Bonne Chanson

Fauré's Stereograms

2011-11-20T18:58:00.001Z

Stare at one of these stereograms in the right way for long enough and hidden images or layers gradually emerge. Practise Fauré at the right speed for long enough and you will uncover some additional melodies that, for many, remain hidden within the texture. In some images, like the one above, the eye gradually picks out a recognisable shape before building up a deep three-dimensional construction made up of many layers. In others, like the picture below, each row is picked out in its own space but is also an essential constituent of the overall picture, like a persian carpet. It's much the same with Fauré's music. There's the singer's melody, obviously, and then there's the basic melody of the piano accompaniment, usually in the right hand. But dig deeper, and you'll often find many other less evident melodies cleverly weaving their individual strands in and out of the basic fabric, creating embroidered patters that delight the careful listener who takes the trouble to examine the detail. Some are deliberately marked out by their note values or some other accentuation, but some are almost accidental byproducts of the composition, as though Fauré wasn't even conscious of having created them.

But — and here's the point — these subsidiary melodies will be lost if the pieces are taken too slowly, which they mostly are it seems. They will lose their momentum and, especially on the piano, their individual tones will decay before the ear has had a chance to make the connections between them and to perceive the tunes that result from joining up the dots. Instead of a beautiful necklace, we perceive a disparate arrangement of pearls, lovely in themselves, but not as satisfying as the finished assemblage.

Just as we have to focus our eyes in a certain way to "resolve" a stereoscopic image correctly, we have to listen in a certain way to hear the underlying tunes. But if the material that will yield these secrets is presented to us incorrectly — not only in terms of speed but also in terms of which notes should be brought to the foreground — we will fail to decode all its messages.

In a future post I shall compare different versions of the same mélodie to illustrate these ideas.

Émilie Girette

2011-11-04T13:21:00.001Z

"I dream of making you hear my melodies sung by perfect interpreters, and I don't know of any among the professionals. It is the amateurs who are the best at understanding and translating my music."

Thus did Fauré write to the Élisabeth Greffulhe, an aristocratic patroness of the arts who held a musical salon. One of these amateurs was Émilie Girette, whose wealthy and musical parents also held a salon in Paris. The room at 11 avenue de Villiers was large enough to accommodate two pianos and an organ. In the summer months the family stayed at La Baule and Vichy. During the winter season they held soirées in their Parisian salon. Émilie studied singing with Raoul Landesque-Dimitri and attended classes in the history of music at the Conservatoire.

In 1901, at the age of twenty-four she started to write a diary, which she kept up for two years until her marriage. Fauré was very much taken with her beauty and her voice, and she clearly fell under his spell. He loved her deep mezzo/contralto timbre, yet she also sang soprano parts — notably the "Pie Jesu" solo in his Requiem (1902). He wrote Accompagnement (1902) and Le plus doux chemin (1904) for her.

I shall let the following extracts from the diary speak for themselves. My sources for the contents of this article are given at the end. All translations are my own. If anyone knows where I can get hold of a photo of Émilie Girette, please could they get in touch with me!

* * *

June 19, 1901 [the first diary entry] [...] I am working at my singing ... Yes, I sing ... Doesn't this evoke the fullness of happiness, of gaiety, of fulfilment? Singing is sunshine, light, dazzlement, infinity! Perhaps it is also weeping, suffering, giving voice to one's pain, giving colour to what is grey, giving light to what is in the shade. To sing is to suffer. To sing is to be consoled.

June 30, 1901 — It is to be hoped that Fauré does not drop us; at present he is charming, but tomorrow he may have forgotten us: those of such stature as his have the right to be inconstant and fantasists. To blame them is to misunderstand them; it reminds me of what Henriette Régnier said about her harp. I asked her whether she didn't find irksome the ease with which it went out of tune at the slightest change in temperature. In response, she said: "how could I deplore such sensitivity since that in itself is what gives the instrument its charm and quality?" [...] Ah, my God, where shall I be this time next year? The anticipation of some inevitable suffering is terrible. But I want to be brave. I feel sad today. I'm expecting too much of life, and I shall be disappointed. Others, like Fauré's wife, experience happiness which they do not appreciate and which, on the contrary, they consider to be grievances. They are jealous instead of rejoicing that they are just a ray, a perfume, for a life, for a human being who is so different from the masses, so superior to reality.

January 7, 1902 — Tonight at dinner ... Fauré was delightful ... At the table, Cortot told him he should compose something for piano and orchestra, whereupon Fauré turned to me and said: "I shan't do anything until I've written a song for you", to which I replied that it would be one of the great joys in my life. "Only I can't find the right poem," he continued, "for I know what you like". Again I said that the words didn't matter, that it was the music that counted. But he considers that words and music are bound together and that it's the words that provide the inspiration. That much is clear in his music, where everything is worked out, honed and chiselled. "I so love your voice," he said to me (while Cortot was playing). "You can have no idea how much I love it — it is a soul that sings."

January 12, 1902 — Last night, a cup of tea at the Humberts. [...] I sang very well (Soir; Pleurs d'or with Humbert, le Secret and les Roses d'Ispahan); Fauré was kind, as always; he told me that no one moved him as much as I did [...] When he accompanies me, we are as one. He follows me and I feel everything that he wants all the while. He lets himself slow down or speed up — oh, just a touch — in the knowledge that I would never exaggerate, that I would never take away the character of his music. It is so special! He is upset that pianists play him so badly: "The greater they are, the worse they play me," he says.

February 23, 1902 — [...] Yesterday Fauré came over at 5 p.m. to rehearse with mama, and he made me sing Schubert's Marguerite; He is going to accompany me in this at the Salle Érard, tomorrow week! I tremble! ... He gave me some excellent advice [...] and also on Aurore and Les Roses d'Ispahan. He also made me sing Nocturne [...] and Les Larmes (No one ever sings Nocturne for him, and he likes it. I will work on it, but he is going to try to get the score in the original key, which is very low, because he likes it in the contralto version). [...] He wants to write me a mélodie, but I'm not banking on it! While I sang Nocturne, a second time, more softly as he advised me, he said: "That is how I dreamed of hearing it". He told me that my interpretation was very personal and that I seemed to have invented his music. I am happy.

March 8, 1902 — Another hour of heaven at Fauré's today — I sang as never before in my life — I was conscious of the fact, and he told me so. I felt as though I formed part of his very music — what an inebriating sensation! — He embraced me — He said that I held a precious place in his life — how rewarding it was for him to be so well understood. He was extremely moved; and he told me so — He has begun "my mélodie", but he won't tell me which poem he finally settled on! [Accompagnement, by Samain] It will be in the same genre as Soir musically, for I told him how much I loved this type of mélodie — He is thinking of me, of my voice, while writing it. It is purely descriptive poetry, he tells me, and I mustn't be put off initially — he's afraid that I shan't like it!! ... He told me that he thought it had a bit of me in it, and that he put his whole heart and soul into it.

March 25, 1902 — A successful and artistic performance of Fauré's Requiem [...] I replaced Thérèse Roger in the "Pie Jesu". I sang it very well. [...] Fauré was enchanted. Me too! He told me that tonight he had the impression of the "Pie Jesu" being something unknown to him, as I sang it.

April 29, 1902 — [on the occasion of taking the solo soprano part in Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis"] This morning I sang for the first time with orchestra ... I was called only last night!! I sang very well. Cortot was perfectly happy; never before did he give me so many enthusiastic compliments. These gave me more pleasure than all the compliments of everyone else put together.

[Spring 1902] — [on the subject of "Accompagnement"] He said he composed in his head first, through the words; it's the poetry that inspires him. The melody forms itself little by little within him, even without his thinking about it, and it matures in his subconscious. Then comes the work of refining it, which is not the easiest part — quite the contrary!

June 19, 1902 — It's exactly a year since I began this diary. What has improved since then ?? I am without strength at present. I can't wait to leave Paris. And yet I dread the voyage and the arrival at La Baule. "The Curlews", Will it be all right? "The sad curlews, annunciators of the autumn." I always think of this phrase of Loti's ... Oh! how I should like to draw a long thread, like the little girl in the fairy tale, and the reel would lead to the end of the year ... Still, I must be patient! The other day, I pulled out my first two white hairs, one from each temple. I cried. - I am no longer a young girl. I will be twenty-six years old on September 9.

May 12, 1903 — [Édouard] Risler and [Reynaldo] Hahn were wonderfully charming, and stunning in their verve and their art. Risler, draped in a table cloth, danced a Spanish dance with great elegance and flair, accompanied on the piano by Hahn, who used a warm, nasal timbre to sing those dizzying oriental rhythms ... Risler made me sing. I was ridiculously nervous and breathless. Souffrances [Schmerzen?] of Wagner; the Sapphic Ode of Brahms; my melody of Fauré, which he sightread faultlessly — notes, rhythm, nuances... I sang it twice. Then La chère blessure of Hahn, which I hadn't studied much but was easy to sing. Risler loves this, more than the Fauré. Then Fauré's Soir (which he didn't know) and Les Berceaux. I was a bit more settled by the end. He was kind, I think. But it is impossible to remember what he said to me!! It is discouraging to encounter such incomparable artistes! The day after such a soirée is always a torture!

* * *

Six months later, in November 1903, Émilie Girette married Édouard Risler. In May 1917, this beautiful and gifted woman died from Spanish 'flu, aged forty.

Sources:

Myriam Chimènes: Mécènes et Musiciens: Du salon au concert à Paris sous la IIIè République (Fayard, 2004).

Graham Johnson: Gabriel Fauré: The Songs and their Poets (Ashgate, 2009).

Jean-Michel Nectoux: Gabriel Fauré: Les voix du clair-obscur (2nd edn) (Fayard, 2008).

Jean-Michel Nectoux: Fauré (Seuil, 1995).

Lydia Eustis

2011-10-29T12:45:00.001+01:00

In 1902, Fauré told Louis Aguettant that the main theme of La Bonne Chanson (composed in 1892–4) was the "Lydia" theme, from the song of that name that he had composed in 1871. It related, he said, to a female interpreter, but he did not reveal the muse's identity. Aguettant was not so indiscreet as to ask Fauré to name the woman, but wondered whether it could be Mme Bardac (dedicatee of la Bonne Chanson with whom Fauré was having an affair during its composition) or Mlle Boissonnet (dedicatee of the 1871 song Lydia).*

In fact, Aguettant is wrong about the dedicatee of Lydia. Other Fauré songs were dedicated to Alice Boissonnet, but Lydia was dedicated to Mme Marie Trélat, an amateur mezzo-soprano who taught singing in her later years.

By a curious coincidence, one of Marie Trélat's singing students, who would become a favourite interpreter of Fauré's, bore the name Lydia Eustis. Whether Fauré's fondness for the interpreter was influenced by his fondness for her name, the poem or the song itself, we do not know. But for some reason "Lydia" mattered greatly to him, and motifs from his Lydia song would re-emerge in many of his later compositions. It is pointless to speculate why "Lydia" had assumed such importance for Fauré. His interest may have been sparked initially by something read in childhood, or even an early fascination with the Lydian mode.

Lydia Eustis as a possible muse seems not to have occurred to Aguettant. She would have been too young (if she was even born) in 1871 to have inspired Fauré's choice of Leconte de Lisle's "Lydia" as a poem to set to music; but could it be that later on, Fauré associated Lydia Eustis with the theme of the song that bore her name? It is an obvious connection to make, but I would need to find out more about her age, whereabouts and activities in 1892–4 before pursuing this line of thought.

All I have managed to find so far is that she lived in New York and Newport for a while and became engaged in 1906. Her husband was Jonkheer J. Loudon, a diplomat and political figure in Paris, and she was the sister of Anita Kinen, a soprano. Both women sang frequently at the salons of Paris in the early 1900s.

In 1902, the year of that conversation with Aguettant, Fauré turned to Lydia Eustis when choosing a dedicatee for his new song Dans la forêt de septembre about the autumn of life.

The only photo of a Lydia Eustis that I have found so far is this intriguing one in the Library of Congress, dated c1910. Was it taken at a fancy-dress ball? And is this Fauré's Lydia?

*See Jean-Michel Nectoux, Fauré (Paris: Seuil, 1995), pp. 110–111.

Fauré's Muses

2011-10-23T12:24:00.001+01:00

The dedicatees of the two Opus 85 songs of Fauré that I studied and recorded this year were women who frequented and performed in the salons of Paris. They were part of Fauré's regular circle of friends and, like many of the other singers who gave the premières of Fauré's mélodies, were not true "professional singers" in the sense that we now use and understand the term. Nevertheless, they must have been well trained and were clearly much admired by Fauré.

Dans la forêt de septembre was dedicated to Mademoiselle Lydia Eustis, a mezzo-soprano. The more difficult Accompagnement was dedicated to Madame Édouard Risler, otherwise known as Émilie Girette, a beautiful young contralto (who also sang soprano parts). The manuscript of Accompagnement is inscribed to "ma délicieuse interprète et amie Mlle. Mimi Girette" [my delicious interpreter and friend, Miss Mimi Girette]. Sadly she died only sixteen years later in 1917, after contracting Spanish influenza, aged forty.

I shall devote my next posts to some of the women who brought to life these mélodies. Frustratingly, I can find no photos or portraits of Émilie Girette on the Internet. As for Lydia Eustis, there is one photo that seems to be of the right period historically, but is it the right Lydia Eustis? — No information about it is given.

September Forest

2011-09-29T15:14:00.000+01:00

On 29th September 1902, Fauré finished writing the music for Dans la forêt de septembre (In the September forest) a poem by Catulle Mendès. It is about the passing of time, the inevitability of decay and eventual death, and the first autumn leaf in an otherwise still green woodland setting. Fauré, like me in September 2011, was 57, but he was already having problems with his hearing and consequently was probably "feeling his age". This autumnal poem must have struck a chord almost immediately when he saw it in Le Figaro on 21st September 1902, for he took just a few days to write one of his loveliest melodies. The music is nostalgic and tender throughout and its regular pace perfectly captures the atmosphere of a walk in the woods in the dying days of summer.

I was surprised to find that several illustrations for this song on YouTube feature highly coloured trees, with yellows, reds and brown dominating. Do people ever read the poems they try to illustrate? This poem talks of the forest's profondeur encore verte (still green depths), of a leaf that is un peu rousse (a little bit red) and of the première feuille morte (first dead leaf). At this stage, the decay is subtle, barely perceptible, and certainly not yet far advanced. This is what makes the poem and the music all the more poignant.

I took care to record the music as near as possible to September (in fact it was the last day of August), and I filmed it in the middle of September to try to capture the essence of the month. Here then is my snapshot of a typical September day in England, probably not all that different from those experienced by Mendès and Fauré.

Quartet of Castles

2011-09-17T11:27:00.002+01:00

My "illustrated French song" project has taken me to four castles this summer to find the material I need to tell the stories. The advantage of castles is that, like superstores, they provide everything one needs under one roof. Not only is there a good variety of beautiful and timeless scenery, but the grounds are large enough to swallow up a large number of people without them getting in one's way. The main annoyance in trying to capture appropriate backdrops and props is having people dressed in garish contemporary garb wandering onto one's "set". Even so, it's best to choose weekdays in term time.

So four times over the past few weeks I have driven up and down the county, armed with my shiny new camcorder and tripod, not to join the bands of ogling tourists but on a mission to shoot images that I could not easily find anywhere else. I am fortunate to live in an area of England that is well served by castles, and now I have enough material to illustrate the four remaining songs in this season's collection of Fauré's mélodies.

SISSINGHURST CASTLE

Sissinghurst was my least successful castle. It is too small and too crowded. I only went there because it's a couple of miles down the road and I can get in free. But I did find some wonderful trees in the surrounding woods, which now feature in "Dans la forêt de septembre", and a couple of useful urns and some flowers which I may use in "Jardin nocturne" or "Reflets dans l'eau".

SCOTNEY CASTLE

Scotney's garden has been described as one of the most romantic in England. I concur. It has a peaceful atmosphere all of its own, which will perfectly complement several of the songs in Fauré's Mirages. Particularly useful were the many water lilies in the lake and moat, which could almost rival Monet's. And these water lilies are exclusively white, the purest form, and are more appropriate for the subject matter. The French poets always refer to white water lilies. There is also a lovely walled garden filled with flowers, which were still in full bloom when I went there at the end of August. All in all, Scotney provided lots of useful "filler material", not just for the projects in hand but for the future too. The only disappointment was that its fountain was not working. This meant that I had to go further afield, to Hever.

HEVER CASTLE

Hever, the home of Anne Boleyn, was well worth the mileage for its wonderful fountains, its Italian gardens and, not least, its traditional, dark-brown, wooden rowing boats. There I got everything I needed for "Accompagnement", "Reflets dans l'eau" and "Jardin nocturne". I was spoilt for choice when it came to fountains, and, in an unexpected bonus, I even found some orange trees with fruit on them (mentioned in "Jardin nocturne"). I was extremely lucky when it came to the rowing boat. It was an overcast day, with spasmodic showers and a heavy downpour at lunchtime. No one was hiring boats. But I happened to set up my tripod at exactly the moment when a member of staff took one of the boats out for a spin. The difficulty here was keeping the lens focused on the oar and the bottom of the boat, making sure to keep the twenty-first century female figure out of the frame! I secured just enough footage, but only just, and with none to spare. No other boats went out that day.

LEEDS CASTLE

Leeds had the most expensive entrance fee, but I was prepared to pay whatever it took to get hold of that elusive creature, a black swan. "Cygne sur l'eau" is all about a swan, which is difficult enough to find in the right setting, but even harder when it's the rare black species. These are much more difficult to spot in the distance than white ones. Leeds has eight breeding pairs, according to the publicity leaflet, but I saw only two pairs and one lone black swan during my four hours of wandering through the extensive grounds. There were many white mute and whooper swans, as well as ducks and geese of all types. In the middle of the day, the two pairs of black swan were more interested in snoozing on the banks than in swimming, and when they did go for a dip, it was in the large lake facing the sun, and always close together as a pair, which did not provide either the right image for the song or the right lighting conditions for good pictures. I diverted my attention to the lone swan on the banks of the moat and waited for two hours for it to rouse itself from its nap. Several times I went right up to it and talked to it, but it refused to budge. I went off to explore the interior of the castle and came back to find the swan had still not moved. Then, when I turned to look at the other lake behind me for a few moments, the swan got up, slipped into the water and swam away, and I got back to my camera too late. After four hours of swan-tracking and disappointing footage (other than some filler shots of mini-waterfalls, streams and exotic plants), it was time to go home. I would have to come back another day. Or so I thought! Not far from the exit is a series of small lakes and canal-like features. This was where I'd seen the first pair of swans earlier in the day. Both were still there, and one of them was on a nest. Suddenly its mate decided to go for a lone swim, bathed in golden rays from a sinking late-afternoon sun. I got some perfect shots.

New Tools

2011-09-06T17:48:00.001+01:00

iMovie 11 is the most frustrating piece of software ever invented. It is not nearly as good as the earliest versions of iMovie, and it doesn't resemble it in any way. It's unintuitive and unpredictable. However, where there's a will there's a way, and I have almost finished making my first movie with my new camcorder. All I need now is two seconds' worth of film (though I don't suppose one can call it "film" now) of rustling leaves of the white poplar tree (to illustrate the words "tremble argenté" ).

I've had my previous camcorder since 2003, and the quality, which was fine when YouTube first started out, is no longer acceptable for serious movie-making. I'd pretty much abandoned it for my more recent song movies and used series of still photos to illustrate them, but Fauré's water-themed songs in Mirages call for moving reflections that are best captured in motion-pictures. I wanted to make a good job of Mirages and the two Opus 85 numbers I recorded last week, so after much research and studying other people's movies, I decided to invest in a new camcorder and settled on the Panasonic HDC-SD90, which makes full HD movies. I'm very pleased with it so far.

My movie of "Accompagnement" uses scenes from the grounds of two local historic castles: Hever, the home of Anne Boleyn, and Scotney, which is partly ruined and has just about the most romantic garden in England. These places have provided almost everything I need to illustrate four of the other five songs I recorded last week: not just gardens, but lakes and fountains. I still need a black swan for the first song of Mirages, but I think I know where I might find one. "Danseuse", the fourth song of Mirages, requires a dancer, and I have already persuaded a lovely and expert dancer to take the starring role.

I will upload "Accompagnement" in the next couple of days (when I've inserted the poplar tree), but I shan't announce its release until I have filmed the scenes for "Dans la forêt de Septembre", which is the first song in Opus 85. I will shoot this partly in the woods behind the house, partly in a nearby forest, and partly in ancient woodland about a mile away, which is home to some of our owls. To make it as authentic as possible I am waiting until next week, the middle of September.
Fauré finished writing the song at the end of September, when he was exactly the same age as me — fifty-seven!

Update: The two songs are now on YouTube. Here's the link.

Your Accompanist

2011-08-28T13:16:00.001+01:00

Today, as I prepare to record (later this afternoon) the vocal parts to six Fauré songs over my pre-recorded piano accompaniments, by coincidence I happened to find a site called Your Accompanist, which sells audio tracks of piano accompaniments. What a good idea! But one thing puzzles me. Why do the accompaniments sound disembodied and why does the piano not sound like a real piano? They have been recorded on a "real" piano, yet to my ears it sounds like a digital piano and seems to have limited dynamic range and tonal depth, particularly at the bass end. It lacks the overtones and interplay of resonances that a grand piano produces, and it sounds both muffled and tinkly at the same time.

Astonishingly, the couple of thousand tracks have all been recorded by one man. He does them in single takes, and if he makes a mistake he starts again. What a tour de force. You can read about him here and see him in action on YouTube here.

So why is there something not quite right about the sound? Is it the piano? (It's hard to tell from the videos whether it's a grand or an upright.) Is it the room it was recorded in? Is it digital manipulation of the recorded tracks? I don't think it can be attributed to the fact that he is clearly taking care to provide a "one-size-fits-all" product, to suit every type of singer; although this could produce a somewhat robotic performance, Gerald Moore's audio tracks of piano accompaniments in his recorded lectures sounded entirely natural and "real". I'd love to know what others think.

Ripples

2011-08-08T21:39:00.002+01:00

Last Thursday, it started to rain in the morning and it was clear that it would continue to do so for the rest of that day. I decided the time had come to record the piano accompaniments for Fauré's late cycle Mirages (op. 113), which I've been working on for a few months. The weather was not the only prompt. The previous day, an annoying and intrusive pedal squeak on the piano vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared, so I took the opportunity of re-recording the accompaniments to the two opus 85 songs that I'd done in May before starting work on Mirages.

I do not know how pianists ever manage to play Fauré from memory. Much of it consists of meandering melodies hidden with subtly shifting harmonic progressions which are almost impossible to predict. Some chords — if one stops to listen to them in isolation — are so suspect that one suspects a misprint or a missing, or mispositioned, accidental, yet it is impossible to know what the correct chord might be, as several permutations sound equally plausible, and Fauré always favoured the scenic route over the direct one.

Mirages is all about ambiguity, things not appearing to be what they seem, fleeting reflections, shimmering images, changing colours and light patterns. It is Fauré's most impressionistic cycle — perhaps his only truly impressionistic one. Whereas Le jardin clos and La chanson d'Eve (the two earlier song cycles of his late period) belong to the symbolist genre — something dictated by the nature of the poetry — and L'horizon chimérique, the cycle which succeeded Mirages, harks back to the more melodic style of his earlier writing, Mirages is altogether more mysterious and unfathomable. He wrote it while staying at a lakeside villa in the French Alps, and one has the impression that he sat staring for long hours at the water, watching the rippling surface and the play of the light on shifting surfaces, in an attempt to capture the essence of the poems he had decided to set to music, two of which had watery themes.

Reflets dans l'eau, the second of the four songs, meanders for four and half pages in the manner of the first three bars in the extract below. It is a long succession of regular chords within which are embedded constantly shifting melodic fragments that move back and forth and from side to side in short steps but unpredictable directions. Then, suddenly, the piano is silent for six whole seconds (metronome marking is crotchet = 60 for this song). I wonder if there is a precedent in the whole history of mélodie. The challenge here will be to know exactly when to come in at "les eaux", so I will have to cue those six seconds by temporarily creating audible beats during the silences when I come to record the voice part. Such silences occur thrice more, but for shorter durations. The sections of triplets slowing into quavers indicate circles of ripples that recede outwards as they lose speed. Sound waves dimming into silence are like water ripples fading into nothing. The triplets merging into duplicates must pass through an infinite number of tempo phases in between that musical notation cannot render. For once, Fauré displays an avant-garde command of impressionist imagery that the recently deceased Debussy might only have dreamed of.

Limited Horizons?

2011-07-16T13:04:00.006+01:00

Fauré's last song cycle — L'Horizon chimérique — is always sung by a man. If you look for a recording by a woman you will not find any. This is curious as the poet did not allocate a gender to the subject of three out of the four poems, and Fauré has never explicitly stated (to my knowledge) that it should not be performed by a woman. In all the four poems a person speaks from the depth of their soul, but only in one of them can we be certain (by one single masculine verb ending) that the subject is male. For the most part the gender is irrelevant. The emotions conveyed concern the human condition in a general sense. The score says "pour chant" and not "pour baryton" or "pour voix d'homme", but that was fairly standard practice, and may of course have been a precautionary measure on the part of the publisher, who did not want to limit potential sales. Its dedication to Charles Panzéra is not in itself a reason to disqualify women from singing them; there are plenty of Fauré's songs dedicated to women that have been sung by men (and a few vice versa, like Clair de lune), and I cannot imagine that Fauré, that kindly old gentleman who so loved women, would have refused to allow any charming young female singer in his entourage to sing his latest compositions.

