Maria Callas’s Waistline and the

Organology of Voice

 
nina sun eidsheim
university of california, los angeles

During my first few weeks at music conservatory, my voice teacher asked who my
favorite opera singer was. “Maria Callas,” I replied. My teacher was surprised, but
commented only that Callas had an “unusual voice.” At that time, Callas existed for
me simply as a wonderful artist, a singer whose recordings I played on endless re-
peat. But as I began to learn about the Callas legend, I came to understand what my
teacher had meant. Callas’s voice gives rise to highly polarized reactions, from devo-
tion to disgust. As an artist, Callas was judged as “temperamental,” “out of control,”
unreliable due to her walkouts; while Callas-the-voice was considered “mesmeriz-
ing,” “terrible,” ruined through “ferocious dieting,” and also “out of control.”1
During my decade and a half of work on voice, body, and materiality, I have been
continually reminded of Callas’s case and its resonance with how we listen to female
operatic voices today.
The case, filled with judgmental language about Callas’s body weight and ques-
tions of control, voice, and character, was seemingly ripe for a feminist critique that
addressed her voice and body head-on.2 Over the years I’ve made a number of at-
tempts, but an effective way to address these issues had escaped me. The imagery
and language available are saturated with the very body- and gender-related power
structures I sought to address. Limited by such discursive structures, I wondered
how I might marshal the necessary critical-analytical resources.3 For example,
how could I refer to women’s bodies and voices occupying the public sphere, and
making artistic demands, without also re-inscribing belief systems that had been
in place for thousands of years? Within the concepts and vocabulary that are cur-
rently available, women find themselves the object of the gaze of assessment and
criticism. They are also continuously assessed for vocal and non-vocal bodily
sounds. While singers are allegedly judged on the basis of their vocal perfor-
mance, for female singers this judgment is intensely applied in the visual as well
as the sonorous realm.4
However, a renewed interest in organology over the last few years, in the form of
what some have called “critical organology,” offers a new inroad into considering

The Opera Quarterly Vol. 0, No. 0, pp. 1–20; doi: 10.1093/oq/kbx008

# The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
2 | nina sun eidsheim

the body and its materiality outside self-perpetuating dogmatic language.5 This
might seem like an unusual approach given that the voice has not traditionally
been an object of organological study: the voice is often referred to as an “instru-
ment” but has not been given the same consideration as (other) musical instru-
ments. Considering the voice from a material point, we may think of it as a
feature that is tangential to breathing (lungs), keeping lungs clear of foreign ob-
jects (vocal folds), and chewing and swallowing (teeth, tongue, and palates). The
organs involved in these activities as well as singing include the lips, teeth, hard
and soft palate, tongue, uvula, glottis, and lungs. The shift to thinking about
voice as only one of many functions of the organs involved may offer a frame-
work within which to develop a vocabulary, concepts, and perspectives that can
help us to move laterally, engaging materiality in a different linguistic and con-
ceptual register. Applied to voice and beyond, critical organology can indeed be
considered a mode of thought.
Specifically, applying the methodology and mode of thinking afforded by criti-
cal organology to voice helps us examine the explicit connections drawn between
body shape, size, and vocal sound. Without such a framework, it can be challeng-
ing to realize how often we instrumentalize the voice. Rather than offering a his-
torical treatment of Callas, in this article I first draw out the main points of the
public discourse around Callas’s voice and body; second, engaging Susan
Bordo’s work on gender and the body, I consider how these narratives about the
voice and body rely on ancient and contemporary sentiments about the female
body, rather than on current knowledge about the live, performing voice; and
third, I examine common assertions about Callas’s voice through what I conceive
as a critical organological approach to voice research.6 In doing so, I seek to con-
tribute to a discourse that will separate voice and body from gendered disparities;
find a way to deal head-on with voice as a material, vibrational practice; and illu-
minate where and how vocal vocabulary and concepts are defined by millennia
of gendered misconceptions.

Maria Callas: The Voice

Maria Callas’s (1923–1977) voice has been both celebrated and criticized, and her
life was thoroughly examined and commented on as well. While she lived, Callas
was often discussed in the tabloid pages, and now she is the subject of numerous bi-
ographies. People in her life personally profited from her story.7 She was cross-
examined in public regarding personal life decisions, professional integrity, and
emotional soundness.8 And, despite diverse perspectives on her voice and artistry,
Callas still looms large to this day. Part of her glamour was her transnational iden-
tity. Callas was born to Greek immigrants in the United States. When she was a
 maria callas’s waistline and the organology of voice | 3

teenager her family moved back to Greece, and Callas’s mother pushed her daugh-
ter toward a vocal career.
In 1941 Callas debuted in Franz von Suppé’s Boccaccio at the Royal Opera House
in Athens, Greece. Her breakthrough came with her title performance of Amilcare
Ponchielli’s La Gioconda at the Arena di Verona in Italy (1947), and her American
debut came in Norma at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1954, celebrated worldwide
after its success. The 1950s saw Callas performing throughout Europe, the United
States, and South America. Her signature roles were Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma and
Amina (La sonnambula); Giuseppe Verdi’s Violetta (La traviata); Gaetano Donizetti’s
Lucia di Lammermoor and Anna Bolena, Luigi Cherubini’s Medea and Giacomo
Puccini’s Tosca. In 1965, at the age of forty-two, she sung her last staged perfor-
mance. In 1974, together with tenor Giuseppe di Stefano, she gave a series of con-
certs in Europe, North America, and Japan. Three years later, Callas passed away in
Paris.
In addition to public interest in Callas’s storied diva-like behavior, two life events
came to dominate the narrative paradigm about her voice: her weight loss and her
passionate affair with Aristotle Onassis. Not unlike her professional voice itself,
these dramas sustained interest by pivoting on the edge between control and its
lack. On the one hand, the celebration of Callas’s voice is summarized in a few
words by the record producer Walter Legge: her voice was “luxurious” and her “tech-
nical skill phenomenal,” in her upper register, she “flash[ed] . . . a sword-like power”
the sound of which is “a legend.”9 Moreover, she offered: “the most difficult fiori-
ture, there were no musical or technical difficulties in this part of the voice which
she could not execute with astonishing, unostentatious ease, her chromatic runs,
particularly downward, were beautifully smooth and staccatos almost unfailingly ac-
curate, even in the trickiest intervals. There is hardly a bar in the whole range of
nineteenth-century music for high soprano that seriously tested her powers.”10 On
the other hand, after Callas’s substantial loss of about eighty pounds in the period
between 1953 and 1954, the very same qualities which had been praised as “sword-
like” by critics such as Legge were criticized by others as “shrill.”11 While Legge de-
scribed a beautiful, technically brilliant voice that could fill an unusually diverse vari-
ety of vocal roles, Callas was often also criticized for the lack of such qualities. After
her weight loss, her voice was condemned: a note produced “effortlessly and solidly
one night might come out shrill and ragged three nights later.”12 Callas’s voice has
been heard as “tortured,” and as having an “unnatural strain.”13 Roland Barthes fa-
mously described her voice as possessing a “tubular grain, hollow, with a resonance
that is just a bit off-pitch”; Raymond Ericson, in his New York Times obituary, re-
membered it as “steely,” “shrill,” “velvety,” “edgy” and “man-made”; and one of her
contemporaries, the American soprano Evelyn Lear, dismissed it as “wobbly,” a “hol-
low, breathy sound,” and “just plain ugly.”14 Callas’s vibrato was also frequently said
to have changed due to her weight loss. However, the story is more complex than
4 | nina sun eidsheim

