In the bad old days, singers in an opera or symphony chorus would
sometimes be given parts that included only their music with no
orchestra reduction. Sometimes it wouldn't even include all the other
choral parts. I remember that Carmina Burana used to come with one
chorus part for the mean and another for the women, so that in the
mixed choruses you had no idea what the other half was singing.
I always hated that. Even if I'm following mostly my own part while
singing, I still want to have the others there to refer to -- certainly
when I take it home to study, and sometimes even on the fly while
singing.
I think that being accustomed to seeing all the parts causes
singer-musicians (which I acknowledge is a subset of all singers) to
develop habits of interpretation different from non-singing musicians,
at least in the classical world. A singer is accustomed to looking at
the other parts to get a sense of whether his or her part needs to
stand out or support someone else, etc., whereas an orchestra player is
accustomed to having that spelled out for him on the part.
For the past umpteen years, I've sung with a Christmas group that has a
large stable of singers it hires out as quartets in mix-or-match
fashion. Most of the pieces in our book don't have much in the way of
dynamic markings, but the singers are all intelligent musicians who can
add dynamics as needed. (Well, some better than others....) A few
years ago, a friend of mine joined the group, and at first she was
being particularly dense about dynamics. This surprised me, because I
know she's an excellent musician. After a while, I realized that in
the few pieces where the dynamics *were* marked, she observed them
scrupulously, but whenever they weren't she sang in a bland and
consistent mf. Because she had played in orchestra for so many years,
she was accustomed to getting her dynamics from the page and not taking
it upon herself to invent them. Once this was pointed out to her, she
changed gears and was just fine from then on. Musicians who are
primarily singers, even the mediocre ones, don't have this problem.
mdl
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