There’s an Intimacy That Comes with Working with the Voice

Juliet Fraser (JF): I think the body is an element that we sometimes forget – though, of course, we don’t forget it when we are it. We become more aware of it as we get older. I was much less aware of my body in my 20s as a singer. Because I didn’t have formal training, I just expected it to do the things that it did – and it did do them, because we have this elasticity when we’re young. But, increasingly, I’m aware of the negotiation that goes on between my creative practice and my body. 

Laura Bowler (LB): It’s certainly something I’m deeply aware of in my practice, and have been particularly conscious of it while learning “FFF” again. I hadn’t performed it since 2018, and I’m not as fit as I was then [laughs], so it was interesting to revisit it in what essentially feels like a different body. That shift inevitably had a lot of different impacts on the voice and the piece itself. But that was always part of why I wrote the piece the way it was: to place those tensions on the voice and put the body and voice in extreme circumstances. That was part of the exploration. 

That interest comes from Jerzy Grotowski. I trained with someone who had trained with Grotowski. I worked with him for two years in physical theatre and voice practice. Before that, I mostly just composed all the time. Most of my vocal practice stems from that school of thought. It’s predominantly an exploration of the body and, in turn, how whatever I do with my body affects the voice. Finding different voices through different body parts has been a key part of my practice. When I worked with Jennifer Walshe – a long time ago – I had to train as a boxer. That was another fascinating experience. After training for six months, I had a new body! Again, it affected my voice in so many different ways. It felt like I was working with a completely different instrument. My body had developed muscles that weren’t there before, and that, in turn, changed everything about my vocal approach. 

JF: It seems to me that training as a boxer, or perhaps a Grotowski training as well, is much more holistic in the way that it views the body. Whereas what I’ve experienced in terms of traditional vocal training is that it’s either incredibly specific about this bit of the body [gestures at larynx], or the tongue or resonance, but rarely about a fully embodied state. Or if you’re doing movement work, then it’s again very specific: it’s about a particular gaze on the body as a performing instrument. What we lack in traditional classical music training as vocalists is this holistic approach to voice and body. 

LB: The training of singers in opera traditions – and the physicality that it often manifests – can be particularly encouraged in female performers. I always find it deeply disturbing whenever I’m on a panel watching young female student opera singers perform scenes and I notice a generic quality to the movement that is taught: an emphasis on grace and beauty. I think that’s probably why I enjoy creating ugly things – ugly things in the female body – on stage.

JF: That makes me think about another opposite: the fact that the body isn’t talked about at all if you’re a choral singer, which is where I started. You put these 25 bodies on stage, and then just talk about vibrato and intonation and how the sopranos are too loud!

LB: One of the things I find fascinating about you as a performer is how deeply theatrical your performance quality is, even though that’s not necessarily where your practice originates. I just wanted to ask you about your relationship with theatre in your practice and your relationship with character.

JF: I don’t think I’ve ever spent this much time thinking about either. I mean, it feels very uncomfortable as a question because I don’t think of myself as a theatrical performer. Maybe I think of myself as a theatrical person because I think I’m a bit ridiculous, but not as a theatrical performer. What I perceive as my strength is not that, so I don’t feel like I belong in a theatrical world. I have never had any theatrical training. I come from the business of sound. So I’m still determining what you see when you see me on stage.

LB: One of the things that I perceive is that there is no artifice; it feels very real. That’s what it is for me that makes me feel like there’s a true inhabiting, a deeply theatrical inhabiting of the work.
JF: I don’t like artifice; it makes me feel very uncomfortable. Maybe that’s why I’ve had no theatrical training. I tried to do a production of “Oliver Twist” at school when I was about 14. It’s a bit hazy – because it’s a bit traumatic – but I think I had to play Oliver’s dead mother. I don’t remember having to say or do anything, yet I was completely freaked out by the task [laughs], so I pulled out! The one time I did a staged opera, fortunately I was working with a director who was focused on finding the truth – not on pretending to be something. Otherwise, that wouldn’t have worked at all. 

And then character, I can connect to that more. But I always have to get to character through the material. The pieces that have worked best for me are Georges Aperghis’s “Récitations”, which were pivotal. Of course, there’s nothing in those pieces about a character, story or narrative; there aren’t any instructions. You’re just dealing with musical material that has a character. That was the revelation for me: you’re dealing with musical gestures that suddenly tell you something. There’s this weird séance moment where the character emerges because you’re trying to get the notes and rhythms right, and then you understand what’s going on. It’s as if Aperghis has whispered in your ear. That’s always the route I take: to let the material tell me the character.