this linear, before-and-after narrative suggests. Complaints about Callas’s vibrato

date back to her 1941 debut in Boccaccio. Already, at this nascent stage, she was criti-
cized for vocal “wobble”: “a distinct fluctuation of the tone, a variation of the pitch,
an undulation.”15 And, as John Ardoin has observed, “her top could be precarious in
her bulky days just as it would be rock solid when she was even slimmer.”16
While biographer Rupert Christiansen writes that the weight-loss idea is “ab-
surd . . . muscular control, not bulk, is the key to healthy vocal production,” the
broad narrative arch with which most people are familiar tells the story of the fall of
an uncontrollable voice and singer, and details the diva’s increasingly unreasonable
and demanding character.17 Thus, despite reviews in the range from glowing to criti-
cal both pre- and post-weight loss, the narrative fashioned around Callas is one that
frequently appears in relation to women: a lack of discipline, control, and sacrifice.
We can see that these accusations were applied to Callas throughout her career—
even though, while she did play with feminine body ideals, she also had the mental
and emotional discipline to preserve her voice. As she dated Onassis and was subse-
quently accused of an inability to control her emotions or observe social protocol,
Callas was judged as forfeiting her voice in favor of other desires. Painted as insatia-
ble, “the voice of the century” was vilified for having sacrificed art, and her ability to
realize composers’ works, for her own vanity and personal appetites.18

Hungry Voice
It is clearly beyond the scope of this article to seek to judge the merit or decline of
Callas’s voice and its possible correlation to relative body weight, or even to dispute
more general assessments. However, what is clear from reading through numerous
descriptions of Callas’s voice is that something is at play beyond its “objective”
sound.19 Even a 1985 piece in this journal offered commentary on her level of attrac-
tiveness and weight and observed that “what changed the least through her life,
even at her thinnest, were her thick legs and heavy ankles.”20 Feminist philosopher
Susan Bordo offers a useful approach to Callas by thinking about “the body as a car-
rier of culture,” an idea which is intensified through naturalistic ideas of the female
voice and its location within the body.21 As Linda and Michael Hutcheon write:
“While earlier reviews had certainly discussed vocal difficulties, now these problems
were always linked to her weight loss. . . . What is evident, years later, is that Callas
was used by both sides of the debate to prove their points: she was the evidence
needed either to prove the correlation between bodily size and power/quality of
voice or to demystify that linkage completely since, to some, her voice actually im-
proved with the bodily change.”22 While a vocal artist such as Callas throws the
Hutcheons’ careful commentary about voice and body into relief, their observations
also extend to voices and bodies generally.
 maria callas’s waistline and the organology of voice | 5

Iconic singers are heightened carriers of culture. As representatives, these sing-

ers become idealized versions of the various roles on offer. That is, not only is Callas
herself measured and perceived in comparison to the iconized version of herself,
but so are female opera singers en masse.23 Thus, as an object of cultural analysis,
opera offers an entry into the exaggerated embodiment of gender stereotypes, and
so shows us the effects of culture on narratives of heterosexual gender dynamics,
the female form and communication, and conventional limits on the expression of
female power. Indeed, through its exaggerated aesthetic, opera generally, and opera
icons specifically, allows us to capture aspects of voice and body within a broader cul-
tural landscape—aspects to which we have otherwise become numbed.24
Examining Callas through a critical organological lens, then, this article offers
interventions not only in opera and voice studies but also in gender studies. In do-
ing so, I look to Bordo’s important work on eating disorders, which is recognized
for its understanding of women’s bodies as text and as image. Thus, this article’s ap-
plication of Bordo’s analytical framework to Callas extends Bordo’s oeuvre to con-
sider liveness, performance, and sound.
Bordo’s body-as-carrier-of-culture concept helps focus vocal organology. It sug-
gests that the vocal body, the vocal apparatus, and indeed the vocal sound never al-
ready exist, but are always produced and performed within considerable cultural
constraints and affordances. When the fields of opera, gender, and voice studies are
combined through the framework of vocal organology, they provide an analytical en-
try point that can account for the systematic devaluation of both Callas’s body and
many other women’s bodies, an attitude which we can trace back to early Western
thought. As Bordo observes, “The body as animal, as appetite, as deceiver, as pris-
oner of the soul and confounder of its projects: these are common images within
Western philosophy.”25 “But what remains the constant element throughout histori-
cal variation,” she continues, “is the construction of body as something apart from
the true self (whether conceived as soul, mind, will, creativity, freedom . . .) and as
undermining the best efforts of that self. That which is not-body is the highest, the
best, the noblest, the closest to God; that which is body is the albatross, the heavy
drag on self-realization.”26 The questioning of Callas’s voice is arguably ignited be-
cause in her voice we hear the body. And, because in that sound she is heard to have
dragged the voice from the position of “not-body” and away from “highest, the best,
the noblest, the closest to God.” Extending Bordo’s astute analysis of textual and vi-
sual data to lived and sonorous female experience, we can think about the body as
an albatross in relation to Callas. In the narratives constructed around her, even as
she was celebrated as a body icon and a model for others, her body’s “drag on self-
realization” of the voice was projected onto questions regarding the soundness of
her decision-making in terms of her body, voice, and soul.27
6 | nina sun eidsheim

Celebration of Callas’s voice was matched, if not overtaken, by scrutiny of it.

After her infamous weight loss, gossip about how she had lost the weight and how
she kept if off abounded. While Callas herself insisted that she had achieved both
goals by eating healthily—salad and chicken were mentioned—others alleged that
she had intentionally ingested a live tapeworm and refused treatment for it.
Another rumor insisted that Callas limited her diet to a special pasta, the “physio-
logic pasta” manufactured by Rome’s Panatella Mills pasta company. This assertion
was met with a lawsuit from Callas, which she subsequently won.28 According to
Bruno Tosi, the president of the International Maria Callas Association, Callas did
have treatment for worms (possibly acquired through her fondness for raw steak).
Nonetheless, he insisted that her weight loss was the result of a diet based on con-
suming iodine, another practice that would call her soundness into question, as (at
least according to Tosi) it may have resulted in neurological damage.29
Audiences’ and critics’ obsession with Callas’s body extended to what she ate,
didn’t eat, or even thought about eating. She was said to consume only steak tartare
and other raw meat, and it was noted that she continuously collected recipes while
traveling, “lifting” recipes from “famous cooks in hotels, writing them on scraps of
paper and stuffing them into her handbag.” Yet, according to Tosi, these “were for
food she herself would never eat.” “Writing down these recipes was a vicarious plea-
sure because she rarely allowed herself to taste any of them.”30 Callas’s personal
cook made and served these recipes at her dinner parties, but “Callas ate only a few
morsels. She rarely drank wine, but liked champagne because it was less calorific,”
The Guardian reported.31 The public’s obsession with her body produced a curious
dichotomy between her voice and her physicality, to the point where soprano Evelyn
Lear and others concluded that her charismatic physical presence was more impor-
tant than her vocal art, and thus “seeing her was far more important than hearing
her.”32
The conversation about Callas’s body and voice pivoted on the question of her de-
gree of control of both. That is, while she clearly showed the ability to control her
own body weight, this capability was undermined by ridicule regarding her weight-
loss method and speculation about her food choices. For example, William Weaver
makes an assessment regarding the edge between control and animalistic reflexes
when recounting the following anecdote:

