Isabelle Bracamonte wrote:
> I, and you, are being trained to stick out of a chorus
> -- to cut through the big ensembles. If, for example,
> I end up full-blown spinto at some point, I'm not
> going to want to "blend" when Susannah and Aida are
> singing full-blown lines right through a huge onstage
> chorus. In Floyd's preaching scene, the chorus swells
> up to a forte and Susannah cleaves right through them
> with her "No"s -- and it's upper middle singing, right
> through their upper-middle singing. Singers have to
> be trained to pierce through a chorus; why are you
> sabotaging your training, especially before your
> technique is stable, by teaching yourself NOT to stick
> out of a group?
Because it's not an either/or situation, Isabelle. I can do both (or I
could when I was still singing) and I worked with plenty of others who
could.
> Duets and ensembles are still a matter of "cutting"
> singing -- listen to any Cosi ensemble; you can pick
> out every voice individually at every point.
Well, there are places where you shouldn't be able to. Where the music
is truly homophonic (I don't have Cosi in front of me at the moment, but
some parts of the Magic Flute spring to mind, particularly the three
ladies) there is a particular magic in hearing this single instrument
which is "the 3 ladies". In music like this you are no different from a
player in a string quartet, where the basic instrumental sound is all
the same, or a wind quintet where each instrument has a distinctive
tone. Instrumentalists in such groups can all cat through where the
music demands, yet listen to any professional chamber group and you will
hear them at times play "as one instrument". Yet, if you're musical, you
will still be able to distinguish the individual musical line.
Some ensemble writing is almost impossible to blend. Why do you think
the last solo lines of Beethoven's ninth symphony nearly always sound so
bloody awful? I _have_ heard it sound beautifully blended, but rarely -
it's usually sung by four soloists chosen for their _individual_
qualities who have been allowed by the conductor to do their own thing.
It's certainly partly Beethoven's fault, he did write some rather iffy
sonorities at times when he was deaf - though I wonder how the singers
in his day would have sounded in this passage.
> Or you can sing everything correctly, with ring and
> cut, and practice seeing if you can (at the same
> dynamic level as everyone else) stick out anyway.
> Then when your director glares at you, say, "But I
> have a naturally large instrument, I am a future
> Butterfly/ Radames/Eboli/Wotan!" This tactic will
> arouse the jealousy of your fellow students and the
> ire of the director,
...who, of course, understands nothing whatever about singing, certainly
by comparison with the students. I really don't know why this numbskull
was appointed (continued on p.94).
I'm sorry. My immediate reaction as that director would be "this student
has an ego problem"
> I just think it's a waste of time. Opera chorus is
> not so bad, since everyone in it is a trained singer
> and directors have usually given up on the blend thing
> and stick to staging (at least at San Francisco Opera,
> where the chorus sounds horrible most of the time and
> you can hear individual voices sticking out all over
> the place).
So what point are you making here? That the horrible-sounding chorus
full of aspiring soloists is a worthy thing to aspire to? Why is it "not
so bad"?
If these singers never get any further than the chorus, then maybe that
page-turning option would have been better.
--
Linda Fox, Cambridge, UK
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