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From:  "Lloyd W. Hanson" <lloyd.hanson@n...>
"Lloyd W. Hanson" <lloyd.hanson@n...>
Date:  Mon Mar 26, 2001  5:57 am
Subject:  The effect of Vowels on singing in the Passaggio


Dear Dre and Vocalisters:

After re-reading my original post on this subject (a tenor who is
grumpy with mozart ) I realized that my many typo errors made my
meaning much less clear. I also became aware of the need to change
the Subject to more correctly reflect the content of the message.
Below is the corrected post.

You make some very important points especially regarding how vowels
are used in singing. Wunderlich tends to choose more closed forms of
vowels when singing in his passaggio. Thus his /I/ tends frequently
to be /i/, his /e/ closes to /I/, his/E/ becomes /e/. He even does
this with the back vowels wherein we hear the /awe/ become /o/ and
the /o/ tends to drift toward /u/. Most of these vowel changes may
be the result of his "Pfälzisches dialect" as you mention but I would
be willing to bet that a substantial portion of these changes were
taught and carefully learned. You can hear him do this not only in
opera but in his Lieder recordings, especially in Schubert's "Die
Schöne Müllerin". The effect of these vowel changes is to move the
primary passaggio points slightly up or down and thus avoid having to
land on difficult passaggio notes. It is a technique that is also
apparent in the singing of Björling and others from northern Europe.

If vowels are kept "speaking quality" pure, the singer is required to
find other means to transcend the passaggio and avoid the audible
changes that must occur in vocal fold function in this area of vocal
change. The concept of "cover" is one method commonly used because
it darkens a vowel and, in so doing, achieves the desired goal of moving
the passaggio points. "Cover" also gives the false idea that one is continuing
to sing the same "speaking quality" pure vowel but this is not so. If one
isolates a "covered" vowel (via a tape loop or its digital equivalent) one
will find that the covered vowel is, in reality, a more closed form of the
attempted "speaking quality" pure vowel. The difficulty with "covering"
a vowel is one of deciding how much cover is necessary and duplicating
that exact amount of cover each time. I have found that vowel modification
is a more accurate method of achieving the effect of cover and is more
reliably duplicated .

Any composer writing for any voice type must have a deep feeling for
the functions of that type of voice. It has nothing to do with
deliberately making a work difficult. It has to do with how a voice
type can best realize the intent of the composer. If a composer does
not understand the potential or the function of a voice type it is
likely that he/she will write music that is less likely to achieve
his/her goals. If a composer writes music that is consistently in
the passaggio of the singer and if the composer also sets text such
that the most open vowels are required in this passaggio, then the
composer has given the singer little, if any, opportunity to solve
the problems of negotiating the passaggio smoothly and the singer
must resort to excessive cover or an extremely light production or
use of head voice below its intended area or, as some wise singers
have chosen, to change the placement of which words are sung on which
notes. When Mozart writes for the tenor voice he frequently places
the tenor in this difficult position. It is not surprising that a singer of
his time requested that he use more of the /i/ and /e/ vowels in the
passaggio area and notes above the passaggio.

The raising of the central pitch of the music since Mozart's time can add
to this difficulty, of course, but it is more a matter of making different
vowel modification adjustments with this raised central pitch than it is a
basic difficulty with the higher notes themselves . The adjustments are
not necessarily more difficult, just different.


--
Lloyd W. Hanson
Professor of Voice, Vocal Pedagogy
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ 86001





Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
--
Lloyd W. Hanson
Professor of Voice, Vocal Pedagogy
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ 86001


  Replies Name/Email Yahoo! ID Date Size
10603 Re: The effect of Vowels on singing in the Passag Greypins@a...   Mon  3/26/2001   2 KB
10605 Re: The effect of Vowels on singing in the Passag Lloyd W. Hanson   Mon  3/26/2001   3 KB
10617 Re: The effect of Vowels on singing in the Passag Greypins@a...   Mon  3/26/2001   4 KB

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