LB: It’s interesting because what you have said about dealing in sound as being your primary focus is the opposite of me. Because mine is dealing in theatre, and I have somehow become a composer [laughs]. It’s very much how I approach everything in composition – always thinking about the theatre within it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s within the ensemble, the soloist, a minute gesture of a single player, or any context. I always say that whatever might be written in an instrumental line is as much about the sound it makes as how it looks. The physicality of it is as important as the sound.

JF: That’s why I like your work – because the two are connected. I don’t feel like you fray at the edges or that there’s any artifice in the relationship between the two. Given that you are a vocalist and often write for the voice, what excites you about the general qualities and potential functions of the voice, and how does that differ from the specific idiosyncrasies of individual singers?

LB: For me – and this wouldn’t be true for every composer or every person, I’m sure – the general thing, when considering the voice or writing for the voice, is breath – it’s all related to breath. That’s the only general rule for me. Everything else is unique to every single person you work with. Whenever I write for others, the answer is simple: get to know the person. Spend lots of time with them, ask them lots of questions, and then you should be able to write for them. Don’t think about it as a specific bracket, register, range, or any of that. Just think about the person. That’s probably why I like writing for the voice so much. Although that is part of my practice when writing for instrumentalists as well, it’s not the same. There’s an intimacy that comes with working with the voice that I’ve never quite found when working with an instrumentalist, which is fascinating. And, of course, there’s the aspect of text, which is a huge part of all my work. I suppose consent is the difference between writing for myself versus writing for someone else. I can do whatever I want to myself – I can put myself through whatever I want to – but that’s not something I can do when writing for others. Collaborating with someone becomes a very vulnerable space within which to work. Although I have explored aspects of more extreme practice with certain singers who have specifically asked me to do so, there’s still an element of care that has to be there. That care element just goes out the window when I write for myself. 

JF: Text or words can be such a barrier and such a point of stress for composers. Obviously, you have quite a positive relationship.

LB: When I write, I spend maybe two-thirds of the writing time reading lots of books on the subject matter and just writing out passages from the books, all colour-coded, of course [laughs]. Then, I filter through all that text and build a collage libretto out of it. And it’s normally not poetic at all. I gather material, and usually I am drawn to academic texts because it feels less problematic manipulating it and implanting my own artistic ideas on them. It’s because there’s so much text that I love – like Samuel Beckett, for instance; I would never set it even if the Beckett Foundation let me. I just couldn’t. It’s already there; it’s already music anyway.

So, working with text not designed to be looked at or used in that way gives me much freedom to play with it. It also builds wonderful relationships with the writers who are deeply excited that you will do something creative with their text. That kind of excitement wouldn’t normally happen. Normally, you’d have many arguments if it’s a poet or a writer – understandably. Even if I’m writing works that don’t feature text, I still go through a similar process. 

I recently wrote an opera, and the text was by the playwright Laura Lomas; it was a really beautiful text, and that became quite a conversation because there were sections of the work where I had intentionally written with multiple layers of the text overlapping each other. And she was very concerned about the fact that the text would become intelligible. Still, I was trying to convince her that that was the point, that I was trying to manifest this sense of overwhelming in the piece. It’s more about the visceral, what the voice can evoke through that, and what the multiple voices, in this case, can evoke through that layering, that then you no longer need “the text”. What is then the text function in a libretto? I talk to my husband a lot about this. He is a librettist, convinced that the words are irrelevant in a libretto because the composer is the only person they matter to. That’s it. We argue about it a lot, but I think that’s probably because I agree with him, but I just don’t want to let it go. 

Juliet Fraser is a soprano, founder and artistic director of the eavesdropping festival as well as co-director of all that dust, an independent label for new music.

Laura Bowler is a composer, vocalist and lecturer in composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Royal Northern College of Music – specialising in theatre, multidisciplinary work and opera.

The conversation took place on 22 March 2023 as part of the Library of MaerzMusik, a space for knowledge exchange and new encounters. The festival programme also included performances by Fraser of her programme “Variations on a Voice”, with works for voice and electronics by Cassandra Miller, Lawrence Dunn and Rebecca Saunders, and of Øyvind Torvund’s “Plans for Future Operas”, as well as Bowler’s performance of her own work “FFF”.