On Jul 21, 2005, at 8:05 PM, Richard Yates wrote:
A lie? Who said anything about lying? I originally asked for possible
rationales for not allowing a male student to sing alto or soprano.
One of
your suggested explanations was that singing out of range could cause
injury. I asked for evidence of this. If there is no evidence then the
TMEA
may simply be ignorant.
For me the issue is not that singing low in the range is bad for the
voice per se. I don't believe that's true at all. My concern about
having women in the tenor section is that it makes it very difficult
for me to work with the voices in a healthy and educational way without
encouraging them to hurt themselves.
Forgive me if I get specific, but I'll try to pick examples that are
reasonably familiar. Suppose we're working on the Dies Irae movement
of the Mozart Requiem. The tenor section has a lot of forte singing up
around F and G, and then when the "quantus tremor ... quando judex"
section comes they've got a big gorgeous countermelody that I want to
bring out. So I'm going to want to spend some time with the tenors to
put them in a the right place so that they can make the big sound the
piece wants without killing themselves and without sounding like a
bunch of bleating sheep on the big "quaaaando". So I'm going to play
with the sound a bit, and then when I've got them feeling it right and
healthy I'm going to encourage them to put their bellies under it and
let 'er rip.
Now if I happen to have a couple of female tenors and I'm doing this,
I've got a problem. Unless they're smart enough to ignore everything
I'm saying (a habit I don't really want to encourage...), they're going
mess themselves up. If they do what I ask, they aren't going to sound
like the male tenors, and if they try to make themselves sound like the
male tenors, they're going to hurt themselves. So all the while I have
to keep stopping myself to say, "oh, but not you, you do this instead,"
at which point I wonder why the hell I've got her in the tenor section
anyway.
Turn it around, suppose we're doing that chorus from the beginning of
the Polovtsian dances. Now I've got those big luscious alto lines way
down below middle C. I have no problem with having women sing low in
their range. The idea that it is somehow unhealthy is poppycock, I
think. But in this piece I'm going to spend a lot of time with the
altos, getting them in the right place to be able to make a full sound
way down there without straining.
What these examples clearly show is that it really isn't about extreme
range at all. The place where I'm worried about hurting the female
tenors is not low in their range at all. It's all well within the alto
range. The problem is not about anyone singing too low or too high.
The problem is that the physiology is different so I have use a
completely different technique. If I had an entire section of female
tenors, it wouldn't be a problem (though I wouldn't be very happy with
that for the Mozart...).
All of this applies equally to the countertenor in the soprano section.
I'm not very familiar with the countertenor voice, but if I've got one
in my chorus, particularly one who is young and impressionable, every
time I'm working with the soprano section, I'm always going to have a
nagging voice saying, "uh oh, what's it going to do to him if *he* does
this too?" Hopefully your chorus director is conscientious enough that
he isn't going to ruin some kid's voice out of ignorance, and at the
all-state level, you're probably fairly safe in that. If it's me, and
I get a countertenor in my chorus, the first thing I do is call up a
trained countertenor colleague and have a talk with him about how the
voice works and what I need to be aware of. The second thing I do,
preferably before the first rehearsal, is have a talk with the kid and
make sure we have an understanding about how many of the things I say
to the other sopranos won't apply to him.
In this specific Texas case, it sounds like the countertenor is
well-trained and he's going to know to take care of himself anyway. I'm
really not worried about him individually. I am, however, worried
about other boys who might sing soprano in another chorus with a less
knowledgeable chorus director.
mdl
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