I suspect that the apportionment was made almost incidentally, as an unconscious attempt to redress the balance of Fauré's vocal oeuvre, which until then had been heavily and perhaps unfairly weighted in favour of the female voice when it came to major song cycles. Two of them were so evidently feminine (La Chanson d'Ève, and Le Jardin clos) that few men would choose to interpret them. A much earlier cycle, La Bonne chanson, dedicated to Fauré's mistress of the moment, but first performed in public by a man, has been recorded extensively by both sexes. An article in the Gramophone contains the following passage:

If we except Fauré's final song-cycle, L'horizon chimérique, composed for and dedicated to Charles Panzéra, we are left with a preponderance of songs undoubtedly conceived in terms of a soprano voice, irrespective of the sentiments expressed in the poems. La bonne chanson provides a perfect example of this; Verlaine's collection of twenty-one poems so-titled sang his personal happiness, short-lived, alas, on becoming engaged to Mathilde Maute, a happiness which radiates from every one of the nine settings making up the song cycle to which he gave Verlaine's own collective title. Yet the songs were composed for and dedicated to Madame Sigismond Bardac … a soprano who sang the cycle to the composer's accompaniment, even though the first public performance happened to be by a man, Maurice Bages. (F.A. Gramophone, May 1976)

One might add that Emma Bardac worked with Fauré on the cycle while he was writing it, and even made him change some passages at her suggestion. But to have her sing the première of a set of songs containing such overt outpourings of passion would have been ill-advised in view of the fact that their affair was then at its height.

Mirages, the cycle that came just before L'Horizon chimérique, is a set of verses by the (probably bisexual) poetess Renée de Brimont. Just as with L'Horizon, it was written for, and dedicated to, a singer that Fauré much admired, in this case Madeleine Grey. The subject of the second poem is clearly female (again, we have that tell-tale verb ending, this time in the very first word), which should therefore qualify Mirages as being a "woman's" song cycle. Yet it did not stop Gérard Souzay and Pierre Bernac from recording it. What a pity that we have no recordings of Madeleine Grey singing it.

I also suspect that after Charles Panzéra first performed and recorded L'Horizon chimérique, it assumed a special place in the repertoire, in the way that "final" compositions often do, and became forever more associated with the timbre of the voice of its first interpreter. However, that's not going to prevent me from studying these songs, and I intend to find out at first hand whether they contain anything that makes them inherently unsuitable for female voices. I shall report back in due course!

Shimmies

2011-07-11T14:56:00.008+01:00

During the last bellydance class of term today I was once again reminded of the many similarities it has with singing in terms of one's ability to execute certain manoeuvres. We were trying to do shoulder shimmies and were getting stuck. Most of us are now able to do lower-body shimmies (after two or three terms' work on them), but we don't seem able to sustain shoulder shimmies. We could keep going for perhaps a second or two before our coordination broke down and our upper-body shimmies reverted to lower-body shimmies. I could feel much unwanted tension in my shoulders and was unable to "let go". Any attempts to make my shoulders go back and forth were counterproductive and I felt blockage and frustration. Shoulder shimmies are going to require some practice!

I was reminded of when I was learning to trill with the voice, and before that to do tongue trills. These fast, repetitive movements may be easy to acquire for the lucky few, but I suspect that for most people — myself included — there's a whole lot of tension that has to be got rid of first. The principal anxiety stems from the fear of not being able to sustain the movements or to go fast enough. That concern is justified, because if you don't know how to perform a movement in a smooth and efficient manner, there's no chance of being able to do it repeatedly at speed. The moves must be learned slowly at first, like a five-finger exercise on the piano, or five-note scale with the voice, and eventually the mind must be trained to disengage itself and to let the muscles to their job without consciously trying to drive them. If you stop to think about your feet as you walk down a staircase, you are likely to grab hold of the handrail in panic for fear of stumbling, and your smooth progress will suddenly look bumbling.

All this may sound obvious enough, but it took me months to learn how to trill my Italian Rs and years to learn how to trill with the voice, even though other aspects of language and vocal art were learned without difficulty. With the piano too, I recall that sustained trills were hard to acquire. In all three cases I started off with trills that lasted barely a second, and gradually developed the ability to increase their lengths until I was able to relax into them and let them go ad infinitum (in theory). Good vocal trills eluded me for many years, and although I did eventually learn how to do them, they're not my best skill by any means. Relaxation of those muscles that have no business to be engaged is the key to acquiring any smooth, regular and sustained moves of a fluttering nature. I sometimes wonder whether repetitive strain injuries are not caused by tensions that have never been properly eliminated.

That small transition between consciously manipulating a repetitive movement and letting it happen automatically at speed, without conscious intervention, is an unaccountably difficult barrier to break. Yet we all did it when we learned to put one foot in front of the other, to walk and then to run. My aim is to have those shoulder shimmies at least as good as my trills by the beginning of next term.

Intoning Like a Nun

2011-07-03T21:11:00.007+01:00

Yesterday I found myself in the odd situation of sipping tea with a well-known English actress in her London garden and, for her benefit, of mimicking the voice of a religieuse aunt who died in 1991. The actress, whom I met for the first time when she picked me up from the railway station at ten minutes to four, is to play the part of a nun in a television adaptation of a novel that has enjoyed enormous success these past two years. It is autobiographical and it is set in and around a convent in the East End of London in the 1950s (at that time a deprived area) in which one of the nuns, who was in fact my aunt, plays a leading role. Sadly, the novel's author died very recently, but she was involved in the preparations for the television series and had given her approval to the casting. (See also my earlier comments and this video.)

My aunt's distinctive voice is still lodged in my memory, so I thought I could give some useful information to the actress, not just about Auntie J's comportment, bearing and mannerisms but also about her accent and intonation. I got in touch with the actress and she readily accepted my offer to meet. I brought with me some of my aunt's artwork (which came to us after her death) and photos too. It is exciting to think that some of the sketches might be used as props.

The actress arranged to meet me at the station. To avoid any awkward moments, we had established via text messages what colour clothes I'd be wearing and what colour car she'd be driving. The car arrived and stopped by the pavement. I opened the door, quickly got in, sat in the passenger seat and fastened my seat-belt. We said hello and turned simultaneously to look at each other's faces. She looked at me to see whether I looked like the photos of my aunt that she'd seen, and I looked at her to see whether she could be made to look like my aunt. It was a very amusing moment.

A few minutes later we were chatting over tea and poring over scripts and lines and ways of speaking. I was relieved to know that she would not give my aunt a cockney accent, and I tried to give as much information as I could about my aunt's speaking voice and how she used it. Singers' ears are (or should be) highly attuned to intonation. A familiar voice remains in the memory in the same way as does a tune. True, all of us — not just humans but many other living species — are genetically programmed to remember voices. Otherwise, how would penguins find their mates or their offspring among so many screeching lookalikes. But I suspect that most singers develop that instinct further than non-musicians and hone their ability to mimic accents and to listen to their own intonation with an analytical and critical ear.

Many vocal pedagogues disapprove of singers listening to the sound they are making. They maintain that singers should sing by feel and not by what they hear. I don't subscribe to that particular school. I suspect it may account for why some singers sound so dire. Would they sound like that if they actually listened to themselves, I wonder. Besides, what pleasure can there be in singing if you're not allowed to listen to it or to enjoy what you hear?

Fauré's Fingers

2011-06-07T11:10:00.002+01:00

It is said that pianists don't like playing Fauré because he is tricky to memorize and his writing doesn't lie well under the fingers. It is true that he is difficult to sightread, and his harmonic progressions can be unexpected, but his later music, once deciphered, can be very rewarding to play and is in fact a very good fit for my hands.

Learning the piano parts of his songs is a relatively new venture for me, brought about by force of circumstances when I moved out of London nearly two years ago. Sorely missing my sessions with my regular pianist, I was motivated into trying my hand at the piano again after many years of neglecting it and, more important, into practising a little every day. As a singer, I had used the piano as a tool to help me learn vocal parts, but I had not practised seriously for about 40 years! Now I am getting huge enjoyment in regaining lost technique and learning beautiful piano parts as well as vocal parts. The bonus is being able to explore these songs in far more depth than I ever did when I had a pianist to play the accompaniments.

At present I'm learning the four songs of Fauré's Mirages cycle. My approach to learning and practising the piano is to start with the section(s) containing the most difficult passages and take them one bar at a time, getting each in turn thoroughly ingrained into muscle memory. It takes discipline to focus on just one bar each day (or even every two days), breaking it up into tiny segments as necessary (perhaps three notes or chords, then the next three notes, then all six notes, repeated however many times it takes). With Fauré, there are often multiple choices of fingerings, and it's often not clear at first which hand should play which notes. I've found it good policy to spend a lot of time working out the best fingering, which is often not obvious. It's easy to get misled by the way the notes have been printed. When a long sequence appears to be written for the right hand alone, the best way to achieve the required legato is sometimes achieved by using both hands and passing the melody notes back and forth between them (remembering that Fauré disliked using the sustaining pedal). There can also be much swapping of fingers on the same note — a legacy from Fauré's technique as an organist.

My bar-per-day progress may sound slow-going, but I've found that it gives better results than trying to learn bigger chunks. Besides, it's possible to learn several pieces at the same time using this technique, depending on how much practise time is at one's disposal. It seems that the brain treats each song as a different activity, on the same principle as the proverbial "a change is as good as a rest". When I'm short of time, I might learn a new bar of just one piece in a day, but if I have a couple of hours to spare, I'll learn one new bar from each of the four songs.

When the most difficult bars have been mastered, I'll go back to the beginning of the song and work on each bar in sequence. If it's a very easy bar, or a repeated bar, or one of the difficult ones that have already been cooked, I might add another bar to my daily ration. It's amazing how quickly the days go by, and before you know it, you've reached the end of the song. Today I got to the end of the shortest of the four songs, a satisfying feeling!

But to get back to the topic of this post. I've come to a fascinating realization. Not once in all the six songs I've been working on recently (all written from Fauré's late-middle age onwards) is the thumb required to pass under the other fingers. No wonder I love playing him so much. Mozart is usually torture for me to play nowadays; his relentless scales are really hard on the thumbs, but playing Fauré is utterly pain-free. He goes out of his way to avoid awkward hand shifts. I can only conclude that he too must have suffered from osteoarthritis in his thumbs!

Walking at 100 bpm

2011-05-16T14:33:00.000+01:00

For the past four months I have been studying two songs that Fauré composed in 1902, the first and third of a neglected set of three mélodies (Op. 85): Accompagnement ("Accompaniment") and Dans la forêt de septembre ("In the forest in September"). Yesterday I recorded their intensely satisfying piano parts. These are songs that I think of as "late middle-period" Fauré: not quite as tuneful or overtly melodic as his early stuff, or his middle-period proper, yet not as abstract as his late period. I can understand why the first song is seldom performed: its opening section is such a hair-raising test of co-ordination that, if the opening bars are executed with anything less than absolute precision and synchronicity by both parties, the two performers risk parting company (note Fauré's sense of humour evident in the song's title), to the extent that recovery can be extremely difficult and the whole piece can end up as a helter-skelter mess (see earlier commentary). I would love to learn La fleur qui va sur l'eau but this second song in the Opus 85 set has an accompaniment that is fiendish. Graham Johnson writes that "its difficulties (which do not sound as formidable as they prove to be under the fingers and in the voice) have discouraged generations of singers and pianists", and I do not want to spend a lot of time and effort on something that I may never be able to master. Besides, I think it is more suited to a male singer.

The neglect of Dans la forêt de septembre is harder to explain. This lovely depiction of a woodland walk in the autumn of life still moves me to tears even after playing it nearly every day since January. This song's simple construction has none of the difficulties of Accompagnement and merely requires an innate sense of rhythm with the ability to keep to a regular pulse. The way to acquire this is to go for a leisurely stroll, preferably in a forest, and to keep to a constant pace of 100 bpm. After several long walks with the song (marked by Fauré at 50 bpm) all the while running in one's head, its beats falling in tandem with one's best foot, the correct tempo becomes engrained and there is no need to resort to checking the metronome.

Incidentally, the same use of regular footfalls at exactly 100 bpm is what helped me to overcome the difficulties of the first syncopated section of Accompagnement, where the pulse, although regular, is often silent. (Fauré gave the same metronome marking for this song.) My walking feet ensured the regularity of the main beats, while I slapped my thigh in time to the off-beat right-hand chords. The music was played in my imagination of course, but when it came to sitting down at the keyboard, everything became much easier.

The next stage is to practise the vocal line to my accompaniments. Then I shall record them and stitch the two recordings together, as I did with Clair de lune. I have also started to work on the late-period cycle Mirages, written for Madeleine Grey, a singer to whom Fauré took a great shine. More about this cycle, and this wonderful singer, in the coming months!

Ecstasy

2011-04-26T11:21:00.003+01:00

"C'est l'extase", as a crack user in the nineteenth arrondissement recently told a reporter for Paris Match. The journalist was writing an article about the no-go areas of Paris and the communities that lived and carried out their business under the concrete bridges of the city's highways. That pronouncement was, for the young man being interviewed, all there was to it.

But it was enough to prevent him from trying to abandon his lifestyle. L'extase was worth the loss of his living quarters, job, status, health. Extase, a word which was originally used to convey the sensation of being knocked off (ex) one's perch (stasis) mentally, came to acquire its usual, tamer meaning of "delight" long after it's original sense of mind-displacement or trance, in the way that many words or phrases, perhaps used metaphorically to begin with, lose force and change value over time. But what goes around comes around. And ecstasy is now used as a moniker for 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine.

I feel certain that Debussy had in mind the drug-induced kind of ecstasy in his setting of Verlaine's C'est l'extase. Much of his other music — his Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune being an obvious example — was surely dreamed up while his mind was in a heightened state; and Verlaine was, after all, well known to have indulged in illegal substances. Other poets in their circle, such as Baudelaire or Pierre Louÿs, a close friend of Debussy's, used coded language in their verse that Debussy would have understood very well.

I feel equally certain that Fauré, who also set the same poem to music, chose a more traditional interpretation of extase, a euphoric state of wellbeing, but not aided or heightened by artificial means. This elegant composer always had an an eye for the well brought up ladies of society who would sing his songs. The high-society salons that he attended were undoubtedly more respectable than the louche opium dens that Debussy and his absinthe-drinking companions visited. Fauré was of an older generation, and I simply cannot imagine him having dabbled in drugs, though if anyone knows to the contrary, please let me know!

Debussy's version of C'est l'extase is probably nearer to the poet's intention, but I love Fauré's version more because I feel strongly attracted to his personality and not at all to Debussy's — though I love the music of both. I wrote a comparison of the two versions here.

Unclassified

2011-04-19T11:29:00.003+01:00

It is quite disconcerting to find that, having been a soprano all my life, I no longer know what to call myself. I cannot in all honesty pretend to be one now when I no longer have a usable, performable top C, let alone anything above it. I would not even sing a B in public and would think twice about a B flat on a good day. There is no doubt about it: my voice now, in my late fifties, is a good third lower than it was in my thirties, and about a minor third lower than in my forties, even though I practise regularly and keep in shape. It is also a lot heavier.

Most soprano repertoire that I found easy in the past is now uncomfortably high. Mezzo-soprano repertoire lies perfectly for me (and I now relish rather than dread low notes), yet I cannot call myself a mezzo, even though that is now my comfort zone, because I don't have the characteristic mezzo timbre. Does that mean I'm not allowed to sing any more? Why is it that in classical music we attach so much importance to labels, as though our voices were immutable species? In other genres singers are singers, or vocalists, and are rarely labelled in terms of whereabouts in the grand scale they sing, so the problem doesn't arise.

I know of some lucky singers of my age whose voices have not shifted so dramatically downwards. These women's voices are clearly still high voices, though perhaps not quite as high as they once were. I also hear women whose voices have deepened even more than mine. I suspect that genetics plays a big part. The women on my mother's side of the family all had high voices, which they kept into middle and old age, whereas those on my father's side had low voices to start with, or voices that deepened markedly with age, so that they sounded almost like men. I am very "pitch"-aware in general, and go through life subconsciously analysing every noise around me in terms of its pitch, whether it's a squeaking door, a pneumatic drill, or other people's speaking voices. I can still hear in my mind's ear the resonant soprano tones of my maternal grandmother's speaking voice in her sixties and seventies. That pitch is ingrained in my memory, even though she died 25 years ago. But if James McKinney's theory is correct, and most of the population are "middle" voices (some of which can be extended upwards through training), and if you then factor in the gradual lowering of fundamental pitch that occurs in a woman's voice throughout most of her life, the chances of being able to sing well in a soprano tessitura in middle and old age become stacked against you if you were not a truly high soprano by nature (rather than by extension-training) in your twenties and thirties.

It is true that singing within your god- (or teacher) given classification matters less in song recitals than in opera. In the latter, the pressure to continue past one's sell-by date is dictated by the immovable (most of the time) keys in which most of the arias were written in. And if you dare to go for a lower alternative to a high note, the loggionisti will howl and the YouTube sharks will bite.

If there's one thing I have never been able to bear it's the sound of a strained high note (particularly if it's my own!). I would prefer the singer to drop down an octave than to feel my own throat tighten in sympathy. If it's no longer within your comfort zone, please forget it, and let me hear a younger person in the role, whose voice can cover all the notes with ease. There are opera singers out there now, celebrating the fact that they are still singing Violetta, or Manon, or whatever the young heroine happens to be called, in their fifties. Why? These roles were written for voices at least two decades younger, and they not only look wrong when played by middle-aged women, but to my ear they sound wrong too. Why do so many sopranos refuse to change repertoire as they get older? The answer of course, is this wretched "soprano" label. So what alternative is there? Reclassifying yourself of course. But what to? There are mezzos who became sopranos and then reverted to mezzo land in later life. That's considered acceptable. But what does a lyrico (not to speak of a leggiero) whose voice has lowered in pitch now call herself if she wants to continue singing in a tessitura that feels comfortable?

By the Book

2011-04-16T17:27:00.007+01:00

"Do you have any books about singing?" asked a young woman in my local bookstore this afternoon. The sales assistant looked doubtful, but showed her where the music books were shelved. I'd gone there to exchange some gift tokens I'd been given last Christmas, and was startled to hear this, as I'd spent the morning thinking about the content of my next blog entry, which was to be about books on singing.

Restraining my urge to ask her what she wanted to know, and whether she would like to book a singing lesson, I simply made a mental note of the shelf to which the assistant directed her, and instead presented my tokens in payment for two books: one on breadmaking and the other (I am ashamed to say) of recipes using my favourite brand of chocolate.

I have been an avid reader of books about singing ever since the age of ten or eleven, when I wanted to know what caused vibrato in singing and how to achieve it. I wanted to be able to sing like Deanna Durbin, or Julie Andrews, but I knew my voice didn't have any vibrato like theirs, and I wanted to find out more about this strange phenomenon. There was no one I could ask because my school had no choirs and no voice teachers. I had developed a passion for singing, but I was not taught it in any formal or systematic way and was given no guidance (there were no singers in my family). If I wanted to know more, I had to find it out for myself. In those days, children could go about town freely without fear of molestation, kidnapping or other such dangers, so I would spend many a pleasant Saturday afternoon browsing in local bookshops or public libraries, looking through every book I could find about singing. There was precious little about vibrato in what few books I did manage to find!

I have amassed quite a collection of books on singing over the years, and I have read a good many that I have never bought. Most of them are reference books, to be consulted when things go wrong, or to refresh one's memory on anatomical structures and the physical processes involved in singing. I do not believe it is possible to learn how to sing from books alone, but there are circumstances when the combination of a good book and YouTube examples of great singers at work will be more beneficial than a course of expensive lessons from an inappropriate teacher.

The art and practice of singing are difficult to describe in general terms when everyone's sensations, physiques, lung capacities, larynx structures, facial features, and speech tendencies (which have a bearing on how they sing) vary so widely. Some books are so technical in their terminology and approach that they make everything seem dauntingly complicated and you don't really know where to start. There are singers who panic every time words like cricothyroid and epigastric are put in front of them. They will not learn from those books because they will not get past the jargon and will be unable to visualise the concepts that these books attempt to describe. Not all singers are academically inclined! I would class Miller's Structure of Singing in that "offputting" category. I had great hopes when I bought Janice Chapman's Singing and Teaching Singing (at last, a book by a woman), but was disappointed when I read it. Its focus is too wide and there's just too much peripheral stuff (some chapters written by other people) that gets in the way of the essentials. It's a manual for teachers of singing rather than singers, and the title could have dispensed with the first two words. Oren Brown's Discover Your Voice is good as far as it goes, and I read it twice, but I didn't find anything in it that made me want to read it a third time.

If I had to choose just one book on singing to take to a desert island, it would be Stephen Smith's The Naked Voice, which bears not only re-reading several times but even memorizing in parts, so valuable are its precepts! It is written in a language that everyone can understand, and it tells you exactly what you need to know: no more, and no less. Its technical approach is reassuringly simple. It's the perfect book for anyone who has run into trouble or got bogged down in the face of contradictory or conflicting instructions (and there are plenty of those to be found on the circuit). His ideas on what are conventionally thought of as support and breath control can sound alarmingly controversial and even revolutionary at first. Take, for example (pp. 41–2), "I dislike the concept of controlling the breath because the vocal folds actually regulate (control) the airflow." His method is based on breath release — that is, neither pushing the breath out nor holding it back, but letting it out at its own rate it in such a way that the vocal folds then deal with it in the way that is most appropriate for the volume and pitch of the notes that are being sung. It's a notion that I've never seen expressed in this way in any other book, but it makes perfect sense to me, and ties in with some of what I've discussed in my post on appoggio. It is worth making the effort to understand and absorb the method presented in the book and putting it to the test with the help of the exercises he suggests. This may involve discarding virtually everything you were ever taught and pretending for the moment that you are a complete beginner! It's like detox for the voice, and the rewards are great.

So what of the young woman in my bookstore? I went to the music books shelf and found one solitary book on singing: Singing for Dummies. There were two copies: one was shelved upright amongst the other books; the other had obviously been removed for inspection and put back on its side, discarded and unwanted. I had a quick look through it. It wasn't bad, actually!

Accompaniment (Part 3)

2011-04-04T18:59:00.008+01:00

A discussion of Fauré's Accompagnement, Opus 85, No. 3

The song's busy second section, with the rower's oars plunging rhythmically into a lake's black waters and forming ripples as they emerge, culminates in Wagnerian sonorities (first line of the page below) before leading suddenly into the moonlit third section, which to my ears is one of the most beautiful passages in the whole of Fauré's output, outshining even the moon's appearance in his Clair de lune. [see previous two posts for comments on the first two sections of the song]

It seems Fauré was pleased with this tranquillo e dolce passage too, for he repeated the first two bars of the piano part, note for note, twice in succession. The rower has laid down his oars and is gliding in eerie silence through the still water while the moon listens and glistens above.

Those two bars then slowly morph into variant forms of themselves. The differences are small — an altered note here and there — but noteworthy, as they have subtle yet profound effects on the underlying harmony. In a reversal of roles, the voice seems almost incidental, serving to comment on what is happening in the piano's music. The challenge for the pianist is to make this sublime, watery music as fluid as possible without blurring the separate strands of its Bach-three-part-invention-like structure. The murky turbulence of the previous part of the song has given way to a calm stillness where the water shines rather than shimmers. The soft moonlight imparts clarity, and though the sound is muffled the texture must not be muddied.

The piano part in the bottom line of this page is repeated twice on the next page (shown below), while the voice part does its own thing in the background until, at last, it comes melodically and urgently to the fore, questioning: "Is it their soul, is it my soul which is being drawn out?" ["exhaling itself" in the French]

Voice and piano then wind down gently in tandem (starting at the third line of the page below) and, for the first time, the piano and voice travel along together in step, in tune, and in perfect synchrony.

At the last bar of this page that our boat has glided to a halt at the point where the water's reflections begin to dance to their cross-rhythmic patterns once again. This signals the beginning of the closing section of the song, which recalls the first section. Voice and piano have shared a landing stage, but in an ambiguous place among the trembling reeds, somewhere between a D natural (voice), and a D flat (piano). And like the moon and oar on the quavering water, the soul now dissolves itself in sobs as the accompanist eventually stills the throbbing piano part to a quiet conclusion.

I'm now ready to record the piano part of this lovely song and am intrigued to find out how much of a challenge it will be to "sing along" to. If it works, I will post the result here.

Update: 10 September 2011: My recorded and illustrated song is now on YouTube here.

Accompaniment (Part 2)

2011-02-27T19:06:00.007Z

A discussion of Fauré's Accompagnement, Opus 85, No. 3

In the month since I first discovered Fauré's Opus 85 songs, I have become more and more entranced by their beauty. I am discovering new facets every day as I familiarize myself with both the piano part and the vocal part. I must confess that the first couple of hearings of Accompagnement sounded rather a blurry mess to me. But the more I peel away its many layers and uncover its structure, the more it begins to swim into focus. This is Fauré in impressionist and symbolist mode, a much more enigmatic composer than in his early and middle-period romanticism. Like a roman à clé, this song yields solutions to its enigmas only to those who have the patience to dig deep.

In my previous post I mentioned how tricky I found it to cope with the offbeat pointillist rhythms. I could barely get through more than a bar without stumbling. Now, after hours of practising the opening sequence bar by bar every day, I have the whole passage engraved in my mind and fingers and wonder why I ever found it difficult. Here is the second page of the song, which the ends the opening sequence and, at the beginning of the third line, launches into the second section of the song. This depicts a rower's progress through the water.

