This introduction to the round table attempts an overview of the conceptualizations of ‘voice’ and ‘agency’. It maintains a dialogic balance between the novel insights offered by each contribution’s topic and the authors’ distinct angles, and current debates around voice and agency. The introduction interweaves philosophical, anthropological, and, of course, (ethno)musicological approaches to the vocal phenomenon, highlighting its complex dimensions as well as its dense intersubjective meaningfulness. If ‘listening’ is the counterpart of ‘voicing’, integral to its very materialization, ‘vocal agency’ urges us to think beyond the interconnection between the vocalizer and the listener, shifting our focus of attention to the capacity of the voice to offer insights into and through itself.

Who gets to have a voice, and what does it mean? Questions of vocal ontology and ethics are perennial, but in a world where the ability to sample the voices of others or to synthesize new ones in pursuit of both creative and commercial endeavours is available more widely than ever before, the relationship of the voice to the individual body, agency, and rights is invested with a new urgency. Through a discussion ranging from The Little Mermaid to Kanye West, Cathy Berberian to Holly Herndon, this short provocation considers the manifold ways in which we find, have, and borrow voices.

This article is structured around snapshots of everyday life in reception centres for asylum seekers. These set the tone of the sonic and affective dimensions of the experience of the centre, as narrated by a resident, a music teacher, and through ethnographic reflections. The article devises ‘voice’ as a distinct category of the sonic spectrum, imbued with the significance of testifying to human existence, in a twofold way: first as a theoretical lens that offers new perspectives on the asylum seekers’ paradigm, and second, as a methodological tool to gain insights into aspects of everyday life in a reception centre, and by extension gaining access into ‘other’ social worlds that would otherwise remain concealed.

This article conceptualises voice as a constellation, examining how objects, images, and sounds (or their absence) speak to the lived experiences of displacement. Drawing from a British Academy-funded project with a Syrian artist collective and a women-led social entrepreneurship initiative in Istanbul, we explore the affective assemblages of loss, belonging, and forced displacement through an ethnographic mode of listening. Bringing together a crocheted life jacket, a painting, and a piece of music that cannot be played, we consider how a politics of listening can offer new ways of understanding forced displacement and agency beyond voice as speech or narrative. We advocate for an approach that foregrounds thick solidarity, collective expression, and intersubjective relations of vocality.

Despite the recognized importance of hymn tunes to Vaughan Williams’s music and philosophy, and the prominence of specific tunes written by him, there is currently no accurate works list of his original tunes. The reasons for this are varied and inevitably include the notorious elusiveness of a genre that has undergone constant change throughout its history. This essay reviews previous efforts to tabulate Vaughan Williams’s originals, settling on a six-point criteria to guide the analysis. The method provides consistency in a fluid environment in which early twentieth-century hymnody inevitably collides with ‘hymn-adjacent’ genres like the unison song and carol, and with traditions of school and community music. Recognizing such contingencies helps us better understand Vaughan Williams’s place in Anglican musical culture. Ultimately, the analysis sheds light on the composer’s aesthetics, demonstrating the degree to which this advocate of amateur music was laser-focused on encouraging the musically inexperienced church-goer to sing with confidence.

Ellen Ann Willmott, although known primarily as a horticulturist, was also an amateur musician and the owner of an important library. As well as containing books on botanical subjects, this library was particularly strong in its early modern musical contents, both manuscript and printed. This article examines the early modern music in Ellen Willmott’s library (which featured composers ranging roughly from Thomas Tallis to Henry Purcell), her collecting habits, and her methods of acquisition. It also evaluates what happened to her library after her death, including the circumstances of its dispersal by auction in 1935, charting the disposal of the more significant items to their various winning bidders. In so doing, it offers a window onto the economics of the music trade — a trade driven by an item’s condition and completeness, and stimulated by the early music revival.

Much has been written about women as composers, performers, or teachers around the turn of the twentieth century. Less attention has been paid to how women could build portfolio careers by weaving musical practices together. This article focuses on a group of Scottish women who did not make their names solely as art music composers or stellar performers, and for whom piano teaching was only part of their musical work. Four were related to the Scottish music publishers Mozart Allan, James Kerr, and the Logan brothers; the fifth published with Allan and Kerr, and also self-published. All but one made their careers in Scotland. Their lives and achievements reveal the range of musical occupations open to upper working- or lower middle-class women in this era, and also provide insights into musical scenes beyond the English cities more typically the focus of British music histories.

It no longer seems eccentric to suggest that the guitar merits a place in any balanced account of British musical life during the nineteenth century. This article concerns three previously unknown manuscript guitar books of that period, discovered serendipitously in bookshops or auction catalogues. None has ever figured in an institutional collection or bibliographical record hitherto. After a succinct introductory account, which surveys the books in relation to aspects of guitar history that are still largely unknown to most modern players of the ‘classical’ guitar (and are usually overlooked by many scholars of nineteenth-century music in general), there is an inventory of all three. Of particular interest is the range of places where these manuscripts were copied or used, which include Trincomalee in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Jabalpur in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, as well as Kempsey in Worcestershire and Dover in Kent. British guitar history in the nineteenth century has a global context that encompasses distant corners of the Empire.

When the nine-year-old Susan Knell wrote to Leonard Bernstein in March 1962 from her family home in Ossining, New York, she had very little — if any — concept of ‘the archive’. Nor were posterity or history-making remotely in her mind. The second child of highly educated Jewish parents, she had been studying the piano because ‘it was something that kids were expected to [do]’.2 Exactly how the letter came about she does not recall. Most likely, one of her parents encouraged her to write to him: ‘They were very impressed by […] famous people who were accomplished’, she reflected. ‘And we were Jewish. And so I think there was that connection with Bernstein.’ Armed with a sheet of lined paper, torn from the pad in such a way that one of the five pre-punched holes was left ripped, she penned her missive. The careful formatting reflected her awareness of ‘good etiquette’, but was also at odds with the childish scrawl, an incongruity suggestive of children’s tendency to do things ‘correctly’, up to a point. Once posted, the letter was sooner or later forgotten by Susan — and likewise was the photograph reportedly sent by return, which she has no memory of ever receiving.3

Cullen Maiden was a bass opera singer, poet, actor, composer, and teacher born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932. After serving with the US military in Korea and postgraduate study at the Juilliard School, he toured with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company and the Belafonte Folk Singers before travelling to Europe — Stockholm, Rome, London, Munich — for further study and professional engagements in the early and mid-1960s. His move to Europe was motivated by racist barriers in the music industry which, while still inescapably present in Europe, seemed more navigable than those in the United States at the time.1 Maiden therefore belongs to a multi-generational cohort of African American musicians who made similar moves to German-speaking Europe, as outlined in Kira Thurman’s landmark study Singing like Germans.2 A successful audition for the Komische Oper in East Berlin led to stable employment in the house’s ensemble, and Maiden later rose to prominence as a popular Porgy in productions of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Maiden lived in West Berlin for over thirty years, regularly crossing the border for work, and he pursued many independent artistic projects there, some in collaboration with political and aid organizations. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, while still living in Berlin, he made a professional return to the United States to give a series of recitals and to perform with the Black-led company Opera/South. By the early 1990s, Maiden was experiencing difficulties singing due to a medical condition, so took on increasing teaching work during his final decade in then-reunified Germany. Maiden and his British wife, Chris Hall-Maiden, moved to London in 2000, from which point he focused his multifaceted creativity on composition. He died in 2011.