A white fist flourishing a green scarf thrusts into the foreground of the cover art on Caroline Bithell's 2014 publication, A Different Voice, A Different Song: Reclaiming Community through the Natural Voice and World Song. A sea of women, older, white women, fills the image's background with a kaleidoscope of brightly coloured tops. Smiling, they are gathered for an 850-person strong, mass choir sing. The energy of the photo is amplified in the call and response that plays out between the fist in the foreground, and the choir constituents in the background who clutch and wave their own jewel-toned scarves, arms raised victoriously to the sky. This framing image is a snapshot from the 2011 Sing for Water at the Thames Festival. Ethnographic scenes from this annual event also open and close the book. Caroline Bithell's second, independently authored, academic publication, A Different Voice, A Different Song is an expansive ethnography on the transnational networks coalescing around natural voice, UK-based community choirs, and world song, particularly songs from Georgia, Bosnia, Corsica, Africa, and the African-American tradition. Given the thematic relevance of Sing for Water to Bithell's project, I read the cover image by way of introduction to the strengths and weaknesses of her book's larger argument.

To begin, the joy of the photo echoes Bithell's palpable love for her research, which she carried out largely as a participant observer in the choirs, singing exchanges, voice camps and workshops she takes as her primary objects of study. That fist, raised triumphantly in song, telegraphs clearly and effectively Bithell's arguments regarding the liberatory dimensions of polyphonic singing in the natural voice tradition, the democratization of music, and the transformative power that participation in world song can have for individual and community well-being, and for intercultural understanding. Yet Bithell's important message on singing, empowerment, and a progressive politics of difference is one a reader can't seize with confidence. Like the cover photo, Bithell positions the whiteness and socioeconomic privilege of her subjects squarely and does due diligence in her theoretical discussions of authenticity and cultural appropriation. The blur of the image, however, reflects the shortcomings of too wide an analytic lens. Bithell's analytic approach is designed to match the broad scope of her ethnography. Beautifully drawing out the global routes of exchange between natural voice practice and multicultural repertoire, Bithell's wide-ranging ethnography nonetheless raises complex issues about performing the other that go beyond the question of appropriation. These issues remain unexamined, however, as Bithell's analytic framework can't scale to the level of, and therefore glosses over, an embodied critique of difference. The result is that the book flattens difference across race, nation, ability, gender, and political subject position, and Bithell's argument for a ‘voice of the future’ that ‘is … multicoloured and multivalent,’ ultimately feels over-reaching (312).

Firmly situating her research in the academic discipline of ethnomusicology, Bithell draws on the field's broad research across community music, music education, world song, and the politics of participation. Bithell also engages briefly with cultural studies via contemporary theories of critical cosmopolitanism, affinity culture, and tourism, and with performance studies through E. Patrick Johnson's work on the Australian gospel choir Café at the Gate of Salvation in his field-defining 2003 text, Appropriating Blackness. Footnote ¹ Surprisingly, Bithell's work shies away from a conversation with scholarship on voice. Instead, an entire chapter is dedicated to a gloss on the histories, techniques, and ideologies behind the various schools of natural voice practice that have developed since the late twentieth century: Linklater, Grotowski, Hart, and, of course, Bithell's central object of study, the Natural Voice Practitioner's Network. In light of the disciplinary emergence of sound studies and its subdiscipline, voice studies, this scholarly omission is unexpected. While Bithell almost certainly did not have access to the recent string of voice studies publications,Footnote ² many of which were published coincident to or after the research and publishing trajectory of A Different Voice, A Different Song, these recent publications grew out of established scholarship on voice that Bithell had access to, but left untapped. These prior works include Don Ihde's Listening and Voice,Footnote ³ Steven Feld's ‘They Repeatedly Lick Their Own Things,’Footnote ⁴ Steven Connor's Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism,Footnote ⁵ ‘Vocal Anthropology: From the Music of Language to the Language of Song’ by Steven Feld, Aaron Fox, Thomas Porcello, and David Samuels,Footnote ⁶ Adriana Cavarero's For More than One Voice,Footnote ⁷ and Mladen Dolar's A Voice and Nothing More,Footnote ⁸ to name a few. It is surprising that Bithell does not make recourse to any of this work,Footnote ⁹ particularly since two of the prominent ethnomusicologists she references for their expertise on world music, namely Veit Erlmann and Steven Feld, have published excellent theoretical articles on voice practice.Footnote ¹⁰ Although Bithell positions natural voice praxis as the analytic ground of her study, what she could have gleaned from these and other interlocutors are analytical tools for theorizing the cultural work of voice as both a discursive and a corporeal practice.

