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From:  "Lloyd W. Hanson" <lloyd.hanson@n...>
"Lloyd W. Hanson" <lloyd.hanson@n...>
Date:  Sun Mar 25, 2001  10:23 pm
Subject:  Re: [vocalist] Re: a tenor who is grumpy with mozart


Dear Dre and Vocalisters:

You make some very important points especially regarding the vowel
usage in singing. Wunderlich tends to choose more closed forms of
vowels when singing in his passaggio. Thus his /I/ tends frequently
to be /i/, his /e/ closes to /I/, his/E/ becomes /e/. He even does
this with the back vowels wherein we hear the /awe/ become /o/ and
the /o/ tends to drift toward /u/. Most of these vowel changes may
be the result of his "Pfälzisches dialect" as you mention but I would
be willing to bet that a substantial portion of these changes were
taught and carefully learned. You can hear him do it not only in
opera but in his Lieder recordings, especially in Schubert's "Die
Schöne Müllerin". The effect of these vowel changes is to move the
primary passaggio points slightly up or down and thus avoid having to
land on difficult passaggio notes. It is a technique that is also
apparent in the singing of Björling and others from northern Europe.

If vowels are kept "speaking quality" pure, the singer is required to
find other means to transcend the passaggio and avoid the audible
changes that must occur in vocal fold function in area of vocal
change. The concept of "cover" is one method commonly used because
it darkens a vowel and, in so doing, moves the passaggio points.
"Cover" also give the false idea that one is continuing to sing the
same "speaking quality" pure vowel but this is not so. If one
isolates a "covered" vowel (via a tape loop or its digital
equivalent) one will find that the vowel so sung is, in reality, a
more closed form of the attempted " "speaking quality" pure vowel.
The difficulty with "covering" a vowel is one of deciding how cover
is necessary and duplicating that exact amount of cover each time. I
have found that vowel modification is a more accurate method of
achieving the effect of cover and is more reliably duplicated .

Any composer writing for any voice type must have a deep feeling for
the functions of that type of voice. It has nothing to do with
deliberately making a work difficult. It has to do with how a voice
type can best realize the intent of the composer. If a composer does
not understand the potential or the function of a voice type it is
likely that he/she will write music that is less likely to achieve
his/her goals. If a composer writes music that is consistently in
the passaggio of the singer and if the composer also sets text such
that the most open vowels are required in this passaggio, then the
composer has given the singer little, if any, opportunity to solve
the problems of negotiating the passaggio smoothly and the singer
must resort to excessive cover or an extremely light production or
use of head voice below its intended area or, as some wise singers
have chosen, to change the placement of which words are sung on which
notes. When Mozart writes for the tenor voice he frequently places
the tenor in this difficult position. It is not surprising that a
singer requested of him more use of the /i/ and /e/ vowels.

The raising of the pitch of music since Mozart's time can add to this
difficulty, of course, but it is more a matter of making different
vowel modification adjustments now than had to be made in Mozart's
era. The adjustments many not be more difficult, just different.


--
Lloyd W. Hanson
Professor of Voice, Vocal Pedagogy
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ 86001

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