In the introduction to his stunning new book Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, a few lines below a Halq’eméylem epigraph with no English translation, Dylan Robinson writes, “My words gather; together, they are an act of gathering, of gathering strength and acknowledging Indigenous voices and bodies, rather than acting as a container of Indigenous content” (25). Robinson’s lucid writing works to invite and perform resurgent, apposite structures of bearing witness to sound, and what sounds create, beyond the ravenous acts of consumption and extraction advanced by settler colonial philosophies. By different means, Katherine Meizel’s Multivocality: Singing on the Borders of Identity and Virginie Magnat’s The Performative Power of Vocality also invite readers to rethink what it is to experience voice and sound, beyond particular longstanding and limited cultural expectations. Meizel refutes the widespread belief in a singer’s one true voice — vocality as singular coherence of self and agency — to consider what it is that singers do in the process of navigating the borderscapes of multiple vocal identities. Magnat calls for greater engagement with experimental and cross-cultural approaches to vocality in the field of performance studies as more than a mere coda to actor training. Together, these books open up space for dwelling more deeply with what vocalities and sounds occasion for those who voice and listen to them, constituting a diverse set of entries in the interdisciplines of voice and sound studies.

In Multivocality: Singing on the Borders of Identity, ethnomusicologist Katherine Meizel proffers a compelling ethnography of singing attuned to the ways that singers navigate vocalizing along and across the boundaries of multiple experiences of vocal expression. “Because the participating singers [each] do their work through many voices,” she writes, “there is no singular authentic voice to locate” (19). This assertion stands in stark opposition to well-worn tropes in classical vocal pedagogy and popular discourse around “finding one’s true voice.” The book opens by mapping the way that Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops has navigated her multiracial heritage and movement across genres from opera to folk and roots music. Beyond overemphasis on individualism and a notion of the singer as a multitasking virtuoso, Meizel argues that practices of multivocality can allow for placing value in a self that is articulated via intersubjective vocal process. Thus, the performances of singers such as Giddens who sing with “many voices” both result from and resist neoliberal expectations.

The introduction includes a useful genealogy of the term “vocality” from origins in psychoacoustics to subsequent deployment in musicology. Meizel derives her use of “multivocality” from Victor Turner and Mikhail Bakhtin, finding especial utility in the term’s operation in excess of the purely linguistic. The nine chapters address singers trained in European classical voice who then vocalize in multiple genres, Vegas impersonators mobilizing voices associated with bodies vastly different from their own, the embattled relationships to voice around which d/Deaf singers must maneuver, singers negotiating the impact of shifting religious allegiances on vocal practice, performances of trans vocalists who experience voice in the plural, and accounts of singers grappling with voice loss, concluding with reflections on aggregate multivocality in the songs of intersectional youth and feminist activists. The two chapters dedicated to voice loss are particularly striking for the clarity with which Meizel details the stakes of equating voice with self and agency, also drawing on her own lived experience with this kind of loss. For singers who encounter the loss of a singing voice due to chronic illness, she attests, “the processes of finding and losing a voice can be inextricably intertwined with each other and with gendered and ability-centered negotiations of agency” (195).

Meizel’s study focuses on the experiences of singers and how they narrate their own multivocal performances, rather than evincing a broad theory of listening or singing practice. Although this approach acknowledges the potential richness of performers’ own theorizing, at times it also means rendering the thorniness of singers’ perceptions. While a white vocal impersonator attributes an essentialized idea of the “Black voice” to imagined physiological differences, her own arrival at a Tina Turner-esque vocality is produced simply by manipulating the physiology of her own vocal tract — as Meizel observes, “a practice that contradicts her thinking” (75). If the terrain Meizel covers here is far-reaching — encompassing Qur’anic recitation, audist discrimination against Deaf people, and African American Jewish cantorial singing — perhaps that is necessary for a project that engages voicing, embodying, and maneuvering through experiences of multiplicity. In attending to singers performing on and beyond the porous borders of intersubjective identity, Meizel argues persuasively for voices conceived in the terms and sounds of multivocality.

Virginie Magnat’s The Performative Power of Vocality works from the premise that performance studies has rarely undertaken the study of vocality in terms that are cross-cultural and experimental. While the first chapter avows a commitment to non-Western conceptions of vocality, with lengthy citations from numerous Indigenous artists and advisors to the research, the author works most confidently through European theorists of voice to bring experimental theatre artists into conversation with scholars from semiotics, social science, cognitive science, and European philosophy. Via her own practice as a performer steeped in Grotowski-based training, Magnat testifies to an experimental, open-ended, and embodied approach to vocal expression as a corrective to training methods that aim for the foregone conclusion of a sonic ideal. Declining to produce an authoritative scholarly voice, Magnat offers instead the approach of a feminist artist-scholar who facilitates a space in which multiple voices can resound. The power of vocality that interests her is that which is ever dialogic — even when nondiscursive and extralinguistic — and, grounded in the aims of Canada’s 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools, advances reciprocal understanding.

Magnat’s book is organized into four chapters that address embodiment, the presence of the lived voice, new materialist theories, and the author’s ancestral vocal traditions from Occitania. In a chapter that makes the case for attending to the lived voice, Magnat contends that meaningful exploration of Roland Barthes’s musings on nondiscursive vocality has been forestalled within theatre and performance studies by the distrust of presence central to postmodern undoings of the modernist notion of the subject. Bringing Antonin Artaud’s impact for voice studies to the fore, she surmises that “Artaud’s theory of vocality, grounded in his embodied experience as an actor, posits that breath supports the lived voice as physicality’s double” (98). A later chapter brings new materialism, posthumanism, and cognitive science to the study of vocality. Although referenced only in passing, there are many resonances here with topics that Nina Sun Eidsheim has theorized in depth in her volumes on voice and sound as intermaterial vibrational practice, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (2015) and The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (2019).