Every bar begins with a forte splash as the oars plunge into the water then fades to a piano, with semiquaver ripples and scatterings of droplets as the oars emerge dripping. Many of the four-note arpeggios have their first note accented, producing a beautiful ascending chromatic inner melody. Usually it's a rising three-note scale, evoking the pull of the oars, but later on, non-sequential three-note motifs are brought in as the oars pivot on their hinges. This whole section produces a rich, almost Wagnerian effect of depth and murkiness. There's also a feeling of energy and forward momentum in the repeatedly surging left-hand chords, which contrasts with the shimmering stillness of the more delicate opening scene.

The harmonies within the broken chords are so fascinating in their progressions that I'm inclined to limit pedalling to a bare minimum in this part. Here's the rest of this section, except for its last line. My next post will deal with the third section of this segmented song.

Accompaniment (Part 1)

2011-02-10T12:59:00.021Z

A discussion of Fauré's Accompagnement, Opus 85, No. 3

Only a man who is perverse enough to deliberately switch from minor to major at the words "mode mineur" (in Clair de lune) can write the accompaniment that he did to a song entitled Accompagnement (Op. 85). This is Fauré at his most ironic, having a lot fun exploring the very concept of accompaniment while at the same time depicting an impressionistic scene featuring a rower on a moonlit lake.

That's the first of seven pages, and this style of writing goes on in the same vein for a couple more lines before embarking on new ideas and then returning for another page or so at the end of the song. It looks innocuous enough. In fact, if it were not for the key signature and accidentals, the notes and the chords would probably be within the grasp of anyone studying for a Grade 3 or 4 piano exam. Yet it is surprisingly hard to play, and the last thing the piano part does is to "accompany" the voice. On the contrary, it goes out of its way to keep out of step with it. At first the only way I could initially create a regular pulse in the right-hand piano part was by displacing the barlines by one notch so that the right-hand chords landed on the strong beats and the left-hand tune appeared to be syncopated, rather than the reverse. It took a few days for my brain to resolve the conflicting messages.

Then there's the question of who's actually accompanying whom. There are three concurrent ideas travelling in parallel: the vocal line, the tune crafted by the pizzicato chords, and the rich cello-like base-line melody underpinning the whole. The voice part is not far removed from speech. It doesn't carry a particularly tuneful melody, yet when put together with the piano part(s), the effect is mysterious and magical. It is tricky enough for the singer to even come in at the right point, but woe betide both singer and pianist if either starts listening to what the other is doing. If they try to be musically sensitive to each other's intentions they risk being put off their stride and heading for a fall. For the notional accompanist, the safest option here is to forge ahead like a blinkered horse and hope to still have a rider astride the straddle at the home fence. As for singers, don't do this song if you don't possess a really good, innate sense of rhythm. If you pull the tempo about, the bits won't fit, and you will destroy the clockwork effect that Fauré intended. This song is not often performed. Probably because it's deemed too much of a risk: tricky to put together on little rehearsal, and difficult to salvage if things go wrong in mid-stream. Added to which, there are not many soaring vocal lines for a singer to show off. But the music's effect is subtle and worth the effort needed to make it work. It's a piece (I rarely think of Fauré's later mélodies as "songs") that takes a while to parse, but the reward is the kind of satisfaction you get from completing an intricate puzzle.

The pointillist effect of the staccato chords and off-beat rhythms symbolize the subtle movements of trembling leaves on the poplars, birches and lime trees (the first line of the poem's text), shimmering reflections of the moon on the lake's surface and shifting waters beneath a wobbling boat.

The big question, for me, was whether to pedal this section or not. My first instinct was not to. Then I listened to recordings by four pianists — Graham Johnson, Malcolm Martineau, Billy Eidi and David Breitman — and all of them use the pedal here, so perhaps it would sound odd if I didn't. Yet lovely as it sounds under their fingers on concert grands, I wasn't quite happy with the effect it produced on my piano. A bit of research came up with the following quotation from Alfred Cortot in Jean-Michel Nectoux's book on Fauré, translated by Roger Nichols. Cortot reported to Bernard Gavoty in 1955:

I was amazed that this sensitive poet could be such a dry pianist. His playing was percussive, without much body to it, and he never used the pedals.

So, perhaps Fauré himself would not have pedalled the detached quavers. Furthermore, he could well have written this passage as crotchets with staccato marks, but the fact that the staccato chords are pointedly separated by quaver rests seems to support my argument. Besides, if I can't achieve a good effect on my piano with the pedal here, I see no reason why I shouldn't buck the trend and reserve pedalling for later sections.

I'll be dealing with the second section, the real meat, of this song in my next post.

Two New Gems

2011-01-23T17:36:00.002Z

One of the nice things about no longer singing in public is that I now have the leisure to explore new or neglected repertoire. Instead of working on standard repertoire — the songs people expect to hear — I can work on songs that interest me and that few have heard of. Even someone like Fauré has secrets to yield. I have sung very many of his mélodies, but I am still discovering gems among those which have until now escaped my attention. The most popular songs, like Lydia and Nell, are all very well, but to my mind they're not anywhere near as interesting as Fauré's later work. In fact, I have to admit that I have always found Lydia rather superficial — nice at first hearing, but palls after a while.

Two Fauré songs that have caught my eye, which were hitherto unknown to me, are La forêt de Septembre and Accompagnement. I think they passed me by because there are at the very back of the third volume of the three-volume set published by Hamelle, and I simply never got that far in my explorations. Furthermore, the wonderful Opus 85 set of three songs is seldom included in recitals, so I'd never heard them. Now that I have heard recordings of them I'm keen to get to grips with them.

These are going to be my next project for recording. The forest song will not be a problem — it has a lovely regular pace. The mysteriously titled "Accompaniment" (why so-called when it concerns a rower on a moonlit lake?) will be more of a challenge and may not work. But the piano part is so scrumptious and so deliciously complex that I shall enjoy deciphering it and trying to master it for many weeks to come. More about these wonderful songs later!

Winter Journey

2011-01-09T18:40:00.001Z

This winter, the coldest in England for several decades, has given me the opportunity of illustrating one of the most evocative winter songs that I know: Debussy's Tombeau des Naiades. The sensation of trudging through deep and heavy snow, numb with cold, is conveyed in those opening piano bars in a way that never fails to send shivers down my spine.

The ponds that I chose to represent the water-nymphs' habitat are in a secluded place called Frogs Hole near where I live. There, in summer months, you can indeed hear choruses of frogs if you are lucky. The enhanced acoustics of the natural amphitheatre is much favoured by birds too. They revel in the mellow sonority of their song as it bounces off the trees and echoes above the water. Dawn in the spring, when the birds sing to the accompaniment of the trickling stream that feeds the ponds, is a magical experience.

The countryside where I live and the woods behind my house are a rich source of inspiration. I have plans to illustrate some more seasonal songs in the coming months.

A Social Pursuit

2010-12-20T19:00:00.002Z

We're not accustomed to such wintry weather in England — at least, not until January or February. Yet we're in the grip of our second bout of really cold weather before Christmas has even arrived, and each time it has lasted for more than just a day or two.

This is when the difference between rural and urban life really tells. Opera, recitals and civilised forms of public song performance thrive in the towns, where travel is easy. Here in rural Kent, travel has been all but impossible, and no one would venture out after dark along icy roads for anything other than an emergency. Singers evoking winter journeys in the warmth of our concert halls are all very well in our capital cities, but when we are snowbound in our cold country houses, and the condensation freezes inside our window panes, winter discomfort after the sun has gone down is something we don't need to be reminded of.

When I moved out of London 18 months ago I talked half jokingly of having forsaken the concert hall for the cowshed. Certainly, at the moment it seems that performing artsong is of less concern than helping the songbirds to survive.

The mélodie is an essentially Parisian art form. It reached its apogée in the salons of Paris and most of its greatest composers lived in the city. Paris is indeed the perfect environment for this art form to have flourished. Its centre was compact; tall buildings along well lit streets provided shelter from wind, and getting about on foot was a lot easier than, say, in London. Composers met regularly, exchanging ideas and cultural trends with the many other artists and intellectuals who lived or stayed there.

In this last entry for 2010, I end with a thought that has never occurred to me until now: that song is an art form best suited to places where people live at close quarters. It is in essence a social pursuit. A voice is only a voice if it is heard at the time that it is sounded (or at least, that was so until the microphone was invented). In isolated rural communities, it is best to find a creative artistic outlet in painting or writing. While the snow falls, a lone voice will go unheard, but brush strokes painted and words writ can always be stored away for others to enjoy later.

For What It's Worth

2010-12-12T17:27:00.005Z

I quote:

With Napster you don't have to download software restricting you to a particular computer.

All MP3s downloaded from Napster are in high quality with no restrictions. Use them on any MP3 device including the iPod, iPhone and all music-enabled phones. Napster makes transferring easy: With the Download Manager you can download MP3s directly to your iTunes, Windows Media Player or to a folder on your computer — it’s your choice.

Access Napster from your mobile. Use the mobile service to preview and download tracks directly on your mobile phone. Napster will send a back up MP3 copy to your PC as well.

As a Napster user, you can enjoy your music in the car as well . . . you have many options to transfer Napster MP3s onto a CD or MP3 player and play through your car stereo system.

Play Napster in your living room. Besides the basic options such as connecting a PC or MP3 player to your home entertainment system, there are an increasing number of products letting you connect Napster with the rest of your house. These can access the internet directly in order to play your digital music seamlessly through your home entertainment system in high quality.

(Quoted from Napster's website)

In fact, you'd be crazy to pay full price for a CD in a plastic case and a piece of paper with coloured artwork when you could download the same music for next to nothing. But do you know how much we artists who recorded and, in my case, financed the album receive (after paying commission to the distributor) for our more-than-two-hours' worth of music? Can you guess how much? We're not talking about mere royalties here, since we ourselves are the record company. No, these are digital sales. The figures are US$1.07 for a double-album, or 2.4 cents per track. Yet people have the nerve to complain about iTunes, which gives us five times more! After reading the description above, I argue that the difference in product or quality between Napster's and iTunes' offering is moot.

Hughes Cuénod

2010-12-10T23:03:00.000Z

Hughes Cuénod, who died a few days ago at the age of 108 and a half, was one of my role models during my student years, in spite of his belonging to a former generation even then. Strange to think he was born only two years after my grandmother!

I was going to say something here about this astonishing man, but I am saved the trouble, for here is a story far better than any comment I could make. Oddly, it appears that he too recorded songs in a living room with a Cohen!

A Winter's Day

2010-12-05T16:28:00.003Z

Winter has come early to England. By the last days of November the ground was thick with snow. Knowing it would not last long — we rarely get snow before January, and even then, many of our winters are snow-free in this part of the country — I determined to seize the moment.

I got enough photos to illustrate two winter songs: one by Debussy and one by Vierne. The Debussy, set in woodland, will have to wait until the new year as it is complex to construct, and I shall have to work out how to represent satyrs and water-nymphs. The short song by Vierne is more straightforward and can easily be depicted with the aid of a few images of the fields and lanes roundabout. This then, was what it was like here just three days ago: the kind of landscape that Vierne must have imagined when he wrote what must count as one of the bleakest of mid-winter song settings in the repertoire (view it full-screen in HD on YouTube for the best effect):

An Hour of Study

2010-12-01T12:50:00.008Z

Having recently finished reading a book about Pauline Viardot — that talented Parisienne who was, inter alia, an opera singer, a pianist, a composer, a linguist, the sister of Maria Malibran and member of the celebrated Garcia family, the hostess of a weekly salon, and generally a woman of high intellect and all-round talent — I was curious to see what she advised in her book of vocalises, An Hour of Study (for she also held a singing studio, though I wonder how she found the time). There are two volumes, one of nearly 40 pages and the second, more advanced, of more than 60 pages.

Pauline Viardot

In a short single-page introduction she gives a few general instructions, but does not give any clue as to how one should use that hour. The volumes are not divided into chapters, or even into sections. The reader is confronted with page after page of music, with no titles or clear indications as to where groups of exercises begin and end, or what their function is, except for a couple of sets comprising a theme and variations. Mostly, the only indications are fermate followed by double-bars, which mark the ends of individual exercises. Some of the exercises are numbered, presumably considered as being part of a group. Speeds are rarely given and there are few breath marks. Having tried all the vocalises, I consider that each is to be taken in one breath unless otherwise indicated by the presence of rests. Consonants do not make an appearance. And the vowel marked is an "ah" in virtually all cases. Comments are sparse.

No one could possibly cover all the material in just one hour (even Volume 1 alone), except perhaps by singing straight through the book without repeating any of the exercises, which would defeat their object and in itself would be a fairly taxing undertaking as there are very few bars' rest. And in any case, she precludes that possibility by stating that "the pupil should not sing longer than a quarter of an hour at a time". So the title of the book is something of a mystery. The exercises become progressively more difficult until, by the end of Volume 2, they reach feats of virtuosic velocity unlike anything normally found in opera, except possibly Handel.

Interestingly, I never hear present-day singers practising scales, arpeggios and sequences that are anything like as complicated. In Viardot, every conceivable pattern and interval is drilled mercilessly into the larynx, with challenging chromaticisms and tortuous key changes to rival even Fauré at his most inventive. No wonder singers of old spent seven years in the studio perfecting the art of vocalising before being let loose on the public stage. Everyone was expected to acquire and master the art of florid singing, no matter how heavy their voice. Voices were truly "trained" by a method that seems old-fashioned to us now. Viardot was a mezzo and by all accounts very far removed from the leggiero type of coloratura voice that might nowadays be associated with a particular facility in the fioriture department.

The focus nowadays is on repertoire acquisition, so-called musicianship, sightreading, and the ability to sing in many styles and languages. To a certain extent, at least in the UK, singers learn on the job. To save time, technical work is often based on passages taken from the rep, and exercises are often improvised on the fly. The idea of working through 100 pages of vocalises does not appeal to the average modern singer, and it is assumed that if you can sing your rep, that is good enough. Yet have we lost something by discarding, or at least playing down the importance of, this athletic aspect of vocal training? I find the vocalises beneficial, and the themes and variations — the nearest thing to proper music in the book — are surprisingly enjoyable and rewarding to sing.

Download the book here and see what you make of it.

The Making Of

2010-11-17T12:57:00.009Z

A few people have been curious to know how we made the Clair de lune video. Here, for those who might be tempted to have a go at DIY karaoke recording, is the recipe.*

Ingredients:

One voice
One piano, tuned and with its lid open
One score, cut into page-sized slices to minimize the amount of turning required
Two microphones
A recording machine
Another person to set and monitor the recording levels
An mp3 player such as an iPod or iPhone
A computer with audio-editing and movie-making software

Our microphones were two cardioid Røde NT1As and one omnidirectional Audiotechnica AT3032. The omnidirectional mic is optional. We used this for the piano, but you can use the same cardioid pair for both piano and voice.

Our recorder is shown here (click the pics to blow them up):

It's quite a small machine. The packet of biscuits, showing the scale, helped to keep the recordist's energy levels up on a cold November evening.

STEP 1: RECORDING THE PIANO

Our setup was somewhat unconventional. First we tried the two NT1A mics close in to the piano, but decided that the sound, though good, wouldn’t be suitable.

So we moved the main piano mic back to the position shown in the photo and tried an Audiotechnica AT3032 omnidirectonal mic at the back of the room to get whatever ambience we could. This worked nicely, and by reducing the volume on the main piano track (which was rather prominent in the raw recording) we got pretty much what we wanted — an open sound that was very much like what one hears in the room when not too close to the piano.

The piano mic went into the left channel, and the background mic into the right channel. (The idea was then to record the main voice mic into the right channel and the voice-ambient mic into the left — in a separate recording of course.)

The recording machine, when connected to a computer, behaves like a flash card. Simply offload the files onto the computer and open them in an audio-editing program. I use Amadeus Pro software, but you can use any program that supports multitrack editing.

I added a small amount of reverb to the piano track. For this I used the filters supplied by Apple in its Mac operating system. I used the "medium hall" option with a 10% wet/dry mix setting, leaving all other values unchanged. Export the file as mp3 and save it to your portable mp3 player. You can then practise singing to your accompaniment until you are ready to record the vocal part.

STEP 2: RECORDING THE VOICE
To record the vocal part I hired the village hall, because I knew that our piano room at home, with its carpets, thick curtains and very low ceiling, would not give a good sound, and would not be easy to sing in once I had one ear blocked by an earbud. A dull acoustical space that provides less than the desired amount of feedback can cause a singer to unconsciously push the voice. To compound the problem by blocking one ear would be asking for trouble. I found that earbuds are better than earphones because it's much easier to leave a bud hanging loose than to park an unoccupied phone on one's head. Not only does it keep slipping down one's hair, but there's the risk of noise leaking to the mic. An unoccupied bud can easily be silenced by hiding it away in one's underclothes.

Here I am fiddling with my iPod in one pic and munching an apple in the other. Apples are very good for the voice.

Our village hall is 60 ft x 340 ft with a high wooden roof. Here we used the NT1A for the voice mic. We tried the NT1A and the AT3032 for the ambient end, but I preferred the results given by the NT1A. The voice went into right channel, the ambient mic into the left.

I did not use any filters on the voice's audio track.

STEP 3: MERGING THE TRACKS
This is very easy to do in Amadeus. It's simply a question of putting both tracks into the same file and making the voice part come in at the right place. Here's a screenshot of the file, with the voice track at the top and the piano part below. A green marker shows where the voice part comes in.

After that, you have to fiddle with the dynamic levels and the stereo balancing tool to get a good balance between voice and piano. When the mix is to your taste, you then "flatten" the file to turn it into a standard stereo track that you can save as mp3, WAV, AIF or whatever you like.

The music is now ready to be served, but you must prepare the dish and the contorni. There are many possibilities for presentation, but this time I decided to go for something relatively simple by comparison with my previous movies.

STEP 4: MAKING THE MOVIE
I used a series of still images (i.e. no camcorder was involved) and, as always, the Mac's iMovie software. With iMovie it is now very easy to upload to YouTube. The whole thing — recording, editing, movie-making and uploading — could theoretically be done in a day. I did mine over the weekend.

*Photos and recording notes kindly provided by the owner of the recording gear.

A Question of Timing

2010-11-15T16:51:00.016Z

As promised in an earlier post, I have uploaded my Clair de lune karaoke experiment. I recorded the piano part at home at the beginning of the month and the vocal line last Friday. For the latter I repaired to the village hall, a large space with lots of wood and a high ceiling, a much better place acoustically than my dry living-room with its low ceiling and thick curtains. For the grand sum of £13, I had the use of the hall for an hour. In London I'd have probably paid ten times that amount for a similar venue!

I arrived with my pre-recorded piano part loaded onto my iPod and I sang several takes with various microphone setups and one earbud relaying my piano part to one ear, leaving the other ear free to hear myself (one-eared singing is not, incidentally, a comfortable experience). I alternated between left and right ears because most people's ears (and mine are no exception) hear pitches very slightly differently, and the brain averages out the result. To co-ordinate one's singing with the piano part it helps to choose a song that has a well-defined and regular beat. Fauré is generally much better suited to this than some of the more impressionistic melodists like Debussy. Clair de lune's rhythmic dance pattern has a just such a constant and clearcut beat, with no unexpected variations in the pulse or indeterminate fermate.

Which brings me to the question of timing and tempo. Most of the recorded versions seem to hover around the 60 crotchet beats per minute mark. Some are slower still, and some have enormous amounts of rubato as well as gaps between phrases or sections. One or two renditions are so syrupy that one wonders whether the performers even noticed the quasi allegretto instruction, let alone the printed metronome mark of 78 bpm. Yet none of these variations or slackenings of tempi are marked in the score. There is not a single printed rallentando or ritardando, and no change of speed is indicated for the "moonlit" section of pedalled arpeggios. Furthermore, only sparing amounts of sustaining pedal are marked, in contrast to the blanket coverage one frequently hears.

It is all very well to perform instinctively by feel, but if there is no attempt to discover what makes a composer tick (metaphorically and metronomically), there is a risk not only of misleading one's audience but also of perpetuating such false representations to future generations of performers. Fauré's Clair de lune is not at all the same kind of piece as Debussy's setting of the same poem (even less his famous piano arabesque of that name). Fauré prefers in this song to pick out the baroque elements of the scene rather than dwell on the impressionistic moonlight (whose short appearance is made all the more magical). The subtitle of the song, "Menuet", gives us the clue, as do the lutes played by the musicians in the poem and featured in the Watteau paintings to which the poem refers. The strummed arpeggiated chords don't sound lute-like if taken too slow, and the elegant upward scale at "déguisements fantasques" sounds ponderous and contrived if it is not allowed to be tossed up into the air with a flick of the hand. Fauré's music always has energy, forward momentum and drive. It should not sound mechanical, but nor should it ever overindulge or wallow.

Playfulness characterizes much of Fauré's music. Here he finds a way of being wistful and playful at the same time, thus capturing the subtle threads of irony that run through the verse. Why otherwise would he have switched temporarily, but very deliberately, to a major key for the words "mode mineur"? The poem and the music are studies in the contradictions of life, exposing a world of subterfuge and etiquette in which figures act out stylized moves, conceal their inner selves behind masks and disguise their outer selves in fanciful costumes. The somewhat sardonic humour is lost if the pointed gaiety of the dance steps is slowed to such an extent that they fade into the background colourwash.

My instinct for a faster tempo is borne out by Graham Johnson in Gabriel Fauré: The Songs and their Poets. He says that Fauré's suggested speeds should at the very least be tried out before being discarded. The metronome marks given for songs were chosen by Fauré himself, not his editors. Sometimes he had second thoughts and a different mark appears in a later edition, but in the case of Clair de lune, 78 is the only marking given. But whatever tempo is settled on, it must, says Johnson, "be scrupulously adhered to".

Claire Croiza was a soprano who worked extensively with Fauré and knew at first hand how he liked his music to be played. She recounts how Fauré disliked indulgent performances of his songs. Johnson states that her own 1927 performance of Clair de lune starts at 82 bpm, eventually to settle at 72, in spite of her insistence on fidelity to the metronomic indications. The variation in speed may of course be the fault of the accompanist; the performance is not on YouTube and I haven't heard it, but Johnson writes: "Her whole performance eschews the soothingly exquisite in favour of a rueful sense of ennui — something that is certainly at the heart of Verlaine's Fêtes galantes poems."

Claire Croiza in Massenet's Werther

According to Croiza:

Fauré was a metronome incarnate. And more particularly so at the end of his life when he became deaf. Before that he was 'galant', he liked attractive women and used to make concessions. But at the end of his life, when he could no longer hear, he went his own way regardless, not noticing that the singer was sometimes two or three bars behind him ... because she slowed down while he kept strict tempo. (quoted by Jeffrey Dane in Gabriel Fauré, A Man of Musical Elegance)

Gabriel Fauré

and elsewhere she says:

Fauré was a walking metronome ... Above all it is slowing him down that distorts him. Fauré had a drive that bore no relation either to expression or shading. (quoted in Johnson, page 390)

Claire Croiza

In masterclasses on Fauré, Croiza made the following observations, the first of which (in bold face) was said in specific reference to Clair de lune (all quoted in Johnson, pages 390–391):

Fauré must be practised with the metronome: it is what he would have wanted — an absolute fidelity to the indicated marking.

In our modern French music what is needed is a pitiless beat with a rhythm that never changes ... In French music one must sing to the metronome and never change anything further. Debussy, Duparc, the same thing with a few little rallentandi. Nevertheless Duparc said to me one day "If I had known what singers would make of them, I would never have put in these rallentandi".

The modern French masters, coming after an epoch where everything had been permitted to interpreters have, as a reaction, become distrustful of the interpretation of the singers. They have indicated all that should be done: nuance, tempo, time signature, it is not permitted to deviate from what has been written ... The interpreter is there to serve the musician as he wishes to be served.

These remarks are significant and important. It is this attention to the written score that makes his music speak. Well, here is my version, with apologies for my pianistic deficiencies.

Valiant Women

2010-11-14T12:16:00.010Z

I have always admired those who can accompany themselves while singing, particularly on the piano. It's hard enough to sing the notes, remember the text and communicate the song without having to think of and play the piano part. It may be easy enough to master songs with simple accompaniments, but imagine trying to sing and play Fauré's La Bonne Chanson at the same time, a work of such complexity that Graham Johnson views it as "one of the great challenges of [an accompanist's] career". The notes, he says (in Gabriel Fauré: The Songs and their Poets), "are much harder to play than almost anything else in the standard French song repertoire ... but ... are only the beginning of the difficulties". The cycle, as one restless and relentless song follows another, is a real test of stamina for singer and pianist alike, let alone for one woman undertaking both roles at the same time. Such a skill demands that the music be so familiar and so ingrained in every muscle of one's body that one wonders how it can ever be acquired.

Yet on one of my voyages around the Internet I discovered just one such woman, Monsegur Vaillant (she drops her first name Giselle), who has performed not only La Bonne Chanson (and recorded it live in one take) but a whole host of other song cycles and operatic arias too. Her website indicates that she has sung everything from Bellini to Wagner as well as performing the great song cycles such as Liederkreis, Dichterliebe and Winterreise as a one-woman show. Check her out on YouTube. There's lots there, though unfortunately, the recorded sound quality is poor.

Time, patience and hard work, it seems, are her secret. In her words:

It has taken a lot of passion, a long ... very long period of work and a lot of patience ... first of all working on the piano part which was often difficult ... and then, as far as the language is concerned, which is often not my mother tongue, practising articulating the text separately from the music, then adding the voice ... and finally getting them all to agree.

