On Fri, 25 January 2002, thomas mark montgomery wrote:
> Someone wrote:
> "and countertenors, by the way, are generally singing in a well-supported
> falsetto, which is not the same production a tenor uses"
> Uh. Oh.
I wrote that. From the "Voice definitions and ranges" section of "The
(Un)official Countertenor Homepage",
http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/misc/voices.html:
"In England, the falsetto tradition remained for a long time, and was brought to
the for of the musical scene by Alfred Deller (a natural baritone) in the 1940s
and 1950s. He, in consultation with Michael Tippett, decided to use the term
countertenor to denote his voice, and the term has since come to mean any male
alto, possibly a boy or high tenor...but *normally a falsettist* since that
tradition remained." (emphasis added)
That's also what every voice teacher I've ever had has given as the definition
of what most countertenors are, and what my countertenor friends say they do.
I stand by my statement.
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