Vocal Music and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Music: Unlimited Voices in East Asia and the West more

Looking at musical globalization and vocal music, this collection of essays studies the complex relationship between the human voice and cultural identity in 20th- and 21st-century music in both East Asian and Western music. The authors approach musical meaning in specific case studies against the background of general trends of cultural globalization and the construction/deconstruction of identity produced by human (and artificial) voices. The essays proceed from different angles, notably sociocultural and historical contexts, philosophical and literary aesthetics, vocal technique, analysis of vocal microstructures, text/phonetics-music-relationships, historical vocal sources or models for contemporary art and pop music, and areas of conflict between vocalization, "ethnicity," and cultural identity. They pinpoint crucial topical features that have shaped identity-discourses in art and popular musical situations since the1950s, with a special focus on the past two decades. The volume thus offers a unique compilation of texts on the human voice in a period of heightened cultural globalization by utilizing systematic methodological research and firsthand accounts on compositional practice by current Asian and Western authors.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Vocal Music and Reflexive Globalization in Contemporary Music Practices, Christian Utz and Frederick Lau Part I:Voices in Global Perspective 1. Globalization, Identity and the Voice in the 20th Century, Dieter Mersch 2. The Rediscovery of Presence. Explorations into Intercultural Spaces between Speech and Song, Christian Utz 3. Imagining the Other’s Voice. On Composing across Vocal Traditions, Sandeep Bhagwati Part II: Practices and Strategies in the Use of the Voice in Art Music 4. Post-war Japan’s "Operatic Problems": Opera-turgie, Narrative, Language, Fuyuko Fukunaka 5. Voice, Culture and Ethnicity in Contemporary Chinese Music, Frederick Lau 6. Metamorphosis of Traditional Vocal Practices in Korean Contemporary Music, Heekyung Lee 7. Problems of Identity in Helmut Lachenmann’s Vocal Music, Jörn Peter Hiekel 8. The Notation and Use of the Voice in Non-Semantic Contexts: Identities and Performativity in the Vocal Music of Dieter Schnebel, Brian Ferneyhough, and Georges Aperghis, Erin Gee Part III: Identity and Politics of the Voice in Popular Music and Media Art 9. At the Limits of Transnationalism: The Synthesized Ethnic Voices in Zuni Icosahedron’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Samson Young 10. Revolutionary Images and Identities: The Chinese Communist Party’s Heritage and Survival in Chinese Popular Music, Andreas Steen 11. Frenchly Japanese: On the Nationality of Voices in Japanese Popular Music, Oliver Seibt 12. Singing from Seoul to Soul: Voice, Body and Ethnicity in Korean Popular Music, Michael Fuhr Afterword, Nicholas Cook