The butterscotch sundae was placed in front of her. Primly, she took the tiniest
spoonful and made a great show of pushing the dish over to me, at her left. A
near-diabetic, I am forbidden sweets, so I also took only a token spoonful; but I left
the dish where it was. As the lively conversation flowed around us, I saw a quasi-
surreptitious hand move toward me, then those expressive, tapering fingers slowly
drew the dish away and, without another word, the sundae was consumed.33
 maria callas’s waistline and the organology of voice | 7

Reading Weaver’s anecdote, I do not take it only as his personal appraisal that for
Callas the distance between full control and no self-control is miniscule, and that
what may appear to be self-control is gone merely a moment later. I take it as envoic-
ing a broadly shared judgment of Callas. Furthermore, as an opera singer’s art is the
epitome of self-control in areas from practice and lifestyle to actual vocal execution,
commentary about her food intake, such as Weaver’s, and by extension the broader
public’s, amounts to commentary about her overall artistic excellence.
This slippage between observations regarding Callas’s life choices and com-
ments on artistic choice, and on whether the choices she made were “good” or
“bad,” is epitomized by Catherine Malfitano, quoted in Opera News:

There was some wonderful demonic thing that worked inside of her to fuse the el-
ements of technique and expression and transcend the [roles she assayed.] But I
think she burned herself up in her own pursuit to grab and embrace life, to taste
everything. I don’t think anyone can survive that kind of drive. She’s an inspiration
to everyone that follows her, but she’s also a kind of cautionary tale for artists, so
they understand that you risk a great deal when you’re that hungry.34

Malfitano suggests that Callas did not have the willpower to lead a life of discern-
ment that could fully serve the art of opera. Indeed, Malfitano posits that, as a bu-
limic is directed by cycles of binging and purging, Callas sacrificed her voice and its
servitude to art because of her lack of self-control.
Like the culture around gender, body, and control considered by Bordo, even if
Callas did not directly experience an eating disorder (we don’t know), the public nar-
rative about her features eating disorder-type fears and obsessions regarding her
body (how is weight lost, how can weight be kept off, what is eaten, etc.). Malfitano
holds Callas up as a “cautionary tale for artists” who are too “hungry” and who want
“to taste everything.” Using food and eating metaphors when presenting Callas as a
“cautionary tale” places the issue of control within a binary dynamic, one that sug-
gests that some people exhibit full self-control while others have none. Arguably be-
cause of the many ways in which hunger is marked as a state or feeling to which
women should be indifferent, it is a marked emotion for many. The dread of that
emotion drives many women. Drawing on Ellen West’s descriptions of her “con-
stant desire for food. . . . Hunger, the dread of hunger, pursues me all morning. . . .
Even when I am full, I am afraid of the coming hour in which hunger will start
again,” Bordo points to a series of potential consequences of that fear of hunger. 35
Considering the image of “hungry” with the desire “to taste everything” beyond
food, Bordo contemplates it at the level of metaphor: “hungering . . . voracious . . .
extravagantly and excessively needful . . . without restraint . . . always wanting . . . al-
ways wanting too much affection, reassurance, emotional and sexual contact, and at-
tention. This is how many women frequently experience themselves, and, indeed,
8 | nina sun eidsheim

how many men experience women.”36 For Bordo, then, controlling women’s appe-
tite for food is a way to control female hunger beyond food. Thus, as evidenced in in-
terviews and public discourse, Callas was put under considerable pressure to
conform to a certain type of femininity in relationship to marriage and power.
When Callas expressively called for “public power, for independence, for sexual grat-
ification,” her character was questioned.37 For example, within a few minutes, dur-
ing an interview at her own home, interviewer Mike Wallace managed to offer a
barrage of invasive statements and questions: “Perfectionists are terrible to live
with. Are you . . . alone?” With crossed arms, he continues: “Obviously you have had
great success in your professional life. Your private life has perhaps not been as suc-
cessful”; “there have been walk-outs and sicknesses and affairs and anger and jeal-
ousy, that’s drama”; “you mean you are a man eater?” Counting on his fingers: “You
discarded a husband, and you no longer have your lover. And, your job . . . you are
making a tour, but . . . that is not the compelling thing it once was. And, one won-
ders, what is at the core of your life? What is at center of your life, Madame
Callas?”38 In reply to this, Callas responded with a calm smile.
As Callas’s character, degree of self-control, and discernment were questioned
head-on, so was her vocal quality. As one health club advertisement analyzed by
Bordo reads, “You don’t just shape your body [and we can add “voice”]. You shape
your life.”39 The language used to question Callas’s voice is strikingly similar to that
which describes expectations about women’s bodies. “My standards,” Bordo herself
confesses, “have not come to favor thinner bodies—rather, I had come to expect a
tighter, smoother, more contained body profile.”40 “The ideal here is of a body that
is absolutely tight, contained, ‘bolted down,’ firm: in other words, a body that is pro-
tected against eruption from within, whose internal processes are under control.
Areas that are soft, loose, or ‘wiggly’ are unacceptable, even on extremely thin
bodies.”41
The language and sentiment Bordo reports on is strikingly similar to that which
people use to describe Callas’s voice and overall character. Her voice, Robert Levine
assesses, was “wobbly,” “frequently awful—a note flapping in the wind, strident and
outside of the correct pitch, which could wind up anywhere.”42 Mezzo-soprano
Giulietta Simionato said about Callas’s voice: “The physiological machinery just
wasn’t there . . . C was frequently a fearsome hurdle.”43 “There was no more elastic-
ity [of the diaphragm] . . . the note . . . danced, because the diaphragm could no lon-
ger support it. When you lose the elasticity, there is nothing more you can do.
Neither rest nor study. Nothing.”44 Walter Legge recalls, “During the Forza record-
ing the wobble had become so pronounced that I told her if we dared publish the re-
cords Angel and EMI would have to give away a seasickness pill with every side,
which we could not afford.”45 The question of Callas’s voice is really a proxy for audi-
ences’ and critics’ questioning of her character, degree of self-control, and social con-
formity. And, as the story goes, Callas’s lack in this arena was audible vocally: her
 maria callas’s waistline and the organology of voice | 9

questionable character and needy body are evident in a “hollow” and “tubular”
voice.
While Callas conformed to gendered body ideals, critics and audiences viewed
her as a vocal transgressor. Moreover, these transgressions were largely articulated
through timbral performance.46 The vast majority of opinion reasoned that what-
ever flaws could be found within Callas’s voice could be traced back to her weight
loss. Sopranos Renée Fleming and Deborah Voigt have connected voice change to
weight loss, but more to the attendant overall changes in body relationship, psychol-
ogy and self-image; only a few insiders do not tie Callas’s body weight to her vocal
quality. Following up on how critics and audiences alike instrumentalized Callas’s
body by forwarding their thesis of a one-to-one relationship between her weight and
vocal timbre, we may consider the basic question through an organological lens:
how does weight loss influence voice quality and ability? Based on my engagement
with the literature in opera studies, voice studies, and musicology, I believe there is
insufficient knowledge to address this specific question at present.
The voice is transdisciplinary: as voice scientist and co-author of the influential
Foundations of Voice Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Voice Production and
Perception Jody Kreiman observes, “by its very nature . . . [voice] partakes of the phys-
ical, the biological, the cognitive, and the social, all of which interact with each
other.”47 While we do not require expert knowledge in medicine, biomechanics, en-
gineering, developmental biology, linguistics, and so on to carry out an informed
analysis of voice in opera, when making causal statements about the relationship be-
tween body composition and voice quality and ability, it does make sense to look to
disciplines that study these areas explicitly. Taking such small steps may aid in, as
Kreiman puts it, “elucidating how these bodies of work might eventually combine
as parts of a single discipline of ‘voice studies’.”48 And, as mentioned above, within
opera studies and music-related fields, a materially grounded approach to voice
study may locate its historical precedents in instrumental investigations that draw
on the material and acoustical sciences. Doing so, vocal inquiry may find in critical
organology a productive perspective and methodology.

