It is the Best of Times.
There are five weeks between me and Torino. That span of time is short, but ripe for work. As our calendars click off significant slices of time, every click hands us a question: What’s next? I keep struggling with that interrogative, and, to be perfectly honest, I never really know to which of a thousand and one (1001) possible projects I am going to commit my next chunk of time. The struggle doesn’t get easier with increased maturity. Even a tenor knows that time past is gone and future time is shorter. So the struggle actually gets harder, but I know the day to act is always today and that my time to work is now.
A certain pristine yesterday the USPS delivered me an easy answer to that “What’s next?” question. Donald V. Paschke sent it.
Dr. Donald V. Paschke
He sent back a stack of “A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing: Part One” proofs to the Blake compound all marked up and ready for me to correct. You know – the typos and formatting errors that were in the printout that I sent Dr. Paschke a short time ago.
Now that the USPS did its work to carry Donald’s answer to my priority problem, I can see that it’s high time to dedicate myself to getting this book ready for the printers, but I just can’t forget that Torino project scheduled for March.
I know there are already a few singers signed up to participate in Torino, but I would like to have more. So here I am adding an invitation to this stream of tenor thoughts. Please come and let me do my best to help you with your singing. Getting you to sing well is now one of the most important parts of my life’s work. My Garcia project is also important, but only as a support for the after-Opera-life I always saw coming when I finally arrived at being an unemployed tenor. I sang in the business for quite long enough for me to learn what it was all about and to collect the demanding fans who insisted that I teach others how to take the stage when I finally quit singing.
Garcia made his life all about that “Get them ready to be great Opera Artists” thing, and I stand small before his legacy calling for anyone and everyone to follow his lead. With maturity (OLD AGE) and retirement I have had enough contemplating time to fully absorb Garcia and study in greater depth the many “problems” of singing which I suffered and the few that passed me by. I am diligently trying to lay a foundation for sharing Garcia and the content of my tiny tenor mind. The first floor of this edifice may one day have many rooms, but the venue that Armando Caruso gives me at Accademia della Voce del Piemonte I already number as 101. I’ll be there on March 14 and hope you will join me.
My dearest Debbie sometimes comes at me with statements like “You’ve got to write something about……….” Many times it’s about a local political or economic (TAX) thing, and we collaborate to shine some light on something resident power broker types would like to see pass unnoticed. But we kind of like people to know what’s going on. It is a sad fact that power brokers in every category of activity and every geographic expanse are able to hide from the apathetic, but Debbie and I care deeply about many things. Big deal!!! Two people, two votes, two opinionated citizens of the World who care about what’s going on???!!!! Well, if there were more of us, there would be a lot less political dirty doings going on. I’m fortunate that Debbie also cares about what is happening to singing almost as much as I do…. To return to perfect honesty; she may care even more than I do, but who am I to judge? Anyway, she came at me with “You’ve got to do a blog about that “Don’t listen to your voice!” thing you keep telling me about.” Not that I haven’t written something (click here), but students keep quoting that hissing serpent in our lessons. I just can’t keep myself from sssssshhhhhharing with Debbie the ssssssssssssstupidities I hear students repeat. They’re phrases they have heard in pre-Blake voice lessons, and they carry them around like “gems of wisdom”. I get really hot under the collar, do my best to keep from punishing my student with a rant, and often let my bubble of anger burst when Debbie asks after the progress of a student. So, now, even she has heard enough, and it will be a future project.
I’m off to,,,,uh,, oh yes, I forgot, the dentist first, and then the editing desk. Garcia’s “Part One” is almost back in print.
Read More
Tenor to Tenor
Time to tell a tenor what not to do: Don’t despise your voice. Don’t go all negative about yourself just because God gave you a vocal instrument that seems small whenever you think of Del Monico, Corelli, Bonisolli,,,,,, I could go on, but it doesn’t change a thing. There is always space in this world for singers who are effective. Big voices are really rare (that’s why they were valuable), really hard to manage (that’s why some big voice owners were considered stylistic pigs) and those big voices often get misdirected.
