Once, my cousin from Hong Kong, then 9 years old, was told by her parents to spend time with my grandfather. Frustrated, she told my grandfather that she might as well speak English rather than Cantonese with him, because she couldn’t understand his thick Ningboese accent. This episode did not end well for my cousin: a serious scolding ensued.

In the ‘right’ environment, my cousin’s request would not have been interpreted as rude and her young age would have been taken into account, but my cousin’s parents took a different view. They knew that my over-seventy-year-old grandfather didn’t speak English and that adjusting his natural speech to communicate with his grandchildren involved a considerable effort. This complex linguistic incident is one of many that I have observed growing up and living in multilingual environments. My navigations between Norwegian, English, Estonian, Finnish and several forms of Chinese have become the foundation of my interest in, and high sensitivity towards, the voice in musical composition. 

The human voice is a fragile thing. The speech apparatus is something almost all humans hold in common, but acts of speech always come with different boundaries, social codes and conceptions of honesty and understanding, dependent on their cultural and social environments. Our voice is both a defining marker of our identity and an inseparable yet immaterial object tied to our body. For artists who use their voice as a tool of expression (vocalists, storytellers, voice actors, orators and others), how one sounds and how one hears oneself can easily become a vulnerable issue. 

Hva are gæælt meh å snækeh som detttt-eh? 
(What is wrong with speaking like this?)

In today’s world, where people, ideas and forms of music are all often highly mobile, individual musicians frequently face the challenge of delivering so-called ‘purity’ in a performance, especially in the traditional confines of the concert and theatre stage. Vocalists trained in opera are required to undertake diction training in the conservatory, reinforcing an idea within the genre that there is an ideal level of fluency in a spoken language that they must attain. Listeners with utilitarian perspectives may feel that ‘getting the point across’ in the literal sense is the only important purpose of language, while others will have much deeper and more complex cultural investments in sounding a certain way. Intervening between these two perspectives are the language policies and codes of different countries, rules that have been developed as political tools and that have ramifications in the press, the media and the arts. Regardless of one’s personal stance, embedded attitudes about what sounds authentic inevitably present special challenges for voice-artists. As a composer who works across cultures and languages, these challenges regularly impact my compositional practice and my collaborations with singers.

When I was working on the premiere production of the chamber opera hvorfor pusen? (“why the kitten?”) in Shanghai New Music Week in 2019, the singers were quick to contact me for assistance in Norwegian diction. The Norwegian text by Linda Gabrielsen was quite foreign to the three singers on stage: none had any experience of performing in a Scandinavian language. I was asked to provide them with voice recordings of the texts recited aloud in different tempi, as well as some sort of written guide making use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. This process felt natural for me as a composer: it was my responsibility to relay technical information and other musical directions through the score. However it soon became evident that these materials were not enough. The singers, incredibly diligent but immensely anxious, pulled me aside after rehearsals and we began to work on their accents in experimental exercises. 

I frequently reassured them that my music was not about phonological precision and pointed out that accents are an essential part of us as human beings, highlighting my own Cantonese-hued Mandarin as an instance. Despite this, during our week together, the singers persistently feared I would be critical of their performance – while never once querying the quirks of my Mandarin accent. Hoping to provide some encouragement, I pointed out that comprehension would not be an issue at the Shanghai premiere: only two people in the likely audience were Norwegian speakers and thus linguistically able to relate sung words, meanings and music with any precision. This idea registered better with some of the singers than others. Some felt it gave them permission to focus on other musical considerations, but others persisted with questions about complex linguistic subjects to do with tone, prosody and so on. One singer’s need to imitate the way I spoke Norwegian led to struggles with memorisation, and that inevitably led to further questions about speech versus song. The singers’ perceived need for some kind of abstract perfection in their practice became a significant hindrance in the production period.

At the end of the performance both I and my fellow Norwegian audience member were impressed at the singers’ comprehensibility, especially given that they had learned and memorised the work in a matter of days. When I spoke with them again during the post-performance reception, though, the performers’ anxieties and fears about language errors resurfaced all over again.

“Ååj, norsken var helt forståelig!”

(“Don’t worry - the Norwegian was perfectly understandable!”)

This experience gave me a deep insight into the working dynamic between classically trained vocalists and composers. The singers’ deep concern to perfect their enunciation helped me develop better tools in score instructions and more effective rehearsal techniques, but on the other hand it also made me realise just how complex and artificial an environment contemporary classical composers impose on performers when we create works that include text. No matter how radical a composer may claim to be, the puristic view of language on the concert or music theatre stage persists and imposes restrictions. Language may not always be a composer’s natural domain, so challenging the norms and issues may seem dauntingly beyond his or her scope. It’s as if the score enables composers to ignore the realities of speech in our daily lives. I have noticed a strong tendency for composers to pay more consideration to notation and musical grammar than to the resulting performance. Creative teams of librettists, composers, directors, costumers and scenographers may strive for inclusivity in many different ways within a work, but the ‘heard identities’ of performers also need to be recognised and developed, using methods which reflect the linguistic diversity of today’s and tomorrow’s musical worlds.

