Fanny’s and Barbra’s Funny Girl Voices

• In Event: Listening to Jewish Music in the Americas: Re-conceptualizing Jewish American Music Research in the 21st Century

Abstract

Jewish. New York. Female. Queer. These are just several of the many identities ascribed by critics and academics onto the physical bodies of acclaimed performing artists like Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand. Such assessments surface from Jewish studies scholarship in an array of subfields that delight in the dissection of the spectacle of “the Jew’s body” (see Sander Gilman [1991], Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, ed. [1992], Stacy Wolf [2003], Linda Mizejewski [2014]). But can these same intersectional identities be found in Brice’s and Streisand’s voices? And have these performers made agential decisions to render these identities audible for their audiences?

This paper seeks to locate intersectional identity and performative agency within the singing voices of Brice and Streisand, two Jewish female performers so famous as to be constitutive examples of their respective generations. To do so, I cross-compare the recordings of “I’d Rather Be Blue”, “Second Hand Rose”, and “My Man” from the surviving Vitaphone reels of Brice’s part-talkie film My Man (1928) and the DVD of Streisand’s Funny Girl (1968). By way of virtuosic stylistic and technical vocal performance, Brice and Streisand communicate particular ethnic, geographic, and gendered self-understandings for audience consumption. While recognizing, as Wolf [2003, pg. 251] does, that the voice and body are “extraordinarily mutually dependant in musicals”, my aim is to restore the importance of the sonic and aural to a scholarship that heretofore has focused primarily on the physical and visual. I will show that an untapped inroad into both Brice’s and Streisand’s agential personas lies in the sonic space between these two women, one of whom seeks to posthumously portray the other.

Author

• Samantha Madison Cooper, New York University