A Different Voice, A Different Song is at its best in framing the natural voice movement and world song as joint partners in a global grassroots effort to decolonize Western music and musicality. Polyphonic singing of world song repertoire in the natural voice style, Bithell claims, decentres the hegemonic ideal of the musical ‘works’, and recentres meaning and value around process and participation in musicking activity. Here, Bithell is treading familiar ethnomusicological ground. But what is truly insightful and incisive is her argument that multicultural repertoire and natural voice choirs provide democratized and life-sustaining access to communities of care and individual and group transformation. There are, Bithell claims, formal elements of natural voice technique and world song repertoire that inaugurate well-being, liberation, and empowerment. To begin, the central premise of natural voice is that ‘if you can talk, you can sing’ (16). Drawn from the word's oral music traditions, multicultural polyphonic song complements this democratic ideal because it is not beholden to the Western concept of the score. Songs from oral tradition rely on ear training for transmission and thus are accessible to those who do not possess traditional musical literacy. Sung without accompaniment, much world song is not constrained by the well-tempered scale, and thus leaves room for fluctuations of timbre and pitch in amateur music-making. Bithell and other natural voice practitioners also highlight how world song is linked to dance or everyday movement and thereby roots voice in a type of embodiment that is considered freer and more natural. Personal liberation is also arrived at through singing in a foreign language. This practice releases choir members from the English language, and from the constraints of a body disciplined and constituted in English. Therefore, Bithell contends, world song frees singers from cultural norms enforced through voice and language, such as gender norms for women. And finally, the community-oriented ethic valued by the natural voice movement is reflected in world song repertoire, which carries within its musical structures the original social functions of song. These co-articulations between natural voice and world song mean that choir ‘[p]articipants are not simply finding a singing voice but are rediscovering, at a far more existential level, hidden, suppressed, or unfulfilled parts of themselves, and that this is made possible precisely by engaging with “the Other”—in a way that liberates them from precisely those things that prevent such self-discovery within their own cultural norms’ (203).

Bithell understands the natural voice movement as growing out of the progressive politics and the folk revival of the 1960s. But the unrealized promise of Bithell's argument about the sociopolitical work of natural voice and world song is the paradigm shift it suggests. In her groundbreaking work on the racialization of timbre, Nina Eidsheim has shown how the ‘post-Garcian voice’ was the epitome of modern, Western enlightenment thought.Footnote ¹¹ My own research highlights how this scientific voice was in fact established as ‘natural’.Footnote ¹² This natural voice was white, able-bodied, gendered, and constructed as the unmarked vocal norm of the classical voice tradition; explicitly racialized, sexualized, and gendered voices were its constitutive Others. In the movement Bithell charts, natural voice has been dislodged from the ivory tower and now works with world song, its former Other, to promote transcultural understanding with de-colonial potential. Historical contextualization of this massive political shift would strengthen Bithell's project by clarifying the political stakes of the new articulation between the natural and the postcolonial. Such clarification feels pressing, particularly in light of Bithell's observations that natural voice and community choirs have moved to the mainstream and are now even state-funded (19, 311). Unfortunately, because Bithell leaves the ideological underpinnings of natural voice unexplored, such historical contextualization is hazy.

