What suits your musical fancy?
1. Rich and smooth R&B gives you the feels.
2. The dulcet tones of a youngster’s pure singing sends you to a happy place.
3. Your fave singer dwells in low places like Johnny Cash.
4. Bright and earthy world music gets your toe tapping.
5. Tosca delivering her heroic and commanding high C’s brings about your musical ambrosia.
Singers train and occasionally their voice fits the genre they prefer. In my case, I love the music I sing and my zaftig “hourglass” fits the armor.
No matter how many times I practice my high or low la la las, my cords vibrate the best in the thick fat lady tunes. However, most of singers on the gig trail don’t always sing what comes the most easily.
A professional choir rehearsal would give most historians whiplash. It is not unusual for a 90 minute choral rehearsal to include music across a 500 year span.
Today the cathedral choir sang a piece by a composer who was born in 1594. My, er, womanly tone, would have been no bueno when this piece was first performed. Now that my gender no longer makes me a 2nd class singer, I have had to learn how to render this style accurately with my verismo vocal cords.
The good news is I sing with a group with a dedicated repertoire. We are able to refine and polish various pieces across the liturgical year. When I first started singing some of these exposed and delicate pieces, my vibrato like to play a spirited game of jack in the box. This was especially noticeable to my director’s chagrin at the end of phrases.
I will admit. I haven’t always been so aware of my choral vibrato challenges. I can only say that I come from a family of choral directors who encouraged full throated singing; the more passionate the better.
This past Tuesday at rehearsal it hit me like a pile of Brunhilde bricks. Maybe it was the mask. Maybe it was maybelline. You still reading? Or maybe it was the fact that we are singing in a smaller group and socially distanced. Whatever the reason, on this trip through the 16th century motet, my freebird phonation made it’s cameo. With the help of core, breath flow, and my forehead, this time around I found my high, round, and clear 16th century singing soul. And I liked it.
A perk of this terrible pandemic is there’s a lot more recordings to review; musical bikini bites if you will. My wife had a revelation recently when she listened to an audio. She didn’t realize that she occasionally scoops. I confessed my own guilt of tone over seasoning. We laughed. We feel better now.
akintsucrooner 