Vocal Music and Contemporary Identities: Unlimited Voices in East Asia and the West, co-edited by Christian Utz and Frederick Lau, was first conceived at the international conference ‘Unlimited Voices: Contemporary Vocal Music in the Era of Globalization’ at the University of Tokyo in 2008. This volume contains fourteen chapters in total including: the introduction by Utz and Lau, twelve individual contributions organized into three parts – ‘Global Perspectives on the Voice’, ‘Voices of/in Art music’ and ‘Voices of/in Popular Music and Media Art’ – and the afterword by Nicholas Cook.

This publication can be paired with Locating East Asia in Western Art Music, which was edited by Yayoi Uno Everett and Frederick Lau.Footnote ¹ Additionally, several years later the Music, Words and Voice: Reader, which focuses on the topic of voice and vocal music, was edited by Martin Clayton.Footnote ² Since then there have not been many book-length publications on the topic. The editors of this volume state that their motivation was to produce a volume which exclusively focuses on ‘intercultural dimensions of the musical voice’ and fill the gap in scholarly studies of vocal music that examine cross-cultural dynamics (3). The intellectual and cultural backgrounds of the authors are indeed very diverse and include composition, musicology, ethnomusicology, media studies, and history and are from across the globe including Europe, North America, and Asia. Each contributor offers a range of case studies focusing on specific artists and vocal works to describe and analyse various artistic and cultural influences from both East Asia and the West. I shall briefly outline each chapter as follows:

The Introduction (chapter 1) begins with the premise that the human voice and vocal expressions are deeply individual yet socially and culturally organized. It is suggested that the dual dimension of hegemony and liberation in the specific local context gives rise to the ethnicization of the voice, while the globalization process prompts ‘a counter reaction’ such that voices can act as leading agents in ‘intercultural dialogue, transnationalism, or cultural hybridity’ (2). More specifically, drawing from Beck and Zolo's theory of ‘reflexive globalization’, Utz and Lau consider that ‘globalization is not […] something from “outside” that “influences” a homogeneous local territory’ and that ‘local and global processes can interact to produce new social communities and cultural identities’ (2). According to them, reflexive globalization also challenges the existing patterns of European modernity, which, in turn, results in reterritorialization and re-ethnicization of identity. While the musical manifestations of reflexive globalization incline towards hybridity, they suggest, musical manifestations of reinforced identities and boundaries are to be found in the ways in which the voice in art and popular music is conceptualized and situated (2). Building on these theoretical premises, this volume attempts to demonstrate how the contemporary identities are ‘continuously reframed by composers, performers, listeners, and scholars’ and at the same time, how contemporary vocal musical practice is historically and locally imbedded (3).

Part I comprises three chapters. In chapter 2 ‘Presence and Ethnicity of the Voice’, Dieter Mersch discusses a philosophical perspective of voice and ethnicity (26). Drawing from Barthes' theory, Mersch suggests that the presence of the voice comes from the materiality of the voice (27). He also suggests that the ethnicity of the voice results from an urgent demand for care, attention, or respect (26). Mersch posits that a key principle of the voice is its responsivity. In order to do so, he argues, ‘the voice needs both a direct confrontation, a face to face, as well as the possibility to respond’ (39). This leads to his conclusion that the voice is ‘a social phenomenon’ and its sociality is manifest as soon as the voice is enunciated (41).

Chapter 3 ‘Rediscovery of Presence: Intercultural Passages through Vocal Spaces between Speech and Song’, by Christian Utz, is about intercultural music analysis of the relationships between speech and songs. Using Japanese giyudayū-bushi, Tan Dun's opera Marco Polo, Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, and a number of other pieces as his examples, he offers a comparative study of traditional and contemporary vocal works and genres. He also analyses and discusses composer–performer collaborations and the interactions between notation and performance. In doing so he is able to show that voices in traditional and contemporary contexts are idiosyncratic and oppose a simple reproduction of notation (69).

The authenticity in voice and intercultural compositional aesthetics are the main themes for Sandeep Bhagwati's chapter ‘Imagining the Other's Voice: On Composing across Vocal Traditions’. Building upon theories by Sloterdijk, Derrida, Ong, and Barthes, Bhagwati suggests that the assumed authenticity of the voice is a medium of ‘redemption effects’ (81), which can be explained in three modes of voice: (i) the ‘normative mode’ which highlights ‘the latent oracular undercurrent of vocality’ transfiguring the singer's body (79); (ii) the ‘individualistic mode’ which attempts to reinscribe the singer's voice into the body (i.e. Barthes' ‘grain’ of the voice); and (iii) the ‘naturalistic mode’ which exists in a reproduced and non-directed form as found in works of electronic music or sound art (79–80). Using his own compositions, notably Atish-e-Zaban (2006), to illustrate his own creative engagement with the human voice, he discusses various issues associated in the process of bringing the Western-trained virtuoso voice to the practice of the North Indian kyal vocal genre.

