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This essay invokes a line of historical singing lessons that locate blues singers Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters in the lineage of Broadway belters. Contesting the idea that black women who sang the blues and performed on the musical stage in the early twentieth century possessed “untrained” voices—a pervasive narrative that retains currency in present-day voice pedagogy literature—I argue that singing is a sonic citational practice. In the act of producing vocal sound, one implicitly cites the vocal acts of the teacher from whom one has learned the song. And, I suggest, if performance is always “twice-behaved,” then the particular modes of doubleness present in voice point up this citationality, a condition of vocal sound that I name the “twice-heard.” In considering how vocal performances replicate and transmit knowledge, the “voice lesson” serves as a key site for analysis. My experiences as a voice coach and composer in New York City over two decades ground my approach of listening for the body in vocal sound. Foregrounding the perspective and embodied experience of voice practitioners of colour, I critique the myth of the “natural belter” that obscures the lessons Broadway performers have drawn from the blueswomen’s sound.

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In this roundtable held at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in 2021, the participants discussed the racialized politics of citation in musical theatre studies. Some of the speakers lifted up anti-racist scholarly pieces that have significantly shaped their work: SAJ considered Douglas Jones Jr’s chapter ‘Slavery, performance, and the design of African American theatre’, Jordan Ealey shared lessons from Matthew D. Morrison’s article ‘The sound(s) of subjection: Constructing American popular music and racial identity through Blacksound’, Masi Asare expanded upon Fred Moten’s essay ‘Taste, dissonance, flavor, escape’ to think through sweeping away and stealing away, Donatella Galella applied Karen Shimakawa’s book National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage to contemporary yellowface, and Hye Won Kim talked about the influence of Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s book The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene on her own work. Morrison, Moten, Shimakawa and Shimizu reflected on why they wrote those pieces of scholarship and how they understand their research years later. Finally, the co-authors spoke to reasons why scholars situated in musical theatre studies have so rarely cited research in fields like Black and Asian American performance studies and imagined radical possibilities beyond a racist citation framework.

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