[Timed for the Aldeburgh Festival (11-27 June, 1999)]

Seaside Aldeburgh has been warming up nicely to receive, very politely, its annual mid-June influx of arty outsiders. Shop fronts are glistening with wet paint in tasteful colours. One old lady, perhaps overcome with excitement, drove her automatic car right into an antique shop (hurting no-one). In his handsome church, it would not be surprising to see the vicar taking some Mr Muscle to the John Piper stained glass tribute to Benjamin Britten, the local boy who has made this place come good.
Inland a touch, at Snape, amongst the off-stage noise of the festival's building programme working its way through several million pounds worth of millennium funding, rising sopranos and mezzos in their twenties and thirties bit great chunks out of the twentieth century song repertoire at the Britten-Pears School based there. Anyone can attend BPS masterclasses: it's cheap and easy. For the first time this year, in a brilliant innovation, three such singing sessions will be in the festival programme: so this felt doubly like a rehearsal.

There is nothing like watching singers exploring their own anxieties about performing this tough music (Poulenc was by far the most overtly charming) to blow away one's own about listening to it. It helped that few of these 12 professional or post-graduate singers (the majority, like the two teachers, from the US) knew how to make an ugly noise: anguished cries, staccato machine-gunned yelps, not to say dog barks and cat miaows, were all thrown down at the audience like gauntlets. They took the music of George Crumb, Cathy Berberian and John Cage and could show any sceptic that there's loveliness there.

Singers are notoriously neurotic, and modern song is not normally regarded as easeful, and yet the miracle of attending these classes was that they were workmanlike, fun and moving. The young women surprised themselves by not competing with one another: an experiment in singing like divas but not behaving like prima donnas.

Phyllis Bryn-Julson, whose earlier career pioneered much of this material, has done seven annual stints at this job. She tells the accompanists where Messiaen himself ran out of fingers to play the notes, or where the song can be taken much slower than is written on the page. "That may be what the score says, but it's not what we worked out at the time", she says, with the authority of having worked with Boulez, Lutoslawski and Ligeti. She seemed to combine showmanship with a delight in technicality. A singer said at one point she wanted to relax a little in a particular passage. "But Messiaen didn't want you to", came back the icy oracle. "You watch that rhythm: you get just as many chills from rhythmic accuracy as you do from timbre".

Her confidence was great for theirs, a real issue with material that so often requires a performer to blast off disjointed noises into deathly silence, or an apparent chaos of other sounds. It seems like making a gymnast operate without parallel bars. Cari Burdett, one of several spectacularly tall, super-model gangly singers on the course, wanted help with an electronic piece. Phyllis (the only woman around built on traditional operatic lines) remarked: "Go back and study Monteverdi when preparing this stuff: remember the classical repertoire. For every electronic piece, there's a Donizetti song you can use as a security blanket".

Kristen Toedtman (a great chanteuse in Weill night-clubbery) repeated a message of Phyllis': "You need to keep some Schubert in your Milton Babbitt and put some Messiaen into your Puccini." This cross-over approach - taking the existential to the mellifluous, and the melodious to the exiguous - is a key to finding the loveliness in modern song (and nicely supposes the compliment can be repaid by the older music). One begins to see that modern composers keep much more truly, and tunefully, to traditions in song-making than at first appears, and this is only slightly because they are often using old texts. To test the truth of this general proposition, try playing the Schubert and the Britten CDs of the tenor Ian Bostridge, the better, anyway, to overcome disappointment that his recital of both composers at Aldeburgh has been fully booked for weeks.

Singers of modern song have to be technically highly proficient. The range and rapidity of changes of tone are awesome. A composer will take a melody and put whole octave jumps into it. The tune is there, but it's sort of on stilts. And the singers say they have to be able to count beats with great accuracy. Finally, they say, you have to love the words. Mangle them, and Phyllis mangles you.

The mechanics of singing are every exciting, and never better on show than in these stripped down, interrupted performances (they remind one of a blues guitarist playing unplugged, or a rock band's muted sound checks). Singers go to vocal consultants as well as teachers: they live at constant risk, like athletes. At the BPS course, Ruth Drucker, a long time friend of Phyllis', took care of this side of things. "See", she shows Emily Strode, an Engish mezzo, placing the girl's hand on Drucker's own stomach as she demonstrates a note: "I want it from here". And then, with another student, it's: "Yes, that's better: we need the sound to come from higher up," as she discusses a quality of note to be wrung from the youngster's head. "A little lift in the mouth, a little smile, does the trick." These people are chasing sounds all over, unearthing them in bits of the cranium, getting them out better by imagining a wire hanging them from the top of the head. Their bones matter as much as their brains.

"We are neurotic because we are our instrument", said Christa Pfeiffer, not that the toll shows in her wonderful composure on stage. Cari Barrett gave the biggest clue to how emotional things become: she dissolved into tears in one passage during a vocal workout. It seemed almost that the noise she was making had unlocked an animal response. No wonder people wail when they're upset: it is just that this was very composed howling. By the way, Phyllis strongly recommended lovers and child-bearing for young singers seeking extra quality of tone.

"You have to be prepared to be very vulnerable", says Pfeiffer. "Getting good means being able to bare your soul". It also means, in the oddest way, staying uninvolved: this is performance, after all, and control and technique matter hugely. Phyllis was allways either ticking the women off for being too Broadway, or not Broadway enough: they have to be able to be austere, flashy, haughty and unhinged by turns, and on tap.

Phyllis and Ruth seemed to work hardest on getting the youngsters to slow down, to make less noise. "Let the audience do your work for you", said Ruth sternly to one woman, "They like to do that best. Let them complete the work". She knows that it is leaving well alone that brings audiences to the edge of their seats. "Give the audience more time", said Phyllis, wryly: "They need to recover between onslaughts".

To one woman daunted by a difficult passage Phyllis' advice was: "You did youself in with the negative thoughts. There's always a limit to what the voice will do. But stay tall. Anything negative shows. And go and find a Bellini song which goes to the same place. Find that sound and put it into your voice." It sounded like remembering to pack the right clothes, or remembering the right tools for a plumber to take on a job. It also sounded easy, which is rather the point.