At what point does ‘emerging’ become ‘emerged’?Footnote ¹ (When does a mutation earn the name of species?) This is a pragmatic question for those ‘emerging’ artists who have to decide when and how they have achieved some sort of professional legitimacy, perhaps in the form of a significant prize or accolade, or a serious critical consideration. For a species of art, or a field of scholarly inquiry – and here are two new books that deal with both – this is an even trickier question. Nina Sun Eidsheim writes:

Contemporary opera is slippery territory indeed. Its environmental conditions seem amenable to wildly different species of work: from conservative, placid specimens which affirm opera’s conventions and its listeners’ expectations while permitting themselves only the most tentative explorations of harmonic language or subject matter, to the more extreme experimentation of the avant-garde, bathtub-opera variety.

Eidsheim takes avant-garde opera – or, rather, new, unconventional works that call themselves ‘operas’ – as the point of departure for a far-reaching discussion of music-as-vibration. She seeks to explore the ways in which such operas’ pushing of boundaries can call into question the acts of performing and listening, yielding new insights about music as more than an art-object: as a social, relational activity. Her book invites readers to remember that music itself is a complex phenomenon better understood as an experience and practice of ‘intermaterial vibration’ (161). Jelena Novak shares Eidsheim’s interest in the singing body; she draws on theories of voice from musicology, film studies, theatre studies, philosophy and feminist critique in order to study a repertoire she calls ‘postopera’, offering detailed readings of six recent works that, she argues, reinvent the voice–body relationship and typify this repertoire. Eidsheim’s book is even more wide-ranging, invoking acoustics, linguistics, vocal pedagogy and art from Homer to Pollock, reaching far beyond voice, opera and sound itself in its questioning of music as human phenomenon. Au courant interdisciplinarity makes possible both authors’ work, and both books are published in series which emphasise that interdisciplinarity: Eidsheim’s is part of a series at Duke University Press entitled ‘Sign, Storage, Transmission’, headed by Jonathan Sterne and Lisa Gitelman; Novak’s is one of the Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera. Novak’s book is much more clearly focused on the frontiers of contemporary opera, but may leave readers wanting further discussion; scope, at times, overwhelms Eidsheim’s arguments, which become so expansive (questioning not only the ‘ontology of music’ but also the nature of human existence) that her book resists any borders at all.

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Eidsheim’s work has focused on the now-emerged field of voice studies. Sensing Sound: Singing & Listening as Vibrational Practice is her first book, and her faculty webpage at the University of California at Los Angeles lists two further books: Musicology in the Flesh: Contemporary Music as Multi-Sensory Practice and Measuring Race: Listening to Vocal Timbre and Vocality in African-American Popular Music. Both of these seem like successors to Sensing Sound, in which she presents her ‘vibrational theory of music’:

Thus, she argues, ‘music’s ontological status can be changed from an external, knowable object to an unfolding phenomenon that arises through complex material interactions’ (2). Eidsheim pursues this by questioning ‘naturalized ideas about singing, listening, sound, and music that commonly underlie musical perceptions and discourses’ (22). Her test cases include some highly unconventional twenty-first-century operas; for instance, through soprano Juliana Snapper’s underwater practice, Eidsheim interrogates the ‘privileging of air’ as the primary ‘medium of sound propagation’ (22). Eidsheim also discusses Meredith Monk’s Songs of Ascension, Christopher Cerrone’s Invisible Cities and a chamber opera of which she was co-creator.

Though Eidsheim writes, with typical frankness, ‘my modest hope is to merely reengage some of the terms’ (165) of musicological discourse, her inquiry moves from the particular, colloquial reporting of very strange operatic works to a philosophical questioning which comes to colour the book. At its most modest, Sensing Sound might be best understood, as Eidsheim suggests, as a collection of reminders: ideas recovered or revitalised through new interdisciplinary juxtaposition and novel case studies of contemporary music. She reminds us that music is simple (vibration) and also much more: more than notes, more than score, more than sound produced – a ‘dynamic, multifaceted, and multisensorial, phenomenon of sound’ (2). Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick’ event here extends Christopher Small’s concept of musicking (1, 15–16). These two notions – of music as a thick event, of music as vibration – become larger reminders of both the singing and the listening bodies; we necessarily take part in the ‘thick event’ of ‘musicking’ by sharing vibration. Eidsheim’s concluding chapter draws together her case studies and the questions they have raised in an even broader conversation about selfhood, community, and the nature of humanity itself. ‘We are sound’ (24), she argues, concluding that our participation in sound as unique human beings reveals, reflects and can mould our human relationships.

