Andrea Garbuglia

Stripsody

La vocazione musicale

delle strisce a fumetti

Andrea Garbuglia

Stripsody

La vocazione musicale delle strisce a fumetti

eum

eum x comunicazione x musica

isbn 978-88-6056-269-2
Prima edizione: dicembre 2011

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Introduzione 1

At tuba terribili sonitu taratantara dixit

Ennio, Annales

Raccolta di tavole realizzate da Eugenio Carmi e pubblicata nel 1966 con in allegato un 45 giri dell’omonima composizione di Cathy Berberian, Stripsody è una delle riflessioni più coerenti sul ruolo svolto dai suoni nel linguaggio dei fumetti.

Nelle strisce disegnate, le onomatopee assumono uno statuto particolare: esse stanno per un suono che non sempre corrisponde alla loro fonazione e per questo, se pronunciate, perdono quel legame con le cose che le rende funzionali alla storia. Si delineano così due piani sonori – quello della narrazione e quello annotato sulla tavola – che per coesistere devono necessariamente rimanere silenti.

Stripsody, sia nella veste sonora sia in quella grafica, recide, almeno apparentemente, il legame tra cose e onomatopee, ma di fatto entrambi i testi lo recuperano in forma mediata, trasformandolo nel luogo di una simbolicità tutta musicale. Se la Berberian, dopo aver decostruito il testo, lo ricompone creando una narrazione aurale, ora atomizzata, ora sequenziale, Carmi usa la veste grafica per ricostruire il suono della cosa nascosto dalla nuda onomatopea, trasportando così i due piani sonori all’interno di una dialettica squisitamente visiva.

I testi che seguono sono il risultato di una ricerca che ancora continua e che verrà costantemente aggiornata nella pagina dedicata a Stripsody (http://musicomix.wordpress.com/stripsody/) del sito Music and Comix (http://musicomix.wordpress.com/).

I. Stripsody. La vocazione musicale delle strisce a fumetti 2

1. Premessa

Stripsody – fusione di comic-strips e del suffisso ody – è il titolo di due opere ben distinte: un brano vocale composto ed eseguito da Cathy Berberian, di cui mi occuperò nel mio intervento, e una raccolta di tavole realizzate da Eugenio Carmi (3). In entrambi i casi, la materia prima con cui hanno lavorato gli autori è costituita dai suoni dei fumetti.

Anche se le due opere furono pubblicate insieme nel 1966, tra esse non esiste nessun tipo di collegamento, fatta eccezione forse per i suggerimenti che si scambiarono Carmi e la Berberian, e per un piccolo Glossario, scritto dalla Berberian, nel quale troviamo elencati i principali suoni onomatopeici dei fumetti, con accanto una loro possibile spiegazione. Vi leggiamo, ad esempio, che BOING è una «vibrazione forte (anche di gong)».

Fig. 1a: E. Carmi, Stripsody (tavola I). Copyright © 1966 E. Carmi

Fig. 1b: E. Carmi, Stripsody (tavola V). Copyright © 1966 E. Carmi

Successivamente, forse servendosi proprio di questo Glossario, Roberto Zamarin realizzò una seconda serie di tavole (Peters 1968), con le quali trascrisse l’opera vocale della Berberian, usando una sorta di “notazione a fumetti”. Naturalmente, malgrado il recupero di alcuni elementi tratti da forme notazionali arcaiche (penso in particolare ai tre righi sovrapposti), queste tavole non sono degli spartiti veri e propri, visto che – come ci fa notare Goodman (4) – uno spartito è tale solo se intrattiene una relazione biunivoca con la sua esecuzione. Esse sono, semmai, una forma di ipocodifica, nella quale si lascia grande libertà all’interprete. Ciononostante, le tavole di Zamarin rappresentano un importante snodo teorico per il nostro argomento. Egli, infatti, sceglie di invertire l’usuale rapporto che c’è nelle vignette tra disegni e suoni, mettendo i primi al servizio dei secondi. L’inversione si fa particolarmente evidente nell’undicesima tavola, dove l’autore allude al ruolo occupato dalla banda sonora nelle pellicole dei film, relegando i fotogrammi in una colonna orizzontale, a margine della rappresentazione dei suoni.

Fig. 2: Cathy Berberian, Stripsody: spartito realizzato da Roberto Zamarin (tavola I, particolare). Copyright © 1966 C.F. Peters Corporation

Fig. 3: Cathy Berberian, Stripsody: spartito realizzato da Roberto Zamarin (tavola XI, particolare). Copyright © 1966 C.F. Peters Corporation

A prima vista potrebbe sembrare che l’opera della Berberian non sia altro che una delle tante liste, ricordate da Eco nel suo lavoro più recente (5), ma non è così. Lo scopo del mio intervento sarà quello di provare che Stripsody dà espressione concreta a quella che potremmo chiamare la “vocazione musicale dei fumetti”. Partiamo dalle strisce disegnate.

2. Le onomatopee nei fumetti

Fig. 4: Quino, due strisce di Mafalda. Copyright © Quino

Nei fumetti non tutti i suoni hanno lo stesso statuto. Ce ne accorgiamo subito se osserviamo due vignette di Quino: nella prima vignetta Mafalda urla BOOOM; nella seconda la scritta BANG è attribuita a due sorgenti sonore diverse. BOOOM e BANG sono indubbiamente due suoni onomatopeici, ma se provassimo ad immaginare i suoni realmente presenti nell’universo narrativo, ci accorgeremmo che tra essi c’è una profonda differenza: il suono prodotto da Mafalda è proprio BOOOM, mentre né le pistole né i palloncini di carta fanno BANG. Dunque, nelle strisce disegnate, è possibile tracciare una netta separazione – non sempre facile da delineare da un punto di vista teorico – tra quei suoni che, se eseguiti, ci restituiscono un suono molto simile a quello supposto nell’universo narrativo, e quei suoni la cui esecuzione, invece, si distanzia sensibilmente dal suono per cui stanno. Quindi, nell’esempio considerato, BANG è un segno che esclude la voce; che si scrive ma che non si legge; è un suono che non deve risuonare (6). I fumetti sono pensati per una lettura silenziosa.

