Mechanical Recording Workshop: Operatic voice study

Organised by Dr. Barbara Gentili and Dr. Inja Stanovic, Mechanical Recording Workshop: Operatic voice study aims to explore interactions between singing and mechanical technologies, focusing on the production of various types of wax cylinders and 10-inch discs. As part of the two-day event, we will run a mechanical workshop with professional opera singers. By placing singers in front of the recording horn, we will observe their reactions and adaptations to the playback in terms of the quality of their vocal production, legato, portamento, dynamics and tempo variation. 

Programme

Wednesday, 17 July 

11:30 – 12:00  Registration and welcome

12:00 – 13:00 Keynote: Professor Rebecca Plack (San Francisco Conservatory of Music)

‘Embodying the past: Practical lessons from historic recordings of operatic singing’

13:00 – 14:00  Lunch

14:00 – 15:30 Mechanical recording workshop - wax cylinders: 

1. Mhairi Lawson, soprano (Guildhall School of Music and Drama)

W. A. Mozart: 'Voi Che Sapete', Le Nozze di Figaro

2. Ingeborg Dalheim, soprano (Norwegian Academy of Music) 

E. Grieg: 'Solveig's Song', Peer Gynt

3. Harriet Eyley, soprano (Royal College of Music)

Ch. Gounod: 'Faites-lui mes aveux', Faust

4. Stefano Gentili, baritone (Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona)

G. Donizetti: 'Bella siccome un angelo', Don Pasquale

15:30 – 16:00 Coffee/tea break

16:00 – 17:30 Mechanical recording workshop - discs: 

1. Stefano Gentili, baritone (Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona)

G. Donizetti: 'Bella siccome un angelo', Don Pasquale 

W. A. Mozart: 'Deh vieni alla finestra', Don Giovanni 

  2. Mhairi Lawson, soprano (Guildhall School of Music and Drama)

'Annie Laurie', Scottish song, arr. Liza Lehmann

W. A. Mozart: 'Voi Che Sapete', Le Nozze di Figaro

  3. Ingeborg Dalheim, soprano (Norwegian Academy of Music) and Heloise Amaral, piano (Orpheus Institute)

Edvard Grieg: "Ved Rondane", Op. 33/9.

  4. Harriet Eyley, soprano (Royal College of Music)

W. A. Mozart: 'Voi Che Sapete', Le Nozze di Figaro

G. Verdi: 'Saper vorreste', Un ballo in maschera

Acoustic recording engineer: Duncan Miller (Vulcan Cylinder Record Company), recording engineer: John Warburton (University of Surrey), John Cuthbert (Royal College of Music), pianist.

Thursday, 18 July

9:30 – 10:30 Keynote: Professor Neal Peres Da Costa (Sydney Conservatorium of Music) ‘Expanding expressive possibilities for Schubert’s lieder: the evidence of early recordings and documentary sources’

10:30 – 11:00  Coffee/tea break

11:00 – 12:30 Session 1

Dr. Daniele Palma (Università di Bologna): ‘In search of the “recording voice”: A brief cultural history’

Dr. Richard Louis Gillies (University of Nottingham): ‘Recording, Consuming, and Licensing Opera in Late Imperial Russia’ 

Elisabeth Salverda (KU LEUVEN): 'The 1931 cantacorde device by G.J. Cloetens, or “the piano that sings”: from vocal cord vibrato to a piano string windmill’

12:30 – 14:00  Lunch

14:00 – 15:30 Session 2

Dr. Joshua Neumann (Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz and Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz): ‘Listen through/to/with What?: Reconsidering Medium-Provided Noise’

Dr. Fatima Volkoviskii Barajas (Independent Researcher): 'Carceleras by Ruberto Chapí. Recording Performance Practices Beyond the Canon'

Dr. Sarah Fuchs (Royal College of Music, London): ‘Finding Your (French) Voice: A Few Reflections on fin-de-siècle Vocal Recordings’

15:30 – 16:00  Coffee/tea break

16:00 – 17:30 Session 3

Ingeborg Dalheim (Norwegian Academy of Music): ‘“Singing in the heart’s language”. Imagining Norwegian early 20th century classical singing as a folk song tradition, and “hacking” myself a way into the heritage line’

