"Then what is music? Panzera's art answers: a quality of language. But this quality of language in no way derives from the sciences of languages (poetics, rhetoric, semiology), for in becoming a quality, what is promoted in language is what it does not say, does not articulate. In the unspoken appears pleasure, tenderness, delicacy, fulfillment, all the values of the most delicate image-repertoire. Music is both what is expressed and what is implicit in the text: what is pronounced (submitted to inflections) but is not articulated: what is at once outside meaning and non-meaning, fulfilled in that signfying [significance], which the theory of the text today seeks to postulate and to situate." (284)
In reading Barthes' analysis of voice, music, and language, the only music I could think of that distinctly embodied his ideas to me was that of Cocteau Twins. The music of the Cocteau Twins is marked by the vague, syllabic, and Barthes would perhaps say, pronounced expression of Elizabeth Fraser's singing voice. It is a singing that revels in the purely oratorical elements of language without being marked by any conventional idea of "meaning." Her phrases are barely words at all. It is a singing of the body, devoid of any denotative content, yet it speaks without articulating.
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