The relationship between self and singer

The professional performer is the tree in the philosopher’s human forest. If there’s no opportunity to sing or act or dance in front of an audience, are they still a performer at all? In the spring of 2020, when most of his colleagues shrugged and started making banana bread, the tenor Ian Bostridge took an altogether more existential approach to isolation, writing a series of lectures for the University of Chicago exploring the relationship between self and singer, silence and song. Now they form the basis of his latest book.

Song & Self is a slim volume. Early on, Bostridge invokes the essay’s origins in Montaigne – the idea of essayer (to try), the form as a space for experimentation and exploration, for provisional attempts rather than finished thoughts or arguments. It’s framed as an apologia; Bostridge’s writing is an ‘open-ended performance’, ‘improvisatory rather than systemically theorised’. The book comes to life when it does precisely that: shakes free of thesis and academic jargon and stops scaffolding itself with critical theory.

Before he was a professional singer, Bostridge was a historian and Oxford research fellow. If you fancy an unexpected diversion from listening to his impressive and much-awarded recording catalogue, you could read his monograph Witchcraft and its Transformations c.1650-c.1750. It’s as though, in lockdown, Bostridge reverted to this earlier self. While his previous A Singer’s Notebook and Schubert’s Winter Journey smuggle profundity in under the jumper and jeans of relaxed, readable prose, Song and Self wears its scholarship as a suit of armour – and not one that’s been oiled recently.

There’s quite a lot of problematising, historicising and ‘othering’, a healthy dollop of Fanon and Gramsci, and not much by way of translations (so best brush up your French and German before you start).