Ben Maloney

Thesis

Thesis Title & Description

If Music and Sweet Poetry Agree': An Orthoepic Approach to Early Modern English Song (c.1540-c.1690)

• Supervisor: Richard Ogden, Robert Hollingworth, Emily Worthington

Since the mid-twentieth-century, singers specialising in early music have drawn upon historical evidence to inform their performance practices. However, historical pronunciation represents a crucial aspect that has been frequently overlooked. English has undergone substantial changes since the sixteenth-century; nonetheless, early song is rendered with present-day received pronunciation. Text delivered in a dialect that it was not composed to accommodate creates discord wherein the stress, rhyme, and assonance do not align correctly. Pioneers of spelling reform during the Renaissance have provided linguists with a solid foundation with which to study the sounds of Early Modern English. Regrettably, their appreciation for the music of their contemporaries has gone largely unnoticed. My objective is to document the approach to music and language between 1540 and 1690, and to establish a methodology for incorporating phonetic reconstructions into modern performances. I hope to rekindle interest in historical pronunciation and make it more accessible for singers.