Whiteness, interpellation, and embodied technique in western classical vocal pedagogy

ABSTRACT

Criticism of the foundational whiteness of western classical music's socio-cultural heritage remains relatively rare, and the field continues to export a prestigious self-image of cultural and technical superiority. Building on Ben Spatz’ epistemology of practice, I argue that the foundational whiteness of western classical music is principally and most tenaciously embodied within its training and practices, and as such scholarly criticism must also address the transmission of embodied technique. I demonstrate how this foundational whiteness relates to philosophies of transcendence and mind-body dualism, focusing on the case of vocal pedagogy. I analyse pedagogical literature and methods to reveal racialised frameworks and powerfully interpellating practices that require student-practitioners to excise aspects of their identity as the price of entry to their field. In light of this, I propose moving beyond the tokenism that takes the field's superiority for granted, towards a more serious reckoning of its value.

KEYWORDS:

• whiteness
• embodied technique
• western classical music
• vocal pedagogy

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewer for their constructive and insightful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 My positionality as a Cypriot also gives me particular insight into the cultural dynamics of WCM in former UK colonies and other contexts in which WCM operates as a force of cultural colonialism. For more on these subjects, see Akrofi and Flolu (2007), Fetokaki (2022), Kok (2011), and Zhang (2019).

2 For work that makes vital contributions to addressing structural whiteness in WCM education and practice (but does not focus on the transmission of embodied technique) see Kajikawa (2019), Marshall (2015) and Thurman (2019).

3 My use of the term ‘high-demand’ is taken from Matthew Remski’s ground-breaking work on abuse and cultic dynamics in transnational yoga (2019). The similarities between high-demand tendencies in yoga culture and WCVP are many and striking, aided in part by the threads of new age spirituality woven through the field of western classical singing.

4 My use of this term is informed by Anna Bull’s analysis of the homology between classical music and middle-class selfhood. Bull argues that this homology, which structures and stratifies WCM practice, is a result of ‘the encoding of classical music’s history in the social relations and practices that are required to produce its aesthetic’ (2019, 111).

5 See Anna Bull’s work for discussion of this phenomenon in WCM education, such as her analysis of the ‘racialized dichotomies’ evident in student choir performances of European versus non-European music (2019, 100–102).

6 Resistance and alternatives to these ontologies is by no means absent from musicological and ethnomusicological scholarship. Christopher Small’s concept of ‘musicking,’ for example, understands music not as a noun but a verb – the activity of learning about, witnessing, and taking part in the relationships that form an individual’s social identity as these are expressed in musical performance. However, in most contexts of WCM pedagogy such concepts remain peripheral, if known at all.

7 The lineage of these works can be traced back to earlier musical treatises written by composers, singing teachers and music theorists between 1600 and 1800. For a list of these, see Fetokaki (2022, 40).

8 James Stark wrote in 1999 that Manuel Garcia’s treatise on singing from the mid-19th century ‘must be reckoned with in any serious study of the history and technique of singing’ (1999, 3).

9 Here I must acknowledge Emilio Aguilar, who addressed the work of Miller and Stark in his unpublished article ‘Ethics and Translation in the Bel Canto Tradition’ (2018).

10 This method is not new and is well-established outside of Chapman’s own pedagogy.

11 Chapman’s book Singing and Teaching Singing features contributions from practitioners with specialisms in phonetics, osteopathy, psychotherapy, counselling, speech therapy, audiology and otorhinolaryngology.

12 While I have chosen to focus on the logic of whiteness as a key and often overlooked element, the practices of WCM pedagogy have of course been profoundly shaped by dynamics of race, class, gender and ability. In 19th century Britain, discourses of ‘healthiness’ and ‘degeneracy’ undergirded the use of music, and singing specifically, as a tool for the militaristic disciplining of working-class bodies in Victorian state schools (Johnson-Williams 2019). In these contexts, music education was intimately bound up with the rise of eugenics and anxieties about the ‘degenerating’ lower classes – the ‘barbarians from within […] who were ‘enfeebl[ing] the British race, deteriorating [the] nation, and menacing the future of the Empire’’ (Bonzom 2022, 2). The pedagogical practices influenced by these anxieties were gradually institutionalised into music pedagogy in the UK, and continue to be exported, in many cases to former colonies, through standardised music assessment bodies such as the ABRSM (Fetokaki 2022). Similarly, WCM’s practice of ‘rehearsing restraint’ has been a key site of ‘boundary-drawing’ around respectable femininity and white, bourgeois identity (Bull 2019). This is to be expected, as categories of race and class have always reinforced and coproduced one another (Ogunrotifa 2022; Wilkerson 2020), just as hegemonic gender identities have historically been reproduced through explicit or implicit appeal to racialised others (Ware 1992).

13 A word used to describe a sensation of lack of muscular constraint in the throat while singing.

14 A sensory descriptor refering to the rate of air release and consequently the speed and pitch range of vibrato.

15 It is important to note the distinct lack of research into abuse in WCM education, a phenomenon that leads scholar Anna Bull to conclude, as I do, that there is a denial of the problem within the field (2019, 90). Such a denial would be completely consistent with the foundational whiteness and transcendent dualisms of WCM, which paradoxically interpellate its practitioners into an ontological disavowal of the body, even as that body is trained to extreme degrees of technical proficiency.

16 See for example, The Inner Game of Tennis (Gallwey 1997), Performance Strategies for Musicians (Buswell 2006) and Mindset: a Mental Guide for Sport (Reardon 2018).

17 The terminology of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ is taken from Spatz, who uses these terms in the context of embodied technique to distinguish between a technique that is ‘accessed and enacted unquestioningly’ and technique as an ‘epistemic object,’ an ‘object of knowledge and enquiry’ that is explored through processes of ‘development and discovery’ (2015, 62). For more of Spatz’ work on epistemic objects, see their eponymous article (2016).

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Sophie Fetokaki

Sophie Fetokaki is a scholar-practitioner working with voice, performance, and text. Her scholarly interests include decolonial critiques of the performing arts, methodologies of practice as research, and the relationship between embodied technique and identity. She is concerned, in research and practice, with what it means to live and create beyond the alienating constraints of oppressive ideologies.