How I got into this....
I did my first degree (in music) in London, at The City University (1986-89) and then went on to do my postgraduate studies at the University of Birmingham in the 1990s. My PhD was on Music Theatre in Europe in the 1960s and 70s, but looking at it in the context of the “isms” of the early 20th century - Futurism, Dadaism and, Surrealism, as well as the literary experiments of writers such as Joyce and Beckett. I was, therefore, already very interested in the kind of text-based experiments that early twentieth century writers and mid-twentieth century composers were involved in, and as a singer with a fairly theatrical background (it was a very close run thing about whether I went to study music or drama when I was making my university choices as a teenager!) I was equally interested in performing this kind of thing, with perhaps fewer of the vocal inhibitions that more operatically-oriented singers might have. Due to the largely fortuitous fact that both the music departments I studied in also specialize in electroacoustic composition, I got to know and have subsequently worked with several electroacoustic composers, and it is in this arena that most of my work with extended vocal technique has been done, particularly over the last ten years.
When I came to the Birmingham Conservatoire (where I currently work), I was asked to teach performance practice in relation to contemporary music, and this was a new area of teaching for me that has significantly changed the direction of my research (rather than the slightly more usual pattern of it happening the other way round). Performance practice issues have underlain many of my ideas about mid-20th century music theatre and extended vocal repertoire, but I had rarely articulated these in an overt way: finding myself in a conservatoire, surround by student performers, it’s perhaps only to be expected that this is an area I have become much more interested in. One of the most obvious results of this is the book on Berio’s Sequenzas that I am currently editing - this was, apart from my own frustration at the lack of published material on Berio and on the Sequenzas in general, a direct response to my students’ complaints that they couldn’t find any books about these pieces....In the future, I also plan a book on some of the great exponents of extended vocal technique, in particular Berberian and Monk.