This work looks at the "voices" that speak to us through 19th-century classical music and opera. It proposes interpretive strategies that seek the polyphony and dialogism of music, celebrating musical gestures often marginalized by conventional musical analysis.

We often think of music in terms of sounds intentionally organized into patterns, but music performed in signed languages poses considerable challenges to this sound-based definition. Performances of sign language music are defined culturally as music, but they do not necessarily make sound their only--or even primary--mode of transmission. How can we analyze and understand sign language music? And what can sign language music tell us about how humans engage with music more broadly? In Seeing Voices: Analyzing Sign Language Music, author Anabel Maler argues that music is best understood as culturally defined and intentionally organized movement, rather than organized sound. This re-definition of music means that sign language music, rather than being peripheral or marginal to histories and theories about music, is in fact central and crucial to our understanding of all musical expression and perception. Sign language music teaches us a great deal about how, when, and why movement becomes musical in a cultural context, and urges us to think about music as a multisensory experience that goes beyond the sense of hearing. Using a blend of tools from music theory, cognitive science, musicology, and ethnography, Maler presents the history of music in Deaf culture from the early nineteenth century and contextualizes contemporary Deaf music through ethnographic interviews with Deaf musicians. She also provides detailed analyses of a wide variety of genres of sign language music--showing how Deaf musicians create musical parameters like rhythm and melody through the movement of their bodies. The book centers the musical experience and knowledge of Deaf persons, bringing the long and rich history of sign language music to the attention of music scholars and lovers, and challenges the notion that music is transmitted from the hearing to the Deaf. Finally, Maler proposes that members of the Deaf, DeafBlind, hard-of-hearing, and signing communities have a great deal to teach us about music. As she demonstrates, sign language music shows us that the fundamental elements of music such as vocal technique, entrainment, pulse, rhythm, meter, melody, meaning, and form can thrive in visual and tactile forms of music-making.

Unlike other motherhood books that focus on the experiences of a small group of affluent, married white women, Who's Your Mama? centers on the largely untold perspectives of the majority of American women, whose unique and sometimes unconventional family structures impact our country. Their contributions speak practically of their personal beliefs, intimate relationships, and socioeconomic realities. The book explores the intersection between motherhood and other facets of the contributors lives, including race, class, sexuality, politics, and personal tragedy. Personal stories include a feminist juggling the roles of activist and mother, a college graduate who applies for welfare so she can remain home with her child, a gay couples navigation of the adoption process, and a mothers celebration of her own vibrant sexuality. This collection of personal narratives will illuminate various female experiences of parenting and humanize a variety of social and economic issues that affect millions of American women and their families.

"Two ideas lie at the heart of this study and its claim that we need a new history of reading: that voices in books can affect us deeply ; that printed books can be brought to life with the voice. Voices and Books offers a new history of reading focussed on the oral and voice-aware silent reader, rather than the historical reader we have privileged in the last few decades, who is invariably male, silent, and alone. It recovers the vocality of education for boys and girls in Renaissance England, and the importance of training in pronuntiatio (delivery) for oral-aural literary culture. It offers the first attempt to recover the voice-and tone-from textual sources. It explores what happens when we bring voice to text, how vocal tone realizes or changes textual meaning, and how the literary writers of the past tried to represent their own and others' voices, as well as manage and exploit the voices of their readers. It offers fresh readings of the key Tudor authors who anticipated oral readers: John Bale, Anne Askew, William Baldwin, Thomas Nashe. And it aims to rethink what a printed book can be, searching the printed page for vocal cues, and exploring the neglected role of the voice in the printing process"-- Provided by publisher.

The genre of mélodrame à grand spectacle that emerged in the boulevard theatres of Paris in the 1790s - and which was quickly exported abroad - expressed the moral struggle between good and evil through a drama of heightened emotions. Physical gesture, mise en scène and music were as important in communicating meaning and passion as spoken dialogue. The premise of this volume is the idea that the melodramatic aesthetic is central to our understanding of nineteenth-century music drama, broadly defined as spoken plays with music, operas and other hybrid genres that combine music with text and/or image. This relationship is examined closely, and its evolution in the twentieth century in selected operas, musicals and films is understood as an extension of this nineteenth-century aesthetic. The book therefore develops our understanding of opera in the context of melodrama's broader influence on musical culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book will appeal to those interested in film studies, drama, theatre and modern languages as well as music and opera.

