ABSTRACT

Roland Barthes’s “Le grain de la voix”, originally published in 1972, has retained its viability, highlighting topics such as corporeality, sexuality, and desire, and affecting studies of performance, opera, and contemporary and popular music. Although Barthes addressed voice as a topic in his numerous essays, he never had them assembled into a collection nor published a monograph on music. In the early 1940s Barthes took singing lessons from Charles Panzera, which were abandoned due to Barthes’s relapse of tuberculosis. In the 1971 interview for Tel Quel Barthes mentions how the indiscreet Fischer-Dieskau has abusively filled the recording market with his numerous LP-recordings while Panzera had to abandon recording just before the arrival of the “microsillon”. In adapting the concept of genotext, Barthes retains its attachment to the oral topography of language. Listening to the exemplary voices identified by Barthes helps to get a sense of what he meant by “the grain of the voice.”.