Paul Robeson's Voices

Paul Robeson's Voices is a meditation on Robeson's singing, a study of the artist's life in song. Music historian Grant Olwage examines Robeson's voice as it exists in two broad and intersecting domains: as sound object and sounding gesture, specifically how it was fashioned in the contexts of singing practices, in recital, concert, and recorded performance, and as subject of identification. Olwage asks: how does the voice encapsulate modes of subjectivity, of being? Combining deep archival research with musicological theory, this book is a study of voice as central to Robeson's sense of self and his politics. Paul Robeson's Voices charts the dialectal process of Robeson's vocal and self-discovery, documenting some of the ways Robeson's practice revised the traditions of concert singing in the first half of the twentieth century and how his voice manifested as resistance.

Grant Olwage is a music historian and lecturer in the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the editor of Composing Apartheid and has written extensively on the Black voice, race, choral cultures, and coloniality. His writing on Paul Robeson's singing, voice, and musical arts has appeared widely.