Mark Bailey (Yale University): ‘Replication, Anachronism, and Inspired Information: The Use and Misuse of Mechanically-Produced Recordings as Performance Practice Resources for Operatic Singing’

Dr. Riccardo La Spina (University of California, Riverside): ‘¡Dobla, Campana! – New Phonographic Implications for a Zarzuela Vocality in Emigrantes’

Abstracts

Wednesday keynote

Professor Rebecca Plack, San Francisco Conservatory of Music

‘Embodying the past: Practical lessons from historic recordings of operatic singing’

Singing is an embodied art whose stylistic gestures are rooted in human physicality. And so, when we experiment with style, we play not only with the sounds we make but also with how we make them. The “how” can be difficult to tease out, but pairing recordings in particular ways can help. For example, comparing recordings of an aria made by the baritone Heinrich Schlusnus just before and after he changed voice teachers makes audible some technical adjustments that are unrelated to other factors, such as aging or shifting aesthetics. Other pairings work for different reasons. The contrast between Alfred Deller’s two recordings of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes plain numerous differences in vocal technique – and perhaps not only because one recording was made live, and the other in studio. Discussing these recordings and others leads us towards vocabulary we can use to describe declamation and exhalation, parameters at the intersection of vocal technique and style which are harder to ascertain than those that can be described through sound alone (e.g. vibrato, portamento, rubato and even legato to some extent). Tuning our ears and minds to the physical gestures that become aural ones allows us to explore how we might embody styles of the past in ways that playing with sound alone might not suggest.

Thursday keynote

Neal Peres Da Costa, Sydney Conservatorium of Music

‘Expanding expressive possibilities for Schubert’s lieder: the evidence of early recordings and documentary sources’

How might Schubert’s lieder have sounded in the hands of the composer or his close circle? And how might lieder accompaniment in the 19th century have enhanced and supported the sounds, timbres, and expressive practices of lieder singers in the bel canto tradition? These questions have been the catalyst for my recent work as part of the Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project - The Shock of the old: Rediscovering the sounds of bel canto 1700–1900. Early recordings of, for example, Schubert and Schumann lieder by 19th-century singers and pianists preserve interpretations which both contrast strongly with modern (text-literal) ideals and point to how the composers’ notation was only a starting point in building an artistically-driven, ‘beautiful’ interpretation that underscored text and story. In this presentation, I will outline experimental work, most recently on Schubert’s Schwanengesang, which considers performing practice information in a newly discovered didactic source by Johann Anton André (early-19th-century), as well as Franz Liszt’s Schwanengesang transcriptions (Vienna: c. 1840) which are brimming with expressive indications and likely preserve Schubertian practices or at least those heard in Vienna around Schubert’s lifetime. 
 

Session 1. Thursday, 11:00 - 12:30

Dr. Daniele Palma, University of Bologna

‘In search of the ‘recording voice’: A brief cultural history’

It is well known that vocal music, and opera in particular, played a key role in the commercial and cultural affirmation of phonography. Some of the discourses that prompted the validation of new medium explored its transformative effects on singing, often in a distinctly techno-determinist fashion, sometimes veering into phantasmagorical desires. More broadly, the emergence of a specialised discourse on voice and sound reproduction was rooted in a broader process of defining the ‘phonographic voice’ as a new, uncanny cultural object. Research has been devoted to tracing this process in literature and philosophy (Hogg 2008; Kane 2014: 180-226); other testimonies, such as journal articles and correspondences, deserve further attention. In this paper, I focus on British phonographic periodicals to sketch a brief cultural history of an idea: the debated existence of a ‘phonographic voice,’ conceived as a set of vocal qualities or vocal techniques naturally possessed or specifically designed to fit the mechanical processes. Such an idea became quite common in the electric era, mostly in relation to the talkies and the nascent practice of crooning (Taylor, Katz, and Grajeda 2012; McCracken 2015; Porter 2018). My aim is to trace its roots back to the acoustic era, focusing on Western art singing to understand if and how singers might have negotiated their long-established vocal practices and identities in the face of new technologies. In addition, an examination of phonographic periodicals allows us to get closer to what ‘ordinary’ people (albeit mostly ‘highbrow’, white men) thought about sound recordings, revealing an awareness of the ‘constructedness’ of recorded sound that the industry often sought to erase. 

