The voice has often been identified with the assertion of idiosyncrasy or exception (The Chanting Crowd: ‘We are all individuals!’ An Individual: ‘I'm not.’ Monty Python, The Life of Brian). This article explores why humans (though not uniquely them) feel urged to merge and magnify the individual voice through assimilating it to the voices of others. What are the powers, menaces, and satisfactions of these singular–plural megavoices, in choirs, collective chants, and other forms of what may be called chorality, that have become more familiar than ever in the mass spectacles (‘audicles’?) of sport, entertainment, and politics? I suggest that the chorus represents the challenge of the inchoate, in that it is the making manifest of what menaces music, the matter that must be made into form, a reservoir of unschooled energy that must be converted to information. I suggest that there may be an implicit relation between the individual voice and the collective voice it may seem to convoke, such that every individual vocality has a connection to a phantasmal chorality. Finally, I consider the political force of chorality, and the fantasy focused on and through the collective voice, and what this means in a world that seems to have moved from the dominion of the mass to that of the multitude.

The musical comedy film was perhaps a surprising genre to appear and flourish in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, a decade traditionally associated with the grimmer realities of Stalin's ruthless consolidation of power, show trials, and purges. Despite (and in many ways because of) this, the musical comedy became quite popular, with audiences and officials alike. Its creation did not, however, proceed without controversy or difficulty. In this article, I examine how director Grigory Aleksandrov and composer Isaak Dunayevsky drew on well-known and well-liked American musical and cinematic models to construct the first Soviet musical comedy film, Jolly Fellows (1934), and the role of music in the controversy that the film sparked. I argue that in choosing musical content appropriate for contemporary Soviet viewers and transmitting it by using American-inspired formal structures that rely on music, Aleksandrov and Dunayevsky created a powerful hybrid that spoke convincingly to audiences and critics, who ultimately used the film and its music as a means for debating issues of cultural significance.

Until the present article, Massenet's influence upon the music of Olivier Messiaen has remained entirely unexplored. During the 1930 and 1940s, Messiaen professed his love for the music of Massenet and regularly used Massenet as a model in his teaching materials. Several examples of the way in which Messiaen selects and transforms passages from Massenet's Werther and Manon are considered. The inclusion of a harmonic formula borrowed from Massenet, contrasted with a melodic formula borrowed from Mozart, in ‘Amen du Désir’, the fourth movement of the Visions de l'Amen, reveals the operatic characters hidden behind the programme of one of Messiaen's best-known works. These intersecting source materials in Messiaen's teaching and composition open new roads for the analysis of the composer's music and pedagogy.

In this article, I propose that Steve Reich takes on the voice as a problem, and that his solutions to this problem are manifold, informing – perhaps driving – works from across his oeuvre. A close reading of his music and commentary indicates that he is motivated by reinvigorating what I call the ‘vocal imaginary’ of Western classical music, or the connection between melody, voice, and human presence. My argument unfolds in four parts. First, I read closely Reich's writings and interviews that illuminate this problem. Second, I turn an analytic lens on two works composed before and after Music for 18 Musicians, respectively – It's Gonna Rain and Tehillim – to see how it plays out in music. Third, I focus on a close reading of Music for 18 Musicians. Finally, I close with some thoughts about how Reich's relationship with the voice might complicate his professed relationship with modernism, calling into question his adversarial stance vis-à-vis modernist practice.

Van Morrison's live version of his song ‘Cyprus Avenue’ on the 1974 album It's Too Late to Stop Now provides an example of the authority of the singer's voice and of how it leads and demands submission from musicians, songs, and audience. Morrison's voice constantly suggests that it is reflecting important experience and can be understood both as an attempt to capture something and as a post-hoc witnessing or testimony. Through the example of Morrison's work, and of It's Too Late to Stop Now in particular, this article explores the location of the voice in terms of the body and of particular places and histories. It then proceeds to a reflection on the relationship between the performing voice as producer of sound, noise, and music and the poetic voice that provides the words and visions upon which the performing voice goes to work. It concludes by focusing on a moment within ‘Cyprus Avenue’ where Morrison performs the act of being tongue-tied, discussing this as an example of ‘aesthetic stutter’. Throughout, attention is also paid to how other voices (particularly those of rock critics) connect to Morrison's voice by attempting to describe it, re-perform it, or explain it.

