At 7:16 AM +1000 7/23/05, keith helgesen wrote:
Does anyone remember details of a legendry singer- South American, I think
called Yma Sumac? - hope I have the spelling sort of correct!
As a youngster I remember being amazed when told she had a six octave+
useable vocal register.
Watch it, Keith; you're giving away our age! Yes, I remember her
well. Allegedly from Bolivia or some equally exotic place, the word
on the street was that she was really from Brooklyn. And I thought
it was more like a 5-octave range, but who's counting?! Yes, she had
a viable and big baritone range and could take her voice up at least
to Queen of the Night range, although I can't remember whether she
made it into Mariah Carrey's top octave--might have. A lot of hype,
but a startlingly unusual voice. She probably wouldn't have
qualified for the Texas Honor Choir.
Someone--I'm almost sure it was Andrew--mentioned Russell Oberlin.
He was the first countertenor when New York Pro Musica Antigua
started up in the '50s, and while I never had the opportunity to meet
and talk with him, my impression from the voice itself is that it was
not a falsetto voice but a tenor voice that simply lay a 3rd or a 4th
above the normal tenor range. I always thought that his recording of
Messiah (possibly with Bernstein) was the most beautiful I had ever
heard, although there was nothing else HIP about the interpretation.
If I'm right about his voice type, it was what the French call "haute
contre," and I later had two students with this same type of voice,
with the power of the male chest voice carried up higher into the
mezzo range. I believe that the next Pro Musica countertenor, Earnie
Murphy, had the same type of voice, as did, on the pop side, Clark
Burroughs of the Hi-Los and Don Shelton of the Hi-Los and Singers
Unlimited.
Oberlin's contemporary in the UK was Alfred Deller, who was a
falsettist countertenor in the tradition of the English chapel
choirs. It was a rather thin voice compared with Oberlin's, but the
two of them started reintroducing the countertenor voice into our
ears after a couple of centuries without it. Our older son, a
professional countertenor, also uses falsetto action, but today's
fine countertenors use a highly developed vocal production that
starts with falsetto but leaves it way behind. Apparently Mike Rawls
has this type of voice, too. I've put him in touch with our son.
Several writers have hinted at this, but let me say it straight out.
Male sopranos in renaissance music were NOT very often castrati (a
practice the church did not approve of, but did take advantage of),
and were not always boys at churches without choir schools. It
depended on the choir. And if modern voices can, for many singers,
open up the head range and sing comfortably in alto and soprano
ranges, so could rennaisance voices.
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
_______________________________________________
Finale mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
