Demetrio Stratos_ Cantare la Voce _ Singing the Voice

In this small presentation, I would like to focus on experimental music and phonetics, particularly on one artist who contributed to expanding our knowledge about the limits of the human voice and how to go beyond them. 

Demetrio Stratos (1945-1979) was a Greek singer, known for his fundamental role in music research. His original name was Efstratios Dimitriou. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Greek parents. His family was orthodox, so he grew up listening to Byzantine sacred music but also Arabic folk music. He studied piano and accordion.  

In 1962 he moved to Italy, to study architecture in Milan.  

In 1967 he joined the Italian beat band “I Ribelli”, and he recorded the hit single Pugni chiusi. 

In 1972 he left “I Ribelli” and founded a new group, “Area”, a well-known prog-rock band. The collaboration with Area lasted until 1978 when Stratos decided to focus exclusively on himself as a solo artist.  

Indeed, Stratos, along with the experience with the Area, was involved with experimental studies on voice and psychoanalysis. In 1976 he released his first studio album as a solo artist, Metrodora, which comprehended his vocal studies and research. In 1977 he worked together with the University of Padua and formulated his pedagogy of voice. In 1978, he released his second solo album, Cantare la voce.  

In this year, his international fame grew thanks to the attention of John Cage, who invited him to perform in different events in New York, Amsterdam, and Paris, and to teach a course related to the possibilities of the human voice at the University of San Diego, California.  

Unfortunately, this developing career was suddenly stopped in 1979, when Stratos was diagnosed with a severe case of aplastic anemia. Stratos died in June 1979 because of a heart attack. 

Besides the official Area discography, Stratos’ legacy in experimental music is indisputable: in particular, his research on phonetic helped to push beyond the limits of the human voice. The result of his research can be heard in Metrodora and Cantare la Voce, where the sounds that seem to be coming from instruments are actually Stratos’ voice. 

In Stratos’ opinion, the voice today is a transmission channel that does not transmit anything. Western vocal hypertrophy made the modern singer insensitive to the different aspects of vocality, isolating him in linguistic structures and patterns. Stratos aims to know the limits of the human voice to overcome them and so to set the voice free.  

In order to do so, Stratos put together deep theoretical research on phonetics and ethnomusicology and a constant physical effort. 

Indeed, for Stratos voice is a muscle, so he trains the articulatory muscles. He explains that opera singers exercise only some muscles, while he tries to include every part. (VIDEO) Through this training and his natural talent, he achieved incredible results. Stratos was able to reach 7,000 Hz, when a tenor normally reaches more or less 500 Hz, and a woman soprano 1,000 Hz. Franco Ferrero, who collaborated with Stratos during the common research at the University of Padua, wrote that: “Looking at what I have found during the emission, the vocal folds did not vibrate. The frequency (for a human voice) was very high (vocal folds do not succeed to exceed the frequencies of 1,000–1,200 Hz). In spite of that, Demetrio obtained not one, but two no harmonic hisses, one that descended from 6,000 Hz, and the other that climbed from 3,000 Hz. Therefore, it could not be supposed that one hiss was the next harmonic of the other. I observed also the emission of three hisses simultaneously.” Basically, this means that Stratos, using various overtone singing and techniques, was able to produce due or three sounds at the same time using only the human voice. (VIDEO 30:40). This result is called diplophony and triplophony, which is also the title of the first track in Cantare la voce.

Ferrero highlights two particular points in Stratos’ research: 

1.The leading role of the signifier over the signified. 

Stratos creates sounds without meanings because the voice has a meaning in itself. Voice must be listened to, regardless of the contents that it conveys. Still, this sounds without meanings open gates to new worlds. Through the repetition, Stratos destroys the subject that says “I”, and replaces it with a plurality of nomad voices. Indeed, “the voice tends to be declined plurally, it whispers, it moans, it imitates, it becomes diplophonia and triplophonia. It is a polyphonic vocalism without a subject, androgynous, where both genders, masculine and feminine, coexist.” Stratos goes back to the instinctive materiality, sings the voice as the voice itself, and sets it free from the codified objectiveness.  

2. The ritual value of voice. 

The relation between Stratos and religious music is clear: In his Flautofonie ed Altro, the fourth track of Cantare la voce, there are two not harmonic voices that push the listener into a state of trance, similar to what happens during the religious rites. Diplophonies and triplophonies were used by Tibetan monks for religious purposes. Also, Stratos recorded a sound poem, O Tzitziras o Mitziras, a Greek tongue-twister that ministers used to repeat for hours in order to enter in a state of trance. (VIDEO) Ferrero lists four ritual elements in Stratos’ work: the repetition, the escape from the ordinary world, the loss of the subject, and the communitarian dimension. Stratos’ double and triple voices, through the resort to repetition, dissolve the ego and create a collective scene, an intimate communion between humans and nature.  

QUESTIONS:

  1. Use of repetition.  

I have already highlighted this point during my long presentation of Zong!, by NoubeSe Philip. Again, repetition seems to represent a key-point in many of the performances we investigated. In Stratos’ production, the relationship between the repetition and the religious rites is clear: the hypnotic rhythm of repetition is useful to dissolve the ego and to escape from the ordinary in a new world, following the tradition of religious rites. In light of this finding, can we re-think the examples of repetition that we witnessed in the other performances as an instrument to lose the Ego? 

2. Mirror and Breath. (VIDEO 11:50)  

In some performances, Stratos uses a mirror to control the movements of his voice: for him, voice “is a vehicle of transportation because it tries to grasp things.” Then he adds that “The child’s mirror in his or her first sounds is the mother that says: You are this.” Can we identify a relationship between the mirror and the mother? We can think, for example, to Hurbinek, the child in Auschwitz that could not communicate because no one taught him how to do it. 

3. Cavarero, For More than One Voice.  

Besides Hurbinek, the connection between Stratos’ experimental work and Cavarero’s essay may represent an interesting topic for a further investigation: in particular, can we relate Stratos’ diplophonia, triplophonia, his polyphonic vocalism without a subject, androgynous, where both genders, masculine and feminine, coexist, with some concepts in Cavarero’s book A più voci? 

REFERENCES:

Cavarero 2005 = Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Levi 1963 = Primo Levi, La Tregua, Torino, Einaudi, 1963.

Stratos 2006 = Suonare la Voce, Edel Italy SRL, 2006.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC3IWYPYQHI    

Tagliaferri 2000 = Roberto Tagliaferri, Demetrio Stratos, La Voce Nomade, edited by Scipione Castello 56, Ludovico Calchi Novati, Milano, Edizioni D’ARS, dicembre 2000. 

http://www.scipionecastello.it/html/il_circolo/libri_darte/demetrio_stratos_la_voce_nomade.html