The biggest misdirection I can think of is down. That is, like you know, the COMMAND: DOWN. It’s a good command for a big dog with dirty feet, but a “commanding” mistake for any singer with an un-rare gift to put his or her larynx down all the time. It will have an effect, but it will almost always cost the instrument more than it can afford to pay. Most students adopting this “all the time” command never get further than completing a college career. Some manage to populate regional theatres, and represent, to some opera operatives, the hope for the future. A few rise high enough in visibility to become shooting stars in the Opera world. Very, very few become durable Stars, and most of these show us, in the twilight years of their vocal life, the symptoms that quickly overcome all those youthful voices unable to sustain the cost of the DOWN command.
Petter Reingardt’s question was:
3. I feel that my voice is quite small but high and light. I’m searching for that dark timbre you have by breathing low, relaxing jaw and throat, and keeping the larynx in a lower position. Now I wonder: have you ever felt that your voice is not big enough? If you did; how did you solve this problem?
My response to Petter:
For you to focus on laryngeal position is a misdirection of your attention. You need to concentrate on the quality of sound you are making. It is primary for all singers who want to be real artists. In your recordings available on the internet, you sing as if you do not recognize the difference between Chest Voice and Falsetto. In your “Ah! Mes amis” video, you manage to do a little Chest Voice but you insert it with no apparent artistic logic and darken enough to make the moments when you sing in Chest Voice hard to discern. Don’t think that you can use tools like “Dark Timber” to tweak your voice into sounding like mine, and please forget imagining injections of Botox to your jaw and throat.
I did a blog some time ago about Falsetto, and confusion. I suggest you consume it: Just click here. Follow the music and Luciano’s singing to get an idea of how Falsetto should be incorporated into an interpretation. There is logic to Pavarotti’s moves from one function to another. I wonder if you can hear it happening in Luciano’s voice. I can hear it happening in your Donizetti recording, but can you? In your audio recording of “Languir’ per una bella” I am hard pressed to pick out any Chest Voice singing.
Please stop telling your instrument that it is just not good enough. Sing in Chest Voice when you intend to sing mezzo forte or louder in your low register, your middle register and your high register. Chest Voice is for the louder bits and Falsetto is almost exclusively for the softer bits. High or low doesn’t matter. The big “trick” is to hide your transition from one function to the other so that the in-expert listener takes no notice of the event as you go from soft (Falsetto) to loud (Chest) to soft (Falsetto). Sadly, your singing hides Chest Voice when you find it. You need to make Chest Voice ring in the ears of your audience.
Yes, my voice is and was a “small” voice. All high voices are “smaller” than lower voices. The real measure of a voice used to be its audibility. If the audience could hear the singer, and the singer inspired the audience to applaud, then the voice of the singer was not “too small”. I didn’t have a vocal size “problem” back in the early years of my vocal life. I did learn to ignore those who criticized my voice for various qualities it had, and those who criticized me for some qualities that a few of my detractors said my voice should have had. Size was an issue that surfaced in auditions and shortly showed up in print. It took a while, but I learned that it was less about my voice than it was about my category. You are of the same category as I, and I’m sorry that you seem to have internalized the standard carping about the “size” a voice in our category normally displays. Making a voice sound bigger than it is by nature is a formula for microphone dependence, if the voice survives.
My hope for you is that you can let go of your obsession with laryngeal movement management, and change your focus to hearing continuity in the sound your instrument produces.
So, Petter, please don’t wrastle your larynx to the floor. It won’t make your voice bigger. A big voice used to be a mixed blessing, and I often went all “Why couldn’t I have a voice like that?” when I listened to Franco Corelli. I am a tenor. So I did try to make like Franco, but my instrument put me on notice: “OK! As long as you do this “Nessun dorma” and “E lucevan le stele” thing in front of that Navy Band microphone then we’re on, but if you take your mouse in elephant costume show on the Operatic Stage then I’m out-uh-here!” I’m glad, I got the message.
I will try to answer your other questions briefly.
1. Coloratura: what is the secret? How should I train this the right way? I feel like I can’t be agile and sing with full voice at the same time. So how do you do it?
