Joan LaBarbara

(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

Born in Philadelphia in 1947, Joan LaBarbara studied music in New York, but soon gravitated toward jazz circles and the entourage of John Cage, with whom she worked in 1975.

Trained in the rigorous school of Steve Reich, LaBarbara adopted new vocal techniques based on special control of breath and vocal cords, on the simultaneous emission of multiple notes, and on the simulation of wind instruments—techniques she showcased on the research album Voice Is The Original Instrument.

The singer favors discipline and concentration over virtuosity: her vocal minimalism demands tremendous effort to control the organs of the vocal apparatus and force them to produce sounds traditionally beyond their range. She succeeds especially in the field of the continuum, where even exhalations and inhalations serve as sound (as in Circular Song of 1975, eight minutes of glissando in circular breathing). In Voice Pieces (1974) she explores for sixteen minutes the chromatic spectrum of a single tone, again producing long, resonant breaths. Vocal Extensions (1976), the cornerstone of her early period, uses electronics to expand the voice: amid the chaos of electronic hisses and gurgles, LaBarbara’s shrill trills, anguished gasps, and terrified wails are reflected and diffracted into increasingly hallucinatory forms. With this study of reverberations and echoes, of the dilation and dissolution of the voice, the scientific rediscovery of the vocal instrument is completed.

Other works from this period, mostly unpublished, testify to her multifaceted activity: chamber music (Ides Of March for voices and string section, 1974), electronic music (An Exaltation Of Larks for voice and electronics, 1975), and gestural music (the sound sculpture Cyclone, 1975).

Tapesongs contains a piece composed by Cage (Solo For Voice) and two vocal collages: Cathing (composed in 1977, premiered in February 1978), which mixes fragments of radio speech with sounds produced by the singer, and Thunder (composed in 1975, premiered in February 1975) for six timpani, electronics, and voice, which electronically alters the singing until it imitates a thunderstorm.

The subsequent Reluctant Gypsy collects four pieces blending various vocal techniques, both extended and traditional. Autumn Signal (1978) is a quadraphonic dance for voice filtered through a synthesizer (a dialogue between a foolish, petulant “o” and a robotic voiceless bass, between a warble and a snore, between two trills, between a yawn and a roar, between radio interference and a Tibetan monk). Shadow Song (1979) is an agitated, almost imperceptible whisper, overshadowed by an intermittent a cappella chorus. Quatre Petite Betes (1979) is a “dada-sonic animation,” with a fantastic solo of panting that introduces a whole series of tonal exploits in the most guttural and animalistic registers. Finally, Klee Alex (1979), clearly an abstract vignette—a multiple song of interwoven vowels recalling the chromatic effect of a rotating prism under a beam of light, much closer to Ligeti’s continuum and to the trance of ragas than to minimal variations—is probably her masterpiece.

In December 1979, while in Germany, Joan LaBarbara and Morton Subotnick were married.

As Lightning Comes (featuring the prodigious Twelvesong (November 1977) for twelve superimposed chants) and Art Of instead exaggerate the use of electronics, perhaps also as a result of her marriage to Morton Subotnick, somewhat obscuring the extraordinary qualities of her vocalism. Even new age influences the mystical and cosmic tones of October Music (1980, unpublished).

LaBarbara rediscovered her true inspiration in the six Sound Paintings, composed between 1979 and 1988. By layering different singing effects and imitations of noises, she succeeded in composing genuine “concrete” vocal symphonies that at times simulate the tropical jungle (Urban Tropics, 1988) and at others the breath of athletes (Shadow Song, 1984). More than experiments in the expressive possibilities of the human voice, these are psychological studies: the singer must identify and internalize the sounds that define the theme of the piece. Berliner Träume (1983) is instead a catalogue of her vocal techniques: circular singing (producing phonemes both while exhaling and inhaling), rhythmic breathing, multiphonics, and so on.

Among her most spectacular performances should also be mentioned Three Voices For Joan LaBarbara, composed by Morton Feldman, one of the last works of the great North American composer.

In retrospect, her greatest contribution to the art of singing seems to be the ennoblement of breath: whereas Western musical civilization has traditionally considered breath a “noise” to be eliminated (in singing schools breathing is taught only to explain how to make it inaudible), LaBarbara aligns herself with more “primitive” musical cultures that base their singing rhythms on the vital rhythm par excellence—breath itself—and that make it explicit as one of the many timbres of the voice. Not by chance, one of her masterpieces, the opera The Book Of Knowing And Of Overthrowing (unpublished, first presented in July 1988), is dedicated to myths of primitive peoples somehow associated with the vital function of breath (such as the African myth according to which, before the creation of the universe, there existed only a breath).

LaBarbara’s breaths seem in fact to live outside her body, an illusion due partly to kaleidoscopic shifts of register and partly to electronic manipulation. In this way language becomes an entity unto itself, removing the body from the scene, and speaks to the listener as the collective memory that it is. Just as every word is recognized by the mind and triggers a chain of memories, so each primary sound of the voice is recognized and associated with moods, experiences, landscapes. LaBarbara’s singing becomes the musical analogue of the stream of consciousness: it floats freely within a space of context. In the theatrical-musical piece Events In The Elsewhere, for example, the voice is treated as an autonomous instrument of communication, capable of moving within the space it creates.

What she has called “situational composition” expresses the inner voice not of a particular person but of a kind of collective unconscious.

Of the three great avant-garde vocalists, LaBarbara is the one closest to the “Cagean” program and to abstract painting: whereas Monk elaborates meticulous dramatic “plots” and Anderson weaves “theatrical” atmospheres, LaBarbara prefers to focus solely on the aspect of singing as an end in itself.