Vocalist.org archive


From:  "Lloyd W. Hanson" <lloyd.hanson@n...>
"Lloyd W. Hanson" <lloyd.hanson@n...>
Date:  Mon Oct 9, 2000  6:58 pm
Subject:  Re: [vocalist-temporary] Re: The rest of the voice,beneath the singer's formant


Dear Mike and Vocalisters;

You wrote
>my want is, that the voice one has always used to communicate
>with, could be extended into singing without losing that personal history of
>self expression. the singer, having negotiated these two factors, would
>then just make their point about the material with 'expression' being a
>by-product.

The above statement describes an art that has as its basic goal a
recreation of life as it exists. This point of view assumes that art
is the same as every day life rather than art as a "reflection" or
distillation of life.

Some forms of art are closer to this ideal than others. Any
word-based art will come closer to the ideal of art as life because
we all use words in everyday life. But graphic arts and music do not
approach this ideal as easily because by their very nature they are
not natural expressions of our everyday life.

As each form of art progress throughout mans history it tends to
become more and more abstract, that is, less a recreation of life and
more a reflection of life until finally it become a distillation or
synthesis of life's experiences.

Painting has clearly moved in this direction in the western world for
the past 300 years. So has Music until more recently. Much of the
rock and the pops world is less a distillation of life and more a
reflection of life. In this sense it is a more primitive art.

But music by its nature is always both. Music has the characteristic
ability to speak at a subliminal level of knowing. It does not
require any fore knowledge to achieve this level of interaction with
its beholders. However, music can also, very characteristically, act
as a form of intellectual stimulus and become an ultimate synthesis
of every day life's experiences. At this level, music achieves its
highest calling and it is not for everyone that music so speaks nor
does it have to.

The arts of opera and singing, because of their relation to both
words and music are often caught in the crossfire between those who
prefer realism and those more at home in abstraction. The final
reality here is that opera and singing live in both worlds and there
is a continuum from singing as mostly text to singing as mostly
music. We make our choices. For most of us, the choices change
from time to time.

Lloyd W. Hanson, DMA
Professor of Voice, Pedagogy
School of Performing Arts
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ 86011

emusic.com