On Melisma picture | Charlie Looker

On Melisma

As seen in Arcana X , 10/30/20

Melisma, noun, (mə’lizmə)

Plural melismata

A group of notes sung to one syllable of text

Since the beginning of my work as a composer and vocalist, one aspect of my music, which has garnered particular attention, is my use of melisma. While this technique of text-setting is standard to many, if not most, vocal styles across world history, from gospel to Carnatic music, its use in a post-punk context is somewhat eccentric. The best-known precedent for this is Morrissey’s florid, idiosyncratic style, which has indeed been an important touchstone for me. My main sources of melismatic influence, however, have been the sacred music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance and, to a lesser extent, contemporary R&B. In this essay, I will discuss the important roles melisma has played in several compositions from across my catalog, and its philosophical place in my thought in general. In my theorizing of melisma, two important reference points will be my favorite thinkers, Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva. There is no single over-arching system of how I employ melisma. I do, however, have certain ideas about melisma’s implications, which inform my use of the technique in all instances, even as these ideas spin off in very different directions in different instances. The central issue is the dialectic between language and pure sound. If, by the end of the piece, we seem to have wandered far afield, it will be because the aesthetic and theoretical connections I tend to find the most inspiring and fertile are those that many would describe as “a stretch”. And what is melisma itself, if not a stretching?

TEXT-SETTING, ABSTRACTION, AND MATERIALITY

Techniques for the musical setting of text can be laid out as a spectrum of increasing complexity:

Recitative (also known as psalm note in the Christian liturgy, and rap-singing in R&B): one note per syllable, remaining on that single note for entire passages of text, chanted at a speed close to that of ordinary speech.

Syllabic (the most common technique in popular music): one note per syllable, with melodic movement.

Neumatic : single syllables stretched into small groups of two to four notes.

Melismatic: one syllable stretched across many notes.

In European and African American musics, melisma is commonly used to express a moment of heightened emotion, whether it be joy, pain, erotic abandon, or religious ecstasy. In the early Christian liturgy, a site of particularly florid melisma is the final syllable of the Alleluia. This melisma, considered on its own, is known as the jubilus (also called the sequence). As its name and its place in the liturgy suggest, the jubilus is a moment of elevated joy, where the exaltation of God reaches an ecstatic peak. As melisma stretches out a single vowel sound, it effectively suspends the articulation of the word. The vowel opens like a portal within the word and we enter the realm of wordless melody. The jubilus exalts a power that is unnamable and it celebrates this limit of language’s reach. Words ultimately fail to represent, describe, or even adequately praise God, and the jubilus takes us, for a moment, to a place too spiritual for language.

Medieval music has been a colossal influence on my work, and my use of melisma is often consistent with its role in that tradition. It could be said that its every instance in my work is, on some level, an ecstatic reaching beyond words, but one of the most deliberate and overt examples is the final section of "Ten Year Teardrop" (2012), from the Extra Life album, Dream Seeds.

This melisma on ah extends for three minutes, including several repetitions with different endings. In this case, the vowel isn’t technically sung as a syllable within a word, but, coming as it does immediately after the lyric, “All praise be to God”, it functions as a melismatic extension of the line’s last word. Ten Year Teardrop dramatizes a riveting, deeply transformative dream of mine, which included the resurrection of a long-deceased loved one, as well as several archetypal mythological symbols. The dream fully solidified my ability to say that I believe in God. Melisma functions here exactly as it does in the jubilus, exalting the namelessness of God’s glory. It seems fitting that this solemnly joyous outpouring would end the last song of what turned out to be the last Extra Life album.

Having established what melisma isn’t (words), we can consider more closely what it is: pure sound. Writer and gospel music scholar Anthony Heilbut, in his discussion of melisma, describes how “the singer will worry a word to the point of abstraction”.[1] Here, Heilbut attributes abstraction to the pure, non-linguistic musical sound of the melismatic vowel, relative to the words as words. Reviews of my own work have also described my melismatic vocal style as abstract, using the term in a way that is fairly consistent with its common use in visual art. As opposed to so-called representational art, abstract art doesn’t represent anything other than itself. The essence of the work is immanent to the shapes, colors, and the physical materials of the medium itself. I would argue, however, that the use of these terms “abstract” and “representational” in art is inapt. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the word “abstract” as: “expressing a quality apart from an object” (italics mine).[2] In art, representation is abstraction, not its opposite. Representational art uses objective materials to represent something apart those materials. In the case of vocal music, pure sound is the medium’s material; words are what is abstract, in that they use sound symbolically to signify things apart from the sound’s own objective materiality. When a singer uses melisma to open up a word, allowing the irruption of non-signifying sound, the music has become less abstract, more material.

