Voices from beyond the grave

I received some sad news last night from Rogers: DC, a former colleague of his at the university where we met, a man who inspired me to think in ways about music that I would never have thought of, whose first-year course baffled just about everyone else but got me really very excited, died in November. All these months, and neither Rogers nor I knew.

I was surprisingly sad. I hadn't stayed in touch with him especially, but he wrote me a couple of references along the way, and I always remember him so fondly. He looked like a tall and senior Hugh Laurie, and was so terribly posh. When he picked up the phone in his office, he would answer only with his surname. And if he called you back, he would only state your first name and then his. Terribly serious, in a way, but I guess just because he was so totally posh, while being really down-to-earth at the same time, not wanting to waste words, just get the job done. And in the vacations or at the end of term, he would sometimes wear red trousers and boating shoes with no socks, which always made me chuckle because it was so very Oxford.

I wrote to the University today, to do with this, and offered to send a CD of an electroacoustic composition written by a friend of mine from the year above, featuring DC reading Genesis I. I thought it was an excellent demonstration of him as a person, ready to give something a go, and always (at least from where I stood) amiable and smiling. In fact, on my way home tonight, something more than that occurred to me. This is a document of DC, it is some kind of his presence even after his death. And as I sit here with Maria Callas on in the background, trying hard not to veg out in front of the telly because it doesn't really relax me, something of the power of voice and recording is plain to me.

Fascinated as I have been for a long time with the voice, the singing voice especially, I have not really felt this. Callas, Karen Carpenter, Elvis... recorded voices. We can inhabit them at times, we can identify with them, and yet they are voices that most of us have never really heard, or indeed ever will. I have not and will not hear any of these voices in the same room as me, only through speakers. If I play back the recording of DC's voice, it will not be his voice, not the voice that is imprinted in my memory from lectures, but an approximation. A good one, admittedly, but there is always something missing. To listen to our own recorded voices is usually a terrible thing, as we become separated fundamentally from a thing that comes only from inside of ourselves.

There is a passage in Tomás Eloy Martínez's The Tango Singer, where the elusive title character hears a recording of his own voice for the first time, after paying to record a song onto acetate. The studio technician secretly keeps the first recording and makes the young lad record the song again to take home. He struggles to find a gramophone to hear his recording on, and is one evening surprised to hear the first cut on the radio:

"Estéfano immediately recognised the first recording, which the technician had pretended to discard, and he went pale. Separated from his own voice, he found himself still connected to it by a thread of the kind of admiration it was only possible to feel towards something we don't possess. It wasn't a voice he would have wanted or sought but something that had alighted in his throat. Since it was alien to his body, it could be removed when he least expected it. Who knew how many times it had been around in the past and how many other voices fit within it. To Estéfano it mattered only that it resembled one voice: Carlos Gardel's."

It is that disconnection that we feel on listening to our voice coming from elsewhere, and unless we find that thread of admiration, we are not connected to it at all. The gap between the sounding voice and the recorded voice of someone else is another matter, of course, because we are not often so deeply invested in their body as we are in our own. At any rate we do not feel the physicality of their vocal production. So although there may well be a noticeable difference between these two voices--especially if they belong (does the recorded voice ever belong? or just pretend to belong?) to someone whom we know very well--the gap is not one that we run from screaming lest we fall in.

But that gap is there for sure. There is no body from whom the recorded voice emanates, and we take this for granted and are blind to it now.

It is precisely the death of the voice's body that illustrates all of this. At the time of the phonograph's invention, there were famously concerns about 'capturing' the voice, perhaps 'stealing' part of the soul, and yet I seem to recall that listening to the departed after their death was one of the uses Edison suggested for his invention (music not being amongst them). So there it is, DC's voice, or something close enough, sitting in a jumble of magnetic thingies on a piece of brown tape, and I expect at some point I'll turn it into 1s and 0s in the beautiful binary way. And as obvious as it is that this is only an approximation of a voice I know, hampered by the absence of the body even before one thinks about magnetic bits and recording quality and the rest, I will listen to it as if it is DC.

As if.

This is how we always listen to the recorded voice. As if. Sometimes we become very aware of the as-if-ness. For instance, there's a Carpenters recording of "Trying to Get That Feeling" that Richard made after Karen's death with her voice track, a tape he'd found after she died. She'd cut the vocals, and they'd intended to do the whole song, but they left it and Barry Manilow did it instead. But this vocal track, obviously not re-recordable, tells the story, because at one point you can hear the turn of a page as Karen looks for the rest of the lyrics. Couldn't (or wouldn't) be edited out by Richard, and in that subtle noise that you can barely hear unless you're listening for it, that split-second, is the dead Karen Carpenter. That song I listen to knowing she's dead. The others, I listen to as-if.

At any rate, I shall listen to that recording of DC as-if and enjoy every second, with the as-if-ness clear in my ears. He was a man that you can imagine would never seem ready to die, always with something left to say or do. And so it's absolutely right that his voice still speaks, albeit as-if.