She comes from a grand tradition of talented French women who were good pianists as well as singers. Pauline Viardot, of the famous García family, not only accompanied herself but took the art of multitasking one step further by composing her own mélodies. Her popular soirées were held at the Viardots' salon in Paris on Thursday evenings — so as not to clash with Saint-Saëns' regular Monday gatherings, or Lalo's Friday evening slots — at half-past nine (after supper, but tea and brioche were provided). More recently, Jane Bathori recorded many mélodies by Debussy, Fauré, Chabrier, Milhaud and Ravel to her own accompaniment.

As for me, I readily admit that I am incapable of performing such juggling acts. Nor do I like singing hunched over a piano. How is it possible to assume the "noble posture" required for singing? Instead, I have been experimenting with singing to my own pre-recorded tracks. I know that pre-recorded piano tracks played by other people are available, but what if you don't agree with their tempo? Or what if you "feel" the song differently? My next posting will reveal the results.

How Belly-Dancing Can Help Singing

2010-11-04T22:48:00.004Z

In the village hall last Monday, while looking around at the other participants at my belly-dancing class, I became aware that some of them had difficulty visualising what their bodies were doing. They could not imagine how an onlooker would perceive them. Either that, or they were unable to control the right sets of muscles to do what was being asked of them. We were practising chest lifts, and one student was raising not only her chest but her shoulders to ridiculous heights until they were practically above her ears. The problem seemed to be an inability to isolate the relevant muscles, with the result that all the surrounding muscles were going into overdrive, with inappropriate and exaggerated movements.

I was reminded of how difficult some beginner singers find it to inhale without lifting or tensing the shoulders, and how, for more advanced singers, elusive some skills are because the movements involved are so small as to be imperceptible. Much of the art of singing involves trying to make perceptible (and therefore controllable) what is at first imperceptible. The ability to capture a particular combination or sequence of muscular activities leading to the desired result demands concentration, focus and co-ordination. The instinct, when a voice does not seem to respond, is to try harder and even to force. Undue tension, once initiated, is difficult to reverse, and a muscle that's being gripped by surrounding muscles cannot work with flexibility or with finesse, if at all.

For singers, the quest for freedom in the emission of vocal tone goes on until the day we die. At the end of her (very long) career Lilli Lehmann told Ninon Vallin, who told my teacher who told me, that a singer, throughout their life, will always find a better way of producing a note in an aria or song. I wondered, all those years ago, what my teacher meant. Now of course, I can see it all too well, as with passing time, stiffer muscles and diminishing margins of error it becomes ever more crucial to produce every single note in a technically correct and efficient way. Conditioning of the right set of muscles for the job has to be done much more carefully, slowly and gently than twenty, ten and even five years ago.

The more we can cultivate good proprioception and kinesthetic awareness, the better we will be able to help ourselves avoid injury and to make sure that inappropriate or compensatory muscular activity that has no business to kick in stays well out of the playing field. We must always seek to ensure that a contracted muscle does not become a tense or tight one. Tension and tightness are precursors to fatigue. They usually indicate that superfluous or counterproductive actions in the surrounding muscles are preventing freedom of action (or contraction) in the muscles we must use for breathing and phonating.

Which brings me back to belly-dancing. I've only been going to classes for a few months, but I'm finding it invaluable, not only for strengthening core muscles but also for helping to promote that all-important awareness of what any given set of muscles in one's body is doing at any particular moment, and for practising fine control of separate muscle groups simultaneously. The ancient art of belly-dancing has a lot in common with the equally ancient art of singing.

A Bit of Etymology

2010-10-27T13:38:00.019+01:00

Appoggio is at the basis of all good singing. It is a word that has been used by generations of singers and teachers, and is usually translated as "support". This translation of the word is perfectly correct, but it can be misleading, because there are two kinds of support — active and passive, support given and support gained — and we tend to focus on the wrong type. In Italian, there are several other words for support (for instance, supporto or sostegno) to help refine the meanings, but in English there is only that single noun "support", and it is not precise enough to designate what I believe is meant by appoggio, which is something more akin to "leaning point". I have seen all kinds of definitions of appoggio in the context of singing, both on the Internet and in books, as well as what I consider to be some serious misinterpretations based on insufficient information about the derivation of the word itself. Here's an attempt at disentaglement.

The words appoggio and appoggiare are etymologically equivalent to the French appui and appuyer, and I believe that they are used in much the same sense. In French, appuyer means first and foremost "to lean", The concept of leaning is somewhat different from that of supporting or propping up. Leaning is usually a passive action (or at least, it becomes so once initiated), whereas supporting, as a conscious act, is an active action (apologies for labouring the tautology). An ailing person finds and gains support by leaning on a friend who gives it. Effort is thus relinquished by the party (or body part, or muscle) that lacks strength and transferred to the other party that can supply it more readily or more efficiently. I believe that appoggio in singing refers to the act of leaning rather than the act of bracing.

The appoggio/appui family of words comes from medieval Latin appodiare, which is derived from podium. This has the Greek word for foot (podos) at its base. Yes, our feet do support our bodies, but we more readily think of "leaning" on a foot than actively doing something with it to support our body above it. Another word for "leaning" is "resting", which is far removed from any notions of deliberate muscular contraction that we often associate with "supporting".

The concept of leaning gives rise to a very different set of sensations and muscular responses from that of supporting. Engaging your whole body to ensure that a column of air leans gently against the vocal folds (or vice versa) is not the same thing as contracting your abdomen to force an airstream up against them. In both cases the aim is to get a constant stream of air up to the larynx, but in the second case the exertive component, when overdone, can result in singing with too much air pressure and not enough air flow, as tightening the abdomen in an attempt to "support" can hinder the free flow of breath on its journey from lungs to larynx, starving the voice in the process.

Stephen Smith in his wonderful book The Naked Voice (which I hope to come back to in a future posting) discusses in greater detail the dangers of misdirected support. He says he would like to banish the word "support" from the vocabularies of all singers, teachers, coaches and conductors because he believes that it leads to improper use of breath management and thence to vocal problems.

My own theory is that this double-edged word and the incorrect technique that it often engenders stem from its unfortunate position of being at the same time an accepted translation (albeit inadequate in this context) and a misinterpretation of the equally double-edged appoggio. We should understand and learn once and for all what "appoggio" really means in the field of vocal technique — an act of leaning or something that is leant on. The support is incidental.

Lessons On Line

2010-10-17T10:27:00.012+01:00

It is generally acknowledged that you can't learn a skill from a book alone, that it is essential to be taught by and interact with an expert who can dynamically adapt their tuition according to your individual needs at any given moment. Yet tuition by multimedia and distance learning is not new; the Open University and other establishments have long been awarding diplomas and degrees to home-based students.

But the Internet is now taking the concept many steps further in exciting ways. There are lessons springing up in blogs and on YouTube (if you can pick out the gems from the junk) that are worth a thousand times more than some of those given by mediocre professors in their colleges and academies. The commenting and sharing facilities extend what have hitherto been one-on-one relationships to quasi multidirectional (one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many) masterclasses.

The best vocal pedagogy blogs that I have seen (though I can only speak for those written in English or French) come from America. I have long been following the wisdom imparted by Jean-Ronald LaFond in The Way of the Singer. Now another tenor has joined the growing band of online tutors. Hear how Gioacchino Lauro Li Vigni personally demonstrates various technical concepts in his new Tenor Talk blog. And what a fabulous voice he has too! How much easier it is to hear what is going on in a voice — even via audio clips on a computer — if the voice of the teacher is well produced and still sounds as fresh and as healthy as a 30-year-old's. When a conservatoire-assigned teacher's own phonation is faulty or, worse, if their voice is pretty much clapped out, how can the student possibly be expected to distinguish the good from the bad? There are good female bloggers too, but they tend to have fewer audio clips. Claudia Friedlander's A Liberated Voice is good on visuals, though, and for general, all-round commonsense advice, in all genres of singing not just classical, it's always worth seeing what Jeanette Lo Vetri has to say. Another to watch is the lovely and talented young soprano Jessica Lennick. She does not set out to teach via her website, but she bravely posts audio clips of her singing voice as it develops, commenting in a highly articulate way on technical matters and her own vocal progress. At her age I would never have possessed her discipline and her degree of critical self-awareness. One day she will make a fabulous vocal teacher. In the meantime I wish her every success with her career.

The great novelty with this way of learning is that it lets you find what you need when you need it, and — more to the point — when you are in the right frame of mind to benefit most from it, and maybe not just from a single source but from several at the same time. It is good to know that there can be many ways of explaining the same thing; to compare different methods, which you can try out in your own time, in tandem or successively; to realize that one particular form of learning may suit one person but not another; to know that there is now a choice of learning solutions from a growing pool of shared knowledge. Yes, there's a lot of misinformation on the Internet, as well as charlatans trying to sell expensive singing courses on CD, with the promise of three octaves in as many months, without providing a clue as to their method, let alone a clip of an audio sample. But anyone who's prepared to shop around will soon realise that the best lessons are free, given by generous donors in eloquent and well-informed blogs and videos. These artists are not out to make a fast buck; they simply want to share with us their great passion for and commitment to the art of singing. And what better advertisement can there be for their teaching abilities? Their rewards will surely be in healthy numbers populating their vocal studios for personal tuition. Perhaps the rest of us can best repay these knowledge-providers by learning from them and contributing our own insights.

I end with an action-packed multimedia piano lesson (one of many) from the engaging Paul Barton, who is taking this form to ultra-sophisticated heights:

Musician, Hear Thyself

2010-10-16T17:42:00.009+01:00

The case of an oboist who claimed that he was picked on and victimized by Carlo Rizzi during his time in the orchestra of Welsh National Opera has been decided. An employment tribunal ruled unanimously that Mr Johnston was not unfairly dismissed. With all cases like these, there were probably faults on both sides.

A musician who doesn't perform well for whatever reason usually knows this only too well and becomes anxious. Anxiety breeds tension, which locks up muscles, plays havoc with coordination and causes the player to lose fine motor control. Smoothness gives way to roughness. Mistakes irritate and distract conductors. Frustration rises on both sides, tension increases, tempers fray and empathy between the two parties eventually breaks down. An angry conductor is only going to make things worse for an already fearful and nervous instrumentalist, whose performance will deteriorate further, and so the vicious cycle perpetuates itself.

For musicians, the memory of a difficult passage that failed on one occasion can haunt them at every subsequent performance of that same passage. A second misfire can destroy their confidence, especially if it is accompanied by a rebuke or sarcastic comment from the conductor. For conductors, the worry of musicians not being able to render their instructions or interpretation, of ruining the whole performance even, becomes intolerable. To be made to work with what they consider to be blunt or worn-out tools is, for them, unfair. Resentment festers and boils over into ill-tempered behaviour towards the "culprit" who is spoiling their canvas.

Most of the conductors I have ever sung for have been charming and pleasant to work with, but I can think of at least half-a-dozen whose bad tempers would not be tolerated in most other professions. I tended not to work for them if I could help it. One or two quite famous maestri had such bad reputations that I decided not even to audition for them. I wouldn't want to work with them even if I were offered the chance to do so. I could never see why music-making with others should be anything other than a rich and pleasant experience, shared by all who take part. How can you enjoy creating music with someone who belittles and humiliates you and who is coaxing what they want from you by bullying rather than encouragement?

In my twenties I sang in an amateur opera company for a few terms to gain experience. It was a recognized training ground in west London for aspiring opera singers, most of whom were semi-professional and some of whom went on to have good careers. It took the form of local-authority evening classes, held in a draughty Victorian school building that looked like a prison, and we paid fees for the privilege of being shouted at twice a week by a cantankerous conductor and a sour-faced pianist, who gave every impression of hating us and loathing their job, not least because rehearsals took place on Saturday mornings. We all put up with these miserable conditions because they allowed us to gain stage experience and learn repertoire. After two terms, I'd had enough of the discourteous behaviour of the music "staff" and I left to seek the company of more congenial musicians who actually enjoyed making music.

But to go back to the hapless oboist and other musicians who find themselves in the position of being mercilessly criticized and then sacked. Although I have some sympathy with this, I also feel that it is all too easy to be insensitive to the reality of one's own situation. Recording machines exist for those who need to hear what they sound like from outside themselves. Ears are what matter here. Every musician should learn to hear and judge their own standard against the standard of their peers. Musical talent is to an extent subjective, but there are certain accepted standards in the various genres. Either you can do what's required in your particular professional field or you can't; auditory and sensory feedback should tell you this. If you can no longer play or sing the notes, then maybe it's time to quit, and it's best to resign before you are fired. If you avoid listening to what your ears are saying, or if you delude yourself into thinking that you are better than you are, then you're not a true musician and have only yourself to blame if you do get the push.

There's no shame in losing our performing ability, but there is shame in not recognizing that fact (unless we're affected by dementia). If our mental faculties are still in good shape, we should be able to judge what we can and should be doing with our lives at any given stage. With age comes deafness. Muscles weaken. Coordination deteriorates. Reflexes slow down. What gives us the right to imagine that others will want to listen to our music-making when we are in decline? The worst thing that any musician can do is to try to perform repertoire that was right for them formerly but now lies beyond their technical abilities. It's not only bad for their own reputation but it's unfair on their colleagues. Why is it, then, that so many of them go on for far too long, trying to do what they've always done, when they could turn to different repertoire, smaller roles, less demanding work, teaching or other pursuits? I guess the answer is pride and money.

Malady in melody

2010-09-02T12:10:00.008+01:00

One of the things that makes French mélodie so difficult to sing well is that so much of it deals with what I call passively negative emotions (as distinct from an actively negative emotion such as anger). Many of the poets who inspired the songs were afflicted by that strange disease of the nineteenth century termed the mal du siècle (malady of the century). Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine are two of the most notable, at least from the point of view of French mélodie. Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal contains several poems that have been set by more than one composer. More a state of mind than a physical ailment, the mal was a malaise characterised by melancholy, lassitude, lethargy, pessimism, depression and general ennui, all sentiments that encourage the body to wilt and that are not conducive to producing the energy required to give voice to a vibrant sound. When it comes to the gamut of human emotions, it is much easier, from the point of view of vocal technique, to give vent to angst and bitterness in song than to convey apathy and torpor. The first two demand energy in the huffing and puffing; the latter two induce flaccidity as they prepare to shut down the systems and switch off the life-support. Without energy and a well toned breath-support mechanism the voice cannot sustain a good singing sound.

Songs such as Duparc's Soupir and Lamento or Fauré's Spleen and Au Cimetière, with their long notes and slow phrases, have a sadness, a stillness, an air of resignation about them that require smooth, controlled and sustained emission of tone — the most difficult form of singing. The sound must appear to be virtually static, non-dynamic, inert, and drained of life, as if coming from a soul that is so frozen in grief that it cannot summon the energy to do anything other than merely exist.

The challenge for the singer is not to let their instrument, their body, fall victim to the same malady as the character represented by the voice in the song. We must convey the illusion of being in a passive, non-energized state while maintaining, albeit concealed, the active energy that keeps our windmill turning.

A Tradition Destroyed

2010-07-21T11:24:00.009+01:00

The first steps have been taken to make redundant the professional church choir that I sang in for 16 years until last year when I moved to Kent. When I joined the choir we sang a fairly large repertoire of Catholic music to a high standard in the proper liturgical context of the Latin Mass, a tradition which the then parish priest and his immediate successors were keen to maintain. This place of worship was, after all, no ordinary church: it had been the seat of the Archbishop of Westminster, the pro-Cathedral, before Westminster Cathedral was built. The Victorian gothic original was bombed during the Second World War, but its replacement occupies the same footprint. The building, though by no means beautiful, is large and possesses unusually fine acoustics. A choir had existed at that church for many decades, but it was the current director of music's predecessor who turned it from a mainly amateur choir into a fully professional choir of excellent calibre, numbering five to eight singers, depending on requirements. The current director has maintained the standards and enlarged the repertoire still further.

The repertoire ranges widely in scope, from Italian and Spanish polyphonists such as Palestrina and Victoria to the English Catholicism of Elgar, Berkeley and Mawby, via the Germanic classics of Haydn, Mozart and Bruckner as well as the French school of Fauré, Gounod, Vierne and Langlais. Medieval plainchant, an essential staple, punctuates the services, bringing unity and continuity to the whole, like bread on a side-plate. But the music scores are destined to remain on the shelves. As the second half of the first decade of the new millennium progressed, the choir's role in the church gradually regressed, the most recent parish priests having brought with them a disregard for both the language and the music of Rome. The church's website contains (at the time of writing this) not a single mention of the word "music" anywhere on any of its pages.

Now the choir has been told that it will henceforth be required to sing once a month instead of every Sunday. It will also be needed at Christmas and Easter. The rest of the time, music will be provided by a Filipino folk group (presumably at considerably reduced monetary expense if not free). I can only guess that the retention of the choir for a dozen or so token appearances each year is a concessionary move designed to avoid both a bad press and the forking out of redundancy payments. A tradition that took decades to build has been destroyed in one moment. The choir's director of music is a highly talented organist and the current choir members are all excellent singers. Unappreciated and now evidently unwanted by their current parish priest, they surely won't stick around much beyond Christmas. The organ's keys will go yellow, the music library, painstakingly built up and expanded in recent years, will gather dust and the choir's benches in the gallery will remain empty, as I suspect the folk group will want to be seen to "take part" at the front of the church, and not remain out of sight in the gods like us.

Western music is highly valued in Asia. Young Japanese and Chinese keyboard players are emerging in their thousands, many of them virtuosos who've mastered the classics before they've reached their teens. One of the best baroque specialist groups anywhere in the world is the Bach Collegium Japan. Soon we will have to travel to the Philippines to hear a proper sung Mass according to the Roman tradition.

Update: (5 September). For the curious, names are named in Damian Thompson's blog on the Daily Telegraph website.

Unlocking the Door

2010-06-16T13:56:00.016+01:00

Change of décor today, with a new masthead* for Bonne Chanson. The original illustration was always a something of a risk as Mucha's work was subject to strict copyright controls (though perhaps no longer as from this year). I put it up faute de mieux when I started the blog, while waiting for something better to present itself.

Fernand Khnopff's image is an entirely appropriate choice, not only because he's a Belgian but also because his type of fin-de-siècle symbolism is a better fit for the music that my albums, website and blog largely concern. My grandparents had a couple of Khnopff's works in their drawing-room. We now own one of them, a portrait; but the other, the more beautiful and enigmatic of the two and much loved by my grandfather, was sold. It was called Le silence de la neige and represented in blue crayon the visage of a veiled, ice-cold snow-maiden, with closed eyes and hands held together as if in prayer, contemplating a world beyond, her silent thoughts extending to some infinite place. She had been stolen by a family member and then recovered, but my grandfather couldn't bear the thought that anything untoward might again befall her, so he sadly decided to let someone else bear the responsibility for her welfare.

A google search suggests that she's now in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, and someone has uploaded on their photo-sharing site a very poor-quality black-and-white snapshot, presumably taken surreptitiously with a mobile phone. I have done my best to bring back to her cheeks the pellucid colour that I remember, but I've not dared try to eliminate the photograph's moiré artefacts from the delicate central portion of the image for fear of removing what little detail there is. The fleeting impression, like a fading footprint in the snow or a ghosting effect on one's retina, is just as I remember it. It is strange to see her again, frozen still, after twenty-odd years.

The masthead picture, with its English title I Lock My Door Upon Myself, was inspired by Christina Rossetti's Who Shall Deliver Me?:

Who Shall Deliver Me?

God strengthen me to bear myself;

That heaviest weight of aIl to bear,

Inalienable weight of care.

All others are outside myself;

I lock my door and bar them out

The turmoil, tedium, gad-about.

I lock my door upon myself,

And bar them out; but who shall wall

Self from myself, most loathed of all?

If I could once lay down myself.

And start self-purged upon the race

That all must run! Death runs apace.

If I could set aside myself,

And start with Iightened heart upon

The road by all men overgone!

God harden me against myself,

This coward with pathetic voice

Who craves for ease and rest and joys

Myself, arch-traitor to myself;

My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,

My clog whatever road I go.

Yet One there is can curb myself,

Can roll the strangling Ioad from me

Break off the yoke and set me free.

Update, October 2011: *The "masthead" format was dropped when Blogger introduced Dynamic Views. The image now appears on my "About Bonne Chanson" page.

The Walking Metronome

2010-06-02T12:13:00.011+01:00

More ferreting around the Internet looking for information on Fauré's Clair de lune has unearthed some interesting findings, which confirm my suspicion that the cloyingly indulgent and rubato-laden interpretations of Fauré that seem fashionable at the moment are quite wrong stylistically and would have horrified him. French élégance and rigorous attention to rhythmic exactitude at the speeds indicated on the score are needed, not schmalz.

As always, it's important to go back to the sources. On the strength of Amazon's preview pages and Google Books extracts (and of course A French Song Companion), yesterday I ordered a copy of Graham Johnson's Gabriel Fauré: The Songs and Their Poets. What a marvellous tome. I wish I'd had it back in 2005 to consult when I was working on my Fauré album, but it was only published last year. Now I can look forward to more than 400 pages of small print devoted to my hero! I can't wait for it to arrive. Meanwhile, Google Books provides a generous taster. And in a discussion of Fauré as a stickler for precision and of his fondness for relentless adherence to the set tempi, Johnson quotes the soprano Claire Croiza, who worked with Fauré:

Fauré was a walking metronome ... Above all it is slowing him down that distorts him, Fauré had a drive that bore no relation either to expression or shading. — Claire Croiza

It was the soprano who created Le Jardin clos ... who spoke these words — they were taken down verbatim from masterclasses given in the 1930s. In teaching the song Clair de lune Croiza observed: "Fauré must be practised with the metronome: it is what he would have wanted — an absolute fidelity to the indicated marking. Work on the words by saying them in time, without singing them. Only sing them later." (Graham Johnson, Gabriel Fauré: The Songs and their Poets, page 390)

Update on 4th June: The book has arrived. It is beautiful and is going to be a very cherished possession. A nice bonus is the generous quantity of contemporary photos and drawings scattered throughout. I don't think I've ever bought such an expensive book, but I don't begrudge the price for one instant.

Karaoke Coordination

2010-06-01T17:52:00.011+01:00

For singers, the most important thing to get right — once all other considerations have been taken into account, such as musicianship and a trained voice that is healthy and properly warmed-up — is coordination. If one's coordination is at sixes and sevens the breath will not flow smoothly, muscular effort will be wrongly timed, energy will be misplaced, and the voice will behave like a car engine whose ignition system has gone haywire. With a problematic voice, however, it's not always easy to tell whether it's the coordination or the instrument that's faulty.

If my coordination is bad, then it will affect my whole body, not just my voice. It therefore follows that if what I could play on the piano yesterday eludes me today, if the piece stutters and judders, stops and starts, with fluffed notes aplenty, my coordination must be below par (because the piano hasn't changed since yesterday). Ergo, it's not a good idea to sing at the moment, and I must limber up with a bit more muscle and brain work and to get the reflexes back up to speed.

I'm working on Fauré's Clair de lune at the moment. I don't know why I've never sung this as it's one of Fauré's best songs. The piano part is a good piece to practise coordination, where the right and left hands seem to be doing a juggling act pretty well throughout. I find it impossible to accompany myself in it without coming to grief because my brain can't cope with the piece's regular irregularities and I'm simply unable to concentrate on so many things at once. Graham Johnson says (in A French Song Companion) that this song is "a challenge for a pianist's nerve ... and the reliability of his inner metronome". In addition I find it hard to find the right posture to support my singing while sitting down at a piano.

In sheer frustration I thought of a workaround. I recorded the piano part onto my iPod, using one main take plus two or three retakes of the fluffed bits so that I had something vaguely acceptable to listen to. I then recorded the voice part on the iPod while listening through earbuds to the edited file of the piano part on my main computer. Out of interest I stitched the two tracks so that both parts would run together. There were a few out-of-sync passages where I hadn't been able to hear the piano part while I was singing, but overall it seemed promising. This scale-model experiment has motivated me to get the piano part up to performance standard and record it using a proper microphone later this summer, on a day when my coordination is good. It will be fun to stick it up on YouTube with some Watteau backdrops. It will be my response to some of the over-sentimental versions of this song on YouTube. Tempo rubato is not what Fauré's about. Listen to Charles Panzéra and his wife at the piano to see how Claire de lune should be done. Meanwhile, I'm impressed with the iPod's invisible microphone (so micro that it's invisible!). It's a bit tinny, but perfectly usable for practice. This is the first time I've used my iPod to record anything. I've taken the little gadget out of its leather wallet and turned it every which way, but I still can't see the mike!

Cuckoo

2010-05-04T18:45:00.002+01:00

I've heard the first cuckoo of the year today. There are usually three in this corner of the Weald of Kent. This one is singing loud and clear as I write this: a minor third, on F5 and D5.

Perfect Pitch

2010-04-19T18:35:00.001+01:00

One of our resident blackbirds — the one who sings a rising three-note motif on B4, C5, D5 — is in full cry once again as the birdsong season is now well and truly established. I noted here last June that he always intones his theme on the same notes, perfectly in tune every time. Having been silent all through our long and hard winter, he's remembered his song, and the pitches, from last year. He has several imitators in the garden, but none as clear and bell-like as him, hitting the notes with total accuracy every time.

Masking the Voice

2010-04-05T19:10:00.009+01:00

Female singing voices evolve and change in their sixth decade, as do their owners' bodies as they age. A technique that has served well for so many years must now adapt to keep up with the altered instrument. The ultra-slim and pure sound that I was able to muster in Allegri's Miserere thirty years ago and in Bach and his ilk even ten years ago was all very fine at the time. Any attempt now to produce that quality of tone with my current instrument would result in strained vocal muscles and an unsatisfactory sound.