This suspension, and temporary overtaking of the symbolic, verbal, and abstract by the material is essential to the sacred function of the jubilus. In my conception, it is not that God’s glory is “above” the grasp of words, but in fact it is “below” it. The sacred does not lie in a rarefied, higher plane, more abstract than language. Rather, it lies immanent to the lowly, less abstract domain of the material, the purely sonic. My view of religion and the sacred is influenced by Georges Bataille’s concept of base materialism, which he links to the spirituality of the Gnostics. Man’s imperfect, mundane realm of structures, symbols, and ideas aren’t redeemed by a transcendental, higher, universal idea from above, but are subverted, corrupted, and undone from below by a sacred, material baseness.[3] To refer to the wordless vocalizing of melisma as “pure” music is perhaps misleading. Its sacred purity lies in its pure materiality, untouched by the symbolic, the intellectual, the abstract. The Gnostic view is typically paradoxical: matter redeems by its purely unredeemed baseness.

In "Ten Year Teardrop", the role of melisma, and the ideas of words versus pure sound, abstraction versus materiality, retain some of the more Christian sense of redemption. An example of where my text-setting techniques serve Bataille’s more Gnostic sensibility is "Black Sun" (2018) from my orchestral album Simple Answers. Lyrically, the song deals with depression, and I use the archetypal trope of being turned to stone to evoke Freud’s death drive. Beyond any simplistic idea of suicidality, Freud describes the death drive as the organism’s desire to return to an inorganic state.[4] Because the very first organic life arose out of inorganic matter, the death drive is a kind of primal nostalgia, a longing to be opened back up and fused with the plane of inanimate material from which we are originally descended.

"Black Sun"’s Freudian theme of returning, in death, to pure matter is expressed both by the text, and by the text-setting techniques I employ. The song begins with the speaker describing the feeling of being turned to stone, pulled by the death drive toward the inorganic. The text here is set syllabically, which renders the lyrics perfectly intelligible and foregrounded. In this non-melismatic setting, the abstract signifying of language is undisturbed, and the speaker is able to clearly articulate his depressed state. Despite the deadened affect of the speaker, and his desire to disappear, the verbal clarity of the syllabic text-setting makes him very present.

There is a fundamental link here between speaking and being, or being alive. The work of psychoanalyst/philosopher Julia Kristeva, which has remained an inspiration to me for years, relies heavily on the concept of the “speaking subject”, which she inherits from Lacan and develops uniquely. The idea is that the child defines itself as a stable subject, with a demarcated boundary between inside and outside, by mastering speech, or the symbolic. To speak is to make oneself discrete from the world, from the maternal body, from all outside matter. In the first half of "Black Sun", while the speaker longs to lose his boundary between self and world (to die, and return to matter), his ability to articulate this desire in song, to speak clearly with syllabic text-setting, is key to what marks him as still alive. Speaking maintains the boundary between the speaking subject and the inorganic materiality of the stone, and the syllabic (non-melismatic) text-setting with which he speaks maintains the boundary between his words and the pure sonic materiality of free melody.

Four minutes into the piece, there is a sudden upward shift in tempo, vocal register, and complexity of the vocal lines. The section opens with the repeated, “Send me a melody”, followed by several longer lines where the last syllable of “melody” is extended into various melismata. Viewed one way, this plea for a melody could be directed at God, the wordless vocalizing expressing the unnamable mystery of his power, as in "Ten Year Teardrop". However, I conceive of melisma’s role here differently, less as an expression of God’s power to deliver the subject from the death drive, and more as a figure for death itself.

In the song’s beginning, the depressed speaker articulates his suicidal desire to be turned into material; now, in the second section, his singing is being transformed from the verbal signifying of syllabically-set text into the non-signifying material of melisma.[5] The lyrics and their setting both describe and illustrate the shattering of the symbolic, and the assumption of absolute primacy by melody, pure sonic material. This dissolution, or at least disruption, of verbal signification by melisma brings the death of speech into speaking. If mastery of the symbolic is how the speaking subject demarcates and maintains his identity, then melisma’s flirtation with the death of the symbolic, the irruption of non-symbolic melodic materiality, gives our depressed speaker a taste of what he wants. This brush with symbolic death is redemptive for the speaker. The flat, depressive affect of his earlier syllabic singing gives way to highly animated, rhythmically active melismata. The depressive subject, with his emotionally numb, yet functionally signifying speech, is revived by melisma’s flirtation with the material, inorganic plane he longs to merge with in death. With respect to speech, and to speaking as constitutive of a subject’s stable identity, melisma here brings a sacred taste of death into life.

