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Speaker: Richard Wistreich (I Tatti / Royal College of Music)
Coincidentally, the year 1600 saw the publication of two lavishly produced books, each representing the voice, and both revolutionary in different ways: the score of Ottavio Rinuccini’s and Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, nowadays considered to be the first true opera, printed by Giorgio Marescotti in Florence, and Julius Casserius’s huge Anatomical History of the Organs of Voice and Hearing, printed by Victorio Valdini in Ferrara, which included engravings by Francesco Valesio of dissections of the larynx and ear rendered with unprecedented accuracy and detail. Although the very different images of the voice which these two books contain each appear to us timelessly translatable — seeing as our own voices must be at least physically identical with those of people in 1600 — in reality, both books were conceived and consumed within paradigms of vocality utterly different to our own. This includes the ways in which the operations of the voice, its social and cultural functions, and its role in the expression of identity were understood. This paradox is the starting point for an exploration of how philosophical, medical, and cultural conceptions of vocality pertaining at the time might affect how we read early modern European voice’s silent traces today.
Richard Wistreich is Professor of Music History at the Royal College of Music, London, and chair of the Advisory Council of the Warburg Institute. His research centres on the history and materiality of performance in the early modern era, with a particular focus on the voice. He is the author of Warrior, Courtier Singer: Giulio Cesare Brancaccio and the Performance of Identity in the Late Renaissance (Routledge, 2007), co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi (2007) and The Cambridge History of Sixteenth Century Music (2018) and has published extensively on the history of pre-modern European singing. He also had a long career as a professional singer and performance teacher, specialising in music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Over more than 45 years he has performed in recitals, opera, and broadcasts throughout the world, and made more than 120 commercial recordings.
Image: De Vocis Auditusque (detail), 1601, Giulio Casserio (Casserius), engraving, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
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