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“Very Female, with the Allure of a Foreign Aura”: Vocality, Gender, and European Exoticism in the US Careers of Alice Babs and Caterina Valente

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2021

Mikkel Vad
Mikkel Vad*
Affiliation:
Department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

“How can America import ‘American’ jazz?,” asked the music editor of Good Housekeeping, George Marek, in 1956. Marek answered, “Singers, particularly if they are very female, give the home-grown music the allure of a foreign aura.” Taking these statements as a starting point, this article gives an account of the US careers of Alice Babs and Caterina Valente. Gender, class, and ethnicity were key elements in the US construction of Babs's and Valente's musical personae, which was especially heard in their vocality, with an emphasis on high-pitched vocal stylings, melismas, and “white” timbres to signify gender and European exoticism. The US careers of Babs and Valente show us that musical Americanness or Europeanness are not created separately on either side of the Atlantic. Their European identities were not created in Europe and then imported to the United States but were created in the process of transmission into the United States. Importantly, the article argues that race and ethnicity were used by musicians, critics, and listeners to position Babs and Valente as Europeans. Their whiteness was transposed in a US context and their stories tell us as much about US ideologies of whiteness as it does about European ethnicities.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , November 2021 , pp. 424 - 446
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Music

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