The secret is in your ability or inability to make your diaphragm flutter and with your coordination. The primary physical apparatus that produces good coloratura is the diaphragm. This controller of support acts in a negative fashion. That is to say that the potential energy developed in the pressure under which your viscera are place by your abdominal muscles is blocked and controlled by the diaphragm. That pressure created by your abdominal muscles, unopposed by your diaphragm, would normally be transferred to the air in your lungs, and if you didn’t stop it by other means the air in your lungs would escape you immediately. So your diaphragm stops your tightened abdominal muscles,,, you do know,,, I forgot. You’re a tenor! The source of energy that goes through two conversions and several modifications before ultimately landing in our ears as your voice are your abdominal muscles. Anyway, your diaphragm is in charge of controlling the transfer of the pressure in your viscera to the air in your lungs which then motivates your vocal chords which provide the vibrations that the rest of your vocal instrument converts into intelligible language and hopefully satisfyingly attractive singing. If you didn’t care a whit about coloratura, that would be enough said.
But, since you ask, the diaphragm is also the main generator of the pulsations that we recognize as coloratura. It is even logical. Not all vocal things are logical, but this one is. There is no other component of your anatomy to which you can award credit. Leo Nucci once told me that he believed that the old school castrati used to do coloratura with their lips. He demonstrated his proposition on the Met stage during a “Barber of Seville” rehearsal. It was a good laugh, but I was never quite sure he meant it as a joke. The diaphragm takes care of this work. I have often offered the following advice:
Sing the violin part from the shaving scene in IL BARBIERE DI SIVIGLIA. Start it in any
convenient key, really slow at first and singing every note without any interruption of vocal cord
activity except during inhalation. And, by the way, not forgetting my target audience, do
breathe and breathe where ever you find convenient. String players don’t have to breathe, so
composers can forgo putting in breathing points some tenors need in the melodic line. You
could say I am calling for you to sing legato. When you get to the repeated notes, just keep on
singing without interrupting your vocal chords’ intonation of the pitch.
You will find that the diaphragm is the only thing that will get the job done. If it does not do the job, then all those repeated notes that represent bow direction changes on a violin will become one long held note or you will be forced to stop your vocal chords from vibrating between each note…. Oh!!! I forgot. Leo Nucci’s method does sort of get the job done, but it would inspire most people to laugh, so I don’t recommend it.
2. Low notes: I find it hard to be heard in the lower register (below g3 down to a2). It feels either breathy or very tight. I’ve been singing “vado incontro…” from Mitridate, re di Ponto, and it’s extremely hard to keep access to those two octaves.
When you have a good idea what Chest Voice is, then you can address this problem. You must use Chest Voice in the Chest Register if you ever hope to have those notes heard while an orchestra is backing you up. The way you sing now leaves the orchestra little choice. It’s going to cover you up, if it is composed of more than a dozen or so instruments.
When you can sing in the middle register of your voice with Chest Voice, then you can experiment with descending by 5ths into your Chest Register keeping Chest Voice function active. When you find yourself singing in Chest Voice in your middle register, you will likely also find your pharynx to be less dilated and your larynx at a higher position than you seem accustomed to maintain.
Don’t forget to use the “Glottal Attack” of Garcia. Tight is not right. You will need to allow for more space into which your vocal cords can comfortably phonate those low tones in Chest Voice. Just be aware that the lowest notes require the least tension on the vocal cords, but they are going to be asked to flap large slow vibrations. They require the chamber above them to accommodate the larger wave forms of the low notes as compared to the 5th above.
“Mitridate” was designed for an expert. If you master that Opera, you will have solved the low note problem. Oh! By the way, you will have solved almost all the rest of your vocal problems as well….. ooops! The coloratura thing might still be unresolved.
