VOCAL BREAK

A consideration of women’s singing voices that blends criticism, memoir, and polemic.

In what she calls this “sequel of sorts” to her previous nonfiction book, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (2023), Elkin includes a strand of autobiography, intermittently reflecting back on a road not taken. A self-described “run-of-the-mill lyric soprano,” Elkin attended a Long Island performing arts high school but ultimately decided against pursuing a Broadway career: “I did not want to spend my life standing in front of people and being found wanting, or excessive”—the kinds of charges leveled at the indomitable women with distinguished voices to whom Elkin devotes many of this book’s chapters. She considers iconic shriekers like Cyndi Lauper, PJ Harvey, and riot grrrls. (A curious omission from Elkin’s inquiry: Yoko Ono.) She also considers more conventionally euphonious singers like Tori Amos, Maria Callas, and Billie Eilish, who nevertheless also spark “these questions about loudness or softness, restraint or abandon, and what it all meant for the way we hear the female voice”—what it means, that is, for women to sing (read: say) what they want and to sing (say) it as they want to, sometimes in protest, sometimes at earsplitting volume, and without apology. Elkin examines the ages-old, fear-based historical precedent for silencing and challenging women’s voices, frequently touching on the urtext on the subject, The Little Mermaid. It’s all in persuasive service to the idea that there are burdensome expectations—of poise, of pitch—placed uniquely on female singers (cf. Bob Dylan), although women have always managed to find ways to unleash their power. In a delicious speculative aside on Motown’s girl groups, Elkin writes of “the Wall of Sound Phil Spector built to amplify their voices, or maybe to protect himself from them.”

A full-bodied and erudite but accessible investigation.