Why Voice Now?

Abstract

Research Article| December 01 2015 Why Voice Now? Martha Feldman, Martha Feldman Convenor MARTHA FELDMAN is Mabel Greene Myers Professor of Music and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her books include The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (University of California Press, 2015), based on the Bloch Lectures at Berkeley, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2007), and City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California Press, 1995). She is currently at work on a book on the end and afterlife of the castrato phenomenon in modern Rome. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Emily Wilbourne, Emily Wilbourne EMILY WILBOURNE is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her book Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell'Arte is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. In 2015 she guest-edited a special issue of Women and Music in honor of Suzanne G. Cusick. She has published on the commedia dell'arte and seventeenth-century music in this Journal, Women and Music, Recercare, and Teatro e storia; an article is forthcoming in Italian Studies. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Steven Rings, Steven Rings STEVEN RINGS is Associate Professor of Music and Chair of the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. His book Tonality and Transformation (Oxford University Press, 2011) was awarded the Society for Music Theory's Emerging Scholar Award, and his article "A Foreign Sound to Your Ear: Bob Dylan Performs 'It's All Right, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding),' 1964–2009" (2013) received the Outstanding Publication Award from the SMT Popular Music Interest Group. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Brian Kane, Brian Kane BRIAN KANE is Associate Professor on Term in the Department of Music at Yale University. His research explores the intersection of philosophy, music studies, and sound studies. He is the author of Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2014). His current project, entitled Hearing Double: Jazz, Ontology, Auditory Culture (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), considers the phenomenon of jazz standards from philosophical and aesthetic perspectives. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar James Q. Davies James Q. Davies JAMES Q. DAVIES is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Romantic Anatomies of Performance (University of California Press, 2014) and coeditor with Ellen Lockhart of Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789–1851 (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). James grew up in Johannesburg. Before arriving in California, he was a Junior Research Fellow in Music at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2015) 68 (3): 653–685. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2015.68.3.653 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Martha Feldman, Emily Wilbourne, Steven Rings, Brian Kane, James Q. Davies; Why Voice Now?. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2015; 68 (3): 653–685. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2015.68.3.653 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search Try to imagine a zone without clear boundaries or strict divisions. Were we able to strip away speech, poetry, phonetics, morphology—all of language, in short—we might have the pure terrain of the thing we call voice. For what would we be left with? Resonance, timbre, phonation. The vocalise, the vowel, the scream, the sigh, the cry, the gasp, the om. Whether such an extraction is in fact reducible to voice is a matter for debate. In what follows we negotiate this question in different ways, thinking of voices of different kinds: theoretical, pragmatic, psychic; linguistic, sonic, physical. Whatever congeries of things we may find voice to be, it remains various and refractory to explanation. A minor literato named Enrico Panzacchi constructed a useful parable of these voices in a bizarre exercise in autobiographical fiction of 1889. In the following scene he stages himself in an approach to the Sistine Chapel,... Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.