Nina Eidsheim
Nina Sun Eidsheim is a Professor of Musicology, in the Department of Musicology, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Founder & Director, Practice-based Experimental Epistemology Research Lab (PEER Lab). Co-editor of the Reconfiguring American Music book series for Duke University Press. As a scholar and singer she investigates the multi-sensory and performative aspects of the production, perception and reception of vocal timbre of twentieth and twenty-first century music. Publications include Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Duke University Press, 2015) and The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (Duke, 2019), The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies (Oxford UP, 2019); a special issue on voice and disability for Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice (2019); a special issue on voice and materiality for the journal, Postmodern Culture (2014). In addition, she is the principal investigator for the UC-wide, transdisciplinary research project entitled Keys to Voice Studies: Terminology, Methodology, and Questions Across Disciplines and recipient of the Woodrow Wilson National Career Enhancement Fellowship (2011-12) Cornell University Society of the Humanities Fellowship (2011-12), the UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities (2015-16), and the ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship (2015-18).
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Editor by Nina Eidsheim
NAMING, UNDERSTANDING, AND PLAYING WITH METAPHORS IN MUSIC
A Virtual Symposium April 29-30, 2022
UCLA PEER Lab
Durham University Music Department
The symposium was organized and the document was edited by Nina Eidsheim and Daniel Walden.
Books by Nina Eidsheim
The Acousmatic Question: Who Is This?
Chapter 1
Formal and Informal Pedagogies: Believing in Race, Teaching Race, Hearing Race
Chapter 2
Phantom Genealogy: Sonic Blackness and the American Operatic Timbre
Chapter 3
Familiarity as Strangeness: Jimmy Scott and the Question of Black Timbral Masculinity
Chapter 4
Race as Zeros and Ones: Vocaloid Refused, Reimagined, and Repurposed
Chapter 5
Bifurcated Listening: The Inimitable, Imitated Billie Holiday
Chapter 6
Widening Rings of Being: The Singer as Stylist and Technician
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-6868-7_601.pdf
Contributors: David Kasunic, Zeynep Bulut, Katherine Kinney, Caitlin Marshall, Annette Schlichter, Nina Eidsheim.
social sciences and medicine in our search for a more complete understanding of these relationships. We use the term voice studies in this context as a specific intervention, to offer a moniker that gathers together otherwise disparate intellectual perspectives and methods and thus hope to facilitate further transdisciplinary conversation and collaboration.
Papers by Nina Eidsheim
Lee’s audition for the fourteenth season of America’s Got Talent (AGT) went
viral, making headlines on mainstream American news networks including
CNN, NBC and CBS. In the YouTube video we watched, which had nearly
18,000 views after just a few days, Lee walks onstage arm-in-arm with his
mother, a probing cane at his right side, and stops in front of the panel
of smiling, inquisitive celebrity judges. During the requisite introductory
exchange of pleasantries between the competitor and his adjudicators, the
viewer discovers that there is more to Lee than the physical markers of his
blindness might reveal. When confronted with questions he struggles ever so slightly to get the words out, widening his mouth, arching his eyebrows, and pausing momentarily before speaking. The camera uses these few seconds of ‘dead air’ to dramatic effect, cutting to shots of the judges as they look on in (nervous) anticipation, awaiting his replies. When they come, the distinctive lilt and unorthodox pacing of Lee’s speech and the loud, blurty, dramatic tone of his voice, with some words in a surprising falsetto, convey something not readily visible to the eye. Indeed, we then learn from Lee’s mother that ‘Kodi is blind and autistic’, and, as if on cue, all erupt into an ‘awww’. She elaborates: ‘Through music and performing, he was able to withstand living in this world, because when you’re autistic it’s really hard to do what everybody else does. It actually has saved his life, playing music’. A few moments later, Lee takes a seat at the piano. After what seems like an extended pause, he proceeds with a breathtaking rendition of Donny Hathaway’s ‘A Song for You’. Predictably, his performance elicits thunderous applause and a standing ovation, replete with tears, cheers and people jumping for joy. The excerpt posted on YouTube had around 737,000 ‘likes’ after two days, and close to
60,000 notes from listeners who shared their emotional reactions in the
comments section.
A recent revival of organology, critical organology, offers a new inroad into considering the body and its materiality outside self-perpetuating dogmatic language. In this article, I first draw out the main points of the public discourse around Callas’s voice and body; second, engaging Susan Bordo’s work, I consider how these narratives about the voice and body rely on ancient and contemporary sentiments about the female body, rather than on current knowledge about the voice; and third, I examine common assertions about Callas’s voice through what I conceive as a critical organological approach to voice research. In doing so, I seek to contribute to a discourse that will separate voice and body from gendered disparities; find a way to deal head-on with voice as a material, vibrational practice; and illuminate where and how vocal vocabulary and concepts are weighed down by millennia of gendered misconceptions.
NAMING, UNDERSTANDING, AND PLAYING WITH METAPHORS IN MUSIC
A Virtual Symposium April 29-30, 2022
UCLA PEER Lab
Durham University Music Department
The symposium was organized and the document was edited by Nina Eidsheim and Daniel Walden.
The Acousmatic Question: Who Is This?
