Steiner's polarity of two formative elements in spoken sound: a sculptural element that shapes the word, and a musical element of streaming tone.
The Plastic and the Musical in Speech in Anthroposophy is the polarity Rudolf Steiner described in Methodology and Nature of Speech Formation (GA 280, the 1922 speech course), where spoken sound carries two formative powers. The plastic, sculptural element shapes and configures the word through consonants and shaped vowels; the musical element streams as tone out of feeling. The plastic governs the epic style and leans on the palatal sounds; the musical governs the lyric style and leans on the labial sounds, while dramatic speaking holds both as the musically plastic. Steiner held that a merely musical speaking does not suffice, since a beautiful voice alone remains animal: the speaker must also shape the speech plastically. Marie Steiner-von Sivers carried this teaching into Sprachgestaltung, the artistic speech formation still taught in the Section for the Performing Arts at the Goetheanum in Dornach.
In Steiner's Own Words
Epic: the word is there for depicting; the third dimension of soul, the will, must be lacking in it. One can therefore use the will, that is, risings and fallings, for depicting, one can make speech plastic. Measure: recitation. Lyrical: the word is there for the streaming-out of feeling; the third dimension of soul, the will, must be within it, that is, one must make speech musical. Height: declamation. Dramatic: musically plastic, thus, when the player has to speak something of his own: declamatory; when he does not have something of his own to speak: recitatory.
What it Means Today
The clearest living home of this polarity is Sprachgestaltung, the art of speech formation that Marie Steiner-von Sivers developed alongside Rudolf Steiner and carried forward after his death. Where modern voice training begins from the muscles and the breath, Steiner began from the sounds themselves: the consonants that carve and sculpt a word, and the vowels and tone that sing through it. He told his 1922 students that the epic and the lyric style are opposed to one another, the lyric more musical, the epic more plastic, and that the reciter must paint in speech-sounds for the epic while letting the lyric be carried by the stream of breath. The discipline did not stay a lecture. It became a trained profession, taught today in the Section for the Performing Arts at the Goetheanum in Dornach, where speakers, eurythmists, and Waldorf teachers still learn to feel a rolled r differently from a wave-thrown l.
Thalira synthesis: the plastic and the musical are not two techniques to choose between but the two hands of the larynx, the sculptor's hand that configures and the singer's hand that streams, and a speaker becomes audible as a whole human being only when both work at once. For a practitioner this means a concrete exercise rather than a theory: take a single line, first overstress its consonants until the words stand like carved objects, then speak it again on pure flowing tone, and listen for the third thing that appears only when the sculptor and the singer share the same breath.
Where to Read More
- Methodology and Nature of Speech Formation, GA 280
- Find speech formation titles at SteinerBooks
- The Chaldean Oracles: Ancient Theurgy and the Fire of the Gods
- Theseus: The Athenian Hero, the Labyrinth, and the Civilising of Chaos
- The Minotaur and the Labyrinth: Theseus, the Beast, and the Path to the Centre