Owning Our Voices offers a unique, first-hand account of working within the Wolfsohn-Hart tradition of extended voice work by Margaret Pikes, an acclaimed voice teacher and founder member of the Roy Hart Theatre. This dynamic publication fuses Pikes’ personal account of her own vocal journey as a woman within this, at times, male-dominated tradition, alongside an overview of her particular pedagogical approach to voice work, and is accompanied by digital footage of Pikes at work in the studio with artist-collaborators and written descriptions of scenarios for teaching. For the first time, Margaret Pikes’ uniquely holistic approach to developing the expressive voice through sounding, speech, song and movement has been documented in text and on film, offering readers an introduction to both the philosophy and the practice of Wolfsohn-Hart voice work. Owning Our Voices is a vital book for scholars and students of voice studies and practitioners of vocal performance: it represents a synthesis of a life’s work exploring the expressive potential of the human voice, illuminating an important lineage of vocal training, which remains influential to this day.

Mahler's Voices brings together a close reading of the renowned composer's music with wide-ranging cultural and historical interpretation, unique in being a study not of Mahler's works as such but of Mahler's musical style.

Somatic Voices in Performance Research and Beyond brings together a community of international practitioner-researchers who explore voice through soma or soma through voice. Somatic methodologies offer research processes within a new area of vocal, somatic and performance praxis. Voice work and theoretical ideas emerge from dance, acting and performance training while they also move beyond commonly recognized somatics and performance processes. From philosophies and pedagogies to ethnic-racial and queer studies, this collection advances embodied aspects of voices, the multidisciplinary potentialities of somatic studies, vocal diversity and inclusion, somatic modes of sounding, listening and writing voice. Methodologies that can be found in this collection draw on: eastern traditions body psychotherapy-somatic psychology Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method Authentic Movement, Body-Mind Centering, Continuum Movement, Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy Fitzmaurice Voicework, Linklater Technique, Roy Hart Method post-Stanislavski and post-Grotowski actor-training traditions somaesthetics The volume also includes contributions by the founders of: Shin Somatics, Body and Earth, Voice Movement Integration SOMart, Somatic Acting Process This book is a polyphonic and multimodal compilation of experiential invitations to each reader’s own somatic voice. It culminates with the "voices" of contributing participants to a praxical symposium at East 15 Acting School in London (July 19–20, 2019). It fills a significant gap for scholars in the fields of voice studies, theatre studies, somatic studies, artistic research and pedagogy. It is also a vital read for graduate students, doctoral and postdoctoral researchers.

This book and its accompanying website present the selected proceedings of the inaugural, 'The Performer's Voice: An International Forum for Music Performance and Scholarship', directed by Dr Anne Marshman (editor) and hosted by the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, National University of Singapore. The chapters, which were selected through a process of international peer review, reflect the symposium's wide-ranging interdisciplinary scope, coupled with an uncompromising emphasis on the act of performance, the role of the performer and the professional performer's perspective.

London, 1820. The British capital is a metropolis that overwhelms dwellers and visitors alike with constant exposure to all kinds of sensory stimulation. Over the next two decades, the city’s tumult will reach new heights: as population expansion places different classes in dangerous proximity and ideas of political and social reform linger in the air, London begins to undergo enormous infrastructure change that will alter it forever. It is the London of this period that editors Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford pinpoint in this book, which chooses one broad musical category—voice—and engages with it through essays on music of the streets, theaters, opera houses, and concert halls; on the raising of voices in religious and sociopolitical contexts; and on the perception of voice in literary works and scientific experiments with acoustics. Emphasizing human subjects, this focus on voice allows the authors to explore the multifaceted issues that shaped London, from the anxiety surrounding the city’s importance in the musical world at large to the changing vocal imaginations that permeated the epoch. Capturing the breadth of sonic stimulations and cultures available—and sometimes unavoidable—to residents at the time, London Voices, 1820–1840 sheds new light on music in Britain and the richness of London culture during this period.