Unsurprisingly, scope is this book’s greatest challenge to readers from any audience, and audience is its second challenge: who is being reminded? In its soaring reach – in asking, ultimately, ‘what is music’ and ‘what is human’ – this book embraces a huge range of disciplines. Relating her own experiences as a listener, singer, and teacher, Eidsheim is consistently engaging and thought-provoking. Yet her simultaneous ‘zoom-in’ (as in the witty recounting of experiences) and ‘zoom-out’ (her broadest concluding arguments about human interaction) can be as dizzying as her discussion of case studies is intriguing. Readers seeking an in-depth study of contemporary opera should be warned that ultimately her examination of these works is fairly brief – for Eidsheim, they are means to a grander end.

One of the book’s most successful arguments may be found in Chapter 2, which features a discussion of acoustics and listener experience of space. Here, Eidsheim interweaves personal observation of Cerrone’s very new opera Invisible Cities (2013) and Monk’s Songs of Ascension (2008) with her hypothesis that the ‘normalization’ of concert acoustics has reified the figure of sound: the ossified ‘concert-music’ model – shaped by preconditions of sound quality determined by normalised acoustic principles – limits our experience of music-as-vibration (2, 23, 60, 65). She highlights these preconceptions by engaging these two works, both of which push against such norms gently; they are recognisable as music and opera but may reveal our preconceptions about them as such. Eidsheim carefully foregrounds her discussion of both Cerrone’s and Monk’s works with a section on acoustics. This departure from her usual experience-inquiry model allows Eidsheim to ‘place’ her field notes in context as she describes each experience, and the chapter is more compelling as a result.

It is not difficult to see why Eidsheim chose to focus on Invisible Cities in her consideration of concert acoustics and audience expectations. Cerrone’s Pulitzer-nominated work was marketed as ‘an invisible opera for wireless headphones’Footnote ² and supported by Sennheiser. In his adaptation of Italo Calvino’s novel, staged throughout Union Station in Los Angeles, singers and dancers emerged from the day-to-day crowds and the audience heard the opera (both the instrumental ensemble and the singers) mixed live through wireless headphones or – if they took the headphones off – in the ‘natural’ acoustic of the station’s spaces. Cerrone’s hypnotic music in Invisible Cities evokes a continuously tolling bell; the prepared piano in the instrumental ensemble creates an ethereal, exotic sound that draws the listener into Calvino’s fictional account of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. As Eidsheim recounts, the headphones created an immersive musical world that was in conflict with the station’s other activity, tantalising the ear with music heard but not always seen; the sources of this music had to be sought out as the audience was drawn into the station’s different areas. In this fashion, Invisible Cities set aside the long-established relationship between singer and instrumentalists in opera: the lyrical vocal lines unfold over Cerrone’s striking postminimalist textures, cleverly orchestrated to support the singers as they move throughout the station, far from the instrumental ensemble (which they heard through earpieces). The live sound-mixing allowed for the creation of sound spaces (experienced through the headphones) which may or may not reflect the physical space in which the audience found itself in any moment, and allowed sound to move and echo in ways that blurred the ‘reality’ the viewing eye predicted for the listening ear.