Dr. Richard Louis Gillies, University of Nottingham 

‘Recording, Consuming, and Licensing Opera in Late Imperial Russia’ 

Published in Saint Petersburg from 1910-1917 and edited by Dmitri Bogemsky (1878- 1931), Grammofonnïy Mir (Gramophone World) was a periodical dedicated to late Imperial Russia’s burgeoning record industry, featuring articles covering topics from patterns of taste and consumption to debates over the future of the Russian record industry. This paper shares some initial findings from research exploring the intersection between class politics, taste, consumption, performers’ rights, and Russia’s early record industry. In particular, it draws on an article by Julius von Knorring published in the second edition of Grammofonnïy Mir (15 April 1910), which appeared in parallel Russian- and German-language text under the title ‘A New Fusion Between Intelligentsia and Capital’ that featured a highly critical reflection on attempts by the Ukrainian-born Jewish operatic tenor Alexander Davydov (1872-1944) to establish an artist-led record company that aimed to safeguard singers from financial exploitation by the record industry. Born Izrail Moiseyevich Levenson, Davydov rose to prominence after his debut singing the role of Herman in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades at the Mariinsky in 1900, yet despite being one of the most prolific and best-selling operatic recording artists of the late Imperial and early Soviet periods, he is today an obscure figure by comparison to contemporaries such as Feodor Chaliapin or the slightly older Nikolai and Medea Figner. Thus, in addition to reflecting on the impact of recording technology on performers’ rights, this research also draws attention to the activities of one of Russia’s most popular yet paradoxically neglected early recording artists. 

Elisabeth Salverda, KU LEUVEN

‘The 1931 cantacorde device by G.J. Cloetens, or “the piano that sings”: from vocal cord vibrato to a piano string windmill’

At the request of vocal students in the Brussels Conservatoire, desirous to “hear their own voices whenever they wanted,” in the 1920s the experimental organ builder and instrument inventor G.J. Cloetens reportedly built a “simple recording device for speech and singing.” The exercise is cited as having inspired his 1931 cantacorde—an electro-mechanical device to acoustically amplify and manipulate piano string resonance, described by listeners at the time as “the piano that sings.” To produce “singing effects” and periodic changes in the soundwave, the decay is channelled through a widening enclosure of “substantially non-vibratory material” where it meets a transverse rotating vane (akin to a two-blade windmill) operated by a rheostat: a variable speed resistor that controls electric current hence oscillations per second. In organ terms, resembling the vox humana stop with tremulant varying the wind supply, as applied to the piano, but with an increase in power of “unexpected and advantageous proportions” and nuance “from quadruple pianissimo to quadruple forte.” That the recording device for the singers of the Conservatoire is absent from Cloetens’ patents is unlikely for an inventor who was quick to protect his intellectual property rights. In the cantacorde, the “lost” sound that is captured or “retrieved” by the resonance box or chamber, as well as characteristics of earlier inventions, may suggest that rather than inscribing sound to a carrier medium for playback the device in question perhaps employed techniques to sustain and/or delay return of the singers’ voices.

Session 2. Thursday, 14:00 - 15:30

Dr. Joshua Neumann, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz

‘Listen through/to/with What?: Reconsidering Medium-Provided Noise’

Almost every kind of pre-electronic recording carrier form comes with some level of acoustical noise resulting from playback of physically etched contents. Perhaps expectedly, this noise is often characterized as unavoidable nuisance inhibiting access to the musical contents of a given carrier form. Numerous capture and remastering techniques have been developed with the aim of capturing some semblance of pure or unadulterated music from the cylinder or disc. While any cleaned files might provide a more familiar sonic experience for modern listeners, they exist as new FRBR manifestations of the performance whose audio elements were captured, as the totality of the intellectual contents on an original item are different from those on a ‘cleaned’ version. This difference in intellectual content is the presence or absence of noise provided by a recording’s materiality. Using an example of Enrico Caruso’s 1904 recording of “E lucevan le stelle” in both digitally transferred and digitally remastered form, this paper reconsiders medium-provided noise and its place in mechanical recording historiography. Rather than advocating for a redoubling or improvement of noise elimination techniques, it considers these concomitantly engraved phenomena as inherent and inextricable part of recordings, and, moreover, the aesthetic and intellectual technosphere that gave rise to them.

