Spring 2025

16 April: Student Presentation (rescheduled from 29 January)

Ty Bouque, “The Vanishing Point;” Respondent, Seth Brodsky

4:30-6:00 pm, Logan 801

Abstract:
It’s not so much the physical limit but the philosophical one that haunts me: dal niente, to sing from nothing—what happens to my body in the nothing? Where do I go? Sciarrino’s innocuous and much-commented-on dynamic circle invites potentially disastrous implications for the singing body, because where an instrument’s vanishing point remains an accessible externality (bow, reed, breath, hand), my threshold hides within. Wherever he may draw his circle—which Sciarrino does far less liberally for voice than for instruments—I must vanish myself. The circle marks the limit of my being, the horizon beyond which an I can no longer be said (at least, according to the music) to exist. Again, it’s not so much the physical extremity (the near impossibility of such a feat of silent song) that worries me—though we will talk about that too–but the broad implications a vocal zero-point has on our ability to conceive any stability of body, place, and being in performance.

Drawing across theories of grief and mourning (Brinkema, Derrida), corpses and corporeal extremity (Blanchot, Scarry), all manner of holes and degree-zeroes (Alberti, Bal, Barthes, Yates) and Sciarrino’s own writings, this paper thinks towards a theory of bodies that vanish in Sciarrino’s vocal music. Working as both a theorist and a practitioner, I trace out the implications of such a violent threshold from varying examples in his operas (Aspern, Macbeth, Luci mie traditrici) and chamber music (Quaderno di Strada, Due nuove melodie), and consider how an attendance to these vanishing points might radically alter our ideas of physical verity and spatial ontology—which is to say (the final leap) of forms—in this music.