Invisible Cities is such a new work that any discussion of it is necessarily timely and provocative. Yet it is a much more complex work, and the experience it creates is more powerful than its obvious novelties might suggest. The fact that Invisible Cities was marketed with the tagline ‘an opera for headphones’ (Eidsheim, 209, note 53) does not mean that, actually, this is what makes it important, and readers may wish Eidsheim had gone beyond the piece’s play with acoustics to explore how its manipulation of acoustic space reflected or resisted the piece’s story, subject matter and dramatic architecture. The headphones – on the surface such a predictable gesture to the contemporary – are unusual, but they are only one element of many that give the opera its riveting complexity. Indeed, the entire opera focuses on the estrangement of the familiar: the hypnotic postminimal language (which draws so skilfully on Renaissance music in one of its most beautiful scenes, about Venice) seems to suspend the progress of time and any sense of (musical) history, as do the characters’ long, ruminative reminiscences. Similarly, the orchestration blurs familiar instrumental sounds (further estranged as the players are unseen until the end, so the eye is no help here), and the singers’ and dancers’ street-clothing costumes make them momentarily indistinguishable from the station’s public. This further helps complicate the opera-as-performance, making a rather pedestrian public space both terra incognita and terra infirma.

The opera is the best kind of adaptation, then, terra nova: not just a publicity-hungry, name-recognition-based retelling of an acclaimed story in a different medium, but instead a thorough reimagining that captures in its own style the poetic strength of Calvino’s novel. Three moments may strike a listener familiar with the novel as particularly deft, and I would suggest that not one of them draws its power from the headphones or the train station venue. Consider Cerrone’s setting of Polo’s description of the city of Armilla, the city of water pipes, now in possession of the naiads. In the novel, Marco Polo describes their pleasurable games, noting that ‘in the morning you hear them singing’.Footnote ³ The opera presents them as two janitors, mopping the station floor, singing music of wrenching melancholy. Here Cerrone has reached beyond Polo’s description to find the elegiac heart of the chapter, and his musical rendering is subtle, putting in the mouths of these ‘content’ maidens (50) Polo’s bittersweet memory and the loneliness of the abandoned city itself. Similarly effective is Cerrone’s musical rendering of the passage that precedes Polo’s epiphany about Venice: ‘The lake’s surface was hardly wrinkled; the copper reflection of the ancient palace of the Sung was shattered into sparkling glints like floating leaves’, Calvino writes, as Polo realises that ‘Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased’ (86–7). That shattered, copper reflection colours the entire scene, the singers’ voices glinting and sparkling in gentle, hocketing polyphony as they call to one another the names ‘Venice’ and ‘Marco’. And this also brings to the ear a children’s hide-and-seek game of ‘Marco Polo’, its sing-song call-and-response remembered here and yet never really answered, drawing out other dappled, sunlit memories and a longing for childhood like that of Polo for his distant Venice.

But it is in Invisible Cities’ remarkable final scene that the opera most vividly resists any interpretations that equate its meanings with its medium or its materials. Calvino’s text reads:

Cerrone creates a stunning, slow-building climax which draws together not only the economical musical material of the work but also its sense of languorous elegy. While this is certainly an opera interested in place, in cities, in the inferno, it is actually about what is ‘not inferno’ – in recognising it and giving it space, just as Polo suggests, as Calvino’s poetry does, and Cerrone’s music now does in its own way and its own language. And that space really has nothing to do with train stations or headphones or mixing boards or any of that: those are the inferno – distractions, novelties. The opera challenges its listeners to see and hear past these, past the inferno, to resist it and to keep looking and listening to recognise what is greater: space, not place. Invisible Cities is therefore a persuasive example of a marked trend towards the elegiac and meditative in the finest American opera. And readers may thus also wish that Eidsheim returned to this fascinating work in her other discussions, allowing its complexities to resonate throughout her book in relation to the many other questions she raises. Strong new art can withstand much more critical scrutiny than Invisible Cities receives in Sensing Sound.

A similar issue of depth besets Eidsheim’s third chapter, which considers music-as-action and the limitations that notation imposes on our experience of it – one of her most intriguing syntheses, embracing theories of language (she invokes Saussure and Derrida) and a discussion of visual art (Jackson Pollock). In an attempt to explore music beyond sound, Eidsheim recounts two musical experiments in which she acted as co-creator: a ‘chamber opera without vocal cords’ (110) called Body Music (created with Alba Fernanda Triana), and a performance piece focusing on improvisation and experimentation with sound-producing costumes, called Noisy Clothes (created with Elodie Blanchard). Those familiar with contemporary music may find themselves somewhat disgruntled by the discussion of Noisy Clothes, which Eidsheim positions as novel when it is actually rather commonplace: the kind of prefatory exploration pursued by improvising groups as they discover a new sound vocabulary with which to make music. And that same audience may be bemused later in the same chapter by her struggles with notation for Body Music; her description of those struggles is engaging but the questions it raises have been confronted every day by composers since the Middle Ages, and not only by those composers interested in extended techniques. (And, crucially, how is this an opera?)

