Annelies Andries (AA): Hello. Hi, Jane, and hi, Lin. Welcome to this conversational review of Nina Eidsheim’s book, The Race of Sound. My name is Annelies and I’m going to open with a more general review of my thoughts on this book.

In The Race of Sound, musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim aims to make the readers rethink the way they approach the naming of ‘voice’. Whenever one hears a voice, she argues, one automatically asks the acousmatic question: ‘Who is this?’ (1). This question betrays the way we name a voice and understand it as an essentialized expression of a knowable individual. She perceives this activity of essentializing especially in relation to vocal timbre—a concept that she understands very broadly as encompassing all characteristics that allow us to distinguish between two sounds of the same ‘pitch and loudness’ (6). It is important to realize, according to Eidsheim, that equating timbre with specific essences is an act of interpretation on the part of the listener, rooted in collective and cultural assumptions. Thus, she seeks to dispel the common notions that voice is 1) singular, 2) innate and 3) that its source is in the singer (9). Instead, she puts the listener in the limelight. It is important to note that vocalists themselves also fall under the denominator ‘listeners’. After all, vocalists listen to their own vocal production and interpret and adjust their production based on their own and others’ cultural and collective perceptions about voice in general, and theirs in particular.

Throughout the chapters of the book, Eidsheim deconstructs how and why listeners read voices as a reflection of essence with a particular attention to race (often in the intersection with gender). She discusses how hearing timbre as racial leads to constructions of imaginary identities that often deny singers agency. In chapter two, for instance, she proposes the concept of a phantom genealogy in which the voices of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Black opera singers were framed within a minstrelsy performance culture. Discussing Billie Holiday in chapter five, she highlights how her voice is interpreted as autobiographical, channeling ancestral history, and biologically determined (156)—all ways of interpreting that suggest Holiday’s sound came naturally and that keep us from understanding Holiday’s artistic skills in crafting her own sound. A theme that also regularly comes back is how listeners expect that a voice’s timbre corresponds to its visual, bodily representation—if this is not the case, representations will be adjusted to fit the vocal timbre; in chapter four, she demonstrates how this is even true of voice-simulation technology such as the Vocaloid.

Ultimately, Eidsheim proposes to shift our attention to the elements of entrainment, style and technique as an approach that puts the singers’ artistry in creating their sounds centre stage. Yet, even in describing voice in these terms, Eidsheim warns against essentializing and champions the restoration of what she calls ‘the multiplicity of the thick event’ (5). In other words, a description is only one among multiple options for giving meaning to the voice; there is an infinity of options that do not exclude one another, but add to the thickness of the description. Highlighting only one or a few options creates a hierarchy revealing the micropolitics of listening—a micropolitics that has disadvantaged Black vocalists.

Eidsheim’s approach seeks to reveal the ideological discourses that underpin our conceptions of voice. In this respect, she wears her activist stance, namely, to counteract racist listening activities openly on her sleeve—this stance may be in part the reason behind the book’s availability as an open access publication from the University of California, which enables it to more easily reach audiences beyond academia. Still, her relatively limited interest in understanding the reasons behind such racist listening practices left me as a reader hungry for more information, interpretation and nuance on the historical case studies and especially for more space dedicated to singers’ own discussions of their vocal production. Still, this silence fits her larger design. For paralleling Derrida’s notion that ‘there is no outside-text’, she posits that voice itself is not knowable beyond experiencing it as a vibrational event; descriptions of voice only reveal something about the meaning-constructing activities of a particular listener at a particular time. Any description or interpretation is fragmentary and reveals listening’s micropolitics. Ultimately, it is fitting that she ends the book with a quote by the poet Rumi, who after exhorting the reader to free him- or herself from the prison of ideological bias suggests to ‘live in silence’ (200). Such a proposal is, nonetheless, a bleak prospect for academia and its fondness of discursive discussion and interpretation. Still, the multitude of concepts Eidsheim offers us to analyse how we listen, provides a fertile ground for further explorations in multiple fields, from musicology to African American studies, from scientific considerations of voice to cultural and political ones.

