![]() ![]() ![]() The introduction of Kurs’s deafness and voice into Lecture on Nothing effectively encourages us to open up Cage’s aesthetic conception and musical formulation on silence, to undo our preconceptions about the physiologically and culturally habituated limits and limitations of the hearing body and speaking voice, and to hear the syncope between acts of hearing and speaking. I argue that LaBelle’s rendition and Kurs’s performance crystallize Cage’s use of silence not only as a musical and conceptual idea, but also as a site in which we can reflect on what constitutes silence physically, culturally, and politically. These propositions are useful for situating the premises of LaBelle’s rendition of Lecture on Nothing and Kurs’s performance in the fields of experimental music and disability studies. Davidson’s questions understand aesthetics as a realm in which one can contest the discursive representations of the disabled body, and propose that the disabled body’s induction into an aesthetic discourse may critically intervene in the aesthetic discourse itself. In his book Concerto for the Left Hand, Michael Davidson asks: “How might the aesthetic itself be a frame for engaging disability at levels beyond the mimetic? How might the introduction of the disabled body into aesthetic discourse complicate the latter’s criteria of disinterestedness and artisanal closure?” (2). Nevertheless, I would argue that these formalized units should also be considered an aesthetic – a relational – intervention, which would allow us to expand both on the conceptual and on the operational limits of silence and speech. One can argue that Cage already forces such creative moments into formalized musical units in Lecture on Nothing. With its tempo, rhythm, and articulation, Kurs’s speech unsettles what we consider regular or normal speech. In other words, I would like to draw attention to the creative potential of Kurs’s voice and speech as it is, without adjusting or restoring it to a normalized form of vocal expression. I am interested in Kurs’s reading as a way to consider the embodiment of sound and voice in the act of forming speech. What Siebers suggests here is important for my point. As Tobin Siebers posits in Disability Theory, “disability creates theories of embodiment more complex than the ideology of ability allows” (9). To what extent can one hear one’s voice in the act of speech? What is being said in this process? Who is entitled to say it and in what way? And after all, what is heard? LaBelle’s interpretation of Lecture on Nothing poses these questions while also asking us to look at the performance of what is silenced. ![]() The suggestion is that by listening to a deaf person’s voice, one will reconsider the normative thresholds of the hearing body and the capacities of the speaking voice. The idea is neither to stigmatize or pathologize deafness nor to normalize or suggest a metaphor of the performative voice through deafness. Kurs’s reading encourages us to question what it means to speak without hearing one’s own voice out loud. Berlin-based artist and scholar Brandon LaBelle’s rendition of Lecture on Nothing features an audio recording of the text read by a deaf person, David Kurs. Written in four columns and divided into five rhythmical sections, Cage’s famous text Lecture on Nothing punctuates the actual moments, unfolding spaces, emerging sounds, and latent ideas of silence within everyday speech. I look at two examples: Phonophonie by Mauricio Kagel, and Lecture on Nothing by John Cage. ![]() In line with this trajectory, I discuss the ways that experimental music and deaf performance can critique the presumed limits of hearing and silence, and the ways they can suggest new limits of voice and speech while enacting a performative language. Problematizing this tension, other essays on voice contest the physical, phenomenal, imaginary, and political limits of the voice. Writings on opera, film, experimental music, radio, and performance art, voice and speech production, and hearing and speech disabilities have scripted the voice as a strain – a zone of sounding – between the materiality of the body and the immateriality of language. In the past 25 years, historical and theoretical studies of sound and voice have helped us to reconfigure what constitutes the thresholds of hearing and voice in the first place, and to imagine what’s more and/or what could be otherwise. Yet there is more to hearing and voice, more to be added to the discussion of silence and speech. We tend to understand the limits of silence and speech as correlated with our physiological and discursive thresholds of hearing and voice. There is no absolute silence, just as there is no absolute loss of hearing or voice. ![]()
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