HMVB00713U Musicological Topic with Performance and Production: Voice Studies

What is a voice? What does it mean to speak, and what does it mean to sing? How is it that we can recognize and distinguish between individual voices, and draw conclusions about a person based on the sound of their voice, whether in spoken or sung contexts? What is meant by such expressions as the “voice of the people,” the “voice of god,” or the “voice of a generation”? What does it mean to find one’s voice, and to give and take voice? Drawing on the interdisciplinary field of voice studies, this course examines the concept of voice in all of its many musical, acoustic, rhetorical, and political expressions. By exploring the voice’s ties to singing in Western classical and popular music traditions, its relationship to gender, sexuality, race, and class, and its status in notions of human subjectivity and political agency, we will come to understand the voice as a diverse, intersectional, experiential phenomenon. Students will have the opportunity to creatively explore the ideas examined in the lecture through exploratory performance-based workshops in the weekly seminars.