Abstract
This thesis considers the relationship between the social contexts of early music singing and the aesthetic agendas of anglophone performance practice researchers. It has a particular focus on the continuing legacy of the Anglican choral tradition and its importance as a training ground for early music singers, researchers and conductors.Its principal research outcome is a text-driven analysis of twenty-four chapters and articles covering music from the Medieval to the Bel Canto periods written by vocal performance practice researchers. This analysis collates a database of statements endorsing particular ways of singing, attitudes and other competencies that the sampled researchers deem appropriate for early music. These statements were rationalised into a collection of 3069 recording units which were categorised according to the aspect of vocal practice to which they pertained. This quantitative enquiry prompted qualitative discussion of the various aesthetic priorities of the sampled researchers.
The analysis reveals a commitment to text primacy (scribalism) to be a fundamental motivator of researchers’ aesthetic priorities. This principle extends beyond the implications of sung text and incorporates any kind of text with which researchers come into contact, most notably written historical evidence. In the case of Anglophone researchers, I propose that this commitment to text primacy takes the form of a reverence inherited from the scholastic Anglicanism of Oxbridge chapel environments. This reverence is reflected in the kinds of ethereal, disembodied voices researchers like to hear, voices emulating choirs of angels and functioning as neutral transmitters of logos. Crucially, this text reverence is unconcerned with and unable to account for the somatic eminence of sung sound.
I contrast this position with that of contemporary holistic vocal pedagogy which acknowledges the body’s critical role in singing. By side-lining the body and prioritising the sung texts and written evidence, researchers ensure that the conversation about what constitutes successful early music singing is had on their terms. Wilfully ignoring the bodily experiences of singers is a means by which researchers and conductors with HIP credentials commodify them as vehicles for the realisation of disembodied vocal aesthetics. In this sense, the aesthetic agendas of the sampled researchers can be seen to have ethical implications. My concluding chapters explore some of these implications, with a particular focus on gender.
The influence of text reverence on the critical reception of today’s early music singers is considered in a case study chapter on eighteenth-century opera. This chapter examines both historical and modern descriptions of singers and reveals how reverence for historical evidence has allowed sexist vocal paradigms to continue in the modern age. These paradigms afford male singers a wider expressive range than female singers and permit male-dominated scribal elites to control the discourses surrounding singing, ensuring their continued validation as taste makers. These observations are examined in conjunction with research documenting women’s continued struggle for vocal autonomy in both the private and professional spheres.
An anonymous interview with an industry-leading soprano considers these conclusions in the context of the early music workplace. She reports encountering early music conductors, notably those running their own groups, who use their status to commit acts of sexual harassment and abuse. She notes that these conductors often seek to exact musical control over singers’ bodies, a tendency which frequently manifests itself in attempts at sexual control and associated predatory behaviours. She reports encountering these kinds of conductors ‘only in the early music business’ and offers examples of enjoyable working relationships with conductors in other contexts. Her testimony is considered against the backdrop of recent high-profile convictions of early music and choral conductors for crimes of a sexual nature. I propose that the phallo-scribal agendas which endorse men of letters as early music tastemakers may well contribute to this culture by prioritising the scribal over the somatic (words over bodies) and thus also texts over people.
I conclude by asking how we might resist the clearly oppressive and potentially abusive aesthetic and social norms which continue to exert a hold over early music singing. I propose that more collaborative relationships between singers, researchers and conductors would create both more aesthetically interesting and ethically comfortable results. These relationships would necessarily involve an acknowledgement of the importance of the body to sung sound, allowing singers and their somatic experiences to contribute fully to discussions around the aesthetics of early music singing.
I also contend that the classical music business generally and the early music business specifically harbour some of the most tenacious assumptions and prejudices that prioritise texts over bodies and thus ‘works’ over people. I intend to use the findings of this thesis to challenge these assumptions and the status quo that they uphold.
| Date of Award | 1 Jul 2021 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (Supervisor) |