So, Lin, do you want to give your considerations on the book?

Jacqueline (Lin) Georgis (LG): Yeah, sure. Thanks, Annelies. Hi. I’m Lin.

So, about once every year, the Episcopal church I attended in Connecticut hosted a special Sunday service where the choir featured several guest singers. As a member of the choir from the age of eight to about fourteen, I remember these Sundays very vividly. One guest singer, an African American man, was regularly invited to sing African American spirituals. Getting to hear spirituals in place of our typical repertoire of Anglican hymns was very popular with our multiracial, multiethnic congregation. And I believe that for many, the visual representation of this African American guest singer paired with music of the African American tradition reified several themes Eidsheim picks up on in The Race of Sound: the idea of an essential voice, timbral blackness, and timbral masculinity. For myself, however, an Eritrean-American trained in the Western classical music tradition, who was also familiar with Southern Black Baptist musical practices, I understood the voice—the Black voice in particular—to be anything but essential. Despite my own cultural upbringing, particular instances such as these special Sundays and others have prompted me to ask similar questions to those raised by Eidsheim: ‘What do we name when we name voice in general and vocal timbre specifically? … Through what associative network are African American singers’ vocal timbres addressed?’ (64).

I found Eidsheim’s continued exploration of the phantom genealogy in chapter three as it pertains to the timbral ambiguity of jazz vocalist Jimmy Scott to be endlessly compelling. Arguing that falsetto allowed African American male performers of the mid-twentieth century to maintain a sense of masculinity or even hypermasculinity in the popular imagination, Eidsheim brings to the fore our own listening biases around gender, pitch and timbre. There was one major consideration though that I hoped she might have addressed. Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke, The Temptations and others referred to as Scott’s ‘colleagues’ or ‘contemporaries’ were coming out of the Motown, gospel, blues, pop and R&B musical spheres; they were not necessarily jazz vocalists as Scott came to be. As such, I wonder what a comparison between Scott and other contemporary male artists specific to the jazz vocal world like a Billy Eckstine might reveal. How do we read a voice like Scott’s within a uniquely jazz context? In bringing together these performers from across music genres and also across racial lines—she includes Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons—Eidsheim opens the door to future conversations, allowing us to elaborate on her question ‘How is gender signalled vocally?’ (105) by asking: How is gender signalled vocally across genres? And what are our expectations as listeners when it comes to hearing style and technique as they relate to gender and genre?

In her final chapter ‘Widening Rings of Being’, after challenging the listener to reimagine their understanding of and position to the voice and the vocalizer, Eidsheim offers her antidote to issues that have been percolating throughout the book, such as how do we unlearn how we listen? How do we develop analytical tools that don’t replicate essentialisms? Through what Eidsheim calls ‘the pause’, she suggests that we might take time to acknowledge our own place as listeners, and practice intentional, self-aware listening. In doing so, the answer to the acousmatic question: ‘Who is this?’ could now be one of many in ‘a chain of potentialities’ (182). What is exciting about the pause is that we begin to move away from the cult of fidelity and towards hearing the voice as style and technique. In this sense, we as listeners may recognize a sense of agency and artistry on behalf of the vocalizer, and free ourselves from the assumptions that voice is innate, singular, or that its source is the singer. In short, we can start to assume our own role as ‘active agents’. On the other hand, I’m cautious of a complete departure, or ‘turn away from identification’ (180) that Eidsheim anticipates may result from refiguring processes of listening.

In The Race of Sound, Eidsheim contributes to the growing collection of scholarship on the intersection of aurality, race and history. The interdisciplinary range present in this work, which crosses disciplinary boundaries and different critical modes, should appeal to scholars and students of musicology, sound and performance studies, as well as American and African American cultural studies.

AA: Thank you very much, Lin, for this enlightening review of some of the important concepts. Jane, would you like to add your voice to the mixture?

