The complex and fascinating world of vocals in early music: A discussion between Kari Turunen and Tuuli Lindeberg

Kari Turunen: Hello Tuuli, long time no see. How are you doing professionally these days?

Tuuli Lindeberg: Hello Kari, pretty well – a lot of wonderful things to sing, repertoire across various eras, artistic planning and a bit of teaching too. 

I’m currently on a three-year government artist grant that allows me to engage with a number of artistically inspiring projects. Apart from performing, my production team and I are preparing for the Musica nova Helsinki contemporary music festival next February. This is my second time as artistic director. I also teach a bit of Baroque and contemporary vocal music at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. I’m doing lots of different things and enjoying them all!

What do you have lined up? I believe the last time we met was when you brought your chamber choir to Finland a year ago.

KT: The Vancouver Chamber Choir and I have had an exceptionally busy year. In addition to our own season of eleven concerts, we had a couple of recording sessions and an unusual number of orchestra gigs. I gave a concert with I Dodici in Finland this summer, at Sastamala Gregoriana. I also taught some choir conducting courses and did a number of small things with local choirs. Oh yes, and I sang more than I have in quite a while, as I joined ranks with the choir at three orchestra gigs. I think I did pretty well.

I feel that the repertoire of the choir in the last season was really good in the sense that it felt the most like me to date, and audiences seemed to like it too. It’s been five years since I came here, and I seem to be finding a balance between external and internal impulses! 

This is partly because I’ve begun to gravitate towards early music again. I found that I’d been avoiding it for quite a while, as I didn’t want to change the profile and policy of the choir too much all at once. I’ve missed doing Renaissance repertoire, and I’ve now realised that it’s all just up to me. We’ll have to see what the reception will be like in the long run, but the initial reactions have been very promising. And the singers enjoy it hugely, of course. Why do you think that is?

TL: I’m very fond of programmes that combine early and contemporary music, because they illustrate on the one hand how the world around us has changed over the centuries but on the other hand how people basically remain very much the same. Singers also enjoy programmes like this, because the relationship between text and music and the expressive palette required can range hugely and inspiringly. Besides, singing early music feels absolutely wonderful in the body! 

I often feel that with that repertoire in particular I can sense something universally human, sincere and essential about voice production, breathing, ensemble work, expression and corporeality. This may be partly due to the tuning systems used in early music, where many harmonies sound and resonate in the body much better than in equal temperament. Also, the ideals of Classical rhetoric, which were rediscovered and acquired central importance in music in the late Renaissance and Baroque eras, offer a clear-cut and natural toolkit for shaping the character of text and music.

Although I perform a wide range of repertoire from various eras, I feel that my roots are very much in early music, and having been ‘marinated’ in the rhetoric and ensemble work of early music and its texts from an early age hugely influenced my growth as a performer and an artist. I recall that I was not very fond of performing when I was young, but singing together always felt good, even in front of an audience. Studying rhetoric somehow gave me ‘license’ to perform, along with concrete tools for engaging the listener’s emotions, which I feel is the key goal in performing Baroque music in particular. I apply these principles to performing music from other eras too.

Tuuli Lindeberg
- A Helsinki-based soprano
- Known particularly for her expertise in both Baroque and contemporary repertoire and performance practices, as both a performer and a pedagogue
- Artistic Director of the Musica nova Helsinki contemporary music festival
- A shared history with Kari Turunen in the vocal ensemble Lumen Valo, where they performed together from 1996 to 2002

Kari Turunen 
- A Finnish choir conductor living in Canada; conductor of the Vancouver Chamber Choir since 2019
- Instructor of choir conducting at the Vancouver Academy of Music
- Artistic Director of the I Dodici vocal ensemble based in Finland.
- Has conducted, among others, the Spira Ensemble, Akademiska Sångföreningen, Kampin Laulu, Akademiska Damkören Lyran, and Chorus Cantorum Finlandiae in Finland; was involved in founding the Aurore Festival of Renaissance Music
- A shared history with Tuuli Lindeberg in the vocal ensemble Lumen Valo, where they performed together from 1996 to 2002

Mainstreams and marginalia

TL: Have you read The End of Early Music by Bruce Haynes (Oxford University Press, 2007)? It was an eye-opener for me, because I realised that classical music and how it is performed is still viewed mostly through the lens of conceptions of art and artists that date from the Romantic era. Just think about how classical musicians are written up in the media, how they are regarded, how the canon of the classical repertoire is outlined, how one is supposed to behave at concerts, and what one is to expect from an artistic experience. Do you see any difference here as opposed to the operating environment and philosophy of early music?