Magnat playfully closes the book with “a dialogical and performative experiment,” a scripted scene in which she speaks with the swath of thinkers whose theories have animated preceding chapters. These include Derrida, Barthes, and Artaud as well as Adriana Cavarero, Zygmunt Molik, Jerzy Grotowski, ancient Greek rhapsodist Ion, Konstantinos Thomaidis (coeditor of the Routledge Voice Studies series in which this book is published), Karen Barad, and a lone Indigenous theatre artist, Floyd Favel (Cree). The scene makes use of a French children’s song, “Promenons-nous dans les bois,” that Magnat reworks to position Derrida in the role of the thunder-voiced and insatiable wolf whose deconstructions threaten to consume all. Although this section with its imagined citations is set apart, it has a similar rhythm to the overall book in the way that Magnat rehearses the theories of other scholars with sparse synthesis, allowing others’ ideas about vocality to reverberate alongside and through one another.

While the effort to foreground voice and vocality among theatre and performance scholars is a welcome and exciting move, it is troubling that Magnat’s delineation of the field of performance studies largely omits the contributions of performance scholars of color whose work has long grappled with the lived experience and nondiscursive work of embodied voice and sound (especially Fred Moten, Tavia Nyong’o, Christine Bacareza Balance, Licia Fiol-Matta, and Alexandra T. Vazquez). Further, The Performative Power of Vocality conflates the experimental and the ceremonial, a fraught project that disregards the intranslability of Indigenous and settler colonial frameworks. Positioning the telos of vocality as reciprocal co-presence leads to inadvertently underhearing how the lived voice is lived variously across difference, filtering out the ways that not every cultural experience can nor should be translated or witnessed. On these points, Robinson’s new book is instructive.

In Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, xwélmexw (Stó:lō) scholar and artist Robinson intervenes powerfully in the whiteness of sound studies by reflecting on performances that articulate the listening encounter of Indigenous song and Western concert music, and the logics of perception that arise from such encounters. The pairing of words in the book’s title purposely convokes both a non-Indigenous sensory mode (settler colonial starvingness) and Indigenous sensory mode (listening as attentive witnessing). More than an act of translation, the conjoining of the words “hungry” and “listening,” given in xwélmexw as “shxwelítemelh xwélalà:m,” creates a new theoretical space that names both settler colonial approaches to perception and the experiences of Indigenous people in the perceptual in-between. To simultaneously feel the pace and expectations of an Indigenous positionality attuned to listening in relation to the land, while being subjected to enforced settler colonial attitudes toward songs as lifeless objects, requires complicated negotiations along the sonic borders of identity (to borrow Meizel’s formulation). The fact that Robinson brings forth three or more analytical configurations in the action of one phrase, “hungry listening” — settler colonial listening, Indigenous listening, Indigenous listening through and despite the imperatives of settler colonial “civilizing” discourses — bespeaks the multivalence and lyricism of his theoretical contributions in this important work.

As a reader, I experienced moving through the book as an act of attentive listening, surprised to find myself reading more slowly than usual. Formally, Hungry Listening makes elegant use of performative writing techniques, creating moments of impasse or indigestibility to purposeful ends. In addition to a section of the introduction designated for Indigenous readers only, from which non-Indigenous readers are politely asked to exclude themselves, Robinson places between each of the five chapters a series of poetic and performative interstices. These openings honor his assertion that the project of decolonizing music studies will require different approaches for individuals with differing listening positionalities. Primarily a series of event scores with framings such as “for those who hold our songs,” “for responsibility,” as well as an “Event Score to Act” (“give over possibility / give up the overdetermination of necessary action” [234]), these moments of pause also include Robinson’s personal listening response to a work by composer Raven Chacon (Diné) entitled “Report” (2001/2015), scored for firearm ensemble (“let’s clear the air / listening to land is not a pristine act” [107]). Invoking Indigenous listening resurgence practices that refuse to cater to settler colonial hunger — “We might consider their indigestibility similar to the indigestibility of seeds that create new life once the berries have fed us” (67) — Robinson also writes after the queer excesses and intimacies of performative writing by theorists such as Wayne Koestenbaum and Suzanne Cusick.

In analyzing the work of Canadian ensembles and composers that incorporate practices such as Inuit throat singing, Robinson critiques hearings that reduce Indigenous participation in concert music to easily digested narratives of multiculturalism and reconciliation. Historicizing the violence of Indigenous song ethnography, he advocates redress for entrapped songs in ways that will reconnect kinship with Indigenous ancestors, and charges contemporary composers to undertake responsibility for “the necessary shift from compositional models of writing about to models of writing with” Indigenous people and communities (151). Ultimately, Hungry Listening challenges readers and music practitioners to become unsteadied by a deepening awareness of the listening positionalities we assume, recognizing that settler colonial ways of being so often travel unmarked when we speak about what it is to listen, or do not speak about what it is that a song brings to life in the world.

These three books will be of interest not only to scholars of music and sound but also to those who study materiality, embodied expression, and performances of difference across categories including race, culture, gender, and disability. Where Magnat advances a notion of vocality that, while productively nondiscursive, carries the imperatives of reciprocity and cross-cultural “balance,” the vibrant critical contributions of Robinson and Meizel also bring forward the importance of attending to moments of communicative impasse, and the disjuncts of loss in experiencing voice and sound.