Part II, which explores vocal identity in art music, consists of three chapters on East Asia and two chapters on Europe. Each chapter focuses on the selected work of a small number of composers and their associated historical, political, and socio-cultural contexts. This focus allows for a close reading of the relationships between the artistic products and social processes.

Chapter 5 by Frederick Lau, ‘Voice, Culture, and Ethnicity in Contemporary Chinese Compositions’, describes and discusses the ways in which voice is used by two Chinese-born composers, Chan Yi in the United States and Chan Hing-Yan in Hong Kong. Lau argues that the voice can serve as an index of place and religion and of a variety of identities including class, gender, and ethnicity. In this sense, the new Chinese vocal aesthetics, meisheng changfa, which were derived from bel canto in the early twentieth century, not only designate a new vocal style but also a new social indicator (111). Analysing the choral works by the two composers, Lau suggests that they employ strategies that intervene and obscure the relationships between vocal sound and language as well as what is deemed Chinese traditional culture. This reinterpretation of Chinese voice, in turn, Lau suggests, creates a space in which a new sense of ‘Chineseness’ can be articulated (112).

In chapter 6, ‘Narrative, Voice, and Reality in Operas by Hosokawa Toshio and Mochizuki Misato’, Fuyuko Fukunaka focuses on two case studies of contemporary Japanese opera. Both Hosokawa's Hanjo (2002) and Mochizuki's Die große Bäckereiattacke (2005–09) employ a ‘polylogic’ narrative in which the ‘simultaneous presence of multiple visions—voices’ unfold. This contrasts with the ‘monologic’ narrative of postwar Japanese operas of an earlier generation in which ‘one centralised story’ was told. Fukunaka suggests these composers liberated Japanese opera from the restraints imposed by the long cherished idea of this genre (129–30).

Heekyung Lee's chapter 7, ‘Reconsidering Traditional Vocal Practices in Contemporary Korean Music’, discusses the Korean case in which a wide range of different approaches to traditional music are found. Lee suggests that the first postwar generation of Korean composers found it difficult to take on the elements of traditional Korean vocal styles in their compositions. For example, Kim Tong-Jin's sin chang'ak, a new style of traditional Korean opera, p'ansori, is a kind of ‘paraphrase’ or a ‘transcription’ of traditional p'ansori drama in a Western opera style while maintaining the tonal and rhythmic framework of Western music (138). The second and third generations of postwar Korean composers, such as Kang Sukhi, Yi Man-Bang or Kang Joon-Il, have introduced traditional Korean musical influences to their work and sometimes collaborated with traditional artists. Lee argues that contemporary performativity and orality of Korean music traditions offers a ‘paradigm-shifting source of artistic creation’ to contemporary Korean composers (152).

In chapter 8 Jörn Peter Hiekel compares Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905–88) and German composer Helmut Lachenmann (b. 1935) and discusses how the issues of identity gave shape to the work of these two composers. Hiekel suggests that due to the principal differences between their aesthetic concepts, the comparison of the two composers helps us to understand a broad spectrum of new vocal music in Europe generally, especially since the 1960s.

Erin Gee's chapter 9 deals with the linguistic research and categorization of European vocal music since the late 1950s. This historical account focuses on three cosmopolitan composers: Dieter Schnebel, Brian Ferneyhough and Georges Aperghis. From her analysis, Gee discusses the interdependences between notational choices, the construction of the performers’ identities, the flexibility that the performers have during the interpretation of the scores and the ‘cultural clues’ in the vocal sounds.

Part III deals with media and popular music development in East Asia and it consists of four chapters as follows.

Samson Young discusses the multimedia digital opera The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci in chapter 10. Created by the Hong Kong composer Steve Hui Ngo-shan, who works in the field of popular and dance music, this ‘digital opera’ is a departure from the European operatic form and style. The only human actor is the sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, performed by a bass soloist, while all the other cast's voices are digitally synthesized and portrayed with a virtual image. The representation of characters in the story and the making of the digital opera raise a number of questions about the cultural production, technology, and identity for contemporary China in the context of globalization.

