Early Music 2013 Wistreich 22 6

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Early Music, Vol. , No. 1 Te Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.doi:./em/cas, available online at www.em.oup.com

Richard Wistreich and John Potter

Singing early music: a conversationWhen John Potter and Richard Wistreich oundedtheir ensemble Red Byrd in they announcedthat they believed that the point o singing musico the past is to illuminate the present. his wasan attempt to distil something o the conversationsand ideas they had been exchanging or a numbero years, while each worked in various dierentearly and contemporary music ensembles. For thisspecial edition oEarly Music they publish a recent

conversation (conducted this time largely by email)about singing, the early music movement, and highereducation.

R: When Early Music hit the news-stands for the first time in , you were free-lancing in London with some of the seminal earlymusic groups, including David Munrows EarlyMusic Consort, putting into practice his occasion-ally weird ideas about historical singing. You alsojoined Ward Swingles new Swingle II, which set

extraordinary new standards for precision, polishand breadth of repertory. Meanwhile, I was join-ing Kings College Choir in Cambridge and begin-ning my apprenticeship in another parallel world ofbizarre vocal authority. How lucky I was to arrivein London four years later when the experimentalyears of the first early music revival had not quitecome to an end (I was fortunate to join MichaelMorrows Musica Reservata for its final year) andthe commercial power of the record industry hadnot yet established its stranglehold on so much pro-

fessional activity in the UK in the performance ofmusic from before in ways that soon afterwardsbegan to dominate the lives of most rank-and-filemusicians.

So, you and I are, for better or worse, veteransof something that still doggedly hangs on to thename of the early music movement. Certainly, thesense of early music as some sort of collective and

progressive endeavour (I will avoid adding otheradverbial riders such as revolutionary or evenideologically driven to this descriptor), was to amajor extent what drew me to wanting to be partof its milieu in those years, just as strong a moti-vation perhaps as the intrinsic allure of the musicitself. I can remember many moments when thefeeling of running on the front of the wind whiletalking about ideas, rehearsing and performing

was so liberating by comparison with the drudg-ery of other kinds of musical experiences I hadhad in other genres, including, I have to say, quitea few in the world of new music. Your career as asinger has always included contemporary ensem-ble musicfrom Swingle II and Electric Phoenixin the s and s to the Gavin Bryars Ensembleand other solo projects now. When I look at yourrecent (post-Hilliard Ensemble) activities involv-ing early musicincluding the Dowland Project,Being Dufay, and Voices and Vihuelas, not to men-

tion some of our own attempts at various kinds offlight with Red Byrd over the past yearsI getthe impression that, whatever you may feel nowabout the idea of an early music movement (andperhaps well come to that later), you are still moti-vated by a similar sense of adventure and creativity,and that early music is actually new music. AmI right?

John: Ive never thought of it in quite those terms,but youre quite rightthe sense of adventure is a

crucial part of it. Weve both had music and singingin our bones from childhood, and I suppose (alittle arrogantly, perhaps) we took it all very muchfor granted. hen suddenly it was the s and sand we got heavily involved in both early musicand the vocal avant garde. hey seemed to be twosides of the same coin, and it was the almost visceralexcitement of engaging with the (to us) musical


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unknown that was common to both. Yes, yourerightearly music was also the new music; verysimilar to the progressive rock movement that washappening at the same time. And all three musicsprog rock, early music and the avant gardewerein a sense revolutionary; all those involved hada real stake in the process and unlike our rather

disciplined musical childhoods no one told us whatto dowe had to invent not only the result but thecomplete process. I suspect we were never eithertrue early musicians nor proper avant-gardistsitwas the bits that were common to both that did itfor us then. But theres one significant aspect of earlymusic that made it for me the true new music: theavant garde, however challenging and experimental,was (just like the music wed been brought up on)the composers (or the conductors) music. In earlymusic the composers were all dead, so they couldnt

own the music like a living composer. here were norules or conventions, and trying to figure out what ascore meant could be an intoxicating collaborativeexperience. You realized that unlike normal musicyou couldnt just perfect an interpretation becauseyou had no idea of what you were aiming at. hatwas the real revolutionary moment for me: the ideathat there could be an infinite number of possibleperformances, some good, some less good, but eachone different from the one before and valid in itsown right. It was then only a short step to realizing

that the roles of composer and performer weremuch more blurred before the th century. You cantell Stravinsky or Schoenberg are great composersjust by looking at their scores; Monteverdis musicdoesnt work that wayit needs performers to bringit to life. And the further back you go, the moreequal becomes the creative relationship betweencomposer and performer.

