How Female is the Voice? Conceptualisations and practices

In any traditional culture, in the area of high art as well as in popular music practices, female and male voices are differentiated according to elaborate sets of conventions regarding ranges, styles of emission, repertoires, roles and cultural functions. Throughout the twentieth century, during the transformation process of patriarchal societies, at different times in different places, such conventions have been challenged and the symbolic role of the voice in culture has been retaught and recast, mostly through the lens of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytical paradigms. Feminist thinkers such as Julia Kristeva and Adriana Cavarero have further developed and asserted the female lineage of the voice. In the second half of the twentieth-century female singers have played a key role in vocal experimentation, trespassing the boundaries of vocal genres and practices, of natural and artificial voice, subverting the hierarchical separation of composer and performer, and displacing local vocal techniques. How do these experiments contribute to the conceptualization of the female lineage of the voice? This chapter addresses this question, interspersing theoretical claims with vocal experiments, drawing on examples from female vocal performers (Berberian, Henius, Hirayama)