Voice and Race

Commencing with the 1931 Christmas Day transmission of _Hänsel und Gretel_, the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts became a media phenomenon-by the late 1930s, around ten million listeners tuned in every weekend. Eighty-nine seasons later, consumers can continuously stream historic broadcasts via Sirius XM. Despite extensive scholarship on Met stage productions, the radio programs have received little critical attention. Incorporating a range of broader questions-from liveness versus mediatized performance to how broadcasts messily intertwined the "public space" of the opera house with listeners' domestic spaces-this paper centers on how the Metropolitan radio programs offer a unique opportunity for analyzing music and identity.
I begin with materiality, considering how collection and dissemination of broadcasts complicates existent scholarship on operatic listening. The Met began officially releasing the Historic Broadcast Recordings series in 1974; thus for over forty years, radio programs typically circulated via bootleg recordings. Leroy Ehrenreich's collection, for example, contains hundreds of broadcasts copied on reel-to-reel tapes. There is an intimate aspect to how these unofficial materials circulated among creators, consumers, and friends-Andrea Bohlman has described other tape cultures as "user-driven, decentralized networks of creative exchange." Such networks of exchange add additional layers to preexistent work on operatic listening subjectivities by scholars such as Mitchell Morris. 
In a second case study, I examine a pivotal decade spanning Marian Anderson's 1955 broadcast through early 1960s programs by Leontyne Price, George Shirley, and Martina Arroyo. As millions listened in their living rooms, what kinds of assumptions did they make about race, voices, and opera? In dialogue with Nina Sun Eidsheim's recent theories about the "acousmatic question," I argue these radio broadcasts offer particularly compelling examples about how listeners (mis)understood the operatic voices of performers of color.
Drawing on institutional documents, bootleg collections, memoirs, and press coverage, the two case studies incorporate theory from voice studies, work on gender, sexuality, and race, and scholarship connecting collecting, intimacy, and material culture. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts are not only a long-lived media product, but also a crucial source which uniquely illuminates ties between music and identity.

Millie and Christine McCoy (1851-1912), African American conjoined twins, billed in the singular as Millie-Christine, were among the most successful freak show performers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Across America and Europe, they delighted audiences with their dancing, conversational prowess in multiple languages, and above all, their singing, which earned them the title "The Two-Headed Nightingale" ("Rossignol à deux têtes"). 


In this essay, we study Millie-Christine's 1873 debut in Paris, at the Cirque des Champs-Elysées. Their stay in the French capital was filled with intrigues, including rival frauds, accusations of forgery, and an unusual amount of intervention on the part of the French medical establishment. Medical luminaries such as Paul Broca, Paul Bert, and Jules Fournet eagerly studied the conjoined sisters or, in their taxonomical language, "le monstre double," and their scientific findings were entangled with sensational press narratives to maintain a tension between obfuscation and clarification that was at the heart of Millie-Chrstine's allure. This tension allowed the sisters to cultivate various kinds of performative mysteries and illusions with their persona: are they a genuine phénomène or merely a fake; are they two persons or one; are they ladies or monsters?  


Imbricated in these mysteries was Millie-Christine's voice, an unusual polyphonic instrument capable of generating various kinds of sonic illusions that worked in tandem with their freakshow persona. At one level, their polyphony confused audience perception of the singularity or duality of their persons, thereby enhancing their freakishness. At another, their repertoire of parlor songs and genteel singing subverted expectations of grotesque bodies and black female performers, creating an illusion of identity constituted around an oral/aural "miscegenation."


Our study of Millie-Christine and their voices reveals the "double-ness" of their monstrosity in a specifically Parisian context; the Two-headed Nightingale was created by the convergence of the two discursive systems of disability and race by which alterity was established, at a time of increasing interest in evolution and colonial exhibition in France. 

Between the 1880s and World War I, African Americans usually performed in minstrel-style song-and-dance acts in white vaudeville. The typical vaudeville bill (or program) also generally contained at least one "song act"-when one or more entertainers sang three or more popular numbers. Song acts with operatic vocalists who programmed opera arias were not nearly as common, but were prized by vaudeville managers because the genteel connotations of the genre reassured skittish customers that high-class vaudeville was an appropriate pastime for respectable middle-class people. I have identified six African American women operatic singers through accounts in the white and black press who performed on otherwise white vaudeville bills before 1915, but who have, thus far, gone largely unnoticed in vaudeville scholarship.
Often nicknamed "Creole Nightingales," they were transgressive in almost every way, breaking social, theatrical, and musical norms. Building on the work of Graham, Kibler, and McAllister on race and gender in popular entertainment, and on the insights of André and Eidsheim on black vocality, I argue that black opera singers in white vaudeville challenged Jim Crow ideology by locating the sounds of European (that is white) opera in black bodies. At once a source of pride in the black community, and of puzzlement and anxiety to white people, these operatic singers performed the same excerpts from canonic operas, such as _Faust_, _La Traviata_ and _Il Trovatore_, as their white counterparts. Moreover, some of the singers "whited up" during their acts, perhaps in a bid to separate themselves from the racially stereotyped song-and-dance acts, as well as to connect their performances to white aesthetic practices. Although vaudeville was saturated in cross-racial masquerade, according to extant managers' reports and press coverage, many white people rejected this challenge to white operatic hegemony. The presence of African American operatic singers in white vaudeville was a moment of integration amidst the deepening segregation of Jim Crow America-a challenge that was contained by the episodic structure of the vaudeville bill and ultimately erased after World War I when black operatic singers no longer appeared in white productions.