Read MoreLadies First
This is my way. It’s just,, like,,, I mean,,,,,, so yesterday to let the girl go first and open the door for her as well, but the young will have to forgive me for being so invested in yesterday as the deepest well of knowledge and wisdom concerning all things human. I really am “Old Hat” on principles…… You know those antecedents, preconceptions, pre-determinants, pre-considerations, presuppositions. The old guard had a chance to analyze how things worked and many grey haired successful types managed to write down the lessons they learned. In the case of the Garcia family, it was the second generation who best recorded those life lessons, and Garcia Jr. added a great deal of value to his father’s wisdom. Blocked/Liberated from the pursuit of an active singing career, he brought his special gift, a sharp analytical mind, to bear on the vocal and artistic wisdom he inherited from his father.
Garcia’s writings are my special wisdom well, so let me pull up today’s pail of understanding and guide “Jenny Lind” on a different approach to her project. I hope she doesn’t think me sexist for putting her first, and I really hope she doesn’t. I want to help her singing, but, if she gets offended, her political sensibilities will probably make her immune to this tenor’s arguments. That would be a shame.
Now you all know that Jenny is not her real name. She knows who she is, and her identity is hers to keep secret or reveal. Just to remind everyone, she gave me a starting point with this statement:
My current teacher, Dr. *******, has been having me work to bring the low, settled larynx position into the higher notes, and not strain for them.
I didn’t include:
Dr. ************ always tells me to bring the high position into the low, so she would agree with you completely.
These statements are in response to an Email I received in which I catalogued some specific and general thoughts on Jenny’s voice and singing. I suggested that her category is soprano, not mezzo soprano. She is currently preparing mezzo soprano repertoire, which, given the quality of instrument with which she is gifted, could be a comfortable home for her working life.
Now, Jenny (we all know it’s not your name), there are two problems with living in one category lower than the category of the gift you received in your mother’s womb.
The native timbre of your sound is going to be too light for the more dramatic mezzo stuff and even a bit light for the lyric stuff, especially so in the face of today’s apparent ideals. This is the case for you.
The regimen your instructors are going to impose on your voice will be contradictory. This is the case with the two examples of advice you have received from your instructors.
I have heard thousands of ways to say “Darken that thin sound of yours; pull your larynx down and open your throat!” Many variants of this were directed toward me by a few well-meaning people and many more emanated from a few less ethical individuals who populated my path through the singing life. I have collected even more examples from overheard conversations and stories told by singers and by frustrated students. Your particular variant is a nice PC version. The word “settled” would seem to suggest that an outside agency, like gravity, is accomplishing the pull, or that a successful attempt to use this advice would require the larynx to enter into some sort of consensus with the professor and the singer who’s making the attempt to ascend to the highest notes of her voice. The “low” position for your larynx seems to already be a “settled” issue for your middle voice. Your audition in LA showed me that it is so. You sang in the center of your voice with ease and a “warm” color. That’s a PC way to say you are using Dark Timbre which includes, in your case, a lowered larynx. That low position stands as an impediment to finding your way happily to the top of your voice. The fact of where your larynx is located at the beginning of your assent is not, in itself, an impediment, but the project to maintain the laryngeal position while seeking to sing ever higher notes is just too big a project for your voice to complete successfully in Rossini’s music. This was the most noted deficiency in your singing. That it was probably appreciated differently by each of us on the judging panel is something I expect in any group of Voice enthusiasts, but it entered our ears and we all noticed.
As your voice followed Rossini’s notes, it did a great job of decorating all that landed in the middle voice and a good work of it in the lower parts. The decoration began to mutate as Rossini’s notes guided you higher and higher on the scale. It is not inevitable, but common to humans, that the vocal chords struggle – and ultimately fail to maintain “normal” function in the face of the extra work imposed upon them – by holding the larynx in place or lowering it while ascending the musical scale. I noticed that, as your voice rose to the highest flights of Rossini roulades, you eschewed Head Voice function where it should have begun and kept Falsetto going as Rossini took you very high into your Head Register. This is often forgiven by everyone when a singer is interpreting some other composer’s music, but Rossini is one of the worst on the list of the unforgiving. First he insists on uncovering a singer’s deficiencies and then leaves no place to hide. The rest of us unforgiving types get all tangled up in linguistics just trying to describe what went wrong for the singer caught out by Rossini’s music. Some just default to “Rossini is just too hard.” My short analysis is that your voice finally and suddenly shifted gears from Falsetto to Head Voice at the highest notes you sang for us in LA, and your instrument gave up the laryngeal stasis project about one or two notes below those really high notes. The resulting timbre change was and is “unforgivable”. As absolute values, they were not very pretty. As for what you should do about them, you will get conflicting advice. Your quotes are from two professors who stand in opposition to one another.
