Start slow, feel the softness of your breath, perhaps you want to mimic some sounds, do you sense the vibrations in your gut, the echoes of your voice? Listen here:
Start Slow, Feel the Vibrations in Your Gut, 11:01
This is an invitation for you to start experimenting with your voice; what follows are humble sonic and written offerings that reflect on the relationships between grief and the voice. The text and the soundwork are companions: you can listen first and read after or the other way around, you can also try it simultaneously if you like.
I HOPE I’M LOUD WHEN I’M DEAD, CAConrad says in their clear voice in the opening of Beatrice Gibson’s eponymous short film.11I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead is the title of a poem by CAConrad published in ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness(2014); it is also the title of Beatrice Gibson’s short film from 2018. The proclamation sits in our bodies long after we’ve heard it, because who gets to be loud after they die? Physiologically, as we learn from the YouTube channel Are you dying to know?, we are all loud, or our bodies make noises at least. Mortician Tracy mimics them with high-pitched whistles and low sighs that come out as the air expels from all orifices. In the comment section, she adds in an answer to user Turtle Tail that they “sound like a small squeaky low scream.” But the idea of being loud when you’re dead resonates deeper with us than just how our bodies sound when we’re twisted and turned in preparation for our final destination.
Inequalities sit firmly in what is often deemed to be the great equalizer: everyone’s gotta die sometime. The Queer Death Studies Network (QDSN) has theorized around questions of a “privileged afterlife,” something that they argue is only possible for those subjects who are “not located beyond the boundaries of what is considered to be grievable in terms of citizenship, migrant status, geopolitical positioning, racialization, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, etc.”22Marietta Radomska, Tara Mehrabi, and Nina Lykke, “Queer Death Studies: Coming to Terms with Death, Dying and Mourning Differently. An Introduction,” Women, Gender and Research 28, no. 3-4 (2019): 3-11. The idea of grievable and ungrievable lives, taken from Judith Butler and furthered by QDSN, lies at the core of Mourning School’s queries into grieving practices. How can we scream, sob, wail, moan, and cry louder for those who are deemed ungrievable? How can we make sure that we are all loud when we’re dead?
Artist and musician Johanna Hedva has shared the grief ritual they developed after the death of their mother through the doom-metal album Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, which opens with “O Death,” a distorted, rage-filled and violent encounter with death loudly personified.”33Johanna Hedva, Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, crystalline morphologies and Sming Sming, 2021, LP, cassette, and digital recording. We try to moan and groan with Hedva, and feel how our fear shifts into catharsis.
Voicing death isn’t always the stuff of catharsis though. The idea that announcing someone’s passing is the thing that makes it real frequently punctuates films and stories about being confronted with intimate deaths—if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? It is this kind of magical thinking that author Joan Didion describes in her account of the first year after the passing of her husband. For instance, as she reflects on the hours after he died, she remembers hearing her friend speak to The New York Times about an obituary; frantically she picks up the phone to deliver the news to The Los Angeles Times but, as the person on the other end of the line picks up, it hits her. LA is in a different time zone, and John, her husband, may not be dead yet on the West Coast.44Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)
According to clinical psychologist Dr. Glenn Doyle, the vagus nerve lights up like a Christmas tree when we speak, shout, or sing, which is why those activities can be so emotional and cathartic for people.55Sarah Jeanne Browne, “What The Vagus Nerve Is And How To Stimulate It For Better Mental Health,” Forbes, April 15, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/womensmedia/2021/04/15/what-the-vagus-nerve-is-and-how-to-stimulate-it-for-better-mental-health. Vagus means wandering, and that is quite literally what this nerve does, as it connects our heart, guts, and voice with one another. It is because of this nerve that Hedva’s moans work; it pulls us out of our flight, fight, or freeze response and back into ourselves.
In a private workshop with music pedagogue and folk musician Emilia Kallonen, we learned about the ancient lamenting tradition of Karelia, known as itkuvirsi. In this visceral and transcendental practice, women mark transitional situations through music, language, gesture, and cries.66Elizabeth Tolbert, “Women Cry with Words: Symbolization of Affect in the Karelian Lament,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 22 (1990): 80-105. What this practice makes palpable is the fact that grief work is part of every transition, not just the ones related to death. When it does relate to this directly, the lament acts as a bridge between two worlds, a way to guide the transition of the deceased from one realm to the next.77Eila Stepanova, “The Register of Karelian Lamenters,” in Registers of Communication, ed. Asif Aghaand Frog (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2015), 258-274.
The words in lamenting are largely improvised, poetic, and filled with metaphors that describe the person to whom the lament is directed; the melody starts up and moves down until it is time for a next breath, a handkerchief rests on the cheek or temple of the lamenter as they rock back and forth. All of these elements contribute to a whole that surpasses its parts. What struck us when reading about the lamenting tradition is the fact that it is found in all corners of the world.88The lamenting tradition we have studied was practiced in several parts of what is now Finland, Russia, and the Baltics. In “Women Cry with Words,” Elizabeth Tolbert describes how this Karelian lamenting tradition shows strong similarities with laments from the Bororo of Brazil. Similarly, we have come across traditions of ritualized wailing from ancient China, and “oppari,” an ancient form of lamenting from southern India, amongst others. In many ways these practices, despite their different origins and localities, overlap. It demonstrates that the relationship between grief work and the voice is omnipresent.
