Join Katherine at the Voice Foundation’s 52nd Annual Symposium on the Care of the Professional Voice. She will present a poster presentation on June 1 at 4pm on “The 21st century sfogato.” This contentious voice type has evolved across its centuries and our understanding of it continues to evolve today. Katherine explores this marginalized vocal identity with data-driven and spectrogram analysis and historical and contemporary examples of scores and singers.

This paper explores: does the sfogato exist?  Might we define the properties of sfogato writing in past and contemporary vocal compositions?  Do we benefit from an expansion of our long adherence to the Fach system and a limited perspective on female-assigned voice classification?  If not, how might we navigate the road forward to understand the unified female-assigned voice beyond historic solecisms, sexism, and racism that proponents and opponents of the sfogato have associated with these discussions? Finally, how might an embodied feminist vocal pedagogy inform this analysis?