Jane Forner (JF): Thanks, Annelies, and thanks, Lin. I’ll just give my response now.

There is only one ‘element’ of music for which I have never yet devised a successful gimmick or satisfactory method of explanation when teaching my first two ‘fundamentals of music’ sessions of the semester for non-music major undergraduates, and that is timbre. I cycle through several of the themes that Eidsheim brings up, but the class never quite gets to grip with timbre’s elusiveness. When it comes to the voice in the context of Eidsheim’s terminology of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ sound events, it seems that the situation multiplies a hundredfold in complexity. Each case study’s deconstruction of timbre is fascinating, but it is Eidsheim’s exhortations—sometimes written, sometimes implied—to her readers to listen to listening that have stuck most vividly with me. The great value I take away here is more a framework and set of tools emerging from her case studies, than what is being added to the literature on any of the individuals discussed, though it’s without doubt welcome. The question rephrased and restated throughout the book, ‘What do we name when we name voice?’ (64), forces a great deal of introspection. As a white English scholar, and a classically trained singer who also writes about race, opera and vocal music, I find Eidsheim’s methodology especially productive, not because she is doing the work for me, but because she makes it clear just how much work I should be doing.

Perhaps my only mild frustration was when a huge, important topic leapt out from the page, but was not probed explicitly for where it might lead. I found, for instance, that the brilliant notion of the ‘phantom genealogy’ of timbre brought up interlocking realms of memory, history and heritage, but discussion of their potential wider significance seemed to stop short. One aspect I wanted to hear more of throughout was the presence and/or agency of African Americans in the discourses Eidsheim interrogates. Considerable portions of the case studies are given to audience/listener readings and hearings of Black voices, but, being drawn primarily from white discourses, offered a slightly one-dimensional understanding. Establishing the aural practices of white listeners over about two centuries perhaps inevitably reflects archival imbalances. Yet while it is immensely valuable research, I wanted to hear about the perceptions of other actors in this history. As we hear how Jimmy Scott, for instance, resisted the projections of his listeners, are there other narratives to add to this of listeners resisting (indirectly) other listeners’ projections? (Once social media enters in chapter four, glimpses of resistance and backlash appear). Sometimes, I could have heard more both from Eidsheim herself as a listener (I found her discussion of her own journey in the concluding parts of the book to be powerful), as well as from performers discussed. The fetishization of Holiday’s voice, for instance, was clear, but I found the lack of Holiday’s own perspectives to be a pressing absence. I wondered what differentiation there might be among aural behaviours when considering the ‘central role played by audiences in the production of voices’ (116).

This brings me to a final point, which is the question of whiteness, a concept never quite named, though very much always present. In chapter five we return to a key point: that the ‘timbral identification of race [is] not a result of racist views’ (154). While so much of the discourse that Eidsheim examines is demonstrably racist, I do find her argument compelling that those behaviours stem from more fundamental misconceptions about sound, voice and listening—that it goes even deeper than systemic white supremacy. But the questions I’m left with are: Do white listeners only racialize timbre when they are attending to (perceived) nonwhiteness? Do white listeners pay attention to whiteness in sound? My concluding point here is far from that we need to hear more about white people in a book about African American vocal music, but that there are enormous questions emerging from this text for future scholars writing in a similar vein.

The occasions when I wanted more from the text are not necessarily gaps in Eidsheim’s investigations: that each chapter offers such a conceptual multitude shows a way, perhaps, to push ourselves in multiple directions, and I find the inherently transdisciplinary mode of her inquiry to be a potentially powerful model for the future of voice studies. Nothing here is the last word, but a map and set of strategies for retraining, for paying attention to how we are listening, as everyday listeners in the world, as much as scholars. What it asks us to examine when we make the move to ‘name voice’ is a necessary and difficult challenge: our task is to scrutinize not only what we think we know, but why we even think we need to know it, and proceed from there.

AA: Thank you very much, Jane, for that also very enlightening discussion. Herewith I open the discussion amongst the three of us.