Dr. Fatima Volkoviskii, Independent Researcher

‘Carceleras by Ruberto Chapí. Recording Performance Practices Beyond the Canon’

The comical zarzuela Las hijas del Zebedeo by Ruperto Chapí was first performed in 1889. Only a few years later, the romanza known as "Carceleras" was first recorded on commercial cylinders by at least two of the most popular recording houses of the time in Madrid: Viuda de Aramburo and Casa Ureña. The popularity of "Carceleras" can be demonstrated by listing some of the recordings made by a variety of companies not long after these first cylinders. Records are found by: Gramophone (Barcelona, 1902); Zonophone (Berlin, 1905); Fonotipia (Milan, 1906); Gramophone (London, 1907); Victor (Camden, 1911); and Gramophone (Paris, 1914), to name a few. First recorded by Spanish singers and tied to the zarzuela performance practices, "Carceleras" quickly crossed international borders and became a stand-alone piece. Unlike many operatic arias recorded internationally, "Carceleras" does not belong to the classical canon, and as such creates a unique case study of performance practices across borders in early recordings. My main interest focuses on finding similarities and differences between the various recorded performances, mapping out the transformation of the romanza as it is sung within and beyond its native Spain. Given the wide net of this study, I have embarked on an initial comparative analysis through sound visualization. Considering how a balance between "close listening" and software-based analysis can offer insightful results (Volioti, 2007), in this presentation I will demonstrate the findings of using the Expressive Means plugins (Vollmer, 2023) as they dialogue with a trained performers ear in listening to vocal performance practices.

Dr. Sarah Fuchs, Royal College of Music 

‘Finding Your (French) Voice: A Few Reflections on fin-de-siècle Vocal Recordings’

Among the many thousands of sound recordings preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France are 228 unpublished wax cylinder recordings that once belonged to France’s National Deaf-Mute Institute, recorded at the initiative of Hector Marichelle (one of France’s leading researchers in the field of “deaf-mute education”—to use the terminology of the time—and the first director of the Institution’s Laboratory of Speech). My initial interest in this collection had to do with the dozen or so cylinders recorded by opera singers active around the turn of the century, which seem to show that professional singers sought therapeutic treatment at the Institution alongside people with speech and hearing impairments. In my book, I propose that the Institute’s therapeutic methods influenced how ‘problem voices’ were understood under the early Third Republic, contributing to a similar pathologisation of the voices of those who could not speak or sing in ‘proper’ (e.g. Parisian) French and those who could not speak at all. More recently, I have begun to explore other corners of the collection, considering (in line with some recent thinking in disability studies) what these cylinders might have to tell us if we understood them as evidence not (or at least not just) of a hegemonic process in which vocal rehabilitation functioned as means of assimilation but (also) of singers and students with disabilities contributing to the production of scientific knowledge. Focusing on two case studies, this presentation will explore larger methodological, historiographical, and ontological questions related to working with early recordings.

Session 3. Thursday, 16:00 - 17:30

Ingeborg Dalheim, Norwegian Academy of Music

‘“Singing in the heart’s language”. Imagining Norwegian early 20th century classical singing as a folk song tradition, and “hacking” myself a way into the heritage line’

In this lecture-recital I will share some of my experiences from my ongoing artistic research PhD project «Back out of the gramophone». For two years, I have been attempting learn how to sing like the Norwegian, female, classical singers of the early 1900s, listening to the first Norwegian gramophone recordings. In an attempt to catch all the details in this singing style, I have vowed not to look at the scores while learning the repertoire, but learn the style and repertoire by ear. This allows me to question the classical music’s focus on the composer and the performer’s duty to fulfill the composer’s wish. By (temporarily) ignoring the composer’s existence, I explore the performer’s role, and the significance of the implicit knowledge and skill passed on from singer/teacher to singer through generations.

