Defining the Therapeutic Singing Voice: Further Examination of the Everyday Singing Practices of Music Therapists

Twelve music therapists were observed working clinically in 3 to 5 of their music therapy sessions and subsequently interviewed about their clinical work in order to further examine and define the essential characteristics of therapeutic singing in music therapy clinical practice. Observational and interview data were analyzed separately using procedures consistent with qualitative content analysis and then integrated to provide a comprehensive picture of these singing practices. Analysis of these data revealed 3 interrelated dimensions of therapeutic singing that were integrated into the larger realization of therapeutic singing: (1) foundational vocal skills, (2) vocal engagement, and (3) authenticity. Implications for the education and training of music therapy students, vocal health, and a reevaluation of the American Music Therapy Association’s competencies contextualize these findings for the profession as a whole.

Are Popular Music Curricula Antiracist?: The CCNY Music Department as a Case Study

In a recent virtual talk at the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music, music theorist Philip Ewell considered how music educators and researchers might begin to “undo the exclusionist framework of our contemporary music academy.” Ewell's enterprise resonated with me not only as one who teaches undergraduate courses in music theory, history, performance, and ear training, but also as an instructor in a recently adopted Popular Music Studies program at the City College of New York (CCNY). The CCNY music department's shift in focus from a mostly white, mostly male, classical-based curriculum towards a more diverse and polystylistic repertory of popular music chips away at the exclusionist framework to which Ewell refers.

Introduction

This book argues that Native ways of doing music history requires relational and radical ways of listening to and for the density of Indigeneity. To advance a more Indigenized sound studies and a more sounded Indigenous studies asks researchers to prioritize analytics of density and audibility, and to hear performances of Indigeneity intimately intertwined articulations of Peoples (ways of being), places/spaces (ways of knowing), and projects (ways of doing). When Indigeneity is understood as more than simply the “condition of being Indigenous,” it becomes possible to emphasize structures of Indigeneity and to operationalize Indigenous logics, or what one might call Indigelogics. Indigelogical ways of doing music history are some of many ongoing projects seeking to unsettle and decolonize dominant narratives, and reframe larger debates of race, Indigeneity, power, and representation in twenty-first-century American music historiography. Sound Relations offers Indigenous-led and Indigeneity-centered terms of engagement as pathways to resurgent world-making and more equitable futures for all human and more-than-human kin.

Recording Indigeneity

This chapter juxtaposes Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of enumerating Indigeneity on record, both on paper and on vinyl, which reveal two projects with very different means for very different ends. The chapter begins with an outline of cacophonous colonial structures and paradigms of containment and measurement that continue to vex notions of “audible Indigeneity,” which informs notions of who does or does not “count” as Indigenous. Whereas much of an early twentieth-century ethno/musicological archive was driven by a colonial savior logic known as “salvage ethnography,” an examination of Cupiit-led and Yupiit-centered archives reveal significantly more expansive performances of mid-century Indigeneity. This examination of family- and community-based gospel, country, and folk music archives—featuring recordings by the Shavings Family Band, John Angaiak, and Joe Paul—argues for a densification of deeply embedded archival logics, methods, and theories that currently inform the enumerative conventions of American music historiography. Put another way, this chapter’s core questions include “who is counting (and using what logics)?” and “who decides who counts (as Indigenous)?”