“Music aspires to be a language without intention. But the demarcation line between itself and the language of intentions is not absolute; we are not confronted by two wholly separate realms. There is a dialectic at work.”
— Theodor Adorno, Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music

Our ‘heard identities’ are constantly evolving, and perhaps this is why past performances value the process of recreating a heard experience (for example, through proper pronunciation). In most spaces for deep listening and focus-centric music – forms of music that involve both listeners and performers intensely – performers are sometimes asked to recreate something which may not personally or emotionally belong to them. This is especially true in classical music.

Composers in many non-classical genres openly recognise and work with issues of identities: in many different ways, they incorporate and celebrate the singers’ backgrounds as a part of the work.* However, this affirmation of vocal identity has not often been possible for composers working in classical traditions, where the prevalent working method entails delivering a score and then leaving the production of the performance to its musicians, directors and technicians. The confines of music notation lie at the core of this issue: sounds are merely represented on paper, not manifested in reality. Ideally, all performers should be enabled to experience speech sounds through listening before finding ways to reproduce them in practice. Sadly, though, when a composer attempts to convey sound information through musical notation and writing the listening process is usually missing. The contentious issue of ‘sounding authentic’ rises to the surface, since the score assumes the singer will have an inherent understanding of what the scripted language sounds like.

I strive to change this in my music through conversation and collaboration, and by letting the individual voice of the performer inform the compositional process. I have recently started work on a bilingual music-storytelling project involving Swiss-German and Norwegian dialects, since they are a part of my collaborators’ backgrounds. The new project will challenge listeners’ expectations and understandings by melding the idiosyncrasies of two different Germanic dialects with a narrative drawn from Hong Kong cultures and traditions. Having learned from my experience producing hvorfor pusen?, I am making a composition that will draw on the speech sounds and particularities of the singers’ individual voices, for example by exploring phonemes in their native speech that they feel are special to them and intimately ‘owned’.** These sound structures will be the building blocks of the composition in a concrete sense (the sounds will feature in my music) but also more abstractly: the metaphorical qualities of the phonemes –  for instance, their ‘roundness’, texture or durational variations – will also help shape the music. This process will require numerous meetings and workshops with the singers because the collaborative process is not a simplistic back-and-forth conversation. It will involve deep listening, reflection and enquiry, in order to build a multidimensional understanding of the linguistic environments the singers grew up in and the resonances of the speech idiosyncrasies their voices embody.

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Singers, especially operatic and classically-trained singers, often seem to be mountain-climbing over formidable language barriers. Those who compose for these voices and bodies can use ‘established musical tradition’ and ‘truth to the score’ as excuses to avoid acknowledging and addressing the challenge of language. However, I believe that it is worth recognising and tackling the limits and challenges of language wherever possible, in order to give everyone involved in the performance of music, including listeners, a sense of belonging and ownership in relation to the musical score. Working together, willing performers and experimental, flexible composers have scope to develop malleable parameters around performances: to deal with the issues of mother tongue(s), secondary languages and idiolects in ways that break down boundaries and return to individual performers a full ownership of their idiosyncratic voices.

Let me conclude with one more listening example. My 2018 bilingual work kj/ærlige ord is built around two short poems, one in Estonian and the other in Norwegian, and it was premiered in 2019 by the Dutch ensemble Orkest de ereprijs and three young singers studying in the Hague. During rehearsals, the performers asked me to invent a narrative for the two short poems, because they were unsure of the emotional import of the speech sounds. Working together, we added imagistic score markings to the different sections of the music: ‘devil vs. angel’, for instance. The ‘angelic’ musical lines were those involving long, open and sonorous vowels while the ‘devil’ lines were articulated with consonants. The ‘angel/devil’ imagery was completely distinct from the literal meanings of the source texts, but it assisted the performance very effectively. 

The strategy clarified for me how speech sounds may be coloured by an understanding of individuals’ linguistic identities and personal backgrounds, and there is no reason why this kind of metaphorical notation has to wait until rehearsals to be developed. The collaborative composer can very well begin adding notes during the compositional process as a way of acknowledging the performers’ involvement from the start, and preparing for the rich conversation to come.

* I’m recalling here the first time I heard Björk’s albums as a teenager, when I realised that the Icelandic idiolect she brings to her English singing is considered curious and exciting.

** For example, whenever I work in the Estonian language the õ sound is a point of interest for the singers