American popular music, politics, and religion have all, in some combination, inspired thorough research. However, there has been little investigative effort regarding the important co‐relationships among the three areas. One convenient site for such study is located in the idea of civil religion, where faith and patriotism converge—as Robert Bellah wrote in 1967—in a cultural network of “beliefs, symbols, and rituals.” This essay offers a contextual examination of two popular patriotic songs in relation to the dynamic state of civil religion from World War II to the Iraq War, from Tin Pan Alley to American Idol. Behind the endurance of songs like “God Bless America” and “God Bless the U.S.A.” lies a relentless need to define Americanness in civil‐religious terms. And as the nation, and the nation‐state, are reshaped in the currents of globalization, appreciation of these songs contributes to the crucial understanding of why America sings.
Chapter 5 deals with movements among styles of sacred and secular singing, focusing on the experiences of musicians who have performed across multiple religious contexts. The role of vocality in religious conversion is explored, in the experience of a singer and convert to Judaism. Other aspects of the chapter focus on the concept of intent in spiritual singing practices and the crossing of borders in the neoliberal religious marketplace. The late twentieth-century’s and early twenty-first century’s individualist, even consumerist approach to religion reflects a widespread economic framing of religion, associated with the neoliberal doctrine that also began to flourish then.
The introductory chapter asserts that voice studies does not make a claim to a given definition of voice, but instead suggests the limits of any one claim. Voice studies offers tools to better detect the values underpinning any definition of voice. It deconstructs not only the performance of the voice, but also the performance of claims to voice. Thus, voice studies asks questions that necessarily connect practices of and inquiries into voice. In our definition, what distinguishes voice studies as a whole from each of the many individual and overlapping strains of scholarship and inquiry that center voice is that it seeks to understand or interact with voice knowledge beyond the potential narrow confine of a defined area of inquiry. By synthesizing the myriad ways voice is conceptualized and researched into the broadest terms, the chapter arrives at six broad modes, or domains, of voice inquiry and explains these in detail. The domains are: (1) prompts; (2) product and performance; (3) material dimension and mechanism; (4) auditory/sensory perception; (5) documentation, narrativization, and collection; and (6) context. These modes are not mutually exclusive; they often overlap, and this is only one of many ways this material could be conceptualized. Ultimately, the chapter seeks to facilitate dialogue and collaboration between voice researchers, and hence facilitate voice studies research. The chapter also offers a brief overview of the voice studies from 1990 to the present, and gives brief chapter summaries.
This book frames vocality as a particularly holistic way to investigate the voice in music, as a concept embodying all the implications with which voice is inscribed—the negotiation of sound and Self, individual and culture, medium and meaning, ontology and embodiment. Like identity, vocality is fluid, constructed and reconstructed continually; even the most iconic of singers do not simply exercise a static voice throughout a lifetime. The book highlights such singers in vocal motion, focusing on their transitions and transgressions across genre and gender boundaries, cultural borders, the lines between body and technology, between secular and religious contexts, between found voices and lost ones. And as 21st-century singers habitually perform across styles, genres, cultural contexts, histories, and identities, the author suggests that they are not only performing in multiple vocalities, but more critically, they are performing multivocality—creating and recreating identity through the process of singing with many voices, at once produced by and in resistance against neoliberal expectations. Multivocality, in its focus on the suppressions and soundings of voice in various borderlands of identity, works toward a deeper understanding of voice as a technology of the self and of culture.
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