What I find interesting coming out of the responses is this idea of identity, so what do we do with voice and identity? Lin, you mentioned that maybe you don’t want to throw away identity completely. But I think also both of your responses interacted with this idea of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ maybe not being as monolithic as she sometimes posits it.

LG: I completely agree with you, Annelies on that point. I think that, as Jane had mentioned, the type of case studies that she draws from does give the reader that impression that blackness and the Black voice was thought of as ‘x’ and we only kind of got these selective, somewhat demeaning and derogatory accounts of how white listeners responded to and perceived ‘the’ Black voice, singular. And I think that the control group, so to speak, that’s been used as a measure of determining and describing the Black voice is, as Jane again mentioned, very much one-sided. I’m curious to know what was being said about performers like Anderson, Holiday, Scott and others in African American archival resources, like Ebony, Jet magazine and many others. What were the reflections or reactions of Black listeners, Black critics and the performers themselves? Because I think in that sense, we would have gotten a much wider and much more comprehensive understanding of the Black voice rather than just from the side of white listeners and white critics from the twentieth century.

JF: It’s an interesting question, especially in the chapter on Anderson when she’s in the nineteenth century and going back over other opera singers that are sort of predecessors to Anderson; it strikes me that it’s probably quite difficult to get to the kind of sources that we’re after. It’s not impossible, but I kind of wanted to know, is it out there and just super-hard to find? There was a lack of explicit saying ‘these are the sources I’m using. Here are the issues with them and here are the problems, but here’s why I’m specifically focusing on this’. And we kind of got this monolithic ‘the listener this’ ‘the listener that’ or ‘the audiences’ and it’s always clear that we’re only really thinking about white audiences listening to Black and African American voices, but it’s never named as such. So, it was an interesting omission, or something that was bubbling under the surface, but you’re not quite sure where to go with it.

AA: I think it is only really in the chapter on the Vocaloid, chapter four, where she goes into contemporary, or at least more or less contemporary, technologies of voice simulation, that she starts thinking about blackness not as one monolithic thing but really discusses the possibly more complicated heritage of the singers that are represented and how that interacts with how white audience members are taking a little bit more of a resistance and an activist stance, as you also mentioned in your review, Jane. It is there where the resistance of the singers themselves and even of the audience against what she posits as a very one-way street of listening starts to come to the surface.

JF: And actually, you know, one thing that you do get in the chapter on Anderson is a lot more perspective, I think, from singers and other people firsthand, ironically, in a way, from the sort of opera singers today that we hear from. And I know from my own research that there is quite a big body of sources—not as big as we’d hope it to be—of the perspectives of African American opera singers, both today and throughout the twentieth century. That’s out there and I feel like that actually came through quite strongly, but maybe that’s because it was about opera and there’s more familiarity, or more availability, that we got perspectives of people today. And we really understood a lot from them, but less so from the actual people in the discourses, if that make sense. So, from the people that she’s examining both historically and in Anderson’s time, we get less from them, but a lot more from the present day. There was a way they neatly dovetailed with a lot of very pressing current discussions about opera and race in America today that it was pointing towards. But it was a little like that was coming on the heels of the historical side, so I don’t know…

LG: I found chapter two, on Marian Anderson and the phantom genealogy—and I think this is what you’re both saying to a certain degree—that of course we wanted to hear a lot more from the artists themselves. I felt like she, in kind of an ironic boomerang-type way, is not giving them voice, is not giving them agency, and [she] often describes them as being put in roles or being plugged into the standard repertoire’s liminal roles, rendering them powerless and in a passive position. But I found that with divas like Leontyne Price, who specifically chose, actively chose, to sing roles like Aida in, for example, her farewell to opera, because she found Aida is not a slave; she’s a captive princess. She chose to play that role. She was not put into a liminal role, or to play a liminal character.