Chapter 1
Formal and Informal Pedagogies: Believing in Race, Teaching Race, Hearing Race
Chapter 2
Phantom Genealogy: Sonic Blackness and the American Operatic Timbre
Chapter 3
Familiarity as Strangeness: Jimmy Scott and the Question of Black Timbral Masculinity
Chapter 4
Race as Zeros and Ones: Vocaloid Refused, Reimagined, and Repurposed
Chapter 5
Bifurcated Listening: The Inimitable, Imitated Billie Holiday
Chapter 6
Widening Rings of Being: The Singer as Stylist and Technician
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-6868-7_601.pdf
Contributors: David Kasunic, Zeynep Bulut, Katherine Kinney, Caitlin Marshall, Annette Schlichter, Nina Eidsheim.
social sciences and medicine in our search for a more complete understanding of these relationships. We use the term voice studies in this context as a specific intervention, to offer a moniker that gathers together otherwise disparate intellectual perspectives and methods and thus hope to facilitate further transdisciplinary conversation and collaboration.
Lee’s audition for the fourteenth season of America’s Got Talent (AGT) went
viral, making headlines on mainstream American news networks including
CNN, NBC and CBS. In the YouTube video we watched, which had nearly
18,000 views after just a few days, Lee walks onstage arm-in-arm with his
mother, a probing cane at his right side, and stops in front of the panel
of smiling, inquisitive celebrity judges. During the requisite introductory
exchange of pleasantries between the competitor and his adjudicators, the
viewer discovers that there is more to Lee than the physical markers of his
blindness might reveal. When confronted with questions he struggles ever so slightly to get the words out, widening his mouth, arching his eyebrows, and pausing momentarily before speaking. The camera uses these few seconds of ‘dead air’ to dramatic effect, cutting to shots of the judges as they look on in (nervous) anticipation, awaiting his replies. When they come, the distinctive lilt and unorthodox pacing of Lee’s speech and the loud, blurty, dramatic tone of his voice, with some words in a surprising falsetto, convey something not readily visible to the eye. Indeed, we then learn from Lee’s mother that ‘Kodi is blind and autistic’, and, as if on cue, all erupt into an ‘awww’. She elaborates: ‘Through music and performing, he was able to withstand living in this world, because when you’re autistic it’s really hard to do what everybody else does. It actually has saved his life, playing music’. A few moments later, Lee takes a seat at the piano. After what seems like an extended pause, he proceeds with a breathtaking rendition of Donny Hathaway’s ‘A Song for You’. Predictably, his performance elicits thunderous applause and a standing ovation, replete with tears, cheers and people jumping for joy. The excerpt posted on YouTube had around 737,000 ‘likes’ after two days, and close to
60,000 notes from listeners who shared their emotional reactions in the
comments section.
A recent revival of organology, critical organology, offers a new inroad into considering the body and its materiality outside self-perpetuating dogmatic language. In this article, I first draw out the main points of the public discourse around Callas’s voice and body; second, engaging Susan Bordo’s work, I consider how these narratives about the voice and body rely on ancient and contemporary sentiments about the female body, rather than on current knowledge about the voice; and third, I examine common assertions about Callas’s voice through what I conceive as a critical organological approach to voice research. In doing so, I seek to contribute to a discourse that will separate voice and body from gendered disparities; find a way to deal head-on with voice as a material, vibrational practice; and illuminate where and how vocal vocabulary and concepts are weighed down by millennia of gendered misconceptions.
For directions to the talk, given in Schoenberg Music Building 1100 (Schoenberg Music Hall), see http://voice.humanities.ucla.edu/directions/
Please join us for this rare appearance.
http://voice.humanities.ucla.edu
The UCLA Humanities Editor-in-Residence series, the brainchild of Professor Nina Eidsheim working closely with Barbara Van Nostrand, is designed to offer an opportunity for graduate students and faculty to gain familiarity and practical insights into the monograph process. The invited distinguished fellow will give a presentation on the book proposal process open to the UCLA community before consulting with Humanities faculty and students. (For more information, please see the Q/A below.)
The UCLA Humanities Editor-in-Residence series is created to facilitate long-term relationships between the UCLA Division of Humanities and book editors in the academic press arena, thus setting graduate students and faculty up for early publication successes. The UCLA Humanities-in-Residence recognizes that, to quote OUP editor Norman Hirschy, "authors and presses alike share a common goal and purpose: publish new scholarship well and with as broad of distribution as possible."
Public Event:
Monday, October 13, 2014
9:00am: Breakfast Reception
9:30am-11:00am "The Book Publication Process,” public talk, followed by Q/A
Royce 314
Distinguished fellows
Fall 2014: Norm Hirschy (Oxford University Press)
Spring 2015: Ken Wissoker (Duke University Press, Director of Intellectual Publics at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City)
Time: 3:00pm – 5:00pm
Location: Young Research Library (YRL) 11360
Please RSVP: http://humssnewfacultypanel.eventbrite.com
During this panel program, Graduate Students and Postdocs will learn about the academic job search, targeting job application materials, and personal hiring experiences from recently hired faculty in the humanities and social science disciplines.
Panel will include new faculty from Divisions of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Moderator: Nina Eidsheim, PhD, Musicology Professor
Jesse Harris, PhD, Linguistics Professor
Marcus Anthony Hunter, PhD, Sociology Professor
David Kim, PhD, Germanic Languages Professor
Davide Panagia, PhD, Political Science Professor
Jessica Schwartz, PhD, Musicology Professor