KT: There are plenty of interesting insights in Haynes’s book. But to address your question, we maybe need to go back in time a bit. If I recall, Haynes criticises the notion that performing traditions form a logical continuum, perpetuated from one teacher to another and from generation to generation within an orchestra, across decades and centuries. I believe that we’re guilty of falling for the same fallacy when discussing the early music movement or the HIP [Historically Informed Performance] tradition. As I see it, both the status of early music in the wider field of classical music and the way people make music within it have changed radically since the pioneering work done in the 1960s and 1970s. But there are identity features in the early music movement that specifically set it apart from the mainstream of classical music. 

For me, it seems more that early music has drifted into the mainstream and is largely governed by the same norms as classical music. Individual artists are promoted using the same Romantic hero saga as in, say, symphonic music, and the concert culture and reception by the public are pretty much the same. The HIP tradition is becoming so authoritative that individualist voices are few and far between, and people learn uniform means of musical expression, just as is the case with Romantic music.

I’ve always considered the Baroque reinterpretation movement that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s to be a descendant of the Reformation. Both abandoned the established tradition and went back to the original sources. Music had to be cleansed of its Romantic baggage, whether it be in printed music (via Urtext editions), in playing styles or “impure” (anachronistic) instruments. The pioneers never claimed to know exactly what the music had sounded like in its own time, but written sources had convinced them that the way in which audiences had become accustomed to hearing it was definitely not what it had sounded like. This resulted in copies of period instruments being made and in the establishing of a kind of blissful interpretative vacuum that these pioneers began to fill. The mainstream, of course, was rather less than amused by being thus challenged.

I feel that this is the identity that still, albeit unconsciously, characterises the HIP movement: the notion of being free, drawing on historical sources and being somehow in opposition to symphonic music. But the world has changed enormously, and this paradigm does not really apply any more, though perhaps there are still some dimensions in early music that represent a counterforce to the Romantic ideals of art and artists. Expanding the canon – or indeed the absence of a canon in Renaissance music in particular – might be an example of this. Do you agree?

TL: Yes, very much so! I’ve always found working outside the established canon to be the most inspiring approach, to boldly inhabit the marginalia. Haynes, if I recall, discussed what a very new idea it is in the history of music for the audience coming to a performance to already know the works being performed. I feel that this often affects how the performers interpret the works and changes the dynamic of the performance context. If the audience already knows the repertoire, it may be difficult to provide them with a genuinely moving and effective artistic experience.

As for the HIP movement, it may well be that it has begun to drift towards the mainstream. But I like to think of this relationship in an opposite way: while the HIP movement began in the margins, mainstream musicians are increasingly taking an interest in it, because they’ve discovered that many of the principles of period performances are applicable in multiple contexts. The early days of the HIP movement involved a keen interest in sonorities, not so much in performing the music. I feel fortunate to have been part of a period where the HIP movement increasingly began to understand the importance of rhetoric. This has proven an invigorating approach for myself and for many other singers mainly working in mainstream contexts, as an alternative to modern professional training that focuses on technical flawlessness, vocal volume and virtuosity.

Rhetoric, text and music

TL: When I look at the early music scene in Finland, it feels like living in the lap of luxury: the community of musicians active in early music are like one big family, in a positive sense. There also seems to be more potential for cross-discipline projects or ‘thinking outside the box’. How does the Finnish scene look when seen from Canada?

KT: It’s a pretty small world over here too, but I see what you mean. In vocal music in particular, the freedom of not being involved in institutions is par for the course. And this, of course, means that one is chronically short of resources, but one is also relaxed and unstressed. The further back in time we go to find music, the more it is about inventing things for ourselves, because there simply aren’t any models to go by. And there isn’t really a canon for pre-Baroque music, at least not in the sense that I understand ‘canon’, i.e. a corpus of commonly known works that are reinterpreted time and time again in each new period. The value of such works is that both performers and listeners already have an established relationship to the music. There aren’t very many universally known pieces like that from before the year 1600.

