 27th. For an encore of weeks one through four of the forum, click here. And now, while we regret to inform you that Art Jones’s dispatch from Pakistan must be re-booked at a later date, the show must go on . . .and I am thrilled that writer and Ph.D. student Airek Beauchamp is stepping in as our closing act. Make no mistake, he brings the pain! Once again, Sounding Out! gives you something you can feel. –JSA, Editor-in-Chief
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At dinner a few days later in the Village Jarrod tells me that he cries whenever anyone says that they really ‘get’ his work. Because his work is so horrifying. It hurts him to know that he has inflicted it upon someone, someone able to understand it.–A.W. Strouse, in reference to the recent performance of Jarrod Kentrell at Ps1‘s “The Meeting”
I first heard Diamanda Galás’s The Plague Mass (1991) around 1994, when I would have been about 20 years old. Equal parts mass and babble, The Plague Mass is an elegiac tribute to Galás’s brother and other victims of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, a sonic rage against the silence surrounding the disease that redefines “the elegy” in the process. I suppose that I should make a confession here and say that contracting HIV was one of my biggest fears at the time. I was fresh out of the closet and ready to experiment, yet the media coverage of the crisis had pretty much told me that, as a gay man, an active sex life was a death sentence, a message I had been receiving since I was in fourth grade. There was something in Galás’s record to which I automatically, deeply connected. Although this brand of desire was new to me, there was also something deeply familiar about it–ancient even–and this feeling was produced by the horror of her work, not in spite of it.
Cover of The Plague Mass (1991)
Recorded live in 1990 at Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, The Plague Mass was conceived as a performance piece, enabling Galás to use sound to move in a messy, unstructured, and often terrifying way across multi-dimensional space. Her sonic trajectories seemed to take my global, abstract fears and make them intimate and concrete. In “Diamanda Galás: Defining the Space In-between,” Julia Meier describes Galás’s soundscape as composed of “chants, shrieks, gurgles, hisses often at extreme volumes, frequently distorted electronically and accompanied by a torrent of words” which defy description (2). In the space created by this cacophony, Galás mourns her brother, responding to the silence surrounding AIDS by making use of what composer and sound theorist Yvon Bonenfant refers to as “queer timbres” in “Queer Listening to Queer Vocal Timbres,” the unique, dynamic sounds of desire and self in the voice that also operate as a kind of touch, a reaching out to other desired and desiring bodies. In homage to Antonin Artaud’s theory of the theater of cruelty–in which audiences are exposed through multisensory domains to truths they often do not wish to see–Galás uses queer timbres to form an outsized means of aural communication in The Plague Mass that fills more affective space than standard musical productions or theater productions. The shrieks and howls suggest Galas as depicted on the album’s cover: flayed, raw, and radically open to the passage of every vibration. By erasing semantic and syntactical codes, these sounds deeply engage the entire body in the process of making sound.
Artaud
Queering the traditional theater, Artaud argued for new intersensuality that would occupy space in a three-dimensional manner. In The Theater and Its Double, Artaud describes how the “intensities of colors, lights, or sounds, which utilize vibration, tremors, repetition, whether of a musical rhythm or a spoken phrase, special tones or a general diffusion of light, can obtain their full effect only by dissonances. But instead of limiting these dissonances to a single sense, we shall cause them to overlap from one sense to the other” (125). Texturing sound, or working with dissonance and disruption to create a more forceful product, offered Artaud a unique play between the senses, allowing it a more direct and apparent physical impact upon the bodies of both performers and the audience.