Questa differenza può essere spiegata anche da un punto di vista semiotico. Infatti, i suoni onomatopeici dei fumetti si caratterizzano per essere al contempo dei simboli, delle icone e degli indici. Sono dei simboli perché si basano su un codice stabilito per convenzione. Sono delle icone perché tentano in qualche modo di imitare i suoni reali a cui si riferiscono. Ma sono anche degli indici – Peirce li chiamerebbe subindices (7) – perché, pur non avendo un rapporto diretto con la cosa che li ha prodotti, inseriti nel contesto delle vignette, recuperano tale rapporto per via mediata, grazie cioè alla reale connessione con la cosa per cui stanno. In altre parole, BANG non è l’indice per una pistola, ma lo diventa se in una vignetta lo troviamo collegato ad essa.

Da questo punto di vista, i suoni onomatopeici dei fumetti funzionano come degli shifters (8): alla loro lettura mentale segue immediatamente la loro messa tra parentesi, necessaria a far emergere il suono reale a cui si riferiscono. Si stabilisce così un profondo legame tra suoni e cose sonore: un legame che rende i suoni dei fumetti difficilmente interpretabili, una volta staccati dal loro contesto; che spesso influenza la loro veste grafica, e che rende quasi impossibile pensare ad un asincrono (9).

Come tutti gli shifters i suoni onomatopeici dei fumetti sono pura negatività (10). Essi, infatti, pur imitando i suoni reali non sono affatto i suoni delle cose, ma non sono neanche pienamente linguaggio verbale. Questo è vero soprattutto nel loro contesto naturale dove essi, per mantenere tutta la loro efficacia, non possono perdere il legame con il suono che simbolizzano.

Quindi, almeno apparentemente, quella compiuta da Cathy Berberian è un’operazione impropria, giacché dà forma sonora a ciò che non dovrebbe averne e, così facendo, estrapola i suoni dalle vignette. Ne risulta un’opera afasica, che nasce proprio dall’eliminazione dell’aspetto su cui si fonda la comunicazione fumettistica: i disegni.

Il termine ‘afasia’ ha sicuramente una connotazione negativa. Tuttavia, nel nostro caso esso assume anche una valenza positiva, dato che Stripsody è costruita proprio sulla base dei due principali tipi di afasia studiati da Jakobson (11): il disturbo della similarità e quello della contiguità. Si ha il disturbo della similarità quando rimane intatta la capacità di formulare frasi ben formate, ma viene intaccata la capacità di sostituire un termine con un altro. Diversamente, si ha il disturbo della contiguità quando ad essere danneggiata è la capacità di produrre enunciati, e le frasi si riducono a stringhe malformate di sinonimi e antonimi.

La Berberian compone Stripsody alternando parti in cui i suoni onomatopeici vengono presentati in modo autonomo e giustapposto, ad altre in cui, invece, la concatenazione dei suoni permette la ricostruzione di un evento, il quale fa assumere alla concatenazione stessa un valore sintattico. Sicuramente, attraverso la concatenazione è possibile ovviare all’ambiguità che caratterizza i suoni onomatopeici una volta separati dai disegni, ma questo non elimina affatto il principio afasico che è all’opera. Infatti, qualsiasi sostituzione avrebbe senso solo se non intaccasse il significato della successione considerata, e comunque, qualora dovesse aver luogo, non instaurerebbe un rapporto sinonimico tra i suoni sostituendi. Allo stesso tempo, però, all’interno della nostra composizione, l’alternanza dei due modi di essere dell’afasia rende l’ambiguità dei suoni presentati in forma atomica densamente significante. Una volta che, attraverso i segmenti narrativi, si recupera per via indiretta il contesto delle vignette, i suoni atomici si aprono ad una varietà di soluzioni interpretative che ne determinano la ricchezza semantica. Se Berio, nella Sequenza III per voce femminile, scritta proprio negli stessi anni, rivaluta aspetti marginali della vocalità attraverso la frantumazione del testo (12), in Stripsody la frantumazione è funzionale ad una trasfigurazione che permette un recupero mediato e polivalente del testo originale. Ed il recupero è tanto più evidente quanto più forte è il contrasto tra i due piani dell’afasia coinvolti.

Fig. 5: Cathy Berberian, Stripsody: spartito realizzato da Roberto Zamarin (tavola IV, particolare; esempio di disturbo della contiguità). Copyright © 1966 C.F. Peters Corporation

Fig. 6: Cathy Berberian, Stripsody: spartito realizzato da Roberto Zamarin (tavola V, particolare; esempio di disturbo della similarità). Copyright © 1966 C.F. Peters Corporation

Non c’è dubbio che il semplice ascolto di Stripsody presenti comunque delle difficoltà ermeneutiche, alle quali, però, Cathy Berberian ha cercato di ovviare attraverso performance in cui la mimica giocava un ruolo fondamentale (13). Accanto ai gesti necessari all’emissione di determinati suoni, la Berberian ne aggiungeva altri con cui spiegava la natura dei suoni emessi, o indicava l’inizio e la fine delle sequenze narrative, combinando così una gestualità produttiva con una linguistica ed una metalinguistica.

