Paul Robeson's Voices

by Grant Olwage

Overview

Paul Robeson's Voices is a meditation on Robeson's singing, a study of the artist's life in song. Music historian Grant Olwage examines Robeson's voice as it exists in two broad and intersecting domains: as sound object and sounding gesture, specifically how it was fashioned in the contexts of singing practices, in recital, concert, and recorded performance, and as subject of identification. Olwage asks: how does the voice encapsulate modes of subjectivity, of being? Combining deep archival research with musicological theory, this book is a study of voice as central to Robeson's sense of self and his politics. Paul Robeson's Voices charts the dialectal process of Robeson's vocal and self-discovery, documenting some of the ways Robeson's practice revised the traditions of concert singing in the first half of the twentieth century and how his voice manifested as resistance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197637500
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/03/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Grant Olwage is a music historian and lecturer in the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the editor of Composing Apartheid and has written extensively on the Black voice, race, choral cultures, and coloniality. His writing on Paul Robeson's singing, voice, and musical arts has appeared widely.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments About the Companion Website Introduction: Voice-Thinking 1. Becoming Paul Robeson's Voice 2. “Negro Spiritual”: Voicing Desire 3. Natural Acts, or To Sing Simply 4. A Voice for the People 5. Voices Politic 6. A Microphone Voice Afterword: In-between and Against: A Voice for the Times Works Cited Index

Editorial Reviews

"The key to understanding Paul Robeson's global humanitarian legacy and cosmopolitan musical imagination, Grant Olwage proposes, can be found by listening to his vocal intelligence, technique, and music-historical awareness. Bold, clear, lyrical, deeply researched and including new archival material, Olwage's polyvocal narrative follows Robeson's 'voices' across continents." — Nina Eidsheim, Author of The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music.

"This carefully researched, well-documented book will be most useful to scholars...Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate through researchers; professionals." — Choice

From the Publisher