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- Volume 2, Issue 2, 2017
Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2017
Volume 2, Issue 2, 2017
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Constructing the singing voice: Vocal style, aesthetics and the body in Okinawan music
By Matt GillanAbstractJapan’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.
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South Indian singing, digital dissemination and belonging in London’s Tamil diaspora
More LessAbstractThis article explores the digital dissemination of Carnatic – South Indian classical – and Tamil devotional songs, singing and learning in London’s Tamil diaspora. Carnatic and Tamil devotional singing are key cultural practices in this highly dispersed, or ‘scattered’, diaspora, and are strong markers of collective Tamil cultural identity. The voice embodies the distinct South Indian style and is, therefore, highly iconic in South India, Sri Lanka and their diasporas. To demonstrate how the voice and singing are experienced in multiple locations, the article describes specific examples of how ‘traditional’ vocal practices are disseminated through the Internet. These examples are Skype lessons and online broadcasting of Tamil devotional singing. Through engaging in traditional singing practices in online environments, it is argued that vocal practices are central to a sense of belonging in multiple diasporic localities and to musical, spiritual and cultural diasporic imaginaries.
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Singing the nation: Contemporary Greek rebetiko performance as carnivalesque
More LessAbstractSignificant ethnomusicological research examines the use of traditional song to embody, perform and promote nationalist sentiment in the contemporary globalizing world. Traditional song as a mechanism for national critique has received less scholarly attention. This is a particularly prominent phenomenon within the contemporary European Union, where the utopian ideal of an increasingly borderless and multicultural region conflicts with conventional structures and ideologies of national belonging. This article examines the popular Rebetiki Istoria club in Athens, Greece, as carnivalesque resistance to state-sanctioned Europeanization projects. Engaging the four categories of a ‘carnivalistic sense of the world’, as outlined by Mikhail Bakhtin, this study examines this rebetiko culture as structurally coherent resistance to crypto-colonialist attitudes towards Greece. Emphasizing the role of heteroglossic dialogue in shaping carnivalesque music culture, the article examines how voice and singing in the music culture of this particular club level social hierarchies, and challenge dominant ideologies of national identity. Primary consideration is given to vocal style in the framing of rebetika as carnivalesque, suggesting that a particular politics of voice within the club frames rebetika as strategic commentary on narratives of self and other. In this study, the voice is understood as phonosonic nexus – both an embodied physical presence and a metaphor for intention and authority – that shapes the interpretive frame and signals a particular metanarrative of resistance and subversion guiding the carnivalesque nature of the music culture in the club.
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The transmission of voicing in traditional Gwoka: Between identity and memory
Authors: Marie Tahon and Pierre-Eugène SitchetAbstractThis article examines the transmission of voicing – the use of voice during the execution of a song – in Gwoka music. Considered at the time of French colonization as mizik a vié nèg (‘vagrants’ music’) this traditional music from Guadeloupe recently underwent a rehabilitation process that led to the idea that it reflected the ‘roots’ and the ‘authenticity’ of the Guadeloupean people. Gwoka music has since then become an important part of Guadeloupe’s cultural heritage, to the point that it is now listed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The present work explores the relation between voicing in Gwoka and the questions of identity and memory. We suggest that traditional singers are chroniclers of their time, and memory smugglers who educate the audience by evoking values through their lyrics and voice. Gwoka music is strongly attached to political movements of resistance since its emergence. Previous generations of singers have not only transmitted vocal practice and lyrics, but also Creole language. Finally, we relate voicing to the preservation of Guadeloupean identity and to resistance in the face of Western domination.
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Maud’s Song and Heraclitus’s Logos: Journal fragments
More LessAbstractIn the search for identity, how does a journey with Maud Robart open the possibility to question artistic ethics, presence and the action of non-action? In this article, Heraclitus and Maud Robart walk side by side through the personal experience of the author who shares observations and two fragments of her journal during her work with Robart in August 2016.
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Songs of tradition as training in higher education?
Authors: Ditte Berkeley-Schultz and Electa BehrensAbstractWhat can be the benefit of working with traditional song in the context of a university or conservatory? Who is qualified to teach this practice, what are the needed conditions for successful transmission, what are the ‘skills’ that a student might learn from this work and are they relevant to a contemporary performer? This is a transcript of an ongoing dialogue between two artist practitioners who have worked in this area over the last fifteen years. Ditte Berkeley is a founding member of Teatr ZAR, a company that has conducted deep research into songs of tradition as well as their application within performative contexts. Electa Behrens, also with a background working with traditional song, now teaches at the Norwegian Theatre Academy, an international experimental conservatory, where she teaches and researches voice training and its relation to emerging, often post-dramatic, performance forms. This dialogue offers insights regarding the underlying principles of performance that these methods, insightfully applied, can offer, and invites further conversation on the topic.
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Reviews
AbstractVoicEncounters, Wrocław, the Grotowski Institute, 14–24 April 2016
The 21st-Century Voice: Contemporary and Traditional Extra-Normal Voice, 2nd ed., Michael Edward Edgerton (2015) Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 195 pp., ISBN: 9780810888401, p/bk, $55.00
Vocal Music and Contemporary Identities: Unlimited Voices in East Asia and the West, Christian Utz and Frederick Lau (eds) (2013) New York and London: Routledge, 324 pp., ISBN: 9780415502245, h/bk, £90.00
Korean Musical Drama: P’ansori and the Making of Tradition in Modernity, Haekyung Um (2013) Farnham: Ashgate, 254 pp., ISBN: 9780754662761, h/bk, £150.95; ISBN: 9781472414557, ebook, £71.80
The Voice in the Drum: Music, Language, and Emotion in Islamicate South Asia, Richard K. Wolf (2014) Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 375 pp., ISBN: 9780252038587, h/bk, $60.00
Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, Sign, Storage, Transmission Series, Ana María Ochoa Gautier (2014) Durham, NC: Duke University Press, xiii + 266 pp., ISBN: 0822357518, h/bk, $94.95; p/bk, $25.95
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