Dear arado_ge: My skin color is a shade of pea green right about NOW!! How VERY fortunate you are to have heard all these contraltos! I had a mezzo friend who learned the sad news from my voice teacher. It wasn't easy for her to make the mental adjustment from thinking of herself as a contralto to thinking of herself as a mezzo! Weldon Whitlock told me that the passagio determined the vocal classification, but the contralto has a truly wonderful "color". I adore mezzos, too! Don't get me wrong! I mentioned before that I'd had several mezzos in church choirs thru the years. Only two of them were "resident" church members! The others were "borrowed" from the community for special occasions! Contraltos very possibly might simply opt not to develop their voices. Anne Homer Doerflinger and Katharine Homer Fryer told me that their Mother's voice was very difficult to train. Again, you are indeed a most fortunate individual! Ed arado_ge <arado_ge@y...> wrote: Sorry to be the one to throw the spanner in the works but I've heard quite a few contraltos just in the last two years alone. I live in Europe and first came across a "true" contralto while accompanying a friend in Andorra where she was participating in masterclasses with Monserrat Caballé. Until then I'd never really heard a true contralto but fell in love with the voice as soon as I heard it and started up my own collection of recordings.
I then heard another amazing one during Richard Miller's masterclasses in Salzburg during the summer of 2002. We also have a very talented contralto taking classes with my singing teacher. Admittedly they are rarer than sopranos but finding them is not exactly like finding a needle in a haystack. As for mezzos ..... I'm a mezzo :-) I like to think of myself as rarer than a soprano ... ;-)
I have to say, though, that at the same masterclasses in Andorra, there was another girl who sang as a contralto but was told she wasn't. It was quite heart-breaking for her to be told that she was in fact a mezzo and that the colour of her voice was not a true contralto colour, she was simply cabaple of singing low which is not the only criteria for a contralto.
My own view on this subject is that there are probably plenty of contralto's out there but they've never learnt to sing!!! I have friends who say "I can't sing". When they do, I've noticed that they have 'alto ranges and just find it uncomfortable trying to sing high! How much talent is lost simply because people are afraid to sing because they cannot sing along to certain types of music and have no confidence?!!!
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