La trascrizione di Zamarin rappresenta un passo ulteriore verso il recupero del naturale contesto dei suoni onomatopeici. In essa, infatti, il linguaggio dei fumetti riassume consistenza, anche se solo per fornire una caratterizzazione grafica alla rappresentazione dei suoni. Inoltre, le tavole non eliminano affatto i due piani dell’afasia coinvolti in Stripsody, anzi li accentuano, replicandoli sul piano visivo.

3. Conclusioni

Concludendo, se nei fumetti abbiamo visto delinearsi la presenza di due piani sonori, uno di superficie e l’altro profondo, appartenente all’universo narrativo, Stripsody riproduce questi due piani in forma trasposta. Da una parte ci propone l’esecuzione dei suoni così come li troviamo scritti nelle strisce disegnate. Dall’altra, allude, senza sostituirsi ad esso, al secondo livello sonoro, nel quale non tutti i suoni mantengono la stessa forma. Il recupero mediato della dimensione visiva, anche nella forma più propriamente fumettistica realizzata da Zamarin, non fa altro che accentuare la frizione tra i due livelli sonori. Ed è proprio mettendo in evidenza il contrasto fra questi due piani che Stripsody fa emergere la vocazione musicale dei fumetti.

I fumetti, attribuendo ai rumori un suono onomatopeico, danno articolazione vocale ai suoni delle cose, senza però far acquistare ad esse una Voce vera e propria. Ecco che i suoni di superficie diventano sempre e comunque la forma traslata, e per questo simbolica e musicale, dei suoni reali. Se per Giovanni Piana il canto è l’eco di un urlo, poiché è solo grazie all’eco che l’uomo pone uno schermo fra sé e la sua voce (14), i due piani sonori dei fumetti ci ripropongono questa frattura proprio nella loro inconciliabile diversità ed innegabile interdipendenza.

Fig. 7: Cathy Berberian, Stripsody: spartito realizzato da Roberto Zamarin (tavola I, particolare). Copyright © 1966 C.F. Peters Corporation

1 Questo breve testo è stato pubblicato nel catalogo Comicon Napoli 2011, p. 21, ed è stato usato come pannello esplicativo delle tavole di Eugenio Carmi, esposte nella mostra dal titolo La nona. Sinfonie nell’arte fumettistica (Napoli, Castel Sant’Elmo, 29 aprile – 1 maggio 2011). Ringrazio Alino per avermi permesso di collaborare con la manifestazione. Colgo inoltre l’occasione per ringraziare il Rettore dell’Università di Macerata, Professor Luigi Lacchè, il Presidente delle eum, Professor Luca Scuccimarra, e il Direttore Tecnico, Dottor Giuseppe Luppino, per aver permesso l’apertura della collana eBook delle Edizioni Università di Macerata e per aver scelto di inaugurarla con il mio testo. Ringrazio le Edizioni Peters e il Maestro Eugenio Carmi per avermi concesso di usare le immagini qui riprodotte. Ringrazio, inoltre, il Dottor Ivàn Giovannucci e il Dottor Alessandro Sisti per il loro impagabile supporto. Uno speciale ringraziamento va alla Dottoressa Carla Moreschini, alla Dottoressa Ilenia Paciaroni e, last but not least, ad Alice Moreschini che, con il loro lavoro e con i loro amichevoli consigli, hanno reso possibile la realizzazione del presente progetto. Infine, con quasi trent’anni di ritardo, ringrazio Iginio Straffi per avermi cresciuto a pane e fumetti.

2 Il presente articolo è la trascrizione (con la sola aggiunta delle note a piè di pagina) dell’intervento libero letto domenica 22 novembre 2009, al XIII Colloquio di Musicologia del Saggiatore musicale (Bologna, 20-22 novembre 2009), Dipartimento di Musica e Spettacolo, Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna. Il testo completo della ricerca è stato pubblicato dalla rivista Sonus – A Journal of Investigations into Global Musical Possibilities (Spring 2011, Volume 31/2 – Cambridge, MA), con il titolo “Berberian’s Stripsody and Comics’ Musical Vocation”. Ringrazio il Saggiatore musicale, nelle persone della Professoressa Giuseppina La Face e del Professor Lorenzo Bianconi, nonché l’Editor-in-Chief di Sonus, Professoressa Pozzi Escot, per avermi gentilmente permesso di pubblicare la presente versione.

3 E. Carmi, Stripsody – Interpretazione vocale di Cathy Berberian. Testo introduttivo di Umberto Eco, Arco d’Alibert – Kiko Galleries, Roma – Houston (Texas) 1966.

4 Cfr. N. Goodman, Languages of Arts, The Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis – New York; trad. it. a cura di F. Brisochi, I linguaggi dell’arte, il Saggiatore, Milano 1976.

5 Cfr. U. Eco, Vertigine della lista, Bompiani, Milano 2009. È decisamente più simile ad una lista il brano di Serge Gainsbourg Comic Strip, pubblicato nell’omonimo album uscito postumo nel 1997. Di questa canzone esiste anche un videoclip di cui è protagonista Brigitte Bardot (in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URr37OUyC6I, verificato il 26 ottobre 2011).

6 Faccio qui implicitamente riferimento a: G. Agamben, Il linguaggio e la morte – Un seminario sul luogo della negatività, Einaudi, Torino 1982 (2008).

7 Cf. Ch. S. Peirce, The Collected Papers – Elements of Logic, Vol. 2, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1932, CP 2.284.