This premise – that everything is new and fresh by definition – may be part of the reason why it feels so easy to include unusual elements in performances of early music. It’s probably a response to the pressure to be somehow contemporarily relevant, which is not entirely unproblematic when we are dealing with music that is centuries old, but it also somehow stems from the music itself. Perhaps it has something to do with the rhetoric of performance that you referred to. What do you mean by that?

TL: When I say rhetoric of performance, I’m talking about the means for establishing an intense contact with listeners and other performers: tools for sharing the affective content of the music, text and voice with the audience and for making the drama, the story, the universe of the character and the context ‘sincerely true’ in the live performance. Baroque repertoire is excellent for this purpose, because in that era the principles of rhetoric formed the foundation for the culture of composing, singing, making music and performing in general.

For me, the ‘toolkit’ of rhetoric is especially significant because analysing and focusing on rhetorical devices in rehearsal and then immersing oneself in them in performance is a process that has allowed me to have something magical happen with other performers – whether we call it flow, energy, trust, warmth, charisma or telepathy. In those circumstances, the focus in performance is not on the performer or on the flawless execution of the music on the page but on striving for a powerful shared experience, narrative and communion. I would claim that this differs from the idea that many with modern musician training have about the ultimate goal of performing. The rigid hierarchy governed by the star soloist and diva culture focusing on the individual is still very strong in certain genres.

Over the years, I’ve felt that early music repertoire has settled in comfortably in cross-discipline projects thanks to the absence of a canon, the low-hierarchy and non-institutional working culture and the universally human appeal and uncontrived nature of the music itself. The ideal of Classical rhetoric is to imitate speech and to create an illusion of ease and natural delivery in any performance, resulting in a relaxed and natural pacing. Somehow this appeals to audiences on a subconscious level even now, hundreds of years after the music was created. 

KT: Rhetoric is an inevitable issue in Baroque music in particular, and also in madrigals from the turn of the 17th century, for instance. With sacred music from the Renaissance, rhetoric does not feel quite as important; there’s more a sense that the purpose of the music is to make space for listeners to address the text or perhaps contemplate their inner voices. Polyphony has a habit of stretching things out. A typical Renaissance motet may spend 3–4 minutes presenting an equal number of sentences of text. Inevitably, this poses the question of what the goal of the music is if not to convey text. For me, that goal is to create a soundspace for the listener to inhabit. Music does address the emotions, but in a way that allows space for the listener.

I’ve never thought about this in any systematic way, but it’s because those rhetorical or emotional means are not available in sacred Renaissance polyphony as they are in Baroque music that the technical quality of the performance acquires such importance – intonation, rhythmic precision and vocal quality. When one cannot do very much with dynamics either, then just about all that’s left in terms of expression is phrasing. If all that is done well, then the music does sound really good and engages the listener. I’m happy to note that young, trained singers seem to be getting better and better at this. Is this your experience as well? Are young singers more likely to be team players these days, or is the understanding of what solo singing is just broader these days?

TL: The relationship between text and music has varied greatly across the various eras of music history. I like to talk about the rhetoric of performance because I feel it’s a broader concept than just text and speech, encompassing performing skills as a whole. As for your question regarding young singers, to simplify a bit for argument’s sake, as recently as 50 years ago it was quite common to think that the best singers become opera singers and that the crowning achievement in the profession is to perform the Classical-Romantic core repertoire for one’s voice type. The culture of classical music has shifted fundamentally since then: the range of institutionally performed repertoire has expanded, non-institutional specialist ensembles have emerged and the global market for classical music has grown.

It seems to me that there are more classically trained singers in the world than there used to be a few decades ago – thanks for instance to brilliant and capable singers emerging from eastern Europe and Asia – and specialisation is a way to differentiate oneself among this great body of singers in our industry. I feel that the basics of universally applicable breathing and voice production techniques are excellently understood in classical voice training these days, as opposed to the quality of the voice in training being guided towards a specific aesthetic from the start. As a result, singers in younger generations may well be generally more flexible vocally and readier to take the plunge into things like singing early music than might have been the case a few generations ago.

