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Collecting Kundry’s Scream:

The implications of recording and digital technology for the materiality of the scream in Wagner’s Parsifal

Roslyn Steer - NUI Maynooth

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Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818)

[The World as Will and Representation]

The Will is the unconscious force behind all things in nature.

Music is the most immediate expression of the Will.

The other arts existed as expressions of Ideas.

Ideas were grades of objectification of the Will

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Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

Beethoven (1870)

“...from the most troubled of such dreams we awake with a shriek, a cry, in which the affrighted Will expresses itself most immediately, and thus enters at once and definitely, through the cry, into the world of sound, in order to manifest itself outwards”

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Parsifal (1882)

Act 2

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Michel Poizat

The Angel’s Cry (1986)

“But whenever I speak of a pure or sheer cry, I mean specifically a paroxysmal vocal emission beyond the range of music and out of reach of the word. This cry is therefore not supported by the musical notation, nor can it be accommodated on the staff”

“The cries plaints and moans of Kundry...are Wagner’s “theoretical” or even “metaphysical” cry made stunningly concrete” (emphasis mine)

Poizat, The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, trans.Denner (London and Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1992): 76-78.

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John Plotz

“Thing” is far better than any other word at summing up imponderable, slightly creepy what-is-it-ness...Thing theory is at its best, therefore, when it focuses on this sense of failure, or partial failure, to name or to classify. Thing theory highlights, or ought to highlight, approaches to the margins--of language, of cognition, of material substance.”

John Plotz, “Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory”, Criticism, 47(1), Winter 2005, 109-118: 110

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Kundry's Scream

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Roland Barthes - ‘The Grain of the Voice’

“there, manifest and stubborn (one hears only that) beyond (or before) the meaning of the words, their form…something which is directly the cantor's body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages...The 'grain' is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue: perhaps the letter, almost certainly signifiance.”

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Rebecca Schneider

“the body...becomes a kind of archive and host to a collective memory...”

‘Performance Remains’ in Perform, Repeat, Record Ed. Jones and Heathfield (Bristol; Chicago: Intellect, 2012), 142.

“To consider the live a record of precedent material flips on its head the supposition that the live is that which requires recording to remain...the same could be said for...any inscribed set of performatives written to require repetition where repetition is both reiteration of precedent and the performance of something occurring “again for the first time”

Performing Remains (Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2011), 90.