AA: In that respect I’ve also been thinking about the case of Billie Holiday, of which there is actually quite a lot of material available that could throw more light on how she used specific elements, even from the way that people read her, to get commercial success. Also, she has at least been identified as a big activist herself with regard to racial issues, and some of that, I feel, is just missing from that chapter. The way that she portrays her doesn’t necessarily seem to allow the more artistic but also activist nature of some of these singers themselves to shine through, and thus could offer more productive ways forward that do not victimize, necessarily, all Black singers.

JF: Yes, that also gets to something that I feel, Annelies, you brought up a little bit when you mentioned that you were hungry for more extensive interpretation from the historical lens. It’s something that’s interesting when we’re talking about that intersection of biography and analysis, listening, and all of these things—and Lin, as you said, I’m also very cautious of this idea of moving away from identification, whatever that might imply. I think an interesting thing to consider for when we’re writing about people who are no longer here and we can’t access them in the moment, talk to them and interview them, you know, what are we doing as scholars writing about them? In trying to elevate their agency, in what ways are we reproducing some of those historical oppressions against them (and so on)? And this is something that in other circles has come up a lot, talking about bringing up so-called ‘forgotten’ composers or artists from the past, whether women or composers of colour. It’s an interesting question as historians, as well as looking in a much more broad sense about ideas of voice and listening in general. In the last section of the book, she brings up this ‘what singers need to be doing’, this sort of vocal critical performance practice methodology, and I was kind of curious: what were your impressions of what she expects of modern-day singers to bring to their practice?

AA: What I find really revealing about her way of talking about classical singers is the way that we are trained to listen to ourselves, to dovetail this idea that while we are very much trained to sound a certain way, there is all this discourse in singing pedagogy about how you’re supposed to free your own voice. And some of the ways that Eidsheim’s way of talking opens new perspectives is, as you suggested, Lin, by thinking about genre and gender in relation to style and technique. Because at least in opera singing, or in certain environments, there is this idea that only ‘this’ specific technique of singing is the one that actually frees your voice, the one that is the ‘healthy’ one for singing. And this reveals a lot of this essentialism that is there in music education and in voice education. But certain genres have very specific techniques for singing or also entrainment for interpreting, for using technique, for using style. And I think it was also quite interesting how you identified that, Lin, as a kind of missed opportunity with the chapter on jazz; that it could have been an opening to think more about genre in respect to these ideas of voice and style and technique.

LG: And to add to that, specifically, what audiences expect from certain genres in terms of style and technique, because we move away in chapter three from dealing with audiences who might listen to a Verdi or Wagner opera to those who are listening to pop or jazz, and clearly their assumptions or understanding of what they’re hearing, again from a technical or stylistic point of view, is going to be very different. And it seems to be getting into kind of complicated and dangerous territory here when you’re talking about jazz repertoire alongside artists who are clearly in the pop or blues or gospel spheres.

JF: I think in general, genre, or the idea of genre in this, is something that maybe is a lot more complicated and multidimensional than it sometimes comes across. In chapters one and two, when she’s talking a lot more about opera, it struck me that there was often a kind of slippage between ‘the classical voice’ and ‘the operatic voice’. And it sounds really pedantic and nit-picky but actually I think there’s a really big difference between the operatic voice and other kinds of classical voices that isn’t quite navigated. What’s interesting is that there are many singers, including the ones like Marian Anderson that we’re talking about, that straddle all of those. But I think in general there’s room for a sort of differentiation, and perhaps shoring up or pointing up how those bigger questions of genre might be theorized, as we go through the sort of practises she encourages us to do as listeners.

AA: Well, just as a final thing to bring up in this discussion, I found it rather interesting how she was very open about not only her own experiences, but also the more activist stance that this book is taking. She’s very clearly saying: part of what I’m trying to do is to make ourselves listen to how racist ideologies might have crept into the ways that we listen and construct voice. It’s also, I thought in that respect, interesting that it’s available as an open access book and thus slightly easier accessible to those outside of academia, at least as long as they are able to know about it. So, I just wanted to hear both of your opinions.