The plague and how it inhabits and destroys bodies is a central metaphor for sound and language in the work of both Artaud and Galás. Artaud focused much of his theory on the plague as an example not only of an affective space but also as a transformative event in human history and in individual lives. Artaud’s writing on the plague, however, also garnered him harsh criticism. By suggesting a theater in which language became subordinate to the shriek, the grunt or other non-semantic orality, he decried all of traditional French theater and its lofty legacy. Nonetheless, he was invited to speak about his essay “The Theater and the Plague” at the Sorbonne. Deciding to actually incorporate his ideas about ‘liquefying boundaries,” he began speaking in a standard oratorical mode but slowly devolved into a theatrical performance of the plague, eventually ending in shrieks of physical pain. In Watchfiends & Rack Screams, Clayton Eshleman describes how, by the end of his speech, the only people left in the lecture hall were a minor contingent of his close friends, including Anais Nin, who recounted the tale (12). The shrieks, the howls are all a further way to engage the whole body in the process of making sound, while also erasing semantic and syntactical code. In Gilles Deleuze’s estimation of Artaud’s work in The Logic of Sense, it reached the depths of language: “The word no longer expresses an attribute of the state of affairs; its fragments merge with unbearable sonorous qualities, invade the body where they form a mixture and a new state of affairs… In this passion, a pure language-affect is substituted for the effect of language” (89).
Jaap Blonk performs Artaud’s “To Have Done with the Judgement of God”
Reflecting and refracting Artaud, Galás uses the space of The Plague Mass to re-consider and re-theorize the ailing body. In her work the body represents not just Galás herself, but also the bodies of all the afflicted, the bodies issuing negation of suffering, and finally, the collective body of the spectacle of the AIDS crisis. Like Artaud, Galás sees the plague of AIDS as transformative, but without the safe buffer provided by the critical space of history. This plague is instead an immediate issue made all the more volatile due to the refusal to help the victims by the conservative Reagan administration as well as the rigidity of the Catholic Church’s encoded dogma that characterizes homosexuality as sinful depravity and refuses to acknowledge the need for AIDS education and condom distribution. Galás evidences this in the opening track “There Are No More Tickets to the Funeral” which incorporates traditional Christian hymns, liturgical representations of condemnation, and the voices of the afflicted.
These appropriated sounds circulate in constant tension, queering the ominous, authoritative patriarchal drones by contrasting them to the timbres of desire and pain embodied by the shrieks. In “Confessional (Give Me Sodomy or Give Me Death),” the narrator’s voice bleeds into the frantic voice of the defiant dying, blending in with the conjured voices of angels of death that hover over the bed. This commentary places the listener in a very immediate and uncomfortable multidimensional space encompassing several terrifying aspects of death. Here Galás exemplefies Bonenfant’s queer timbres through the tactile effect of layered sound that is felt with the skin, in the bones, as well as with the ears, communicating a palpable experience that lies beyond the barely-nuanced music it is seductively easy to grow accustomed to.
It is Galás’s use of sound’s affective properties that makes The Plague Mass most effective as queered communication. In “This is the Law of the Plague” she incorporates elements of glossolalia, colloquially known in religious communities as “speaking in tongues,” a speech act that embodies voice by implying a physical loss of control of the body as well as the casting off of concrete linguistic structure. Galás’s use of glossolalia deliberately blurs the border between spiritual possession and the madness inherent to AIDS as the virus passed through the blood/brain barrier of its human host.
Aided by electronics, Galás’s vocals begin as the chant of orator. Punctuated by a throbbing, sparse single drum-beat, her sickened, keening crawl of words enumerates in detail what it is that defines a person as unclean. The language is precisely enunciated, each word sharply edged and cornered—a practice that would no doubt double Artaud over in pain, given his struggle with schizophrenia that left him vulnerable to crisp sounds. Slowly, Galás’s voice rises to the shriek of a pious, avenging angel, a shrill, wail shimmering with vibrato communicating the sound of a raptured body, rent in chaotic ecstasy. Eventually her ululations are submerged in a bath of primordial babble, a place where language moves in every direction through a body somehow more permeable, a sonic space that Deleuze would describe as topographic, that is, possessing heights and depths. Enacting and inviting the babble of the mad and the afflicted maintains a red line on the tolerance of the listener’s psyche before returning, without ceremony, to the sparse and cold incantations of the church. Here queer(ed) timbres push the audience to limits well past the reaches of patriarchal or accepted sound; Galas plays along the edge of tolerance before dropping the audience abruptly back into the decidedly colder and less humane sonic tropes of an unforgiving religion.
