Artistic Voice Research Articles

Ways of Knowing Ways of Understanding and Ways of Coping: HIV/AIDS, Poverty and Governance in Zimbabwean Popular Music

From time immemorial, in Zimbabwe, as in other African cultures, music has occupied centre stage in articulating the artist’s perceptions of socio-political developments, usually from an unofficial platform and, therefore, speaking on behalf of the silent masses. The lyrics of such music are usually marked by irreverent epithets directed at the rulers. But its role has never been as prominent as during the period of the Second Chimurenga from the 1960s to the late 1970s, as well as in the post-independence era. While both political partysponsored singers in the war zones and home-based artists were then united by their common yearning for liberation from colonial rule, its actual achievement has ironically led to discoursal dissonance. There is disillusionment in the voices of unofficial artists arising from their perception of betrayal by the rulers, while state-aligned ones continue to see ‘method’ in government’s running of the country. The lyrics of both formations comment on the economy, HIV/AIDS, and governance, but from contrary standpoints. The critical question is, ‘Who has the right to speak on behalf of the marginalised vulgus?’ This question is answered through a textual analysis of songs transcribed and translated from CD’s recorded by various artists working in Zimbabwe. Keywords: HIV/AIDS, metaphor, poverty, economy, governance, land

Inside/Insight Me

Inside/Insight Me was initially presented as a ten-minute performative provocation in response to Anna Furse's production Glass Body: reflecting on becoming transparent at the conference Birth: The Cultural Politics of Reproduction, Lancaster University, March 2007. The work aimed to creatively critique Glass Body and Furse's theatre workshop The flesh is no longer the deepest thing - writing the body from cellular to cyborg, by viscerally and visually highlighting what I perceived as lacking in the production: deliberate, intentionally unruly, fractious women's bodies in performance. As with every written paper that emerges from practice, Inside/Insight Me has inevitably changed in the course of, to paraphrase Geraldine Harris, translating it from one set of codes into another (1999: 4). Thus, in order to echo the performative aspect of the initial provocation - and here provocation has to be understood simply as an act to incite critical thought -this paper aims to re-create a fruitful interplay between my artistic and my scholarly voice, both of which are intrinsically linked in all my work as performance practitioner, academic and pedagogue. Starting with a brief introduction of Furse's artistic work, I present Inside/Insight Me as a dialogue between Glass Body and my performative responses to it.

Dissident Syria: making oppositional arts official

From 1970 until his death in 2000, Hafiz Asad ruled Syria with an iron fist. His regime controlled every aspect of daily life. Seeking to preempt popular unrest, Asad sometimes facilitated the expression of anti-government sentiment by appropriating the work of artists and writers, turning works of protest into official agitprop. Syrian dissidents were forced to negotiate between the desire to genuinely criticize the authoritarian regime, the risk to their own safety and security that such criticism would invite, and the fear that their work would be co-opted as government propaganda, as what miriam cooke calls “commissioned criticism.” In this intimate account of dissidence in Asad’s Syria, cooke describes how intellectuals attempted to navigate between charges of complicity with the state and treason against it. A renowned scholar of Arab cultures, cooke spent six months in Syria during the mid-1990s familiarizing herself with the country’s literary scene, particularly its women writers. While she was in Damascus, dissidents told her that to really understand life under Hafiz Asad, she had to speak with playwrights, filmmakers, and, above all, the authors of “prison literature.” She shares what she learned in Dissident Syria . She describes touring a sculptor’s studio, looking at the artist’s subversive work as well as at pieces commissioned by the government. She relates a playwright’s view that theater is unique in its ability to stage protest through innuendo and gesture. Turning to film, she shares filmmakers’ experiences of making movies that are praised abroad but rarely if ever screened at home. Filled with the voices of writers and artists, Dissident Syria reveals a community of conscience within Syria to those beyond its borders.

Finding Artistic Voice: Expressive Critiques Embedded in Teacher Education

Many students in education programs never engage in an artistic experience. Typically, they completetheir requirements through writing, oral presentations, seminar discussions, internships, and studentteaching. In my classes I have inserted expressive critiques that ask students to demonstrate theirreactions and understanding of classroom observations and topics discussed in class through a visualor performance art medium.