Inevitably, women's voices become heavier in their forties and fifties. Body shapes alter, so laryngeal structures may shift their positions in the vocal tract, and associated muscles may lose some of their flexibility. Pitch can deepen under the influence of changing hormonal balances that affect the vocal mechanism, so tessiturae that once were easy can become daunting and fatiguing. High notes that once felt free and easy can start to feel effortful and constrained. Arias that were difficult but doable can become terrifying, perhaps because of one single note that's now too close to one's ceiling for comfort, or because of diminished stamina overall. Such changes can be disconcerting and confusing to a singer who can't see what is happening within their throat. The voice can feel responsive one day but unusable the next, for no apparent reason. Further problems arise when the cords, whose surfaces are much less moist than they used to be, are affected by allergies and other irritating factors. The fear arising from this inconsistency and unreliability is compounded by the fact that there's no longer any margin of error. Whereas in youth a badly approached note might still be reached and somehow land on target pitchwise, now, neither hooks nor crooks can save a note that misses its mark because its attack is less than perfect. Older muscles and tissues are less malleable and are slower to respond. Imperfect attacks arise from insufficient support or coordination or misplaced effort, which in turn arise from fatigue. Often it's simply a question of muscles not being strong enough at that moment to do what the brain is asking them to do. I see parallels in all areas of physical activity, most noticeably in getting up from a crouching position without putting my hands on the ground. I have to think about this now, and it's no longer something I can do as a matter of course, whereas before it was as easy as walking.

Where there's fear there's tension. When the tension starts first thing in the morning because one's unwarmed-up voice has no range to speak of, let alone sing with, a self-perpetuating cycle of tension begetting fear begetting more tension seems impossible to break. Recognising and solving these problems take time. So do relearning technique and consolidating it. Great singers go through these experiences too, to judge from various accounts and biographies of those who dare to talk about it. It's a shame that badmouths on forums, blogs and YouTube delight in blaming singers and their techniques for their deficiencies without having a clue about vocal technique and without allowing for the fact that certain irreversible physiological changes may be taking place in the voices themselves that need time for their users to come to terms with and to master.

On practice days when I hate the sound I'm making and tension creeps in, I block my ears with my fingers, open my mouth and just let the sound come out as is. That way, I can't hear what I'm doing, I'm not being put off by my own negative feedback, and all the tension falls away. The sensation of muscular relaxation is immediate. By pressing closed the little flaps in front of my ear holes I can eliminate from my hearing much of what I am subconsciously judging to be undesirable about my sound (a judgement that causes anxiety and tension) and at the same time I can monitor and deal with any tension in the jaw as soon as it arises. This approach helps me to focus exclusively on sensation rather than being concerned with the sound. It works every time! The action of placing one's fingers at the hinge of the jaw seems to encourage the voice to anchor itself properly and to find the right resonating space in the masque. Once the voice begins to feel better it begins to sound better too, and then a good cycle kicks in: good sensations begetting freedom begetting good sounds. The fingers-in-ears trick is particularly useful during warming up, when the voice sounds at its worst. A few minutes of this are enough to get the energy and the voice flowing in the right way without the neck muscles tensing up. When everything is working in sync, the rest follows automatically, like a log fire that's slow to get going but easy to maintain thereafter. I first became aware of the benefits of not listening to my sound years ago when I realised how much easier and freer it felt to sing when I was vacuum-cleaning the house and the sound of my voice was masked by the sound of the cleaner.

The Seventh Age

2010-03-27T11:37:00.007Z

The seven ages of man, in terms of a singer's life could be interpreted, very approximately, as follows:

Infancy: unconscious vocalisation and imitation of human sounds.
Childhood: learning informally to pitch sounds in a controlled way.
Teenage: using the voice in formal contexts such as choirs, but without necessarily having formal voice training.
Early Adulthood: formal voice training and consolidation of technique.
Adulthood: a long period of singing professionally and acquiring experience.
Prime years: a relatively short period when voice, technique and artistry are at their peak.
Middle and old age: vocal decline.

It is the seventh age that varies so markedly between individuals, not only in its time of onset but also in its rate of progress and its duration. In many (but not all) women, hormonal changes at this time can signal its beginning, soon followed by the enforced termination of their career as certain physical changes take place in the voice which make it increasingly difficult to maintain previous standards. Soprano Carol Neblett once said, "A woman sings with her ovaries — you're only as good as your hormones."* In the same way that grey hair, wrinkles, middle-age spread and arthritis make their appearance sooner in some people than in others — sometimes even a decade or more earlier — adverse changes in vocal fold tissues (thickening and swelling) and laryngeal muscles and cartilages (loss of tonus and flexibility) can hit some singers at a younger age than others. Some lucky women claim not to be adversely affected by vocal changes. As a general rule, however, we are at the mercy not so much of technique (assuming that our technique was sound to begin with) as of genetic predisposition when it comes to ageing of the voice. A good technique can help, but it can't reverse, for example, a general lowering of overall range that normally occurs in an ageing woman's voice.

It has been well demonstrated in studies involving identical twins that lifestyle, training and environment count far less than our genes when it comes to determining what weaknesses, diseases and manner of eventual death will overtake us. A voice is nothing more or less than living tissue — an organic instrument which must necessarily age at the same rate as the rest of our cells.

At one extreme was Maria Callas, whose vocal prime was well past by the time she hit forty and who always appeared older than her true age. At the other extreme is Magda Olivero, born 13 years before Maria Callas and who has just celebrated her 100th birthday. Here she demonstrates what can be done at the age of 99 if (a) you are still alive, (b) you still have reasonably good health and (c) you are still able to produce sung pitches.

*Mordden, Ethan (1984). Demented: The World of the Opera Diva. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Needlepoint

2010-03-07T11:55:00.011Z

What has needlepoint to do with singing? More than you might think. Singers spend much of their time travelling and waiting. Needlepoint, which can be taken up and put down again in seconds, is the ideal activity with which to occupy those wasted periods. It's better than books because one's brain can, to some extent, be elsewhere, especially when you are simply filling in blocks of background colour. Joan Sutherland always had a petit point on the go in her dressing room or while waiting in the wings. Cushion covers are the ideal size. But yesterday, I hung up this needlepoint peacock I stitched in the 1990s. It was previously in my London house, in a dark stairwell deprived of natural light, but it looks much better on our landing here, next to our 1930s oak staircase against a white wall by a north-facing window.

The book from which the design was taken is Beth Russell's William Morris Needlepoint. I saw it in a shop and knew immediately that I had to make the cover design if nothing else. This was long before the days of websites and online shopping, and I recall the difficulties I had in obtaining the wool. None of my local stockists in London — not even John Lewis — had Appleton wool and I had to make do with Anchor wool. There was one colour I wasn't convinced about. The rims around the peacocks' "eyes" seemed wrong to me. A trip to Holland Park confirmed my impression that the rims seem to glow around the edges, like flames, though the exact colour of something as iridescent as a peacock's feather can be difficult to determine when the colour varies to such an extent according to the light and the viewing angle. But I wanted my peacock's tail to glisten more and to stand out from its surrounding foliage, so I chose a golden yellow for the rims instead of Beth Russell's recommended turquoise and jade colours.

Anchor's shades were fine for most of the design but were useless for the vibrant blue of the peacock's head and neck. None of the Anchor shades came anywhere close to what was required. Eventually I found an Appleton stockist, and I was able to complete the bird's head. I used industrial quantities of wool. The design uses more than seventy-seven thousand stitches. I used a wide-gauged canvas which needed a double thickness of wool to fill its large holes. I always employ cross-stitch for all my needlepoint, as it gives better coverage and stability. It takes twice as long to work as conventional tent stitch and uses much more wool, but it is well worth the extra effort and expense because the piece does not have to be worked on a frame, needs less stretching once finished, and will not go out of shape over time. It is always sad to see antique pieces of needlepoint that have become distorted and skewed. My finished piece (excluding the dark blue fabric onto which it is sewn) measures 97 cm x 139 cm. It is more orthogonal in reality that it looks in my camera picture, which I had to take at a slight angle to fit the whole image in the lens.

When you work from a chart you stitch onto a blank canvas. Everything is done by counting. In a piece that measures 232 stitches across and 332 stitches deep you are bound to make errors, and it is not unusual to find that you are half-a-dozen stitches out. Unless the design is highly geometric and symmetrical, in which case unpicking is the only option, it is usually possible to adapt and adjust as you go along. This means that no two versions of a design are identical.

Beth Russell's beautiful needlepoint designs and books can be found on her website.

A Question of Semantics

2010-02-26T12:46:00.011Z

While Rupert Christiansen asks where all the contralto voices have gone, I wonder why we persist in using such strange terms for female vocal types. To categorize voices, we use Italian words that were coined centuries ago, when Western-style music was still undeveloped. These terms distinguished one vocal line from another in music that was written in two or more parts. Soprano (from sopra meaning "above") denoted the top line. Alto (or altus in Latin), which means "high", distinguished the high part from the low or base part (bassus gave us "base" as well as "bass"). Contralto was used when a third part was added to the mix, singing "against" or "counter to" (contra) the alto part. In fact you could have a contra anything — for instance, contratenor (cf. countertenor), contrabasso (cf. double-bass member of the violin family). A mezzo-soprano is a later term brought in to describe a voice that was mid-way between the soprano and the alto. Illogically, the rarely used term mezzo-contralto denotes a voice type that lies mid-way between a mezzo-soprano and a contralto. In practice, it's a voice that lies low but has a lightness and agility that is more generally associated with a higher voice. Etymologically, the word mezzo-contralto means a voice that sings "half against high" — which is of course utterly meaningless.

To complicate matters, contralto is almost exclusively applied to women and opera. Alto is more of a genderless and generic term, which describes a pitch range (cf. alto saxophone) rather than a particular type of voice. Countertenors sing alto (and are sometimes called altos) in church music. You must not call a man a contralto, though it is worth noting that "male soprano" is an acceptable alternative for the more elegant appellation sopranist — a man with a highly developed falsetto range who can sing in the female soprano range.

By the law of averages, most voices are middle voices, which carries slightly negative connotations — such voices may not have a rich low register and may not easily (if at all) go very high. Commercial pressure requires singers to train upwards rather than downwards, particularly if they are female, because high pitches are perceived as being rarefied, more difficult to attain and therefore more exciting to listen to. They are also associated with youth because the voices of children and young females are generally higher than those of more advanced age, the nannies and grannies of contralto roles in opera. If higher frequencies and faster vibrations are seen as glamorous, exciting, youthful and sexy, there is a strong incentive for singers and their agents to rebrand voices to something more marketable. So contraltos get renamed as mezzos, mezzos try to extend their high registers to become sopranos, and lyric sopranos strain to undertake the coloratura roles. Our categorization of female voice ranges into three basic types of high, middle and low seems somewhat crude when one considers that a soprano's range is supposed to lie a fifth higher than a contralto's, and a mezzo's range somewhere in between. Yet some sopranos' ranges may lie a semi-tone apart or a tone. Others may straddle the border and be forced to choose between repertoire that lies too high and repertoire that lies too low. Two singers may have identical ranges but different tessituras (comfort zones), or they may have different ranges but similar tessituras.

Some physiques and larynges can cope with being stretched and cranked up beyond their god-given limits. Others, less robust, cannot. Many singers fail to make it as performers in opera because they fall between two stools: either they are too lightweight for the roles that fit their natural range or they lack the endurance and/or top notes for the roles in their assigned category. Muscular training can only do so much; a voice's limits of range and volume are to a large extent determined by such physical attributes as the shape and size of the instrument itself (larynx) and resonating spaces (mouth, palate, pharynx). Muscle tone, elasticity, flexibility can all be improved, but even the extent to which such improvement is possible and the speed at which it can be carried out are partly determined by our genetic makeup, our metabolism, our age, our environment and many other factors. Musicality and talent do not come into the equation until a functioning instrument has been built; singing is first and foremost a physical activity.

One problem with our system of labelling is that paradoxically there are too many categories and too few at the same time. Why is there a mezzo-contralto category between mezzo-soprano and contralto to cater for the rare lighter-voiced singer in the alto tessitura, yet no there is no equivalent classification between soprano and mezzo-soprano to cater for the soprano who is relatively lightweight but not high? Such a category could accommodate a leggiero who has a mezzo's range and for whom much of the soprano leggiero repertoire lies in an uncomfortably high tessitura. There are light voices who lack a solid high C but who have usable notes at or even below the lower limit of G that Christiansen ascribes to the contralto voice. These voices would struggle to make themselves heard above an orchestra in an opera house so they are discounted as non-viable for opera. They find work in the concert hall, early music and professional choirs. Other candidates for this category are voices that lack range tout court. A couple of examples from fairly recent history are Madeleine Grey, a soprano often billed as a mezzo, who said in her memoirs that one Debussy song eluded her because of its low A flat, and Isobel Baillie, a light soprano whose voice naturally stopped at high B. It seems that the current labelling system has arisen in response to what the modern (post-baroque) operatic world demands. A low but light soprano-timbred voice is almost guaranteed to be lighter than a light mezzo-soprano or a light mezzo-contralto, by virtue of the fact that deeper voices are generally heavier than higher ones. Sadly, this type of in-between voice is excluded from the mezzo-soprano branding because of its lack of heft and its wrong coloration, and it is also excluded from the soprano branding, at least in opera, because it lacks either the high notes for the roles in the leggiero/coloratura fach or the weight and stamina to sustain the lower-lying but heavier lyrico roles. Such voices, which cannot find a place in opera, thrived in oratorio and recital rooms in a former age. Now even the very word "oratorio" sounds outmoded and recital room opportunities are becoming as rare as the contraltos who once gave them.

Bistre Skies

2010-02-22T15:21:00.003Z

What better way is there to spend a grey, rainy February day than creating even worse weather in PhotoShop and trying to bring it to life in iMovie? Louis Vierne was drawn to turbulence and tempests. He liked nothing more than a raging storm at sea. Verlaine's bistre* skies provided him with a perfect excuse to conjure up roaring thunder, crashing waves and vicious lightning strikes by beating the hell out of the piano.

*bistre (or "bister"): a water-soluble brownish-yellow pigment made by boiling wood soot.

So We Think We Can Sing?

2010-02-17T10:31:00.013Z

Compared with some species of bird, our singing repertoire is severely limited and primitive. Is there any human capable of imitating the sounds, inter alia, of chain saws, camera shutters, power drills, human whistling and the songs of other bird species with the same virtuosic precision and accuracy as the superb lyrebird? Meet Chook, born in 1979, who lives at Adelaide Zoo.

It is fascinating to watch his lower mandible and see him making fine adjustments with the utmost delicacy to control his tone quality, just as we adjust the position of our lower jaws and the shape of our palates to modify vowels at higher pitches. But so many questions arise. How does a bird hold so many sounds in its tiny brain, let alone have the ability to work out how to reproduce them? It's not just his syrinx that's remarkable, it's his ear.

At about 2 minutes 20 seconds into the video, Chook suddenly switches from his grating mechanical noises and cackling kookaburra calls to delivering the sweet song of a blackbird on an English summer's day. Turdus merula was apparently brought into Australia in the 1850s. It was originally confined to Melbourne and Adelaide but is now found throughout southeastern Australia. The blackbird has always been my favourite songster for the richness of its instantly recognizable and highly evocative timbre. Many birds have a lot of chiaro without much oscuro. The blackbird imparts to his song a beautifully balanced tone quality. No wonder Chook liked it too.

Jules Renard Centenary

2010-02-12T11:10:00.003Z

Jules Renard, the author of the Histoires naturelles, some of which Ravel so craftily put to music, died in 1910. He was only forty-six. In celebration of this centenary, a website and associated blog have sprung up.

Among many interesting things on the site is a gallery of works of art by French painters of the period, to which Françoise (the website's owner) has added captions in the form of quotations from Renard's oeuvre. It starts here. The first quotation is particularly appropriate in our current climate:

"Comme la neige serait monotone, si Dieu n'avait créé les corbeaux!" (How monotonous snow would be if God hadn't created crows).

A Cricket in a Chalet

2010-02-11T10:30:00.012Z

I was about to throw out an old childhood money-box when it occurred to me that it might make a good house for a cricket — the cricket in Ravel's Histoires naturelles, to be precise. So the fifty-year-old little wooden chalet was removed from the bag of items destined for the local dump and taken to the woods, where I set it down among pine needles and dead leaves. The Swiss connection would allude to Ravel's alleged fondness for clockwork.

Then I photographed all the props the cricket would need to illustrate the story: a broom, a door, some sawdust, a chain and a key. From the Internet I raided some pictures of crickets and some clockwork. I spent the whole of yesterday enjoyably messing about with PhotoShop and creating a little fantasy world. This film can now join its four siblings, which have been up on YouTube for quite some time.

Lucky the shooting wasn't scheduled for today. We had seven inches of snow dumped on us overnight. The little chalet, relieved that it had been saved from landfill, felt quite at home:

Rupert versus Rolando

2010-01-27T11:29:00.010Z

Whatever the eventual outcome of Rolando Villazón's troubled operatic career, he has to get on with his life. If finding a way to occupy his time and earn his living when he is "resting" involves agreeing to participate in lowbrow television shows, then so be it. A respected critic is sickened by ITV's Popstar to Operastar show, saying that Villazón has "lost all his dignity by participating in this ghastly vulgar trash ... The real disgrace is Rolando Villazón, whose participation in this travesty is truly tragic." He ends his diatribe with the ungracious hope that the show will prove to be a massive flop.

In yesterday's Daily Telegraph Villazón put up a spirited defence. I particularly liked this:

In his polemic outburst, Christiansen questions the credentials of one panellist because she "has never sung a full opera in her professional career" and therefore "carries little authority". I have always found this contradiction interesting: the majority of critics are usually not capable of singing real operatic notes, let alone performing entire operas on stage, yet they make their living by evaluating musical performances. [my emphasis]

We mustn't forget that opera is, first and foremost, entertainment and comes in many forms, some of which do, in fact, include travesty. Not all opera is of the seria variety. There is opéra comique, opera buffa, etc. We may think of it as high art now, but there was a time when treading the boards of an opera stage was considered to be not a particularly respectable profession.

I am not suggesting that opera should henceforth allow singers to use mikes, cut out the difficult bits and transpose their arias. The fact that this is happening in the TV show — and Villazón makes a point of telling us it's happening — is a question of practicality: Most of the well-known arias are too difficult and too long for beginners, so without such devices to make them singable the contestants would fall at the first hurdle. And the alternative — Grade 1 songs and technical vocalises — would not go down too well with the viewers! But I am suggesting that everyone has a right to try their hand — or voice — at classical singing, and that television companies have a right to use some aspects of the operatic art form (e.g. the best tunes) to create entertaining programmes, as long as they are honest about what they're doing and don't resort to parody. Why should opera be reserved for conservatoire-educated graduates to perform in and discerning opera buffs to listen to? As in almost any branch of artistic endeavour or craftsmanship — be it writing, painting, joinery, garden landscaping, cookery, or what have you — there are degrees of proficiency and expertise, and most people are capable of telling the difference between pros and hobbyists. There are amateur operatics in village halls and local education authority courses in singing up and down the country. Is it such a crime to televise the efforts of a few who are brave enough to have a go in public? And why should it be considered undignified for an established opera singer to give pop singers a crash course in the basics of a different form of the vocal art?

The singing on the show was by no means all "atrocious", "talentless", "toneless" and "out-of-tune", as described by the critic. On occasions I've heard top-flight opera houses broadcast singing that bore at least some of these attributes. We're dealing with beginners here, and even Birgit Nillson was said to sound like a foghorn when she started her training. I take my hat off to anyone who can produce the top B flat that Bernie Nolan did at the end of her song in the second programme, mike or no mike.

If anyone thinks the British public is going to confuse this TV show with the real thing, or to imagine that it takes only a few lessons to make an opera star, then it is being credited with very little intelligence indeed. This show is just a bit of fun (not parody). The participants are having fun (though they're working hard too), but they're not making fun of opera singers. Putting aside the "operatic" element, the programme is worth watching as an experiment to find out how well people can learn a different type of singing in a short time, what sort of progress they may or may not make, whether they have any aptitude for it, what sort of strengths and weaknesses show up, how well (or poorly) their voices function and adapt, how they cope with nerves, and answers to all sorts of other questions related to human behaviour in a competitive environment. And that is how I think most viewers will see it. They're not going to think, "If I do this I'll be able to sing at La Scala di Milano next year." The format is similar to the programmes where Gordon Ramsay teaches cooks in hamburger joints to do a spot of cordon bleu. Just because they've taken part in Hell's Kitchen doesn't qualify them to apply for the position of head chef at the Ritz. Nor do these shows devalue the work of the Michelin-starred chefs of the world.

Hydration in Cold Weather

2010-01-12T12:32:00.000Z

As the cold weather continues, our bodies have to adapt to conditions that, here in southern England, they're not used to. I'm surprised at the level of dehydration that can occur — even greater than in the summer, it seems.

If my skin feels dry and my arthritis flares up, I take it as a sure sign that my vocal cords will probably be dry too. Dehydrated vocal cords are something I have had a constant battle with over the past five years. It seems that our ability to retain and circulate water to all the tissues in our body weakens as we age. I certainly don't remember going around with a water bottle when I was young, or constantly feeling the need to drink. Now, with vocal cords that feel constantly dry, I'm keenly aware of the importance of keeping well hydrated. But this week, I gained clear evidence of just how devastating the effects of inadequate hydration can be.

On Saturday, when our weather was at its coldest, I couldn't sing, even after careful warm ups of both body and voice. My voice felt tight, heavy, thick, lumpy, sluggish, inflexible and unresponsive. High notes were simply not there, but even anything above D5 felt effortful and fatiguing. It couldn't just have been a question of stiff muscles; my voice felt in such terrible shape that thoughts of nodules or polyps entered my mind. I spent the whole of that day sipping warm herbal teas. I must have drunk several pints by the end of the day. On Sunday, after the fluid had had a chance to work its way through to my vocal cords, my voice had miraculously recovered to a great extent, and was more than half way to being its former self. I still needed a long warm-up time, but the voice felt lighter and easier, needing less effort. The difference was quite staggering. I haven't been suffering from a cold virus or allergies, and I didn't change my technique overnight, so I can only attribute the change to a difference in fluid levels. A singing teacher is reported to have told her students that singers should drink enough to need to pee every fifteen minutes! That's perhaps going a bit too far, but when you think of the trouble that oboists and bassoon players go to in order to keep their reeds moist, you begin to understand why she might have a point. Cold weather often entails dry air, irrespective of the amount of wet snow outside.

What is interesting is that I was not severely dehydrated on the day when my voice wouldn't work (I was imbibing my normal eight glasses of water a day) yet even that level of hydration, while being adequate for other purposes in day-to-day living, was not nearly sufficient for my singing voice to work. When the mercury goes down, keeping our whistles wet must be our first priority.

I suppose we are like a car and its engine oil. It consumes more oil during testing conditions, and if the oil falls below the level shown by dip-stick, even by a small amount, the car won't function properly and there's a risk of damaging its engine.

Jour d'hiver

2010-01-09T14:03:00.002Z

Le ciel est transi.

Sur la terre nue

La neige est venue...

Sur mon coeur aussi.

Dans l'air obscurci,

Les feuilles dernières

Roulent aux ornières...

Mon bonheur aussi.

Il fait froid ici!

Les cailles, les grives

Ont quitté nos rives...

Ma maîtresse aussi.

Jean Richepin

Winter's icy grip continues in England. This morning I ventured out between snow showers to capture a scene that would illustrate this "Winter's Day" poem set by Louis Vierne as part of his Poème de l'amour, a cycle divided into four seasonal groups according to the Napoleonic calendar: Floréal, Thermidor, Brumaire and Nivôse. This song of deep mid-winter is bleakest, sparest of all Vierne's mélodies.

Footsteps in the Snow

2010-01-07T14:35:00.003Z

Le long du bois couvert de givre, je marchais;

Mes cheveux devant ma bouche

Se fleurissaient de petits glaçons,

Et mes sandales étaient lourdes

De neige fangeuse et tassée.

Pierre Louÿs

From the third song in Debussy's Chansons de Bilitis

Debussy's Tombeau des Naïades always makes me shiver as soon as I hear the piano introduction, which recalls Debussy's Footsteps in the Snow. While I sing the song, my imagination takes me through a scene very like the one captured above, which I beheld this morning on my walk through the woods behind my house.

Coping with Cold

2010-01-04T11:48:00.014Z

Here in the UK we are having an unusually cold winter, and the forecast is for the freeze to continue awhile yet. As I contemplate the snow-covered scene outside and try to keep warm in our large, draughty and cold English house, I reflect on how differently muscles behave in weather like this.

The cat, sensible creature, has taken to snuggling in his bed for as long as he can get away with. We humans find that moving is an effort, and our muscles feel stiff. Warming up the body, never mind the voice, takes twice as long as normal. Perhaps the cat is wise to hibernate: his instincts tell him that it's best to find somewhere warm in which to keep still and not risk injury. I go about with a thick scarf permanently tied around my neck, indoors as well as out. If even my core muscles feel stiff I know that my voice will take a long time to achieve mobility and flexibility. It will feel heavy and sluggish, will be slow to respond and will refuse to extend beyond a tone shy of its nominal range at the top. At such times, the temptation to speed up the process by forcing the voice into areas where it does not want to go must be resisted. The voice, like the cat, wants to be left alone and not made to work. It must be coaxed slowly and gently.

Once we've gone to all that trouble to warm up to a state of vocal semi-compliance (even if it's a far cry from the absolute ease we can sometimes experience on a balmy summer's evening), a further temptation is then to sing for too long, to make the most of our hard-won condition. Bodies tire more quickly in the cold. Singing when fatigued is asking for trouble. We must be extra vigilant and know when to call it a day.