8 Il concetto di ‘shifter’ viene usato qui nel senso attribuitogli da Roman Jakobson: cfr. R. Jakobson, Selected Writings II, Mouton, The Hague – Paris 1971, pp. 130-147.

9 Mi sono occupato di questa possibilità nelle pagine conclusive dell’articolo “La musica e i fumetti – Declinazioni di un binomio” (Musica/Realtà, n. 92, Luglio 2010, pp. 89-104).

10 Cfr. G. Agamben 1982, op. cit., pp. 28-37.

11 Cfr. R. Jakobson 1971, op. cit., pp. 229-259 e pp. 289-333.

12 «In Sequenza III ho cercato di assimilare musicalmente molti aspetti della vocalità quotidiana, anche quelli triviali, senza però per questo rinunciare ad alcuni aspetti intermedi ed al canto vero e proprio. Per controllare un insieme così vasto di comportamenti vocali era necessario frantumare il testo e in apparenza devastarlo, per poterne recuperare i frammenti su diversi piani espressivi e ricomporili in unità non più discorsive ma musicali» (il corsivo è mio). La citazione è tratta dal libretto della registrazione integrale delle Sequenzas di Berio fatta dalla Deutsche Grammophon nel 1998, p. 61.

13 Ricordo in particolare l’esecuzione del 1969 per la Televisione della Svizzera italiana (in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmOwX1xTAak, verificato il 26 ottobre 2011).

14 Cfr. G. Piana, Filosofia della musica, Guerini e Associati, Milano 1991, pp. 68-71.

II. Berberian’s Stripsody and Comics Musical Vocation 1

1. Some historical premises

Between 1965 and 1966, Cathy Berberian, Luciano Berio and Eugenio Carmi were working, independently from one another, at three new, astonishing and ground-breaking opuses.

Luciano Berio was composing his Sequenza III (for woman’s voice). His intent was to give musical dignity to all the daily aspects of human vocal behaviour, even the most trivial and incidental, and to move listeners’ attention to the voice as a sound in itself. «The voice – he says in the Introduction to Sequenzas – always signifies something, always refer to something other than itself and create a vast range of associations. In Sequenza III I tried to assimilate into a musical process many aspects of everyday vocal behaviour, trivial ones included, though without allowing this to distance me from certain intermediate aspects and indeed real singing» (2).

Cathy Berberian – who at the time was still Berio’s muse and fellow worker, but no longer his wife (they had divorced in 1964) – was writing a composition in which she used sonic material derived from comic-strips. In the mid sixties, comics were undergoing an artistic re-evaluation and a scrupulous semiotic investigation. Umberto Eco, for instance, wrote about comics in Apocalypse Postponed, originally published in 1964. On the other hand, since 1961, and precisely with his Look Mickey, Roy Lichtenstein had started using the style of comic-strips and in 1963 he depicted his famous Drowning Girl. Nevertheless, we cannot consider Berberian’s composition merely as a musical reflection on comics, nor the acoustic counterpart of these innovative tendencies. Her decision to use comics onomatopoeias as raw material for a musical composition does not simply mirror Berio’s intent, but – as we will see – it also represents a radically new paradigm and a totally different musical conception.

Even if they barely knew each other, during the same period Eugenio Carmi was depicting a series of fourteen plates dedicated to the graphic representation of comics onomatopoeias. If Cathy Berberian was interested in the musical latency of comics sounds, Carmi was interested in their graphic potentiality. Eventually, Carmi and Berberian got in touch and had some meetings – probably attended by Berio and Eco as well – during which their parallel interests were discussed. The result was that they decided to use the same title for their works, Stripsody, and to publish them together (3).

In the pages ahead, I shall investigate the theoretical implications and the musical perspectives which could be derived from Berberian’s Stripsody. In order to reach this result, I shall first problematize the role played by sounds and music in comic-strips, an issue not often approached by scholars nor by musicians.

2. Sounds in Comics

It is quite common to consider sounds in comics as if they were all equivalent, but this approach tends to mislead us. There are at least three different categories of sounds in comics: (1) the verbal or non-verbal sounds uttered by one character (it does not matter whether human or not); (2) the verbal sounds attributed to a non-specified external narrator; (3) the onomatopoeic sounds. To be even more thorough, we should add to this triple classification all sounds that are implicitly represented by simply depicting a sonic/acoustic situation (e.g., a car passing by, a crowded street, a leaking tap), but here I will not deal with them.

If we can rightly assume that, within the fictional context, the first two categories would have more or less the same acoustic structure that we could easily attribute to them through an inner or louder performance, the third category of sounds has a quite different role and a completely different status. If we perform an onomatopoeia inserted in comics we know that the sound produced is not nearly so similar to the sound supposed in the narrative context as the other two categories. Therefore, most of the times, we just do not read them aloud. This produces an existential splitting among comics sounds.

Onomatopoeias such as BOOM, BANG, SLAM, CLAP, SNIFF are so common in comics that we almost do not bother to reflect on them, nor on their function. We see them; we almost do not lose time in reading them; we just skim through them on our way to follow the story plot. This is an apparently illegitimate practice, but, on the contrary, it has a precise theoretical foundation.

An onomatopoeia is, first of all, a symbol and secondly an icon. The Webster dictionary defines ‘onomatopoeia’ as «the formation of a word, as cuckoo or boom, by imitation of a sound made by or associated with its referent» (4). Therefore onomatopoeias are “imitative words”, they are, in Peircean terms, «Representamen whose Representative Quality is a Firstness of it as a First. That is, a Quality that it has qua thing renders it fit to be a representamen. Thus anything is fit to be a Substitute for anything that it is like» (5). Since any word is “largely conventional” and most of the onomatopoeic sounds in comics are English verbs, it would be more appropriate to say that onomatopoeia are hypoicons, just like images and diagrams (6).

