Are we all castrati? Venanzio Rauzzini: ‘The father of a new style in English singing’

Though the castrato has been absent from the operatic stage since the nineteenth century, this voice is often described as the mysterious link in understanding the vocal techniques attributed to bel canto. The mystery lies in the fact that the voice of the operatic castrato cannot be heard by modern ears; and yet its legacy can be seen in the vocal tuition of several successful opera singers at the turn of the nineteenth century. What is unusual about this period is that some of the most successful singers of the day, including Nancy Storace, John Braham and Elizabeth Billington were British and shared the same vocal teacher. The castrato Venanzio Rauzzini (1746-1810) began his career as a primo uomo on the continent and while he established himself in various areas of musical activity, his main contribution and legacy was as a vocal teacher. During his residency in Britain from 1774 until his death, he trained several leading British professional singers who were the stars of opera in London and on the continent. They each demonstrated a use of techniques associated with the castrato vocal aesthetic and popularised a new vocal style, which can be traced to Rauzzini. Through this thesis, I will draw attention to the importance of Rauzzini’s impact on vocal teaching practice in Britain and his wider influence on the development of vocal style. I will demonstrate that Rauzzini should be considered part of the vocal teaching canon to which Pier Francesco Tosi (c.1653-1732), Nicola Porpora (1686-1768) and Manual García II (1805-1906), three other foreign vocal teachers, who were resident in Britain, already belong. By examining exactly what the expected vocal aesthetics were for all singers, castrato, non-castrated male and female during the period in which Rauzzini was active, I will demystify the castrato technique and provide a more tangible understanding of what this encompassed, demonstrating that many of these techniques were learned, performed and popularised by other voice types such as the female soprano and the male tenor.

Breaking old and new ground: a comparative study of coastal and inland naming in Berwickshire

This thesis investigates the place-names of four parishes in Berwickshire and compares coastal and inland naming patterns. Berwickshire is a large county that borders on northern England and historically formed part of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria. Partly due to the survival of extensive archives from the medieval priory of Coldingham, preserved in Durham Cathedral Archives, this county holds some of Scotland’s earliest recorded place- names. The parishes that form the research area are grouped together in the north-east of the county. Two of these parishes, Abbey St Bathans and Bunkle & Preston, are inland, and two, Cockburnspath and Coldingham, have extensive coastlines. The diversity of this group of parishes allows a comparative study of the place-names of coastal and inland areas to be undertaken. The topography of Berwickshire’s thirty-two parishes is very varied, and the four parishes have been chosen to reflect this range of landscapes. The place-names within the four parishes examined in this thesis derive almost exclusively from Old English, Older Scots, Modern Scots including Standard Scottish English, with a small minority derived from Old Norse, Gaelic, and Brittonic. The chronology of Old English, Older Scots, and Modern Scots is defined as given in the Concise Scots Dictionary: Old English is the period up to 1100, Older Scots is the period 1100-1700, and Modern Scots is the period 1700 onwards (CSD, 1985: xiii). Often with place-names it is not possible to give a precise dating for the coining of a toponym. For the purposes of this study, the language label given for a toponym is that of the date of the earliest record of the place-name with earlier linguistic evidence supplementing discussion. This thesis focuses on the names of topographic features, for example hills, rocks and woodland, and the role of perception in their naming. In order to compare the role of perception in inland and coastal naming, this thesis includes a diachronic study of the toponymy of the research area, along with two case studies. The first of these is a study of the toponymy of relief features, which focuses on generic elements in order to compare the perception of one type of referent in the two environments. The second is a study of the ‘colour’ category, which focuses on qualifying elements in order to compare the use of colour terms in the two environments. This thesis is the first comparative study of inland and coastal place-names, and it is one of the first to investigate new ways of using fieldwork as a central part of its methodology. In doing so it proposes innovative and nuanced ways to understand the toponymy of diverse landscapes within a community.