Your “bring high to low” professor is giving you good advice. The unfortunate quality of your highest notes is the direct result of excessive Dark Timber use in your upper register. Lowering the larynx is only one component of Dark Timber application to the voice. When you venture out of your middle register into your head register you try to match the “warm” character of the sound you attain in the middle, and you cannot. Other singers may be able to do it, but not you. You must allow your instrument to adjust to its needed clarity for attaining “Head Voice Function” in your head register much earlier. This is especially true when singing those roulades surmounted with challengingly high top notes.
I know that your “settled larynx” professor would most likely disagree with me, as well as with your “high to low” professor if the “high to low” statement is correctly understood. My specific advice to you is to try to use arpeggio exercises to find the most beautiful and effortless high notes your voice will deliver, and use them as the pattern for every high note you ask your voice to produce. Then bring that quality down with you as you descend the scale to your middle register. If you insist on maintaining that “warm” color in your middle voice, please be content to reapply it somewhere between F and D. Let it live in your middle voice and forget about taking it to high Q.
Think of Federica Von Stade and her manner of register negotiation. She presents the pattern of how you should find your way to the top of your voice.
I have other thoughts about traveling into your lower register, but I’m way over my word limit.
Read MoreWho was Mario Salerno?
This blog’s for Debbie. (My wife.) The die was cast when I mentioned Mario Salerno in my previous blog. I don’t usually take requests, but I could not resist Debbie’s enthusiasm.
When I kick started my career at Washington Opera in 1976, I met Mario. I found him sitting at our rehearsal piano located about level with the surface of the Potomac River somewhere deep in the bowels of the Kennedy Center in our Nation’s Capital. Great building, lovely river and a familiar sight because I had sung many times just downstream from that great white titan for the arts in open air concerts behind Lincoln’s back at his memorial on the shore of the Potomac with the United States Navy Band. It was one of my goals to sing at the Kennedy Center, but I had no idea how my singing would be impacted when it happened.
George London scheduled a production of “L’Italiana in Algeri” for the early days of 1976 and populated it with some of the best talent I could ever hope to work with and steal from. I did steal a lot from one of them, Renato Capecchi, but Mario became a key figure in my musical life. I hope to tell you about Renato in a future blog.
What I know of Mario’s history was gleaned from tidbits of information that he let slip during our conversations. It would be a boring bit of info to know that he studied at the Conservatorio di Musica Luigi Cherubini in Florence, Italy if it were not for the fact that my voice teacher Renata Carisio Booth studied there too, and they were contemporaries. I was so disappointed that they did not remember one another from those school days, but, even so, I suspect that their teaching styles were so similar because those long ago school days had profound influences on them.
Before Mario found work along the Potomac, he had spent more than ten years at La Scala in Milano, Italy during the golden years of singing, and around fifteen years working for Swiss Radio in their classical music broadcasting program.
When I found him, I needed everything he had learned over his long musical life and he was ready to share. I loved the way he worked in studio. He was full of musical suggestions and was dedicated to improving or just varying an interpretation. He was challenging, meticulous and not easy to please.
Mario became my go to guy for help with repertoire and, after Washington, I made the trek to Milano one summer to work with him at his home. It was wonderful. He would hand me suggestion after suggestion for how to sing 4 measures at a time. Not that he had to hector me to sing the way he wanted, because Renata Booth had done the work necessary to prepare me technically to do everything he asked of me and, sometimes, after only one rendition of his suggested interpretation he would say good, now why don’t you try……… I found this work ethic addictive, and when I was invited to return to Wolf Trap in the young artists program, I suggested to Frank Rizzo that he bring Mario in to coach us youngsters. Frank knew how good Mario was, and I got my wish. The only problem with his method of working, that I loved so much, was that it inspired some of my colleagues at Wolf Trap to leave Mario’s studio with tears streaming down their cheeks. I didn’t know that many of my fellow Wolf Trap singers-in-training were accustomed to running all the way through arias before coaches would make any suggestions. The best comment I remember was from a wet faced soprano that couldn’t believe she had spent the better part of an hour working on 8 measures. If my tenor memory serves, I told her that she must be really good, because Mario had the habit of making me work on only 4 measures at a time!