In the last few decades, established narratives of twentieth-century music – with Schoenberg and his disciples at the centre and others on the periphery – have come under considerable fire: some have denounced the modernist canon itself as narrow and esoteric, while others have sought to restore marginalized ‘minor’ composers to a supposedly rightful centrality. In this article, I revisit the mid-century process of canon formation in order to excavate a deeper, less divisive understanding of its history. Using Benjamin Britten as a case study, I sketch a more ambivalent and reciprocal relationship between major and minor composers than has often been suggested. After illuminating key tropes in Britten's mid-century reception, I examine how the composer and his critics fashioned his canonical minority and, in the process, helped to construct the ‘majority’ of his modernist counterparts. I argue that, far from marginalizing his oeuvre, Britten's ambivalent, peripheral, and even diminutive relationship with the ‘major’ figures of musical modernism was central both to his mid-century appeal and his enduring place in the canon. Ultimately, I suggest that attending to Britten's complex and self-conscious canonical negotiations can teach us a lot not just about his own role in history, but also about the wider ways that twentieth-century canons are negotiated, mediated, transmitted, and performed.

In his ethnomusicological writings and lectures, Béla Bartók describes folk music as ‘a natural product, just like the various forms of animal and vegetable life’ and elaborates this view, going on to describe a collection of developmental processes modelled explicitly on biological evolution. In this article, I characterize Bartók's evolutionary model by laying bare the taxonomies and genealogies inherent in his classificatory system. Then, through an analysis of the fifth of his Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Folk Songs (1920), I suggest the outlines of a method for interpreting and analysing Bartók's music engendered from this evolutionary model, a method that involves the elaboration of two ideas: (1) a conceptual shift from a relatively historically static major/minor tonality to a multivalent, ‘evolving’ tonality, and (2) the reconception of motives or themes as having no single original forms, but rather as being related genetically, as somehow evolving in their own right.

This article examines constructions of national musical identity in early twentieth-century Britain by exploring and contextualizing hitherto neglected discourses and practices concerning the production of an ‘English’ singing voice. Tracing the origins and development of ideas surrounding native vocal performance and pedagogy, I reconstruct a culture of English singing as a backdrop against which to offer, by way of conclusion, a reading of the ‘English voice’ performed in Ralph Vaughan Williams's song ‘Silent Noon’. By drawing upon perspectives derived from recent studies of song, vocal production, and national and aesthetic identity, I demonstrate that ‘song’ became a place in which the literal and figurative voices of performers and composers were drawn together in the making of a national music. As such, I advance a series of new historical perspectives through which to rethink notions of an English musical renaissance.

Textured voices include both voices heard as interpolated into a musical texture and voices heard as having their own textured character, whether as a ‘voice’ with a ‘timbre’ or as a ‘collective voice’ with a ‘composite timbre’ made up of many voices, each textured itself. They have often been heard as performances of ethical life. Comparisons between these performances can be misleading because the contingencies characterizing the textured voice for a listener who listens in a particular way can make each performance irreducible. A pair of articles and cartoons in TV Guide from the summer of 1966 depict the making of a textured laugh track as a contradictory activity. Yet they seem to resolve contradictions into surface conflicts between individuated parties. Listening for textured voices in this case was itself a political activity because it was productive of more than one distinct form of ethical life.

This article considers three science fiction films, released in 2013–14, featuring Scarlett Johansson: Her(dir. Spike Jonze), Lucy(dir. Luc Besson), and Under the Skin(dir. Jonathan Glazer). It suggests that to engage with the phenomenon of voice in imaginative and productive ways it is necessary to slide over a disciplinary divide and address more explicitly the musicality of speech. In my main example, Her, Johansson provides the voice of an operating system with which the film's protagonist falls in love. Central to their intimate connection is the establishment of what I call the ‘haptic voice’, which conveys a sense of physical proximity. A similar blurring of the boundaries between voice and body occur in the presentation of the alien characters Johansson plays in the other films.