Professor Susan Rutherford

Susan Rutherford is Emerita Professor of Music at the University of Manchester, and has held Visiting Fellowships at the University of Oxford and here at the University of Cambridge. Her research is mainly driven by a curiosity about the act of vocal performance: as event, aesthetics, technique, interpretative process, gesture, collaborative engagement, cultural product and social history. Much of her earlier work focused on nineteenth-century Italian opera, performance and gender. Her current research project (funded by a three-year Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, 2016-2019) is entitled A History of Voices: Singing in Britain 1588 to the Present.  Ranging across classical, popular and religious contexts, the project investigates ideas of singing, vocal techniques, performance practice, pedagogy and critical reception, and the way the development of vocality across the centuries in Britain was shaped not only by changing musical styles but also by broader cultural and political imperatives. She is the recipient of both the ‘Pauline Alderman Prize’ (International Alliance for 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, Scottish Opera, English National Opera, Wexford Festival Opera, BBC Proms, Glyndebourne, and Opera North), and has written and presented two documentaries for BBC Radio 3.