Front Matter

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-62709-2 - The Cambridge Companion to Singing Edited by John Potter Frontmatter More information

The Cambridge Companion to Singing

Ranging from medieval music to Madonna and beyond, this is the only book to cover in detail so many aspects of the voice. The volume is divided into four broad areas. Popular Traditions begins with an overview of singing traditions in world music and contin- ues with aspects of rock, rap, and jazz. The Voice in the Theatre includes both opera singing from the beginnings to the present day and twentieth-century stage and screen entertainers. Choral Music and Song features a history of the art song, essential hints on singing in a larger choir, the English cathedral tradition and a history of the choral movement in the United States. The ﬁnal sub- stantial section on performance practices ranges from the voice in the Middle Ages and the interpretation of early singing treatises to contemporary vocal techniques, ensemble singing, the teaching of singing, children’s choirs, and a comprehensive exposition of vocal acoustics.

  is a member of the internationally renowned vocal groups The Hilliard Ensemble and Red Byrd. He is lecturer in music at the University of York and author of Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology (1998).

Cambridge Companions to Music

Instruments The Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments Edited by Trevor Herbert and John Wallace The Cambridge Companion to the Cello Edited by Robin Stowell The Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet Edited by Colin Lawson The Cambridge Companion to the Organ Edited by Nicholas Thistlethwaite and Geoﬀrey Webber The Cambridge Companion to the Piano Edited by David Rowland The Cambridge Companion to the Recorder Edited by John Mansﬁeld Thomson The Cambridge Companion to the Saxophone Edited by Richard Ingham The Cambridge Companion to Singing Edited by John Potter The Cambridge Companion to the Violin Edited by Robin Stowell

Composers The Cambridge Companion to Bach Edited by John Butt The Cambridge Companion to Bartók Edited by Amanda Bayley The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven Edited by Glenn Stanley The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten Edited by Mervyn Cooke The Cambridge Companion to Berg Edited by Anthony Pople The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz Edited by Peter Bloom The Cambridge Companion to Brahms Edited by Michael Musgrave The Cambridge Companion to Chopin Edited by Jim Samson The Cambridge Companion to Handel Edited by Donald Burrows The Cambridge Companion to Ravel Edited by Deborah Mawer The Cambridge Companion to Schubert Edited by Christopher Gibbs

Topics The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock Edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street

The Cambridge Companion to SINGING

  John Potter University of York

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

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First published 2000 Reprinted 2000, 2001 (twice)

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data The Cambridge Companion to singing / edited by John Potter. p. cm. – (The Cambridge companions to music) Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Popular traditions – The voice in the theatre – Choral music and song – Performance practices. ISBN 0 521 62225 5 (hardback) – ISBN 0 521 62709 5 (paperback) 1. Singing–History. 2. Choral singing–History. 3. Vocal music– History and criticism. 4. Performance practice (Music) I. Potter, John, tenor. II. Series. ML1460.C28 2000 782´.009–dc21 99–32948 CIP

ISBN-13 978-0-521-62225-7 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-62225-5 hardback

ISBN-13 978-0-521-62709-2 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-62709-5 paperback

Transferred to digital printing 2006

Contents

List of illustrations [page vi] Notes on contributors [vii] Acknowledgements [x]

1 Introduction: singing at the turn of the century John Potter [1] Part I · Popular traditions 2 ‘Songlines’: vocal traditions in world music John Schaefer [9] 3 Rock singing Richard Middleton [28] 4 The evolving language of rap David Toop [42] 5 Jazz singing: the ﬁrst hundred years John Potter [53] Part II · The voice in the theatre 6 Stage and screen entertainers in the twentieth century Stephen Banﬁeld [63] 7 Song into theatre: the beginnings of opera John Rosselli [83] 8 Grand opera: nineteenth-century revolution and twentieth-century tradition John Rosselli [96] Part III · Choral music and song 9 European art song Stephen Varcoe [111] 10 English cathedral choirs in the twentieth century Timothy Day [123] 11 Sacred choral music in the United States: an overview Neely Bruce [133] Part IV · Performance practices 12 Some notes on choral singing Heikki Liimola [151] 13 Ensemble singing John Potter [158] 14 The voice in the Middle Ages Joseph Dyer [165] 15 Reconstructing pre-Romantic singing technique Richard Wistreich [178] 16 Alternative voices: contemporary vocal techniques Linda Hirst and David Wright [192] 17 The teaching (and learning) of singing David Mason [204] 18 Children’s singing Felicity Laurence [221] 19 Where does the sound come from? Johan Sundberg [231]