Both of these accounts would benefit from more context: experimentation at the boundaries of noise, sound and music is now a long tradition, popularised by Cage, and in contemporary music and improvised music these questions (and the ensuing questions of notation) have hardly been neglected, let alone forgotten, by scholarly audiences. Eidsheim’s discussion of her approach to vocal pedagogy is another instance in which readers might enjoy clearer connections to the ‘operatic’ works discussed, or at least to the vocal challenges of those works. While this music-as-action chapter offers some of Eidsheim’s liveliest writing and most interesting interdisciplinary synthesis, it is, again, best understood as reminder, but for whom? The episode of Noisy Clothes highlights, again, a central issue of this book: who is its audience?

But if at times Eidsheim’s book feels limited by its breadth (each chapter could well be its own book) and if its audience is unclear as a result, that is in part because what it is doing is ambitious. This is critical theory that seeks to initiate a broader conversation; future applications by Eidsheim and her successors will determine its place in voice studies and sound studies. Embracing so many aspects of music as experience and action, Eidsheim questions our understandings of music, and she does by selecting (and co-creating) works that question the genre ‘boundaries’ of music, theatre, performance art, and so on; she has not chosen to discuss, for instance, Jake Heggie’s more conservative Moby-Dick. In asking ‘what is singing?’ ‘what is opera?’ and ultimately, ‘what is music?’ Eidsheim’s holistic answer is ‘vibration’. In embracing so much, this quickly becomes slippery; readers may ask, what about the opera-in-my-bathtub is opera?

In this passage Eidsheim implies that just two things are required for a given work to qualify as opera: the participation of an operatically trained singer, and the opinion of that singer that the work is opera. Readers of this journal may wish Eidsheim spent more time on this issue. Her larger project certainly asks ‘what is music?’; it does not really address ‘what is opera?’, a question that her examples pose but which the book seems to defer as it moves on to the broader questions that more interest its author. When confronted by such new, strange works, which often focus our attention on the body (as Eidsheim stresses), should we not ask whether this is still opera? Is it something else? Is it becoming something else?

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In Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body, Jelena Novak examines a number of challenging contemporary operas which, despite their differences, share some features – features which position her work as an answer to some of these very questions. Studying these similarities allows Novak to identify a certain group of works which she calls ‘postoperas’. Novak first introduced this term in Opera in the Age of Media, where she argued that a reinvention of the relationship between dramatic text and music was the hallmark of postoperatic works.Footnote ⁵ Now her understanding has deepened:

Readers may recall H. Marshall Leicester’s unforgettably scathing review in this journal of Jeremy Tambling’s 1996 Opera and the Culture of Fascism (and the more reserved review by Joe K. Law in Opera Quarterly).Footnote ⁶ Worryingly, Novak identifies Tambling’s book as a point of origin for her central term – derived from his ‘post-opera’. Fear not: she is quick to distinguish her work from Tambling’s, and her term from his (and from Nicholas Till’s and Kandis Cook’s use of ‘post-operatic’ and ‘post-operative’):

Perhaps it would have been preferable to use some other term, had not ‘postopera’ been so handy; nonetheless, her book presents a persuasive and interesting case for the existence of the species of opera she identifies here. Novak describes avant-garde opera as a messy, seemingly incoherent space of innovation and peculiarity, from which, nonetheless, particular approaches and trends are clearly emergent. She groups as postoperas those operatic works which are both postmodern and postdramatic (about which more below). In these works, Novak suggests, ‘the relationship between the singing body and the voice becomes a site for creative exploration where the boundaries of the opera world are stretched’ (7–8). Rather than wait to allow threads of creative inquiry to emerge as new works do (or do not) settle into the repertory, she presents a useful, perspicacious critical approach that allows her readers to see a ‘scene’ in its emergence.