CONTINUITY OF EXISTENCE

Bataille writes, “We are discontinuous beings… but we yearn for our lost continuity… The quest for continuity of existence… signifies an essentially religious intention”.[6] By “discontinuous”, Bataille means that the default condition of human subjectivity is to be sealed off from the greater totality of all that exists. The impulse of religion (from the Latin religare, to bind together) is to fuse us with that primal continuity by erasing, or at least destabilizing, the boundaries of the self. From the Bataillean perspective, the Freudian death drive has a religious quality. Melisma is a fitting technique to render this sense of dark religiosity because, like the death drive, melisma also seeks the continuity of being. It does this both on the level of language and, more immediately, of the body itself.

I’ve noted that melisma, by definition, must occur as a vowel sound. This might seem too obvious to require highlighting, as the purpose of melisma is melodic extension, melody is made of sustained pitches, and pitches can only be sung as vowels.[7] However, if the only function of melisma were to turn language into pure sound, this could be achieved just as well using a word’s consonants, perhaps by shortening the vowels and over-enunciating non-pitched sounds like p or t. This would be a percussive effect, rather than a melodic one. The melismatic vowel, however, is the better vehicle for the singer’s religious impulse toward the continuity of existence because it is literally a continuous movement of air through the body. Consonants are discrete, finite events, closing off air flow to the body, sealing the body more tightly, making it more “discontinuous” with existence’s totality; the vowel, on the other hand, opens the body to the outside, to the continuum of matter. If the “spiritual” comes from the Latin spiritus, (breath), I don’t view it so much as God’s breath filling our bodies with its divine substance above the material world, but rather as our own breathing opening our bodies to fuse with the sacred continuity of matter.

Melisma’s relationship to language and to (non-)signification also engages Bataille’s sacred continuity of existence. To name something, to speak of it, to represent it with language, is to separate it from existence’s greater continuity. Language and thought divide the continuum of existence into discrete things, and enter them into various relationships, while maintaining the seal of each thing’s discontinuity. In some traditions, the intellect has been associated with the image of the sword, thought being a faculty of dividing. As melisma opens up the word and breaks the seal of its abstract symbolic function, it returns the word’s sonic material to the greater undifferentiated realm of non-signifying sound. The continuous melismatic vowel could extent infinitely. In "Black Sun", we discussed melisma as speech’s death drive in music; this drive is toward existential continuity that destabilizes both the seal of the singer’s body and the seal of the word as a signifier of something discrete.

EXCESS

“There is in nature… a movement which always exceeds the bounds… Indeed it is by definition that which can never be grasped... But through the excess in him, that God whom we should like to shape into an intelligible concept never ceases, exceeding this concept, to exceed the limits of reason.” – Bataille [8]

Another poetic element associated with melisma in my work, which is very much in line with Bataille’s concept of the sacred, is a sense of excess. With the band name Extra Life, I was consciously evoking overbrimming vitalism. While some have interpreted it as referring to an afterlife, a higher, second life to come, to me it was always more about the joyous and terrible (in both the antiquated and modern senses of the word) idea and experience of extravagant expenditure. The Extra Life piece "Voluptuous Life" (2010) is a hedonist anthem, calling for the Dionysian spilling of wine, tears, sperm, money, and vomit, in a total unleashing of all flows, whether they be libidinal, emotional, financial, or simply aesthetic.

The melisma on “flow” is very clear in its programmatic function. Not only is the melismatic vowel more fluid than syllabic singing on an aesthetic level, melisma also represents an overflowing excess with respect to language. Melisma disrupts the symbolic function of the word with a sonic materiality, which is superfluous to the system of signification. If language, as a system of relationships between discrete, abstract things, is a kind of economy, then melisma’s materiality is a wasteful, non-recuperable expense, like an extravagant gift, spilling outside the system of exchange.

