Biography

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.

Project Summary

The Renaissance was heir to a sophisticated set of philosophical, cultural, and social beliefs about the voice, which included relatively comprehensive explanations of how voice functions mechanically (if, in hindsight, scientifically erroneous) and also in the intra-human communication of ideas and emotions. The ancient philosophy of physiognomy, meanwhile, suggested that temperament and moral character are fixed at birth and expressed in the body’s physical manifestations. Although normally associated only with visible features (particularly the face), until well into the 18th century, physiognomical theory also included a key non-visual marker – the voice. As ancient wisdom comes up against real-life experiences there is, however, a vital contradiction: if the characteristics of a person’s voice are immutable – baked into their DNA – how can such fixity square with the human vocal organ’s capacity for almost infinite modification and flexibility, which might manifest, for example, in the feigning of different persona by actors, or the subjection of an individual singer’s voice to generic timbral and registral demands of complex vocal music? How this conundrum played out, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on one hand through the oral and aural dimensions of both specialised professional and popular everyday practices, and on the other, theoretical discourse ranging from philosophy, medicine and anatomy to music and drama, lies at the heart of this investigation of the role of voice in the formation of early modern identity.