At 3:09 PM -0400 5/13/11, Christopher Smith wrote:
On Fri May 13, at FridayMay 13 2:44 PM, John Howell wrote:
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.
I wrote for a women's chorus once that had 4 women comfortable down
to C, and one could get out a reasonably warm mf G! She could almost
sing it as loudly as I could!
I also heard an Armenian folk singer once (a man!) who could sing a
low A. The whole place erupted when he ended a piece on that note!
Christopher
I've known maybe 4 or 5 contrabass singers in my life (mostly in
quartets, although one is in Chanticleer) who could hit low C2 or
below acoustically, NOT through a mic and EQing. Gurney Bell of the
Sportsmen Quartet back in the '50s regularly warmed up down to about
a low G1 to be confident that his low C2 at the end of "16 Tons"
would be out there! Those voices are rare, but were selected for in
the Russian Orthodox choirs and the Don Cossacks, and of course in
Southern Gospel Quartets. Monteverdi wrote a low D2 for Seneca in
"Poppea" when he was about to take poison, but it's awfully rare (and
we don't know what his pitch standard was, since Venice was said to
have the highest standard in Europe). I had a Freshman audition for
my college show ensemble who just wrote on his application, "I can
sing down to low D," and that guaranteed that he would make the
group! And I eventually wrote for him down to Db2.
But a lot of those voices ended up in radio, or later in TV, because
the low growl gives a voice a great radio sound just for speech.
John
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
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
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.
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