Singing Utopia

Singing Utopia is a unique and ambitious work which asks us to listen differently to voice in musical theatre. Across fifteen case studies from Florodora to Hadestown, Ben Macpherson hears something utopian in the extraordinary, emotional, and situational directness of singing voices as they escape the confines of everyday life. Yet, as this book discovers, the very nature of utopia is paradoxical, fraught with undercurrents of nostalgia, melancholy, and the perpetual threat of the dystopian. Singing Utopia listens across these fault lines in our understanding of utopia and asks what it means for a musical to give voice to an imagined world which is always a contradiction in terms. Who gets to inhabit such a world? Who is excluded? How can we locate utopia in musical theatre voices, and what might be the consequences when its complexities are exposed? Listening for answers to these questions, implicitly connected with concerns of class, race, gender, and culture, the author draws on a diverse range of approaches, including voice studies, musicology, sound studies, literary studies, political philosophy, and ethnography. In doing so, Singing Utopia examines current ways of listening while moving beyond them to develop a series of new terms, including 'decadent appropriation', 'simuloquism', two kinds of 'voiceworld', and three new approaches to the chorus and ensemble. This book offers an original and provocative account of musical theatre singing, exposing the power, possibilities, and paradoxes heard in voices that promise 'something better'-whatever, in the end, that might be.

Ben Macpherson is Reader in Vocal Theatres at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Joining Portsmouth in 2013, he led the undergraduate musical theatre programme until 2023. Prior to working at Portsmouth, he taught at various other institutions in the UK. He is founding co-editor of Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, an editorial board member of the Studies in Musical Theatre Journal, and has published and presented widely on topics relating to voice studies, musical theatre, and the musical on record - a subject on which he has led several grant-funded projects. He holds a PhD from the University of Winchester, UK.

Acknowledgements List of Figures Author's Note Introduction: Songs for new worlds Part 1: Cultural Contexts Chapter 1: Reaffirmation and rupture-Why this is not opera Chapter 2: Decadent appropriation-The process and politics of singing musical theatre Part 2: Critical Approaches Chapter 3: Two voiceworlds, three choralities-Locating the voice Chapter 4: Intermediate vocalities-Between speech and song Chapter 5: Rediscovering nostalgia-Whose voice is it, anyway? Conclusion: Keep singing, Orpheus Bibliography Index