On Tue, 30 Jul 2002, spintotenor2002 wrote:
>
>
> What makes a baritone? Is it solid low notes? thick rich sound? What
> makes a lyric baritone... which is sometimes mistaken for a tenor.
> Help..
Probably the most important two factors in determining any voice type are
where the "breaks" - passagii - are, and what the most comfortable
tessitura is. Range is important, except that range is so often affected by
faulty technique (or by physical ailments, such as edema, mild laryngitis,
etc.), that it's sometimes hard to make a judgement at any given point in
time about whether a certain voice actually "has" a given top note or
bottom note. And general vocal "colour" (darkness vs. brightness - or
"squillo") is also an indicator - but only in combination with the more
reliable indicators.
The passagii will (or should) not be affected by temporary physical
ailments, nor by vocal technical problems. And the comfortable tessitura
is directly related to the locations of the upper and lower breaks. One
tends to sing most comfortably when the tessitura - which is a kind of
median or mien that indicates where most of a given piece of music "sits"
- vs. it's absolute range. A comfortable tessitura means that most of the
piece will sit between the upper and lower passagii. If too much of the
music sits below the lower "break" or above the "upper" one, the tessitura
will be hard to sing - and will be indicative that the piece of music was
not intended for the voice type of the singer attempting it. Thus, a kind
of indirect way to determine a voice type is to attempt to sing a bunch of
repertoire that you know is in a baritone tessitura, then to sing a bunch
of repertoire that you know is in a tenor tessitura, and figure out which
set of pieces is easier to sing. This is hardly scientific, but it's a
good rough self-test.
Vocal colour is probably the most unreliable indicator. If you don't
believe me, listen sometime to Giuseppe Giacomini and Jose Cura - both of
whom are tenors, and both of whom sound more baritonal than some
baritones. Then listen to Thomas Hampson on his operetta recording, or
singing "Deh vieni alla finestra". He sounds more like a tenor than many
tenors I know. And yet, he is - and has never claimed to be other than - a
baritone.
And, of course, there's also that "on the fence" beast known as the
baryton-martin (French designation) or the "baritenor" (informal
designation). This voice type exists exactly because not every singer can
be neatly slotted into a pre-existing category. The French particularly
seemed quite willing to invent new categories to accommodate some of their
favourite singers whose voices defied categorisation. Thus not only is
there the baryton-martin (named after a high-voiced baritone/low voiced
tenor named Martin), there is the Dugazon, a kind of slightly lower-voiced
soubrette (a la Frederica von Stade perhaps), and named after the famous
(in France) 18th century singer Mme. Dugazon, and also the Falcon, a kind
of dramatic soprano with a "short top" and a meatier "bottom" - so that
her voice hovered somewhere between dramatic soprano and what we'd now
call a dramatic mezzo (but, back in her day there was no such thing as a
mezzo, so the other choice was contralto, which she was not); yes, there
was a Mme. Falcon, after whom the voice category was named.
Anyway, if you truly have the range and can sing the tessitura of a
baryton-martin, there is certainly a lot of French and other repertoire to
suit you - particularly in operetta, where the distinctions between tenor
and baritone are often blurred. Eisenstein in Johann Strauss's DIE
FLEDERMAUS and Danilo in Lehar's DIE LUSTIGE WITWE are just two of the "on
the fence" roles that get sung by both baritones *and* tenors. Pelleas in
Debussy's PELLEAS ET MELISANDE is another (it was written for
baryton-martin).
Karen Mercedes
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html
______________________________________
I will sing with the spirit, and I
will sing with the understanding also.
1 Corinthians 14:15
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