Reading Lives of the Voice I found myself working on a memory of my father’s voice, trying to recollect it in a more than general way, calling up something of its specific grain or knot, a voice I’ve not heard for nearly 20 years since my father’s death. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht begins the book with reflections on and attempts to recall his parents’ voices. The sound of his mother’s voice eludes him, though her can recall and describe aspects or features of it. His father’s voice, he writes, “by contrast, is a burning presence with a somehow physical impact I am not able to escape.” (p. 1) For Gumbrecht part of this impact derives from an irritation or discomfort he felt with his father’s voice, a discomfort gathered around ideas of gender, of masculinity and sexuality. He writes that his father’s voice had “a feminine tone but not in the high-pitched sense; it was more of an alto” (p. 2) and for the young Gumbrecht this voice “did not fit his looks, success, and status” (p. 1). His sense of his father’s voice led Gumbrecht to compensate at school and in other contexts for a perceived lack, to anxiously await the change of voice that puberty would bring, and into adulthood to “have never been proud or even relaxed about [his] voice” (p. 3). These very personal reflections lead into a discussion of voices, in different relationships of proximity, of being, of authority ranging through everyday exchanges with a barista, to communal singing, to divine voices, to the voices of popular singers.

Gumbrecht describes the topic of the human voice as “disorderly” and proposes that the strategy for presenting it may be “to circumscribe” it (p. 12). By this he means,

“on the one hand, that we leave empty the discursive space of the topic’s systematically necessary but epistemologically impossible unfolding and, on the other hand, surround this conceptual void with a series of essays on partial aspects and the specific phenomena involved. (p. 12-13)”

This offers him a model or structure for the book – a set of independent essays linked by “some basic conceptual premises” (p. 13). These are explored across six chapters that consider spatial and interpersonal aspects of voice, socio-cultural voices in unison or community, the human voice as a historical phenomenon, auditory hallucinations and imagined voices, divine or transcendent voices, and voices of individual singers that produce a sensation of being “overwhelmed” (p. 16). As the book’s title indicates, all these engage with aspects of closeness or proximity, a sense of bodies and beings in spatial relation with each other. “This always present and never stable relation in space is the challenge that our voices process and absorb” (p. 17).

The structure Gumbrecht establishes for his investigation of the “disorderly topic” allows him to draw on an eclectic mix of sources, examples, and illustrations. From an observation of members of his family joining in with the singing of a football crowd in Rio de Janeiro (p. 42), to a reference to Suetonius’ description of the voice of Julius Caesar (p. 63), to Marcel Proust’s remembering of the voice of Albertine (p. 119), to the voice of God in the Old and New Testament, to his final chapter discussing in detail the voices of a number of popular twentieth and twenty-first century singers including Elvis Presley and Adele. Alongside these he draws on the writing of Nietzsche, Darwin, Julian Jaynes, and Freud who have considered voice in relation to consciousness, the development of humans as a species, the relation of voice to conscience and relationships of utterance and speaking to a sense of what it is to be a person with others.

These diverse sources, along with the many references to Gumbrecht’s personal history and experience give a particular flavour or tone to the book. He documents his life in recollections or encounters with voices, tracking this across different countries, including Germany, USA, Brazil, and Switzerland, and various life moments including the birth and development of his children, his different employments, and his education. These specific and particular details provide a set of figures that help Gumbrecht map a ground of voicing, sounds, and utterances that are ephemeral, but are essentially human. He arrives at the end of the book, not at “one major thesis” (p. 180), but at a proposal around the sensing of the material and palpable elements of voice impacting on the human body.

“If being exposed to human voices always triggers elements in the imaginary that we then interiorize and accumulate on sensible layers of our personalities, we can indeed say that voices never operate without producing effects of fusion that imply our primary material existence. (p. 180)”

Operating in part as a reflection on a life lived with and among voices, and with a sensibility that is attentive to relations of closeness, Lives of the Voice arrives at a point where Gumbrecht hopes that

“thinking about voices has pushed further the sense of closeness as an existential dimension – even if we only understand that concepts and arguments are not enough to grasp what is at stake with voices. (p. 181)”

The book set me thinking about my father’s voice, remembering a mixture of emotions, of expectation and resistance. My father was a farmer, but also a singer, singing at weddings and funerals, at home and to his cows. Known locally as a singer, his reputation generated a mix of embarrassment and pride in me as a child and created expectations that I too might be a singer. Listening to other singers, I sometimes catch echoes of his voice and am drawn into a spatial-temporal relationship of nearness and distance, of connections among material human bodies and the specific sounds they produce. The bittersweet sensation that Gumbrecht highlights as specific to singing and listening to songs (p. 51-52) is wrapped up in a sense of being overwhelmed by some experiences of song, and a paradoxical sensation of proximity with voices of the dead or of artists we have never seen live.

“Closeness in this dimension cannot be measured by shorter or larger distance; rather it is an affinity, or better, a contiguity with everything else that is matter, matter as occupying space and being palpable. (p. 178)”

In his conclusion, Gumbrecht focuses on the knot of voice, on how it involves an oscillation between existential and conjectural, between life and death. Gumbrecht proposes voice as a phenomenon that operates at a horizon of the transcendental and the substantial, and in this disorderly oscillation, this edginess, lies its power and attraction for us.