In 2007, I received an invitation to a recital that would take place in my bathroom; the artist offered to present an underwater concert in my tub. My reaction? “Crazy,” I thought. “Why go to the trouble of singing in an element so far from ideal?” After a year of mulling it over, though, I finally realized that what I had dismissed for its hopeless impracticality might—precisely because it was impractical—offer fresh perspectives on singing and listening by resituating these familiar activities in vastly unfamiliar territory.
The underwater singing practiced by contemporary American soprano and performance artist Juliana Snapper challenges audiences to confront their unexamined assumptions about the relationships between the voice and materiality, the sensed and the singular. How do the physical and sensory properties of singers’ and listeners’ bodies affect and participate in the music we create and the sounds we hear? How do the physical space within and the matter through which sound travels shape what we hear? And how do the relations between these aspects affect what it feels like to sing, and what it is possible to hear?
The rooftop bar at the Standard Hotel, downtown LA
During the spring of 2010, while I was working on an article about Snapper’s project and teaching a seminar on the multi-sensory aspects of music, Snapper offered to mount a participatory version of her project for my class. She took us through some exercises in a large swimming pool in downtown Los Angeles. The first exercise paired us up; one person gently held the other under water, while the person underwater made sounds. I was paired with Natalia, who shouted––but with my ears above the water I couldn’t hear her voice.
The author with Natalia Bieletto (under water). Aquaopera #4/Los Angeles, 28 April 2010.
So we tried another strategy: one person made sounds underwater while the rest of us put our heads and ears in – and then we could hear her. We found that the deeper into the water we descended, the more difficult it was to sing high notes. Fast tempi were also difficult to maintain; Natalia’s attempt resulted in muddled sounds.
We found that the deeper into the water we descended, the more difficult it was to sing high notes. Fast tempi were also difficult to maintain; Natalia’s attempt resulted in muddled sounds. Surprisingly, while sung sounds didn’t seem very loud, small internal throat sounds were incredibly powerful. These exercises demonstrate how much the medium through which sound waves flow affects their characteristics: their speed, direction and so on. It also shows that in order to register sound, the listening body (including the head) must be immersed in the material through which the sound flows.
The next exercise linked the six of us together
The next exercise linked the six of us together by the arms; three participants stood in a line, with their backs against three others. We sang in a drone-like manner, playing with our voices above the water, at its surface, and then slowly sinking into it. We felt the sonic vibrations largely through direct contact with each other’s bodies. Of course sound also passed through the air and water, but because the most immediate path was from one body to another, this was the sensation that overpowered us.
At the end of the day, gathered around the poolside fireplace, we discussed how different singing felt in a liquid environment. We’d discovered that aural experience is predicated on physical contact with sound waves through shared media, in this case water and air, flesh and bone. We noted that the shared medium makes a great differenceto how we experience the voice, and that the sound we ultimately hear depends partly on what is sung, and partly on the medium through which it passes (and how our bodies interact with that medium). In other words, in Snapper’s workshop we discovered that sound is a multi-sensory experience, tactile as well as aural. It also became clear that sound and music involve much more than traditional theories and notation can capture. (For a more thorough discussion of the differences between singing and sound underwater and in air, please see my forthcoming article.)
At the Standard poolside fireplace.
Hyunjong Lee and Zachary Wallmark.
Sam Baltimore and Alexandra Apolloni.
Jill Rogers.
I would like to underscore here that the character of a given sound source is not stable. Instead it is dependent on specific material conditions, and on particular relationships between the elements involved. A sound signal will move with a given speed depending on the material––air, water, metal, glass, etc.––through which it is propelled. As humans register the sound it will move more or less directly through the ear drum or bones (and then transfer to the inner ear) depending on the relationship between the material through which it is propelled and the materiality of the ear. The part of the body that registers sound also plays a role in its apparent directionality.
Juliana Snapper.
For example, our ability to hear in “stereo”––two distinct signals, left and right––is the result of sound entering our bodies from two directions (two ears). Because we most frequently deal with sound as it is propelled through air, we take this as a given and adjust our musical and acoustic research (and thus our concert halls and (performance spaces accordingly).
By highlighting the material aspects of sound and their reception, Snapper reminds us that what we hear depends as much on our materiality, physicality, and cultural and social histories as it does on so-called objective measurements (decibel level, soundwave count, or score), which are themselves mere images. Our experience of sound is a triangulation of events in which physical impulses (sonic vibrations), our bodies’ encultured capacity to receive these vibrations, and how we have been taught to understand them are at constant play, and subject to negotiation. In the experience of sound, what becomes clear is not a stable explanation of what sound or music is. Instead we are led to understand that each such account is a composite manifestation of our perception of sound at a given moment in time and place.