Mark Bailey (Yale University) 

‘Replication, Anachronism, and Inspired Information: The Use and Misuse of Mechanically-Produced Recordings as Performance Practice Resources for Operatic Singing’

Assessing the value and utility of mechanically-produced recordings to inform performance practice requires several crucial acknowledgments and aspects of consideration. First and foremost, such recordings, also known as acoustical recordings, are not constricted by stagnant technology. The differences between pre-1900 cylinders and acoustical discs made in the 1920s before the age of electrical recordings have significant impact on what listeners hear on those recordings today. And though acoustical recordings at any stage in their evolution share certain fundamentals in common, such as the recording horn, the details of process and equipment vary greatly, as vast numbers of 78s were produced internationally by several recording companies and distributed throughout the world for approximately three decades. Therefore, listening to operatic voices on mechanically-produced recordings is not linear, but is highly influenced by the actual circumstances of the recording itself, to say nothing of the disposition of the singer and other musicians involved. It is impossible and overwhelming, from today’s perspective, to grapple with the multitude of variables embedded in the acoustical recording listening experience. To allow and enable these recordings to serve as an invaluable resource requires a change in assessing what is heard to how it is heard. This presentation, by way of several audio examples of mechanically-produced operatic 78s from the Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings, will discuss and consider not only the ultimate purpose of acoustical recordings in performance practice research, but the type of critical listening and assessment that needs to take place in order to capitalize on the information they provide.

Riccardo La Spina, University of California, Riverside

‘¡Dobla, Campana! – New Phonographic Implications for a Zarzuela Vocality in Emigrantes’

The 1920s saw Italian tenor Tito Schipa associated with the emblematic ”Granadinas” by Tomás Barrera (1870-1938) from the one-act zarzuela Emigrantes (in collaboration with Librettist Pablo Cases 1875-1943) and co-composer, Rafael Calleja (1870-1938), recording it for several labels. Little memory remained of its original 1905 Madrid production to compete with this new rendition’s phenomenal success. But rediscovered evidence reveals these now-emblematic versions as manifestly different from that heard by the work’s first Madrid audiences. No evidence of an extended run or of repeat performances exists, despite critical endorsement that Emigrantes remain on Madrid’s boards. And notwithstanding its main composer’s occasional success producing it on two continents over nearly three decades, evidence of its trajectory remains obscure and scattered. The comparison with Schipa, while important, illustrates an unrecognized historical fact: the original version of Muleta’s song by role creator Enrique Gandía was eventually supplanted by Schipa’s. Each betrays distinct deliveries manifesting divergent vocalities, two singers divided by a common vehicle. Transcending interest in merely comparing each singer’s stylistic differences of interpretation or ‘musical choices’ these recordings reflect, this paper examines their significance as a ‘case’ study of how these ‘choices’ speak to a greater question: the recognition of a specific endemically Spanish vocality and its inherent qualities. Furthermore, putting these findings into the proper context means entering a discussion already begun with recent breakthrough scholarship by Eva Moreda Rodriguez and Barbara Gentili, and others uncovering Schipa’s relevant association, and validating it with new perspective and insights stemming from different sources. 

Biographies

Mark Bailey is the director of the renowned Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings at Yale University. The collection consists of over 280,000 recordings in a variety of historical and modern formats that focus on the early to mid-20th century, especially romantic-era performance practice. Mr. Bailey is also the artistic director of The American Baroque Orchestra and is professor of choral conducting at the Mahanaim school. He guest conducts prominent ensembles regularly and gives numerous presentations on historical performance style and expression, especially as heard on early recordings. He also co-administers the Facebook group, “Celebrating Romantic-Era Performance Practice.” Mr. Bailey is a graduate of the Eastman and Yale schools of music.

Norwegian soprano Ingeborg Dalheim combines baroque music and contemporary music with a touch of Norwegian traditional singing. She studied at the Norwegian Academy of Music and with Barbara Schlick at the Hochschule for Musik Köln, specializing in baroque opera. As a soloist and ensemble singer, she has an extensive, international career, and has collaborated with some of the best known names in early music, like Les Arts Florissants/William Christie, Jordi Savall and Rolf Lislevand. In 2019 she was awarded a 3-year Norwegian State Artists’ grant, and in 2022 she released her first solo album, For one/for none, featuring contemporary music for solo voice hand-in-hand with Norwegian folk songs. She is a PhD candidate in artistic research at the Norwegian Academy of Music, and has spent the last 6 months in Los Angeles as a UCLA Fulbright scholar.