Yokhor, an artwork from 2018 by Natalia Papaeva, could be read as a contemporary lament. In this short film, the artist stands under a bridge while she repeats the same two phrases of a traditional Buryat song. Papaeva becomes visibly upset, her voice starts to shake, and she eventually starts crying, as she forces the words out of her mouth, using the same hand gestures to steer herself forward. This forgotten song symbolizes the possibility of the disappearance of her language, whilst Papaeva also points to a sense of hope in the possibility that languages on the verge of extinction can be saved.
These acts of lamenting, as we experienced it in the workshop, as we see it in Papaeva’s work, and even in Hedva’s album, as well as the works of so many others that we did not touch upon here, are not (only) about the words or the act of singing itself. It is as Emilia described it: “a way to see your inner world, and mirror it back, it is a journey through your body that comes out in song.”
These thoughts are situated in Mourning School’s current research on grief, loss, death, and the voice; they were formulated during a residency at HIAP, Helsinki, in Autumn 2022. Mourning School is a long-term artistic and curatorial research program initiated by Lucie Gottlieb and Rosa Paardenkooper in January 2021.
1. CAConrad in Beatrice Gibson’s short film, I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead, 2018
2. Johanna Hedva, Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, 2021
3. dolphins in heaven, “get well soon,” 2013
4. Rosa Paardenkooper reads Corrado Bologna quote from Adriana Cavarero’s book For More than One Voice, 2005
5. Voice exercises
6. William Hoyland in The Future’s Getting Old Just Like the Rest of Us by Beatrice Gibson and George Clark, 2010
7. Natalia Papaeva, Yokhor, 2018
8. William Basinski, The Disintegration Loops, 2002/2003
9. Pirkko Fihlman in “På gråterskekurs i Helsingfors,” SVT, 2018
10. Pauline Oliveros, “Lear,” from the album Deep Listening, 1989
11. Seana McKenna in The Year of Magical Thinking based on the book by Joan Didion, 2009
12. Maria Antonovna Prohorova, “I died at my mother's grave,” 2000
13. Pirkko Fihlman in “På gråterskekurs i Helsingfors,” SVT, 2018
00:02
[CAConrad strongly proclaims]: I hope I'm loud when I'm dead.
00:05 – 00:38
[Strong electric guitar strum that reverberates into a droning noise and slowly fades. A jolted short strum stops the reverberation. The guitar strum repeats twice more, reverberating into a droning noise and slowly fades. A voice sings “oooohhhh” over the third strum and stops]
00:38 – 01:09
[Strong electric guitar strum that reverberates into a droning noise and slowly fades. The guitar strum repeats three times more. The voice sounds like it’s from far away and harmonizes drawn out sounds moving between lower and higher keys]
01:09 – 01:36
[Strong electric guitar strum happens three times more. It reverberates into a droning noise and slowly fades. The voice sounds like it’s closer and continues harmonizing]
01:36 – 01:39
[Soft piano music fluctuates between middle and high notes. It continues; each note played lingers until the next]
01:39 – 01:51
[Overlapped with the piano, a light jingling trickles in, getting louder until…]
01:51 – 02:29
[A distant voice that is difficult to decipher overlaps with the piano and jingling. The voice says:] For the ancients, the voice is generated by the alchemy of internal fluids, it coagulates in the vital organs, in the heart and diaphragm; in the seat of the thumos, which is force, energy, ire, and impulsive instinct (its etymology is the same as fumus; and in Dante smoke rises from the chest when the passions pulsate).
02:29 – 03:05
[Light piano music continues the same echoing chords, with soft jingling, which continues, then crescendos and ends. The piano moves into a higher key, with jingling trickling in again]
03:05 – 3:30
[A voice humming monotonously overlaps with piano and jingling]
03:30 – 03:58
[Voice stops. The high key piano, jingling, and a soft digital thud continue]
03:58 – 04:31
[A male voice says]: Voice C. Voice characteristics, fast-paced, as if compensating for gaps in memory, stuttering, spluttering, magnified in relation to an inability to recollect detail, struggles with articulation and volume. Speech caught at the intersection of throat and mouth. Erratic when words are not forthcoming. Actively addresses the other voices.
4:31 – 04:53
[Repetitive rhythm: high key piano chord music layered with jingling and interspersed thumps. Music becomes much lighter. Duration between thumps shortens a bit until…]
04:53 – 6:03
[A new distant voice slowly begins to sing over the rhythm. The thumps continue, voice continues, and jingling in the background stops. White noise begins behind singing, then a swell begins to layer in over white noise]
06:03 – 06:24
[Voice has faded, sound of gentle swell takes over]
06:24 – 06:39
[A new voice comes in over the sounds, it says:] Where you sent your lament… It can be the trees, it can be the nature, a prayer to God, whatever, but it has to go outside, you. And you must also say it loud.
06:39 – 7:06
[Music continues]
07:06 – 07:25
[Voice says:] There was a level on which I believed that whatever had happened remained open to revision. That was why I needed to be alone, I needed to be alone so that he could come back, so that he could come back.
07:25 – 08:21
[Loud droning sound slowly fluctuates between lower and higher pitches]
08:21
[Voice singing while wailing, then fades out]
09:09
[Droning sound continues]
09:43 – 09:46
[A voice says:] And you follow your breathing.
09:46 – 11:01
[Droning sound continues, a voice sings over droning sound until it fades out and the piece ends]
Audio clips are used with permission, except in cases where copyright holders could not be contacted. Please contact the publishers if any corrections should be made to the digital version.
Mourning School is an artistic study program on the notion of being in grief as the stuff of our everyday, initiated by Lucie Gottlieb and Rosa Paardenkooper. In a series of exhibitions, public programming, and publications, we imagine new ways of collective mourning to give name to and make space for the feelings that come with death, dying, loss, and mourning.
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