Looking at musical globalization and vocal music, this collection of essays studies the complex relationship between the human voice and cultural identity in 20th- and 21st-Century music in both East Asian and Western musical traditions.

1. Introduction: Voice, Identities, and Reflexive Globalization in Contemporary Music Practices Christian Utz and Frederick Lau Part 1: Global Perspectives on the Voice 2. Presence and Ethicity of the Voice Dieter Mersch 3. The Rediscovery of Presence: Intercultural Passages through Vocal Spaces between Speech and Song Christian Utz 4. Imagining the Other's Voice: On Composing across Vocal Traditions Sandeep Bhagwati Part 2: Voices of/in Art Music 5. Voice, Culture, and Ethnicity in Contemporary Chinese Compositions Frederick Lau 6. Narrative, Voice, and Reality in the Operas by Hosokawa Toshio and Mochizuki Misato Fuyuko Fukunaka 7. Reconsidering Traditional Vocal Practices in Contemporary Korean Music Heekyung Lee 8. Escaped from Paradise? Construction of Identity and Elements of Ritual in Vocal Works by Helmut Lachenmann and Giacinto Scelsi Jörn Peter Hiekel 9. The Notation and Use of the Voice in Non-Semantic Contexts: Phonetic Organization in the Vocal Music of Dieter Schnebel, Brian Ferneyhough, and Georges Aperghis Erin Gee Part 3: Voices of/in Popular Music and Media Art 10. A "Digital Opera" at the Boundaries of Transnationalism: Human and Synthesized Voices in Zuni Icosahedron's The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci Samson Young 11. "Voices of the Mainstream:"Red Songs and Revolutionary Identities in the People's Republic of China Andreas Steen 12. Asagi's Voice: Learning How to Desire with Japanese visual-kei Oliver Seibt 13. Voicing Body, Voicing Seoul: Vocalization, Body, and Ethnicity in Korean Popular Music Michael Fuhr 14. Afterword: Giving Voice to Difference Nicholas Cook

Christian Utz is Professor of music theory and music analysis at the University of Music and Dramatic Arts in Graz, Austria.

Frederick Lau is a Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.