Yesterday I devised a useful vocalise to induce vocal freedom on cold days when breath condenses visibly in the practice room and when scales need more control than the body can muster. I'll post it when I've sorted out new music notation software on this computer. In the meantime, will someone please transport me to a tropical country where the air is moist and warm.

Ways of Learning

2009-12-31T12:15:00.002Z

This end-of-year post is simply a pause for reflection on what benefits I (and perhaps others) have gained from the blogging medium, which didn't exist even a few years ago and is still evolving in all kinds of unexpected directions.

I began my blog as a personal diary, as a convenient way of noting down various points for future reference and easy recall. I didn't think anyone would read it, but I guess that's what many people think when they start to blog. It's a shame when good blogs vanish without trace. What happened, for instance, to soprano Geraldine McGreevy's wonderful blog? Hers was the inspiration for mine. When blogs die they usually show signs of sickness for some time beforehand, with prolonged periods of absence, followed by apologies and half-hearted attempts to revive them, until eventually, from lack of time, interest or motivation on the part of their authors, they go the way of so many good resolutions, slimming programs or fitness regimes. What was so unnerving about McGreevy's blog is that it stopped abruptly from one day to the next, with no slowing down of momentum, no announcement of impending cessation, and no sense that its author had formed any intention of abandoning it.

What I didn't envisage when I created Bonne Chanson is that it would become primarily an educational resource, for me and for others. It's fascinating to see how an idea in one person's blog can spark off other ideas, which reflect one another across related blogs and bounce from one reader or follower to another. The classical singer blog community is a tiny one still. Through Bonne Chanson I have discovered other blogs to read, techniques to try, books to study, recordings to hear, notions to ponder, that I wouldn't otherwise have known about and whose relevance wouldn't necessarily have occurred to me. The combination of blogs, books and YouTube, for people like me who now live in an isolated rural area — where cowsheds and barns take the place of theatres and opera houses — is hugely motivating and inspirational. It is also enlightening to discover, through statistical analysis, what it is that people want to know about. Who'd have thought that "whistle register" and "c'est l'extase" would be the most popular search terms that attract visitors to these pages? The idea of helping a student in a Tokyo tower block to understand a little more about north European symbolist imagery appeals to me. May this process of giving and taking continue through 2010.

Never Forget the Consonants

2009-12-30T20:10:00.009Z

When we address points of vocal technique we tend to focus on breathing, muscular support, resonance, balance, raising the soft palate, covering, placement, vowel modification and tone quality. Yet too often we forget that many problems can be caused by the way we handle — or mishandle — the consonants.

The French singer Madeleine Grey (1896–1979), whose memoirs I bought in Paris last month, recalls the difficulties she had in superimposing words onto sung pitches: "To have a homogeneous voice on A, I and O is not everything: one must add the words." She worked very hard on her diction, even to the extent of putting little pebbles in each side of her mouth during her practice sessions on the text, though she doesn't make clear why that would have helped. I was delighted to find that she mentions Fauré's Chansons de Venise as giving her particular difficulties of enunciation. I've already noted here how awkward I found his setting of "Green" to negotiate.

In The Head Voice and Other Problems, D. A. Clippinger writes:

If language consisted entirely of vowels learning to sing would be much simpler than it is. It is the consonants that cause trouble. It is not uncommon to find students who can vocalize with comparative ease, but the moment they attempt to sing words the mechanism becomes rigid. The tendency toward rigidity is much greater in enunciating consonants than it is in enunciating vowels, and yet they should be equally easy.

It is a very common thing for singers to vocalize for an indefinite period with no ill effect, but become hoarse with ten minutes of singing. The reason is apparent. They have learned how to produce vowels with a free throat but not consonants. The moment they attempt to form a consonant, tension appears, not only in those parts of the mechanism which form the consonant, but in the vocal organ as well. Under such treatment the voice soon begins to show wear.

His solution is the obvious one of keeping the consonants distinct but short, and preserving the legato as much as possible by not allowing them to interrupt the continuity of the tone and not giving them so much weight that they cause the throat to become rigid.

Words, and even less consonants, are things that we don't immediately associate with vocal technique. Next time there's unresolved tension on a phrase, ask yourself whether it's the consonants that are getting in the way.

Laryngeal Workout

2009-12-23T17:05:00.006Z

I've now been doing Yva Barthélémy's silent vocal gymnastics for about three weeks, and today I can report positive results. I first noticed a difference yesterday but decided to wait another day before attributing the breakthrough to the exercises, in order to make sure that the new ease I experienced in the upper middle register was not due to the normal variation in vocal condition that one experiences from day to day (the voice simply works better on some days than on other days, for no apparent reasons). The exercises are "silent" in that they're done without phonating, and I do them at various times throughout the day, in the bath, in the house, in the car — in fact anywhere where I can't be seen (as they involve sticking the tongue out) — both before and after my normal singing practice session.

So today I definitely felt a difference in the muscles: instead of complaining they complied. Instead of resisting they relented. And where I've grown accustomed to stiffness and tension in certain areas of the voice I new began to feel a certain freedom and blessed support. (My yardstick for measuring the ratio of tension versus freedom in the voice has always been Vaccai's "Senza l'amabile".) There is a way to go, but now at least I know which way. Since my voice began to change about five years ago, getting deeper and heavier in a process that is still ongoing, the amount of muscular support that I used in the past was now no longer sufficient to sustain notes from D5 upwards. My vocal muscles had not managed to keep pace with the physical changes in my larynx, which, for what I assume are age-related hormonal reasons, was reconfiguring itself. My suspicion that the difficulties I was having in playing my altered instrument could be attributed, at least partly, to weakness in the laryngeal muscles and not just to insufficient engagement of the abdominal and intercostal muscles has, I think, been borne out by the fact that no amount of extra breath energy or increased lower-body support made any difference. My breath control has always been my strong point (I would always win any "who can sing a note for longest" contest), so I was fairly sure that the trouble was more likely to be related to inherent vocal difficulties in the upper passaggio, which, never having been properly resolved, were bound to become magnified once the voice began to lose its elasticity and flexibility in the sixth decade of life. Now that I'm halfway through that sixth decade, remedial measures are definitely called for, so I was delighted to discover Madame Barthélémy's exercises for strengthening the laryngeal muscles and reducing vocal fatigue.

In one sentence — and stated in very simplified form — these particular exercises consist in breathing in while yawning with an open jaw but a closed mouth, and then breathing out though a wide open mouth while sticking the tongue as far out as it will go, flat against the lower teeth and with its tip curled downward over the lower lip. This movement strengthens in alternation the muscles that lower the larynx and those that raise it, but it also works the support muscles at the back of the neck, encourages an open pharyngeal area and raised position of the soft palate, and loosens the tongue. The palate positioning and tongue loosening elements are perhaps important for beginners, but for me, it was the strengthening of those muscles in and around the larynx and in the neck that mattered.

There are other supplementary movements to be used in conjunction with this basic exercise, as well as exercises that target the core muscles and other muscles of support, but it is this laryngeal exercise — the only one that I've done so far — that is at the heart of Madame Barthélémy's method.

Update on 27 December:
Two unexpected byproducts of the vocal gymnastics:

improved eyesight and sharper vision
enormous progress in the whistle/flageolet register (a whole octave from the B flat below high C to the B flat above)

YB talks about the connection between eyes and larynx in her book. As for the whistle register, I recall that only one year ago I couldn't access this register at all!

Yva Barthélémy

2009-12-04T19:49:00.007Z

I am halfway through a first reading of Yva Barthélémy's fascinating book La voix libérée. At the same time I am trying out some of the silent laryngeal gymnastics she advocates. Perhaps in a couple of weeks I shall be able to report on their effect.

Meanwhile, there is much else to consider in this volume. In particular, she mentions that she would never give mélodies by Fauré to a beginner to study. Fauré, she says, is redoutable! (So it's not just me then!) Although she is French, she considers French a difficult language to sing and prefers to train her students on Schubert and Wolf, and Italian arias.

On technical matters she is not afraid to buck the trend. She is opposed to the practice of high notes sung with the head tilted slightly back, a habit of many of the greatest singers and a position advocated by several respected authorities. If it worked for those singers, she says, it's because they all had a particular shape of face and neck that permitted it, but in most cases it would be detrimental to good sound production. I happen to agree with her on this.

Of special interest are her observations and insights into the individual characteristics of physique and posture that determine what type of singer we are (or have the potential to be) and what particular weaknesses or difficulties are liable to occur. Since everyone is different, voice training—or muscle building—requirements will be different for every singer.

This made me ponder about the days when composers wrote operatic arias to fit particular voices. This no longer happens, or at least not to the same extent. Now we have to make our voices fit music scores that are written in stone (out of respect for the composer), and the experience is not always a comfortable one. Just as bespoke suits and dresses made to measure look and feel so much better than ready-made clothes bought off-the-peg, so surely does bespoke music bring out the best in the individual voice for which it was written. Why do we no longer have the liberty to edit or rewrite passages to suit our own voices? Once, it was accepted practice for singers to write their own embellishments or cadenzas for bel canto operas, yet now we are expected to choose from one or two "standard" offerings that Ricordi, or whoever, have chosen to print, on the recommendation of musicologists or conductors who are not vocalists and may not know all that much about how the voice works; a one-size-fits-all approach. Singers used to collaborate with composers in putting the final touches on newly composed material. Now, however, the body of the classical repertoire is mostly just that—music from a dead body, a corpus. It is no accident that the songs in Fauré's La bonne chanson are so much less redoutable than many of his other songs: the editorial hand and final say-so of Emma Bardac — the cycle's dedicatee and the woman who actually had to sing the pieces — was clearly at work.

But going back to Yva Barthélémy, I have discovered, to my amazement, that she obtained the Grand prix du disque for the mélodies of Louis Vierne! When were these recordings made? Why does no one seem to know of their existence? My google searches on this information have reached an impasse. I shall try to find out more about this.

Equally intriguing is why this important book has never been published in English. I will gladly undertake to translate it gratis for any publisher who wants to take it on. It cannot be ignored by the English-speaking section of vocal pedagogy.

Green

2009-11-29T18:32:00.024Z

This is the third piece of my trilogy of comparative studies of Debussy and Fauré's settings of Verlaine. The second is just below and the first was at the beginning of this month. In some ways the two Green settings are more straightforwardly transparent than the other two songs and perhaps therefore not as interesting. There is less of substance to explore, and I find less to say about them.

Fauré's Green, composed in 1891 as one of the Chansons de Venise, and written a few years after Debussy's setting, is in my view not as successful as his predecessor's version. And I'm not saying that just because it is irritatingly difficult to sing. It is Fauré at his trickiest, meandering around awkward corners, delighting in wrongfooting his performers with unexpected twists and turns in and out of mini-modulations. The restless vocal line leaps about, darting up and down awkward intervals. His metronome mark (crotchet = 69) is surprisingly fast, making the tortuous vocal line even more difficult to negotiate. The breathless singer must do their best to keep up and is evidently supposed to portray someone rushing in from the cold, with beating heart and panting breath, bearing fruits, flowers, leaves and branches as an offering to the beloved. Fauré's metronome markings have often been discredited in the past, yet Fauré was known as Monsieur Métronome and, when accompanying singers, reputedly ploughed on regardless, giving them no leeway. He abhorred unnecessary sentimentality and excessive rubato. Swift tempi give his music the required deftness and delicate élégance that characterised him as a person. I, for one, find performances that respect his speed indications totally convincing.

A further difficulty is that this is something of a patter song. Every note has its own syllable, and the fast pace and almost uninterrupted vocal part allow few opportunities for rest. I only found out recently that the edition I have (for high voice, shown above) is one tone higher than original key. Perhaps that's why it feels wrong and ill-fitting. I heard a tenor perform it not so long ago, and he sang it in the original key. That suggests to me that he too found the high-voice version ungrateful. To sing it a whole tone down would make an enormous difference to ease of production of all those consonants. It would by no means sit too low in the voice, and the lowest note would be one single D flat. The high-key version might suit a young or light voice better, but I suspect that most lyric voices would prefer the original key. There are difficulties everywhere in this song, but the most awkward passage is perhaps the three-note sequence on "Puisque vous..." near the end. The G flat to C flat downward interval does not come instinctively and needs to be thoroughly worked into the voice.

Debussy's setting, by contrast, is technically easier to sing, if not to play. The pianist here has all the awkward leaps. The vocal line has a wider compass — both upward and downward — than in the Fauré, but the tessitura is less taxing overall. Incidentally, it is not a good idea to transpose Debussy. Some of his songs are high, some are low and some wide-ranging, but he chose his keys and sonorities carefully and you can't mess around with them; Pierre Bernac was adamant about that!

Unusually, Debussy's version is the more melodic and tuneful of the two. The most difficult passage to master is the phrase "de vos derniers baisers", with its diminuendo up to the G flat. Care is also needed with "Ne le déchirez pas": the distinction between the tones and semi-tones in that unintuitive scale must be clear and the tuning precise.

The tone is fairly similar in both songs — light and frothy — but Debussy's version has an added layer of sensuality. There is a seductive suppleness that is not present in the Fauré. All these facets must be captured and conveyed.

Oddly (in view of the title), I don't associate these settings with any particular colour. Perhaps that is why I chose to describe them as transparent at the beginning of this analysis. Translations and links to downloads can be found here. Any student of Debussy's piece should listen to the man himself accompanying Mary Garden in 1904:

Spleen

2009-11-29T11:11:00.020Z

This is the second piece of my trilogy of comparative studies of Debussy and Fauré's settings of Verlaine's poetry.

The two settings of Il pleure dans mon coeur (called Spleen in Fauré's version) were composed one year apart, in 1887 and 1888. If Fauré heard Debussy's setting before writing his own, it was the one that Debussy published in 1888. He republished it in 1903 with certain modifications as one of the songs in the Ariettes oubliées cycle. Singers using the Dover scores should be aware that it is the earlier version that is reprinted there, rather than the later edition that is usually heard on recordings and in performance. The differences, mainly in the vocal line, are slight, however, and do not affect the general interpretation.

The rival versions have several features in common. Both are in 3/4 time, and both have pianistic raindrops falling throughout the song. Only Debussy allows a brief lull at "Quoi! Nulle trahison? Ce deuil est sans raison." Fauré's rain has a neat touch: its rhythmic patter is accentuated by thicker, heavier drops falling at more widely spaced intervals — perhaps dripping from overflowing gutters — in the base of the left hand. And whereas Debussy's rain pours down at a regular rate, Fauré introduces variation by alternating light rain (in semi-quaver patterns) with heavier rain (triplet motifs). Both composers set apart the word "quoi!", but Debussy does so more deliberately.

As with C'est l'extase, the emotions in the Debussy setting are more complex than in the Fauré.
Fauré sees the narrator as being in the throes of unadulterated or unmodified sadness and suffering. Debussy's narrator has more mixed and conflicting feelings: the sadness has given way to bitterness mingled with a sense of irony and mockery and an attitude of being past caring. But there is also a perverse taking delight, or wallowing, in the suffering. Where Fauré's narrator is nostalgically self-centered, and speaking subjectively to no one in particular, Debussy's is more objectively self-aware and relates the situation, almost with relish, to the world at large.

The key lies in the word doux in "O bruit doux de la pluie" (Oh, gentle sound of the rain). For Fauré, doux means soft, and the narrator seeks consolation, as one might seek solace in grief with appropriately soft, sad and restrained music. For Debussy doux means sweet, but with ironic overtones, in the sense of bittersweet. Another interesting word is écoeurer in "Il pleure sans raison dans mon coeur qui s'écoeure" (It rains for no reason in my sickened heart). The etymological meaning of écoeurer is dishearten (literally: to take out the heart), but it is usually used in the sense of disgust, in association with feelings of nausea.

So, where Debussy's general summary of the poem might go something like: "What is this languorous feeling that enters my heart? For a heart that's disgusted, oh, the sweet sound of the rain", Fauré's take on it could be more like: "What is this awful heaviness that penetrates my heart? For a heart that's being torn apart, oh the soft sound of raindrops." Debussy's narrator is staring at their predicament in the face, through and beyond the rain, and is moving on. Fauré's narrator, in a state of desolation and near-catatonia, cannot see beyond the veil of tears and rain; at this watershed moment, all hope is abandoned.

As far as interpretation goes, it's all a question of colour. For me, Debussy is turquoise in this song. The tone should be crystal clear, cool, sophisticated and somewhat detached, but laced with a touch of sarcasm, in a way that foreshadows Poulenc. There's a little remnant of sadness but also a tiny portion of humour. The many conflicting facets are tricky to bring off without sounding overly flippant. Vocally, the only technical difficulties are the leaps up to the G sharps, which must be clean and on target, and the last phrase of the song, with its long, sustained C sharp on a diminuendo, followed by a low D sharp that must be held steadily for its full written length, requiring excellent breath control. This last phrase is a good reason for not taking this song too slowly. There is a recording of it sung by Mary Garden accompanied by Debussy himself, which weighs in at 2 minutes 8 seconds.

Fauré's colours are deep velvety pink, crimson and purple, enveloping one in a warm tenderness (as only Fauré can), despite the sadness and the nostalgia. There's no humour here; only humility. Technically, the difficulty is to glide from one note to the next in a perfectly smooth, steady and supported legato. The tuning of each note must be scrupulously exact; the tessitura makes it difficult not to sing under pitch. Nothing must bump, or jar or deviate from the line. Fauré writes for voice here as though it were a violin, and the words take second place to tone and line.

Both of these settings are little masterpieces in equal measure. Translations and links to downloads can be found here. Any student of Debussy's piece should listen to the man himself accompanying Mary Garden in 1904:

Vocal Muscle Building

2009-11-28T17:17:00.008Z

One advantage of speaking a language other than English is that a whole new literature becomes available for perusal and study. While in Paris last week I went to the capital's largest book store and checked out the section on voice. Alongside the usual classics, such as translations of Richard Miller's books, I found La voix libérée (the liberated voice) by Yva Barthélémy, which has never been published in English, though it has been translated into Italian.

In mid-career as an opera singer, Yva Barthélémy strained her voice and faced a vocal crisis. She explains in her book and on her website that in 1975

[she] had to come to terms with a sudden and inexplicable deterioration in the quality of her voice in the preceding years. This sparked an exhaustive study of the phonic system. The next step was to study anatomical-physiology which resulted in a brand-new method of muscular preparation for opera singers. She experimented with it for seven years, after which her voice improved dramatically. The school of singing was founded. [Source]

La voix libérée was published in 1984 and revised in 2003. Yva Barthélémy's website gives a brief outline of her methodology. It contains some exercises that I have not seen in other books. Those which interest me in particular are the exercises that specifically target the muscles of the larynx. So often one is made to believe that laryngeal muscles (unlike abdominal or other muscles of the respiratory support system) cannot and must not be exercised independently of phonation, and that the only way to train, condition or rehabilitate the voice box is by vocalizing with a proper technique. This lady believes that it is possible to strengthen the muscles in and around the larynx without uttering a sound. I like the idea of focusing on an activity that is dissociated from the production of sound that might otherwise distract me. A sound that I'm not happy with always entails some compensatory manoeuvre which, if incorrect, only exacerbates the problem when it becomes etched in the muscle memory. Exercising in silence eliminates such risks entirely.

Yva Barthélémy observes that slim-built people (like herself), who tend to have long, slender necks, have a predisposition to weakness in certain areas and often have less vocal stamina than those of heavier build, whose necks tend to be shorter and stockier. I'm a long-necked species, and in spite of having developed excellent breath control I have always had limited vocal stamina. I am happy therefore to put these exercises to the test.

I shall report back as soon as I have anything of interest to report, whether it be positive or negative.

Now We Are Three

2009-11-13T20:01:00.028Z

Just spotted on iTunes: a new recording on the Naxos label of one of Louis Vierne's song cycles, the opus 48 Poème de l'amour. It was released on 17 November of this year (note tense and date; does time work backwards in our virtual world?). So now there are all of three of us who've put out CDs of this ill-known work. Listening to the clips on iTunes gave me a shock as of course I've never heard Vierne's mélodies sung by a man. Nor, I dare say, have many others in living memory. The piece was written for a woman to sing (Madeleine Richepin, Vierne's companion and a cousin of Jean Richepin who wrote the verses), but Michael Bundy's bass-baritone voice gives it a tenebrous tonality that suits it well (an effect that is possibly enhanced by the transposition one tone down from the written pitches).

The pianist is Jeremy Filsell, a chap I worked with many years ago when he occasionally came to play the organ at the church where I sang in West London. He's admirably suited for the task as he's just as much an organist as a pianist — and vice versa. And he knows Vierne's music inside out as he's already recorded all of the organ symphonies. So Jeremy, if you see this, may it remind you of those Sunday mornings in Kensington. And I hope you didn't have as much trouble tracking down the out-of-print score as we did! By an unfortunate misunderstanding the national library in Paris initially sent me a murky photocopy of the full handwritten score of the orchestral version, which ran to a couple of hundred pages and almost as many Euros.

The cycle was composed in 1924 and published three years later, but it was not until 1930 that it received its first performance — by Vierne and Madeleine at the Salle Érard.* Vierne orchestrated the original piano part, but his biographer Bernard Gavoty doesn't say whether the orchestral version ever got further than the handwritten page. It wouldn't have been exactly cheap to put on (4 horns, 4 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, etc.)! Here's a folio from "Les sorcières" (The Witches). Click to enlarge it.

What a lot of work for something that was so seldom, if ever, performed!

Also just out (on the Melba label) is a recording of Australian tenor Steve Davislim singing Vierne's four symphonic tone poems for voice and orchestra. These are: Psyché, op. 33; Les Djinns, op. 35; Eros, op 37; and the Ballade du désespéré, op. 61. I'm glad there are now others to help spread the word about Vierne the mélodiste.

*Update, 18 November: I understand from Michael Bundy, who has very kindly got in touch, that this scheduled première performance by Madeleine Richepin and Vierne was cancelled because Vierne was ill.

C'est L'Extase

2009-11-07T17:14:00.018Z

Debussy's and Fauré's settings of C'est l'extase appeared within four years of each other, in 1887 and 1891 respectively, yet it is Debussy's that sounds the more modern of the two. Both have a triple-time pulse running through them and both make use of irregularity in a similar syncopated rhythm to signify breathlessness, excitement, the skipping of a heartbeat. In Fauré this device continues more or less throughout the whole of song. In Debussy it is more spasmodic but is particularly noticeable at "C'est tous les frissons de bois/Parmi l'étreinte des brises/C'est vers les ramures grises/le choeur des petites voix."

Fauré's setting is the more unified. He starts in a certain style, continues pretty much unvaryingly in the same vein and, after the climax at "La mienne, dis, et la tienne/Dont s'exhale l'humble antienne", winds down at "Par ce tiède soir", and comes to a gentle stop at "tout bas". The whole song is one great melodic arch underpinned by delicate piano figurations. It waxes and wanes with steady dynamics in a gentle rise and gradual fall.

Debussy's setting is more disjointed, as with so many of his songs. He operates in smaller units, in two- or three-bar chunks, which he strings together to form a whole. Whereas Fauré weaves his way around a fairly direct (if not entirely predictable) path, fitting the words to the melody almost incidentally, Debussy seems to carve a route as he goes along and to take whatever direction is dictated by the words. In Debussy's C'est l'extase the sung words take precedence and the piano part is fitted around them to some extent. In Fauré the reverse happens. Debussy builds his song to reach a climax at the same lines of text as in Fauré's version, and there is a similar winding down of the voice part, ending on a pianissimo note somewhat low down in the singer's range. The last words of the song, "tout bas", in the context of speech mean "very softly", but the literal meaning of "bas" is "low". The vocal line of both songs ends on the key-note (E in Debussy and E flat in Fauré), and the piano fades out with similar syncopated rhythms, ending on simple tonic chord.

Debussy's rendering is the more overtly sexual. Fauré's is perhaps less original and less explicit, but it is just as suggestive in its way and is beautifully crafted. It has a warmer, more romantic and tender feel to it. Debussy's is more double-edged and ambiguous. There is an air of desperation about the last verse — an anxious question mark at "n'est-ce-pas?" (is it not so?) — which is not present in Fauré's unashamedly passionate outpouring. Fauré's "is it not?" is more of a conspiratorial, almost incidental, "don't you think?" or "wouldn't you agree?" Debussy reads more into Verlaine's question: a situation that is too good to last, that may end in tears, where doubt is already beginning to form. For Debussy, "is it not?" means something more like: "It is so, is it not? Please tell me yes; that you feel as I do; that you won't abandon me", where the voice says nonne but the heart knows it's a num.* Debussy has seen the punctuation mark that ends the poem, whereas Fauré either didn't see it or chose to ignore it in favour of a happy outcome. And no wonder, since Debussy was more of a pessimist and Fauré more of an optimist.

Fauré delights in unusual note sequences and intricate patterns, Debussy's concern is with conveying mood by means of rich harmony and subtle coloration of individual words. In some respects Debussy's piece is a better reflection of Verlaine's poem, which is itself a series of seemingly random images whose connections are only discerned at the end.

From a technical point of view, everything about Debussy's writing is problematic for singers. There are awkward leaps, some wide intervals and a fairly wide compass. Clean lines, fine tuning and tight control are needed throughout. The difficulty is not to let the disjointed and sometimes angular writing cause undue tension. Controlled freedom is the paradoxical aim here. The first phrase (see image above) is a real challenge, especially for higher voices. To follow the soft and restrained piano introduction with a controlled "C'est" that is both contained and fully charged with a complex set of emotions needs all the concentration that one can muster and is truly daunting. Any tiny deviation from the pitch, any wobble on the note, will show up dreadfully here. Then, for "l'extase langoureuse", one must get the just the right amount of sultry smoothness on the descending scale (which straddles the first passaggio) without letting the whole thing sag and without exaggeration or parody. It must sound heartfelt but not mannered; one should be recounting ecstasy, not reliving it. Fauré's version is more singer-friendly in that the vocal line is altogether more abandoned and free. It is beautifully melodic and should be sung as legato and sostenuto as possible. Nevertheless, there are one or two awkward intervals and passages to negotiate in terms of pitching.

