On voice : an introduction / Lawrence Kramer -- Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty : reflections on voice in the operatic adaptations of The great Gatsby and Sophie's choice / Michael Halliwell -- The vocal persona of Jussi Björling / Simon Williams -- The voice of/in opera / Lawrence Kramer -- Resonances and dissonances : listening to Waltraud Meier's envoicing of Isolde / Laura Wahlfors -- From "vox" alias "phoné" to voice : a few terminological observations / Albrecht Reithmüller -- Indefiniteness, ethereality, and unarticulated meaning : breath, music and the problem of "voice" in Poe's Ligeia / Charity McAdams -- Voice and vocation in the novels of George Eliot / Delia da Sousa Correa -- Voice and presence in music and literature : Virginia Woolf's The waves / Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen -- The Mahlerian mask : on Heine's voice and visage in post-war Germany / Axel Englund -- Voice and voices in oratorios : on sacred and other voices / Gerold W. Gruber -- Schubert's instrumental voice : vocality in melodic construction in the late works / Robert Samuels -- Composing voices and Ravel's L'heure espagnole / Jessie Fillerup -- La castrata and the voices in my head / David Francis Urrows -- Homer Simpson's "Doh!" : singsong between music and speech / Albrecht Reithmüller.

HKBU library

YT2025 M08

The essays collected here raise a simple but rarely asked question: just what, exactly, is voice? From this founding question, many others proliferate: Is voice an animal category, as Aristotle thought? Or is it distinctively human? Is it essentially related to language? To music? To song and singing? Is it a mark of presence or of absence? Is it a kind of object? How is our sense of voice affected by the development of recording technology? The authors in this volume approach such questions primarily by turning away from a general idea of voice and instead investigating what can be learned by attending to the qualities and acts of particular voices. The range is wide: from Poe's Ligeia to Woolf's The Waves, from Jussi Björling to Waltraud Meier, from song to oratorio to opera and beyond. Throughout, consistent with the volume's origin in papers delivered at the eighth biennial meeting of the International Association for Word and Music Studies, the role of voice in joining or separating words and music is paramount. These studies address key topics in musicology, literary criticism, philosophy, aesthetics, and performance studies, and will also appeal to practicing musicians.