Dylan, Opera and Expressions of the Soul

I just woke up from a dream in which Jen and I were in a bar with two pianos and people like Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Bob Dylan and me (!) were jamming on them. There may have been other famous folk, dead or alive, but I can't remember them now. It began with Paul doing a kind of Jerry Lee Lewis riff, then various folks joined in, two or three on each piano. The jam eventually evolved to into a sort of open improv with elements of Cecil Taylor and maybe Henry Cowell...it was cool. Then Dylan brought it down (in the musical, not emotional sense) and began playing and singing a song by himself. Jen and I were standing in the bend of his piano and this brunette chick slid down the lid and planted a deep soul kiss on Bob, twice. There was an attractive blonde gal standing behind Bob and the brunette whispered to me, "Who is that?" I told her, "That is Mrs. Bob Dylan." My impression at the time was that the brunette was interested in Mrs Dylan in the same way she was interested in Bob. Unfortunately my dream never lived up to that promise. The unvoiced question hovering around the room was why this girl would be so stirred up by this old gravelly voiced dude, and both in the dream and upon waking I was brought back to what has been a longtime consideration about the nature of the human voice and the ways that it can project, impart and otherwise express the unexpressable.


I think this dream reflected a conversation Rob and I had when he was up last week about singers like Dylan and Johnny Cash who have/had a certain quality to their voice that transcends the effects of age or other seeming limitations. In fact in both cases - Dylan now and Johnny Cash (notice that we can call Bob Dylan "Dylan" but one would never call Johnny Cash "Cash"? It just seems wrong and somehow disrespectful) in his last recordings - one can hear their lives and depth of experience in every bit of gravel, every quaver of the voice such that we can, at least while we're listening, connect their experience to our own lives.

I think this ability is lost in today's "American Idol" centered version of popular culture. For some reason we care that a singer is able to muster up enough vocal gymnastics to sing an old Queen song, but we have little time for an insightful lyric delivered with true conviction. I don't even mean to disparage Queen here. Whatever the limitations of their brand of schlock-rock (and I am a fan of some of it) at least they followed their own muse to an extent and did some fairly weird and creative stuff. I also don't think Freddie Mercury would have made it beyond the first, maybe second round of American Idol. I must admit, though the idea of Freddie encountering Simon Cowell at his bitchiest is quite an entertaining thought. 


I also don't want to give the impression that I think only old gravelly folk singers represent the quality that I am speaking of. I have noticed this effect in the cantor of a local synagogue whose choir I used to direct (he was somehow able to summon the combined experience of the entire Hebrew nation when he chanted), I mentioned it with respect to Karen Carpenter in an earlier blog and I have heard it in the trained voices of opera singers: Maria Callas, Tito Gobbi, Jon Vickers, Lucia Popp, Jan DeGaetani, Mirella Freni. 

In some respects, I think that opera is at the same time both the most difficult medium in which to accomplish this and potentially the most powerful. The difficulty lies first in the fact that there is a certain standardization of technique that doesn't allow for the kind of individual and spontaneous self-expression common to other genres of music. Second, the fact that the opera singer is portraying a character set to music by someone else often temporally separated from them by hundreds of years means that it is not enough to draw solely on one's own experience. One must inhabit the state of mind of the respective character (act, in other words) as well as that of the composer all filtered first through the visions of the stage and music director. Given this state of affairs, is it any surprise that singers are often at odds with their directors?


However, when you link the transcendent ability of opera singers like those mentioned above to the genius of the likes of Verdi, Britten and others the results can be shattering. I will note as examples Freni as Violetta (La Traviata), Vickers in Peter Grimes, Callas and Gobbi in Tosca, and in a comedy, Lucia Popp in Don Pasquale. A sort of left-field example is Jan DeGaetani singing Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire; she is able to imbue this work with a touching devastation that I'm sure Schoenberg would have enjoyed immensely.

I don't mean for this list of singers to be exhaustive by any stretch, and it obviously represents favorites of mine. And while I don't claim to have extensive familiarity with many current opera singers (nor with a lot of past singers for that matter) I must say that my overall impression of the current state of the art is that the American Idol phenomenon is extending into opera. Over the last 20 or so years I have read about, and to a degree witnessed, a greater emphasis on physical appearance (not that this is exclusive to today, witness Callas' struggle with her weight) and a certain generic level of technique at the expense of the individual, expressive voice. I know that Maria Callas is a divisive figure among opera fans, even in her prime. But I think it is safe to say that her unique expressiveness, to say nothing of her technical idiosyncrasies, would probably not be welcome today. 


As to why this state of affairs exists today I invite opinions: Certainly the continuing expansion of mass media as part of the "global village" leads to a generalization of art. And while this is offset somewhat by easier access to media - with the explosion of home studios, blogs, Youtube et al - by unknown and amateur artists, there is currently a greater gap between the upper artistic one percent (http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/07/13/women_dominate_forbes_list_of_higihest_paid_celebrities_under_30.html) and the local amateur or semi-pro musician. Whether this is a temporary situation that awaits the retrenching of the music industry, or just the beginning of a dystopian path towards even greater conformity remains to be seen.