My first writing was a piece about the nascent Electric Phoenix, pitched to the contemporary music journal Contact. Editor Keith Potter (no relation) declined it (too similar to the earlier Contact article on Tim Souster’s band OdB that had inspired mine), but he asked me to review some concerts of Xenakis and Ferneyhough. It was a one-off and formative experience: I realised I knew far too much about the messy nitty gritty of performing ever to be able to write an objective review. I was happier to accept an invitation from The Composer to write about singing with electronics. I was then too busy with performance projects until I began my PhD. This yielded an article on Louis Armstrong for the OU Graduates Association and a piece for Popular Music on women singers as composer-poets. Then in 1998 Cambridge University Press published Vocal Authority, a re-working of my PhD thesis (which had been supervised by the legendary Richard Middleton) which outlined a Gramscian theory of vocal style and has remained my most quoted book.

CUP then asked me to edit The Cambridge Companion to Singing, to which I also contributed chapters on ensemble singing and jazz (the latter when my chosen author didn’t deliver). Various articles and reviews for musical journals followed, and then Yale commissioned Tenor: History of a Voice. A longer term project was A History of Singing which I co-wrote for Cambridge University Press with my York colleague Neil Sorrell. I contributed to two Cambridge Histories, and a piece for History Today with Jez Wells on the organ of Notre Dame on the occasion of the fire. I have increasingly felt that academic writing needlessly limits itself to a very small readership, and was delighted to be asked by Yale to write a book on song that would be aimed beyond the academic bubble (it's even available as an audiobook). Song: a History in 12 Parts was researched in just the same way as my other books but instead of footnotes it has a separate chapter, Beyond the Notes, which explains what materials I used and how to follow them up. Sadly, the arts press was not sufficiently impressed to review it, but I was very pleased that Song was selected as one of the Country Life Best Books of the Year, so I must have done something right. 

I should point out that there is a formatting error on page 281  of  Song which unfortunately appears to make nonsense of the text. An errata slip was included with review copies, but I don’t think this was extended to copies on sale (my copies ordered from Amazon didn’t have it). It’s the text of Berio’s Sequenza III, which should be on three lines. The typesetter apparently misinterpreted this as an instruction to italicise the 2nd line and reduce the whole quote to two. I’m assured it will be corrected in future editions.