Historical Performance in Early Opera: A Brown Female Artist-scholar’s Autoethnography

University music students report that historically informed performance—especially of music from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century—often poses considerable challenges, not least because it involves specific skills in improvisation as well as an approach to notated music that regards it as a descriptive starting point rather than a prescriptive text. In this latter sense, some practitioners of ‘European’ early music (many being themselves of diverse backgrounds) have regarded living traditions of classical music from South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia as sources for inspiration, learning, skill acquisition, and collaboration. Since at least the 1960s, cross-cultural projects within the early music movement—for example those of Thomas Binkley, Jordi Savall, Jean-Christophe Frisch, and more recently Charulatha Mani—have aimed to demonstrate to audiences cross-cultural synergies and correlations in technique and aesthetics. Such projects have provided speculative sonic contexts that could inform curriculum development that aims to reconsider the epistemic constructs underpinning western music, while affording bold ways of imagining historical encounters in earlier centuries. However, more reflexive research—and especially descriptions of lived experience in this field—is necessary in order to locate diverse ontological perspectives. I draw on and bring into dialogue our distinctive ways of being (ontology) and knowing (epistemology) to search for forms of shared understandings of historical performance practice. For this chapter I create an autoethnography in which I reflect on my experiences, locate cultural specificities in my practice, and identify common objectives in the practical and aesthetic frameworks surrounding this field.