Dear List:
--- In vocalist-temporary@yahoogroups.com, Jodie Bean
<bean2871_2000@y...> wrote:
> My voice part would best be described as a
> contralto/low mezzo, and at least for me, I know that
> I am working extremely hard to get a deeper, richer
> quality.
I wonder Jodie if you might say more about what you mean by working
to get a deep rich quality. I'm also curious what some of the list
teachers feel about such a statement. When I read about working to
have a "deep rich" quality it triggers my thinking about forcing,
artificially darkening the sound, making a hollow sound, and so on.
I would mention that in my opinion, perhaps not shared by others, I
often hear in "lower" voices (mezzos, contraltos, baritones, basses)
a tendancy towards woofiness - a kind of exaggerated quality to my
ears from an attempt to sound richer and lower than the voice really
is. I remember once hearing a mezzo soloist at the San Francisco
Symphony - wish I could remember her name - and it was such a
beautiful sound with such clarity at first I thought soprano, but the
color and richness of the lower range was quite different.
My voice is very light and bright, and I have a tendancy to tense and
strain and raise my larynx giving something of the "tenor with
squeezed testicles" sound ;). I had a teacher with a heavy, dark,
large operatic baritone voice, but his voice definitely had a
penetrating "squillo" and ringing quality. You might think he would
try to get me to sound like him, but that's not at all what he did.
I remember well his instruction to me. He said, we cannot make a
voice brighter, but we can make it duller by blocking the sound in
some way with the tongue or by closing the mouth or by making a
breathy or unfocused tone.
So he was telling me to accept the inherent brightness in my voice
and in fact he felt my tone was dull and I tended to block the sound
to try and round it out and have it sound more pleasing to my ears.
Cheers,
Michael Gordon
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