One-to-one tuition in a conservatoire: the perceptions of instrumental and vocal teachers

One-to-one instrumental/vocal tuition forms a core part of the professional education offered to undergraduate and postgraduate music students in a conservatoire. However, whilst anecdotal evidence is plentiful, there is little research underpinning its practices. This article provides an analysis of the perceptions of 20 principal study teachers in a conservatoire in the UK about one-to-one tuition, its aims, processes and context. Findings emphasized the isolation of these teachers in their practice, and suggested that this might be problematic particularly given the intensity and complexity of the relationships formed between teacher and student. Furthermore, tension was evident between teachers' aspirations of facilitating student autonomy and self-confidence in learning and the processes of teaching they described, where the transmission of technical and musical skills, largely through teacher-led reflection-inaction, was often paramount. In this context, the dynamics of power invested in the one-to-one relationship suggested that whilst the potential of detailed shared reflection-in-action in one-to-one tuition was great, the relationship could also inhibit the development of self-responsibility and of an individual artistic voice, both of which were so prized by the teachers.

Tensions and conflicts in Zimbabwean society: Nyamubaya reminisces

This article explores how Freedom Nyamubaya examines the tensions and conflicts in post-independence Zimbabwe through her collection of poetry On the road again (1986). It also seeks to investigate how post-independence developments in Zimbabwe make her revisit and recount Zimbabwe's liberation war of the 1970s. Nyamubaya, who has also published Dusk of dawn (1995), a collection that combines short stories and poetry, is a veteran of this war – the second Chimurenga – which was waged in the then Rhodesia to unseat the colonial government of the time.This war, which was in resistance to the inconsistencies and injustices of colonial governance, has been narrated from various perspectives in both fictional and historical accounts. On the road again, as becomes evident, is one such account which does not only add a new voice to the corpus on this historical event, but also illustrates Nyamubaya's intimate perception, informed by her active participation in and lived experience of the war. In Zimbabwe, as in most African countries where there were armed movements against colonial governments, the war was not won by nationalists, but rather paved the way for elections, which gave ZANU PF – one of the nationalist parties – power in 1980 and ended formal colonial rule. Despite the advent of independence, which gave Zimbabwe its identity as a unitary nation, the country remains heterogeneous in composition, divided by factors such as race, gender, ethnicity, social class and economic status, to mention but a few distinguishing characteristics of its populace.These aspects give rise to the various artistic voices which have emerged to narrate the Zimbabwean nation.

The effect of three-dimensional glottal geometry on intraglottal quasi-steady flow distributions and their relationship with phonation

Vocal fold geometry plays an important role in human phonation. The intraglottal quasi-steady pressure and velocity distributions depend upon the shape, size, and diameter of the glottis. This study reports the effects of the variation of glottal shapes on intraglottal pressures and velocities using a Plexiglas model with a glottis having nine symmetric glottal angles (uniform, as well as convergent and divergent 5 degrees, 10 degrees, 20 degrees and 40 degrees), while the minimal glottal diameter was held constant at 0.06 cm. The empirical data were supported by penalty finite element computational results. The results suggest that larger convergent glottal angles correspond to increased pressures and decreased velocities in the glottis upstream of the minimum glottal location, with a reversal of this pattern at the minimal glottal diameter location. The pressure dip near the glottal entrance for divergent glottal angles was greatest for the 10 degrees divergence angle condition, and was sequentially less for 5 degrees, 20 degrees, and 40 degrees. Flow resistance was greater for a convergent angle than a divergent angle of the same value, and least for the 10 degrees divergent condition. Pressure recovery in the glottis suggested that the optimal glottal diffuser angle was near 10 degrees. Results suggest that the glottal geometry has a critical relationship with phonation (especially for vocal efficiency), and therefore important significance to understanding artistic voice and clinical voice management.

Kid-talk/Art-Talk: Learning to Listen to the Kids We Teach

A poet delves into the language of his students,.finding innate artistic voice and style.

Black Artistic Invisibility

This article follows a long pattern of works where authors (e.g., Alain Locke, The New Negro; Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual; Amiri Baraka, Blues People) write to provide an aesthetic inquiry and examine what constitutes the politics of the documentation of Black concert music and culture (i.e., symphonies, opera, chamber work, etc.). Writings like these have taken a stab as well at American cultural institutions, which have in the past choked and blocked artistic voices of color and consciousness. The author addresses, celebrates, and critiques some current values carried within the traditional institutional culture around Black composers in contemporary concert music. This piece is a historical essay outlining thematic threads and trends in the concert music circles, and it poses questions to the industry and common listeners interested in music who do not yet recognize or celebrate these important and unique artists.

