Infernal Voices: The Sinister Reaches of the High Voice (Research Forum at IMV)

FREYA JARMAN

In conversation with Peter Edwards & Áine Mangaoang

Throughout the history of western vocal music, high notes and high voices have come to signify a range of ideas that don’t seem at first to be issues of gender but which very rapidly turn out to be gendered spaces. From the purity and innocence of the angelic church treble, through the coloratura of the nineteenth-century operatic madwoman and the heroic climaxes of her tenor counterpart, to the antisemitic coding in Wagner’s high-tessitura villain roles, high voices do an awful lot of cultural work. Drawn from a book-length project on the topic, this paper will consider how high voices and high vocal notes code for sinister spaces—the devilish, the demonic, the underworld—and how these spaces are also intensely gendered. In order to explore these themes, I draw on examples from heavy metal and death metal, opera from Purcell to Penderecki, musical theatre, and various vocal accompaniments to death.