Without this contextualization, Bithell's important claims feel more like familiar metaphors about the power of natural voice and lose some of their potential robustness. To clarify, I don't mean to critique the contention that engagement with natural voice and multicultural song repertoire is liberatory; rather, I want to query the foundations upon which Bithell makes her argument. Annette Schlichter provides an excellent theoretical model for parsing the political implications of natural voice practice in her recent article ‘Un/Voicing the Self: Vocal Pedagogy and the Discourse-Practices of Subjectivation’.Footnote ¹³ In her article, Schlichter critiques Linklater technique and denaturalizes the voice practice as a disciplinary regime ‘that produces forms of identity through a notion of authentic selfhood in conjunction with the ideal of the natural voice’ (np). Yet at the same time she acknowledges that ‘a student's engagement with her embodied voice can also create a different relation to, maybe even a new understanding or knowledge of the self, one that is not rendered in terms of the natural and authentic’ (np). In other words, Schlichter is claiming that a discursive analysis of natural voice practice is not sufficient to capture the complex ways that somatic practices bring identity into being. Her work therefore calls for an equally complex theoretical approach to voice, one that reads voice as both a discursive and a corporeal practice. Following this model, voice is examined as a material site of identity formation without the voice becoming the discursive ‘ground of a truth of self’, and this materiality is also read so as not to ‘negat[e] [the voice's] discursive construction’ (np). While Bithell's approach to voice suggests a discursive critique around world song and the politics of authenticity (more on this shortly), it does not provide a discursive analysis of natural voice, and, aside from ethnographic description of a generic choir practice in chapter 4, it avoids a corporeal critique of both natural voice technique and the practices of singing world song in the natural voice tradition.

According to Schlichter, to bypass a balanced critique of natural voice is to flatten difference and place voice and voice practice outside of culture, and as stand-ins for the universally human. And indeed, Bithell positions world song in the natural voice tradition as a ‘resource for all humanity’ (302). Natural voice in Bithell's project thus possesses an unmarked neutrality that allows it to be passed over by critique. Carrie Sandahl, in ‘The Tyranny of Neutral’,Footnote ¹⁴ reveals the inherent ableism underpinning the mythic neutrality of method acting. Similarly, Schlichter argues that essentialized gender is fundamental to Linklater formulations of natural voice. In contrast, Bithell's lack of attention to natural voice at the level of the discursive and corporeal enables the more problematic racial politics of her project to go unquestioned. While an overt discussion of race doesn't occur, Bithell does address the question of cultural appropriation of world song. She handles this academic discussion well, but I won't rehash her claims here. They are largely based on those of E. Patrick Johnson, who, in a nuanced reading of the Australian Gospel Choir Café at the Gate of Salvation, reveals the humanist ruse of ‘authenticity’. Included in Bithell's own critique of the charge of cultural appropriation is a strong argument for how intercultural exchange benefits the home cultures of world song repertoire in ways that are validating and economically empowering.

Unfortunately, however, theories of authenticity are not sufficient theoretical tools to parse the thorny politics of representation that arise in Bithell's ethnographic work. Whether Britons do or do not have the right to sing Others’ songs is, as Bithell concludes, ‘in some ways beside the point’ (302). Rather, the relevant questions are: if world song in the natural voice movement is about engaging the Other, how is this Other engaged corporeally? How are Other lives and Other bodies imagined and taken on through song? Heidi, a participant on the Village Harmony 2004 singing exchange in Corsica, describes engagement with the Other as an embodied experience of empathy: ‘[s]inging the traditional songs of cultures other than our own puts us empathetically in other bodies, looking out of other eyes, singing out of other throats’ (149). Heidi's statement raises perhaps the most important, if unanswered, questions of Bithell's project: How are choir members identifying corporeally with Others? How might this performative process (in addition to the formal attributes of world song Bithell accounts for) be involved in identity formation, transformation, and liberation?

