When one makes a sound, there is the sound itself, and there is the silence which anticipates it.
What we actually hear is merely an afterimage of what we had once imagined—something that was once pure and resonant and infinite in its potential, now collapsing itself into a singular form. On that precipice between a prepared breath and its release, we grapple with what is referred to in vocal pedagogy as the ‘moment of onset’. This is a clinical term for what might otherwise be called the death of possibility, where all things that could be are displaced by the skeletal remains of what actually happens: if you release too much air before your vocal folds close, the sound comes out too breathy, timidly relying on the cushioning of your exhale. If the vocal folds close before the air is released, the sound comes out harsh and glottal, jerked into existence like a premature ejaculation.
Classical vocal technique endeavours for a pure onset. The air must be produced simultaneously as the vocal folds close; a fleeting second of physical coordination that cannot be seen, barely even felt, but is still executed by some strange alchemy of trust and intuition. Before the sound even surfaces, a tensed jaw or a tightening of the shoulders might corrupt it entirely. You know you have achieved it only after it is heard, when the note feels weightless, suspended, materialising fully-formed as if from nothing. Simply understanding its mechanics isn’t enough. What it really relies on is a far more primitive knowledge, an ancient bodily instinct embedded somewhere in the diaphragm and operating through a blind faith in muscle memory. That faith alone takes years to build. Years spent refining the very first breath, where painstaking effort must create an illusion of complete effortlessness—in this instant, we surrender all control. Even a fraction of hesitance distorts everything that follows.
As you may or may not have noticed—I’m affecting nonchalance here, as if I’m totally indifferent to your noticing—I have not published anything since July. In fact, I have rewritten this opening paragraph fifty times just over the past week. I have an unproven superstition that if I perfect the first sentence, the rest of the work will reveal itself to me automatically: ‘before there is sound, there is anticipation’; ‘the quality of silence preceding a sound determines the quality of the sound itself’; countless iterations of the same tired idea, none of them producing that elusive flow which should write this essay without my conscious effort.
Everything I write lately feels trite and aphoristic. (Even this sentence takes seven revisions. Replace ‘is’ with ‘feels’ to create a plausible deniability; replace ‘now’ with ‘lately’ for some temporal haziness; always create escape routes; never fully commit to a sentence. Imprecision must be manufactured precisely.) I spin ornamental webs around a hollow centre, dreading that they will be exposed as the work of a poseur by anyone with half a brain. I whisper sweet nothings to fog the window between writer and audience so that I might obscure a bald truth: I cannot write anymore, I am impotent, and I still need you to adore me. This is onset without release. Everything exists more whole in imagination than it ever does on paper, everything collapses under the weight of its own form. I am fossilised in intention.
Perhaps this is why I join a community choir on Tuesday evenings. I am seeking some kind of cure: ostensibly, I am here because I like to sing; on a more subconscious level, probably because I cannot bear to be alone for more than an hour; more than anything, I am forced to do. I draw comfort from the familiar rhythms of my former choir kid days—an Anglican choir kid, almost as pathetic as a theatre kid and yet more sinisterly pretentious—where the hours were measured in the printing of sheet music, geometric arrangements of fold-out chairs, Sunday service rehearsals. What I find is that in each routine, no matter how trivial, I am forced to inhabit my body entirely. No part of me remains abstract or theoretical. Where writing can hover in a limbo of eternal hypothesis, singing demands immediate and active participation. It must be embodied: diaphragm engaged, skull resonating, sound produced into space. It must either be physically manifested or never exist at all. The voice never remains as just an idea.
The cardinal rule of community choir is that no matter how tone-deaf your neighbour might be, it is in poor taste to point that out. I take quickly to this principle when I join the bass section, immersing myself in a ragtag collection of older men whose gravelly voices descend to low droning notes with all the grace of someone tripping down a staircase. In this fumbling inelegance, in our disagreements of pitch and technical shortcomings, we stumble upon something beyond musicality. Not a soul in this room is below the age of forty; our ranks comprise retirees, parents, professionals who have sacrificed a pleasant weeknight at home to blunder through a rendition of Coldplay’s Fix You. Here, the beauty of sound falls decidedly below social cohesion in the hierarchy of priorities. That permission to be mediocre strikes me as a strange and beautiful luxury. I am used to an art which burdens itself with purpose. Every piece has already imagined its audience before it exists, trying to move or impress or establish its own credibility, forever rehearsing its own invented significance. But here, in this fluorescently-lit community hall, we sing a song for no other reason than the easy joy of making sound together. It is pure, uncomplicated. Expression for expression’s sake.