Peirce’s semiotic approach seems to explain exactly what kind of signs onomatopoeias are, but if we consider more closely the characteristic triadic relation (Sign – Interpretant – Object) established by an onomatopoeic Representamen, such as BANG, it is easy to detect a certain vagueness in the Object place. What kind of object could the onomatopoeia BANG stand for? An explosion, one may correctly answer. But what kind of explosion? A gun shot? A bomb? A car accident? Obviously, there is not a single Object for which the Representamen BANG stands for: its representation, its act of standing-for, depends on the context. Taken by itself, BANG is an onomatopoeia that stands for several different Objects.

However, the ontological vagueness of onomatopoeias does not lessen their iconic (hypoiconic) nature. All their possible (acoustic) Objects are somehow, and in some respect, similar to one another, and BANG (or any other onomatopoeias) represents exactly that shared characteristic that makes those acoustic objects similar.

Paraphrasing one of the most significant passages of Giovanni Piana’s Philosophy of Music (7) and using it in a slightly different context, it is possible to say that onomatopoeic sounds point to an opened set of meanings, and their values do not consist in determining the one meaning they are standing for, but in keeping their polyvalence open. Nevertheless, in comics the definition of the actual object of an onomatopoeia is not a problem usually: the drawings associated with them have the function of depicting the sonic situation and the combination between onomatopoeias and images determines a fixed Object. As a matter of fact, we realize the vagueness of onomatopoeias only when we consider them outside their proper context, i.e. outside a comics frame.

The relation between drawings and onomatopoeic sounds is so strong that we almost do not consider it a relation at all. Sounds are the essential counterpart of what is represented, much as a certain representation has already a fixed range of unexpressed sounds within its potentiality. In a way, onomatopoeias vagueness is specularly equivalent to the acoustic vagueness of the situation depicted by the drawings. Only trough onomatopoeias, in fact, we can decide whether the depicted situation does actually produce a sound or not. If we consider the frame in which an onomatopoeic sound is collocated as a single communicative unit in comics language, we realize that its object is not – at least not only – a real sound, but the relationship between a sound and a certain sonic situation. Onomatopoeias are a whole with the sonic representation.

The nature of this representation is iconic, and more precisely diagrammatic, because «it is only in respect to the relations of their parts that their likeness consists» (8). There is no sensory resemblance between the real sonic situation depicted, the real sound and the comics frame-unit in which they are represented; there is no cogent relation between the depicted acoustic situation and the onomatopoeias similar to the cause/effect relation existing between the real acoustic situation and the produced sound. But there is «an analogy between the relations of the parts of each» (9). Conversely, unlike diagrams, in this case the parts involved are not only conventional signs (symbols), but icons. So, in a comics frame containing an onomatopoeia, we have the iconical representation of an indical relation (the one between the sonic situation and the real sounds) based on Firstness. More precisely, comics onomatopoeic sounds are indices, or better subindices, of the acoustic/sonic situation depicted in the frame/s in which they are inserted. They are not indices but subindices because they are «rendered such principally by an actual connection with their objects» (10). Onomatopoeias have in comics a function similar to the one that sounds have in real world: they indicate the actual existence of a sonic situation.

It is important to stress out that onomatopoeias such as BANG, SNIFF or CLAP are not in themselves indices respectively of a shooting gun, of a sniffing dog, of an applauding audience, but they do become such in comics because they are related to the drawing of a shooting gun, of a sniffing dog, of an applauding audience.

From this point of view, an onomatopoeia is similar to a proper name, to a personal demonstrative, to a relative pronoun or to a letter attached to a diagram: it «denotes what it does owing to a real connection with its object but none of these is an Index, since it is not an individual» (11). The indexical relation is based on convention, on symbolic elements. As we already said, BANG is first of all a conventional word, as much as a comics drawing must be considered conventional (12). But if we consider the connection between BANG and the drawings linked to it we cannot fail to see an indexical relation in it. With their design, with their bright colours and dimensions, comics onomatopoeias do not only startle us (13), but, in the very same moment they startle us, they drive our attention to something else, to something different from themselves. However, our attention is not driven to a real sound, as we may think at first, but to a certain sonic/acoustic situation drown in the frame. Onomatopoeias main function is to lead readers’ attention to a certain situation responsible for the production of a certain sound. Exactly like demonstrative pronouns, BANG calls upon the reader «to use his powers of observation and so establish a real connection between his mind and the object» (14). In reading comics onomatopoeias, the reader shifts immediately to what is happening in the story, to what caused a certain sound which continues to be at least partially indeterminate and vague until the shift is completed, until the indexical function of the onomatopoeia has accomplished its goal. Within the context of a frame, the onomatopoeic sounds are subindices (hyposemes), as a finger pointed to a fire. An onomatopoeia in a comics is “dynamically” connected with the situation depicted in the frame, and it is precisely its “subindical” function that renders impossible to perform an onomatopoeia and therefore to separate it from its natural context. But, as well as pronouns, personal demonstratives, relative pronouns or the letters attached to a diagram, there is no existential relation between the Representamen and its Object; they could be considered signs only because they are physically connected to their objects.

To establish a significant analogy between onomatopoeias and pronouns is not only an important step towards the understanding of Cathy Berberian’s composition, but it also throws a new light upon the role played by onomatopoeias in comics; a light, as we will see, which is essential to determine what can be rightly assumed to be comics musical vocation.