Flash and Crash Days: Brazilian Theatre in the Post-Dictatorship (review)

Reviewed by: Flash and Crash Days: Brazilian Theatre in the Post-Dictatorship Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento Flash and Crash Days: Brazilian Theatre in the Post-Dictatorship. By David George. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000; pp. xviii + 177. $25.95 paper. English-language publications about Brazilian theatre are few and far between. The majority of books dedicated to the subject came out during the 1970s, and since then only two major titles have been published: Augusto Boal's Hamlet and the Baker's Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics (Routledge, 2000) and Severino Albuquerque's Tentative Transgressions: Homosexuality, AIDS, and the Theatre in Brazil (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). David George's Flash and Crash Days: Brazilian Theatre in the Post-Dictatorship Period picks up where the earlier scholarship left off—with a major focus on the relationship between the stage and the military regime in Brazil—and provides the English-speaking reader with information about postdictatorship theatre. But while George considers the lack of recent works about the topic to reflect "an unstated assumption that theatre in Brazil thrives only under repression and dictatorship" (xv), I blame scholars and publishers who often overlook the artistic contribution of that major part of Latin America that is not Hispanic. After all, even in the seventies and during the worst years of the dictatorship, there were never as many books on Brazilian theatre for the American reader as on playwrights and directors from Spanish-speaking countries. Flash and Crash Days serves as a reminder that the Brazilian stage continues to thrive and produce vibrant theatre even though it remains as an almost unexplored field of scholarship and research. George's book offers an exposition of different aspects or fields of Brazilian theatre today and introduces a number of theatre practitioners to the North American readers. Chapter 1, "Gerald Thomas and the Postmodernist Theatre in Brazil," discusses the emergence of the postmodern director in Brazil. George uses Robert Wilson as the prime example of an encenador, the term he uses to describe a director who assumes the authority of auteur of the performance text by fulfilling a tripartite role of director-playwright-designer. The main problem is that the chapter, which constitutes roughly one half of the book, focuses exclusively on the performances of Gerald Thomas. Thomas was brought up in Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, and New York, and received his professional training in the United States and Europe. It is very true that his performances created heated polemic in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, effectively contributing to revitalize the audience's engagement with the stage. But Thomas makes a point of presenting himself as highly individualistic and self-made encenador, and is often condescending to other Brazilian artists and to critics, so it is no surprise that many consider him to be an outsider who returned to Rio to demonstrate postmodernist performance to the less-enlightened. George himself seems to support this view of Thomas as an artist greatly detached from the Brazilian cultural and artistic context when he locates Thomas's work exclusively via European and American directors—Pina Bausch, Tadeusz Kantor, Peter Sellars, and Robert Wilson. A more balanced introduction to the Brazilian encenador as a creative artist who emerges not only from a formalistic concept but also from financial limitation (which has not been the case of Thomas's productions) and with emphasis on group theatre should include other reputable names. I consider that encenadores Antonio Araújo, Bia Lessa, Moacyr Góes, Gabriel Villela, and Ulysses Cruz, who are mentioned only in passing, are more distinctly national artistic voices, since they pointedly reflect and engage in performance the many issues that inhabit the collective unconscious of contemporary Brazilian society. Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the less visible and at times neglected work of Brazilian women playwrights. George discusses in depth the works of two playwrights: Maria Adelaide Amaral's Querida Mamãe (Dear Mom) and Edla van Steen's O Último Encontro (The Last Encounter). The chapter [End Page 525] serves to spark curiosity about these two women's writing, as very little of it has been translated to English. Amaral and van Steen...

