Bel Canto Summer School

The Bel Canto Summer School is an international program held at the Royal Irish Academy of Music/Trinity College Dublin that offers singers intensive training in historically informed approaches to performing vocal repertoire from the 17th to early 19th centuries. The course includes vocal coaching, private instruction, and master classes in the technical and interpretive foundations of music from Giulio Caccini and John Dowland to Handel, Mozart, and Rossini.
Tutors
The principal tutors for the summer school are Emma Kirkby, Nicholas Clapton, and Robert Toft.
The Bel Canto Style of Singing
Treatises from the 16th to 19th centuries establish the principles of interpretation taught in the program, and singers learn how to turn skeletally notated scores into passionate performances through a range of techniques that bring Domenico Corri’s phrase, coined in the early 1780s, to life: “either an air, or recitative, sung exactly as it is commonly noted, would be a very inexpressive, nay, a very uncouth performance”.
Although the expression bel canto most likely refers to a style of singing practiced in the 18th and early 19th centuries, the term can encompass historic styles of singing from around 1600 to about 1830. Writers did not apply the words bel canto to a “school” of singing until the early 1860s, a time of nostalgia when people began to long for an earlier approach to performance that had started to wane around 1830. Late 19th- and 20th-century sources would lead us to believe that bel canto was restricted to beauty and evenness of tone, legato phrasing, and skill in executing highly florid passages, but earlier documents describe a multifaceted manner of performance far beyond these confines.
From the 16th to the early 19th centuries, principles of rhetoric, particularly those associated with pronunciatio (the division of rhetoric that concerns the delivery of texts) lay at the heart of vocal performance, and writers from Nicola Vicentino in 1555 to Charles Smyth in 1817 make the connection between the two arts explicit. Vicentino advises singers to use the orator as a model, and Smyth believes that the finest readers would make the best singers. In the 18th century, Giovanni Battista Mancini (1774), echoing Vicentino’s remarks, noted that in recitative singers should listen to “the speech of a good orator, and hear how many pauses, what variety of sounds, and how many different emphases he uses to express his meanings. Now he raises his voice, now he lowers it, now he hurries it, now it becomes harsh, and now he makes it sweet, according to the various passions that he intends to stir in the listener” / “Attenti pure al discorso d’un buon Oratore, e sentirete quante pose, quante varietà di voci, quante diverse forze adopra per esprimere i suoi sensi; ora inalza la voce, or l’abbassa, or l’affretta, or l’incrudisce, ed or la fà dolce, secondo le diverse passioni, che intende muovere nell’Uditore”. Vocalists of the time transferred these principles to the arias they sang, for as Richard Bacon explained in 1824, the techniques are “all capable of being applied to the air”.

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