In this no man’s land of untrained warbling, something unexpected emerges. I can hear it in myself, when I strain for a high F that was once second nature and instead land on a flimsy dinghy of falsetto. Each mistake is evidence of the body that made it—raspiness cultivated through years of nicotine addiction, deposits of phlegm which dampen what should resonate, the cautious catch in my throat from years without practice. This is what Roland Barthes’ calls the ‘grain of the voice’: the physical materiality of the body behind the production. It lives in the distinct architecture of one’s vocal cords, or in the stamina of lung capacity. It persists as everything technique cannot master and everything the performing body cannot hide; a sonic fingerprint, eluding control and yet etched into our personhood.
Barthes recognised a crucial distinction: we may admire technical perfection, but we surrender to the grain. It is the singer who exposes their grain that grants us a more intimate pleasure, an almost erotic experience of the real body erupting through its execution. We often mistake manufactured vulnerability—the face mimicking sadness, the emphasis on a poignant lyric—for honesty in art. But the true grain of a voice reaches for something beyond articulation; it evokes something visceral and seductive, and can only be accessed when we relinquish control. The imperfections we struggle to conceal become our most human offerings. This is the ‘body that sings, the hand that writes, the limb as it performs’ that Barthes described, and it emerges in amateur choir not in spite of our technical limitations but because of them. Rasp, break, strain. Each voice carries the telltale signature of a life being lived.
When we talk about singing, and indeed when we talk about artistic gifts en masse, we talk about them as being sourced from somewhere outside ourselves. Talent is bestowed rather than developed. We are visited by the muse, struck by inspiration, writer’s block happens to us—all passive constructions, always a force passing through us. This paragraph, should it succeed, would be credited to some higher being moving through me; should it falter, I'd blame some mysterious obstruction rather than the conditions I've created within. We use a language of externalisation to absolve ourselves of responsibility, comforted by the myth that if creativity is not ours to command, then neither is its absence.
But Barthes shatters this convenient fiction. His idea of the grain is rooted within the body; it razes the distance between artist and creation. When we hear something truly remarkable, we hear it erupting from within, arising from the friction between intention and the material limitations of the body. It is violently honest, and therein lies the price of greatness—anything less and we are forever circling the perimeter, fantasising about what we might have made. Do I fear technical adequacy, or do I fear being truly present? Am I paralysed by the thought of baring my grain? My community choir compatriots have no such concerns. They sing with their whole selves, their voices inseparable from their lived experience, not speaking of lost gifts or extrinsic barriers. They simply make sound, physical and present, each Tuesday evening.
I have a parasocial relationship with Maria Callas. Of course, obsessing over one of the defining voices of 20th-century opera is a predictably insufferable hobby for me to take up, but for once, this isn't mere cultural posturing; rather, I am drawn to something profound in her constitution. Callas understood that artistry demands sacrifice. Where an amateur might achieve honesty through a naïve unself-consciousness, Callas illuminates the deliberate violence of the grain. Her dogged attention to detail was never an end in itself, but always in service of a deeper authenticity. She didn't aspire to sing beautifully—she sought to touch something primal in us. Her voice became what the critic Rodolfo Celleti called ‘a voice of desolate harshness,’ what Harold Schonberg described as "disfiguring musical lines in the interests of drama,’ a monument to self-flagellation. Her body and life were mutilated for her art: the dramatic weight loss that ultimately compromised her vocal support; the uncompromising technical choices that decimated her vocal longevity; her personal life and romantic relationships, subordinated to her marriage with artistic integrity. Callas retired at the age of 41, succumbing to an instrument that had become too immense for her frame to sustain. But where critics construe this as a voice crumbling under its divine gift, I see instead an artist who made a series of deliberate choices, fully conscious of her fate. An artist who understood that in the search for truth, one must not be afraid of a little blood.
This is Callas singing Vissi d’arte at Covent Garden in 1964. Callas plays the titular protagonist in Puccini’s Tosca, a celebrated singer confronted with an impossible choice: submit to the villainous Scarpia’s sexual advances, or watch her lover die. The aria—whose title ironically translates as "I lived for art"—is her prayer to God, questioning why a life devoted to art and love has led to such suffering. At about 2:40 in this recording, Callas sings the climactic ‘perche, perche, Signor’ before descending with an audible gasp, her voice cracking as she slides down the scale. It is unclean, imperfect, antithetical to the purity of a trained voice; it also sounds like a heaving sob. Here, the melodic prayer of Puccini’s composition transforms into a work of anguished, pleading desperation under Callas’ interpretation. What pours out from her body is an inarticulable, pre-conscious self, and what it provokes in me is reminiscent of the ‘shudder’ in Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. I feel something visceral with each listening, something akin to hearing a mother's scream. I experience exactly what Adorno described: a momentary disintegration of self. I shudder.
