Representing the Early Modern Voice: Towards a Fresh Historiography

The phrase ‘historically-informed’ is a badge (usually self-awarded) worn by many musicians who perform ‘early music’ these days. But just what does it really mean, both in a certain world of musicking that embraces practitioners and their audiences, and in more scholarly historiographical terms? When it comes to singers and singing, for all that the airwaves and download sites are brimming with the sounds of confident performances of a massive range of music of the past – almost unimaginable fifty years ago – there remains a continuous uneasy stand-off between two different conceptions of the ‘historical’ in ’historically-informed’. This paper takes a sceptical view of some of the claims, and at the possibilities of alternatives.

Richard Wistreich is a historian of early modern vocality, whose research focuses on the role of the voice in the construction of identity. His published work includes two edited collections of essays about Claudio Monteverdi, chapters and articles on the cultural and technical history of singing, and a monograph, Warrior, Courtier, Singer: Giulio Cesare Brancaccio and the Performance of Identity in the Late Renaissance. His latest book is The Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music (jointly edited with Iain Fenlon). He has also had a long career as a professional singer specialising in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music, during which he made more than 100 commercial recordings, appeared in opera, solo recitals, and as a member of several seminal ensembles of the early music revival. Richard Wistreich is Professor of Music and Director of Research at the Royal College of Music in London.