UI Press | Edited by Ruth Hellier | Women Singers in Global Contexts: Music, Biography, Identity

Women Singers in Global Contexts

Music, Biography, Identity

How diverse women use singing to vocalize their stories

Exploring and celebrating individual lives in diverse situations, Women Singers in Global Contexts is a new departure in the study of women's worldwide music-making. Ten unique women constitute the heart of this volume: each one has engaged her singing voice as a central element in her life, experiencing various opportunities, tensions, and choices through her vocality. These biographical and poetic narratives demonstrate how the act of singing embodies dynamics of representation, power, agency, activism, and risk-taking.

Engaging with performance practice, politics, and constructions of gender through vocality and vocal aesthetics, this collection offers valuable insights into the experiences of specific women singers in a range of sociocultural contexts. Contributors trace themes and threads that include childhood, families, motherhood, migration, fame, training, transmission, technology, and the interface of private lives and public identities.

This volume is the first collection of primarily ethnographic work to concentrate solely on individual women singers. Singing takes on a distinctive role in each woman's life, and the women profiled include a locally known community singer, an internationally renowned priestess, a professional wedding singer, and a national star. Essays range across musical genres encompassing jazz, rap, traditional, folk, devotional, and classical, and the collection's geographical range encompasses Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, Cuba, Cyprus, Germany, Iran, Japan, Mexico, Poland, South Africa, Torres Strait Islands, Turkey, and the United States.

Contributors are Shino Arisawa, Katelyn Barney, Gay Breyley, Nicoletta Demetriou, Veronica Doubleday, Ruth Hellier, Ellen Koskoff, Carol Muller, Thomas Solomon, Amanda Villepastour, and Louise Wrazen.

"An ambitious collection of essays on women singers by leading scholars in ethnomusicology and related fields. The volume will be welcomed by students of a variety of disciplines including ethnomusicology and women's studies."--Anne K. Rasmussen, author of Women, the Recited Qur'an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia

Ruth Hellier is on the faculty at the University of California Santa Barbara, where she teaches ethnomusicology, performance, dance, and theater studies.

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