You'll find the text and my translation here , where there are also links to download the songs.

*In Latin, “nonne” is used to phrase a question when a yes answer is expected and “num” is used when a no answer is expected.

Mistaken Identity

2009-10-17T10:37:00.009+01:00

The Barbican, one of London's principal concert halls, has (at the time of blogging) put on a page of its website an audio clip of Dawn Upshaw singing "Debussy — La Chanson d'Ève". I'm wondering how long it will take for someone to spot the error. French mélodie may be somewhat of a less than mainstream genre, especially in England, but to me, this is as glaring as seeing a reference to "Schumann's Winterreise". The clip in question (the third song of the cycle) shows Fauré in one of his most characteristic guises and could not possibly be mistaken for anything Debussy ever wrote.

It was Dawn Upshaw's disc of La Chanson d'Ève, incidentally, that inspired me to add my own interpretations of Fauré's late, negelected, song cycles to the disc of Debussy cycles that I'd already recorded. The first piece of La Chanson is the cycle's masterpiece. It depicts the first day in the creation of the world with a single-note piano introduction (see image), echoed by the voice, which gradually unfolds, by means of a bare fifth followed by simple held chords, from dawn to full-blown day. Who, other than an organist, would have thought of using the piano in this way? But the theme is in fact Mélisande's theme from Fauré's incidental music to Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande.

A Question of Dynamics

2009-10-11T10:22:00.008+01:00

Those who run a service for musicians must keep an eye on what's happening on the online social networking scene. Accordingly, I set up a Group for DepList on Facebook quite some time ago, but although it has quite a few faces it's hardly ever used. I wonder if the same will happen with MusBook, where I have just set up a similar Group. When MusBook moved house and rebuilt itself elsewhere, many of its users stayed behind, presumably in disgruntlement after encountering the sort of problems that I documented here in June. But MusBook has worked hard on its internal workings as well as its exterior appearance and its fixtures and fittings, and it now looks a whole lot better. The number of its subscribers in the UK is still surprisingly small, but I know from DepList how long these things can take to get going.

I wish I could provide for DepList some degree of the kind of dynamic interactivity that's found on Facebook, MusBook and similar sites. I have searched high and low for an off-the-shelf solution that I could adapt and customise for DepList. As a absolute minimum requirement, my members should be able to update their profiles interactively and instantaneously, without having to send their updates to me for uploading onto the site. I'd also like user name and password creation (and reminder!) facilities for members to be done automatically. But I can find nothing that would would provide these things as a bolt-on to what I already have on the site, laid out in the format that I want. All the forum and guestbook templates, membership sites and the like that I've examined provide some of what we need, but not all of it and not in the right combination or with the right interface. Customisability only goes so far, and DepList's subtle mixture of public and private components cannot be accommodated in anything I've looked at so far. The only solution would be to create a bespoke site using the PHP scripting language, and that is technically beyond my capabilities. I'd need to take several months off to learn and do what needs learning and doing, and even then I still might not be able to make it work, because I'm me on my own and I don't have a team of backroom techies. It's one thing to create a working site; it's another to get that site working with your chosen web host provider. The upheaval of closing down one site and reopening it elsewhere, without too much downtime or disruption to one's members, is a terrifying prospect. Discussion forums can be helpful, but not if it takes half a day to formulate a query and receive a sensible reply.

Fortunately, the website part of DepList is not as important as the messaging part, which relies on e-mail and RSS feed and which works extremely well. But the time must surely soon come when the website will have to be rebuilt from the ground up, using PHP. I hope that by then there will be some user-friendly software available for people like me to design dynamic websites.

UPDATE, February 2011
I did eventually find such software and have been able to fulfil all the minimum requirements listed above, and more besides. It was not easy, but I have rebuilt DepList as a fully interactive site, with facilities for uploading pictures and audio clips. It uses PHP and MySQL.

Maintaining One's Muscles

2009-09-24T18:03:00.006+01:00

Toreadorssong makes some fascinating observations on muscle strength and stamina in singing. I have spent most of a physically demanding summer — doing house clearance, tackling big gardening projects, and moving house — thinking about strength, and realising that certain movements that I took for granted even a decade ago now feel effortful. For instance, standing up from a crouching position without placing my hands on the ground, or setting off on a bicycle when the road is on an upward slope, or getting out a car after a journey that's only moderately long are activities that I now must consciously prepare for and brace myself to perform. I am conscious of my muscles and what they are telling me. In the old days I no more thought about those movements than I would think about putting one foot in front of the other when I walk. Thank goodness I am no longer a choir member at All Saints, Margaret Street, where, once a year, we had to drop down to the ground and get up again in a double genuflection with a hymn book in one hand and a candle in the other, singing all the while. That posed no problem at the time but is now a sequence of actions that would require forethought, careful preparation, and conscious coordinated effort for it not to end in disaster. So it is with singing.

If the major muscles in my body have lost a certain amount of their strength and flexibility with time, then so have the laryngeal muscles. They are certainly much more prone to "feel the pinch" in music that hovers around and above the upper passaggio for more than a few seconds. In addition, my vocal cords have become thicker and slower to respond. Some days they feel like heavyweights and it takes more muscle to get them to work. A programme of maintenance involving strength training, vocal aerobics and stretching exercises is called for if what technique remains is not to disappear altogether. And of course, taking care to avoid overexertion (I learnt my lesson about this last year) and to allow adequate rest periods. Another blogger has much of interest to say about muscles here .

Songs of Triumphant Love

2009-09-23T12:23:00.010+01:00

)I have just finished reading Jessica Duchen's latest novel, Songs of Triumphant Love. She is one of my favourite bloggers and I found her wonderfully sympathetic biography of Gabriel Fauré invaluable when I was preparing my CD of his songs. I was curious to see how she would treat a novel about a diva.

The subject of the novel was inspired by the story of the singer Pauline Viardot — whose daughter Marianne was engaged to Fauré — and the writer Turgenev. Pauline Viardot retired from the stage at the age of 41, having lost her voice. (In passing, it's worth mentioning that Viardot was also the inspiration behind George Sand's Consuelo.)

In Songs of Triumphant Love, the twenty-first century equivalent of Viardot and Turgenev are Teresa Ivory, an operatic soprano, who has just had a vocal polyp removed, and Teo Popovic, a Bosnian writer who is her lover. Marianne and Fauré are represented by the diva's student daughter and her soldier boyfriend.

Jessica Duchen's novel takes place in London and Paris with a few scenes set in Bosnia and Afghanistan. It's a clever novel, with plenty of interweaving threads and comic elements alongside the tragic ones, and a good storyline, but I probably would have enjoyed it more if its heroine had been anything other than a classical singer. I couldn't identify with her or be carried along in her sphere in the way I was expecting and hoping to be. I just wasn't convinced by the personality of Teresa Ivory as an opera singer. But that's just me. It's a good novel, and others will enjoy it nevertheless.

Many years ago, when I was a teenager, Beverley Nichols' Evensong took me deeply inside a singer's psyche and succeeded (with uncanny accuracy, now that I'm in a position to judge) in conveying to me what it actually feels like to be a singer d'un certain âge, an age that Teresa Ivory is fast approaching. Beverley Nichols was able to let us in on a middle-aged prima diva's obsessions because he knew and worked for Nellie Melba. His heroine may have been nasty, but by god she was convincing.

In a singer, the person and the voice are intricately and inextricably linked, each one exerting control upon the other. The ability to sing professionally is a delicate balancing act, an opposition of forces, and it needs a constant programme of care and maintenance, as well as regular training sessions. A singer's voice is never out of her mind—until the day she retires. Aside from such dangers as late nights, loud parties, pollen, dust, extremes of temperature, strong alcohol and acid reflux, is the constant fear of straining the delicate muscles that work the voice and the seasonal one of catching a throat infection. A cold can put you out for a whole month. Avoidance of these daily threats to a voice's ability to function becomes second nature, but it also governs a singer's life to a degree that many would consider obsessive. It is a life of continual monitoring and anxiety, which singers try to keep hidden from the public but which manifests itself from time to time as behaviour that others might deem eccentric at best and totally neurotic at worst. I saw little of this in Terri (she's far too normal), which is what failed to convince me that she was a real singer.

I'm disappointed that Jessica Duchen didn't focus more on a singer's regimen, and what can go wrong with the voice; after all, she knows her stuff and she consulted three singers, a vocal coach and a laryngologist. I'm not suggesting that readers should be overwhelmed to the point of boredom with such minutiae, but they risk being left with the idea that singers, once trained, have to do very little to maintain their voices. We don't know what led up to Terri's polyp or how it affected her singing. And we're not told very much about how she regained her voice after the long period of recovery. It's almost as though the author didn't want to inflict that level of detail on her readers.

Next on my list of diva novels to read is Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Let's see how she fares in comparison to Nichols' nasty heroine and Duchen's nice one.

Relocation

2009-08-28T19:49:00.003+01:00

No posts in July, and none in August save this one. That's because my domestic circumstances have changed since my last entry, and various matters unrelated to singing or music have taken up all of my waking hours. Not least of these is my relocation from London to Kent, which was temporary initially, but now, for practical reasons has been made permanent. Other duties have meant that I haven't had a free moment to even think about singing, let alone write entries in this blog. I hope that some kind of service, even if not yet normal, will resume in the Autumn. Meanwhile, I have to accept that singing opportunities in the Weald are obviously never going to be as plentiful as in London, but in due course I hope to be able to go up to London occasionally. Perhaps now is the time to think about starting to teach here in Kent. With luck, in the Autumn I will find time to resume blogging a little more regularly.

End of an Era

2009-06-29T14:42:00.002+01:00

Yesterday, domestic circumstances forced me to initiate my move to Kent and to tender my resignation from my Sunday church singing job in London. I've been in this particular post for 15 years. Before that I sang at All Saints Margaret Street for eight years, and before that at a Roman Catholic church in St John's Wood for 12 years. I have sung about 35 Christmas services and the same number of Easter Day services. The comforting and familiar routine has come to a sudden stop. From now on, away from London, singing opportunities will be few and far between. The most intense years were at Margaret Street, for there are two services every Sunday as well as numerous extra weekday services. One Sunday I came to a 10 a.m. rehearsal straight from Heathrow, with five minutes to spare. I had left Denmark at dawn, having sung there the previous night. I thought nothing of it, other than a vague sense of excitement, but I can no more imagine doing that now than singing the Queen of the Night!

Histoires Naturelles

2009-06-25T09:28:00.005+01:00

It may be fun to discuss the finer points of a review (see previous post), but sometimes life's little histoires cause us to abandon (temporarily I hope) such pleasant diversions. The performance and criticism of the French mélodie is best left to the towns—preferably Paris—where life is less distracting. In the country, more pressing problems tend to take over.

On Friday, the last day of a major house rewiring project, we lost our water supply. Trees grow, and roots reach down and break pipes. Letting a water pipe run through woodland is not a good idea, but decades ago, when the pipe was laid along the shortest route from the road to the house, the trees were mere saplings.

The water board managed to reconnect some parts of the house by means of a temporary pipe, but left our staff flat unprovided for. The following day my mother decided to go down to the roadside to see what the watermen had done. She slipped on the gravel driveway and fell. We got her back to the house and to her bed, where she stayed as she thought she had sprained her ankle. On Monday I was seeing off the electricians after their month-long programme of work and welcoming the water board back again, all the while waiting for the doctor to arrive and, once he'd examined my mother, the ambulance. The "sprained" ankle is in fact a broken one—in two places.

Yesterday, I took a chair to a workshop be re-upholstered. The workshop's doors were wide open and music was blaring from a radio in a corner. No sign of the occupant, save for a large red-setter dog lying asleep, presumably guarding the premises. I sat by the door in my broken chair and waited in the sun. It was a blazingly gorgeous day, as it often is in the days following the summer solstice. After ten minutes the red-setter got onto its feet and ambled over to check me out. We talked for a while. After another ten minutes the owner of the workshop drew up. He'd only nipped back home to feed his pigs, he said. But his mother-in-law had decided to do some gardening and dug through the mains water pipe.

Ah, les faux beaux jours!

Reviewing the Review

2009-06-21T20:33:00.014+01:00

It was most kind of Ian Bailey to review the Vierne album on the MusicWeb International site, and I thank him very much for his balanced and fair assessment. I hope he won't mind if I use the best bits of its bottom line for promotional purposes. That, after all, is partly what reviews (not to mention bottom lines) are for! But for those who might be curious enough to read the whole of it, I must quickly point out that a quotation he attributes to Vierne's biographer, Bernard Gavoty, a celebrated music critic in his day, was actually penned by me! Mr Bailey writes:

In their liner-notes the duo quote a passage from Bernard Gavoty’s biography of the composer (comparing him with Fauré) which states, “Vierne was more elemental, more overtly passionate and, by some gothically tragic streak in his nature, naturally drawn to poems that featured lightning storms, and maelstroms, turmoil and tormented souls.”

And then, later,

The final song "Marine" again rouses strong passions, reflecting not only Gavoty’s Gothic seascapes...

What my liner notes actually say is:

In his biography of Louis Vierne, Bernard Gavoty said that “he stood halfway between Franck and Fauré, was less ecstatic than the former but less pure than the latter, was more profoundly lyrical than both, and generally allied himself to a more absolute romanticism.” One might add that whereas Fauré was always elegant and refined in his composition, and generally chose poems that would enable him to reflect those qualities in his music, Vierne was more elemental, more overtly passionate and, by some gothically tragic streak in his nature, was naturally drawn to poems that featured lightning storms and maelstroms, turmoil and tormented souls.

I suppose I could have made the distinction clearer, but the "One might add" was supposed to indicate a switch from Gavoty's views to my own. Futhermore, that sentence lacks quotation marks. But it's interesting that the word "gothic" captured my reviewer's attention. That was my term, picked after a long search in my mental vocabulary, as well as dear old Roget's, for something that might fit. It's probably not a word that Gavoty would have used, because in French the adjective "gothique" is confined to styles of architecture. Fortunately Monsieur Gavoty, now in his grave, is not in a position to object. A shame in some ways; he'd probably have a blog today, and I would enjoy discussing Vierne's gothicism with him.

The Long and the Short of It

2009-06-02T15:04:00.012+01:00

One of the resident blackbirds in the garden has chosen a singular theme tune for the season. It consists of a rising three-note motif, B, C, D, repeated once. The rhythmic pattern is three quavers followed by a quaver rest, then the same again. And that's it—short and to the point. The bird has been singing this at intervals throughout the day for the past month or so, always maintaining perfect pitch, beginning on a note that's somewhere between a B flat and a B natural. The three notes are intoned squarely and deliberately, like bells, and the song is distinct from anything else going on in the garden and can be heard from quite far away—an unusual strategy for a species renowned for its somewhat complex melodic statements.

Meanwhile, in the woods behind the garden, we have a virtuoso willow warbler whose breath control would be the envy of many a singer. For the bird's recording session last week, R and I were lucky to pick an evening when airplanes were few and the tiny songster had the stage to himself. These are a few of the arias he performed for us from his theatre in the birch trees. Sadly, our favourite nightingale hasn't come back this year.

Engine Tuning

2009-05-14T14:52:00.007+01:00

Singers' voices need maintaining, and occasionally repairing, just like any other musician's instrument. When the voice is not co-operating and seems not to be working properly for no obvious reason, it is not always easy to discover the cause of the malfunction because the instrument is invisible. One's instinct is to try to change one's way of producing it on the assumption that one's technique has developed faults. But if there is some other physiological reason for the malfunction, which cannot be attributed to vocal abuse, tension or muscle strain, such an approach is futile and can result in compensatory actions that will do more harm than good. The difficulty is to discover whether it's the technique (driving in the wrong gear) or the physiology (the mechanical parts of the engine) that's impaired and to take appropriate remedial measures.

As we get older, various changes in our muscles, ligaments and tissues occur. Body parts lose some of their flexibility and elasticity. It would be a miracle indeed if the voice remained unaffected. What I particularly notice at this stage of my life is muscular stiffness, particularly in the morning, however careful I am to warm up before exercising and to stretch and cool down afterwards. Stiffness in the vocal muscles is bad news for a singer! In addition, acid reflux overnight causes swelling in the larynx, which causes further limitations. Warming up the voice takes longer than it used to, and everything is just that bit more difficult to get going. Some days it never does, and I have to keep to the low gears. On such days, instead of purring, the engine judders. There is a feeling of resistance, of separate components being jerked into place by hook or crook, and of an extremely dry vocal tract. Some days, however, the components act smoothly in concert, registers ease gently up into higher gears, the larynx and tract feel moist and flexible, and I can do several reps of scales in one breath. If I can't do two full reps of one particular scale in a single breath, I know immediately that my vocal apparatus is in poor condition and that I need to treat it with extra care. Achieving adequate hydration and lubrication of the vocal tract is the most difficult thing to achieve. Driving technique is irrelevant when it's the engine that needs servicing.

Paying attention to the engine under the hood becomes increasingly important as age and miles accumulate. One's art of singing must adapt to the changed circumstances of one's reconfigured instrument. To keep the engine in prime condition it must be kept well oiled (drink plenty of water), driven at considerate speeds (avoid extremes of dynamic and range), and not be taken into mountainous terrain (stick to repertoire that doesn't tax your resources). The soprano I heard on the radio yesterday should have heeded the warning lights on her dashboard. The effect of her gloriously rich soprano voice was ruined by an upper passaggio that sagged below pitch and high notes that fell even further short of their target—the kind of faults that I associate with singers d'un certain âge. Whether this was due to poor technique or a worn out vocal apparatus I know not, but she would have done better to show off what she could do well than to show up what she could no longer do.

Scoop or Portamento?

2009-04-19T18:57:00.003+01:00

I have always abhorred the habit of scooping up to notes that even some well-respected singers indulge in. By this I mean sliding up from one note until the desired pitch of a higher note is reached. Often this arises from a fear of inadvertently "changing gear" during phonation, or a lack of confidence in attacking a note at its true pitch, or an attempt to ensure that the larynx stays anchored before a high note is sounded. But equally often, however, it seems to me to be an affectation—a signal to the listener to pay attention because a high, and therefore difficult, note is about to be scaled, and the singer is achieving great prowess in doing something highly athletic. This approach is never tolerated in choral music, and it is counterproductive in solo singing because it usually results in a note that sounds effortful, whereas surely the aim must be to make a high note sound effortless. One of the most stunning high notes I have heard was produced by June Anderson hitting a high E squarely on its head as though it lay in the middle of her range. It was far more impressive than singing that has you sitting on the edge of your seat because the singer leaves you wondering whether the high notes will actually be reached. I recently heard on the radio a recording of a soprano (I forget who) who sang Glière's Vocalise in such as way that during her journeys from one note to the next she would visit at least half a dozen intermediate pitches along the way.

Certain styles of singing (e.g. blues) and certain instruments (e.g. violin) use the scooping device legitimately, making a virtue out of a phenomenon that must have had its origins in a vocal technical deficiency. But that is no justification for adopting it as the default technique for passing from one pitch to a higher one. One of the miracles of singing is that the brain knows what to tell the larynx to do before it has even begun to sound a pitch. It should therefore be possible to initiate each note at its intended pitch. Obviously, the higher the pitch the more difficult this is, but some singers are given to scooping even when the pitch is not particularly high. Perhaps choral singers avoid the tendency to scoop because they are taught to listen right from the start of their vocal careers, whereas solo singers are taught to vocalise first and foremost.

Portamento should be a device that is used sparingly and for a specific purpose. It should not be allowed to occur every time there is an upward interval to be sung.

A Central Point

2009-04-11T11:25:00.010+01:00

The Triduum has come round again. Yesterday's Maundy Thursday service was long. I didn't get home until almost 11 p.m. and then had to cook supper as I was starving. There were, as always, two services on Good Friday, so the whole afternoon and evening were taken up with rehearsal and performance, with about an hour's break between the two.

In past years I have been usually been vocally and physically exhausted by the end of Good Friday. Not this year, which is the second year I have sung the alto part. (I have switched to the lower part for choral music because my voice has become heavier and lower-pitched with age; to sustain the long, floating, high-lying soprano lines characteristic of much Renaissance polyphony now produces too much tension in my vocal muscles for comfort.) Last year I was learning how to adapt to the very low tessitura. This year I feel I've just about got the hang of it, as my vocal and breathing muscles have adjusted to the different requirements. There is lots of sustained singing in the area from Middle C to G or A above. As a soprano, I've not had to use this part of the voice very much, especially at the lower end, and especially not for long sostenuto lines. I must be doing something right, though, because my voice felt as fresh by the end as at the beginning, I did not feel unduly tired, and I felt no tension in the vocal muscles. The only really tricky piece to negotiate and in which to produce a reasonable amount of volume was Tallis's Salvator Mundi, with its split alto line (therefore one singer per part) that sits around middle C and goes down an E below the stave on two occasions. This is not music that was written for women to sing! Those low Es constitute the bass of the chord on both occasions, below the notes that the basses themselves are singing! Fortunately, the E lasts only for a moment, but there's no way it could have been audible against four hefty basses and tenors. The piece ends an with an important cadence for my line, right across the lower passaggio (Middle C sharp – B natural – C sharp) at the end of a long sustained phrase, approached from the D. Even Clara Butt would have had trouble with this, I suspect! I haven't worked out how to achieve a good mix on this cadence without resorting to raw chest at the end of this very long phrase. I do not like to use full chest on anything higher than B or Middle C. Maybe by next year I'll be able to do it better.

On my way home, I realised that today's alto range had covered two octaves, from E to E, with every note in between. Whoever said that choral alto lines were static and that singing alto was the easy option? Not even the sopranos—bottoming out at Middle C and with a lone High B flat for the first soprano line alone—were required to sing two full octaves today.

Whistle Register Update

2009-04-01T08:43:00.010+01:00

Ever since my February posting on the whistle register I have had a large number of visits to my blog from people wanting information on how to access the whistle register. At that time, I was in no position to give any advice as I was only just beginning to discover this region of the voice for myself. My explorations arose out of curiosity, after hearing ordinary people — young and old alike and not necessarily trained in singing — using it unwittingly. Babies in prams, children in the park, groups of women in uproarious laughter, my fitness teacher in her exercise classes — none of them singers — could all use this high register yet I couldn't. How galling! I simply had to find out how it worked. I began to suspect that whistle register involved a manoeuvre of the laryngeal muscles not normally used in speech—a trick that you either had or (as in my case) not, and that it could probably be acquired if it wasn't inbuilt. I remembered the tongue-tip rolled R, which I was absolutely incapable of doing until I had to learn to use it when I started Russian lessons at school at age thirteen. I practised it for hours, days and weeks, and eventually it came, little by little, until I could do it automatically and with ease. Now I wonder why I ever found it difficult. If these things are not learned in infancy through imitation (we don't use trilled Rs in English or French), or if for some reason they are suppressed (well-behaved 1950s children were not encouraged to make high, piercing sounds in whistle register), they are much more difficult to acquire later on!

Hence my experimentation with the whistle register, which resulted, a few months later, in my February post. Now, two months further down the line, here's a summary of progress so far, together with an attempt to describe in words something that is in fact almost impossible to describe in words — unless you are very knowledgeable about how the vocal mechanism works, which I am not!

My whistle register is not yet fully functioning (i.e. I can't just call upon it at any time and produce perfect high Fs on demand!), but it gets easier to access every day. There were many more misses than hits to begin with, and now the ratio is about equally balanced. That, to me, is progress. It is important to realize what a tiny manoeuvre is used to produce sound in this register, and what a tiny sound it is. To find the placement, one must — for once! — ignore any muscles below the neck, as everything happens in the throat and above, and any temptation to use the large muscles of the body must be held at bay. It helps to work on this register while sitting (rather than standing) to promote relaxation of the lower body and focus entirely on the positioning of the larynx, tongue and throat. The larynx should be kept low, the tongue low and relaxed, the back of the nose shut (as if you wanted to avoid a nasty smell) and the thoat open. At first, the sound is either not there or barely there, and it will keep cutting out. The temptation is to squeeze or force. Resist this temptation like mad, and do not work on it for more than a couple of minutes a time. This way of phonating is maddeningly elusive — just like the trilled R was for me at first — but I'm finding that the muscles are gradually learning to stabilise their position. Split-second sounds that are prone to slip out of gear eventually turn into whole second notes, but it's a slow process requiring patience (for me, at any rate). Pitch control is an added skill that comes later. The sensation has been described by some as a back-flip, but for me it feels more like a folding in half, with the back half bending upward and forward over the front half. I recently achieved a seamless "siren" transition from the lowest vocal fry to the top of the whistle register, going through all passaggios smoothly. Six months ago I would not have thought it possible.

The reason for exercising this area of the voice is not (for most singers who are not coloratura sopranos) to use it in performance but for the added flexibility it gives to the whole laryngeal mechanism. I have noticed that high notes in ordinary head register feel easier afterwards.

The best advice I can give, though, is to watch Brett Manning demonstrating the whistle register on YouTube. Watching in this case is almost as important as listening. See in particular the relaxation involved, and follow his instructions on how to find the placement. His laid back attitude has a purpose: it is contra to everything one has been told about maintaining a noble position for normal singing, but in this instance, it is more important to relax the foundations than to brace them. I find the best place to practise this register is lying back in a warm bath. And as with everything in learning, keep going back over that video. In two weeks' time you will see and hear things in it that you didn't see and hear before. This is why (and I keep harping on about this) YouTube is such a fantastic educational tool.

