Cathy Berberian’s Morsicat(h)y (1969) is a brief, cryptic composition for solo piano (right hand only) that transcribes her own name into Morse code. Deceptively minimal, the piece stages a potent act of manual envoicement, in which identity is transmitted through rhythmic fragments rather than sung or spoken text. In this paper, I read Morsicat(h)y as an extension of Berberian’s broader project of exploding vocal norms—transforming sonic embodiment through gesture, semiotic play, and media translation.

While Stripsody (1966) famously turns comic book onomatopoeia into theatrical vocal sound, Morsicat(h)y explores a different kind of performative code: the abstraction of language into telegraphic pulse, associated with military, bureaucratic, and masculinized communication systems. By inserting her own name into this system, Berberian offers a tongue-in-cheek reimagination of authorship and signal transmission. The title itself fuses Morse, Cathy, and “catty”—framing the piece as both technological inscription and feminist wit.

Building on scholarship by Susan McClary and Suzanne Cusick on gendered embodiment in postwar music, I argue that Morsicat(h)y offers a minimalist but highly theatrical challenge to the expressive authority of the (male) composer and the myth of the female interpreter. I also draw from Mara Mills’s work on communication technologies and disability, as well as Jennifer Walshe’s theorization of vocal gesture and post-instrumental music (“The New Discipline”), to situate the piece within broader conversations about performance, code, and bodily constraint. Berberian’s use of a single hand on a silent keyboard becomes a performative enactment of constraint as creation, and code as character.

In celebrating Berberian’s centenary, this paper centers Morsicat(h)y as a vital contribution to the crosscurrents of music, theatre, and media that shaped late 20th-century avant-garde performance. It is a portrait of the performer not as muse or machine, but as a winking encoder of her own mythos.