Vocal Organology
We recall that Callas’s critics were most concerned with pitch, vocal range, vibrato,
timbre, vocal support, and register, and that most vocal commentators opined that
her voice had changed drastically due to weight loss. The unresolved tension within
Callas-related music criticism is that, on the one hand, she is criticized for what is
understood as an instrumentalized dimension of her art, what I think of as the
voice-as-instrument thesis (the one-to-one relationship between body size and vocal
quality; her lack of technical ability to hide vocal register breaks; praise or criticism
for her degree of vocal control; praise or criticism for her degree of adherence to
10 | nina sun eidsheim

performance practice and realization of the work). Yet, on the other hand, her vocal
ability is understood within a mystical framework which I think of as the demonic-
voice thesis (“there was some wonderful demonic thing that worked inside of her”)
situated beyond the pale of rigorous inquiry.49 Because this fundamental tension
has not been resolved, no single line of Callas criticism has been followed through
to some logical resolution.
If we were to pursue the dominant critical line, the voice-as-instrument position
that states that Callas underwent dramatic vocal decline as a result of weight loss,
we would need to earnestly consider what the scientific and medical literature says
about the question of body size, weight, and voice quality, and the extent to which
that would apply to Callas. However, to my knowledge, no scientific studies were
carried out with Callas during her lifetime, and her vocal physiology was not investi-
gated with respect to the qualities for which she was criticized. Having consulted
the general literature on these issues, I have found that, while voice can serve as a
sign regarding the size and weight of the person, there are also many exceptions;
the voice, in general, is not stable, but changes over time as part of developmental
and aging processes.50
While it would arguably be more challenging to engage the demonic-voice the-
sis, we may more readily pursue the voice-as-instrument line of inquiry formed in
response to Callas’s voice. However, such an inquiry must be conducted in a thor-
ough and systematic manner, beyond deep-seated myths regarding female bodies
and voices and the issue of control. Of course, thinking more broadly about the mu-
sical sphere in which opera singers find themselves, the question of control is not
reserved for the singer. The issue of control cuts across the dynamic between singer
and voice teacher, coach, and accompanist; singer and conductor; singer and com-
poser, and so on. However, here I want to engage the premise of voice-as-instrument
while maintaining the critical-analytical dimension that such a project requires.
If we think beyond musicology and opera studies, what do we know about the
extent to which the voice signals body size and strength?51 And, conversely, what do
we know about the possible correlation of body size and strength to vocal character-
istics? As we’ve seen, while the voice can serve as a clue to body size and strength, it
also possesses the important ability to give a “false” signal in terms of these features.
How is physiology related to human vocal sounds? How are the corporeal and sono-
rous elements of the voice connected and correlated, and how might these functions
connect to body fat percentage, if at all? How does the voice serve as a sign of body
size, and how does the voice change over a lifespan? Finally, how do the various vo-
cal issues brought up in relation to Callas—range and pitch, vibrato, timbre, vocal
support, and register—correlate with corporeal clues and changes?
Within bioacoustics, human vocalization falls within the general category of ter-
restrial mammal behavior. For terrestrial mammals the most common vocalization
is generated by air moving from the lungs through the closed glottis, vibrating the
 maria callas’s waistline and the organology of voice | 11

vocal folds that sit within the larynx.52 This results in phonation that is filtered by
the supralaryngeal vocal tract. As the name indicates, the supralaryngeal vocal tract
is located above the larynx, and is comprised of the pharyngeal, oral, and nasal cavi-
ties. Vocal production therefore takes place in two stages, creating “the fundamental
frequency (denoted as F0) that, together with its harmonics, we perceive as voice
pitch, and formant frequencies (or simply formants) which are resonances of the vo-
cal tract and affect our perception of vocal timbre,” two strong nonverbal characteris-
tics of the human voice.53 The understanding that, while they are perceived as a
compound, these two nonverbal characteristics—the fundamental and formant
frequencies—are largely independent of one another in terms of production has
been especially salient to research on vocal communication of body size and poten-
tial threat a vocalizer may pose.
The question, then, is whether the human voice can provide reliable indexical in-
formation about the person speaking in general, and in particular about the size of
that person’s body, their age, and their gender. Has the human voice been shaped by
natural selection to reveal such physical traits? It would certainly be socially advanta-
geous to signal and perceive such information. On the one hand, evolutionarily,
physical size and strength are good indictors of fighting abilities as well as health,
and these factors influence the process of mate selection.54 Indeed, work within
ethological literature suggests that, to a certain degree, listeners may estimate size
and strength based on vocal sounds.55 But this correlation is seen specifically in re-
gards to the general size of a person, such as tall or short. It does not address “size”
in reference to a person’s body fat, as do the types of assumptions made about
Callas’s voice and body weight.
Specifically, what can we infer from the stature of the human body about the vo-
cal tract, and hence the likely vocal fold length, laryngeal tract size, pitch range, and
vocal formant frequency? The mammalian larynx and vocal tract typically parallel
the overall growth of the rest of the body. Vocal folds with larger mass vibrate at a
slower and relatively deeper vocal pitch than smaller vocal folds. However, vocal
folds transform beyond their starting mass through lengthening and tension mech-
anisms, which adjust pitch.56 In terms of formant frequency, the vocal tract often
parallels a person’s length (a longer vocal tract creates a lower formant); however, as
we’ve all experienced, there are many exceptions to this tendency. But voice pitch is
not a reliable predictor of body size within sexes. Additionally, in comparing wom-
en’s and men’s voices, the reason for differences between their voices may not be di-
rectly related to body size. For example, testosterone exposure during puberty,
which drives vocal fold size, is more significant than body size.57 Humans are also
capable of voluntarily altering their vocal pitch, which is common during everyday
speech production or singing, and may potentially disguise or exaggerate cues to
size.58 In summary, as Katarzyna Pisanski and Gregory Bryant have observed, “as
neither fundamental nor formant frequencies account for very much of the
12 | nina sun eidsheim

