Introduction: Voice, Queer, Technologies

Abstract

When I was at school, at about the age of sixteen, I once asked my music teacher if she would mind my staying in the music building during a lunch break, something normally not allowed as the building was locked up. She asked me why, and I explained that I wanted to listen to a tape I had recently acquired. It was of Allegri’s Miserere, recorded by the Tallis Scholars in 1980, and I was desperate that day to experience again, in private, a particular musical moment I had discovered—the point where Alison Stamp, singing the treble line, hits the highest C in her range, falls gradually downward, and resolves after a melodic ornament to a new harmony. I was not surprised when my teacher declined my request, but the memory of how much I wanted to hear that voice sing that moment remains with me. What was it about that voice, that moment, that musical and vocal tension and resolution that drew me to it so intensely? The same year of my life was the most troubled part of a long process of coming out, of coming to terms with my sexual identity despite the intense prohibitions of my Christian life at the time; what I had found in this brief vocal moment, which repeats several times throughout the piece, was a moment that both seemed to speak of my struggles and effect a brief catharsis, a temporary relief from the mess of my mind.

Do you think it’s queer that I’m writing all this?

Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness