In his collection of stories Soirées de l’orchestre (1852), Berlioz paints a bleak image of vocal aging. The voice of a fictional aging tenor is described as a “fragile instrument,” the singer a tenuous deity reducible “to mortal ranks” as he ages. His voice, writes Berlioz, is lost to time, becoming in the ears of opera audiences a vulgar and lifeless musical object. Just two years after Berlioz’s description, Manuel Garcia began experiments with the laryngoscope as a tool of voice pedagogy, allowing for the visualization of voices of aging bodies that were being newly pathologized in gerontological literature. How was the rise of scientific voice pedagogy influenced by prevalent ideas of the aging body as diseased?
I will explore biomedical discourses of aging from the 19th through 21st centuries and their impact on ideas about vocal ability in operatic and classical vocalism. The historical biomedical “disciplining” of gerontological knowledge has had great influence on contemporary attitudes towards the aging body as a site of decline (Katz, 1996). I suggest that gerontological discourse framing aging as disease influenced decline narratives of vocal aging in musicological and voice pedagogical writing.
I examine how the biomedicalization of classical voice pedagogy parallels early gerontological knowledge in conceptualizing aging as a problem. I then turn to Nina Eidsheim’s listener-centered vocal analysis (2019) to consider how this framing of aging vocality entrains audiences and singers to identify aging as a type of vocal deficiency in need of rehabilitative intervention. As such, I move to explore what I term the “rehabilitative imperative” in voice pedagogy as the source of aural erasure of aging in operatic and classical vocal performance. Using insights from disability and age studies, I ask how ideas about vocal impairment can help launch a critique of our aesthetic values, the fetishization of youthfulness, and the biopolitical underpinnings of classical vocalism.

Musique et maladie : jour 2