A fleeing object: voice amd musicology

Abstract

As an inseparable part of both speech and song, the voice is a fleeting object escaping the partial approaches from the several disciplines which deal with it. Starting with this observation, I discuss the status of the voice in the musicological field. On the one hand, opera and art song gave birth to vocal typologies that can’t be applied to popular and folk vocalizations. On the other hand, musical analyses that stress the syntactic level of the musical organization don’t have much to say about the voice. A musical approach to the vocal style was conceived by Alan Lomax, who called his method Cantometrics. Together with the ethnographies of speech and music, the method appears as an important step towards the integration of phonetics, anthropology and musicology.