Singing Early Music

Helena Daffern and Professor David Howard

Modern performance culture promotes distinct genres of singer within ‘classical music’. As a result of the early music revival of the 1950s/60s a new breed of singer was established, performing repertoire written from pre-17^th – 19^th century. Whilst the revival was in part a scholarly initiative, it was lead heavily by instrumentalists, and the singers that adopted the early repertoire as their specialty originally did so with no academic incentive. Questions of historical performance practice that encompass the revival were and continue to be mainly concerned with which notes to sing and when, rather than with technically how to sing them. Despite this, there is now a strongly established characteristic vocal sound and technique connected to early music. The origins of the ‘early music’ voice will be discussed both in terms of the intentions and historical motives of the performers involved in the early music revival, and the strong objective to be perceived as sounding different to a contemporary opera singer. The ‘early music’ voice is considered against that of the contemporary grand opera singer drawing on the findings of a pilot experiment which examined 2 groups of singing students, one specialising in early music, the other working towards a career in opera. The results show differences between the groups in their use of vibrato, closed quotient values and spectra. The implications of these preliminary findings are discussed in terms of historical performance practices, current fashions and modern perceptions of historical vocal techniques.

Helena Daffern - Intelligent Systems Research Group, Electronics and Music Departments, University of York, York, England, YO10 5DD. hd502@york.ac.uk
David Howard – Intelligent Systems Research Group, Electronics Department, University of York. dh@ohm.york.ac.uk