ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the female voice in a particular historical moment (the first half of the twentieth century) and in a particular musical tradition (modernism in Western art music). Its focus is unashamedly on specific musical works and the questions they provoke about the writing of the voice in this musical repertoire. In relation to the normative vocal comportment of nineteenth-century song, vocal writing in key works of musical modernism has habitually been judged in terms of its excess and the deformations of its ‘unnatural’ shapes and gestures. A musical writing of the voice not only destabilises the relation between language and subjectivity, but also anticipates, within its own logic of particularity, some of the most radical conclusions that theory reaches within the realm of language. As a practice of embodied thought, and a highly sophisticated writing, such music explores the ground that theory arrives at only belatedly.
