Rossini's Guillaume Tell, first performed in 1829, defined the new genre of Parisian grand opera. This was grand indeed. Divided as a rule into five acts, with a ballet spatchcocked into at least two acts; on a historical subject, freely interpreted for maximum spectacle (in Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini of 1838 the Pope and the College of Cardinals enter Cellini's studio just as the furnace explodes and the brand-new statue of Perseus rises from the smoke); educative intent built into the plot so as to show great historical forces arrayed in conflict – it all suited a bourgeois audience that welcomed notions of liberty and progress. Tyranny might win for the moment, yet the march of civilisation would prevail, helped on its way by sacrificial love: Halévy's La Juive (1835), Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots (1836) and Le Prophète (1849) hinted at freedom of worship, Tell and Verdi's Les Vêpres siciliennes (1855) at national independence, Verdi's Don Carlos (1867) at political liberty; each gave one plenty to look at, ballerinas' legs included. The whole thing took five hours or more and called for months of rehearsal to drill the hundred-strong chorus and get the vast, historically accurate sets right.

Rossini had carefully led up to Tell by adapting for Paris three of his Italian operas. Though his music had already taken Europe by storm, he altered it to meet French taste: he cut down ornamentation, allowed for more dramatic singing, and brought forward the chorus. The outcome each time was a great success.

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.

Introduction

The idea of rationality has a central place in Max Weber's Economy and Society. In the years since it was written, rationality has also come to be one of the most important concepts in the social sciences – not only in economics, but also in political science and increasingly in sociology. In the present article I confront some central arguments in Economy and Society, notably from the first two chapters of Part I (“Basic Sociological Terms” and “Sociological Categories of Economic Action”), with what I believe to be the standard contemporary approach. Because I know much more about the modern theories than about Weber's writings – I am not a Weber scholar – my procedure will have to be somewhat schematic. In examining passages from Weber out of their historical context and without regard for the vast secondary literature, I obviously run the risk of anachronism, oversimplification, or worse. I can only hope that the analytical arguments will be useful to those with a better knowledge of the Weberian corpus.

The article is a personal essay, in the sense that it is colored by my own interests and preoccupations. For many readers of Economy and Society, the emphasis I give to emotions and social norms will come as a surprise. Yet although Weber's discussions of these topics are brief and often extremely condensed, I believe his treatment is very acute and worth highlighting. Also, as already indicated, I shall confront Weber’s views about instrumental rationality with modern ideas from cognitive psychology and game theory that he could not possibly have anticipated.

There are certain basic, practical things we can do with children which will enable the vast majority to sing pleasantly and tunefully in a group, and to improve individually. In the description of these ideas, the focus will be on how to convey them in a group situation – a choir, or in the classroom – within a wider context of a general understanding of children's actual musical and vocal possibilities, and the assumption that (barring exceptional physiological impediment): all children can sing, learn to sing better, and have the right to do both.

Each child, being unique, has also a unique voice, with its own special colour, and dynamic and vocal range, as with adults, although usually a lighter instrument than a fully formed adult voice, and lacking its power. As children grow, so does the strength of their voices. Many investigations of children's vocal range give a general picture of about c1–c2 at five to six years, increasing to a–g2 by nine to ten years, and further to a–c3 by eleven to twelve years. However, most studies omit any mention of head or chest register, when in fact each is available even to tiny children, as confirmed by observation of very young children's spontaneous, improvised singing, which shows that they can manifest a very high voice. Each register yields its own vocal range, and while the lower chest-voice range tends to be very limited in small children, many of whom find it difficult to reach tones below c1, the head-voice range extends in most children rather higher than indicated in conventional studies and than commonly believed. Some singing teachers differentiate between the range where children can comfortably sing a melody and where they can do singing exercises.