Nothing was too small to address. While I was doing my best in Milano to sing Mario’s musical suggestions, he got frustrated with me doing recitative according to the composer’s notation. That is to say, me following the note values I had memorized. He decided I should study the recitative as spoken language, and he told me he wanted me to learn the rhythm that would be natural to the language. I was all for it, that is at first. He assigned this teaching task to his teenage daughter. I had my doubts that this young lady was going to be able to do anything for me, but we got started. She listened to me recite the recitatives before telling me “Non sembra Italiano.” (That’s not Italian.) During my month long sojourn her three word comment became less and less frequent. She was more than qualified for the job, and she got it done. Mario was pleased with the way I did my best to forget the note durations in those recitatives and rambled over the notes with the replacement rhythm associated with my recitations that had garnered an OK from his young daughter.
Mario and my voice teacher, Renata, may not have remembered each other from Conservatory time, but I think they remembered a lot of what was taught them while they were there. I wish I had asked Mario about his professors at Conservatorio di Musica Luigi Cherubini. Renata had spent time under Ottorino Respighi’s instruction way back then, and I wish I could say the same for Mario. What I can say is that they were consummate professionals who knew what making music was all about, the traditions and how to drill them into their students. They also taught, Renata by insistence and Mario by example, humility along with confidence in one’s abilities and understanding.
Mario was the natural next step in my preparation for the professional life. Renata dragged me out of the woods, pruned off some of my North Country bumpkin culture and put my voice in order. Mario showed me what I should try to do with my voice and my Renata inspired appreciation of sophistication. It was a long, interesting and fulfilling road with many more people stepping in at just the moment needed to point me along in the direction that my life took.
Along the way, Garcia was dropped in my lap… or on my head… Whichever seems more appropriate to your attitude concerning tenors. These formative influences were living introductions to Garcia. I think of them as:
Introduction to, and implementation of Garcia Part One: Renata Carisio Booth
Introduction to, and implementation of Garcia Part Two: Mario Salerno
(and daughter – sorry, I don’t have a picture of her).
Almost Two Weeks to Torino!
I left my previous blog with the promise to write “more” about “Una furtiva lagrima”. I’m back with a little bit more Falsetto stuff, and an invitation to meet me in Torino, Italy for a Master Class. It starts on June 9, and I am looking forward to making new friends as well as getting back to work with those of you signed up already for more of what Garcia spent his life teaching. Even if you haven’t already signed up, I hope to see you there if you will let me help you.
In case Torino is too far to travel or just doesn’t fit your calendar, please come to my home town, Plattsburgh, NY, for a Master Class. It will begin August 10 and finish with a concert on August 16. Last year’s Plattsburgh event was a blast that moved some of our participants to make some really big changes in their vocal lives. Come and see if we can bring your singing to a higher level.
Now to get back to dragging Falsetto out of today’s confusion, let’s first remember what the Great Master had to say about discerning talent:
Garcia writes:
Often one needs an experienced judgment to recognize in the voice of the student the germ of the true qualities which it possesses. Generally, these qualities are only in the rudimentary state, or well veiled by numerous faults from which it is necessary to free them.
A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing: Part One by Manuel Garcia II
I don’t think anyone needs any experience or judgment to admit that Luciano Pavarotti had a fantastic talent, and successfully sang all over the World. I seem to remember that when anyone wanted to talk about the “faults” that Luciano may have possessed while he was still singing, critics and theatre goers were more concerned with non-vocal imperfections. I don’t remember anyone quibbling with his vocal qualities.
