Spiritual Multivocality

Abstract

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.

Geschlecht als Erfahrung

“…13 They not only represent multiple bodily experiences but also produce them in processes of reading and reception. Aesthetic-literary and aesthetic-musical forms of experience allow barely spoken and articulated experiential dimensions of sexuality, desire, and corporeality to be experienced and made visible (Meizel 2020;Patch/König 2018;Roth 2016;Wolf 2018). The reality first produced by literary language and correspondingly aesthetic-sensual signs can be understood as material that helps to explicate the bodily implied meaning about one's self and one's desire that is not available in everyday language.…”

Listening to Anohni's variously vibrating voice: studying transfeminine vocality in 21st-century popular music culture through the concept of vocal figurations

“…In popular music studies, queer and feminist analyses have investigated how artists may use stylistic conventions, vocal technique and studio technology to perform and deconstruct gendered and sexualised vocalities (cf. Dickinson 2001; Weheliye 2002; Dame 2006; Steinskog 2008; Hawkins 2009; Jarman-Ivens 2011; Pecknold 2016; Muchitsch 2016, 2020; Meizel 2020). More recently, initial studies of transgender singers in popular music (cf.…”

“…However, given the long history of otherworldliness as a descriptor for voices and singers considered non-normative in terms of gender and sexuality, including the association of trans singers with ghostliness (Meizel 2020, pp. 147–59), it risks reinscribing stereotypes of otherness.…”

‘Yr Beast’: Gender Parrhesia and Punk Trans Womanhoods

“…Unlike for trans men, hormone replacement therapy for trans women does not noticeably alter the voice. Making one’s voice pass as feminine usually requires difficult and not necessarily successful voice therapy, or invasive surgeries that—crucially for singers—run the risk of destroying one’s capacity to sing (Meizel, 2020).…”

“…Teece’s voice hasn’t changed—there are some things you cannot change. Or, at least, you don’t want to—some trans women singers refuse to mask their ‘masculine’ voice in their art even as they look to make it pass outside of performing (Meizel, 2020). But it is not a male voice.…”