It is the night after… Excuse me… I am such a tenor. Christmas night is ended, and the Morning After in Plattsburgh is still dark. My joy of celebrating the birth of my Savior was yesterday, and today I have the joy to celebrate the gifts that I know I will never merit. His coming to earth is reason enough to throw a party, but knowing why He came, makes for a lifetime full of happy tears and smiles. There are lots of moments filled with doubt, disappointment and impatience, but these are not among the gifts I celebrate. They are a part of our life on Earth that we all share to some degree or other. Even though these things are so mundane and common to us all, small as they may be in the grander scheme of what life here has to offer, I am none the less staggered every time the Christmas season overtakes us, that He chose to come share them with us. He shared many more negative aspects of human life that we artist types, if we are allowed, only get to depict. Do we suffer? Give me a break. I know that I am blessed. To be able to do this blog is a blessing. To be able to reprint Garcia’s voice bible is a blessing. To be able to own and read The Bible without fear of reprisal is a blessing. To have family and friends with whom I can share the wisdom of God’s Bible and Garcia’s bible is like, so amazing. So, I am blessed, and I pray you all may find your way to celebrate the blessings you enjoy. So here you have the end of my idea of a very long winded postdated Merry Christmas.
I am so happy to receive a question that is a nifty little gift. It happens to bridge two conversations I so want to pursue with all of you.
Conversation number one (What does Chest Voice and Falsetto sound like?) is already started with my last blog, and conversation number two starts with the gift:
Maestro Thank you for your Book, it is great! It has been a week that I received it and it is keeping me busy. I read it almost every day… and I am already doing some of the exercises. I have a question, if I may ask you. Garcia is very specific about the blending of the registers… if the tenor voice is one from low to high in chest voice, why would he use the term blending the registers, or would prescribe exercises in chest and falsetto at the same time? Pardon my ignorance, could it be possible that Garcia wants us to start singing in falsetto to develop it, make it stronger, to the point that it sounds, or it becomes chest voice or like chest voice? I am sorry, some light on this would be great, thanks!
My Face Book friend has discovered a dissonance that tripped me up when I first read the book he bought from my webstore that he calls mine. It is not my book, but I am happy he bought it. He noticed that Garcia would seem to speak with a forked tongue. I believe the truth is that Garcia made a wonderful invention, the laryngoscope, with which he discovered the most important difference between boys and girls. Not the difference that makes public bathroom door icons a modern controversy, but the much more important Vocal Pedagogical difference. Boys have two functions, one register. Girls also have two functions but three registers.
Now, forked tongues are not all developed for seeking victory on Election Day, even if some feel they are essential. A tongue can get forked by circumstances. In Garcia’s case, giving the appearance of a fork in his tongue could have been avoided by eliminating all the text rooted in his opinion expressed in the original edition of his book. When he researched Vocal Function with his little mirror, a decade after his book was first published, he made a key discovery that made him reedit and publish a new revised edition. The expressions that he did not revise give rise to questions such as the one above quoted.
There is another reason to see a split in Garcia’s tongue. It comes from the loose way Garcia used the terms “register” and “voice”. It would have been easier for me if he had been much more pedantic in his word usage, but he was only human. He wasn’t a tenor like me, but, you know, not perfect. Much of his advice to “blend the registers” was about using two different vocal functions on single pitches. That is to say: Sing a note in Chest Voice and then in Falsetto. The word “blend” is more about hiding the transition from one function to another. He didn’t even have a machine to make smoothies back then.
If you turn to page 209 in A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing: Part One you will find Garcia’s revised treatment that contains Garcia’s new thinking resulting from his use of the laryngoscope. Garcia’s advice for the early stages of study to train tenors to resort to Falsetto on the way to the upper range of the voice, found on page forty eight did not get changed. So what’s up? What would seem at first to be simple advice to be cautious is really Garcia directing the training of a beginner toward finding, with the guidance of a good teacher, one of Garcia’s “Secrets”. On page fourteen of his “Hints On Singing” he discusses the early stages of instruction:
Q. Why do you not use what is called the “messa di voce”?
A. The use of the “messa di voce” requires a singer to be expert in the control of the breath and of timbres. At this elementary stage it would cause only fatigue.
In the same “Hints” he expands on the benefits of learning the “Messa di Voce”:
Just how should a singer start the mystic “Messa di Voce”? The answer is lurking inside the last paragraph of page forty eight in A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing: Part One. The upper Falsetto singing suggested by Garcia, which should be approved by Garcia’s definition of a “good teacher”, is the beginning point for a tenor to use in his crusade to master the “Messa di Voce”. Once a singer has that sound established, he can turn to page one hundred thirty three in the Treatise to confront the “Messa di Voce” exercise. Word use becomes problematic on page one hundred thirty five of the same Treatise. Garcia advises the student to go from “falsetto” to “chest register”, and I can understand that some might think he is talking about moving into a different note range or something. But he really means falsetto (IGC) to chest voice or CGC, and then in the very next sentence he decides not to repeat himself with “chest register” and writes “chest tones” instead. No pedant in sight.
One great singer who knew his ideal falsetto sound for just about every pitch was Leonard Warren. I think almost every note in this song could be a perfect beginning of a wonderful “Messa di Voce”:
Now the full answer to the question asked by my Face Book friend: Garcia wants you to know Falsetto and Chest Voice so well that it is hard to tell when you move from one to the other. The ultimate end of the advice with which you are struggling is the “Messa di Voce”, which is the best training tool for establishing mastery in this area.