Answering these questions is of utmost importance. Bithell herself avoids a close reading of the corporeal experience of singing world song with an almost post-racial dismissal of what she calls the ‘authenticity police’ (299). Participants in natural voice choirs, she claims, engage in sensitive and responsible multicultural exchange with world song and primary culture bearers. Yet in spite of these good intentions, many choir members quoted in the book express deep and even fetishistic desire for essentialized bodies and sounds. Moreover, it is clear from some singers’ self-reporting that the imagined and embodied process of taking on the Other through song is the primary vehicle for release and liberation. Thus, choir members’ desires for, and imaginaries of racial Others recapitulate a problematic politics that Bithell claims natural voice choirs work against. For example, natural voice practitioner Chris Rowbury invokes black and Other bodies to instill the natural voice principle of voice–breath–body connection. In using these bodies pedagogically, Rowbury offers them to his choir members for consumption, and frames the imaginative and corporeal ‘taking on’ of these bodies as crucial to the performative work of transformation sought by natural voice practice: ‘Gone are the days of the clenched buttocks, feet in second position and formally held hands of the posh recital. We need to get back to the cotton fields, the chain gangs and the weaving looms and sing with our bodies, breathe with our imagination, and dance with our mouths’ (113). Here, the idealized voice–breath–body connection is conjured with recourse to the explicitly racialized and essentialized experience of slaves and the incarcerated. What's more, Rowbury suggests the choir identify corporeally with the heinous physical oppressions of slavery and Jim Crow in order to ‘dance with our mouths’. Here, Bithell's subjects are conjuring fantasies of racialized Others in ways that are far beyond the theoretical tools available to a discussion of authenticity. Notwithstanding the irresponsibility and offensiveness of Rowbury's exhortation, this example, though unexamined by Bithell, painfully illustrates two points: first, the degree to which the bodies of real or imagined Others are just as crucial to the transformative power of world song and natural voice as are formal musical features, and second, the need for an embodied critique of difference at the crossroads between natural voice and world song. What is at stake in this and other examples is no less than white and ‘Other’ identity formation.

Rowbury's remarks are not an isolated incident in A Different Voice, A Different Song. Comments of this nature abound, whether they are from a choir member who sings African music to ‘access [her] tribal person’ (175), or from Bithell herself, as when she likens the predominantly white Sing for Water choir to ‘Desmond Tutu's vision of a post-apartheid Rainbow Nation’ (12–13). Again, what is problematic in these instances is emphatically not the principle of white folks singing world song. After all, in Appropriating Blackness, E. Patrick Johnson reads the liberatory potential of white Australians singing the African-American gospel tradition. He does so, however, by taking the body as a material and discursive site of dialogic engagement with blackness. We cannot know if Bithell's subjects are thus engaged (though evidence points to the contrary) because she gives no such close reading to her subjects’ embodied performance. The unfortunate effects are twofold: the reader doesn't trust completely that community choirs are being responsible to the Other voices they are inhabiting, and Bithell's claims are thereby divested of authority.

In penning this review I have wondered whether, as a performance and sound studies scholar, my evaluation is fair within the boundaries of discipline. There has been of late, for example, pushback against Gustavus Stadler for his critique in SoundingOut! of what he argues is a relative lack of a politics of difference in recent reference publications in sound studies,Footnote ¹⁵ including the important Keywords in Sound co-edited by ethnomusicologists David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny.Footnote ¹⁶ My resolve, however, has been strengthened in reflecting on Bithell's own recourse to performance studies scholar E. Patrick Johnson. Bithell uses Johnson well but contingently, borrowing his argument but not his honed mode and method of analysis. And then again there is the work of ethnomusicologist Steven Feld, who, in his spectacular ‘They Repeatedly Lick Their Own Things’, deploys a sophisticated argument on the intimacy of voice in intercultural exchange, and manages to do so with a performative writing that profoundly unpacks the discursivity, metadiscursivity, and embodied nature of voice. I want to conclude by suggesting there are many opportunities for this type of analysis in Bithell's work, and she has a wonderful eye for rich and suggestive sites of inquiry. Two stunning examples in particular that beg for sustained attention are the persistent Welsh identification with the Fisk Jubilee Singers following their tours of the UK in 1874 and 1876, and the culturally ‘mixed’ music of the Zairian and Belgian sisters of the a cappella group Zap Mama, Anita and Marie Daulne. It is my hope that Bithell returns to these and similar sites in future scholarship, albeit with a somewhat different scholarly approach, to give a more satisfying account of the paradigm shifts in world song and natural voice in the twentieth to twenty-first centuries.