Kate wrote about how her drastically her voice has changed in terms of the repertoire she has been able to sing in the 10+ years she has studied voice, and asks what clues her experience might provide as to what her "fach" might be.
That I can't answer - but I can say that the note-range one can sing at a given time (before one has achieved full technical mastery of one's voice) is the least accurate predictor of voice type.
In my own case - while there's never been a question that I'm a soprano, and a small, light one at that - the range of the notes I can sing, and the ease and beauty with which I can sing them, have changed a great deal over the course of my studies. This is the result of a consistently improving technical mastery.
At the start, with no technique, there was an extremely limited range and nothing that sounded really good. After some study, the middle started sounding better, and I added bad-sounding notes at the top side of my range.
I kept adding notes to the top and bottom side of my range, and the ones at the very top and the very bottom sounded decent (because I never had a "wrong" way to sing them to unlearn, I guess). The notes in the "passagio" - from about D an octave+ above middle C to about A above that - were always iffy - often sounding tight and constricted, though sometimes they worked OK.
Now (after 15 years of study - I'm a very slow vocal learner) I FINALLY can sing consistently well in the passagio (but it always has the potential to slip back into the "bad" ways, so I, with my teacher's help, must be vigilant), the top is much more consistent, the bottom sounds much better, and I am successful improving my ability to sing a different way in the lower-middle voice - so I can be heard and project in a performing space without resorting to "pure" chest tone from Middle C up to the next F.
The above changes reflected only my improved technique, not my "fach". I suspect that for singers with bigger voices than mine, who have a wider variety of vocal resources than I have, the technical advances that make more options in your voice available to you are confusing you about a "changing fach". But in my opinion, the type of voice you have isn't changing - only your ability to use everything nature has given you in your voice.
As Dr. Diane has so eloquently stated many times (as can be read in the currently-inaccessible Vocalist archives), one's goal should be to maximize vocal ability by improving your technique, and let the "fach" fall where it may. And working on arias in the studio for pedagogical purposes (e.g., singing lighter Mozart arias when one is a teenager) and to explore the voice's possibilities (e.g., a soprano working on a mezzo aria or vice-versa) is not the same as making a career singing the repertoire (and the full roles the arias exemplify).
Peggy
-- Margaret Harrison, Alexandria, Virginia, USA "Music for a While Shall All Your Cares Beguile" mailto:peggyh@i...
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