Dear Rocky, Thank you for a brilliant explanation of a much discussed and misunderstood area of the work.I follow your blog and work with great interest and many “Eureka” moments! Much love to Debbie and yourself. All the very best for 2017.
Dear Francis,
It is great to hear from you and thanks for the encouragement. May 2017 shower you with success.
Rocky,
If a register is a series (continuous) of notes that sound the same, then perhaps one could argue that clear timber, CGC is one, clear timber, ICG is another, dark timber, CGC is another, and dark timber, ICG is yet another, in which case men would have 4 registers ;). When I first started singing, I don’t think I could produce anything in CGC, and yet I would “break” into a seemingly weaker and more feminine ICG at around E4 or F4 on an ascending scale. Therefore I could not go from one “register” to another in the same function. Also, if boys only have chest register, what am I using when I squeak out an F6? As I descend with that I flip into a different quality around A5, and then another quality at A4, etc. If these are all just the falsetto function (and I do think they are), then why do boys have one register and girls have three? I’m not so sure it matters or that I necessarily care all that much about it. I’m just interested in having an instrument that can express my full range of human emotions. This is proving to be a lengthier endeavour than I thought.
While it is a simple concept to become an expert at managing the transition from one function to another, in practice I have found it to be a painstakingly slow process. Messa Di Voce is yet even longer.
I have found that clear timber in CGC above F4 (not quite perfected, so I guess it is technically still ICG, but I’d say it is closer to CGC than ICG) has a really “yelly” quality and tends to be shriller the higher I go with it. My wife says I sound like mad man in that timber. At first (a few years ago) ICG in clear timber was very feminine in quality but even that is becoming less and less the case. Dark timber up there (anywhere really) is much more agreeable. Clear timber below E4 is agreeable, but everyone prefers the dark timber down there (of course). But if I sing with Dark timber when I’m happy, what can I use to express sadness? ICG is easier to access in dark timber, and I therefore find it easier to exercise it there. So getting to my questions… What timber do you think Garcia exercised it? Does the timber matter? Do you have a recommendation? Does an MDV start in dark timber ICG and move through to CGC clear timber and back again? My larynx moves quite a bit during this from low to high, and back to low again. Is that expected?
I’m not sure I will ever succeed in a perfect MDV, but at least my storytelling as improved 100 fold with all of the timbers and voices I can produce now.
Thanks again for your blog and your writing! You are an excellent writer.
Steve,
Thanks for reading and putting into action your understanding.
For some reason I only received notice of your comment in the wee hours of this morning. Even the computer world is imperfect.
I want to answer all the questions in your comment, but have to attend to other matters for now, but I’ll be back.
Rocky
Thanks Rocky. No worries about the delays. It is your blog and your time, and I don’t pay you anything for it ;). I do appreciate the service you are providing. Tax free too!
I did find some description of how to do the MDV in his book (I read the French version, 2nd edition part 1 I believe). If I understand properly, then the starting of it (only near C4 – G4?) is in dark timber falsetto. Then add chest voice and swell it, lifting the larynx (clear timber?) to show the brightness, then reduce back to dark timber eventually returning to falsetto. However, what kind of falsetto is Garcia talking about? And would this progression be the same for the entire voice? And I assume this would include the more disagreeable timbers of very dark and covered to very bright and shrill?
Thanks!
Steve
Steve,
You are reading the French correctly, up to a point. Please be aware that good taste was important to Garcia. We could enter the flow of argument over taste and drown before coming to an agreement, but what I would suggest you follow is the idea that Garcia wants the sounds coming from our instruments to be the best, most attractive and musically accurate sound our voices are capable of. This statement has one missing component. I am not talking about a universally applicable attractiveness or an absolute best possible sound. That idea keeps giving us the homogeneity among individuals that I hear just about everywhere I listen to singers.
You need to recognize what your sound is. Then husband that sound with all the tools that Garcia delineates. At no point in this exercise should you damage the intrinsic quality of the sound with unattractive applications of things Garcia defines. Garcia writes of what is possible, but does not insinuate that all things possible are desirable in every context. The MDV is a demonstration of technical/artistic ability not an opportunity to flaunt how much mutation the human voice might display. If you can call it disagreeable, don’t do it.
What kind of Falsetto? My teaching trick is to make the student sing a nice full voice mezzo forte in the middle of the student’s vocal range, and then sing the same note in a manner demonstrating the student’s idea of what that note would sound like as an echo of the original sound. When the two match, according to my taste, we have the starting “Kind of Falsetto”. The MDV trick is to start with the echo. Then crescendo to the original mezzo forte quality we used for discovering the “echo” in the first place. Then do a decrescendo to the original volume and sound quality of the “echo”. All the physiological maneuvers, laryngeal movement included, need to be set in secondary focus. Concentrate on the sound. How you sound when you start, how you sound as you progress to mezzo forte, and then how you sound as you return to as close as possible to how you sounded when you started out. When Garcia speaks of physiology, he is talking about what you will discover to be going on when you attain to success in the exercise. Success has two components.
1. Technical
2. Artistic
Why don’t you send me an example of your work?
PS. Please be aware that the search for an “echo” can be begun with almost anything. Pleasantly dark and loud and pleasantly clear and loud with everything in between would be correct. However, every different loud would require a different “echo”. Have fun, and please do send me something.