The similarity between pronouns and onomatopoeic sounds in comics may not be immediately seen, but there are undoubtedly many convergences: both onomatopoeias and pronouns do not have fixed meanings; both carry our attention to the context in which they happen to be in; both are strictly related to the person/object/situation pronouncing/producing them. It is different if I say “I” or if you say “I”, as much as it is different if “BANG” is produced by a gun or by a falling tree. What is exactly the same in all these examples is that we see a shifting going on: from the uttered sound to the utterer; from the written sound to the drown object producing it. For this reason Roman Jakobson places pronouns in a particular class of grammatical units named, after Jespersen, shifters.

The shifters are one of the most complex language units. They are the last to be apprehended by children, and the first to be lost in language impairments. Shifters represent an overlapping between codes and messages, i.e. «the general meaning of a shifter cannot be defined without a reference to the message» (15). In a way, shifters could be seen as empty objects, and from a certain point of view they undoubtedly are empty objects, but as Agamben puts it, «deixis, or indication […] does not simply demonstrate an unnamed object, but above all the very instance of discourse, its taking place. The place indicated by demonstration, and from which only every other indication is possible, is a place of language. Indication is the category within which language refers to its own taking place» (16). Besides, «only because language permits a reference to its own instance through shifters, something like being and the world are open to speculation» (17).

What is even more interesting for our investigation upon comics onomatopoeic sounds is Agamben’s reflection on the name of God. Alain de Lille, in his Regulae theologicae says that «whenever a noun is used to predicate the divine substance it is transformed into a pronoun (pronominatur) and it becomes formless (fit informe)» (18). In Hebrew tradition, God’s name is IHVH (yod, he, vav, he) and cannot be pronounced in the way it is written because vowels are not contained in it. Every addition of vowels is an illegitimate one since there are no vowels in the written name and, for the very same reason, even all the possible pronunciations are illegitimate. Therefore «that which is construed as the supreme mystical experience of being and as the perfect name of God (the “grammar” of the verb to be that is at stake in mystical theology) is the experience of the meaning of the gramma itself, of the letter as the negation and exclusion of voice (nomen innominabile, “which is written but not read”)» (19). We could summarize in saying that the name of God is a noun that, in losing its substance and its form, becomes nomen innominabile, a name that can be written but not be read.

As strange as it may sound, onomatopoeias in comics are exactly like that. They are names – names of sounds – that entering in a comic frame are turned into “pronouns”, in shifters, and in this process they lose their substance (their meaning), their form (no question about that – onomatopoeias in comics have many different forms, even bizarre ones, and Eugenio Carmi’s Stripsody is a reflection on comics onomatopoeic sounds graphic possibilities), and they become names that cannot be read. If you do read them, they are immediately transformed into nouns and lose their main function, i.e. to refer to a certain acoustic situation. Like God’s name in Hebrew tradition, comics onomatopoeic sounds are nomina innominabilia.

From this point of view, the practice from which we have started our reflection is perfectly legitimate and relies upon a philosophical, even if not explicit, presupposition: we do not read comics onomatopoeic sounds because they are nomina innominabilia.

3. Stripsody: an aphasic composition

In Stripsody Cathy Berberian does exactly what a comics reader is not supposed to do: she provides comics onomatopoeic sounds with an audible performance. At least in her first version – the one published together with Eugenio Carmi’s graphic plates – she completely erases any presence of the onomatopoeias’ original context. What we hear in her composition is only a discrete succession of vocalisations of comics sounds such as AAAAH, BLAM, BLUM, BOING, GRUNT. At first we might even suspect that Berberian is just presenting here a significant, but partial, list of onomatopoeias and, knowing of her acquaintance with Eco, we might even suspect that this supposition could be well grounded.

There is, however, a more interesting impression that Stripsody gives to its first-time-listener: it seems to be an aphasic composition. Aphasia, as much as any other kind of language impairment, could be of two main kinds: the one that affects the production, and the one that affects the reception. In Stripsody we cannot be sure which one is at work; the only thing that we can be sure of is that something is lacking. Apparently the singer presents us with a succession of “linguistic” units but she is not capable of giving them a meaningful organisation, nor we can understand them.

Antonio R. Damasio, in his essay on the Signs of Aphasia, says that one of the characteristic difficulties manifested by aphasic patients is the

difficulty in comprehending a purely verbal command (i.e., a verbal message given through auditory or visual means, without accompanying gestures, facial expressions, or meaningful emotional intonation). The errors of comprehension may range from an almost complete inability to understand any but the most elementary questions, to mild defects that surface when complex sentences are presented (e.g., sentences with double negatives or dependent clauses) (20).

As we have seen in the first part of this essay, comics onomatopoeic sounds are strictly related to the frame in which the sonic situation that produces them is represented, and their relation is so strong that we do not see it as a relation at all. In singing the onomatopoeias, Cathy Berberian cuts off the visual part of this dyadic relationship and inevitably produces a linguistic impairment based on the most neglected aspect of natural language: multimediality/multimodality.