JF: I’d say for me, as I said in my response, the things we are finding need more pushing are areas where we want to add more nuance or exploration. I think what’s great about that is that it offers a huge amount for anyone reading this to go forward in their own research. I feel like everything that is left out or is a bit too one-dimensional isn’t like, ‘Well that’s a bit frustrating. We move on’. I think, and perhaps I’m biased because it’s close to my own area—and especially how she makes interventions in different disciplinary fields—I think it has great potential to spawn a huge amount of more work in this vein, and in that sense that sort of ‘activist stance’, as we’re calling it, really does prove productive. But I hadn’t really thought about what you brought up, Annelies, about the access to nonacademic audiences. I don’t know. I mean that, I think that in terms of economics that’s probably true, but I find it very difficult to believe that even if nonacademic audiences who were interested in this knew about the book they would actually be able to get to grips with it in a way that would be productive. I mean, it’s quite close to a lot of things that we’re thinking about, and there were things that I struggled with, that I had to read several times. I think that it’s not accessible to a nonacademic audience as a piece of writing. I think the ideas there are a hundred percent accessible and extremely interesting. I mentioned this to you both in an email, but just as I was preparing for this, I was explaining it to my parents over dinner and they’re both very musical but very much not academics. And it took a while, but once they sort of understood the general thrust of it, they were so interested and it immediately got down to questions of biology and nature versus nurture and evolution and all of these sorts of topics, and it was so interesting to hear. I feel like there is a huge potential for it to reach nonacademic audiences, but I see a huge barrier for that actually happening without some sort of mediation—translation, as it were.

LG: I agree with Jane. I think that there are some chapters in the book that are a bit more accessible than others—I think the introduction and chapter one are really fantastic—but in a similar sense, I was talking to my grandmother about chapter three and Jimmy Scott and a lot of the artists who are mention[ed] there from around her period, and the conversation was really interesting; she was very engaged and interested in the points I mentioned Eidsheim brings up.

AA: So, yes, it opens a lot of questions and a lot of messages that can be quite widely distributed. She has also been going around the U.S. giving a lot of talks, which I think is part of this activity of translating it to wider audiences. But I agree with both of you in that the way that the book is written is definitely in an academic tone and really interacting with academic theories that we scholars care about. But also, I think, some of the listening practices, some of the elements she mentions are [but] discernible by people who are really used to listening to voices and know about certain techniques and styles and maybe even genres, who are very well trained at hearing the nuances.

JF: What I think is very accessible is just how much it gets to things that fundamentally affect us in our everyday lives. If you take away the interventions in voice studies, opera, history, or any of the more finely honed academics, and we get to the central thrust of what are we doing when we try to name voice: how do we listen to listening; voice not being the essence, and the source of the voice being within the listener. I think those are three pretty neat concepts that I think we can just bring into our everyday lives, and I’ve already noticed different ways that I’m doing things as a listener—not to do with my scholarship or anything like that, but just when I’m listening to the radio or listening to music; I think that my parents are maybe going to think about it! I think there are ways we can maybe distil some of this in a way that is so applicable to how we relate to each other as humans, and this is kind of what she gets at when she’s like, ‘this isn’t just about racism’. It’s easy just to say ‘this is how audience x responds’ and ‘this is racist’ and ‘this reflects this’. But she says, ‘ok, let’s go beyond that and think about how we relate to sound as humans,’ and I think there’s a lot to go with there.

LG: And as you mentioned, it puts us in a bit of an uncomfortable situation for a moment… we anticipate, or we expect that we can ‘know’ voice. That we can determine and point specifically at, ‘I know that this is this person. I know that I’m hearing this.’ So, to relinquish ourselves of that power and knowledge can be a bit unsettling and a bit uncomfortable but I think it is an activity, an exercise, that will only be better for us in the future.

AA: Yes, I would definitely agree with both of your assessments, and it has made me think about voices a lot more in detail and what I’m doing when I’m listening to them.

So, thank you very much for this conversational review, and let’s continue the discussion.