A time for tea: women, labor, and post/colonial politics on an Indian plantation

In this creative, ethnographic, and historical critique of labor practices on an Indian plantation, Piya Chatterjee provides a sophisticated examination of the production, consumption, and circulation of tea. A Time for Tea reveals how the female tea-pluckers seen in advertisements—picturesque women in mist-shrouded fields—came to symbolize the heart of colonialism in India. Chatterjee exposes how this image has distracted from terrible working conditions, low wages, and coercive labor practices enforced by the patronage system. Allowing personal, scholarly, and artistic voices to speak in turn and in tandem, Chatterjee discusses the fetishization of women who labor under colonial, postcolonial, and now neofeudal conditions. In telling the overarching story of commodity and empire, A Time for Tea demonstrates that at the heart of these narratives of travel, conquest, and settlement are compelling stories of women workers. While exploring the global and political dimensions of local practices of gendered labor, Chatterjee also reflects on the privileges and paradoxes of her own “decolonization” as a Third World feminist anthropologist. The book concludes with an extended reflection on the cultures of hierarchy, power, and difference in the plantation’s villages. It explores the overlapping processes by which gender, caste, and ethnicity constitute the interlocked patronage system of villages and their fields of labor. The tropes of coercion, consent, and resistance are threaded through the discussion. A Time for Tea will appeal to anthropologists and historians, South Asianists, and those interested in colonialism, postcolonialism, labor studies, and comparative or international feminism. Designated a John Hope Franklin Center book by the John Hope Franklin Seminar Group on Race, Religion, and Globalization.

1Put your hands together

THE MAX MAESTRO is an animated music notation system created within the artistic research project VOICES OF UMEA by composer Anders Lind. By using simple animated graphics presented on a screen, in ...

Mo' Better Bebop

SPIKE LEE'S 199I FILM, Mo' BETTER BLUES, TELLS THE STORY OF trumpeter Bleek Gilliam, a musician whose star is rising on the New York jazz circuit. During a party, Bleek engages in a heated debate with fellow band member and rival, Shadow Henderson. The scene sizzles. As the two men argue about artistry, commercialism, and the racial composition of contemporary jazz audiences, Bleek proclaims that I have my own voice. His voice was that of the virtuoso jazz soloist. Lee modeled Bleek after the young lions, the score of young, dapper and primarily African American musicians who appeared on the jazz scene in the mid to late 1980s, each armed with recording contracts and a pocketful of hard bop riffs in their Italian cut suits. In Bleek's view, African Americans under-appreciated his artistic voice and the larger jazz tradition within which he expressed it. Jazz, Bleek insists, was black people's music-their heritage and culture-but they seemed to prefer crossover music from other people like Kenny G. The equally talented Shadow rejects Bleek's artistic stance, saying that the people don't come because you grandiose motherfuckers don't play shit that they like. The two characters find no middle ground in the Great Artist vs. the Unwashed Masses divide articulated by their respective positions. The larger cultural wars within which this fictional account circulates show little sign of abating. Moreover, the

New Visions, New Perspectives: Voices of Contemporary Australian Women Artists

New Visions, New Perspectives: Voices of Contemporary Australian Women Artists

Voices of imagination: the artist as prophet in the process of social change

In this article we contend that vision, imagination and a passion for justice are in short supply in our schools and society, and we advocate the importance of creating space for the voices of artists to emerge. The preponderance of materials and programmes that emphasize the technical rationality of our work as educators continues to stifle and silence the voices of imagination. If schooling is simply technical, it has reached the end of its usefulness and is incapable of contributing to the social, spiritual and ecological problems of our communities. We are not resigned to the end of education. Rather, we believe that empowering the voices of imagination through the arts will contribute to a renewal of the metaphysical dimension of our work. We advocate such a posture. As we encourage the young to make the arts a natural means of expression we also encourage the development of the prophetic voice. And it is this voice that most certainly can attend to the pressing problems of our postmodern world.

Jose Donoso's House of Fiction. A Dramatic Construction of Time and Space

This text examines the multiple narrative perspectives Donoso presents and traces a transformation in Donoso's works from complex stage performance to political forum. It illuminates a weaving of feminine and masculine aspects of artistic voice in his work.

Fo-perturbation and Fo/loudness dynamics in voices of normal children, with and without education in singing

Sustained phonations were compared in two groups of children (aged 7–12), one with special artistic voice education and one from a normal school, without voice complaints or problems. The hypothesis of specific (better) biomechanical vocal fold properties in the first group is confronted with the hypothesis of differences solely related to training of voice control. In both groups, Fo-aperiodicity was measured in a sustained phonation at 3 different SPL levels. As a general rule, aperiodicity clearly decreases when the voice becomes louder. Aperiodicity is highly significantly lower, at all SPL-levels, in children with trained singing voices: this implies better mechanical properties of the vocal oscillator. The Fo SPL relation on a sustained /a:/ does not differ in trained and untrained children's voices: out of singing context, trained children do not spontaneously control the Fo SPL dynamics differently from untrained children. The higher regularity of vocal fold pulses is not related to the duration of training.