Max Weber was initially trained in both law and history and he drew extensively on examples from legal history in constructing his later sociological works. Yet he was not, properly speaking, a legal historian. In fact, as we shall show, the superimposition upon legal history of his sociological categories of “ideal types” of legal authority resulted in serious distortions at the same time that it led to some important insights. His sharp separation of “fact” from “value,” and his relegation of law to the realm of “fact,” led him to overlook entirely the importance of legal values in two of his best known socio-historical studies, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and The City. In the background of his entire sociology of law was an oversimplified historiography in which the history of law in the West was viewed as a progression from a “feudal,” “traditional,” “personal” type to a “capitalist,” “formal-rational,” and “bureaucratic” type, with the prospect of an emerging “socialist,” “substantively rational” type.

Weber's background in the law

Max Weber was born into a family that “was steeped in the intellectual culture of the law.” His father was a lawyer as well as a politician, who served as a member of the National Liberal Party in the German Reichstag from 1872 to 1884. The son pursued a legal education from the time he first matriculated at Heidelberg University in 1882, where, in his first semester, he enrolled in a course entitled Roman Law: Pandects and Institutes. He later continued his law studies at the University of Berlin, under the tutelage of some of the leading lights of the late nineteenth-century German legal academy.

What was it that drove Weber, arguably even to this day the foremost theoretician of modern western society and its historical evolution, to embark on a far-reaching series of investigations of non-western cultures? The question arises inevitably when one considers the sheer scale of Weber's writings on the world religions, all but encyclopedic in scope and displaying an extraordinary capacity of the part of their author in ordering and synthesizing the detailed historical materials involved (a task made all the more impressive given the technical difficulties arising from the undeveloped state of the documentary and scholarly sources at the time). Was all this effort required to establish the correctness of the Protestant ethic thesis? Or, was something further involved that went beyond the earlier problematic and transformed it?

In what follows we shall assume that Weber's studies of the orient, along with his Ancient Judaism, constitute key parts of what was a major expansion and enhancement of the Protestant ethic thesis and concerned the daunting task of grasping the rationalization of the modern world in the context of universal history. Whilst the original umbrella title of the monographs he began to publish in 1915, The Economic Ethic of the World Religions, suggests Weber remained preoccupied with demonstrating via counter-factual comparisons the validity of the Protestant ethic thesis, the contents of the writings subsequently presented as well as the inclusion of several crucial linking essays indicate the problematic had been modified in important ways.

Basic approaches

For the singer of today, especially when starting out on a career, finding the right teacher, or the perfect ‘method’, can be fraught with difficulty. One teacher may seem to have some secret that will perfect the student's breathing technique, another may claim to have found the secret of the old Italian bel canto. Add to this the vagaries of what or who is fashionable and it is not surprising that many singers prefer to rely on their own instincts. Many mainly self-taught singers have considerable success in working out an approach that works for them, while others may embark on a career harbouring a sense of insecurity caused by unsolved problems. I hope that this overview of teaching precepts, past and present, will provide an objective framework for the singer, whatever his or her particular needs, thus helping him or her to contribute his own informed input to the complex process involved in the study of singing.

Every singing teacher brings his own individual personality, a different cultural and intellectual background, and different tastes to the teaching/ learning situation. In a sense therefore, one could say that there are as many ways to teach singing as there are teachers and students. However, one can locate most approaches on a scale that ranges from the ‘non-technical’ to the overtly scientific. The existence of a ‘non-technical’ approach demonstrates the unusual nature of the singing voice, compared with other musical instruments. Although the finest instrumental teachers show an understanding of psychology and the importance of motivation, inspiration and so on, it is not possible to avoid some actual discussion of the physical nature of the skill being taught.

Politics, power and the rule of man over man

The idea that the “rule (Herrschaft) of man over man” is an inescapable fact of human existence is a central theme of Max Weber's social and political thought (E&S 939). A discussion of the forms of rule (Herrschaft) constitutes the core of his most important work, the unfinished and incomplete Economy and Society. For Weber, the idea of a world free from “the rule of man over man” is Utopian. So too is any escape from the struggle for power through a unity of interests within classes, political parties, states or nations.