Like Eidsheim’s, this is a brief book, but Novak is much more interested in how and why what she calls ‘postopera’ both partakes in and departs from the conventions of ‘opera’, and what new meanings are thereby created for audiences. The relationship between voice and body is a continual focus for Novak. She reads a selection of operas with and against a variety of voice–body theories from a range of disciplines, and pursues four goals, which her book helpfully lists in bullet points:

Four large sections work methodically towards these goals. A first chapter defines her terms: she explains her dissatisfaction with the heading of ‘opera’ for the works of composers such as those she studies here (Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, Steve Reich, Michael van der Aa, Laurie Anderson and so on) and develops a critical terminology that connects these avant-garde music-theatrical works to Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theories of post-dramatic theatre.

A second chapter advances the argument that postopera is characterised by a reinvention of the singing body. Novak outlines a ‘theoretical map’ (13) for her study, proposing that body–voice gap, postopera, body/voice theory and opera studies can intersect to illuminate the creative approaches in these new works and their similarities. She identifies Glass’s Einstein on the Beach as a paradigmatic example of postopera and goes on, in Part II, to study the impact of technology in opera on the voice–body relationship, as exemplified by Michel van der Aa’s One and Reich’s Three Tales. One uses video doubling of its soprano-character to question vocal and physical uniqueness, vocal amputation, identity, embodied/disembodied voice and even the passage of time, as the singer and her video double are ‘interlaced’ in performance (44). Three Tales is a video documentary opera which uses technology to question the role of technology in contemporary society; the opera explores the Hindenburg disaster, atomic testing on Bikini Atoll, and the cloning of Dolly the sheep. ‘Dolly’ opens and ends with the ‘singing’ of the humanoid robot Kismet, and uses talking-head interviews with scientists as its libretto and departure point for the musical material. Thus calling into question the human body, the cloned body and the singing body, and challenging audiences’ expectations of opera itself, Three Tales makes an ideal case study for Novak’s project. The author also examines postoperas in which multiple bodies ‘share’ a single singing voice through video projection and later, through Andriessen’s La Commedia and Laurie Anderson’s Homeland, Novak explores the ‘friction’ (15) that postopera can create between the singing body, voice and perceptions of gender.

Novak positions her work as the correction of an ‘imbalance’, giving the singing body in opera the attention that it deserves, and suggesting that such research ‘signal[s] the importance’ of the voice–body relationship in other cultural practices, from religious rituals to music videos (153–4). As her study unfolds, Novak identifies particular devices through which postopera self-consciously questions the relationship of voice and body. For each device she probes the critical theory which illuminates its use in these works: destabilised identity that questions vocal uniqueness (Adriana Cavarero); the concepts of vocal intruder (Jean-Luc Nancy) and vocal prosthesis (Sandy Stone); the monstrous body (Bojana Kunst, Brigitte Felderer, Mladen Dolar); desynchronisation of voice and body (Carolyn Abbate, Mladen Dolar, Steven Connor, Rick Altman); duplication of body and the use of writing-as-voice (Hélène Cixous, Carolyn Abbate); vocal travesty (Joke Dame); and vocal drag (Michelle Duncan, Shoshana Felman, Judith Butler).

This focus on technique makes Novak’s book relevant to a wide audience: to performers engaged with these works, to composers and librettists who are intrigued by these works’ strengths and weaknesses and what those suggest for their own new work, to musicologists who are curious about opera’s evolution or intrigued by its stranger contemporary offerings, and to audiences (lay or not) who seek guidance either before or after a challenging encounter. Like Eidsheim, Novak writes that her experience of these works prompted her inquiry: she writes charmingly in the introduction of ‘stuttering’ every time she had to write the word ‘opera’ to describe such works (5). Her aim – identifying a new class of works and reading various theories against those works – is skilfully and persuasively accomplished: the characteristics of this class of works most certainly emerge.

The major limitation of Novak’s Postopera is its sample size, which hazards selection-bias; she notes, ‘I selected [these works] because they are self-reflexive engagements with my principal subject’ (150). After such a lucid examination of this small sampling of six ‘ideal-to-type’ works of a very particular kind – as she puts it, ‘high-budget … opera spectacles on European and North American operatic stages since the mid-1990s’ (150) – readers may hope to see Novak next explore postopera’s techniques in works that are not paradigmatic postoperas, and that are at the borders of what could be defined as opera, such as those Eidsheim engaged. And this, happily, provokes further questions. If we can call some such new works postoperas, what would Novak call the rest? What seemingly unusual creative decisions in future works will Postopera explain? What broader critical apparatus for such works emerges from Novak’s approach?