Galás’s sonic practices encourage in me a listening that reaches out into space to connect with these sounds, whose physicality communicates fears and apprehensions that are old enough to feel genetically encoded in my psyche. Bonenfant describes this reaching as “queer listening,” an extrinsic process based on desire in which “we listen ‘out’ for (reaching towards) voices that we think will gratify us” (77). Bonenfant queers the body in the process of sound; it becomes abstracted, absorbed into a process and functioning on many layers that include—but also subsume—the subjective Cartesian body of agency we are comfortable with. The body becomes bodies, and it becomes present in spaces that go beyond the immediate space it occupies in space/time. Galas traverses time and space in The Plague Mass, from the ancient litanies of hymns and spirituals to the anguish of those afflicted with AIDS, and layers voice on voice until they are inextricable, a huge din telling more than just a story, or The Story but the stories of many.
Image by Flickr User 1v0
In a personal e-mail exchange, Bonenfant clarified his relation to both Artaud and Galás. When asked if he was influenced by Artaud he explained:
Not directly, but certainly indirectly, and his ideas affect extended voice practice generally. I think the idea of the ‘theatre of cruelty’ is often deeply misunderstood and it was a product of its time. I understand Artaud to have been crying out for an anti-bourgeois theatre that actually stirred people up. But stirring people up is only part of the story. What stirs some, attracts others. Now, my argument is more that: these voices we might call ‘queer’ stir SOME people up but actually they ATTRACT others – others who might be seeking queered bodies to contact.
Bonenfant went on to explain that artists such as Galás can thus make contact with people who desire the kind of disruption or ‘stirring’ that they provide. He went on to relate a story that Galás shared in an interview, in which she described a performance in which she looked out at the audience and noticed a very young boy listening to her perform. For the rest of the concert, Galás said she felt guilty for the damage she was undoubtedly inflicting on the young boy’s ears and psyche. However, after the concert the boy approached her and thanked her profusely. It turns out that he had suffered from a terminal and painful illness and felt unable to express the physical and emotional distress that he lived with. Here, though, was an artist onstage articulating it, broadcasting it to him and others, for him and others. This is what Bonenfant refers to as “an affective, somatic bond” created through shared sonic experience, and this is what Galas constructs. By standard definitions The Plague Mass is almost unlistenable, but yet it has connected audiences remote in space and time (a nod here to Karen Tongson’s “remote intimacy”). A sonic reaching out attracting listeners similarly reaching, its indelicate music draws the suffering near, providing a form of collective comfort by exploring and embodying the suffering, grief, and rage located beyond the permeable membrane of conscious thought and feeling.
Diamanda Galas performing in the 1980s, Image Courtesy of Flickr User Carl Guderian
It is this kind of connection through a tonal richness that is uncoded but yet full of information that is radically important. Galás’s groans, growls, and chants create an intersubjective circuit of communication that moves active listening outside of the body and draws visceral connections in a three-dimensional psychic space. This is what Galás immediately stirred in me back in 1994, and what I have been determined to recover and communicate since that first listening cut me to the quick. Queer listening does not just entail an affirmation of the soundtracks of queer lives–a kind of perpetual disco, 12” remix project–but rather it also demands a critical–and visceral–vulnerability to the jarring, violent world arranged against queer agency. Galas’s work hijacks the elegy and queers it, extending it to us as an offering against the true horror: the official silence in the face of so much death.
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Featured Image of Diamanda Galás courtesy of Flickr user digital_freak
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A Taurus who enjoys the ocean, Airek Beauchamp is currently at SUNY Binghamton pursuing his PhD in Creative Writing. He also studies composition pedagogy and queer theory, although he is becoming more and more seduced by sound studies. He can rock a disco all night or just stay in and maybe catch up on some 30 Rock. Some call him fancy, some call him a bitch, but really he is both. He is a multiplicity of multiplicities, all in one mortal shell.
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