1. Preamble
It is under your name, that this [book] then recommends itself to these our times: and again to these who will come after, for whom I have principally written: so that when our language will no longer be native, or it has undergone notable change (because the word only has life by writing) they shall create an image as in a mirror, the portrait of French in this our century, in its most accurate form. 1
Jacques Peletier, 1555, Dialogue, adressed to Jeanne de Navarre.
To hear the voice of Peletier, click on the kettle drum.
This setting into context of early music, largely applied today in spite of a shared utopian dream that it requires, leads us to explore the specific instrumental techniques and the principles of musical interpretation that were left free in the documents of the day. But especially, it sounds the death-knell for an ideology that sets music up as a universal language, immediately comprehensible to all. In opposition to this it necessitates, for each repertoire, apprenticeship and culture, an individual style of interpretation. Ensuring the destruction of the "Tower of Babel" built by the romantics, it begins an era of "musical polyglotism". In this respect, the interpreters like the mélomanes have shown, over the course of the last decades, that they were capable of rapidly adapting to the extremely diverse musical universe.
Firstly, the voices of the past are not preserved in any museum. The iconography put into the context of the singers hardly tells us of the vocal technique employed. In the end, the musicologist desires to take a historical study of song, which is not well disposed to incomplete treatises.
Next, a singer can hardly change ones voice like one changes an instrument: the cultivation of the vocal organs, which is a lifelong affair, is difficult to take in several divergent directions. It is for this reason that the schools of song most often try to adopt a "master-key" technique that allows a uniform manner of interpretation over the vast baroque, classical or romantic repertoire. This is a tool well adapted to the demands which a singer of today is bound to, it nonetheless tends to gum up the national differences and the particularities of style that, probably, cultivated the schools of the past.
Finally, song is the magic place where two distinct sometimes opposed modes of expression are fused: music and language. Curiously, a singer nevertheless adhered to the principles of the historic interpretation often feels reticent to transpose to language the method that they themselves apply to music. This reticence will be more marked when approaching spoken language. Affectionately attached to its "maternal" character, they will tend to consider it as a loss of identity by abandoning the intonations with which they are familiar. Often they simply refuse to enter into the matter, fearing that, in its ancient guise, the language would sound ridiculous coming from their mouths.
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