My devotion to Callas feels increasingly anachronistic in the current artistic landscape. The needle is always shifting, and today it moves from craft to concept: what captures the zeitgeist now is the Billie Eilish sound, whispered vocals and pared-back bedroom production, the modest trappings of intimacy. Even within classical music, Patricia Kopatchinskaja's barefoot, deconstructive approach to Beethoven's Violin Concerto receives acclaim precisely for its eschewing of convention. That is not to say these artists lack mastery, but that mastery is no longer the point; we reward that which distorts or dismantles. We've grown suspicious of virtuosity itself, as if technical accomplishment somehow impedes authentic expression. What was once considered the necessary foundation for artistic achievement now appears as an obstacle to overcome, the shackles of tradition from which true art must liberate itself.
A parallel transformation is occurring in contemporary writing. The dominant mode in fiction has become autofiction, where Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous earns acclaim not for its formal innovations but for its seemingly unfiltered exploration of trauma and identity. When The New York Times praises its ‘raw emotional force’ while barely mentioning sentence craft, we see the same hierarchy of values: authenticity over technique, experience over execution. Poetry has largely shed its traditional constraints, moving away from rhyme and meter toward blank verse and fragments of the personal, the political, the accessible. We find ourselves drowning in the age of the trauma-centered memoir, valuing personal revelation over how skilfully it might be conveyed. Terms like 'masterful' or 'accomplished' have taken on an almost pejorative quality, cursed with a sense of unrelatable elitism.
This tension between technique and authenticity isn't unique to our moment, of course. The Romantics privileged emotional immediacy over Enlightenment precision; the Modernists stripped away Victorian ornament in search of essential forms. But no matter where the cultural pendulum swings, I remain unconvinced. I have always been enchanted by art that is unabashedly in love with its own medium, that revels in its possibilities, that is concerned with ornamentation and flair and excess. What I find is that this love is no less authentic than its deconstruction. We presume a binary relationship between expression and mastery, that craft and truth are somehow mutually exclusive. But in reality, neither Callas’ deliberate gasping nor Vuong’s minimalistic prose quite capture what makes art truly revelatory. What incites the shudder, that electric response we feel when art touches something innate in us, cannot be attained through technical perfection or its intentional abandonment. Instead, it is something transcendent that we discover through these contradictions. What works in this essay: a detailed metaphor, the intellectual armour of my references, my stark confessions? Or is it something beyond that—your recognition of this writing’s human undercurrent, my desire to write this for you at all?
In Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building, he coins the 'quality without a name.' An Austrian-British design theorist I discovered through The Sims 1's reading list, Alexander dedicated himself to articulating what makes certain spaces feel alive rather than merely well-designed. He traced this to a quality he could only approximate—something like aliveness, freedom, exactness, egolessness—but never explicitly define. The quality remains nameless because it exists at the intersection of contradictory forces, like when an artwork feels both timeless and completely of its moment. Yet despite this ineffability, we recognise it immediately, intuitively, in our visceral response to encountering it. Alexander demonstrates this quality in an analysis of Persian carpets, discussing how master weavers deliberately introduce asymmetries into mathematically precise patterns. What appears as a mistake—a disruption in pattern, an unexpected color variation—is essential to the carpet's sense of aliveness. Without these intentional ‘flaws,’ the rug would feel mechanical, regardless of technical perfection. Crucially, these asymmetries work only because they exist within a framework of extraordinary skill. A child's uneven weaving wouldn't achieve the same effect; the disruption requires the pattern it disrupts. The quality emerges where mastery and its transcendence meet, only when technique becomes so internalised that it can be selectively abandoned for a higher purpose.
As artists, we are always negotiating with what I think of as the Hand: ‘the hand as it writes,’ the Hand of technique and curation, the visible proof of deliberate effort. It is what chooses one brushstroke over the other, why one adverb is removed and another added. The central paradox of art is how to conceal the very Hand that makes it. We strike the perfect balance when we attain a pure onset, when my carefully-constructed sentence reads as if it has just tumbled on to the page, and we fail when we have become too aware of this negotiation. My writing feels trite and aphoristic precisely because I can see my Hand too clearly, each rhetorical flourish and turn of phrase drawing attention to itself. The more I see the Hand, the more I try to conceal it; the more I try to conceal it, the more conspicuous it becomes. I catch myself building these clause-chains with semicolons; hoping they read as elegant mosaics; anxious that a more talented writer could choreograph these thoughts into fully-formed sentences. The more I am conscious of the Hand, the more a stylistic quirk is perverted into something gruesomely incompetent.
