Conference Agenda

Martha Feldman’s 2015 JAMS colloquy, “Why Voice Now?” arrived at the peak of the material turn in Music studies. It argues that voice is a “sounding” that “escapes the unitary” and permeates and deconstructs boundaries; nevertheless, she writes that “voice is thus material, not metaphysical, and it is embodied […].” Extending from this provocation, I argue that voice is both material and metaphysical, and the imbrication of the two can reshape how we think of the ontology of fictional objects, of voice, and of racialized fictions. This paper will consider the various metaphysical/material guises of “air” within the spectacle of opera—breath, dramaturgical perfumery, théâtre en plein air—to suggest that air exists as an umbilical cord between the “real world” and the “stage world” in opera. It is this act of transmedial respiration that ultimately contributes to the fiction of opera and the seeming aliveness of characters. When we understand the ways that metaphysical morphs into material we come away with a renewed understanding of operatic aesthetics and a newfound moral bent that allows fictional and fictionalized people to realize themselves.

In the 2015 "Why Voice Now?" colloquy, Steven Rings's piece included an anecdote about Bob Dylan imitating other voices and a spectrographic analysis of Buffy Saint-Marie performing. Now that Saint-Marie's Cree identity has been called into question, I find the inclusion of her voice in Rings's piece a (perhaps unintentional but nonetheless fortuitous) reinforcement of one of the colloquy's core tenets: voice is a "condition that escapes the unitary," or, in other words, that voice is "always contingent and heavily dependent of social relations." Using two examples, one of my grandmother speaking and one of Lumbee/Tuscarora singer-songwriter Charly Lowry, I will explore the reception of Lumbee voices, how the Lumbee voice relates to indigeneity (and the sonic expectations of indigenous people), and how my own relationship to my voice and my people have shaped my identity as a person and a scholar. The sound of the typical Lumbee voice is a distinguishing signifier—one that marks a person as Lumbee for some, but simultaneously raises questions for others about their ethnic, racial, regional, and educational status. I offer this exploration as an updated reflection on the complexity of what it means to "sound indigenous" in 2026, and how indigenous voices continue to be "mistaken by others for things they are not."

In this paper, I engage with questions of vocal transmission and circulation. What happens when the processes of voicing, receiving, and perceiving exceed the initial speaker and the content of their utterance? Drawing on the writings of Bengali poet-composer Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), I consider how the voice becomes meaningful through its movement between subjects. In his essays, Rabindranath repeatedly returns to the limits of language alone as a vehicle for expression, emphasizing instead that it is through embodied media that thoughts and emotions become communicable to others. The voice, in his view, is not simply the externalization of an interior self but a performative event whose significance emerges through its transmission and uptake. I explore these ideas through Rabindranath’s dance-drama Tasher Desh (The Land of Cards, 1933), situating its treatment of the voice as a fundamentally relational phenomenon within broader questions of social order and collective transformation in colonial Bengal.

My paper examines how empires objectify the voice through extraction, inscription, and re-embodiment, where “giving voice” to subalterns means endowing a material plenitude that produces a surplus that could be extracted, then reconstituted into new bodies made to speak for the imperial center. I show how recent scholarship on music history and empire [Hu, Ochoa Gautier, Ospina Romero] has regarded voice beyond an inviolable expression and confirmation of individual personhood, but as a colonial resource to be exploited for imperial domination. I raise examples from my work in nineteenth-century Siamese opera to show how such objectification created new configurations of embodied racialized vocality within imperial formations in dialog with, yet situated beyond, Eurological understandings of race in the Atlantic world.