variation in body size and shape among same-sex groups of adults . . . and listeners
are only moderately successful in accurately estimating body size from the voice, it
appears that vocal indicators of size in humans are weak.”59
In light of these findings regarding voice and body size, it is pertinent to keep in
mind that conscious and unconscious signals evolve in a context of perceived
benefit for both vocalizer and listener.60 Therefore, we can infer that emotional ex-
pressions also evolve in this way, and emotional expressions can therefore be consid-
ered signals with “adaptive benefits for the senders.”61 While most voice research
outside the humanities—including bioacoustics and human behavior and
evolution—studies non-artistic vocalizing populations, manipulation of emotional
expression for the purpose of providing a signal is even more poignant in the case
of professional singers such as Callas: outliers who create their art by performing ex-
traordinary vocal emotional expression for audiences.
In regards to the general question of the relation between body size and vocal ap-
paratus, we know that there can be some correlation, but that exceptions and the hu-
man ability to manipulate the voice do not allow for a strong or reliable indicator.
Indeed, based on what we know at this point, we cannot rely on strong and unques-
tioned generalized patterns of correlation, let alone causation, between body size
and vocal sound. However, what do we know about the specific areas for which
Callas was criticized (range, pitch, vibrato, timbre, vocal support, and register), and
which perceived flaws were believed to be caused by her weight loss?
“Vocal support” refers to the effectiveness and ease with which a singer controls
both vocal phrase and pitch. Broadly speaking, we can think about this in terms of
the degree to which singers are able to control the pace of their exhalation. When a
person inhales, as with a filled balloon, the lungs increase in size due to the air that
fills them. As the lungs are located within the torso, all the elements surrounding
them are displaced by the lung size increase. Situated within the lower torso, the di-
aphragm is a dome-shaped muscle that separates the thorax from the abdomen. It
is integral to the process of inhalation and exhalation. In a relaxed position, the dia-
phragm sits in a high dome shape, while in a contracted position the dome shape is
much lower, close to flat. Singers do not have direct, but only indirect, control over
the diaphragm. In summary, it is through inhaling and inflating the lungs that the
diaphragm contracts, and through expanding the ribs, the diaphragm contracts and
flattens and the lungs are automatically inflated.
Vocal support takes place through intricate coordination between the different
intercostal muscles, which indirectly affects the diaphragm. The intercostal mus-
cles, then, aid in control of respiration in order to produce perfectly formed
phrases.62 Because a vocalizer habituates to vocalizing in correspondence with his
or her physicality, he or she will have to adjust after any substantial physical
changes.63 However, beyond such general rehabituation, which would be true for
weight loss as well as weight gain, the literature does not seem to offer any reason
 maria callas’s waistline and the organology of voice | 13

why weight loss itself would affect vocal support. Given this, what are “the breaks”
in vocal register for which Callas was criticized, and for which her weight loss was
blamed? For that matter, what is vocal register? The term is adapted from the no-
menclature register as it is used in reference to church pipe organs. But whereas, in
reference to the organ, “register” describes integration of different pipes for the crea-
tion of specific sounds, the mechanism of vocal registers is not fully understood in
relation to the voice. Broadly speaking, vocal register is defined as a perceptually dis-
tinct region of vocal quality, a uniform characteristic that is maintained despite
changes in pitch and loudness. Historically as well as contemporarily, scientists and
singers alike have failed to reach a uniform understanding regarding the identifica-
tion, exact regions, and labeling of the registers.64 However, most typically, the voice
is divided into four distinct registers. The set of labels includes (from lower to
higher pitch) chest, middle, head, and falsetto (men) or whistle (women); pulse,
modal, loft, and whistle registers; or simply the numbers one through four. Vocal
register is not clear from a mechanical perspective, and the division has varied
across historical records.65 Rather, as Marek Fric and his colleagues put it, “vocal
register is a perceptual category, which divides the whole voice region in the compo-
nent register by the voice quality.”66 “But, as with the organ, voice registers can still
be considered from either an acoustical or a physiological point of view. In regards
to voice register production, Fric and his colleagues distinguish three main factors
that influences the configuration of the larynx: ‘phonatory settings (a mechanism of
the oscillation of the vocal folds); vocal tract resonance (formants setting influence
resultant spectrum); interaction of the subglottal and supraglottal resonances with
the vocal fold oscillations’.”67 For example, using videokymography—“a high-speed
optical method which provides good presentation of irregular vibration or fast
events”—Fric and his colleagues were able to observe the distinct changes that take
place in the vocal folds’ vibratory behavior. Considering these physiological changes
from a perceptual point of view, vibration behavior was heard as “jumps of pitch”
and as noticeable vocal quality changes.68 In regards to controlling register change,
Fric and his colleagues observed that classically educated singers mix adjacent regis-
ters, their registral changes are perceived as smoother, and the changes are “difficult
to be perceived in this case.” In people who do not sing on a regular basis and sing-
ers of some popular styles of music, abrupt register change occurs frequently.69 In
contrast, as Wayne Koestenbaum assesses (as do many others), “Most singers of
Callas’s caliber hide the register break. Callas couldn’t. The naked break shows her
to be, though a genius, a bit of a freak—delightfully self-embarrassing, unable to
control herself in this tiny matter on which bel canto art depends.”70 But what if we
consider Callas’s approach to register change from a scientific point of view? Given
her training and overall command of her voice (a command that is not disputed by
her commentators), it is quite possible that the registral changes were intended.
However, the answer might also lie somewhere within a middle ground, the result
14 | nina sun eidsheim

of both decreasing ability to mix her registers and intentional aesthetic choices. But
there is nothing in the literature on registers that suggests that weight loss per se
causes abrupt and uncontrollable registral shifts.
In summary, investigation within the material and medical realms does not sup-
port the narrative that Callas’s weight loss led to vocal problems. However, for some-
one coming to this research as a humanist, there is a fundamental issue involved in
fusing these two investigative approaches. Undertaking voice inquiry from a mate-
rial point of view, Jody Kreiman observes, “The literature on voice can be seen histor-
ically, as a tale of two broad kinds of research, one emphasizing the specific (a
humanistic approach), and one seeking to derive general principles (a scientific ap-
proach).”71 Employing material and medical research—the aim of which has been
to investigate general vocal physiology, production and perception—to consider the
discourse around Callas’s voice is far from a perfect approach. However, instead of
discounting other fields’ methodologies, findings, and conclusions, I believe, with
Kreiman, that it is “the complex relationship between these two approaches [that]
makes voice research a particularly promising target for truly interdisciplinary stud-
ies and integrative research.”72 Instead of dismissing generalities, to me, Kreiman’s
article exemplifies an effort to build an integrative research program that includes
work with sometimes opposing views, and suggests some ways to consider the ma-
terial dimensions of voices such as Callas’s based on a wide range of inquiry into
voice.73
What can a critical organology of voice offer? At this point, despite excellent exist-
ing research on voice in an astonishing diversity of fields, there are still many un-
known variables when it comes to the most basic areas of vocal production and
perception. And, even if the hypothetical day arrives when we fully understand vocal
production and perception and the complexities of their cultural and historical con-
texts, none of our analytical tools and conclusions will be immune to the epistemol-
ogy, power dynamics, and values that enabled their production in the first place.
Thus, my intent for a critical organology of voice is not necessarily to exhaus-
tively explain a particular vocal case. Instead, my first goal is to strip away layers of
the broader dynamics within which voices are perceived—such as gendered body
ideals—so that we may begin to consider the largely unexamined thesis at the core
of Callas’s reception: weight loss causes vocal decline. In the same way that applying
critical organology to the case of Callas clarifies the cultural and gender biases of the
meanings made of her body and voice, such an approach can also help to illuminate
the ways in which other historically and culturally situated attitudes direct vocally-
based meaning-making, including (mis)conceptions about race, class, and ethnicity.
As I see it, joining the insights of critical inquiry and the material realities of vocal
production and perception to cultural meaning-making paves the way for a stronger
theoretical and practical understanding of voice.
 maria callas’s waistline and the organology of voice | 15

