It's always great when you come to a common ground, isn't it? Let's see...
What I mean by a pointy, focus-heavy voice will be extremely solid, stable, and full of core. It just won't have the luxury of space around it yet for warmth and roundness. It feels free and sounds very small inside the singer's head, but sounds cutting and large to others. The top of the voice tends to shrill (shrill without tension -- it gets edgier-sounding and leans heavily into its ping).
Young singers generally want to sound soft, delicate, warm, and pretty. Singers who try to add space and warmth to their voices without first lining it up into point and focus, end up with airy wobbles and the type of "unstable" voice that reminds you of a 60-year-old. It's near impossible to teach someone like that to add "core" and stability without totally retraining the voice.
So what you have (I mean, what I had as a late teen) is a slim, piercing, solid voice resplendant with brilliance and ping but short on warmth and grace. With maturity, the natural weight of the voice comes in and the opulence magically happens. High notes get big and beautiful (rather than just cutting).
So I erred in leading you to think that the focus-heavy voice was unstable -- to the contrary, the wobbly spacious voices are the ones who can't get enough control to sing a Mozart line to save their lives.
And the pointy voice is LOUD, it's just not warm. It may sound and feel small to the student inside her head, but that's where a tape recorder and trust in the teacher have to come into play.
I used my recording of early Tebaldi as an example because, in her biography she discusses how her technique did not change during her career, and it's a recording of a great singer at a young stage, which is rare. Young Freni sounds the same way -- pointed and lacking in the gush and warm plumminess that came in with age. The problem with young singers (and singers in their twenties) is that they expect to sound like a 40-year-old star, complete with plummy, velvety high notes and a rich, dark middle -- and that gets them in trouble.
Are we common yet?
Isabelle B.
===== Isabelle Bracamonte San Francisco, CA ibracamonte@y... ibracamonte@y...
__________________________________________________ Yahoo! Photos - Share your holiday photos online!
|