The field and the evidence

The performance practice of the twentieth century's singing entertainers is a vital component of the mass culture of its period, and it cries out to be analysed and interpreted. How should it be categorised alongside other types of singing, and how and why has it undergone such enormous changes? There is almost no literature on the subject. Pleasants deals with the rise of modern popular singing from one particular standpoint, that of its opposition to classical singing, and Osborne takes a sustained critical look at the Broadway ‘belt’, again from the same viewpoint, though, unlike Pleasants, with negative rather than positive intent. Yet neither author has the opportunity to develop a more neutral historical investigation comprehensively based on evidence from primary and secondary source material, in other words in the ‘early music’ terms that Robert Philip pioneered for classical orchestral music of the first half of the twentieth century.

Three types of source material constitute the evidence for performance practice, its identity and changes. The first and most important is recordings. The second is film (plus TV and video footage), for although the musical content of a film can be isolated as its soundtrack recording, the visual element is also significant in analysing a singer's performance practice (though this is beyond the scope of this chapter). The third type of evidence is that of written and spoken documentation: correspondence, production files and promptbooks, published and unpublished memoirs and other monographs, interviews, press reviews, song manuscripts and dance plots.