Sarah Fuchs is Area Leader in History at the Royal College of Music, London. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from, among others, the American Association of University Women, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and the Music & Letters Trust. Sarah writes mainly about operatic culture, audio-visual media, and archival practices around the turn of the nineteenth century. Her essays have appeared in the Cambridge Opera Journal, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and several edited collections, and she is currently completing a book tentatively titled Operatic Artifacts: Opera, Archives, and Audio-Visual Media in Third-Republic France.

Stefano Gentili is a baritone, full-time member of the Chorus of the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. He studied singing at the Accademia internazionale della Musica Claudio Abbado in Milan and has been active as a soloist and chorus singer since 2017. He sang main roles at the San Carlo in Naples, the Comunale in Bologna, the Mario Del Monaco in Treviso, the Teatro della Pergola in Florence, and the Teatro Argentina in Rome. His most performed role has been Amonasro in Giuseppe Verdi's Aida, followed by Malatesta in Donizetti's Don Pasquale and Enrico Ashton in Lucia di Lammermoor by the same composer. He has had the privilege of collaborating with renowned artists including singers Roberto De Candia, Marco Filippo Romano, Roberto Frontali, Carmela Remigio, Annalisa Stoppa, and conductors such as Riccardo Frizza, and Rinaldo Alessandrini.

Richard Louis Gillies is a musicologist specialising in Slavonic and East-European culture of the 19th and 20th centuries with secondary research interests in popular culture and film music. Much of his research focusses on musical-literary genres (song, vocal cycles, and opera), including his first book, Singing Soviet Stagnation, which explores the intersection between voice, music, poetry, and identity in vocal cycles by Dmitri Shostakovich, Georgy Sviridov, and Valentin Silvestrov. His second book, Sculpting in Sound: Valentin Silvestrov’s Symphony No. 5, examines the aesthetic ‘kinship’ claimed by Silvestrov between his symphony and Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, and is planned for publication in 2025 (RMA Short Monograph Series, Routledge). He currently teaches on a fixed-term contract at the University of Nottingham. 

Harriet Eyley has performed across the continent: in Switzerland as guest artist in Four Seasons by Candlelight (Raymond Gubbay Ltd) and in the Czech Republic by invitation of the Janacek Brno Festival. Most recently, Eyley returned to Garsington Opera for her role debut as Echo Ariadne auf Naxos, for which she received the Leonard Ingrams Award. In addition, Eyley made her company debut for ENO in their Gilbert and Sullivan Walking Tour. As a Welsh National Opera Associate Artist, Eyley made her UK debut as Oscar in Sir David Pountney’s Un Ballo in Maschera under maestro Carlo Rizzi. Distinguished role debuts followed: Norina Don Pasquale, Frasquita Carmen and Barbarina Le nozze di Figaro. Eyley is an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) and currently an RCM Studentship Holder and recipient of the Siow-Furniss Scholarship in support of her continuing Doctoral research specialising in performance, en travesti. 

A lifelong record collector, Riccardo La Spina researches nineteenth-century opera and vocality, enjoying membership in international study groups. His many scholarly conference presentations include Società Italiana di Musicologia; Society for Musicology in Ireland; American Musicological Society; IRCTP, Tbilisi). Research awards (UK), visiting scholarships (Mexico, Spain, Italy), include the AMS’ 2014 Hampson Fund Award for Research in Song (Antonio Barili). Published contributions include Grove, RILM, PMM, Studies in Musical Theatre and articles in Diagonal (one in press). A concertizing tenor-soloist and composer, Riccardo also performs ethnic song, often self-accompanied on Georgian panduri. He is currently in residency as Visiting Scholar at the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music, University of California at Riverside, having recently earned doctorate in Musicology from the Universidad de La Rioja.