Richard: his resonates with a second rush ofexcitement, when it began to dawn on me that the

overwhelmingly score-based historical musicol-ogy I encountered as a performerwhich, for bet-ter or worse, was (and remains in some quarters) theself-appointed parent and guardian of early musicperformancemight well be both challenged as thedominant epistemology and then redirected in thelight of the knowledge that I (and many others) hadacquired in the process of our own experience of

actually having prepared and performed so muchof it. I felt that a lot of the music-making I foundmyself involved with was still stuck in what you sorightly signal as characterized as a poverty-strickenparadigm of the performer as interpreter of musi-cal scores, rather than as co-creator or re-creator.In the late s, after more than ten years on the

road with various ensembles, and while continuingto work pretty well full time as a jobbing freelance,I rather nervously took myself back to university totry to make good at least some of my ignorance ofthe history of Renaissance music and music theatre.My motivation for this academic return was, per-haps, a realization that, notwithstanding my goodfortune to have started in the early music tradeunder the guidance of some notable challengers oforthodoxy, whose innate heterodoxy appealed tome as I sought to shake off the shackles of the nega-

tive aspects of an Oxbridge collegiate training (andhere I would single out Andrew Parrott as one ofthe most significant for me at the time), I still couldnot quite see the point of performing music eitherjust in order to reveal and demonstrate historicalcorrectness, however hedged around by disclaimersand provisionalities such claims might be, or sim-ply to make a new case for the existing canon andits expansion to embrace lots more works. Not thatI mean to suggest that there was not much heartfelt,meticulously researched, and sometimes inspiring

and ear-opening music-making on the way, onlythat its inherent claims to supra-audible authorityseemed so often unfounded in genuine experimen-tal process.

John: I remember a time (after a Red Byrdgig in the Birmingham Early Music Festival)when we were both prodded into coming out asmusicologists. We were ambushed! We once drewup a list of academic terms that wed never use in ourown writing (I think it included epistemology...).

I also engaged with critical theory while doing myPhD, and although I enjoyed it as an intellectualchallenge (and still do) it didnt seem to haveanything much to do with real musical life. Idperformed well enough before I came across allthose words ending in -ology. I also think of myselfas a historian, and I also find abstract historicalmusicology too often divorced from the likely


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historical reality. he early music movement hasnever had much connection with the shambolic,messy and just plain confusing nature of historicalreality (which is where the real excitement is forme). he composers intention charade was anintellectually lazy concept that enabled musicians,record companies and audiences to bypass history

altogether. here have, of course, been examplesof more productive collaborations betweenmusicologists and performers, particularly wherethe materials themselves are so open in the firstplace that there is no alternative to an experimentaland highly creative approach. Red Byrds Parisianorganum project with Mark Everist (whose story istold from Marks side elsewhere in this issue) springsto mind. It didnt help, either, that institutions haddiscovered the non-concept of excellence at aboutthe same time (so much easier to be excellent in

determining what Bach or Monteverdi mighthave wanted rather than speculate on what theyactually got). Its a shame that early music washijacked by musicology, making so much of it thepreserve of an elite (who, as you imply, were toooften barking up the wrong organological tree). Itsno coincidence that theres very little sign of LeanMethodology in early music: Lean Musicology,Lean Pedagogy? Slim it all down and make sure itall has performative value.

Richard: Not content with more than years ofseemingly indefatigable performing and encourage-ment of other musicians, including many years ofservice in a series of international super-groups thathas involved, besides all the live performance, incal-culable hours waiting around in airports, probablythousands of hours in recording studios and freez-ing churches, as well as plenty in libraries, you havealso been (and continue to be) a prolific researcherand writer about singing in the past and the present,not least in your latest book A history o singing,

written jointly with Neil Sorrell.

