Legato
Notwithstanding the silly simplicity of the Wikipedia definition you can find by clicking the word above, it does serve as a good place to start.
It serves up a good opportunity for me to oppose, one more time, the tendency of modern thinkers to build pine boxes for thoughts and ideas that came from the minds of long dead people, for the purpose of burying them next to the bones of the thinkers who thought them. Not that the Wikipedia writer suggests that Legato is no longer a living relevant idea, but that the style of singing, “Bel canto” in which it is most essential has lost out to something else in the lives of voice teachers and singers alike. The term “Bel canto” for this band of volunteer Wikipedia editors would seem to find its best usage when, according to them, it is “used to evoke a lost singing tradition”. I’m glad these volunteer moderns didn’t try to wedge Legato into that “lost” box.
When we talk about good legato singing, we should always state the style in which the legato is to be used. There are very different mannerisms that characterize a good legato in each different style. Just because Wikipedia wants to put Bel canto six feet under doesn’t mean that we should allow them to do so, or use their silly, singular, wrongheaded, bare bones definition for Legato. I can understand their desire for a definition relevant to Modern Times, but, for serious vocal artists, this one is just plain useless.
The modern Wikipedia definition of “Legato” would seem to call for a singer to flirt with being unintelligible. I think that teaching legato singing as a process with “minimal interruption from consonants “ has already produced many singers who just can’t be understood when they sing. The war between Words and Music would seem to be over. Who won? Given the crisis, I would say no one.
Ok, what is legato? It is the following of any melodic line with carful maintenance of certain characteristics. Each style of music has its own set of standards and particular mannerisms. The most important characteristic to control is rhythmic accent. Technically, the best Bel Canto legato would have no discernable accents at all. What is left in the mind of a modern concerning this little statement is the bone headed Wikipedia idea that consonants should be minimized. Without the consonants fulfilling their bone like framework for those fleshy vowels, listeners are not going to understand the words the composer put to music, if they are well set, or even if the singer’s interpretation is/isn’t consonant with the meaning of the words that the listener just can’t discern. Consonants are not accents, but if a student insists on turning “T”s, “P”s, “B”s and “D”s into personal melodic IEDs then one can understand how an individual teacher might want to eliminate these intrusive consonants rather than teach the student how to use them. Lazy is as lazy does. Wikipedia and most of the modern pedagogical literature I have encountered supports many such short cuts. So please join me in rebuilding the scaffolding of language (consonant use) and disassembling the scaffolding for lazy.
Legato = No accents (Wikipedia = no consonants), functional stability (Wikipedia addresses this with: “maintaining the “line” across registers”) and constant well equilibrated timbre application.
Wikipedia leaves timbre out. Almost all the modern pedagogical literature I’ve read fails to mention it in any context whatsoever. So, Wikipedia ignoring it while defining “Legato” is no big deal. However, it is almost as important as keeping accents under control.
I have to kick Wikipedia one more time. It uses a term, “line”, in quotes, just like that, and fails to define it. It implies a synonym quality such as Legato = Line, but it is not at all so. There is a line maintenance responsibility in most styles of music, and many of these styles are quite rambunctious and not legato at all.
