The volume offers a substantial and innovative appraisal of the role of the female voice from the perspective of twentieth-century performance practices, the centrality of female singers' experimentations and extended vocal techniques along with the process of the 'subjectivization' of the voice.

Serena Facci is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies at the University of Rome 'Tor Vergata'. Her fieldwork and research projects include traditional and popular music in Italy and in Central-East Africa, and intercultural music making in educational and religious contexts.

Michela Garda has a philosophical and musicological background. She teaches Musical Aesthetics and Sociology of Music at the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage, University of Pavia.

Part 1 The 'Voice' and the Voices: Definitions, Iconologies, Myths and Practices

1. Vocalising honey

Adriana Cavarero

2. Writing the female voice from Debussy to Boulez

Julian Johnson

3. Eurydice's Voice in Contemporary Opera

Michal Grover-Friedlander

4. Maria Callas and the Achievement of an Operatic Vocal Subjectivity

Marco Beghelli

5. How Female is the Voice? Conceptualisations and Practices

Michela Garda

Part 2 The grain of the voices, Experimentation and Technology

6. Love, Race and Resistance: The Fugitive Voice of Nina Simone

Martha Feldman

7. Black Sonic Refusal

Jayna Brown

8. The Voice that Gives Voice: Female Folk Revival Singers around 1968

Serena Facci

9. Women's Voices in Cairo, Egypt, at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Virginia Danielson

10. 'Hear what I Feel': Joan La Barbara, the 1970s and the 'Extended Voice'

Veniero Rizzardi

11. Remediating the Female Voice in Extremis(m): The Human Voice (1966)

Pamela Karantonis