A Time of Unfulfilled Expectations

Writing down an account of my presentation at the Forum Artistic Research means mentally going back and recalling it to memory. My Italian language—which will be translated into English by the time this contribution is published—bends to the necessity and begins to narrate using the past tense. My present and the moment of the Forum coexist in my writing thanks to the artifice of language. This was precisely the central theme of my collaborative lecture performance, where the participants and I tried to explore the relationship between the time of musical performance and the time conveyed by language.

Spoken language shares with music the ephemeral nature of their medium, which is sound. Whether musical or linguistic in nature, sounds disappear in their occurrence (Krämer 2016, 14). However, while happening in time, language can also construct a different temporal plane: it is not bound to refer only to the present moment but can address the past or the future. In other words, there is a concurrence—or we could even say a friction—between the vanishing of sounds and the designation of meanings that persist on a different temporal plane. But there is more: it is not just language that exists, but many languages. And if every language expresses time differently, we can also say that speakers of different languages have different experiences of time when they are speaking about it. This idea aligns with the theory of “thinking for speaking,” which suggests that events are perceived differently depending on the language being used to narrate them. In other words, each language trains its speakers to focus on particular aspects of events and experiences when they are describing them (Slobin 1996, 88–89).

So, the languages we speak shape our experience of time. What happens, then, when we sing together in improvisation using language? How might our understanding of a musical performance change in light of a different use of language in singing? How can we use language to sing differently?

Until not long ago, questions like these (assuming they were even formulated in these terms) would have led to a theoretical dissertation on the nature of voice and language. Or, on the other hand, they would have been the intuition and inspiration for a purely artistic project. Today, however, I have the opportunity to thematise the issue from the perspective of artistic research.

My presence at the symposium was not about the dissemination of a concluded research project, but rather the sharing of a practice and a way of doing research while sharing research, performing with other artist-researchers and discussing problems, strategies, and results with them. The nature of the issue is such that it cannot be resolved either by a theoretical explanation of a state of affairs, or by the practical resolution of an artistic problem. My aim, therefore, was not to explain the mechanisms through which different languages express temporal aspects; nor, on the other hand, was it my intention to provide instructions for a new style of vocal improvisation. Rather, I sought to initiate a conversation—through dialogue and practice—on how we typically conceive of a musical performance and how this understanding can evolve by reflecting on and through the use of language in singing.

Initially, the Forum participants and I discussed how our different languages express certain temporal aspects. Particularly the continuity of an action is rendered similarly in languages like English or Italian: think of the distinction, in English, between “You walk” and “You are walking”. But it is either absent or expressed differently in other languages, such as German and Irish. Through these differences we directed our focus to the present moment and tried, each in our own language, to experience the time of the performance no longer as an incessant series of ever-fleeting moments, but as a dilated and somehow still experience.

The starting point of this second moment of collective exploration, i.e. using everyone’s own language, was a short text by philosopher Giorgio Agamben (2024), which I adapted and translated from Italian into English. In this piece, Agamben invites us to a certain use of language as a tool for thinking differently: no longer in nouns, but in prepositions and adverbs. In particular, to think about time, nothing is more useful than relying on adverbs: always, never, immediately, and—perhaps the most mysterious of all, he says—while. The while, a simultaneity between two actions or two times, challenges our conception of time as an incessant series of successive moments, instead configuring itself as an immaterial place in which we always already are without realising it. After reading the text together, we put Agamben’s ideas to the test and improvised upon it: not by setting the words to music, but in a sense, by staging the text. We embraced his invitation to use verbs, prepositions, and adverbs as a way to think differently, and translated it into artistic practice, trying to use language itself as a way to sing differently. More specifically, we improvised together, in our own native languages, using adverbs and verbs that described the very moment of the performance, each of us seeking the right tools to express aloud this “simple, motionless while” (Agamben 2020). In other words, we sought—fully aware of the aporia we faced—to suspend time within the very flow of the voice in language.

The performers were arranged in four rows, with two rows facing the other two, forming a central corridor between them (Fig.1).

As I sang and walked through the space in the middle, I listened to their voices, improvising and resonating like a strange echo that, through fragments and attempts, managed to carve out a creative space for herself in the process of translating from one language to another (Fig. 2).

Our performance was constituted as a simultaneity of voices and a simultaneity of times: the shared time of the performance overlapped with the linguistic tenses and adverbs through which that same present was being described—or rather, invoked—by the voices improvising in multiple languages. As the only one moving in the room and changing my point of listening, I experienced this play of echoes in a way that was quite different from the ears of the other participants or from the microphone I used to record the performance. While the audio recording forms part of the research methodology, it is not one of its intended outputs: the aim of these performances is not to be passively listened to or enjoyed; rather, it is to construct a practice, an experience that only truly exists in the moment of doing it together.

As a matter of fact, an outsider listening to our performance during the Forum would likely perceive only a continuous flow of voices, murmurs, fragmentary words, and the occasional melody. In a certain sense, there is nothing to listen to: the performance resisted the impulse for transformation, musical variation, or development. During the conversation we had after singing together, one of the participants brought attention precisely to this aspect:

[...] I experienced a very unusual feeling of time because when we work with music, let’s say, there is this dramaturgy and we work with expectations. I found it interesting because it was like a time of unfulfilled expectations, a quality that we very seldom actually meet. […] I wasn’t sure about how we would understand this ‘in the meantime,’ but maybe this was actually it.

Listening back and transcribing this account after a certain amount of time, I wonder where the quality that made this experience “a time of unfulfilled expectations” should be traced. Does it lie in the meanings generated by the language used, or rather in the act of collective pronunciation? If, as I believe is more likely, it is to be found not in one component or the other, but in the relationship between the two, what other lines of inquiry does this consideration open up?

Another participant highlighted how imagining time through language led him to think in terms of space: “imagining time but putting language on it, it kept going back to space really, not time.” This comment is as short as it is poignant. The reference to a spatial dimension in language might deserve to be explored in relation to writing, which is usually considered as “the spatial transmission of temporal spoken language” (Krämer 2016, 19). For now, it is enough, and at the same time necessary, to acknowledge the vital role that the participants in the improvisation sessions I lead play in this research through their practice, sensitivity, and insights.

Language seems to emerge—at least in nuce, in its potential—as a profoundly formative and transformative element of the musical experience itself. Studies on the relationship between music and language have mostly focused on language as a system of signs. In this sense, we are used to thinking of music as a language. However, it appears to be still difficult to think of language as being music-like. Perhaps this is only possible by holding together the timelessness of language—its structure, its grammar, its writing—and its temporality: in its vocality, as speech; in other words, by shifting the focus from language as a system of signs to language as (musical) praxis. And maybe this is only possible by abandoning the purely speculative dimension of research and embracing its artistic dimension. Only then, perhaps, will we truly be able to speak of music, as Roland Barthes seems to suggest: “plutôt que d’essayer de changer directement le langage sur la musique, il vaudrait mieux changer l’objet musical lui-même, tel qu’il s’offre à la parole: modifier son niveau de perception ou d’intellection: déplacer la frange de contact de la musique et du langage”¹ (Barthes 1982, 237). Chang­ing “the musical object itself” means rethinking the forms of experience of music and transforming its aesthetic apparatus. And “to shift the point of contact between music and language”, as Barthes says, requires a deeper exploration of the horizon that both connects and distinguishes music from language, prompting us to ask not why music should or should not be considered a language, but rather how a certain use of language in music has contributed to shaping our experience of the musical matter.