Novak is consistent in situating her case studies and the issues they problematise within the larger traditions of opera; for example, her discussion of vocal travesty and gender in Anderson’s Homeland in relation to the performances of castrati places such ‘novelties’ in historical context and shows that what might seem shocking is a logical and historically legitimated response to current cultural concerns. In her conclusion, Novak places her own work within opera’s much longer tradition of problematising the voice–body relationship, arguing (through Michelle Duncan) that opera is a corporeal cultural practice whose use of the singing body has been absent from ‘pedigreed discourses’ (142).Footnote ⁷ As a collection of thoughtful, insightful ‘readings’ of problematic and challenging contemporary works – works which purposefully frustrate listeners’ expectations and seem often to revel in the discomfort they produce – Postopera is an ambitious exercise in interdisciplinarity, drawing on theoretical apparatuses from other fields to develop new critical theory for the emerging field of contemporary opera studies.

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It is difficult to imagine anyone arguing that opera is not at some sort of crossroads. This turn of both Novak’s and Eidsheim’s scholarly attentions to the ‘scandal’ of the singing body suggests that ‘pedigreed discourse’ (and opera’s wider audience) is no longer so easily scandalised, and that opera scholars are pursuing strange fauna into new territory. Novak is right to claim that, through the concept of postopera, she has found a way to discuss seemingly disparate and elusive works in a highly fragmented and quite turbulent area of new musical development, responding to a need that Björn Heile identified a decade ago. Writing in 2006, Heile suggested that:

Heile also noted that ‘contemporary opera and experimental music theatre have hardly appeared on the horizon’ of opera studies.Footnote ⁹ Yet a decade after Heile’s remarks, Eidsheim feels that music’s multifaceted nature is not yet ‘self-evident’ enough, even if she agrees implicitly with Heile by using contemporary opera to explain it: here again, her book is indeed a reminder.

Heile’s call for scholarship on contemporary opera anticipates both Novak’s and Eidsheim’s books. The issues of discipline he raised may also explain Novak’s discomfort with the status of voice studies and opera studies more broadly. Novak positions her work as pioneering, as helping to establish opera studies as a less-uncertain discipline (here she cites Herbert Lindenberger), but her book’s publication in a series titled ‘Studies in Opera’ (founded in 2011) would seem to affirm the place of her contribution in just such an established field. And Novak’s assertion that ‘voice studies as a separate academic discipline does not exist’ (152) would surely startle Nina Sun Eidsheim. The publication of both books in a year which has seen such a flurry of activity around voice seems already to date Novak’s claim.Footnote ¹⁰ Both Novak and Eidsheim are now figures at the cutting edge of voice studies and they have positioned opera – specifically, contemporary opera – at its heart. Both books engage with difficult new works that resist scholarly taming, and present critical frameworks that suggest the scholarly riches to be discovered in this new territory. Voice studies has emerged. With these new books, we see contemporary opera studies emergent.

Eidsheim and Novak point at something opera used to do and is now doing again: in their studies, opera behaves as novel spectacle: pushing the limits of singing, of what the body can do and the stage can support; pushing even the limits of music, struggling out from the chrysalis, or emerging – brand-new, ink-dripping wet – from the oddest bodies of water. The strange, new creatures that Eidsheim and Novak have found wandering around the wilds of Melodramatos appear awfully like the para-operatic chimeras recently predicted by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker. Following their rather grim report on opera’s environmental conditions and the fate of its Triassic behemoths, Abbate and Parker envision the emergence of such new creatures:

Grand opera may indeed be ossified; the dinosaurs are always the most popular exhibit. These still-beautiful museum-pieces may indeed be increasingly irrelevant to contemporary audiences. But the dinosaurs did not vanish: we have learned from their bones that they changed into birds.

Is Invisible Cities one such rara avis? As composer Mark Adamo jokes: