ABSTRACT
This is a book about shifting and contested boundaries, and the role that music can play in their construction and negotiation. The voice, its ostensive topic, stands like an earthquake belt at the junction between multiple tectonic plates, where deeply embedded cultural values grate against one another. On the one hand the voice is a biological and cultural given. Like our faces, our voices mark out who we are, not only as individuals—the products of personal life histories—but also in terms of the problematically essentialized categories of the social and political order: white, black, Caucasian, working class, C1. As Frederick Lau says in his contribution to this book, the voice is enmeshed in a politics of sound. Writing proclaims its artifactual status, as does instrumental music, but by contrast, speech and vocal music encode naturalness. That makes the voice the perfect instrument of ideology, as illustrated by the story—told here by Andreas Steen—of the “red songs” of revolutionary and postrevolutionary China, at one time the vehicle of a xenophobic nationalism but more recently deployed for purposes ranging from nostalgia to the assertion of a transnational Chinese identity. A perhaps even more spectacular example of the possibility of political change through song is the “Singing Revolution,” the series of mass demonstrations that began in Estonia during 1987 and eventually led to the three Baltic states gaining independence from the Soviet Union. It is not just a matter of constructing community through singing together: the singular power of the voice derives from the qualities of tradition, self-evidence, and facticity that it gives to cultural and political beliefs.