Let’s push off into the Falsetto fog by agreeing that Luciano is not displaying any “faults” in the little video embedded at the end of this blog.
The audience response recorded at the end of this video should help me convince you to agree.
Mario Salerno
Luciano used enough Falsetto in his interpretation of Nemorino’s aria to fulfill the traditional interpretive mannerisms I learned from a fantastic old man of the theatre, Mario Salerno. “Who was Mario?” could be a stand-alone blog, or a page, and I may get to it one day, but for now I introduce him as my guide to a lot more Falsetto use in Nemorino’s aria than Luciano used when he was caught on video tape.
Falsetto can be a big fault in the singing of a student when it appears unintentionally on notes that a composer would argue should be sung in Chest Voice. I encountered, in Roveretto, just such a student.
In that same jewel of a town, Roveretto, I ran into an un-tenor that reported the displeasure of certain important Italian Opera operatives with a tenor that used a lot of Falsetto in Nemorino’s aria just as I had I taught him to sing it in Torino last year.
I can agree that when Falsetto is the only function used by a fella, it is a fault.
When Falsetto is used convincingly, according to traditional interpretive values, it is not a “fault” but is a wonderful tool.
Back to Luciano: I suggest you download the music (by clicking here) and follow along with the video. You will find that my markings in the music indicate where Luciano used “CGC” – “Complete Glottal Closure” or “Chest Voice” and where he incorporated in his singing “IGC” – “Incomplete Glottal Closure” or “Falsetto”.
This blog is an introduction to my analysis of Luciano’s performance and only addresses two issues.
- Where did Luciano change from Chest Voice to Falsetto?
- What does Falsetto – IGC and Chest Voice – CGC sound like?
Luciano’s voice has a striking divergence of quality when he moves from Chest Voice to Falsetto and back. The difference that you can hear in this video is an excellent example to use for recognizing these two functions in the singing of other vocalists, and in your own singing if you happen to be a guy.
How much of either function should a singer use?
An answer to that question was dumped on me by that un-tenor in Roveretto who put me on notice that Falsetto is just not good singing. I’m glad Luciano knew better.
Luciano used Falsetto much less than I would like to hear. Falsetto only appears on 35 notes of his singing as compared to Luciano using Chest Voice on 159 of the notes he sang. But then I can understand that Luciano’s voice was just so beautiful when he sang in “CGC” – Chest Voice, that making his listeners wait and wish for that gorgeous flow of glowing vocal gold by singing a lot of Falsetto might seem a big risk.
Does anyone want to suggest that there is no difference between the beginning phrase Luciano sings at measure #10 and the phrase we hear at measure #27? If so, you need medical help or an upgrade to your hearing aid. If you think Luciano should have sung #27 the same way as #10, then you may be a Verdi or Wagner addict who needs to expand his/her taste in music.
I’m going to leave you with an assignment. Keep the music with my markings handy. Print it out if you like, and troll through You Tube for “Una furtive lagrima” sung by other singers. See if you can pinpoint where each singer sings in “CGC” and “IGC”. Certainly no other tenor will sing this aria the same way as Luciano. I believe there was no more perfect voice for “Nemorino” to be found anywhere, but his rendition of “Una furtiva lagrima” could have been more interesting interpretively. But, again, given the beauty of his voice, keeping his audience happy was more about delivering his sound to their ears than developing the character of Nemorino or sharing Nemorino’s emotions with them. This is not the case for the rest of us.
I have a lot to say about what the rest of us should do, and I’ll be back later to say it.
Read MoreFalsetto Friends
I am about to pack my bags and go back to Torino for a Master Class that will bring me back where another Falsetto kerfuffle in my life was born.
Last September I had the privilege to work with some really talented young people who offered me many opportunities to use Garcia. It was a tenor, of course, who started the ball rolling toward an incident in Rovereto. I taught that tenor how to sing “Una furtiva lagrima” from L’ELESIR’ D’AMORE. It wasn’t the only aria we worked on, but it became a bone of contention. I mentioned this tenor’s success in the little concert we did in Torino in a previous blog from that city. It was a struggle to convince him, but eventually he successfully put Falsetto to exactly the use for which the Bel Canto composer, Donizetti, intended. The result was most gratifying, but a kerfuffle was set to catch up to me a month later.