Mhairi Lawson has worked worldwide with companies such as English National Opera, New York City Opera and The Early Opera Company in works by composers from Monteverdi to Puccini.  She has sung as soloist with the Halle Orchestra, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, The Northern Sinfonia, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and period instrument ensembles Les Arts Florissants, the Academy of Ancient Music, The English Concert and the Dunedin Consort. Her discography ranges from Haydn’s ‘Creation’ (Oxford Philharmonic) and Canzonettas (with Olga Tverskaya), Schubert Lieder (with Eugene Asti) and works by Vivaldi (La Serenissima) to traditional classical Scottish music (Concerto Caledonia). Mhairi is a member of the Vocal Performance Department of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and is a Teaching Professor of Voice and Historical Performance Practice at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.  In 2020, she embarked on study as a PhD student at the Guildhall, researching vocal pedagogy in the publications of Domenico Corri (1746-1825).

Joshua Neumann is a Digital Musicologist at the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur | Mainz and Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz. His current project, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, focuses on analysis of Dietrich Fischer Dieskau’s 40+ years singing Die Winterreise and his relationship to modern conceptions of this cycle. He is currently planning a project examining notions of work expression through production and performance practices in Giulio Cesare in Egitto as recorded since 1950. Additionally, he continues to develop analytical applications between network science and musicology, digital musicology infrastructure development, and data standardization for large scale projects. His publications address music encoding, vocal performance practice, film music, ground truth data, conducting, music data analysis, dance, film, and 18^th vocal music. 

Daniele Palma is a postdoctoral research fellow in musicology at the University of Bologna, working on the performance practice of Verdi’s operas in nineteenth-century London. He is also an Assistant Professor at the University of Ferrara, where he teaches Contemporary music. His research interests include operatic vocality and cultural imaginaries of opera, early sound media, and amateur musical practices. On these topics, he has published journal articles (Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, Palaver, Mimesis Journal, Acusfere, Journal of World Popular Music) and book chapters (Guerini, Squilibri, Neoclassica, Routledge). He is co-editor of Sounds of the Pandemic: Accounts, Experiences, Perspectives in Times of COVID-19 (Routledge, 2023). His first monograph has been published by Libreria Musicale Italiana in 2024, under the title Recording Voices. Archeologia fonografica dell’opera (1887-1948).

Neal Peres Da Costa is a world-renowned performing scholar, researcher and educator. He has held academic posts at the University of NSW, University of Leeds, Trinity College of Music (London), and Royal Academy of Music (London). He is Professor of Historical Performance at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music where he founded the Historical Performance division in 2007, and was the division's chair for eight years. Subsequently, he was Program Leader of Postgraduate Research. Currently, he is Associate Dean (Research) at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Rebecca Plack is a musicologist, singer, and voice teacher. She is Professor of Opera Studies and Music History at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she also created the curriculum in Vocal Pedagogy. She graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, received her MM from the Manhattan School of Music, and earned her doctorate at Cornell University. Her research interests include intersections of technique and style in vocal recordings; relationships between notation and performance practices; improvisatory techniques in “classical” music; 18^th century Italian opera; and 19th century German song. 

Elisabeth Salverda is a doctoral researcher at LUCA Lemmens | KU Leuven and member of the Music, Thought and Technology cluster at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent. Her PhD in the arts investigates the sound world, acoustic experimentation and timbral devices of organ builder and inventor Georges (Josse) Cloetens (1871–1949) at the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels, in tandem with her own experiments in sound and musical instrument making in the present-day. Her publications include (as co-author): ‘Restoration and Reinvention. Reviving the Piano-viole’, Galpin Society Journal 72 (2019).

Fatima Volkoviskii Barajas defended her doctoral thesis at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid in June 2023. Her dissertation focuses on the vocal performance practices of early Flamenco music in pre-electrical recordings. Recent conferences include: “Flaunting the Mantilla: The Embodied Tease of the Spanish Singing Style in Early Recordings” read at the Hochschule der Künste, Bern, and a talk presented at Glasgow University as part of the RMA Research Colloquia in Music. She received a research grant from The City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society last year and has also participated in phonograph recording sessions at a symposium held in January 2023 through the AHRC-funded research network Redefining Early Recordings, where she recorded early XXth century popular Spanish songs.