Conference Agenda

In this presentation, I argue that audience and critic perceptions of nineteenth-century Black singer Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield’s voice were inseparable from her body size and race. In the mid-nineteenth century, audiences were learning to listen for body size for perhaps the first time in United States and, just after the height of the Temperance movement of the 1840s, they were hypervigilant and wary of fatness, which was already associated with savagery, gluttony, and an overall lack of Protestant morality and rationality. I posit that Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield’s body became a site for white audiences to consolidate racial difference through racialized attention to comportment and body size. Furthermore, conceptions of Greenfield’s body size were integral to the formation of an “ideological filter” in the discernment of taste, talent, and other values that determined American standards of listening. It mattered that Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield was perceived as having a large, Black body which was variously described as “stout,” “robust,” “short,” “thick-set,” and/or “fat” because these perceptions influenced how audiences heard her.

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield’s repertoire was a mix of highbrow and lowbrow musical forms, including arias or cavatinas, ballads, parlor songs, and hymns. At the height of her popularity, most of her performances took place in venues meant to attract upper- and middle-class audiences. Despite Greenfield’s noteworthy distancing from the most well-known popular music in the 1850s United States, reviewers consistently connected the singer to blackface minstrelsy, effectively tying her to mid-nineteenth-century popular culture in its many forms. In the United States, the lines between “classical” and “popular” music were only beginning to form at this point in time which many scholars consider the inception of U.S. popular music. The music Greenfield sang was only sometimes “pop music” of the nineteenth century, but her large, Black presence on stage and the ways audiences and critics reacted to her singing reflect a sense of Greenfield existing between vernacular and “legitimate” entertainment forms, essentially preventing her from being labeled as fully “classical.”

Building on queer and feminist musicological critiques, this article examines fatphobia’s role in shaping the lives of early-career women and genderqueer instrumental performers in the US. The first part brings fat studies into conversation with musicological scholarship, highlighting the significance of this literature for a critical engagement with music embodiment. The second part builds on selected testimonials drawn from my ethnographic research in the form of interviews. These testimonials highlight the many ways in which aesthetic pressures shape the lives of aspiring and established instrumental performers attempting to transcend their bodies and become “pure musical vessels.” Musicians are scrutinized and judged based on their “vessel,” which often becomes an obstacle to their professional recognition. I argue that fatphobia serves as a disciplinary tool within the secluded spaces of a private lesson and as a category of exclusion on stage, and that thinness and beauty standards are parameters that further contribute to hierarchies of musicianship. There are multiple forms of oppression at play that cannot be fully understood without also addressing fatphobia, because musicians’ achievements, education, labor, health, cultural participation, and lived experience are intertwined with the discriminatory assumptions associated with their bodies. As musicology continues to grapple with questions of race, gender, trauma, and disability, fat studies provide an important critical framework to further analyze how these intersect. Thus, centering the lived experiences of those who don’t belong because of their bodies is about challenging some of the foundational assumptions that sustain Western classical music’s exclusionary traditions.

“I have been told my arms are too fat and I should cover them up. I’ve been told to not wear a particular dress because people can see my tummy rolls when I breathe. I’ve been advised that I looked thinner in college and should return to that” says soprano Victoria Erickson. Promulgated in the early 1990s, America’s moral panic over its “obesity epidemic” was not confined to public health campaigns and media maelstroms but bled into the arts – reinforcing fatphobia entwined with a parochial, white, and classed ideal of westernized beauty. These aesthetic and bodily norms, while often presented as neutral, are deeply embedded in the sociocultural fabric of classical music. These prejudices starkly play out in Young Artist Programs (YAPs), where aspiring singers are taught, judged, and scrutinized often through unspoken norms. In YAPs, the tension of the (in)visibilized body is magnified: singers must not only sing well, but they must look the part in ways that conform to cis-heteronormative and fatphobic ideals of marketability.

From OPERA America’s audition guidelines, to blogs, workshops, and social media posts, the past three decades have seen a neoliberal proliferation of “how-to” discourse codifying ‘professional’ audition attire, positioning dress – and by extension the body that wears it – as a crucial marker of competence and hireability. These gender-binarized guidelines converge on the cultivation of a standardized audition uniform: for women, the ubiquitous solid-colored, jewel-toned, knee-length dress with heels, nylons, the ‘right’ undergarments, makeup, and “approved” hairstyles; while men are expected to don a tailored suit with polished shoes. What emerges is a less a matter of individual expression than a disciplining of bodies into industry-sanctioned legibility, premised on meritocratic, neoliberal logics and a compliance to imperious constructions of the gender binarism. Drawing on the lived experiences of young artists, industry praxis, and cultural criticism, I interrogate the intersection of fatphobia with other systems of oppression, and how these forces govern opportunity and demand conformity under the guise of professionalism. I argue that audition “uniforms” function as technologies of compliance that invisibilizes systemic exclusion, while displacing the responsibility onto young artists.