Hearing beyond vocal twilight : aging vocalities in contemporary American operatic and classical voice performance
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation explores how socio-cultural attitudes towards old age as a process of decline shape voice and listening in American operatic and classical voice performance. Opera's conventional vocal aesthetics, focused of athleticism, health, physiology, and transcendent beauty, often lie in tension with dominant age-based decline ideologies. While opera audiences often conceptualize vocal aging as a type of failure, I propose an aesthetic paradigm shift that refigures vocal aging as a socio-cultural as well as material process. Four case studies use archival research, interviews, and interdisciplinary theoretical literatures from age studies, disability studies, and voice studies, to outline the aesthetic legacies of age biomedicalization in classical voice cultures, the late career reception of Jan Peerce and Marian Anderson, and intergenerational creativity in a contemporary chamber opera about Alzheimer's disease. I suggest that traditional life course narratives of decline organize hierarchies of cultural value, sociocultural sonic relationships, employment opportunity, and definitions of virtuosity and creativity in a genre seemingly obsessed youthful, able bodies. I conclude that by listening beyond the tropes of old age, operatic and classical vocalism becomes expressively richer by celebrating the fullness of the human condition.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Kinney, Michael Evans |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Hadlock, Heather |
| Thesis advisor | Hadlock, Heather |
| Thesis advisor | Eidsheim,Nina Sun |
| Thesis advisor | Gill, Denise |
| Thesis advisor | Grey, Thomas |
| Degree committee member | Eidsheim,Nina Sun |
| Degree committee member | Gill, Denise |
| Degree committee member | Grey, Thomas |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Music |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Michael Evans Kinney. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Music. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/vp895td1729 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Michael Evans Kinney
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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