Notes [248] Select bibliography [264] Index [279] [v]

Illustrations

1 Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (Jack Vartoogian, 1993, by permission of Shanachie Records). [10] 2 Huun-Huur Tu, throat singers of Tuva (Shanachie Records). [15] 3 Ladysmith Black Mambazo (Shanachie Records). [20] 4 Farinelli, drawn by Antonio Zanetti (Royal Library, Windsor Castle, used by permission). [91] 5 King’s College Chapel, Cambridge: the choir viewed from the screen (Nigel Luckhurst). [130] 6 Choral exercises. [155] 7 Fourteenth-century singing monks (La Bible hystoriaux, Bibliothèque Nationale MSf. fr. 159, fol. 277v, used by permission). [174] 8 Rognoni’s vocal exercises (Rognoni, Selva di varii passaggi, 1620). [189] 9 Cathy Berberian performing Stripsody (Annette Lederer, by permission of Peters Corporation). [200] 10 ‘The soul of music’ (Corri, The Singers Preceptor, 1810). [208] 11 ‘On the swelling and dying of the voice’ (Nathan, Musurgia Vocalis, 1836). [209] 12 Exercises from García (Traité complet de l’art du chant, 1847). [214] 13 Types of placing. [216] 14 Simon says . . . [229] 15 The voice organ. [232] 16 Subglottal pressure. [235] 17 Transglottal airflow wave forms. [237] 18 Frequency values of first and second formants characterising different vowel sounds. [241] 19 Spectrum contours of the vowel [u:] as pronounced by an operatic baritone singer in neutral speech and singing. [242] 20 The singers’ formant. [243] 21 Speech vs. sung frequencies. [245] 22 Enhanced partials. [247]

[vi]

Notes on the contributors

Stephen Banfield is Elgar Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Sensibility and English Song (1985), the award-winning Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals (1993) and Gerald Finzi: An English composer (1997) and is editor of the twentieth-century volume of The Blackwell History of Music in Britain (1995). Neely Bruce is Professor of Music and American Studies, Director of Choral Activities, and former chair of the Music Department at Wesleyan University. He is a composer, conductor, pianist and scholar of American music. He was on the Editorial Committee of New World Records and was the first chairman of the New England Sacred Harp Singing. He has long been associated with the works of John Cage, Henry Brant and Anthony Philip Heinrich,‘The Beethoven of America’. Timothy Day was educated at Oxford University, where he was organ scholar at St John’s College. He joined the staff of the National Sound Archive in London in 1978, and since 1980 has been Curator of Western Art Music. He is currently writing a study of one hundred years of recorded music for Yale University Press. Joseph Dyer teaches music history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is also an organist and has been a performer on historic wind instruments. He has published articles on performance practice, medieval music theory, liturgy and liturgical music, especially Old Roman chant. His special interest is the history of chant and liturgy at Rome during the Middle Ages. Linda Hirst was a Swingle Singer and a founder member of Electric Phoenix. With both groups she toured the world, leading to an enormously varied solo career which included operatic roles, large-scale new works with symphony orchestras (Osborne, Rands, Sciarrino, Ferneyhough), and many premières by Holt, Muldowney, Knussen, Weir, Harvey, Ambrosini, Lachenmann and others. She has been active in education since 1973 and has taught at Dartington International Summer School since 1978. In 1995 she was appointed Head of Vocal Studies at Trinity College of Music, London, and in 1998 she became a Fellow of Dartington College. Felicity Laurence was born in New Zealand and is a children’s choir specialist and composer. Her publications include Birds, Balloons and Shining Stars: A Teacher’s Guide to Singing with Children (1994); the children’s choral works African Madonna (1990 and 1997); My Place (1992); Frugvin Margareta (1993); Moder Jords drömmar (1998) and Friendship – The International Children’s Choir Festival for Friendship (1997). She currently teaches at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik, Trossingen, Germany. Heikki Liimola studied singing and conducting at the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, where he is now teacher of choir conducting. He conducts the Tampere Philharmonic Choir, Harju Chamber Choir, Tampere Opera Choir and Chorus [vii]