Now, my struggle with my Torino tenor was nothing new to my work. I strove for an extended period, back in Plattsburgh, to convince another tenor to utilize Falsetto in Bel Canto music with eventual and welcome success. Apparently Verdi loving voice teachers are loath to accept Falsetto as a worthy component of good singing, and I encountered in these tenors a shared attitude of aversion for Falsetto use. My Plattsburgh tenor told me that his previous Maestri had told him that what I was suggesting to him was “not singing”.
Even with this background, I was not ready for the incredulous inquiry I received after the Rovereto concert. A Rovereto home boy baritone participated in the concert, and during the crowded aftermath he got in my face (it was very noisy in the hallway) and asked me if I had, by chance, ever worked with a certain tenor. It was my Torino guy. I told the home boy that I had worked with him in more than one master class, upon which declaration the baritone told me that he had recently been on the jury of a competition in which that tenor had sung “Una furtiva lagrima”. He did not win the competition because of the way he sang that aria. The baritone wanted to know if it were true that I had taught him to sing so badly. Given that I was not there to hear what that tenor had done, I was at a loss to discuss the quality of his rendition of “Una furtive lagrima” but I did manage to bellow that I had taught him how to sing the aria “alla” Bel Canto. I was happy that at that point in our semi-shouted conversation a bevy of fans grabbed him away from me and I was accosted by a few audience members that wanted to recount to me good memories of performances in which I sang. I felt badly for my Torino tenor.
The baritone’s dislike for good Bel Canto style was easily understandable given his performance of Mozart’s music in the concert. Everyone, including me, would praise the quality of the man’s voice, but I wouldn’t suggest his rendition as a model for anyone to follow in the interpretation area. This is because I believe Mozart’s music lives best in a style of singing that this Rovereto home boy just didn’t bring to the concert. I suspected that many of my favorite components of Mozart style are missing from the man’s vocal technique.
I subsequently learned from my Torino tenor that he was a “good friend” of this Rovereto home boy and that they had shared a voice teacher. A light bulb switched on in my head! It has long been my observation that teachers often teach the style of singing they employed, when and if they sang for a living, as if it were a technique. I have often heard and read references to Verdi technique, Rossini technique, Bellini technique etc. essentially mixing style and technique together. These Torino / Rovereto events brought home to me most forcefully how limiting this way of thinking and teaching can actually be. Vocal technique is not style specific, but empowering to all styles. Style and technique are not the same thing. Each style, excepting the hardest Bel Canto, has a limited set of technical requirements, and teaching only those requirements leaves the student bereft of many elements of technique necessary for the other styles.
I knew that the technical components I had taught my Plattsburgh and Torino tenors to use for “Una furtiva lagrima” would inspire an audience to applaud. My audiences did when I used them. Since I learned these technical things from a woman born just 5 years after Garcia’s death and I learned how to apply them to “Una furtiva lagrima” from a man of her generation who attended her alma mater at the same time she did, I assume my taste and style of execution for the singing of this aria are traditional. Looking back at the history of music through the lens each composer offers us on the time line can be a wonderfully enlightening study, but if one of them, like Verdi, becomes a glass so darkened that his becomes the only style visible to a teacher or singer, then just about all other composers’ music will suffer damage at the hands of the teacher and the voice of the singer. It was nice to hear from my Torino tenor about his audience at the competition that he didn’t win. He told me that they enthusiastically approved of his rendition, even if his “good friend” Rovereto home boy, and the teacher they once upon a time shared, who was also on that jury, didn’t like it.
Falsetto has a place in the House of Music, even for boys. There is a lot of confusion about when it is called for, what it should sound like and when it is inappropriate. I hope to get to these issues very soon.
The artist in the above video is my reason for never singing Nemorino. I knew I couldn’t compete with Luciano. My Torino tenor is no match for Luicano either, but he learned to do everything Luciano did in the above video and more. I’ll be back to explain the “more”.
Read More