One thing thathas characterized your developing analyses of theconcept of singing as both a technical and a socialphenomenon ever since Vocal authoritythrough torecent contributions to various Cambridge Historiesand Companions, has been a deep-seated sense thatas there can never be historical singing based onevidence that predates recording, this therefore

renders the institutionalization of the teaching ofearly music either pointless or, worsedamaging tocreativity. Most recently, inA history o singing, youwrote: the history of classical singing for the lasthundred years or so has been one of stasissmall,frozen repertoires perpetuated by conservativeteaching regimes focusing on the abstract pursuit

of excellence rather than creativity. I have, likeyou, spent many recent years working in academicinstitutions, including a lengthy spell with the titleof Professor of Singing (Early Music) in a Germanconservatoire, and I can think of many reasons foragreeing with you (and a few for disagreeing).Butto put the question perhaps rather bluntly: do youthink that singing that is informed by historicalknowledge is, firstly, valid; second, can it be taught;and third, could institutions be changed in any wayto make such an endeavour possible?

John: heres no question about the validity ofhistorical knowledge: everything is informed byits past to some extent. For early musicians thequestion (for those inclined to ask it) was whatshould be recovered from the past and what leftin dignified obscurity. So the connection betweenearly music as a concept and history as realityhas always been ambivalent (to say the least). Itall begins to unravel when we try to grapple withth-century music, as early musics own ideology

and beliefs come up against the reality of the firstrecordings.

Richard: Indeedin you and I took part inthe annual three-day symposium on historical per-formance practice at the Schola Cantorum in Basel.hese events have been bringing performers andmusicologists together to debate different topics forthe past years; their proceedings are subsequentlypublished in the Basler Jahrbuch r HistorischeMusikpraxis. Quite significantly, I think, this was

the first time that the series had turned its attentionto the question of singing since the inaugural eventin (which focused solely on medieval song andthe legacy of the Studio der Frhen Musik). I sensedthat the subject had been assiduously avoided at theSchola, as it has been everywhere else where his-torical performance is taught in conservatoires,in favour of the far safer ground of questions of


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organology, musical sources, historical documents,even hand gesturesindeed anything rather thandeal with the elephant that has been hanging aroundin the early music movements room, probably eversince Mendelssohn brought in soloists from theopera house to sing in his revival of the St MatthewPassion in .

John: In my presentation at Basel, I played somerecordings of Adelina Patti, whose extravagantportamento caused the assembled companymuch amusement. Do you teach th-centuryperformance style and technique, I asked? Ofcourse we do. Does it sound like that? Of courseit doesnt, came the reply. here was a collisionbetween the expectations generated by years ofearly music, and the apparent awfulness of actualhistory. And a nagging feeling that we might have

got something wrong somewhere. he truth is weinvented the early music vocal sound based onwhat we wanted it to be like, and on the voices of asmall number of singers with particular talents. hesmall-scale, refined, straight, disciplined early musicsinging that we were used to came out of nowhere(or perhaps the head of David Munrow!): it wasntthe product of research (and you wont find anyevidence for it in the literature). Even when singersbegan to look at pedagogical sources and so on,they (we) chose to ignore those bits that didnt fit

the model we had in our heads. An entire pedagogywas developed by people who claimed to knowhow th- or th-century singing was supposedto go, but whose knowledge was based mostly ontheir own experience of the late th-century earlymusic movement, rather than an understandingof the sources. he huge success of early musicrecordings then made it impossible to go back andstart again. heres nothing wrong with the results,incidentally, its just that its misleading to use a termlike historically informed.

he earliest early musicians (like us) were self-taught, and both you and I were among those whoonce called for early music singing to be taught inmusic colleges on a par with the opera singing whichincreasingly came to dominate conservatory think-ing in the late th century. With hindsight, I thinkthis was a mistake, as the industrial approach toopera singing is now applied to early music. For

singers, conservatoires essentially remain opera fac-tories, but many now have another production linewhich claims to produce early music singers as well.hey can produce very competent performers whoall nevertheless sound rather similar (and in suchquantity that many of them wont find work). Musiceducational institutions are programmed to deliver

teaching. his is something of a paradox for thoseof our generation who werent taught, and it high-lights the fundamental difference between teachingand learning. You can teach the basics of singing (itdoesnt take long), but after that, historical singingis a matter of research. Research is learningyoucant teach it. Universities dont help either as theyseem to think that teaching and research are umbili-cally linked to each other: they arent. If institutionsare going to do more than just reflect political andfinancial realities there has to be a basic shift from

teaching to learning. hey need to become placeswhere learning is enabled by individual research,not disciplined by teaching schedules. here is arole for teachers, but as consultants perhaps ratherthan gurus.