viii Notes on the contributors

Cantorum Finlandie. He is also artistic director of the Tampere International Choral Festival and has run courses for choirs both in Finland and the rest of Europe. David Mason is a pianist and teaches singing at Trinity College of Music, London, and has private studios in London and Madrid. He is voice teacher to the Rundfunkchor Berlin. His students have performed in all the important concert halls and opera houses nationally and internationally. He has contributed to the New Oxford Companion to Music and to the magazines The Singer and Opera Now. Richard Middleton is Professor of Music at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Previously he taught for twenty-ﬁve years at the Open University. He is the author of Pop Music and the Blues (1972), Studying Popular Music (1990), Reading Pop (1999), and numerous articles on popular music topics. He is also a founding editor of the journal Popular Music. John Potter is Lecturer in Music at the University of York. He has been a member of the Hilliard Ensemble since 1984 and is a co-founder of the ensemble Red Byrd. He has made more than a hundred CDs ranging from Leonin to Led Zeppelin and has contributed articles to the revised New Grove and Popular Music among many other publications. He is the author of Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology (1998). John Rosselli, until 1989 Reader in History in the University of Sussex, has worked for the past twenty years on the social history of opera. He is the author of The Opera Industry from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario (1984), Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession (1992), and The Life of Mozart (1998). John Schaefer is the author of New Sounds: A Listener’s Guide to New Music (1986; 1990), and a former contributing editor for Spin and EAR magazines. He has written numerous articles and CD booklets, as well as the biography of composer La Monte Young(Sound and Light, 1997). In 1982 he created the nightly radio program‘New Sounds’,devoted to new and unusual musics from around the world, on WNYC, where he has been director of programming since 1991. Johan Sundberg has a personal chair in Music Acoustics at the Speech Music Hearing Department at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), Stockholm. He has published extensively on many aspects of singing and summarised research in this area in Röstlära (2nd ed. 1986, translations: The Science of the Singing Voice (1987) and Die Wissenschaft von der Singstimme (1997)). As the President of the Music Acoustics Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music (1975–91) he edited or co-edited eleven volumes in a series of Proceedings of public seminars on music acoustic themes arranged in Stockholm since 1975, and he is the author of The Science of Musical Sounds. A singer himself, he is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, the Swedish Acoustical Society (President 1976–81) and a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America. David Toop is a musician and author. He has published three books – Rap Attack (ﬁrst published in 1984, now in its third edition), Ocean Of Sound and Exotica – and released three solo albums – Screen Ceremonies, Pink Noir and Spirit World. As a journalist he has contributed to The Times, The Face, The Sunday Times, The Wire, The Observer and many other publications.

ix Notes on the contributors

Stephen Varcoe is known world wide as a concert and opera singer, with a repertoire stretching from the early Baroque to the latest contemporary works. His discography of more than one hundred recordings includes songs by Schubert, Fauré, Hahn, Parry, Bridge, Grainger, Butterworth and Finzi. He has given master classes on Lieder, French and English song at many universities and music colleges. Richard Wistreich is a professional singer who specialises in the performance of pre- nineteenth-century and contemporary Western classical music. He is co-founder of the ensemble Red Byrd and appears throughout the world in concerts and operas. He is Professor of Singing at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik, Trossingen, Germany, and is doing doctoral research into the social history of singing in sixteenth-century Italy. David Wright is a musicologist working on aspects of twentieth-century music, including a range of contemporary British composers and concert life in London since 1945. He has written an outline history of Faber Music and entries for the revised New Grove and the Dictionnaire de l’Art vocal, as well as articles for The Listener, Musical Times and Tempo. He is Head of Postgraduate Programmes at the Royal College of Music.

Acknowledgements

It would not have been possible to put such a comprehensive volume together without the help of a large number of people. Among these I should especially like to thank Stephen Banﬁeld, William Duckworth, Christopher Page, John Schaefer, John Snelson and Robert White, who were generous with their advice and time. I should also like to record my gratitude to the contributors, who all responded with great enthusiasm. My son Edward Potter assisted in the compilation of the bibliography and the music examples for Chapter 12 were transcribed on Finale by Gerard Power. Penny Souster at Cambridge University Press has been tremendously sup- portive throughout, and I am very grateful for the sharp eyes of copy editor Ann Lewis. A note on pitch: the Helmholtz system is used throughout: c1 is middle C.

[x]