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.
Olwage applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Paul Robeson's Voices, and reported the following:
Page 99 finds the reader in the thick of a discussion on how Robeson’s voice was heard as a ‘natural’ voice. This is attributed to Robeson’s singing of what critics considered ‘simple’ music, which included African American spirituals but also folk songs from around the world; and to his plain singing of this repertoire, which was devoid of artifice. Page 99, however, complicates this: Robeson’s race, it argues, was key to understanding his voice as natural, and more than this, it suggests, aesthetics – Robeson’s simple singing – was imbued with ethics: his voice was an expression of his sincerity, an authentic expression of Robeson’s person. And finally, the page notes that Robeson’s simple singing marked a broader shift in the 1920s and 1930s, from a preference for virtuosic performance to one that favored “more intimate styles that privileged the vocalist’s genuine feelings.” Robeson’s singing was thoroughly contemporary.Learn more about Paul Robeson's Voices at the Oxford University Press website.
Page 99 thus gives the browser some idea of key topics and arguments the book makes; although it doesn’t give much indication of the variety and scope of content. The test works insofar that it shows how listeners (critics, fans, and professionals: voice teachers and sound engineers) are involved in producing voices as much as singers. The critics’ varied accounts of Robeson’s natural voice ranged from (racist) claims that he sang naturally because he was Black to nuanced accounts of how Robeson artistically constructed a natural aesthetic; that is, that Robeson’s simple singing was intentionally worked on and performed. Another core idea of the book that page 99 illustrates is that voices are multiply, collectively constructed; and hence the plural in the book’s title, Paul Robeson’s Voices. Different critics heard Robeson’s voice differently, and attributed different meanings to it. The variety of these meanings is not captured on page 99, and include, inter alia, the many political voices – radical, official, protesting, heroic – Robeson performed. Page 99 also gestures at a fundamental point the book makes: the voice envoices modes of subjectivity, expressing both social and individual identities. On page 99 the browser gets a glimpse of how the voice partakes in the social construction of race, and elsewhere in the book other identities are the book’s subject: family, church communities, cosmopolitan ones, technologically-mediated ones, and more. Page 99 doesn’t – and one page can’t – describe the richly varied means by which Robeson shaped his sense of self and politics through song during the greater part of the first half of the twentieth century, and in the process how he revised many of the practices of concert singing, which the book details, but the page is a window into how Robeson sang plurally, and how his listeners variously heard-understood his vocality.
--Marshal Zeringue
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