| This dissertation investigates how a variety of performers, audiences, citizens, and immigrant communities laid claim to the United States's vocal sound at the turn of the twentieth century. The years between 1890 and 1924 bore witness to a fascination with voices, as massive waves of immigrant communities from South and Latin America, Asia, and Eastern and Southern Europe transformed U.S. cities into polyvocal communities beset with racial and cultural tensions. The concomitant birth of the popular music industry (driven increasingly by black musical expressions) amplified this polyphony through the mechanization of musical commodities. In researching this historical moment, I address critical questions regarding the relationship between national identity and the vocal sounds of the national populace: how is the nation shaped and brought to life through its vocal sounds? Which vocal sounds were privileged and why? How did the nation's socio-economic policies, limitations on citizenship, and so forth affect the vocal sound of its inhabitants? And how were these sounds produced, disseminated, and embodied by individuals and communities? Drawing on a variety of primary sources including physiological studies of the voice, anthropological literature, recordings, and voice training manuals, I address the tension between understandings of the voice as expressive of individual or cultural truths and an understanding of the voice as malleable, flexible, even playful. Singing is a unique way of inhabiting the body, one that involves knowing intimately the physiological processes that make up the act of vocal emission. To sing, accordingly, is to necessarily alter the body. Yet too often voices are heard as the expression of inherent, essential differences. Listening carefully to singers' strategic vocal choices -- their employment of particular timbres, accents, dialects, vibrato, and other vocal characteristics -- I seek a better understanding of how singing critiques and reinforces notions of racial, national, and cultural difference. |