As a matter of fact, Roman Jakobson, who discusses aphasia from a linguistic point of view, concentrates his attention only upon what he considers to be the two fundamental characteristics of language: combination and selection. He says that «any linguistic unit at one and the same time serves as a context for simpler units and/or finds its own context in a more complex linguistic unit» (21). Therefore any linguistic unit does exit only combined with at least another linguistic unit. Moreover, every linguistic unit used in a text is the result of a decision, a selection among units which could be equivalent and/or different from the chosen one (22). What he does not take into account is that there is a third element that constitutes every linguistic manifestation and, more in general, every human communication: con-currency. Any linguistic manifestation is not only the result of a selection and of a combination (which in this case should be called ‘concatenation’ since we could have a simultaneous combination, i.e. a concurrence), but even the result of a concurrence of different communicative devices: verbal language, prosody, mimicry, body language, drawings, music and so on. Damasio shows that aphasia is not only the result of a similarity disorder (which affects selection) and/or of a contiguity disorder (which affects combination/concatenation), but it could be the result of a simultaneity disorder as well, which affects the capacity of perceiving a speech lacking its natural multimedial/multimodal context, and/or affects (we could presume) the capacity of correctly producing a text formed by the concurrence of different kind of media. From this point of view we should talk about the Threefold Character of Languages (see fig. 8).

Fig. 8

However, the similarity disorder and the contiguity disorder are both involved in Berberian’s composition, but, strangely enough, Cathy Berberian uses these two kinds of linguistic impairments as constructive expedients.

The intentional use of an aphasic expedient to compose a musical piece is already present in Berio’s Sequenza III. Markus Kutter did write a text for Sequenza III and Berio used it, but he says that, since he was trying to involve many different aspects of everyday vocal behaviour, he «had to break up and seemingly to lay waste to the text, so as to be able to recover fragments from it on different expressive levels, and to recompose them into units that are no longer discursive but musical» (23). A clear functional relation, between the aphasic process that destroys the text and the musical values of the re-composition in no longer discursive units, seems to emerge in Berio’s words. However, Cathy Berberian employs the two different linguistic impairments studied by Roman Jakobson more deliberately.

Jakobson says that if an aphasic patient is affected by the similarity disorder s/he has a selection deficiency and her/his speeches are context-bound. For instance, «the sentence “it rains” cannot be produced unless the utterer sees that it is actually raining» (24). So, in the appropriate situation the patient will not have any problem to say “it rains”, but at the same time, if asked, s/he will not be able to say what ‘rain’ means: for such a patient a word cannot be substituted for another, nor for its definition, and every occurrence of the same word in a different context (let’s say “it rains” and “rain is a meteorological event”) counts as the occurrence of a different word. On the contrary, if a patient is affected by contiguity disorder s/he has a combination deficiency and has difficulty in combining «simpler linguistic entities into more complex units» (25). In the speeches of these patients the «word order becomes chaotic» (26) and «in advanced cases of this disease, each utterance is reduced to a single one-word sentence» (27).

In Stripsody, even though we may not realise it at first, both kinds of impairments are at work. In some passages Berberian uses autonomous onomatopoeic sounds, i.e. onomatopoeias which are not connected with the following or the preceding ones. In some musical passages – e.g. BUM, BLAM, BLOMP, BRRRR – the aggregation of sounds is not the result of a combinational process and the onomatopoeias are not single elements joined together in a more complex unit, just as “b”, “o”, “o”, “k” form the word “book”, or the word “cat” is an significant unit in the sentence “the cat is on the table”. These sounds are typical examples of a contiguity disorder: a single word, like “cat”, or a single sound, like “BLAM”, could stand for an entire sentence. However, in other more articulated passages – e.g. MEOW, SNIFF, IHUSSS, RUF, KXXHH, CAICAI – Cathy Berberian uses meaningful successions of onomatopoeic sounds. Even in these cases, each onomatopoeia, if taken separately from the others, could mean almost anything, but if we consider them together, as in the above succession, it is perfectly clear that they tell us a story: there is a cat (MEOW), who has been sniffed out by a dog (SNIFF). When the dog finds the cat they have a fight (IHUSSS, RUF, KXXHH) and the dog is sent packing (CAICAI). In another passage the onomatopoeias describe a woman who is waiting for someone. She stares at the clock which is ticking every second of her long waiting. In order to make the time run faster, she decides to turn on the radio. She skims through an opera, a pop song, the weather forecast, but nothing catches her interest, so she decides to turn it off. She is almost on the point of breaking into tears, when someone knocks at the door. She is startled. She opens the door and her long agony ends: the person whom she has been waiting for has finally arrived, and they kiss.

Obviously, these narrative parts are almost self-sufficient and the drawings are less missed than in the others. But, at the same time, these narrative passages are important for all the sounds which are not part of them. Since in these sections a story is told, the remaining sounds are charged, by contrast, with a polysemous indetermination which reveals them for what they really are: comics onomatopoeic sounds which have lost their natural context and therefore become open to different interpretations, all equally possible and acceptable. However, as I said before, this vagueness constitutes the real richness of onomatopoeias.

In the difference we have just described it is possible to recognize the basic characteristics of the two kinds of linguistic impairments studied by Jakobson. In the passages in which onomatopoeias are autonomous, they function exactly like words in speeches of patients affected by continuity disorder: every single word is a sentence in itself. Obviously, this makes those words highly polyvalent. On the contrary, the onomatopoeic sounds of the narrative passages are more like words in speeches of aphasic patients affected by similarity disorder: each word is meaningful only in that particular context; it cannot be pronounced autonomously and, if inserted in a different context, the patients do not consider it as the same term anymore. Besides, those onomatopoeic sounds do not have synonyms and cannot be substituted.

Using this expedient, Cathy Berberian creates a composition that, in a way, could be considered exactly the opposite of Sequenza III. If Berio, in his Sequenza for woman voice, uses aphasia as an expedient to destroy verbal language and to reveal the musical potentiality of its sounds, Berberian uses aphasia firstly to bring the listener’s attention to sounds which are not supposed to be heard, and secondly to re-create the comics dimension from which they have been extrapolated, providing onomatopoeias with new linguistic values. In Stripsody the original integrity of the linguistic units is not destroyed, and the loss of the drawings, which results in a concurrency impairment, is counterbalanced by two different and opposite aphasic strategies.