Repertoire in specialist areas of classical vocal music is performed under the auspices of a widely variable mosaic of financing sources, organisational structures and institutions. Thus, there are widely differing career prospects, resources and operating environments available to specialised professionals. It’s no longer enough for any classical singer just to have a wonderful voice, because in order to create a long and successful career one must have other qualities too: one must be a virtuoso in time management and self-governance, have exceptional resilience and skills in languages, research, networking and interaction, besides being in solid mental and physical health, leading a disciplined and regular life away from work and – as is often the case these days – being adept at branding, social media presence, entrepreneurship and so on. And all this is in addition to the singing itself while maintaining and improving one’s repertoire, music-making skills and artistic competence.

Music that resonates through the body

TL: I’d like to go back to the corporeality of singing. In order for singing to engage the audience, the voice must be in harmony with the singer’s mind and body. Singing is a very intimate process of accepting one’s voice, listening and growing together, and this goes hand in hand with how the singer views themself and their own body at various stages of life. For me, performing early music repertoire is particularly relevant for this process, as it speaks to being sincere, convincing, natural and engaging in a (rhetorical) performance context. I also find it interesting that nearly every singer’s voice changes in the course of their career, and the repertoire suitable for them may suddenly expand or shift. Growing up from a fledgling to a mature artist also takes its time, and a singer may find their focus gravitating in unexpected directions over the years.

Have you thought about such development paths in choir conducting, or in your work with various vocal ensembles?

KT: Certainly, and I suspect that someone else would be able to see and hear the changes better than I can myself. The people one works with are crucially important: the choirs and ensembles one works with set the framework within which one must operate. And because every human voice is unique, every choir and vocal ensemble is different, and they unobtrusively guide the conductor towards working in a way that benefits both the voices at hand and one’s own ideals. And those ideals change gradually according to the kind of singers one works with the most. For me, it’s maybe been about my attention shifting to the process and trusting that a good process will produce a good outcome.

My conducting of Renaissance music is quite different from conducting other music, sort of rounded and indicative, you might say less precise. I’ve felt that it produces better results than control and precision; the music just works better that way. Another thing I might mention is that with my choir I’ve begun exploring ways of giving space to the choir and encouraging singers to make music more independently, while I take care of the bigger picture and remain physically as relaxed as possible.There’s still plenty for me to do, starting from major decisions like choosing the tempo and ending with what I call micro-improvisation.

When singing Renaissance music, especially when alone on a part, no one can tell you exactly how long the notes should be, how you should shape a phrase or how sharp or flat a particular pitch in a particular harmony should be. There’s a huge number of tiny choices constantly going on within the music that is externally very well organised. Some of these choices are conscious, while others are intuitive, and the only limit to this freedom is the freedom exercised by the other voices. Music that appears highly controlled is full of tiny but essential freedoms. Some of these are in the singers’ domain, others are in mine. I feel that in conducting there’s a process that at least in part involves recognising which freedoms are exercised by me and which I need to give up. Do you have any idea what I’m trying to say?

TL: I certainly do, because you mentioned quite a few keywords that really resonate with me! People. Trust. Letting go. Freedom. Autonomy. These have been fundamental insights for me, not only in singing but in art in general and in recognising how meaningful my work is. Alongside such top-level themes, things like voice quality and technical control, stylistic competence or interpreting the music seem almost trivial – and yet these are the things that can be tangibly sensed by outside listeners and hence evaluated.

Your concept of micro-improvisation reminded me of a term related to the performing of early Baroque music that I think is quite ingenious: sprezzatura. It means a certain kind of attitude, a sort of conscious negligence. A musician embracing sprezzatura would of course demonstrate to listeners that they were completely in control of their performance and style, but by blatantly deviating from it to just the right extent at just the right times, they could show how incredibly and admirably ‘cool’ they were. I find this really fascinating! Sprezzatura would seem also to apply to the autonomy and independent decision-making of a singer within a specified framework. It’s inspiring and empowering, it lends a sense of responsibility and it fosters creativity and confidence – all of which are vital for singing and ensemble work in any genre of music.

TL: We should wrap it up, at least for now. What a wide-ranging discussion! It was hugely inspiring to read of your experiences, thoughts and impressions, and also to write about things that I’ve never really verbally expressed.

Thank you so much, Kari! Have a great autumn, and I hope we’ll meet live again soon!

KT: Thanks, Tuuli! It was refreshing to discuss these issues with you. It’s weird to notice time and time again that one learns not only by another person sharing their thoughts but also by having to verbalise one’s own thoughts and experiences. Have a great musical year, and I’m sure our paths will cross sometime.

Translation: Jaakko Mäntyjärvi