Lessons in Singing: Vocal Treatises in Britain and the Writing of Voice (Professor Susan Rutherford, University of Cambridge)

How can the act of singing, that most common yet most mysterious of musical emanations, be communicated in words? That is surely the issue facing every author of a singing manual. In Britain, for example, all manner of treatises across the centuries from Pietro Reggio’s The Art of Singing (1677) to Margaret Watts-Hughes’s similarly titled The Art of Singing (1907) sought to transmit the lived experience of sound and sensation through written marks, diagrams and notation. Those marks inevitably left traces of other information. Singing manuals are not only documents of pedagogy and performance practice but indicators of ideas about singing and its role within society. Who wrote these works and why? Who read them? What conventions shaped their content and structure, and how were these influenced by changing notions of cultural identity, scientific knowledge and aesthetic trends? And what (if any) contribution did the manuals make to developing greater understanding of and proficiency in the act of singing? A clutch of examples drawn from the past two centuries illustrate some aspects of the rich, curious and at times bizarre discourse the manuals produced about the purpose and nature of singing in Britain: Gesualdo Lanza’s repeated efforts to introduce Italian techniques to British voices from his lavish, four-volume work Elements of Singing (1813) to Signor Lanza’s New Method of Teaching Class-Singing (1843); the influx of female-authored treatises beginning with Harriet Wainewright Stewart’s Critical Remarks on the Art of Singing (1836); scientific charlatanism in Justin Abner and Albert Augustus North’s Voxometric Revelation (1896); and Al Bowlly’s considered defence of the use of the microphone in popular song in Modern Style Singing (“Crooning”) (1934) and its challenge to aural codes of masculinity prevalent at that time.

Biography

SUSAN RUTHERFORD is Emerita Professor of Music at the University of Manchester, Honorary Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge, and Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. Her publications include The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre, 1850–1914 (co-editor, 1992), The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Verdi, Opera, Women (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and London Voices 1820-1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories (co-editor with Roger Parker, 2019), as well as numerous essays on voice, performance, and nineteenth-century Italian opera. She is the recipient of both the ‘Pauline Alderman Prize’ (IAWM) for research on women and music, and the ‘Premio Internazionale: Giuseppe Verdi’ (Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani). She regularly contributes public talks and programme notes on opera for various companies (including the Royal Opera House, Glyndebourne, Scottish Opera, English National Opera, Wexford Festival Opera, BBC Proms, Opera North, Opera Holland Park), and has written and presented two documentaries for BBC Radio 3. Her current project (funded by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship) is entitled A History of Voices: Singing in Britain 1588 to the Present.