Constructing the singing voice: Vocal style, aesthetics and the body in Okinawan music

Japan’s southernmost prefecture of Okinawa has a thriving traditional music culture that has become popular throughout the country, and has also become the basis for a more modern Okinawan pop music scene. Most Okinawan musical genres strongly emphasize vocal technique – vocal timbre, inflection and ornamentation are all singled out as being cultural markers that differentiate Okinawan genres from each other and from the vocal music of the Japanese mainland. Vocal techniques have long been theorized and mediated through both written and verbal aesthetic discourses, and the voice continues to be a way that regional identities, lineage affiliations and other aspects of Okinawan society are negotiated. In this article I draw on fifteen years as a researcher and performer of Okinawan folk and classical vocal traditions, as well as recent recorded interviews with performers and music producers, to analyse how these discourses function, and how they have interacted with changes in performance practice since the early twentieth century.