But when we transform the Hand from obstacle to instrument, when vulnerability is produced through technique rather than in spite of it, this is when we touch the quality without a name. Take Joan Didion’s prose, her controlled sentences executed with such precision that the Hand becomes altogether invisible. What prevents it from feeling manufactured is the unmistakable sense of self erupting through her work, like a nervous system made textual. Even in a sentence as simple as the opening to The White Album—‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live,’ a sentence that has now been diluted through years of Instagram story abuse, but I still laud as one of the most perfect sentences ever constructed—we see the quality in effect. The sentence's stark precision creates the perfect vessel for the desperation lurking beneath. The quality emerges in that space between her mastery of form and what that form barely contains: the threat of meaninglessness, the barely suppressed panic. Each word carries the presence of the fragile woman behind the immaculate prose—thin-boned, wearing sweaters in summer, haunting her own syntax.
When I like a work of art, my first instinct is to describe it as ‘honest.’ This compliment could apply to anything from Jennifer Lopez’ This Is Me… Now: A Love Story to a Clarice Lispector novel, works which share nothing but my erratic sense of affection, but in every instance that quality of honesty feels inalienable. When I interrogate ‘honesty’, I know what it is not: not sincerity exactly, not authenticity in the contemporary sense where we excavate trauma for credibility. Rather, it is something more elusive, what I can only describe as the specific textures of a human consciousness emanating through their work.
It is the grain of the voice—that pure selfhood imbued within the creation, the evidence of a specific body making these particular choices. This grain, when perfectly balanced within technical framework, catalyses that quality without a name—not despite the limitations it reveals but because of them. The quality emerges precisely at this intersection where the body behind the work becomes perceptible through, not despite, its technical execution. And when we feel this quality, we experience the involuntary shudder, that visceral understanding that we have encountered something true. When art is good, when it is honest, it is the moment this circuit completes itself. When I respond physically to a work of art—when I shudder—the boundaries between creator and audience momentarily dissolve, and for a fleeting moment, I am neither fully myself nor fully other, but somewhere in the space between.
We are discussing another writer’s work, and my friend dismisses it as too ‘self-serious.’ Like any good narcissist, I immediately wonder what this means for my own writing, how many times I have been the recipient of that same critique. After all, is there not something inherently self-serious in the decision to write at all? In this belief that I have thoughts so worthy of preservation that they must be published, in the assumption of an audience who cares what I have to say? Even this essay, with its classical references and theoretical frameworks, is one that assumes its own importance. I try to undercut it with moments of vulnerability, but I wonder if even these attempts are cynically manufactured. It is the same reason I struggle to write poetry, because I feel as if I must add layers of abstraction to obscure the embarrassingly naked bones of my feeling. What are the bones here? That I am afraid to write badly?
But maybe what I think of as self-consciousness—this recursive self-awareness, this tendency to circle and question—is just as much the signature of my living, the grain of my voice. The specific texture of my consciousness manifests in semicolons and em dashes, always explaining, always circling, always layering abstractions not just to hide feeling but to map its contours more precisely. I write lists because I value nuance, or because I am afraid to be declarative; I reference academics because I am well-read, or because I desperately need to be validated as intellectual; I am reflective because I am self-aware, or because I am a voyeur to my own experiences. The same quirks I find pretentious or overwrought are just as much the evidence of a mind trying to translate itself onto the page. What appears as self-seriousness might actually be my most honest offering—the fabric of a soul that cannot help but examine its own mechanisms, that finds meaning precisely in this examination. Maybe the quality of aliveness pours out in the space between my intention and execution, forever trying and failing to articulate what feels just beyond expression. The ‘I’ that writes is the ‘I’ that lives.
I write because I must. I write because I find myself inarticulable, and only through wrestling words into impossible shapes might I enter that small heaven of feeling known. Perhaps that perfect onset will forever elude me, yet I return constantly to that precipice between silence and sound, thought and expression. It is precisely there—not in the perfect sentence, but in the striving itself—that we might glimpse each other across the void, where the singular ‘I’ of this text might dissolve into a momentary communion of you and I together.
where was this during anne hathahate gate, an artist renowned for her dedication to technical excellence and subsequently criticised for her supposed inauthenticity .... a most wonderful read, you're a light.
hey so this is genuinely amazing i cant believe i exist in a period to be able to read this while having a coffee