Researcher as Artist/Artist as Researcher

This is a postmodern article that is nontraditional in its form, content, and mode of representation. Upon recognizing that we share interests and common experiences as artists, we decided to collect life history information from each other about our artistic experiences. Thus we have become, simultaneously, "the researched" and "the re searcher." In these conversations, we explore the ways in which we were each guided by our past, very strong aesthetic and artistic experiences. We also include the voices of other researchers and artists in our conversations as we explore the influences of art in the formation of our worldviews.

Speaking with "Hands at our Throats": The Struggle for Artistic Voice in The Blithedale Romance

In feminist assessment of The Blithedale Romance, Mary Suzanne Schriber explores motivations for suicide: how, she asks, [are we] to judge death, reportedly a suicide for love of the reformer Hollingsworth, in light of feminist protestations?(1) Schriber attempts to explain what she considers the merely superficial incoherence of character by exposing the distortion inherent in Miles Coverdale's highly subjective narration. Schriber's conclusion that drowning is either an accidental death or a suicide over despair of woman's lot and future prospects(2) is, however, no better founded than Coverdale's own account of the situation. Other critics, in their attempt to account for the inconsistencies that Schriber exposes, suggest that Coverdale is a mad narrator, or claim that Zenobia is murdered, citing both Hollingsworth and Coverdale as likely suspects.(3) In my view, however, the attention to exact motivations and the emphasis on redeeming character by pointing the finger at fellow Blithedalers fails not because the conclusions that result are implausible because they are only of tangential interest in the romance. The end of The Blithedale Romance tells the story, not only of a character's suicide or murder, of a narrator's need to suppress the artistic vision that threatens his own production. The question of whether Coverdale murders Zenobia in the course of the novel's action may, of course, be debated; more interesting and relevant, however, is the issue of why Coverdale as narrator must silence the voice of Zenobia in his text. From the first, Coverdale shows himself uncomfortably aware of the artistic power wielded by Zenobia. When Moodie enquires about Zenobia, it is art with which Coverdale first associates her: but have you a literary turn, Mr. Moodie?(4) Coverdale's anxious assessment of literary efforts intrudes in his initial description of her, a description which begins by focusing on Zenobia's aspect takes a significant detour: Her hand, though very soft, was larger than most women would like to have . . . though not a whit too large in proportion with the spacious plan of entire development. It did one good to see a fine intellect (as hers really was, although its natural tendency lay in another direction than towards literature) so fitly cased. She was, indeed, an admirable figure of a woman (p.43). Hidden between Coverdale's description of hands and figure is a telling aside that reveals less about art than about Coverdale's anxiety. The narrator's mention of literary pursuits is consistently qualified by his use of diminutive adjectives: her poor little stories and tracts never half did justice to intellect. It was only the lack of a fitter avenue that drove to seek development in (p. 68). Despite his scathing assessment of work, Coverdale's very obsession with artistry displays the radical sway art holds over him. With absolutely no evidence to support his claim, Coverdale assumes that Priscilla's apparent worship of Zenobia is a result of the girl's admiration for art: There occurred to me no mode of accounting for Priscilla's behavior, except by supposing that she had read some of stories (as literature goes everywhere) . . . and had come hither with the one purpose of being slave. There is nothing parallel to this, I believe - nothing so foolishly disinterested, and hardly anything so beautiful, - in the masculine nature, at whatever epoch of life (p. 58). After wrongly assuming that Priscilla's tribute to Zenobia has a literary basis, Coverdale attempts to undercut the significance of that tribute by claiming that the public worship of such is only understandable. Even were work significant, Coverdale makes it clear, it is solely status as a female artist that invites the presence of literary disciplines. …

Beyond Amnesia: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Future of America

Then as the voices of artists and family and millions of black people (and their votes, and their nonblack allies) began to build, the sad wisdom of Hines's words seemed to sharpen and to cut deeper at every moment. For it became increasingly clear that most of those who were leading the campaign for the national holiday had chosen, consciously or unconsciously, to allow King to become a convenient hero, to try to tailor him to the shape and mood of mainstream, liberal/moderate America. Symbolic of the direction given the campaign has been the unremitting focus