Overview

Multivocality frames vocality as a way to investigate the voice in music, as a concept encompassing all the implications with which voice is inscribed-the negotiation of sound and Self, individual and culture, medium and meaning, ontology and embodiment. Like identity, vocality is fluid and constructed continually; even the most iconic of singers do not simply exercise a static voice throughout a lifetime. As 21st century singers habitually perform across styles, genres, cultural contexts, histories, and identities, the author suggests that they are not only performing in multiple vocalities, but more critically, they are performing multivocality-creating and recreating identity through the process of singing with many voices. Multivocality constitutes an effort toward a fuller understanding of how the singing voice figures in the negotiation of identity. Author Katherine Meizel recovers the idea of multivocality from its previously abstract treatment, and re-embodies it in the lived experiences of singers who work on and across the fluid borders of identity. Highlighting singers in vocal motion, Multivocality focuses on their transitions and transgressions across genre and gender boundaries, cultural borders, the lines between body and technology, between religious contexts, between found voices and lost ones.

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9780190621476

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With an authorial voice at once singular and prismatic, Katherine Meizel offers a series of profound meditations on the sociopolitical borderlands of speaking, singing, and silence in musical cultures and everyday life. An exhilarating and indispensable book. -- William Cheng, Dartmouth College

With an authorial voice at once singular and prismatic, Katherine Meizel offers a series of profound meditations on the sociopolitical borderlands of speaking, singing, and silence in musical cultures and everyday life. An exhilarating and indispensable book. * William Cheng, Dartmouth College *

Author Information

Katherine Meizel is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her book Idolized: Music, Media, and Identity in American Idol (IU Press) was published in 2011; she also wrote about Idol for the magazine Slate from 2007 to 2011. She is currently co-editing the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies.

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