Yeah, I have pretty much been instructed that the Baroque "A" is
equal to our present "A-flat."
Dean
On May 18, 2011, at 10:27 AM, John Howell wrote:
At 1:07 AM -0700 5/18/11, Mark D Lew wrote:
On May 16, 2011, at 10:42 AM, John Howell wrote:
Classical singers, voice teachers, and musicians in general take
it as an article of faith that men's and women's voices are an
octave apart, and in a lot of situations that works just fine.
Another thought: Although I never really formulated it as such, I
guess I think of the distance between men's voices and women's
voice more like a ninth rather than an octave.
For example:
- chorus altos on low G is like chorus basses on low F
- chorus tenors on high G is like chorus sopranos on high A
- baritone soloist's high F is like mezzosoprano soloist's high G
etc
An interesting concept, and certainly applicable in SOME
situations, depending on the voices available. With college
voices, for example, the sopranos will tend to have had more years
of voice lessons than the tenors, and the voice teachers will be
trying to turn altos into mezzos.
The only problem I can see is that in a huge majority of standard
choral repertoire, because of the imitation of lines between men's
and women's voices, they ARE used with octave displacements. In
ALL of the polyphonic choruses in "Messiah," for instance, and in
the choruses that included trumpets, and had to be in D major
because Handel's trumpets were in D, both tenors and sopranos have
to handle high As. (Of course what pitch standard was used in
London, or Dublin, or elsewhere in England at the time is also an
open question!)
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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I have opened my soul/To let in the warmth of sound/Now my saving grace
Adrian Estabrook, author
And ... I remain intrigued that some folks who accept and practice,
with absolute fidelity, the concepts of, say, feng shui and
pyramids, should find the task of extending their leaps of faith to
include an existent God so arduous.
Dean M. Estabrook
http://sites.google.com/site/deanestabrook/
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