‘If I teach you something as fact, it’s your duty as students to try and prove that I am wrong’. I hung on to one sentence of David Wulstan’s inaugural lecture to students when he came to Aberystwyth as new chair of the music department, and it has become more meaningful to me over time. Back then, emanating from his mind to ours, it was a wrestling invitation from a lion to cubs. Sure, in my last year at Aberystwyth when I was proof-reading and indexing his forthcoming book Tudor Music, I did query a some of his theories about pitch and the counter-tenor voice, but my tentative pawings were swatted away. My doubts remained, though. Although parts of his argument made sense, as a whole it didn’t quite add up. The counter-argument, led by Andrew Parrott, seemed more plausible but, like Wulstan’s, could only be made to work with extraordinary voices. My eureka moment was hearing a random radio article about Welsh male voice choirs dying out for lack of tenors: the reason was that men were getting taller, and on average shorter men had higher voices. I contacted the laryngologist whose research lay behind this item, and began to piece together his work with the evidence that Tudor men had been considerably shorter than modern men. The result of this was ‘A sweet shrill voice’, which I wrote for the journal Early Music in 1998. That piece was specifically about voices in Tudor England, but I was aware that the ramifications of the relationship between human height and vocal pitch were much wider. Following these threads led me to writing The Supernatural Voice – a history of high male singing, which was published in 2014.
Writing that book opened up a further can of worms about how music had been made in the past. Was it composed by in solitude or more corporately? What role did improvisation play in the creative act? How, if at all, was it rehearsed? How was it heard? I was asking and trying to answer these and countless similar questions with a purpose: to explore what we could learn from past ways of approaching this thing we call ‘classical music’. I’m exploring this in a book called Ear to Ear – the historical journey of classical music which I hope will become reality in due course. But I first needed to ask a more basic question: what is classical music? I hope you enjoy engaging with this brief answer.