Few political thinkers have been committed to the idea of the “permanence of the political”; in some ways Weber was obsessed with it. For Weber, man's unavoidable fate is to be a political animal, but politics does not and cannot offer a road to either happiness, justice, perpetual peace or redemption. “Anyone who goes in for worldly politics must, above all, be free of illusions and acknowledge one fundamental fact: to be resigned to the inevitable and eternal struggle of man with man on this earth” (GPS 29). The “rule of man over man” is the inevitable concomitant of this struggle. Struggle requires leaders who, in turn, require the “apparatus of a human following.” Consequently, it is not surprising that the religious prophet and the political demagogue play a central role in Weber's thought.

Max Weber's publications and his intellectual influence were both enormous and wide-ranging. He was educated in the law, held two chairs in economics, and became one of the founders of the discipline of sociology. For his work in economic history he was considered to be one the major figures of the Younger Historical School in Germany, along with Arthur Spiethoff and his frequent intellectual disputant, Werner Sombart, with whom he often disagreed while sometimes working on similar historical problems. As a scholar, the nature of his concerns broadened over time, and shifted to what may be described as economic sociology. His contemporary Joseph Schumpeter described him as “a sociologist with a penchant for things that are primarily concerned with economics.” Schumpeter's laudatory and insightful memorial was written at the time of Weber's death. He later indicated that, although Weber's academic career began with chairs in economics, “he was not really an economist at all,” but rather a sociologist. Schumpeter distinguished between economic analysis, which “deals with the questions how people behave at any time and what the economic effects are they produce by so behaving,” and economic sociology, which “deals with the question how they came to behave as they do.” Economic sociology, according to Schumpeter, included the “analysis of economic institutions.” A recent collection of essays in economic sociology describes its core propositions as: “(1) economic action is a form of social action; (2) economic action is socially situated; and (3) economic institutions are social constructions.”

Since polyphony evolved out of plainchant sometime around the end of the first millennium there has been a tradition of people coming together to sing in harmony. The polyphony associated with the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris specifically contrasts the singing of the chant choir with that of soloists who sing in up to four parts. These are likely to have been the best singers available, able to hold their own as soloists and yet sing with one another as a unit; they predate polyphonic choral singing by several generations and opera singing by hundreds of years. The successors of those early polyphonists are found today in all branches of Western music from barbershop to Berio's A-Ronne, from Corsican folk polyphony to the King's Singers. What all these musicians share is an ability to communicate with each other as well as with their listeners, and that is what this chapter is about. It will focus primarily on ‘classical’ ensemble singing, or consort singing as it is sometimes called, i.e. one voice to a part (usually no more than about eight parts, though larger groups are possible), but the same principles apply to any group of solo singers, whatever the music they are singing.

If you are getting together for the first time, the first thing you need to think about is how you are going to work together. Ensemble singing is a co-operative activity and it is very important that everyone's input is used to its fullest extent. This is one of the great differences between singing in a small one-to-a-part ensemble and singing in a choir.

Max Weber's true calling was to become a politician. In an often quoted letter to Mina Tobler, he refers to politics as his secret love. Yet Weber was acutely aware of his own limitations and why they excluded him from politics. He recognized his inability – vividly evident in his life as a scholar – to compromise, as well as his unsuitedness to the “slow, strong drilling through hard boards, with a combination of passion and a sense of judgment,” that he believed politics to require (PW 369). Nevertheless, he waited in the background for circumstances to hand him a political role. But his moment never came.

Weber's unhappy passion for politics had long and complex consequences. He was one of the few figures in German intellectual life to have a well-developed conception of politics that (also) rose above party-political interests. The members of his circle, such as Karl Jaspers, took up the task of the political education of Germany in the few moments in which events provided an opening, such as the early years of the Weimar Republic, the period just before its demise, and the period immediately after the Second World War, when democracy was reintroduced at bayonet tip. Weber was treated retrospectively as a substitute “founding father” for the Federal Republic of Germany by his close admirers in Germany. And this political mythologization of Weber produced a powerful scholarly reaction that has ever since colored perceptions of Weber's politics, notably by emphasizing the ways in which Weber was unlike liberal democrats elsewhere.

