Historically informed singing: fantasy, reality - or an irrelevance?

The phrase ‘historically-informed’ is a badge (usually self-awarded) worn by many musicians who perform ‘early music’ these days. But just what does it really mean, both in a certain world of musicking that embraces practitioners and their audiences, and in more scholarly historiographical terms? When it comes to singers and singing, for all that the airwaves and download sites are brimming with the sounds of confident performances of a massive range of music of the past, almost unimaginable fifty years ago, there remains a continuous uneasy stand-off between what we think we know and what we think we are actually doing. Indeed, rather than coming to terms with what a commitment to being ‘historically informed’ might actually lead to, singing itself is (and is in danger of remaining) the elephant in the room