Chapter 11 is about China's ‘red songs’. Andreas Steen discusses these Chinese popular songs from the mid-twentieth century and their recent resurgent popularity. Created as part of the state propaganda apparatus and mass culture, the red songs contributed to the formation of a collective identity and revolutionary spirit for the Chinese nation in the newly born socialist state. Re-immerged and refashioned by the twenty-first-century mediatization and entertainment business, the red songs appeal to a broad Chinese audience and also instil a sense of pride and Chinese neo-nationalist sentiment. Steen suggests that the red songs will continue to remain the voice of the ‘mainstream’ supported by the state, which has ‘successfully uplifted and promoted its musical standard by making it attractive and flexible enough to incorporate various voices and musical styles’ (243).

Chapter 12 is about the second generation Japanese glam rock genre visual-kei and its vocal appeal to fans globally. Oliver Seibt suggests that the first generation of visual-kei bands played straightforward masculine-style hard rock or glam metal following the Western model. The second generation of visual-kei bands, however, developed multi-faceted, complex musical styles and gender ambiguity, all of which appealed to the fans outside Japan. He analyses the links between the desire of ‘band girls’ (bangyuaru) and the voice of the visual-kei singers by applying a Lacanian theory of the voice. According to Seibt, these fans’ fascination with the voice of the visual-kei artists is associated with an unfulfilable desire and this contributed to the worldwide popularity of this genre (251).

The last chapter in Part III is on Korean popular music and its vocal multiplicity. Michael Fuhr illustrates how various vocal techniques employed in contemporary Korean popular music can be related to both traditional (e.g., p'ansori) and popular (e.g., t’ŭrot’ŭ) genres and how specific vocal techniques and aesthetics give shape to the particular vocal genre and the individual style of the singer in different contexts. For example, Fuhr suggests, the collective ethos of the traditional aesthetic terms for sorrow (han) can be interpreted as political and rebellious when associated with Korean punk rock. He contests what some consider to be a primordial notion of Korean identity; instead he argues ‘voice is neither neutral nor biologically determined’ (281), challenging a stereotype and the perceived entanglement between the essentialized Korean vocal timbre, body, and ethnicity.

Nicholas Cook's Afterword draws the discussion together by specifying the principal themes and the theoretical and methodological issues, which have emerged from the preceding chapters. For example, he reviews and discusses various ways in which Barthes' theory has been applied by many of the contributors to this volume. Finally, he summarizes the main conclusions on questions of identities and vocal music in the cross-cultural contexts that have brought East Asia and the West together through musical practice.

This volume offers informative cross-cultural case studies of contemporary vocal music development in East Asia and the West. While the concept of ‘West’ in this volume is not clearly defined, it largely relates to Western Europe and North America, reflecting the specific historical connections and cultural contacts established between the two worlds. For example, Western classical music was perceived as a symbol of modernity in East Asian societies at the turn of the twentieth century. Eight chapters of the volume are concerned with East Asia, one with South Asia and the work of individual ‘Western’ composers is discussed in four chapters. All of which is probably indicative of the course of musical influences and the dynamic changes that have been taking place in China, Japan and Korea at a global scale in recent years. Many chapters discuss the creative process (i.e., composition) and the musical analyses are illustrated with various notations and scores, which, in turn, illustrate the musical hybridization process in local, regional, and global terms.

It is striking that seven chapters have applied or discussed Roland Barthes' theory of ‘grain’ of the voice. Clearly his theory is quite useful in each case study and has the potential to bring different case studies together as a tool for cross-cultural analyses. It is also notable that the role of language in some of the vocal music, as illustrated in Japanese operas by Hosokawa and Mochizuki and Japanese glam rock visual-kei, is increasingly less significant as artists seek a global audience and the international audiences’ interests and desires transcend linguistic and geographical boundaries. These global influences and local processes reshape the relationships between the vocal arts and the question of identities, all of which is well illustrated in different ways by the diverse collection of authors.

The tripartite structure and theoretical framework for the cross-cultural analysis proposed by the two editors work well but arguably all twelve case studies could be seen from the global perspective in equal measure. The book, as a whole, is comprehensive and rewarding but not an easy read due to the variety of academic styles and conventions. However, Nicholas Cook did an excellent job of bringing all the different perspectives of the authors together in a clear and illuminating exposition. Those who are interested in musical and cultural globalization and intercultural processes will find this volume very useful, including ethnomusicologists, musicologists, composers, popular music and media studies scholars.