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A History of Singing by John Potter and Neil Sorrell . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2012. 349 pp., hardback. £78. ISBN 9780521817059 .
In the introduction to this scholarly volume, the authors unequivocally state that it represents 'a history of singing, not the history'. This is not merely false modesty on their part, as the main reasons for this are clearly explained in their opening paragraphs. Firstly, the impossibility of encompassing sufficient content to represent a 'comprehensive history of all the singing in the world' is recognised. Secondly, there is also the impossibility of being at all certain of any historical detail regarding performance style or singing technique, especially with reference to vocal tone and choral blend, which must obviously be a matter for conjecture in the pre-recording era. Thirdly, the difficulty of achieving a universally agreed definition of what actually constitutes 'singing' is acknowledged. This means that there exists the additional challenge of deciding which aspects of vocal performance should be included in such a history. For the purposes of this book, a relatively inclusive definition of singing has been applied, with very interesting results.
The book is divided into three main sections. Part One is entitled 'Imagined Voices' to reflect the fact that any commentary regarding the voices of earlier singers, their vocal technique, and indeed very early repertoire, must be largely based on speculation due to the aforementioned lack of recording technology. Part Two, 'Historical Voices', describes the 'genesis of the Western classical tradition'; the emergence of the soloist and the primacy of the lyrical text; the rise of the virtuoso soloist as a cultural icon; and the '19th-century revolution', which partly came about due to the loss of the castrato voice, the rising popularity of more conventional male voices, and the changing roles of female singers in society. Part Three describes the advent of the recording studio and the revolutionary changes this ushered into the world of singing. In this section a wide spectrum of vocal styles and musical genres are covered,...