Thus, Callas herself might already have given the best clues to understanding
the changes in her voice. In a number of interviews prior to her 1973–74 “come-
back” tour, she calmly observes that she will not sing with the same voice with
which she sang twenty years ago, and makes comparisons to the body’s aging pro-
cess during that same timeframe.74 The interviewer, Barbara Walters, however, in-
sistently returns to her question about Callas’s vocal decline and mental stability. In
a string of questions and statements, Walters demonstrably doubts Callas’s integrity
and artistic excellence: “don’t you think you are asking too much [of opera compa-
nies]?” Recounting what the so-called public thinks about Callas, Walters summa-
rizes: “Maria Callas is broken-hearted. She gave up her career. She didn’t marry
him. He married somebody else.” And, the final assessment recounted by Walters
twists the already inserted knife: “You have been praised nearly universally as an ac-
tress, but your voice has not been that complimented.” Callas, who had remained
calm throughout the excruciating interview, responds slowly: “Nobody is as they
were twenty years ago. Not you. Not me.”75
We know that the voice undergoes drastic changes from infancy through child-
hood. But what is less commonly reflected on—although it is observed perceptually
when a listener makes an educated guess about a speaker’s age—is the physical ag-
ing of the voice. While the vocal change that takes place during the teens, most nota-
bly in males, is often conceived as the final stage of voice maturation, the vocal
apparatus continues to adapt and change as the entire body does throughout the hu-
man lifetime. The larynx position, for example, continuously descends well beyond
the teens, and ossification of the larynx is typically only complete by the age of sixty-
five. The shifting position of the larynx naturally changes the length of the vocal
tract, and thus influences the formant profile. Moreover, cartilage ossification in the
ribcage makes its movements more rigid and negatively affects respiration. The
lungs are progressively less flexible because collagen fibers become cross-linked
and, again, more rigid. General muscle degeneration affects every aspect of singing,
from the relative efficiency of thinning the vocal folds to decreasing fine motor con-
trol over the respiratory and phonotory systems. These changes affect aspects from
vocal timbre to registral shift and vibrato.76 In short, all of these well-known age-re-
lated changes do affect the areas for which Callas was criticized.
While, again, it is beyond the scope of this article to offer any conclusive judg-
ments regarding Callas’s voice per se, or regarding the relationship between her
weight loss and voice quality, it seems likely that natural aging is a crucial aspect that
is left out of the oft-recounted story of her vocal decline. Instead, the public story of
Callas’s voice is tethered to the plot of female hunger, a state that “figures unspeakable
desires for sexuality and power.”77 Where bodies are a “site of struggle,” Callas’s seem-
ing non-conformity to “docility and gender normalization” is punished by dismissing
her vocal artistry as all “charisma”78—an “electrical” presence and “supreme acting,
unforgettable acting.”79 It is worth noting that such observations also discount
16 | nina sun eidsheim