Bataille’s concept of the erotic, which he closely links to the sacred and to the death drive, is based in excess. The lyric “Too much life, so much life that we die” evokes the Bataillean sense of an overflowing of vitality that can’t be contained within the subject, and a kind of pulsion toward the hydraulic release of death, the organism’s opening, returning to continuity with the inorganic. "Black Sun" depicted the depressive’s lugubrious slouching toward this fusion with the outside; "Voluptuous Life" is its manic, excessive counterpart. Hedonism’s excess vitalism pushes the subject toward the continuity of death, whether as the little death of orgasm, heart attack, or financial ruin; melisma’s sonic excess bursts apart the word, flowing back into the continuum of sound.

POWER

Melisma has also been a vehicle for me to express ideas and feelings surrounding human power dynamics. To consider power, especially in any hierarchical formation, is inherently political. However, this aspect of my work has never been a commitment to an ideological alignment or agenda. My thoughts on power are ambivalent and as a songwriter, I often inhabit several different perspectives within one piece. To engage this fraught psycho-political area, I have employed melisma in several ways in the past.

"The Next Stab" (2004), written for my very short-lived project Seductive Sprigs (two tenors and two electric guitars), uses the entire spectrum of text-setting techniques, from recitative to melisma, to fortify the text’s narrative in very clear, specific ways. Written in the second person, but referencing my own experience, the song describes a scene of childhood cruelty, where your friend forces you into a cardboard box, seals it with duct tape, and stabs the box repeatedly with scissors. The opening lyrics wryly describe a naïve optimism about human nature which, under the banner of Reason, attempts to deny the unavoidable reality of sadistic violence.

The first few lines of text are mostly set syllabically, with a few neumatic moments (two or three notes on a syllable). In the spectrum of text-setting complexity I laid out earlier, these techniques fall in a middle ground, more mobile than recitative, without venturing into the open realm of melisma. With syllabic and neumatic setting, text is clearly intelligible, with a melody that is active, but still follows cadences similar to normal speech.

The clarity of this text-setting serves the “reasonable” perspective put forth by the opening lines. Your trust in your friend not to hurt you has yet to be betrayed. Your sense that people are mostly in control of their violent urges, and your faith that the primal will to dominate can at least be suspended in friendship is intact. In the syllabic singing of the text, signification prevails, with melody serving the function of language, not yet threatened by melisma’s pure, non-signifying sound. Aesthetically, linguistically, and with respect to the social outlook of the speaker in the narrative, the piece begins in a stable, “functional” realm.

Your entering into the cardboard box is a turning point in both the narrative and the music. The characters’ relationship of domination and subjugation is formed, and this power dynamic is rendered with a shift in the text-setting. The consistent syllabic setting of the piece’s opening splits into a polarized oscillation between recitative (psalm note) and melisma. The lines describing your confinement in the box are set as rapid-fire psalm note chanting, while your friend’s freedom is elaborated with extended melismata.

The programmatic function of juxtaposing the two starkly contrasting techniques is to evoke imprisonment versus mobility. In psalm note singing, the chanting is locked into the repetition of only a few notes, strict harmonic confinement, not stretching out into what one would even call melody. Melisma, on the other hand, roams with complete melodic freedom, never even repeating a note consecutively, just as our tale’s aggressor freely moves around the room outside the box. The recitative here is also faster than the melisma, its hectic sixteenth notes pitted against the melisma’s comparatively leisurely triplet eighths. You are panicked and sputtering in the dark while your friend paces arrogantly outside.

Beyond your physical imprisonment and its mirror in the psalm notes’ strict harmonic and registral limitation, there is another level of confinement at work in the piece’s text-setting. With respect to language and song, and relative to melisma, recitative is a confinement within pure signification. Here, pitch, rhythm, and pure sound in general are subservient to the signifying function of the words, even more so than in syllabic setting. Language, notoriously unable to represent reality as it truly is, and yet the “house of being” where we dwell, is a kind of prison. [9] Whether we are attempting to name the power of God in his unrepresentable highness, or to describe Bataille’s continuity of being in its sacred, material baseness, language spells impotence either way. It is the abstract, the intellectual, unable to touch the terrible power of existence’s totality. Speaking is the cage of the all-too-human, who, with his significations, representations, and abstractions, remains powerless in the face of Life’s nameless outside. [10] Outside of the box, the tyrant roams; outside of the verbal and melodic confines of recitative’s verbal signifying, melisma flows.