“Don’t tell me you’re still listening to that shit.”
“I told you, I like it.”
“This is why we have so much trouble with you.”
“You don’t know anything about it.”
“Listen to that cursing…it’s nothing but garbage!”
“What are you doing?”
“All of these CDs are going in the basement. No more rap until you start listening to your parents! Now, go practice your violin!”
Growing up, exchanges like these were common between my Korean American mother and me—a multiracial Korean Euro-American. In her eyes, there was no such thing as enough violin practice. Rap—the vulgarity! The noise! It was turning me into a juvenile delinquent! She was convinced I had it in me to be the next Korean-American classical music virtuoso, the next Sarah Chang—if only I would practice more scales and stop trying to imitate “black men shouting.” (However “conversational” the rap world considered Nas’s flow, my mother still heard yelling.)
Violinist, Sarah Chang
It’s not that I didn’t like classical music—I watched Amadeus on loop until the VHS squealed—but my mother, like the mothers of most all my Asian friends, insisted on it consuming a fairly large chunk of my life. While immensely diverse in its makeup, most of the Asian population where I lived was either Korean or Chinese, and were forced by their parents to learn violin, piano or cello. Not only was it criminal to play an instrument other than one of these; but, whichever one (or two) you chose, you had better be the best at it.
Author and Yale Law Professor, Amy Chua, recently incited an online firestorm when the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from hercontroversial new memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which she recounts calling her daughters “worthless” and “garbage” if they couldn’t perform a piece of classical music up to her exacting standards. University of Hawai’i at Manoa Professor, Mari Yoshihara’s study, Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music(2008) describes similar instances of “tiger mothering,” such as virtuoso violinist, Midori Goto’s, mother, Setsu Goto, who (it was rumored) was so strict that it forced Midori into a mental breakdown and an eating disorder. Many would likely agree that “Tiger Mothering” such as this is morally questionable (and in some cases abusive), but I should note that instances like these are only part of a much bigger picture. Scores of students and performers would no doubt concur with Dr. O’C’s recent SO! account of the potential for classical music praxis to have ameliorative effects. Despite this, however, classical music training seems to have become a central tenet of “Tiger Mother” methodology. In all the kerfluffle over Chua’s book, no one has been asking the most foundational question: Why is it so important to Asians and Asian Americans that their children play classical music?
Amy Chua, (CC) Larry D. Moore
In a recent interview on why she chose classical violin and piano for her children, Chua fancifully suggests that classical music is the antidote to materialism. She says that “classical music all about depth” and calls the violin and piano “very respectable instruments.” Indicative of more than just a love of classical music, Chua’s statements imply that other forms of music lack comparable artistic value and require less cultivation to perform and enjoy. In a similar vein, the Asian-descent classical musicians interviewed in Yoshihara’s Musicians From a Different Shore divulge their belief that playing classical music anchors one to a high social stratum. Acknowledging the contradiction between classical music’s high cultural status and its mostly poor compensation, the musicians identified social factors such as educational attainment and musical taste and ability as more important determining factors of class standing than income. Yoshihara thus links the importance Asians and Asian Americans place on classical music praxis to class consciousness and the production of cultural capital.
Class consciousness no doubt accounts for some of the zealousness exhibited by Tiger Mothers with regard to their children’s classical music training, but it’s not the only thing that keeps them roaring. Chua’s Battle Hymn illustrates that, in addition to class consciousness, the pressure to study classical music stems from an intra-racial expectation to perform Asianness adequately. Chapter 5 of Chua’s memoir, titled, “On Generational Decline,” is her cut-and-dried summarization of how subsequent generations of Chinese Americans become lazier as they’re allowed to revel in the comforts of middle class life. Chua chooses classical music for her children because it is “the opposite of decline, the opposite of laziness, vulgarity, and spoiledness.” Constructed as an appeal to Chinese Americans, Chua essentially argues that classical music training is key to an Asian person’s cultural and racial legitimacy. Unwilling to relinquish “the high cultural tradition of [her] ancient ancestors,” she expects her children to uphold a racially and culturally endorsed standard of melody-making that reinforces Asian gender norms and encourages other Asian parents to do the same.