I jumped off the academic tree in terminal frus-tration, but youve gone from being a German pro-fessor of singing to a British university lecturer to afully fledged academic professor in a conservatoire,and I cant help thinking youre going to say its allvery well for me to rant on, but you actually have to

deal with these issues at the sharp end...

Richard: In fact, I agree with most of your points.Institutions which educate musicians are in urgentneed of radical reform at just the time when thisis less likely to happen than at any moment in thepast years, because in the coming period ofdevastating attack and retrenchment in highereducation, conservatoires and universities (in theUK at least) will probably feel the need to battendown the hatches and wait for the storm to pass.

Nevertheless, the conservatoire where I teach (theRoyal Northern College of Music in Manchester)has been persuaded by the idea that the best wayto open the eyes and ears of young musicians tothe thrill of playing music from before about ,with which even today most of them have neverhad more than the most cursory contact, otherthan the odd bit of Bach (mainly because too many


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have spent their young adulthoods alone in smallpractice rooms perfecting their ability to reproducethe canon), is not to create more specialist coursesin early music and certainly not to try to persuadethem to choose historical instruments over modern.Rather, with the limited resources at its disposal,it will do its best to let the students work with as

many interesting professional early musiciansas possible and support them to make their ownexperiments and find solutions, just as they do withcontemporary music of all kinds. hus, I certainlydo not think there should be some specific,professionally definable specialism called earlymusic singer; nor would I any longer attempt totry to invent a course that would educate a youngstudent to become one (having tried for twelveyears in another conservatoire). But equally, theconcepts of opera singer or musical theatre singer

are, to my mind, other anachronisms that need to beprised out of the curriculum of conservatoires andstage schools as soon as possible.

It may be that in the decade between whenyou wrote When we talk of historically informedperformance, we are informing ourselves of an idealwhich may have had no basis in realityand ,

the idea that there can be no historical performanceis no longer just a debating point among philoso-phers of the post-modern but has truly permeatedat least parts of the professional world of perfor-mance. But this could, ironically, mean that the newidea of a valueless approach to the performanceof early music may have made it easier for musical

directors to impose their often dubiously foundedorthodoxies on new generations of young singers,who feel they must toe the line to get into payingwork and hold on to it. What worries me is that allthat self-empowerment that we gained by inform-ing ourselvesat a time when, as you rightly say, wehad no alternativewill pass young singers in con-servatoires by, as they battle to find their own voicesin what is in many ways a more deeply conservativeclassical music scene than it was in the early s.

John: Its good to hear the positive case for abroader approach to pedagogy, and lets hope itsreplicated elsewhere and does indeed generate asense of self-empowerment. In a sense, the bolshieearly music teenager has become the genteel grown-up success story. But lets hope it grows old a bitmore disgracefully.

Richard Wistreich is a singer, teacher and academic, currently Proessor and Dean o Research andEnterprise at the Royal Northern College o Music. His research interests ocus on the cultural his-tory o the voice in the early modern period; he has also published on Monteverdi. [email protected]

John Potters musical collaborators include lutenist Ariel Abramovitch, Te Dowland Project, RedByrd, the Gavin Bryars Ensemble and the composer Ambrose Field. A writer as well as a scholar,he has published our books on singing and is a ormer British Library Edison Fellow. He is ReaderEmeritus at the University o York, having lef the university in to ocus on his reelance [email protected]

www.john-potter.co.uk/red-byrd.php

J. Potter and N. Sorrell,A history osinging(Cambridge, ).

J. Potter, Vocal authority: singingstyle and ideology(Cambridge, ).

Potter and Sorrell,A history o

singing, p..

See R. Wistreich, eaching and

practising historically informed

singing: who cares?, Basler Jahrbuch

r Historische Musikpraxis, xxvi

(), pp..

J. Potter, Past perfect & future

fictions, Basler Jahrbuch r Historische

Musikpraxis, xxvi (), pp., at p..
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.john-potter.co.uk/%EF%BF%BDd-byrd.phphttp://www.john-potter.co.uk/%EF%BF%BDd-byrd.phphttp://www.john-potter.co.uk/%EF%BF%BDd-byrd.phpmailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]

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