In my discussion of melisma so far, I have attributed to its sacredness a certain threatening aspect. Its status as sonic materiality threatens the function of the word as an abstract signifier. Its physical production as uninterrupted breath threatens the body’s boundaries (more so than other vocal styles). Its sense of excess threatens the system of language as an economy. In those religious and erotic contexts, however, these “threats” are desirable and beautiful transgressions of boundaries. Even in "Black Sun", where melisma represented a flirtation with death, it provided a redemptive, ritual fulfilment of the death drive, reanimating the depressed subject with a taste of the death he longed for.

In "The Next Stab", however, melisma represents something actually threatening in the more standard negative sense of the word. The realm outside of the box isn’t tempting you to dissolve into its sacred materiality, nor is it some erotic domain of ego-less ecstasy which our overflowing excess of desire pushes us toward. The unnamable outside, linked to melisma, is a source of real violence. In this song, you don’t want to die or dissolve. You want to live and speak. You cower inside the box, inside language, hysterically stammering out your verbal barrage. The recitative is a desperate, vain scrambling to signify, in the face of what always trumps words, thoughts, and abstractions: the power of pure action. The sacred outside of language, which in other pieces of mine has meant God’s glory, or the material world’s undifferentiated continuum, in this piece means domination. Free from saying or thinking anything, the aggressor’s melisma flows like his pure action, force, and will, his violent movement through/as the continuity of being. In comparison, words are the domain of the weak.

THE JEW

This journey through my use and theorizing of melisma has taken us from the relatively traditional and familiar into far more idiosyncratic territory. Continuing from my use of text-setting to express themes of power in "The Next Stab", we arrive at one of my personal obsessions: antisemitism, the figure of the Jew, and the complexities of Jewish consciousness. Jewishness, as perceived by both Jews and gentiles, both positively and negatively, correctly and falsely, occupies a conflicted place in my intellectual and emotional ecology. The entanglement of Jewishness with all of the ideas discussed thus far has been the subject of several of my songs over the years. Here, I will focus on a case where I specifically use melisma to engage those entanglements.

"Ritual Fire" (2018), from the Simple Answers record, addresses and expresses self-directed Jewish antisemitism. The song takes the idea of language as weakness encoded in the text-setting of "The Next Stab", articulates it overtly, and ups the ante by racializing it.

Lyrically, this passage attributes true masculine power to wordlessness and thoughtlessness. In his essay Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco diagnoses a fundamental psychological aspect of fascism as

“… the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.” [11]

The actions of the truly powerful man are pure forces, uncorrupted by abstractions. He is “whole” in that thoughts do not divide his world into discrete, discontinuous things. As discussed earlier, ideas and language as representations are barriers to the continuity of being, to totality’s wholeness. In the jubilus of the Christian liturgy, or in my own Ten Year Teardrop, the inability of language to represent God’s unnamable glory is celebrated with ecstatic reverence. Conversely, in "The Next Stab", and even more explicitly in "Ritual Fire", language is mocked as weakness, from the point of view of a superior, supra-linguistic man, who wields the unnamable power of the continuity of existence.

The phrase “danger and play” here comes from Nietzsche, as his definition of the true man’s desire. The placement of the melisma on “play” is important and deliberate. [12] The unfettered actions of Nietzsche’s übermensch, in all their violence and cruelty, are above all cheerful and playful. [13] Play exists outside the intellect and its confining gravitas. Its dangerous power is in its “pointlessness”, its non-sense. A game may have rules but play itself is free, outside systems, or in the system’s gaps. Language and the intellect work, both in the sense of functioning and of labor and productivity. Melisma plays, disrupting, fleeing, and dancing outside, and in excess of the seriousness of the rules of signification, like the übermensch’s unthinking movement.

This kind of play, this sacred levity, is presented as something the Jew is incapable of. One need not be a fascist, or even an anti-Semite, to understand the stereotype (and reality) of Jews as a highly verbal, intellectual people, a people of the book. In Eco’s analysis of fascism, the Jew becomes a lightning rod for distrust of the intellect and contempt for the impotence of abstraction and language in the face of pure action, real power, and play. The Jew inside all of us, with his weak and weakening words and ideas, must be destroyed, just as words themselves face their Final (dis-)Solution in the non-abstract, material power of melisma’s playful movement.