One of Ellicott City’s Korean Shopping Plazas, photo by Barbara Fisher
In Ellicott City, Maryland, the wealthy, culturally diverse “Ethnoburb” of Baltimore where I grew up, Asian American classical musicians abound and Asian American rappers are few. Here, (where the community-wide motto is “Choose Civility”) Asian youth gained a sort of “cred” for mastering the violin or piano, and this pressure to “prove” oneself along racial lines was something I always felt—particularly as a teen of mixed race. It was probably the biggest reason why I didn’t quit the violin until I graduated from high school. I hated it, but resentfully continued attending orchestra and private lessons in the fear that I would lose the meager amount of “cred” I’d built up. It hardly mattered, though. There was no chance of me getting into an Ivy League school or playing Carnegie Hall—I listened to rap and sometimes didn’t do my homework. In short, I would never be a “Super Asian” (a term coined by my Indian music stand partner and me), and as any Asian kid knows, if you’re not the best, you needn’t bother trying. None of the “Super Asians” had any interest in rap, and one even joked that I was a “chocolate-filled twinkie” for wearing a Pelle Pelle jacket to practice one week.
Wolfosonian Museum, Unknown Artist
People who looked like Sarah Chang were supposed to be in the business of making melodies, not rhymes. Chang performing a violin concerto is a comforting scene, a sonic image that reaffirms a familiar cultural narrative of femininity and class stature associated with Asianness in the US. A result of the gradual process of East Asian modernization (instigated by Western Imperialism), classical music was initially adopted by the people at the behest of the state, eventually becoming a integral part of middle class life in East Asia and a social marker of bourgeois womanhood that functioned to situate women vis à vis the domicile. Uncomfortable defining myself in this way (and feeling, also, that I never truly could), I gravitated towards something more “disruptive” that would allow me to show a different face to the world.
Rap became a vehicle for me to explain myself in more hybrid terms. On drives into Baltimore City, I heard it bellowing from the windows of the West Side’s crumbling row homes. The loud, curt, interjections! The spontaneity and candor! This loudness was initially what drew me in, but eventually I realized that rap had just as much profundity as anything classical you could throw at it. Listening to rap, I was finally on offense. It was a medium that spoke to me, because it made me feel capable of speaking back. And there was an entire legion of disaffected youth who seemed to feel the same way.
Nas performing in 2007
Despite this popularity, however, critics of rap maintain that the sounds that (predominately African American) rappers produce are nothing more than “noise.” In Black Noise,Tricia Rose observes that despite (and perhaps because of) rap’s widespread popularity and cultural relevance, it is often pitted as classical music’s polar-opposite—“unintelligible yet aggressive sound that disrupt[s the] familial domain” (63). Against charges that rap lacks “depth,” purveyors of hip hop (despite their hefty salaries) often accrue little to no widespread artistic acclaim. Evidence of what Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman terms the “sonic color-line,” this demotion and “Othering” of non-white sounds into “noise” (discussed further in her recent SO! post) has historically functioned to both generate and underwrite public attitudes about race, class and gender and to create dominant ideas about listening that she dubs “the listening ear.”
It seems that dominant modes of listening have everything figured out. If you look like this, you sound like that. But, what about people who look like me? What are we supposed to sound like? With which sonic cultural productions am I supposed to ally myself, and do I have a choice in the matter? How does “the listening ear” interpret a biracial Korean Euro-American or any person of mixed race heritage? Was there a distinction to be heard? I was sure there was, but didn’t quite know how to voice it.
For most of my life I have lived on the precipice of Asianness and something else, leaving me to feel—at times—confused, demoralized and illegitimate. As Michael Omi and Howard Winant famously note in their seminal work, Racial Formation, “Without a racial identity [in America], one is in danger of having no identity.” Acutely aware of my difference, I searched for ways of being heard as a multiracial subject in a fiercely stratified, race-conscious society. In the Introduction to The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed-Heritage Asian Americans, Michael Omi notes that within the historical and political context of the United States, (the “one-drop rule,” eugenic fears of racial intermixing, anti-miscegenation laws, etc.) multiracial identities have consistently been “contained, disregarded, [and] denied.” Disruptive to fixed notions about race, it is often a challenge for multiracial subjects to be recognized or understood by the state or the ear.
Rap assisted me in my effort to be heard as a multiracial person. While my Asian friends in All-State Orchestra were polishing their four-octave chromatic scales for the judging panel at Julliard, I was conscientiously studying Rakim’s flow and the RZA’s beats, hoping that one day it might make sense for me to show my face at a rap battle, if only as an observer. After the realization that Nas wasn’t the reason I could never be a “Super Asian,” my mom returned my copy of his masterpiece debut, Illmatic. As previously, I spent the hours before bedtime reciting the lyrics to Nasty classics like “It Ain’t Hard to Tell,” moved by every skillful turn of phrase: “Nas is like the Afrocentric Asian/half man-half amazin,” I would repeat over and over until I got the cadences just right. Whatever the hell he was talking about, I was sure it applied to me.
Recent Comments