Dear "v--",
At 05:30 PM 12/27/01 -0000, vivaelcanto wrote:
>My first teacher told me (this will sound crazy) that I would make a
>nice bass or a nice tenor but not a baritone as I didn't have the
>character for it. This was, as you can imagine, utterly confusing.
It surely is that!
>My current teacher believes I'm a baritone and my coach, who is very
>experienced and works for a major opera house in England, believes
>I'm a bass-baritone. My tessitura is between Ab1 to F#3 being my
>passagio note around Eb3 or E3 . I feel comfortable singing things
>like Mozart's Figaro or Leporello, Escamillo from Carmen, etc. I
>feel happy with this because I have a sense of who I am vocally.
It sounds to me like this is where you'll find your answer. A voice teacher
once told me that baritones are the most confusing voices. The designation
seems to encompass such a very wide range of voices with qualities of both
tenor and bass. The speaking voice seems to be only a general, and often
unreliable, indicator. Some teachers and speech pathologists use the
"uh-huh" method as another indicator; where the "-huh" part, if truly
unaffected, can point to the lower middle of a singing voice, and also where
general speech level should be.
Other teachers rely on the passagi. I believe an upper passagio point of Eb
- E above middle C (ie, Eb4-E4) would indicate a typical baritone, with
tenors being F4-G#4 (depending on type). Others on this list will correct
me, I trust, if I boggle these points. These are also described in Richard
Miller's books. However, I suspect the passagio method can be confusing,
too. One of my teachers decided to train me as a baritone, partly because
that's what I was singing in church choir when I first came to her. I
really wanted to sound, well, "baritonal"; worked hard to darken my voice;
to block the overtones that I thought made me "stick out". She found my
passagio exit to be about Eb4-E4, like yours. But I was having lots of
trouble with notes lower than Bb2, and the steady diet of "low-ish" notes
was very tiring for me. My current teacher told me that there was a reason
I didn't like low notes; that my voice took on more interesting colors above
D4; that I needed to relax and stop trying to "beef up" my voice. A year
later, the passagio exit had risen to F#4-G4.
Then someone on this list wrote an interesting post which I found very
helpful. She (and I'm sorry I don't remember who it was) said simply, "It
just depends on where you like to sing, and feel the most free." In other
words, if for whatever reason, you could only sing ONE OCTAVE, what would
that octave be? B2-B3 or D3-D4 or G3-G4?? So, that brings us to your
defining statement, above. It seems to me that if singing Figaro or
Leporello suits your sense of self, QED.
On the other hand, I am not a voice teacher, and the above is just my
personal opinion.
GWendel, dT
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