THE SYMBOLIC AND THE SEMIOTIC

The strange conceptual nexus of language, the intellect, fascism, Jewishness, and music, which motivates my use of melisma in "Ritual Fire" and elsewhere, is a configuration which has been with me for some time, but for years I only sensed it in the most vague, inchoate form. The ideas became crystallized for me, and my intuitions corroborated, by Julia Kristeva’s work. Kristeva’s analysis of the work and life of author Louis-Ferdinand Céline has been particularly resonant for me. Céline was a notorious anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer, and Kristeva explains his racial animus as stemming from a

“… rage against the symbolic, which… culminates in what Céline hallucinates and knows to be their foundation and forebearer—Jewish monotheism. When one follows his associations of ideas, his anti-Semitism [is a] sweeping away [of]… abstraction, reason, and adulterated power, considered emasculating.” [14]

Kristeva’s assessment of Céline is that he harbors great contempt for intellectualism, and that his antisemitism functions as a sublimation of this contempt. This is similar to the fascist psychology diagnosed by Umberto Eco, and expressed in "Ritual Fire". Kristeva never endorses Céline’s racial hatred whatsoever as an actual viewpoint; she is concerned with how it functions as an expression of his deeper ambivalence toward language and the symbolic, a conflict which she celebrates as central to Céline’s brilliance. In various letters, when he isn’t maniacally railing against international Jewry, Céline expresses his struggle with his own artistic medium:

”… to resensitize language, to have it throb more than reason—SUCH WAS MY AIM… That doesn't happen without imparting to thought a certain melodious, melodic twist…”

“At the precise point where emotion turns into sound, on that articulation between body and language, on the catastrophefold (sic) between the two, there looms up my great rival, music’." [15]

Like so many writers, not to mention philosophers, Céline expresses an almost jealous admiration for music, as an artform that exists in the liminal zone between language and body, sublimely negotiating the abstract and the material, reason and throbbing. Language’s reasoning is its signifying, while its throbbing is something less abstract, more material, dangerous, erotic, and playful. Céline states that for language to throb, not only the words, but thought itself must become melodic. It must play. Like my depressive speaker in "Black Sun", who pleads for a melody, both Céline and Kristeva understand “rhythm and music as being the only way out, the ultimate sublimation of the unsignifiable”. [16]

Kristeva’s analysis of Céline’s work and thought is based, to a large extent, in her concepts of the symbolic versus the semiotic. As discussed earlier, the symbolic is the Lacanian idea of the space where the child enters the world of language, and forms himself as a speaking subject. Mastery of the symbolic is how one establishes one’s own discrete identity, one’s “discontinuity”, to use Bataille’s term. The semiotic, on the other hand, is a non-symbolic current of rhythms, tonality, gestures, and affects, which runs through language, but operates within the “gaps” of its symbolic functioning. It exists before language, rooted in far more primal, biological experiences of the pre-verbal infant, or the unborn, when the body itself has not yet been separated from the mother, from the continuity of existence. It is a more archaic flow within language, in dialectical tension with the symbolic.

“… the semiotic functions within signifying practices as the result of a transgression of the symbolic… It requires the symbolic break to obtain the complex articulation we associate with it in musical and poetic practices…” [17]

For Kristeva, the semiotic lies in the musicality of everyday speech, and is subversive quality with respect to signification. Speaking need not unravel into melisma, or even be sung at all, to be destabilized by pure sound, rhythm, and pitch. All speech is always musical. If symbolic mastery through language is how the subject solidly defines their discrete identity, then Kristeva’s idea of the semiotic means that identity is never completely stable. It is disrupted at all times by the musical materiality of semiotic flows. This analysis of abstraction versus materiality in speech is quite a bit more radical than my own, as mine has focused on singing, which is by definition musical, with melisma being a very obvious extreme endpoint of the aesthetic spectrum. Kristeva identifies the less obvious, but ever-present semiotic, musical undercurrent of all language, explicating its radical implications for subjectivity itself. When I see colossal thinkers such as Kristeva or Céline attributing to music such dangerous, elusive, far-reaching power, I feel proud and fortunate to have been called to such a sublime medium.

