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Song and Self: A Singer's Reflections on Music and Performance
Award-winning singer Ian Bostridge examines iconic works of Western classical music to reflect on the relationship between performer and audience.
Like so many performers, renowned tenor Ian Bostridge spent much of 2020 and 2021 unable to take part in live music. The enforced silence of the pandemic led him to question an identity that was previously defined by communicating directly with audiences in opera houses and concert halls. It also allowed him to delve deeper into many of the classical works he has encountered over the course of his career, such as Claudio Monteverdi’s seventeenth-century masterpiece Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and Robert Schumann’s popular song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben. In lucid and compelling prose, Bostridge explores the ways Monteverdi, Schumann, and Britten employed and disrupted gender roles in their music; questions colonial power and hierarchy in Ravel’s Songs of Madagascar; and surveys Britten’s reckoning with death in works from the War Requiem to his final opera, Death in Venice.
As a performer reconciling his own identity and that of the musical text he delivers on stage, Bostridge unravels the complex history of each piece of music, showing how today’s performers can embody that complexity for their audiences. As readers become privy to Bostridge’s unique lines of inquiry, they are also primed for the searching intensity of his interpretations, in which the uncanny melding of song and self brings about moments of epiphany for both the singer and his audience.
Like so many performers, renowned tenor Ian Bostridge spent much of 2020 and 2021 unable to take part in live music. The enforced silence of the pandemic led him to question an identity that was previously defined by communicating directly with audiences in opera houses and concert halls. It also allowed him to delve deeper into many of the classical works he has encountered over the course of his career, such as Claudio Monteverdi’s seventeenth-century masterpiece Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and Robert Schumann’s popular song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben. In lucid and compelling prose, Bostridge explores the ways Monteverdi, Schumann, and Britten employed and disrupted gender roles in their music; questions colonial power and hierarchy in Ravel’s Songs of Madagascar; and surveys Britten’s reckoning with death in works from the War Requiem to his final opera, Death in Venice.
As a performer reconciling his own identity and that of the musical text he delivers on stage, Bostridge unravels the complex history of each piece of music, showing how today’s performers can embody that complexity for their audiences. As readers become privy to Bostridge’s unique lines of inquiry, they are also primed for the searching intensity of his interpretations, in which the uncanny melding of song and self brings about moments of epiphany for both the singer and his audience.
- GenresMusicEssaysNonfiction
120 pages, Hardcover
Published April 5, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 2, 2023
"I have been forced to question an identity," tenor/historian Ian Bostrige wrote in the preface of this short book, made up of three essays delivered as lectures at the University of Chicago.
The pandemic made all of us do so, but it was especially difficult for those who were effectively silenced, work-less, voice-less for over 2 years.
Who are we, if we cannot say who we are, and act out who we are?
Bostridge chose to question performed identities of vocal actors in the Western classical repertoire by examining works that suited 3 major things that we construct identity around: gender, race, and our attitudes towards death.
What makes Bostridge interesting is that he is not just a staid scholar with index cards from a library. He writes with the lived experience of the performer who has inhabited these sound worlds, who (however briefly) embodied other voices from other centuries. He conjures that kind of performative magic from the layering of a modern man's grasp of history with the attempt at remaining true to the composer's age-tinged intentions.
Can women sing lieder for male voices? Or vice versa?
Can a white male sing Poulenc's Rapsodie nègre, with its anti colonial sentiment?
Bostridge sounds more academic in this one, compared to his previous books. But he still makes one want to listen to all the tracks on Spotify, despite the more professorial tone.
And how convenient that a lot of the tracks he mentions in the book have HIS particular interpretation. 😄 Which makes this fangirl veeeeeeeery happy!
Whether heard, or read, Ian Bostridge's is a voice that is worth listening to.
The pandemic made all of us do so, but it was especially difficult for those who were effectively silenced, work-less, voice-less for over 2 years.
Who are we, if we cannot say who we are, and act out who we are?
Bostridge chose to question performed identities of vocal actors in the Western classical repertoire by examining works that suited 3 major things that we construct identity around: gender, race, and our attitudes towards death.
What makes Bostridge interesting is that he is not just a staid scholar with index cards from a library. He writes with the lived experience of the performer who has inhabited these sound worlds, who (however briefly) embodied other voices from other centuries. He conjures that kind of performative magic from the layering of a modern man's grasp of history with the attempt at remaining true to the composer's age-tinged intentions.
Can women sing lieder for male voices? Or vice versa?
Can a white male sing Poulenc's Rapsodie nègre, with its anti colonial sentiment?
Bostridge sounds more academic in this one, compared to his previous books. But he still makes one want to listen to all the tracks on Spotify, despite the more professorial tone.
And how convenient that a lot of the tracks he mentions in the book have HIS particular interpretation. 😄 Which makes this fangirl veeeeeeeery happy!
Whether heard, or read, Ian Bostridge's is a voice that is worth listening to.
May 5, 2023
How many lecture series actually make important and readable books? One can see why both publishers and authors are keen to leap on the bandwagon but the reality is that many such books are of hugely variable quality and generally forgettable. For me the exceptions are easy to call to mind because there are so few (TS Eliot’s Clark Lectures, Paul Muldoon’s lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry are my favourites).
I'm afraid Ian Bostridge’s latest book (based on thee lectures he gave in Chicago in 2020) comes towards the lower end of the veritable pile of such books. It’s billed a reflection on some of the pieces Bostridge has performed. The first chapter on the concept of identity in Monteverdi and (Robert) Schumann is ludicrously whimsical, random and difficult to read. The next on a song from Ravel’s 'Chansons madécasses' is odd and largely unrevelatory, whilst I struggled to find anything truly original in the final chapter on Britten and particularly the Holy Sonnets settings. These were probably better as lectures in some ways but further claims to posterity are decidedly dubious.
I'm afraid Ian Bostridge’s latest book (based on thee lectures he gave in Chicago in 2020) comes towards the lower end of the veritable pile of such books. It’s billed a reflection on some of the pieces Bostridge has performed. The first chapter on the concept of identity in Monteverdi and (Robert) Schumann is ludicrously whimsical, random and difficult to read. The next on a song from Ravel’s 'Chansons madécasses' is odd and largely unrevelatory, whilst I struggled to find anything truly original in the final chapter on Britten and particularly the Holy Sonnets settings. These were probably better as lectures in some ways but further claims to posterity are decidedly dubious.
August 18, 2024
A wonderful academic and at the same time human and musical perspective on topics like gender, imperialism and death in the Lieder tradition. Ian Bostridge uses pieces like Benjamin Britten's operas and Ravel's songs to illustrate how politics, traditions and history shape the performance and perception of Lieder today. I especially liked how the three big topics tied entire chapters together and gave a great introduction into pieces of music and considerations when performing these songs.
March 26, 2025
Great, super well-informed and v interesting essays. But he doesn’t really settle on any opinions…… so you come away like ???? So what are the answers to the questions as promised ???
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews