Francesca Verunelli: Songs & Voices

In the work for electric ensemble »Five Songs (Kafka’s sirens)«, written for C Barré ensemble, the title alludes to Franz Kafka’s story »The Silence of the Sirens«–but this is not a literary reference. In fact, Kafka’s story isn’t so much about telling an alternative history (that the sirens didn’t sing) as it is about suggesting a paradox, insinuating a doubt of perspective. Rather, it’s this–a possible paradoxical perspective–that the title alludes to.

 

It’s a form articulated in five instrumental »songs«, in which the poetic question that imposed itself on me was: what’s left of singing when the voice disappears? What is the essence of singing, and how can we perceive singing when no one sings? This presence of song in the absence of a singing voice was the driving force behind instrumental sound research, a kind of aporia that–like Kafka’s paradox- aimed to push back the limits of the instrumental »visible«.

 

This first question naturally begs a question that is in some ways the opposite: what is the voice without the song? The voice for its pure presence, stripped of its orphic function? The voice as instrumental body, and as body tout court, the voice as carnal presence that precedes and surpasses speech. A kind of a potropaic object that we would know without understanding. Exploring this other half of the question prompted me to integrate a vocal ensemble into this musical journey, which thus takes place between these two extremes.

 

Extreme absence and extreme presence, singing in the voice and the voice without singing. Between these two focal points of paradox lies perhaps what so attracts Ulysses to approach the sirens. This journey is structured into several moments that explore different aspects of the voice as body, the voice as instrumental body, the voice as song that inhabits the body and precedes speech, and the voice that, by embodying speech, transforms it, cancels it out and surpasses it.

 

All this is transparent in the myth of the sirens, as Kafka points out. The very idea of migration and passage is strongly inscribed in the myth of the sirens. We return to mermaids as an image of the limit of singing and sound itself (Kafka’s mermaids owe their horror to their silence, which could have broken even Ulisses’ resistance). Mermaids always stand at a crucial point, marking a decisive passage. Passage between the living and the dead, passage between the known world and the unknown (among others).

 

Indeed, »the siren myth has also served, among other functions, to enable a discourse on space, and in particular on the notions of limit, frontier and margin. These categories are both analogous and different in their various meanings: the limit is the place where something ends, but also where something begins, which makes reality measurable and therefore meaningful; the border, on the other hand, presupposes a division, but also a relationship between the same and the different, between the self and the stranger. And this is precisely where the category of the margin comes in, defining that which is neither on this side nor on the other of the border, the no-man’s-land, the place of passage, of transformation.

 

«This work is a musical »tomb«, a funerary monument, an attempt to pay humble homage to the memory of my sister, who died prematurely in tragic circumstances. So, while »A valediction for her sister« for voice and detuned guitar inherits the structure of a love song, it is in fact rather the absence of any possible song, the loss of its very possibility.

(Francesca Verunelli)