Callas’s technical abilities and artistic agency. Walters summarizes this attitude toward
Callas in a taunt disguised as a rhetorical question about the press’s coverage: “When
the notices are better for the personalities than the voice, is that a concern?”80
***
The investigative framework of critical vocal organology is not only about forwarding
research on voice per se. It is also about turning feminist thinking about text and im-
age to the sounded, lived voice, and turning voice inquiry into a critical thinking tool
more broadly. Investigating the body, which is burdened by millennia of social prac-
tices, is one small step in the process of unsticking the female (and the raced, classed
and so on) body and voice from their construction and existence within a social and
cultural sphere that can only comprehend them from within its own set of resources
and hierarchies. In my assessment, critical vocal organology does so not by avoiding,
but by addressing head-on, the sociocultural material dimensions of voice.
Recall that Callas’s public image is divided by popular discourse. She is admired
and glamorized for her loss of weight, and for adhering to the body ideals many un-
derstood to drive that transformation. At the same time, her voice is still scrutinized.
Bordo describes society’s disgust over wiggling flesh and female desire itself. This is
precisely the language used about Callas’s voice: it is framed as created by an over-
weight, uncontrolled body, and as delivering a “terrible wobble,” sounding “hollow,”
leaving Callas herself “hungry.” Transferring textual and image-based discourses
about women’s bodies to women’s live and performing voices only reinforces the
sentiments that created this metaphoric cluster of excess. Using this same language
passively reinforces the sentiments and power structures upon which this discourse
is constructed, and which it aims to support. To change the discourse about Callas’s
and others’ voices, we need to reboot the language, concepts, and analytical frame-
work through which we understand voice.
Contributing to an organology that expands the current humanistic understanding
of voice based on current knowledge, interacts cross-disciplinarily, and contributes to-
ward formulating questions is one of the ways in which we can break the cycle of re-
inscribing unexamined attitudes about voice. While still under-developed, even at this
nascent state, a critical organology of voice that draws on both material-oriented studies
and critical theory suggests a complementary arsenal of analytical tools that have the
capacity to address how myths about the female body and voice are projected onto vo-
calists. For example, in the case of Callas, it is the myth of the feminine body as out of
control, as ruining her voice, that directs the narrative and, hence, perceptions of her
voice, career, and person. While further study into Callas’s voice and its perception will
offer more detailed answers, my goal, with both this article and by adding to the larger
project of a critical organology as a mode of thought, is to show that to examine dis-
courses around voice is truly to bear witness to the dynamics of power as they are ex-
pressed through the body, while also retaining a focus on singers’ agency.
 maria callas’s waistline and the organology of voice
notes
Nina Eidsheim is Professor of Musicology at
UCLA and Associate Dean for Academic
Mentoring and Opportunity. She is the author
of Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as
Vibrational Practice (Duke, 2015), Measuring Race:
the Micropolitics of Listening to Vocal Timbre and
Vocality in African-American Popular Music (Duke,
forthcoming); co-editor of the Oxford Handbook
of Voice Studies (forthcoming); and recipient of
the Mellon Foundation Fellowship, the Cornell
University Society of the Humanities Fellowship,
the UC President’s Faculty Research
Fellowship, and the ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp
Fellowship.
Deep gratitude is extended to Emily Dolan
and Arman Schwartz for reading and providing
feedback, as well as to two anonymous reviewers
for Opera Quarterly for their insightful comments.
1. These quotes can be found in the following
texts: Eric Myers, “The Lady Vanishes,” Opera
News 70, no. 4 (2005): 40; Antony Tommasini,
“A Voice and a Legend That Still Fascinate; Callas
Is ‘What Opera Should Be’,” New York Times,
September 15, 1997. Accessed April 1, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/15/arts/a-
voice-and-a-legend-that-still-fascinate-callas-is-
what-opera-should-be.html; Ibid. This is soprano
Evelyn Lear’s observation about Callas’s vocal
quality in regard to her wobble, reported in James
Whitson, “The Callas Legacy,” Opera News 70,
no. 4 (2005): 22; Stephen E. Rubin, “NOW IT’S
DO-RE-MI; FAT,” New York Times, February 12,
1978, 42; Tommasini, “A Voice and a Legend
That Still Fascinate.”
2. Beyond numerous trade biographies,
Callas has of course been treated in much
interesting scholarship, and she has often been
the foil for queer aesthetic, film and opera theory,
and the body in performance, respectively
(Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat:
Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire
[New York: Poseidon Press, 1993]; Michal Grover-
Friedlander, “The Afterlife of Maria Callas’s
Voice,” Musical Quarterly 88, no. 1 [Spring 2005]:
35–62; Michael and Linda Hutcheon, Bodily
Charm: Living Opera [Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2000]).
3. Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of
Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91,
no. 5 (1986): 1053–75; Donna Haraway, “Situated
Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist
Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99.
4. Not only female opera singers are judged
in the visual realm, but females and non-white
| 17
opera singers are exposed to a different level of
expectation and attending scrutiny than are those
who present white male bodies.
5. Emily I. Dolan, “Perspectives on Critical
Organology,” Newsletter of the American
Musical Instrument Society, 43, no. 1 (2014):
14–16; John Tresch and Emily I. Dolan, “Toward a
New Organology: Instruments of Music and
Science,” ORISIS 28 (2013): 278–98. I do not
employ Tresch and Dolan’s four categories (the
instrument’s “material disposition”; “mode of
mediation”; place within a “map of mediation”;
and the “teleos” of its activity) (284). Adapted
from Michel Foucault’s “analysis of the self’s re-
lation to the self,” they seek to take “steps toward
a new taxonomy—a classificatory scheme for or-
dering the long series of scientific instruments
and the long series of musical instruments” (284;
285). While deeply inspired by this work, I only
retain the general gist of considering the materi-
ality of the instrument as acted out within
cultural forces. In addition, Brian Kane’s work on
voice, especially, “The Model Voice,” Journal of
American Musicological Society 68, no. 3 (2015):
671–77, has been deeply influential to my thinking
about voice and materiality.
6. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight:
Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
7. See, for example, her estranged
mother’s biography: Evangelia Callas, My
Daughter Maria Callas (New York: Fleet Pub.
Corp., 1960).
8. See, for example, the questions posed
during Barbara Walters’s interview with Maria
Callas for Today (NBC), Stanhope Hotel
(New York, April 15, 1974), accessed July 1, 2016,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v¼TjBAqTAYSdk.
9. Walter Legge quoted in Nicholas Gage,
Greek Fire: The Story of Maria Callas and Aristotle
Onassis (London: Pan Books, 2001), 10.
10. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, On and Off
Records—A Memoir of Walter Legge (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1982), 198.
11. Raymond Ericson, “Obituary: Maria Callas,
53, Is Dead of Heart Attack in Paris,” New York
Times, September 17, 1977, accessed July 1, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/
onthisday/bday/1202.html
12. Robert Levine, Maria Callas—A Musical
Biography (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal
Publishers, 2003), 112.
13. See London Green, “Callas and Lucia,”
Opera Quarterly 14, no. 3 (1998): 66; and Rupert
18 | nina sun eidsheim
Christiansen, Prima Donna—A History
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), 327.
14. See Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice:
Interviews 1962–1980 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1981), 184; Ericson, “Obituary”
(see n. 11); and Evelyn Lear, quoted in Whitson,
“The Callas Legacy,” 21.
15. Levine, Maria Callas, 112.
16. John Ardoin, The Callas Legacy—The
Complete Guide to Her Recordings on
Compact Disc 4th ed. (London: Duckworth,
1995), 80.
17. Christiansen, Prima Donna, 308.
18. This sentiment is expressed in the
posthumously released CD compilation Callas,
The Voice of a Century (EMI Classics, 1998).
19. Not only in the case of Callas is such an
endeavor moot. As I argue in Sensing Sound,
there is no objective sound of the voice.
Specifically, I write: “This lived body is
embedded in, and subject to, cultural forces at a
foundational level. It is this body, whose
perceptual system has been ‘tuned’ by a given
culture, that is the perceiving conduit of
sound. . . . What we hear depends as much on
our materiality, physicality, cultural and social
histories, as it does on so-called objective mea-
surements (decibel level, sound-wave count, or
score). . . ” (Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening
as Vibrational Practice [Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2015], 115–16).
20. John Ardoin, “Maria Callas: The Early
Years,” Opera Quarterly 3, no. 2 (1985): 7.
21. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 287.
22. Michael and Linda Hutcheon, Bodily
Charm: Living Opera (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2000), 140.
23. Thus, while there is a phenomenological
difference between those who heard Callas live
and those who have heard Callas only via
recording, I posit that the imaginary of the voice
is so powerful that the discourse around Callas
also strongly influenced the experience of those
who heard her live.
24. Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat; Michel
Poizat, The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure
Principle in Opera (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1992).
25. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 3.
26. Ibid., 5.
27. “The cost of such projections to women is
obvious,” Bordo summarizes, continuing: “For if,
whatever the specific historical content of the
duality, the body is the negative term, and if
woman is the body, then women are the negative,
whatever it may be: distraction from knowledge,
seduction away from god, capitulation to sexual
desire, violence or aggression, failure of will, even
death.” Ibid., 5.
28. Matthew Jacob and Mark Jacob, What the
Great Ate: A Curious History of Food and Fame
(New York: Three River Press, 2010), 196.
29. Bruno Tosi, quoted in Barbara McMahon,
“Revealed: Callas’s Secret Passion for Recipes
She Refused to Taste,” The Guardian, July 24,
2005, accessed July 1, 2016, https://www.
theguardian.com/world/2005/jul/24/italy.arts
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Lear quoted in Whitson, “The Callas
Legacy.”
33. William Weaver, “Remembering Callas:
Some Confessions of a Fan,” Southwest
Review 77, no. 4 (1992): 489.
34. Malfitano quoted in Whitson, “The Callas
Legacy.”
35. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 146.
36. Ibid., 160.
37. Ibid., 171.
38. Interview with Maria Callas, Mike Wallace,
60 minutes, Paris, February 3, 1974, accessed, July
1, 2016 http://www.mariacallasmuseum.org/
video.htm.
39. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 196.
40. Ibid., 188.
41. Ibid., 190–91.
42. Levine, Maria Callas, 112.
43. Quoted in Ardoin, The Callas Legacy, 8.
44. Quoted in Gage, Greek Fire, 36–37.
45. Quoted in Schwarzkopf, On and Off
Records, 200–201.
46. In fact, even Koestenbaum’s beautiful and
very impactful work of thinking about queer
aesthetics through Callas rests on the very notion
of complete transformation with injury
(Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat, 134–53).
Particularly poignant is his observation, “Every
body is a civil war. Callas sang the war” (Ibid.,
146).
47. Jody Kreiman, “Defining and Studying
Voice Across Disciplinary Boundaries,” The
Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies (London:
Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
48. Ibid.
49. Catherine Malfitano quoted in James
Whitson, “The Callas Legacy.”
50. From birth through puberty, the vocal
apparatus grows in size and matures in strength
and ability to execute detailed movement. With
aging and attending hormonal changes, the vocal
apparatus undergoes gradual ossification. This
leads to lessened flexibility, hence vocal range.
Based on these material conditions, female and
male voices often sound similar in infancy and
 maria callas’s waistline and the organology of voice
childhood, as well as in old age. In these phases
of life, gendered vocal differences are largely in
the way in which a vocalizer uses his or her voice,
as opposed to in the vocal sound itself.
51. To date, my own work has considered how
to answer this question in two ways, and I am
now embarking on a third, related approach.
First, I’ve addressed the fashioning of the vocal
body—the voice as carrier of culture—through
formal and informal vocal pedagogical practices,
and through engaging with questions of how so-
cial and cultural ideologies form these practices.
Second, I’ve considered the materiality and phys-
ics of sound, and their implications for the ex-
change of voice and music. A third dimension
that I would like to engage is developmental and
material approaches to voice, perception, and
acoustics, in order to begin to build an interdisci-
plinary voice studies. This is largely a question re-
garding engagement between and impact across
fields.
52. Glottis is the space between the vocal folds
that is “closed” when vocal folds are drawn
together and “open” when the vocal folds are
apart.
53. For a more thorough overview of the
current understanding of the way in which the F0
is “controlled physiologically,” see Jody Kreiman
and Diana Sidtis, Foundations of Voice Studies: an
Interdisciplinary Approach to Voice Production and
Perception (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011),
59.
54. See literature review by Katarzyna Pisanski
and Gregory A. Bryant, “The Evolution of Voice
Perception,” The Oxford Handbook of Voice
Studies (London: Oxford University Press,
forthcoming).
55. Ibid.
56. Harry Francis Hollien, “Vocal Fold
Dynamics for Frequency Change,” Journal of Voice
28 (2014): 395–405; Ingo Titze, “Vocal Fold Mass
Is Not a Useful Quantity for Describing F0 in
Vocalization,” Journal of Speech, Language, and
Hearing Research 54 (2011): 520–22.
57. M. Harries, S. Hawkins, J. Hacking, and
I. Hughes, “Changes in the Male Voice at
Puberty: Vocal Fold Length and Its Relationship
to the Fundamental Frequency of the Voice,”
Journal of Laryngology and Otology 112, no. 5
(1998): 451–54.
58. L. Anolli, and R. Ciceri, “Analysis of the
Vocal profiles of male seduction: From Exhibition
to Self-disclosure,” Journal of General Psychology
129, no. 2 (2002): 149–69; Hughes, S. M., S. D.
Farley and Rhodes, B. C. “Vocal and Physiological
Changes in Response to the Physical
Attractiveness of Conversational Partners,”
| 19
Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 34, no. 3 (2010):
155–67; P. J. Fraccaro, B. C. Jones, J. Vukovic, F.
G. Smith, C. D. Watkins, D. R. Feinberg et al.
“Experimental Evidence that Women Speak in a
Higher Voice Pitch to Men They Find Attractive,”
Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 9, no. 1 (2011):
57–67; J. D. Leong omez, J. Binter, L. Kubicova, P.
Stolarova, K. Klapilova, J. Havlıcek, et al. “Vocal
modulation during courtship increases proceptiv-
ity even in naive listeners,” Evolution and
Human Behavior 35, no. 6 (2014): 489–496; K.
Pisanski, V. Cartei, C. McGettigan, J. Raine, and
D. Reby, “Voice Modulation: A Window into
the origins of Human Vocal Control?”
Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20, no. 4 (2016):
304–18.
59. Pisanski and Bryant, “The Evolution,”
forthcoming.
60. J. Maynard Smith and D. Harper, Animal
Signals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
61. Pisanski and Bryant, “The Evolution,”
forthcoming.
62. As a side note related to vocal support,
tearing or other trauma to the diaphragm, as was
suggested happened to Callas due to weight loss,
is extremely rare. As the figure shows, the
diaphragm is well protected within the rib cage.
Diaphragmatic rupture typically results from
sharp/severe or penetrating trauma, which,
generally speaking, is a rare occurrence.
63. And, from the performer side, Renée
Fleming, quoted in Whitson, reflects: “I have a
theory about what caused her vocal decline, but
it’s more from watching her sing than from
listening. I really think it was her weight loss that
was so dramatic and so quick. It’s not the weight
loss per se—you know, Deborah Voigt has lost a
lot of weight and still sounds glorious. But if one
uses the weight for support, and then it’s sud-
denly gone and one doesn’t develop another
musculature for support, it can be very hard on
the voice. And you can’t estimate the toll that
emotional turmoil will take as well. I was told, by
somebody who knew her well, that the way Callas
held her arms to her solar plexus [allowed her] to
push and create some kind of support. If she
were a soubrette, it would never have been an is-
sue. But she was singing the most difficult reper-
toire, the stuff that requires the most stamina,
the most strength” (Whitson, “The Callas
Legacy.”)
64. For an interesting discussion regarding
register in a historical perspective, see Nathalie
Heinrich, “Mirroring the Voice from Garcia to the
Present Day: Some Insights into Singing Voice
Registers,” Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology 31,
no. 1 (2006): 3–14.
20 | nina sun eidsheim
65. See Leon Thurman, Graham Welch, Axel
Theimer, Carol Klitzke, Addressing Vocal Register
Discrepancies: An Alternative, Science-based Theory
of Register Phenomena, Second International
Conference of the Physiology and Acoustics of
Singing National Center for Voice and Speech, 6–
9 October, Denver, Colorado (2004). Accessed
December 1, 2016. http://www.ncvs.org/pas/
2004/pres/thurman/ThurmanPaper.htm.