MELISMA IN MY CURRENT AND FUTURE WORK

In a sense, any vocal music is a mixed medium, at least relative to purely instrumental music. While I consider myself a composer way before a writer or a poet, and way before any kind of intellectual, the process behind most of my best work has begun with writing or harvesting text. The symbolic dimension of language in song is a dramatic sense of human presence, if not my own, then a speaker, character, or narrator. Lyrics tether the musical work to an aura of subjectivity, the individual; and, however simple or emotionally-based the lyrical content might be, text is always on some level intellectual compared to pure sound, simply to the extent that language, as I’ve argued, is inherently abstract. In various examples from my work, I have shown how this realm of speaking subjectivity and the intellect can be a safe, stable home, a place of devout humility, a condition of weakness to be scorned, or a prison to be fled. In reflecting on all of these examples together, and in reflecting on my own foregoing analyses themselves, I notice something consistent: while melisma disrupts or suspends the symbolic, my discussion here has focused on the ways in which I use that disruption to ultimately serve the meaning of the text. Melisma may be a non-signifying, purely sonic, semiotic element, but when I use it to signify the idea of non-signification, it is still beholden to the text, to representation. The lyrics’ complex systems of meaning often include the idea of meaninglessness, which melisma serves to represent. While melisma’s materiality continually haunts and problematizes the abstract symbolizing of the lyrics, that haunting itself is often key to the abstract ideas the lyrics are articulating. My melismatic excursions programmatically feed back into what the songs are “about”.

Of course, there is the other side of my use of melisma: text as simply a springboard toward the joy and power of writing pure music. Beginning my compositional process with lyrics belies the extent to which the text is just a pretext for my working with sound. When I am launched by the initial text into melisma, or further out into extended instrumental writing, my inspiration never remains held in the orbit of serving the original meaning of the text. Lyrics might come first in the process, but composition as pure sound, melody, and rhythm become the fundament, after the fact.

Over the years, my lyrical content has changed. So much of the Extra Life and Seaven Teares songbooks were rooted in autobiography and inner life, fortified by some philosophy. Across Psalm Zero’s trajectory, and in Simple Answers, my lyrics became less personal, more political, outwardly directed, and overtly intellectual. However, I’ve grown tired of my personal narratives and dramatizing my own mishegas (despite how good I am at it), as well as “making people think”. I have also lost interest in consciously and explicitly responding to the world outside. The political and social fabric has reached a level of complexity and fragmentation which I now find uninspiring to even attempt to address directly in song. In my current and upcoming work, I’m consciously moving toward far more vague, cryptic lyrical expressions, and even more importantly, simply writing less text. I am stripping my lyrics down to only what is necessary to open the floodgates of pure musical material. This is not to say that my new music will be so overtaken by rampant melisma as to have an entirely new quality. But the weight is shifting.

There may be an apparent irony to ending this dense philosophical and technical disquisition on my work with the announcement of a creative move toward the sidelining of text, personal reflection, and intellect. However, this is a part of why I’m writing more essays now; moving forward, these essays may branch out away from my own music, because, as my music increases power by shedding much of its text, there will probably be less and less to say about it.

[1] Interview with Mike Katzif for NPR, January 11, 2007

[2] Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary, 2020

[3] Two other influences on my thoughts along these lines are Fred Moten’s work on the aesthetics of the black radical tradition, and various alchemical and Hermetic writings, as analyzed by Carl Jung.

[4] Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p.308

[5] “When the symbols shatter” is a reference to Death in June’s 1992 album, But What Ends When the Symbols Shatter?. The band’s notorious ongoing flirtation with Nazi aesthetics connects with Simple Answers’ recurring themes of Jewish consciousness, including the song title "Black Sun"’s referencing of the Nazi Schwarze Sonne symbol. How all this relates to melisma in my work is elaborated later in the essay.

[6] Georges Bataille, Erotism, p. 13, 16

[7] Technically, this is not phonetically accurate. When I say “consonants” here, it’s really shorthand for the sub-groups plosives (such as p or b) and voiceless fricatives (such as s or F). One could sing melismatically with consonants such as voiced fricatives (such as V or z) or nasals (such as m or n). A melisma on m is simply humming.

[8] Erotism, p.41

[9] Martin Heidegger, Being in Time, p.217

[10] My reference points for these ideas include Immanuel Kant and Nick Land

[11] Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism, p.6

[12] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p.48 , Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy.

[13] To use interchangeably Nietzsche’s übermensch and simply the “true man” is sloppy, as the übermensch is a post-human figure, yet to even exist. But I’m comfortable eliding them here, as Nietzsche’s “danger and play” can easily be attributed to both, and the “true man” seems like his idea of the least weak of a human we can hope for at the moment.

[14] Powers of Horror, p.178

[15] Powers of Horror, p.190, or Letter to Hindus, May 29, 1947, L’Hern

[16] Powers of Horror, p.23

[17] Revolution in Poetic Language, p.118