table of contents Spring 2012 Number 93: “Race, Sound, and Performance” Editors’ Note Articles Nina Eidsheim Voice as Action: Toward a Model for Analyzing the Dynamic Construction of Racialized Voice .........................................................................................9 Ashon Crawley Harriet Jacobs Gets a Hearing.....................................................................35 Regina N. Bradley Contextualizing Hip Hop Sonic Cool Pose in Late Twentieth– and Twenty–first–century Rap Music ................................................................57 Siarhei Biareishyk Come Out to Show the Split Subject: Steve Reich, Whiteness, and the Avant–Garde ................................................................................................73 Charles D. Carson “Melanin in the Music”: Black Music History in Sound and Image .........95 Reviews Seth Mulliken Julian Henriques. Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing .............................................................115 Shannon Mattern Hillel Schwartz. Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond ................................................................................................121 Florence Feiereisen Barbara Lorenzkowski. Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North America, 1850-1914 ...................................................................................131 Jennifer B. Lee Ulysses Kay Special Collection. Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library ...................................................................................141 Contributors editors’ note The editors of Current Musicology are excited to present special issue number 93 on Race, Sound, and Performance. Through this issue, Current Musicology continues to push the boundaries of musicological inquiry to include disciplines such as sound studies, critical race theory, performance and dance studies, art criticism, and other areas that engage music from diverse perspectives. Scholars in American Studies, musicology, English & Comparative Literature, and art history were approached to contribute to this interdisciplinary conversation. As the first musicology journal to dedicate an issue to theme of race, sound, and performance, we hope to contribute to the expansion of approaches within music and sound studies at large. The articles in this issue push the reader to think through the creation and impact of racialized sound from multiple sensorial perspectives, while also pointing toward new ways to conceptualize how sound has been produced, performed, commodified, and circulated along what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “color line.” While race and other markers of identity have been traditionally understood within an ocularcentric purview in the creation of “western” civilization, sound—and its production through music—is as critical in evaluating how both identity and society are formed and function. The history of racialized sound in the United States extends back to the antebellum era, and it was formally constructed through the first, “original” form of popular entertainment in the U.S.—blackface minstrelsy. Yet sound, and its musical production, has also been a way for individuals and groups to hear and see themselves beyond the systems by which they are defined. The articles in this special issue discuss the significant ways in which individuals, groups, and systems engage with identity and racial formations through sound—particularly as articulated through performance and music—and how people both sonically exist and resist within racialized societal structures. Moving from the crawl space of Harriet Jacobs in the antebellum era to the production of the hip hop album, Watch the Throne (2012), the authors collectively engage with the history of sound in the construction of race in ways that force us to rehear the development of popular sound and culture. Nina Eidsheim, through a number of contentions and interventions, opens the issue by challenging the reader to understand vocal production as an act of choreography, rather than as an innate sound that comes from a “marked” or racialized body. This theoretical turn requires a detangling 5 of the “naturalized” voice from the body in order to understand the com- plicated physiological developments and cognitive choices through which humans produce sound. In “Harriet Jacobs Gets a Hearing,” Ashon Crawley suggests that we listen to freedom, flight, and existence in the “loop hole of retreat”—the cramped, solitary, and empty crawl space to which Harriet Jacobs escaped enslavement. Unable to be in physical contact or interaction with her family or outside world, Crawley paints a sonic portrait of Jacob’s life, as sound becomes a way to think through solitude and silence, existence and resistance. The issue then takes a temporal turn as we move to Regina Bradley’s theorization of “Hip Hop Sonic Cool Pose” in commercial rap music. Rather than focus primarily on the lyrics and images that are often attended to in commentary on hip hop/rap, Bradley suggests that we take seriously the sounds that complement the lyrics (i.e., the track) in order to consider how sound allows rappers to be a part of, as well as challenge, the structures of capitalism and the commercial music industry in which they participate. Siarhei Biareishyk takes us a few decades back to the 1960s and the racial tensions of the Civil Rights era, as he reconsiders how we hear avant-garde composer Steve Reich’s response to the 1964 “Harlem Six” case through his tape piece. Biareishyk moves beyond a pure analysis of the recording itself in his thoughtful consideration of the ways in which discourses of whiteness are embedded into its composition and reception. The author further considers the Lacanian “split” that occurs between the (white) composer and the (black) voice through which the composer speaks and becomes “avante-garde.” The closing article by Charles Carson is an analysis of music and art by African Americans (the string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops and artist Jefferson Pinder are among those highlighted) who challenge the past by critically engaging with it; what could be consid- ered nostalgia on the part of the artists becomes a retelling and rehearing of history, and these retellings produce new forms of art that are at once engaged with the past and the present, while pointing towards the future. Issue 93 closes with three reviews of recent texts within sound studies: Julian Henrique’s Sonic Bodies, Hillel Schwartz’s Making Noise, and Barbara Lorenzkowski’s Sounds of Ethnicity. Each of these books are central within the growing discipline of sound studies, and the reviewers provide thought- ful analyses that consider the significance of sound, society, and identity in this rapidly growing and interdisciplinary field. Jennifer B. Lee, curator for performing arts at Columbia University, closes the review section with a discussion of the Ulysses Kay Special Collection housed in the University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. This brief essay provides a short biog- raphy of this significant twentieth-century American composer, as well as a guide to the exciting and rare manuscripts, correspondences, publications, and other materials ripe for research that are part of the collection. Current Musicology continues its role as a critical voice in the expansion of music studies through special issue 95, an exciting collection of experimental writings on music, edited by David Gutkin. We hope that readers will be stimulated by the provoking methods and topics presented in these issues, and that musicology will continue to readily engage in cross-disciplinary conversations about music and sound. Matthew D. Morrison David Gutkin Voice as Action: Toward a Model for Analyzing the Dynamic Construction of Racialized Voice Nina Eidsheim Shirley Verrett once asked an interviewer: “When you hear my sound, would you think it’s a black voice?” Te interviewer replied without hesitation: “No.” Verrett responds, “Tat’s it. And people told me this a long time ago. So, it mixes me up a little bit.” (Schmidt – Garre 2000) Vocal timbre is commonly believed to be an unmanipulable attribute, akin to a sonic fngerprint.1 Because the voice arises from inside the body, quotidian discourse tends to refer to someone’s vocal sounds as inborn, natural, and a true expressions of the person. What, then, are we to make of the common notion that a person’s race is audible in her voice? While it has been con- clusively demonstrated that many of the physiognomic aspects historically employed as evidence of a person’s race—including skin color, hair texture, and dialect or accent2—evidence nothing more than the construction of race according to the ideological values of beholders, vocal timbre continues to elude such deconstruction.3 Recent critical thought on the intermingling of the physical senses, including the so–called sensory turn in anthropology, “new materialist” philosophies, and recent advances in science, technology, sound studies, and media studies, underscores the need for scholarship that recognizes the voice and vocal categories as culturally conditioned material entities.4 Trends such as the metaphorical notion of “having voice”5 have to some degree obscured the material and multisensory aspects of voice. Conceived within the specifc context of musicology and the general context of the humanities, this article seeks to demonstrate how the re–framing of voice implied by sensory and material