Composers very often write music with specific performers in mind. Performers' particular gifts, perhaps an outstanding technique or an individual quality of interpretation, can stimulate and open up a composer's imagination. The written-out ornamentation Monteverdi supplied for Orpheus's central aria ‘Possente spirto’ in Orfeo poses a technical challenge which suggests why its likely first singer, Francesco Rasi, was so admired by his contemporaries. In our own century, Poulenc's intuitive response in setting the difficult poetry of Apollinaire and Eluard was also shaped by his experience of Pierre Bernac's sensitive projection of texts. The genesis of these examples, both of which belong firmly to the ‘traditional’ rather than the ‘alternative’ vocal tradition, only reinforces the point that very many alternative developments come out of the creative nexus between composer and intended interpreter. So even though most of today's alternative voices sound more radical to an audience's ears than does the Monteverdi (despite its stunningly wacky quality) or the Poulenc, artistically there is common ground in the shared concern to exploit the expressive possibilities of the musical situation, both vocally and compositionally. But the particular experience of the twentieth century is the move away from defining mainstream singing in terms only of bel canto. Certainly the rich, almost bewildering, variety of written and improvised styles that has now been opened up, as well as the opportunities for these styles to interact in new and fertile ways, point to the fact that vocal quality can be just as freshly or differently expressive, away from the constraints of the bel canto style.

The Continental Congress, which had governed thirteen British colonies while they were becoming the United States of America, adjourned in 1789. The first Congress then took office, elected under the recently adopted Constitution. After fifteen years of subversion, rebellion, war, divided loyalties and conflicting visions, a hard-won consensus had been reached. A new chapter in political and social history was beginning. A new chapter in cultural and artistic life was beginning as well. The young Timothy Dwight, contemplating ‘war's dread confusion’ during the Revolution, envisioned an unprecedented order of peace and prosperity in the emergent country, when

A momentous event in the history of sacred choral music took place shortly before Dwight penned these stirring words. William Billings (1746–1800), a tanner by trade, published his ‘opus one’, The New England Psalm Singer, in 1770, just in time for the Revolution. Approximately a dozen sacred pieces by American composers had been published in the thirteen colonies before Billing's collection appeared. In a single stroke Billings, with his original volume containing 120 new works, increased this repertoire a thousand per cent. Also, in the book's remarkable preface, he issued what amounts to a Declaration of Independence of the American composer. His emphatic and well-argued case for compositional flexibility (he observes that everyone knows what ‘Poetical License’ is, and ‘I don't see why with the same priority there may not be a Musical License’) culminates in his often-quoted exhortation to the composer of the future.

Considering the tremendous breadth of musical activity throughout Europe and the range of its different social, technical and aesthetic contexts between the beginning of the sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth centuries, the sheer consistency of the information we have about the fundamentals of the art of singing during this time is remarkable. Some aspects of vocal performance which were constantly repeated throughout the period are as obviously necessary now as they were then. For example, the repeated demand that the words always be audibly and correctly pronounced, the text understood and intelligibly delivered by the singer, and that its meaning and poetics inform every aspect of the musical performance, suggests that in former times, just as in the present, singers needed regularly reminding of this fundamental principle. There are other aspects of vocal performance which were also reiterated in every generation, but which nowadays are either little understood and not seen as being as important as they once were (for example, the correct way to articulate passaggi), or which are quite simply not considered any more (for example, the differentiation of chest and falsetto registers and their proper joining together) and are therefore no longer part of the training of professional singers.

What, then, were the main preoccupations of singing teachers, writers of vocal treatises and singers themselves in the centuries under consideration and how might an awareness of the differences from current priorities in the teaching of singing technique affect the choices that performers of pre-nineteenth-century music might yet make, even in the current ‘age of enlightenment’ of historically aware music-making?