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- Volume 4, Issue 2, 2019
Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2019
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2019
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Extraordinary voices: Helen Keller, music and the limits of oralism
More LessAbstractThis article examines iconic American deafblind writer Helen Keller's entrée into musical culture, culminating in her studies with voice teacher Charles A. White. In 1909, Keller began weekly lessons with White, who deepened her understanding of breathing and vocal production. Keller routinely made the acquaintance of opera singers in the 1910s and the 1920s, including sopranos Georgette Leblanc and Minnie Saltzman-Stevens, and tenor Enrico Caruso. Guided by the cultural logic of oralism, Keller nurtured a lively interest in music throughout her life. Although a voice-centred world-view enhanced Keller's cultural standing among hearing Americans, it did little to promote the growth of a shared identity rooted in deaf or deafblind experience. The subsequent growth of Deaf culture challenges us to reconsider the limits of Keller's musical practices and to question anew her belief in the extraordinary power of the human voice.
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Disabling the avant-garde: Listening to Berberian and Lucier
More LessAbstractAvant-garde electronic music purports to be abstract rather than representational. We are supposed to care only about sound qua sound, but what if the body is fundamentally audible in the musical work? Furthermore, what if the audible body is disabled? This essay pursues several close listenings of the avant-garde electronic works Visage (1961) and I Am Sitting in a Room (1969). Both pieces feature stuttering voices that are highly mediated by technology. Sounding out disabilities from traumatic to mundane, the works promote an aural staring encounter, asking listeners to grapple with the discomfort that they may hear.
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Ballad of the dork-o-phone: Towards a crip vocal technoscience
More LessAbstractThis piece elucidates the related politics of vocal impairment and vocal prosthesis through a close analysis of the Spokeman Personal Voice Amplifier, a.k.a., the dork-o-phone. Drawing from voice theory, disability studies and phenomenology, I present an analysis of the dork-o-phone in use and challenge the boundaries between disability and impairment. In the process, I also show how vocal impairments and protheses ultimately give the lie to the idea that voices are self-sufficient and can exist without supplementation.
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Self-determination, disability aesthetics and (refusals of) voice in the US–RMI Compact of Free Association
More LessAbstractThis article uses the framework of disability and voice to consider the consequences of nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands among the Marshallese diaspora. The valorization of the voice as it signals the agentive individual is a modern phenomenon that denigrates the breadth of human and nonhuman movements through which Marshallese matrilineal agency is understood. I argue that Marshallese songs thus offer a testament to the myth of contemporary liberalism through vocalizations that resound the complex constellation of physical, mental and emotional ailments imposed upon the Marshallese (e.g., thyroid, sickness, 'denigrated intellect', etc.).
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Musicals and the envoicing of mental illness and madness: From Lady in the Dark to Man of La Mancha (and beyond)
Authors: Raymond Knapp and Zelda KnappAbstractBecause musicals routinely position musical expression as an enabling form of madness, they can have a difficult time when they try to consider mental illness in thoughtful ways. This essay considers four prominent musicals that deal overtly with mental illness and/or madness to delineate these difficulties and show how musicals try to surmount them. The relatively few musical numbers in Lady in the Dark (1941) allow its protagonist Liza Elliott to both confront her mental block and give voice to her emancipation. In Anyone Can Whistle (1964), Hapgood's ambiguous mental status allows him to swing from absurdities to rebellion to the touchingly human, each phase differently opposing the insanities of the world. Quixote, in Man of La Mancha (1965), defies reality in favour of impossible dreams. And the songs of next to normal (2008) provide a panoply of escapes from the painful realities of the dysfunctional Goodman family, none of whom quite finds a way to a desired 'normal'. As these shows exemplify, mentally unstable women and men generally have different options in musicals: women (at least, Liza and Diana Goodman) are obliged to chart paths to mental wholeness, with decidedly mixed results, whereas men (at least, Hapgood and Quixote) are allowed to indulge their flights from reality as forms of romanticized idealism, becoming heroes and liberators in the process. Next to normal exemplifies a renewed determination to take mental illness seriously in musicals, further advanced in the four-season television series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
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The moaning of (un-)life: Animacy, muteness and eugenics in cinematic and televisual representation
More LessAbstractThis article analyses the eugenicist imperative governing speaking and non-speaking characters in western televisual representations, including films such as The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and The Shape of Water (2017), and in the trope of the zombie. Typically, sublinguistic sounds are either assigned to human characters with supposed intellectual disabilities, or to reanimated, subhuman characters such as monsters and zombies. In both cases, characters denied speech are subject to isolation, sterilization or death, thus mirroring the status of voice in western constructions of humanness as it informs eugenicist discourse on disability.
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Singing tone: Disability and pianistic voices
More LessAbstractHumans experience multiple forms of vocality not only through encounters with each other but also with other animals (e.g. the crying wolf), and in moving through natural environments (e.g. the howling wind). Music likewise affords varied opportunities to experience and express ourselves as vocalizing beings, giving rise to complex relationships between speaking, singing and playing musical instruments. This piece considers the built-in percussiveness of the piano against the aesthetic prestige of lyricism – that is, 'songfulness' – as it encodes ableist choreographies on the part of the pianist. Disabled performers whose embodied relationships to their instrument transgress the corporeal biases of piano performance and pedagogy thus defy the aesthetic limits of normative lyricism: by foregrounding interstitial gesture, and multi-sensory expression, they envoice a new aesthetic that I call 'disabled songfulness'. Their pianistic voices, I argue, reach beyond stage and studio, refusing containment within the sensory hierarchies out of which music is often made.
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From Craic to Communitas: Furthering disability activism through traditional Irish song
More LessAbstractThis piece offers an ethnographic account of work undertaken to bridge neurotypical and neurodivergent communities in Limerick, Ireland, through music-making workshops. By harnessing a common musical heritage in traditional Irish folk music, specifically its participatory dynamics, and its emphasis on story-telling, dialogue and inclusion, participants were able to musicalize their identities in ways that resonated with the integrative spirit of neurodiversity, against the logics of neurotypical, able-bodied assimilation.
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