66. Marek Fric, Frantisek Sram, and Jan G.
Svec, “Voice Registers, Vocal Folds Vibration
Patterns and Their Presentation in
Videokymography,” Proceedings of the 33rd
International Acoustical Conference, EAA
Symposium, Acoustics High Tatras, January
2006. Accessed April 1, 2016, http://zvuk.hamu.
cz/vyzkum/dokumenty/Lit147.pdf. James Q.
Davies addresses the historiography of
perception, aesthetics and pedagogy in regard to
vocal register from a musicological point of view.
While a seamless timbre performing “one voice”
is the current aesthetic ideal, it hasn’t always
been so. Davies notes, “There was in fact a time
when the best performers, the most celebrated
singers in Europe, cultivated many voices—head
voices, chest voices, feigned voices, flautino voi-
ces, white voices, falsetto voices, half voices,
mixed voices, medium voices, nasal voices, inspi-
rated voices, covered voices-as many voices, nu-
ances, expressive registers, and colors as
possible” (Romantic Anatomies of Performance
[Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014], 126).
67. Fric et al., “Voice Registers,” 1.
68. Ibid., 4.
69. Ibid.
70. Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat, 146.
71. Kreiman, “Defining and Studying Voice.”
72. Ibid.
73. Jody Kreiman and I have already begun this
type of work. See Nina Eidsheim, Measuring Race:
The Micropolitics of Listening to Vocal Timbre and
Vocality in African-American Music (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, forthcoming); Nina
Eidsheim and Jody Kreiman, “Jimmy Scott and
the Problem of Gender in Singing,” invited paper,
presented at the 170th Meeting of the Acoustical
Society of America, Salt Lake City, Utah, May 23–
27, 2016.
74. For dates and program for this tour, see
“Farewell Concerts,” accessed July 1, 2016,
http://www.mariacallasmuseum.org/_farewell/
farewell.htm.
75. Walters, interview.
76. This information in this paragraph is
adapted from Kreiman and Sidtis, Foundations,
116–18.
77. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 183.
78. Zachary Woolfe, “A Gift from the Musical
Gods,” New York Times, accessed April 1, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/arts/
music/what-is-charisma.html
79. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 184; Ericson,
“Obituary.”
80. Walters, interview.