Michael Kinney

Music

Michael Kinney is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Music at Stanford. His research focuses on the (bio)politics of aging in contemporary vocal aesthetics. His dissertation, titled “Hearing Beyond Vocal Twilight: Aging Vocalities in Contemporary American Opera Performance, explores how age ideology has shaped how we listen to and evaluate operatic sounds and bodies. His research interests also include gendered labor in both popular and classical music performance, embodiment, disability, and cultural and scientific histories of listening. His forthcoming chapter titled “Céline Dion and Cher’s Vegas Residencies: The Envoiced and Embodied Spectacle of Feminine Aging on the Vegas Stage” (co-authored with Jessica Holmes) will appear in The Possibility Machine: Music and Myth in Las Vegas from University of Illinois Press. 

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