John Howell wrote:

>Sometimes it isn't a matter of being ASKED to sing tenor, but a 
>matter of INSISTING on singing tenor.  

Yes, I've encountered plenty of that as well, including one woman whose voice 
really wasn't even all that low. She could easily sing soprano if she wanted 
to, but for some reason she really liked being a tenor. With amateur choruses, 
voice part is often as much about personal identity as voice.

> [...] And it's true that out on the fringes of the bell curve 
>there are fewer and fewer people as you move from one to two standard 
>deviations from the mean, but those voices DO exist--the bass in the 
>Pointer Sisters or Carol Channing on one end, Mariah Carey or Yma 
>Sumac on the other. 

Mariah is famous for her high notes, but the main tessitura of her voice is 
rather low. She has two distinct vocal registers, and if you listen to her 
songs you'll notice there's a fairly big gap between the two which she almost 
never bridges. Instead, she mostly sings in her main register, which is the 
typical lowish range for a female pop singer, but then occasionally flips into 
the upper register which she sings with a sort of whistle tone. Her upper 
register goes from about D6 to Bb7, which is at the very top of a classical 
soprano range. (Queen of the Night's top note is F6.) The notes most associated 
with the traditional operatic soprano, from about F5 to C6, Mariah barely uses 
at all.

mdl
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