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By integrating theoretical approaches to the female voice with the musicological investigation of female singers' practices, the contributors to this volume offer fresh viewpoints on the material, symbolic and cultural aspects of the female voice in the twentieth century. Various styles and genres are covered, including Western art music, experimental composition, popular music, urban folk and jazz. The volume offers a substantial and innovative appraisal of the role of the female voice from the perspective of twentieth-century performance practices, the centrality of female singers' experimentations and extended vocal techniques along with the process of the 'subjectivisation' of the voice.
List of contents
Part 1 The 'Voice' and the Voices: Definitions, Iconologies, Myths and Practices
1. Vocalising honey
Adriana Cavarero
2. Writing the female voice from Debussy to Boulez
Julian Johnson
3. Eurydice's Voice in Contemporary Opera
Michal Grover-Friedlander
4. Maria Callas and the Achievement of an Operatic Vocal Subjectivity
Marco Beghelli
5. How Female is the Voice? Conceptualisations and Practices
Michela Garda
Part 2 The grain of the voices, Experimentation and Technology
6. Love, Race and Resistance: The Fugitive Voice of Nina Simone
Martha Feldman
7. Black Sonic Refusal
Jayna Brown
8. The Voice that Gives Voice: Female Folk Revival Singers around 1968
Serena Facci
9. Women's Voices in Cairo, Egypt, at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Virginia Danielson
10. 'Hear what I Feel': Joan La Barbara, the 1970s and the 'Extended Voice'
Veniero Rizzardi
11. Remediating the Female Voice in Extremis(m): The Human Voice (1966)
Pamela Karantonis
About the author
Serena Facci is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies at the University of Rome 'Tor Vergata'. Her fieldwork and research projects include traditional and popular music in Italy and in Central-East Africa, and intercultural music making in educational and religious contexts.
Michela Garda has a philosophical and musicological background. She teaches Musical Aesthetics and Sociology of Music at the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage, University of Pavia.
Summary
The volume offers a substantial and innovative appraisal of the role of the female voice from the perspective of twentieth-century performance practices, the centrality of female singers’ experimentations and extended vocal techniques along with the process of the ‘subjectivization’ of the voice.