4. Conclusions

Why should we talk about comics musical vocation, then? The answer is easy and Berberian shows it to us with her Stripsody. In singing comics onomatopoeic sounds, Cathy Berberian reveals the two sonic dimensions involved in comic-strips: on the one hand we have the sounds that we suppose to be present in the narrative situation, and which are iconically described by drawings; on the other hand, we have all the notated sounds which are all somehow influenced by their connection with the sonic situation depicted inside comics frames. Among the notated sounds there are onomatopoeias which are, as we said before, sounds that cannot be vocally articulated. These nomina innominabilia reveal the fracture between the two sonic dimensions of comics, because they are, at the very same time, the acoustical index of a sonic situation and the gramma of a sound that can be revealed only by losing its indexical valence. This fracture provides comics with the two basic functions of sounds: the indexical and the symbolical ones (here the term ‘symbol’ is no longer used in Peircean meaning). Onomatopoeias, while incorporating both indexical and symbolic dimensions, reveal comics musical vocation.

Comics onomatopoeias are already musical in their muteness, but their sonic potentiality is rendered explicit only in Cathy Berberian’s Stripsody, in which the dyadic relation between the two dimensions of sounds is re-composed through an aphasic process and transposed into the acoustic dimension.

5. References

Agamben, Giorgio, Language and Death. The Place of Negativity, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis – Oxford 1991 (ed. or. 1982).

Agamben, Giorgio, Infancy and History. The Destruction of Experience, Verso, London – New York 1993 (ed. or. 1978).

Buda, Fabio, Luciano Berio, Visage e il linguaggio non verbale, tesi di laurea, Istituto Musicale V. Bellini, Catania 2006-2007.

Berio, Luciano, “Introduction to Sequenzas”, in Sequenzas. First Complete Recording, leaflet, Deutsche Grammophon, Humburg 1998, pp. 8-22.

Carmi, Eugenio, Stripsody. Interpretazione vocale di Cathy Berberian. Testo introduttivo di Umberto Eco, Arco d’Alibert – Kiko Galleries, Roma – Houston (Texas) 1966.

Eco, Umberto, A Theory of Semiotics, Indiana U.P. – McMillan, Bloomington - London 1977

Eco, Umberto, Apocalypse Postponed, Indiana U.P., Bloomington 1994 (ed. or. 1964)

Edwards, Patti Yvonne, Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III. The Use of Vocal Gesture and the Genre of Mad Scene, doctoral dissertation, University of North Texas, 2004.

Halfyard, K. Janet, “a few words for a woman. Gender and Authority in Contemporary Vocal Composition”, 2001, (www.sequenza.me.uk/Authority_web.htm).

Halfyard, K. Janet, “Before night come. Narrative and Gesture in Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III (1966)”, 2001, (www.sequenza.me.uk/Sequenza_web.htm).

Jakobson, Roman, Selected Writings I, Mouton – ’S-Gravenhage, The Hague 1962.

Jakobson, Roman, Selected Writings II, Mouton, The Hague 1971.

Jakobson, Roman – Halle, Morris, Fundamentals of Language, Mouton, The Hague 1956.

Peirce, Ch. Sanders, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Harvard U.P., Cambridge (MA) 1931-1958.

Piana, Giovanni, Filosofia della musica, Guerini e Associati, Milano 1991.

Sarno, Martha Taylor (ed.), Acquired Aphasia, Academic Press, New York 1998 (1981).

1 I have previously discussed this issue in a speech given at the XIII Colloquio di Musicologia del Saggiatore musicale (University of Bologna - November 22, 2009).

2 L. Berio, “Introduction to Sequenzas”, in Sequenzas. First Complete Recording, leaflet, Deutsche Grammophon, Humburg 1998, p. 12.

3 E. Carmi, Stripsody. Interpretazione vocale di Cathy Berberian. Testo introduttivo di Umberto Eco, Arco d’Alibert – Kiko Galleries, Roma – Houston (Texas) 1966.

4 Electronic Dictionary and Thesaurus (version 1.0), Random House Webster, 1992.

5 C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Harvard U.P., Cambridge (MA) 1931-1958, CP 2.276.

6 Ivi, CP 2.277.

7 G. Piana, Filosofia della musica, Guerini e Associati, Milano 1991.

8 Peirce, Collected Papers op. cit., CP 2.282.

9 Ivi, CP 2.279.

10 Ivi, CP 2.284.

11 Ibidem.

12 Ivi, CP 2.276.

13 Ivi, CP 2.285.

14 Ivi, CP 2.287.

15 R. Jakobson, Selected Writings II, Mouton, The Hague 1971, p. 131.

16 G. Agamben, Il linguaggio e la morte. Un seminario sul luogo della negatività, Torino, Einaudi, 1982; English translation Language and Death. The Place of Negativity, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis – Oxford 1991, p. 25.

17 Ivi, pp. 25-26.

18 Alain de Lille, in ivi, p. 27.

19 Ivi, p. 30.

20 A.R. Damasio, Signs of Aphasia, in M.T. Sarno (ed.), Acquired Aphasia, Academic Press, New York 1981, p. 28.

21 R. Jakobson, Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances, in R. Jakobson and M. Halle, Fundamentals of Language, Mouton, The Hague 1956, p. 60.

22 Ibidem.

23 Berio, “Introduction to Sequenzas”, op. cit., p. 12.

24 Jakobson in Jakobson and Halle, p. 64.

25 Ivi, p. 71.

26 Ibidem.

27 Ivi, p. 72.