Michael Kinney is a PhD candidate in the Department of Music at Stanford University. His research focuses on the politics of aging in contemporary vocal aesthetics. He is the recipient of the Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship from the American Musicological Society.
SHC Project
Hearing Beyond Vocal Twilight: Aging Vocality in Contemporary American Opera Performance
Panic about the aging process has long impacted perceptions of what it means to grow old in the United States. Kinney's dissertation explores how age ideology has shaped how we listen to and evaluate singing voices in contemporary operatic performance. While it is more common to hear older voices in genres such as rock or jazz, older operatic voices are often criticized as being incapable of the high-performance voice use that characterizes operatic singing style. His project engages with voice studies, age studies, and disability studies to analyze examples of singers whose vocal longevity challenge opera’s relationship with concepts such as beauty and ability, as well as gatekeeping processes that lead to the inaudibility of aging. When older voices are given the opportunity, he argues, the borders of operatic vocal expressivity, storytelling, and even the genre itself are reshaped to become a more powerful medium of the human condition.