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- Volume 5, Issue 1, 2020
Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2020
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2020
- Editorial
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- Tribute
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- Articles
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‘La voz del pueblo y para el pueblo’ Amparo Ochoa’s vocal trajectory: From the Mexican Revolution to the Latin American Cold War
More LessAmparo Ochoa (29 September 1946–7 February 1994) is widely acclaimed as one the most outstanding and versatile performers of the Mexican Canto Nuevo movement. The sympathy that Amparo Ochoa awoke among Mexican and Latin American audiences has been tacitly attributed to a sort of natural charm. Therefore, a supposedly ‘popular’ character within her voice has been substantiated as a result of the political message of the songs she interpreted as well as of the forums where she publicly appeared. Complementing the reiterative focus on either the political context or the discursive elements of the Canto Nuevo, this paper historicizes Ochoa’s trajectory, problematizing notions of ‘the people’ in order to dissect ‘the popular’ within her voice. The main claim is that the general reception of her voice as the voice of ‘the people’ is grounded on firm vocal traditions of turn of the twentieth century Mexican musical theatre, which lingered to the twentieth century but which were recontextualized during the Latin American Cold War. Due to its subjective impact on the listener, these vocal strategies made audiences subjectify notions of ‘el pueblo’ and thus garner sympathies for the movements that opposed dictatorial regimes during the 1970s and 1980s. Such an approach of her voice contributes to assess the role of music and song in the ideological and political projects that framed them as well as to question the affective impact of voice in the listener’s subjectivity.
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Whale wonder
More Less‘Whale wonder’ explores the allure of the humpback whale’s voice and our responses to it in a few seminal works involving music – among them, Walt Disney’s The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met (1946), Pete Seeger’s ‘The Song of the World’s Last Whale’ (1970) and John Cage’s ‘Litany for the Whale’ (1980). The article considers works in which the whale’s voice affects singing as well as our very concept of what singing is. ‘Whale wonder’ shows how music in these works is not a mere projection of what the whale symbolizes or signifies for us. As the whale’s voice enters music, it transforms it and our understanding of what music can be.
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Baudrillard on Broadway: Bio-musicals, the hyperreal and the cultural politics of simuloquism
More LessThis article considers the nature of vocal hyperreality in bio-musicals: a form of musical theatre in which actors simulate the voices of well-known pop singers or groups in theatrical retellings of their lives and careers. To do so, I employ the four successive stages of simulacrum found in Jean Baudrillard’s ‘The precession of simulacra’ (1981) to consider the potentials and limitations of such vocal simulation in the act of (re)authoring pop singers for the musical stage. Considering the way in which such performances mask or denature their source material (the ‘original’ voices of pop singers and artists), while at the same time employing a dual temporality of cultural memory and current experience, I offer a neologism that may help articulate the complex experience for audience members who attend these productions. The final part of the article considers the peculiar convention of releasing Original Cast Recordings of these works, arguing that these may be symptomatic of Baudrillard’s simulacrum, as popular culture reaches a terminus from which it is unable to progress without regression, intertextuality or manufactured nostalgia.
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On breaking with
More LessIt is through voice that oftentimes individuals find themselves breaking with conventions and systematically ingrained injustices. In the recent literature in the burgeoning field of interdisciplinary voice studies, the phenomenon of voicing has been projected as a powerful process, across cultures, to represent human agency at its most potent, and this article is a critical discussion on this very uniqueness of voicing in relation to social equity, corporeality and cultural value. The author, a female singer-researcher of Karnatik music of South India, unpacks the burdens and privileges of voice in the light of cultural contingency, global mobility and interculturality. Following a discussion encompassing literature and theories on voice, historical ideas of voice and feminist critiques on voice and the voicing female body from a South Indian angle, the author proposes a Pentagonal Entanglement framework for equitable engagement with the voice – across scenarios and cultures, to critically address the socially pressing issues of our time through the medium of voice.
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- Voicings
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Dramaturging the I-voicer in A Voice Is. A Voice Has. A Voice Does.: Methodologies of autobiophony
More LessThis practice-research (PaR) piece proposes autobiophony (vocal autobiography in/through voice) as both a new area of research for interdisciplinary voice studies practitioner-scholars and a distinct methodology for probing the interconnections of selfhood, narration, performativity, intersectional positionality and voicing. Using as a point of departure the PaR performance-lecture A Voice Is. A Voice Has. A Voice Does., devised by the author, this Voicing interrogates the makings of the polyvocal self as monophonic chorus. The I-voicer of the PaR piece is examined as both constitutively plural and communicatively dialogic (but never resolved as either), enacting a complex dramaturgy of belonging. Framed by a working manifesto on autobiophony, the Voicing below is itself composed in a way that invites autobiophonic engagement by the reader-listener and proposes suggestions for using autobiophony as pedagogy, performance analysis tool and research methodology.
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Voice, technology and feminist community: An interview with NYX
More LessThe role of vocality in the field of techno-feminism in performance is undertheorized. The latest takes in posthumanism and eco-feminism wish for a more inclusive, less capitalo-utilitarian use of new technologies. Through the motto ‘make kin, not babies’, the new frontiers of techno-feminism address the anthropo-heterocentric concept of family, hoping for different agglomeration of creatures. Following these stances of feminist and queer critique, it is possible to assume that the work of NYX – an electronic drone choir – addresses vocal composition from an inclusive and posthuman point of view. Through the interview conducted by Francesco Bentivegna with Sian O’Gorman, this voicing explores how the NYX experience might fit in the latest feminist waves, being a shout for a more inclusive, less patriarchal and non-exploited use of technologies.
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- Conference Review
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