Singing has not proved to be the easiest form of music making to be covered in this series of Cambridge Companions. Other volumes have covered particular instruments with a relatively short historical development and, until recently at least, a fairly narrow cultural range, but singing is a world‐wide activity. Through recordings, broadcasts and travelling performers (and audiences), we can now easily hear all kinds of singing from vocalists of every culture under the sun, moon and laser. Thus we have here contributions on world music, pop, jazz, rock and rap, as well as European “art song” and opera. The field is too vast for a single volume.
There are chapters on world music (a respectable survey), followed by a detailed description of how certain rock and jazz singers produce the sound they make (to my mind an exercise in mis‐applied scholarship). Stephen Varcoe’s survey of the European art song tradition is very superficial; I would have preferred something, from the inside as it were, about the actual business of preparing, rehearsing and performing as a soloist, more along the lines of Heikki Liimola’s description of how he trains his amateur Finnish choir. A whole section is devoted to the voice in the theatre, which includes some interesting thoughts on why French opera failed to dominate the European stage after the latter seventeenth century when their other arts exercised such a cultural hegemony.
A reasonable amount of space is given to performance practice, and it is in this part, with more technical detail, that the content becomes more generally useful. As with others in the series, the diagrams are good and clear, even though most of the other illustrations are not very helpful: a photograph of Cathy Berberian performing Stripsody is no substitute for hearing her, so could we not have had a CD of extracts of that and other pieces described throughout the book? The bibliography is good; the index is mostly, though not entirely, confined to proper names. All in all, then, not one of the most successful volumes in the series, but if you have been collecting the others there is no reason to disregard this one.
