Song Character Analysis Worksheet - The University of North ...

order while the musical number represents “romance, [a] rogue imagination,” fantasy,
and “exercise for imagination and personal freedom.” 11 Martin Sutton described the
suspension of realism and the often seemingly superficial need for production numbers as
the following:
The [musical] number functions as a narrative interruption, a fantastical tangent
that at once frustrates and releases the spectator. The plot . . . surrounds,
regulates, and keeps in check the voluptuous, non-realist excesses of the number.
Plot thus takes the part of ‘super-ego’ to the unruly ‘id’ of the number. 12
The hegemonic reaction is to applaud the logic of the plot while feeling “frustrated” (and
yet liberated) by the imagination of the music.
It is precisely the provocatively feminine elements of timbre and expression (the
imagination) that allows a performance to become an individual interpretation, particu-
larly in the art of singing. Roland Barthes described the “imaginery” in music with its
function “to reassure, to constitute the subject hearing it (could it be that music is
dangerous —the old Platonic idea? that music is an access to jouissance, to loss?).” 13
This almost ineffable quality of performance invokes the ethos of music in the combi-
nation of language and melody, termed by Barthes as the body or the “grain” of the voice.
191.
11 In Genre: The Musical, A Reader, ed. Rick Altman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981),
12 Sutton, 191. Note his use of descriptive words, particularly “voluptuous,” which have a
feminine connotation.
13 “The Grain of the Voice” (1972), reprinted in his collection Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen
Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 179. “Jouissance” means enjoyment.
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