For a demonstration of whistle register at its most virtuosic, look no further than Yma Sumac. I doubt she will ever be surpassed.

The Incredible Jumping Owl

2009-03-29T19:42:00.012+01:00

Owls, not perhaps the best songbirds in the world, but some of the most distinctive and evocative none the less, will hoot with laughter when they read this story, concerning a piece of photographic fakery intended to bring fame and fortune that its fabricator will surely live to regret. If Hatto's forgeries were found out in the end, so undoubtedly will this wildlife photographer's fairy tales be.

Reduced Assets

2009-03-02T09:54:00.027Z

It is very sad when the owner of one of the most beautiful soprano voices of my generation, a singer whom I admire above all others in her category, receives reviews like these:

I am left wondering why she continues to give recitals. Yes, the voice has faults: a tendency to sing under pitch; to phonate incompletely, leaving certain syllables missing altogether (a possible result of injurious vocal nodes) and others without body; to push in all registers while at the same time skipping artfully but inexcusably over certain notes in the all-but-vanished middle of her register [...] and an overreliance on pushing the voice [...] She seems to have lost the commitment to performance, to communication with her audience, to her own artistry. (Stephanie Friedman, SFCV, April 2006)

Time and adversity have not been kind to [this singer], once the possessor of a silvery, clear soprano that responded to her every musical intention [...] The voice will not cooperate: It is unresponsive and unyielding. Gone is the pliability, the suavity, the subtlety — and with them, the artistry [...] This was a voice that could stir the hardest heart, and now that heart remains unmoved. There are singers whose voices have suffered the ravages of time, who nevertheless show artistry despite many vocal faults. [She] is not, alas, one of them. Those of us who came, full of hope, to hear and cheer her [...] heard, instead of the gleaming artist of former times, a brassy version of what once was, painful to the ear and heart [...] Where, oh, where is there a voice shop, like a violin shop, where a singer can take a voice to be retooled to its former glory? (Stephanie Friedman, SFCV, February 2009)

Granted, the reviewer is the same in both cases, and these things are subjective, but Stephanie Friedman was herself a (very good) mezzo-soprano and she knows what she is talking about. What she describes accords very precisely with what I too heard a couple of years ago when the soprano in question gave a recital that was broadcast on the radio. It seems my worst fears concerning this soprano were confirmed in her recital last week.

It is said that a singer is the first to know when trouble strikes. A vocalist, knowing her instrument intimately as no other person can, feels every minute alteration in ease of phonation, every tiny pull of a muscle before a note is even sounded. Paradoxically, it is possible for a singer to feel some degree of constraint or effort in the production of a note, yet for that note to sound effortless to the listener. The ideal is of course a totally free vocal production at all times, but few are those who are fortunate enough to achieve that objective on every single day of their singing lives. With a combination of technique, artistry and professionalism we can dupe the listener into believing that all we have to do is open our mouths, let the sound pour forth, and allow our musicality to take over. Non-singers have little idea of the hard work and hours of practice that go on behind the scenes. Part of our training is to make sure that we can give a fairly consistent performance from one day to the next, even when the circumstances of our instrument — the state of the vocal folds, mucous membranes, muscles, ligaments, blood circulation, hydration, and so on — are not at their best and make vocal production more difficult. All musicians are affected by their mental and physical state on any given day, but vocalists perhaps more so than others.

But when more serious problems arise and the instrument becomes so impaired, for whatever reason, that no amount of musicality, artistry, or technical trickery can overcome its limitations, the listener will become uncomfortably aware of the singer's vocal difficulties. A good performance from a malfunctioning voice is impossible because most of the singer's attention is focused on trying to produce the notes rather than on interpreting the music. When that state of affairs becomes chronic rather than just representing an "off day", it is surely counterproductive for a top-flight vocalist to battle on, especially if it generates reviews that only confirm suspicions that may already be held. Gone are the days when a bad review could pass by unnoticed in a provincial publication. Once Google gets its claws around it, its reach is global and hopes of damage limitation are futile. It is not a good idea to publicize one's decline. Maria Callas is remembered today almost as much for the technical difficulties she encountered in her later career as for her great singing when in her prime.

Singers with problems like these must feel intense misery. If they want to continue to perform in public, a period of rest, recuperation and retraining is probably the only sensible course of action. Repairs to damaged vocal apparatuses, if they are possible at all, can take months and even years to effect. And when natural age-related disturbances to the vocal mechanism cause a voice to lose enough of its former flexibility, resonance and responsiveness to cause concern not just to the performer but also to the listener, there are really only two options: either retire from the public arena or choose a repertoire that will enhance all the remaining qualities and expose none of the defects. (To end a recital with Strauss's taxing Four Last Songs — as this soprano did last week — was sheer foolhardiness.) For most of us, particularly women, it is pointless to delude ourselves that the vocal instrument we had when we were twenty-five will not have undergone some change by the time we are fifty. Certain aspects of singing will become increasingly problematical as we get older for purely physical reasons, as with any other form of athletic activity, and cunning strategies are called for if we are to show our reduced assets in their best light.

Making Waves

2009-02-18T11:54:00.016Z

A couple of years ago, when the Joyce Hatto scandal broke out, I followed the story with appalled fascination, particularly as I knew one of the pianists whose discs were used to create Barrington-Coupe's "recordings" of his wife's piano-playing. The story made big waves at the time but petered out fairly quickly. A quick search on the Internet reveals nothing new, but the story was excellently summarized in the New Yorker in September 2007. It really needs someone like Norman Lebrecht to turn it into an extended account — The Making of Joyce Hatto.

Audio editing is very much like word-processing, and the shapes of the waves, individually and collectively, can be compared to the sequences of words, phrases and sentences in a given passage of text, with their characteristic cadences. What provided irrefutable proof of the Hatto scam was not so much the sound of the music as the identical appearance of the waveforms in the digital files, the musical equivalent of a performance's fingerprint or its DNA. To produce two identical sets of waveforms is as impossible as two writers writing the same short story using the same words in the same order. In fact it's even less possible (if possibility can be allowed to have shades of grey), because a single performer cannot reproduce multiple (or even two) identical versions of their own performance.

Anyone who's edited digital audio files will know how tempting it is to keep tweaking the waveforms on one's computer screen in the hope of attaining the unattainable — namely, perfection. The scope for experimentation seems limitless — a little piece from this take, a few notes from that take; no let's try this bit instead — and would have been unimagined by those who made do with magnetic tape and scissors a few decades ago. The number of possible variants and permutations of one particular piece of recorded music is limited only by the editor's imagination, the size of their computer disk and the number of takes, not by the (im)practicalities of duplicating, splicing and storing large reels of tape. The publishing analogy can be used again because in my other life I'm a typesetter. In the 1980s we had only one stab at getting the page layout of a book right. We cut up galley proofs and stuck them down with glue in a certain order. If it wasn't perfect, we sought workarounds and compromised somewhere along the way, but there was no chance of going back and trying a different route. These days, on computer screens, typesetters (more likely to be called designers now) can easily experiment with different layouts until they have a perfect product. The same is true of audio files, as long as you have a sufficient number of takes to work with. The difficulty is knowing where to draw the line and when to stop. We can only assume that Mr Barrington-Coupe found his wife's waveforms to be inadequate so discarded them in favour of some shapelier models.

Cadenza Workout

2009-02-09T12:29:00.014Z

Cadenzas are a singer's secret weapon. They are not just show cases for a vocalist's technique, a way of pulling out all the stops, a signal to alert the audience that the big moment is about to take place. I suspect that they originated from a desirability, if not necessity, for the singer to take complete control and mastery of their voice before hitting the high note, preferably without the distraction of accompanying instruments and the constraints of the composer's written notes on the page. The silencing of the instruments can be likened to the soft, lone drum roll at the crucial and dangerous part of the highwire act. It raises tension in the audience, but it also helps to concentrate the artiste's mind. The content and the structure of the cadenza can be used to good advantage as a strategic vocal workout, a set of carefully planned manoeuvres to prime the voice into its best possible state before it is asked to produce its most difficult note. It's as though the composer is saying: "OK, here's where you have to go. Do what you have to do in order to get there. Take your time and don't rush it. But make it good. Over to you!"

In my previous post I mentioned the importance of passagework as a way of relieving muscle tension. If the laryngeal muscles tire after extended periods of uninterrupted sustained singing in the upper passaggio, good tone can be harder to maintain and brilliant high notes more difficult to achieve. Yet it is nearly always at the end of a song, aria or act that climactic notes are required, at the time of greatest risk that the singer and/or voice might start to feel fatigued, especially if there has been a buildup of tension, both dramatic and physiological, with rising tessitura in the passaggio area. Perhaps this is why ornamentation, fioriture, trills and other devices that keep the voice on the move (with a high ratio of vowels to consonants) are so characteristic of baroque arias and nineteenth-century bel canto operas. This type of vocal writing ensures that no single set of muscles gets to carry the burden for too long and that the voice is allowed to flow freely without constant interruption by consonants. It could also be why, in many baroque and classical arias, the climactic high notes were traditionally preceded by a cadenza ad libitum.

In a cadenza, the singer, given free rein, engages in a virtuosic display of vocalises that serve not only to show off their technique but also, in a hidden agenda, to refresh a fatigued voice and to loosen it up by literally shaking it free. These vocalises, often sung on a single vowel without any interfering consonants, resemble the sort of fast passagework that is used in vocal warm-ups. They can condition the vocal musculature in the way that best suits the singer's voice before it is required to go for the high jump. One or two beats' rests — added not just for suspense or dramatic effect but also to give the muscles a crucial moment's rest when it is needed — can be incorporated into the cadenza for good measure. And the cadenza can be varied according to vocal and physical condition on the particular day. Since every voice is different, a customized build-up to the note that the audience has been holding its breath to hear will ensure success for everyone, not just the singer for whom the aria was written. If you have a cadenza marked in your score and the freedom to make up your own, use that opportunity for all it's worth!

Writing for Voice

2009-02-08T09:49:00.017Z

The degree of difficulty of a song, as perceived by the singer, differs somewhat from what the public at large imagines it to be. It depends not so much on the complexity of the melody, the pitching of the intervals, the number of key changes, or, in modern music, the unmemorable tunes. All these things can be learned and drilled into the system, even if it takes time. It is more a function of the tessitura, the average length of the notes to be sung, and the ratio of sung notes to rests. The simplest ballad that employs a range of barely an octave can be the most taxing music to sing because the voice must emit a smooth and continuous stream of sustained legato sound without respite. Even if you have excellent support and perfect control of the breathing muscles (appoggio), it doesn't alter the fact that certain laryngeal muscles are inevitably part of the equation in healthy sound production, and they, like any other muscle, can tire. A voice that is asked to remain relatively static within a limited range tires more quickly than a voice that is allowed to move up and down over a greater part of its compass. (I elaborate on this in my next post on cadenzas.) And a voice that is not allowed regular periods of silence to rest, recover, regroup and, most important, relubricate itself, can get so tired that the muscles start to go into emergency mode and to treat high notes as non-essential activity. They will become reluctant to do what they're perfectly happy to do in other circumstances. Sustained singing ability in the passaggio areas and vocal stamina are the two most difficult things for a singer to acquire and to maintain.

Waving one's arms up and down in a 180-degree arc for two minutes is less tiring than holding them outstretched at 90 degrees the same length of time. In the same way, it is more tiring to stand still than to walk. The reason is that one set of muscles is required to remain contracted without being given a chance to hand over the burden to a neighbouring set in order to relax, if only for a few seconds. After a long period of maintaining the same position, the muscles will eventually become stiff and difficult to move until they are loosened up. They can also take longer than normal to decontract. If there is not enough "rest" time for them to properly prepare for the next task, this can lead to poor coordination, loss of control, limited function, and even failure to achieve that next task.

I remember how a group of us once tried to explain to Arvo Pärt why one of his choral pieces was so hard to sing when the soprano line consisted of nothing but a string of consecutive semibreves on G5 for several pages. He looked at us in wide-eyed astonishment. "But the soprano range has G5 in it," he said. True, but singing dozens of them in an unrelieved stream is not the same as blowing them on a flute. Yet why should anyone know that if they're not a singer? Someone should have told Beethoven that too before he wrote his Ninth Symphony.

It is evident that the three composers whose oeuvre I have worked on the most in recent years — Debussy, Fauré and Vierne — learned about the importance of giving singers periodic moments of rest. The song cycles that they wrote in the earlier part of their careers contain vocal lines that are more or less continuous from beginning to end. Something like Fauré's Après un rêve, with its long sustained phrases and slow buildup, is a real test of stamina. Fauré's later songs tend to be more voice-friendly from the point of view of pacing and tessitura. Similarly, many of Vierne's later songs feature vocal phrases of just the right length, alternating with phrases of similar length written for solo piano during which the voice can rest. His earlier songs are not so carefully and considerately constructed. By the time of their later compositions, these mélodistes had presumably accumulated much experience of accompanying singers and heeded their entreaties to give them a break from time to time. Musically and often interpretation-wise, yes, the later songs tend to be more difficult, but vocally and technically they are far easier.

Double Interpretation

2009-02-07T09:30:00.015Z

Among all musicians, singers have a unique task of interpreting two people's intentions simultaneously: the lyricist's and the composer's — probably, but not necessarily, in that order. For French mélodie, the words are nearly always those of a poet. And when those poets are symbolists or impressionists, the words can be open to a range of interpretations. What do you do if your reading of poem seems completely at odds with what you perceive to be the composer's take? You have to work extremely hard to discover how and why the composer arrived at that interpretation, and you must be prepared to revise your own understanding of the composer's music. Allow yourself to consider that perhaps you misread the music. But if you remain convinced that the composer misread the poem, then — but only as a last resort — let the music speak foremost, and let the words take a secondary role of accompanying sonic elements.

My website gets many google searches on the term "interpretation" in connection with Debussy's settings of several of Verlaine's poems. I think it would be worth indulging in a detailed comparative analysis of Debussy's and Fauré's treatment of three of the best-loved: "C'est l'extase", "Il pleure dans mon coeur", and "Green". I hope to start later this year with "C'est l'extase".

Update: You will find my analysis of "C'est l'extase" here, "Il pleure dans mon coeur" here and "Green" here.

Whistle Register

2009-02-02T15:37:00.020Z

"Whistle tones, … by which coloratura sopranos reach their stratospheric high F’s in the Queen of the Night’s treacherous second aria, are nothing more than a modification of chest … voice." — Jerome Hines, The Four Voices of Man (New York: Limelight Editions, 1997), p. 68.

"The highest pitch extensions of the female voice are described by a variety of … terms … flageolet, piccolo, flute, or bell register. The timbre results from the uppermost extension of traditional 'head voice' function." — Richard Miller, Training Soprano Voices (Oxford, etc: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 136.

These definitions, by people who know what they're talking about, are, on the face of it, poles apart. One says the whistle register is a form of chest voice and the other says it's the continuation of head voice. But that's perhaps not so surprising when you consider that arguments over the nature and the number of vocal registers in the human singing voice have been continuing for centuries. What Jerome Hines calls the whistle register is the same as what Richard Miller calls the flageolet register. But what Miller calls the whistle register, which he says is different from the flageolet register, is not spoken about by Hines. Miller considers the whistle register to be a "laryngeal whistle" — though quite how else one is supposed to produce any kind of register without the use of the larynx is not made clear!

I was never taught to use any kind of high-lying register that wasn't just regular head voice. The first inkling I had of the existence of a mysterious method of high-note production that was different from normal head voice production was at a master class given by Peter Gellhorn. Commenting on a high E that I had just sung, he said "... And full voice too! I'm sure you have several more notes above it." I shook my head as I knew that E was my absolute limit and was already becoming difficult for me. I'd given up trying to sing the Queen of the Night some years previously. But when I had studied her arias, and Zerbinetta's aria, I'd always sung the top Es and Fs in the same way as any other notes, because that was the only way I knew how to do them. With hindsight it was probably not a wise thing to do, as both the E and the F had pretty well disappeared from my range by the time I reached my early thirties, and I had no "flute voice" to fall back on. Once or twice my teacher had demonstrated to me what she called her "harmonics" — saying that was how she suspected Melba to have produced her celebrated pianissimo high C in La Bohème — but those notes were undeveloped in her own voice, and she never suggested that I myself should explore that form of voice production. If I had discovered, and developed, the flageolet method of singing high Es and Fs I might have found the coloratura repertoire a much more comfortable and pleasurable experience to sing, and I might have been able to do it for longer.

Last autumn after watching Brett Manning demonstrate the whistle register on YouTube, I decided that if he — and a man at that! — could produce those extremely high notes so effortlessly, slouched in his chair in that laid-back way, then anyone must be able to do it. (He's been criticised in the YouTube comments for his posture, but surely that posture was a deliberate way of showing that the whistle production must be totally free of tension and effort.) I have watched that video many times, and I am determined to discover the trick. I have experimented for a few months and am just beginning to find that tiny place where the sound comes from. But it's touch and go, here one minute and gone the next, and vestigial when it does happen. During certain stages of a head cold, however, I find myself temporarily able to produce strong whistle notes with ease; sadly, that ability recedes along with the cold. The particular configuration of the vocal apparatus that produces these sounds seems (as far as I can tell from the sensations that I feel) to use muscles that have never been put to work in fifty-four and a half years. They were probably not even used when I was a baby, for my mother tells me I never cried. And in my generation, it was considered unseemly for children to scream, yell or shriek. If I had indulged in high-pitched squealing I would have been told at once to stop that noise. Even in the school playground we were constantly told to keep our voices down for fear of annoying the well-to-do residents of Kensington. Besides, I was by nature a quiet child.

Jerome Hines's idea that the whistle register is linked to raw chest voice, to the primal scream, made me think anew about those high-pitched squeals that children at play and groups of women laughing uninhibitedly together can produce without even thinking about them. If non-singers, with untrained voices, can make high pitched sounds up there without any apparent effort, why can't I? Yet I've never been able to do so, presumably from lack of practice. Many years ago, when I was grabbed from behind in the street one dark night and had a hand clamped over my eyes and the sharp edge of a knife held against one side of my neck, I opened my mouth, tried to scream, and discovered that I could not produce any sound at all. My instincts were telling me to produce the highest-pitch sound that I could muster, like an animal in distress, but my vocal apparatus was unable to do so because the particular muscles needed to do so were undeveloped. At the time, I was more shocked by the realization that I couldn't scream than by the thought that my jugular vein might be slit open at any moment.

Could the moral of this tale be that if you want your offspring to develop all registers of their voices you should encourage them to cry as babies, to shriek as children, and, like Yma Sumac, to imitate the songbirds as adults?

Vibrato

2009-01-06T09:29:00.013Z

When I was in my mid-teen years and became seriously interested in singing I wanted to know more about the curious phenomenon of vibrato. What caused it? How was it produced? Why did some people have more pronounced varieties of it than others? And why didn't I have it? At least, I didn't think I had it, and I certainly didn't know what to do to make my voice produce it, but it was hard to be absolutely certain that I lacked it, as back in the late 1960s recording onto cassette tape was not the commonplace activity that it later became (reel-to-reel tape was still in use), so I didn't know what I really sounded like. I associated it with adult singing, yet I hugely admired Deanna Durbin who seemed able to produce it quite effortlessly and beautifully when still in her teens.

I'd look in all the books on singing I could find in shops and public libraries, but I never found a satisfactory explanation of vibrato. Some books at the time barely mentioned it. And even now it is still a process that is not fully understood. It seems to arise from the interplay of several factors in combination — various mechanisms all reacting individually to produce an overall effect. What I am certain of, however, is that no two people hear the same person's vibrato in identical ways. What one person will call a pleasant vibrato will be perceived by someone else as a wobble, and by a third person as tremolo (these last two being generally perceived as a fault). Various optimum speeds for vibrato have been put forward (somewhere around 6 pulses per second being generally considered ideal), but plenty of great singers have produced vibrato speeds as slow as 4 pps or as fast as 8 pps, and speeds vary among individuals from day to day and from note to note.

Yesterday I was intrigued to read the following passage in a review of a new recording:

[The singer] has a pleasant voice but she isn’t in control of it — there is a pronounced wobble, it is certainly not a vibrato for it’s on every note possible. After a short time the ear tires of the sound. One of the reasons why we can happily listen to the greatest singers — Elisabeth Schumann, Lisa della Casa, Mirella Freni, Isobel Baillie, Art Garfunkel, — again and again is because they possess a purity of line, they understand that different timbres and different colours of voice, must be used to express the music. Most important of all, they understand that vibrato is an expressive device which must only be used sparingly. I studied voice with a woman who had studied with Stiles-Allen before the war. She passed on to me the belief and understanding in the voice as a lyrical instrument which had to be kept pure and used to articulate the notes clearly and precisely without any frills. Vibrato was to be kept to a minimum and the line had to be faultless [...] I have the feeling that what can only be described as wobble is taught in music colleges today for I hear students using it all the time. It is an ugly sound and needs to be stamped out as soon as possible. — Bob Briggs

The mention of Isobel Baillie is interesting. She was one of my heroines when I was learning, and I tried to model my singing on hers. Most people admired her singing for its bell-like purity and choir-boy quality, the often expressed general opinion being that she employed little vibrato. Yet some people considered that her voice had a tremolo (which in plain language means a bleating quality). To my ears she simply had a fast and narrow vibrato, which was indicative of a voice that was healthy and vibrant, and which I greatly envied. But Bob Briggs' notion that vibrato must be used sparingly, and only as an expressive device, rather than as a constant and intrinsic byproduct of normal vocal production, is a somewhat Anglo-Saxon one, deriving from a tradition that required crystal clear and somewhat asexual tones from those who sang Tallis and Taverner in cold cathedrals. Yet all the other singers he mentions do employ vibrato, and mostly "on every note possible", so either he's not as much of a purist as he makes out or the threshhold at which vibrato becomes detectable is set at a higher level in his ears than in mine.

In the light of all this, I decided that the out-of-control wobble probably belonged to a second-rate singer with poor technique and stereotypical "operatic voice" that people try to imitate (badly) when they want to ridicule classical singing. But because of my ongoing fascination with the vibrato process, I was curious to hear for myself what this particular wobble sounded like. I went to the iTunes store to see if it had any tracks of the singer in question. I struck lucky. The whole album that Bob Briggs has just reviewed is there, so I sampled every song — with increasing surprise. Did I hear "a pronounced wobble"? Not in the least. I can think of several world-famous sopranos who possess wider vibratos than this lady's. The voice does have a vibrato, for sure, but it's no more pronounced than, say, Mirella Freni's. I did, however, detect a slight beat or jitter in the voice, but that is something entirely different, which relates to fluctuations in the rate of airflow to the larynx and not to steadiness of pitch, and cannot therefore be termed wobble, which implies an oscillation or deviation from one central pitch point.

There is no reason why I should come to the defence of a singer I know nothing about. I'm merely using this as an excuse to put down some thoughts about what I have suspected for a long time — that the way in which we hear vocal vibrato, and assess it in terms of quality (as an enhancement or an impairment) can vary significantly from one pair of ears to another.

Colloque sentimental

2008-12-31T14:27:00.009Z

Debussy's setting of Verlaine's "Colloque sentimental" (see text and translation below) is one of his most profoundly moving songs. For a singer it poses some interpretive challenges. The spareness of the writing for most of the time that the voice is singing means that the expression must largely be conveyed by the voice with little support from the piano, yet with Debussy nothing must ever be exaggerated or overstated. There must be no sentimentality in the delivery, and it is essential to maintain absolute purity and steadiness of tone at all times, an even vocal production, very clear diction, and impeccable intonation. In short, to pull off this song requires a fine degree of control. With Debussy, the music, the mood, the feeling often seem to come not from within but from without -- from some other world. The vocal line must appear to float in a disembodied way above the piano writing, even in the lower registers. The main difficulties in this song are:

Every note is sung to a separate syllable
There are three voices, which must be distinguished
The accented words do not always coincide with the strong musical beats

Let's examine each of these in more detail.

Syllabic writing
French mélodie is very often syllabic rather than melismatic, but in "Colloque sentimental" every single note is given its own syllable, without exception. Consequently, every note is separated by at least one consonant, which causes the flow of the breath and the legato line to be constantly interrupted. This stop-start approach to singing, with the numerous manipulations of jaw, tongue and lips that are required to enunciate the words, can produce tensions in the singer and unevenness in the singing. The best way of dealing with this is to practise speaking the words in the correct rhythm, in a monotone and in as legato and relaxed fashion as possible, until all the words are thoroughly embedded and the syllables can be produced with ease. This is to ensure that no unwanted tensions will interfere with the vocal production when the words are later sung. The most difficult syllables in the song are "parc solitaire". The fear of having to sound three successive consonants (r-c-s) in the space of a quaver can set up enough tension to cause temporary paralysis! The secret is not to let the tongue try to switch to the -s- position immediately after closing off the airway to pronounce the -c-. Instead, keep the air flow going through to the -s- by inserting a tiny neutral vowel between the -c- and the -s-. It helps to imagine a word that's halfway to being the Italian "parco". This is essential if the -c- is to be audible, in concert if not in recording. But this extra vowel must be so short as to be barely perceptible. Similarly, the transition from "donc" to "qu'il" also requires an intrusive vowel because the final -c- in "donc" must be clearly articulated. While we're on the subject of words, I like to give "bouches" an unusual treatment in this song. Rather than giving it two syllables, I prefer to omit the second syllable and instead to elongate the -ou- vowel and end the word with an elongated -ch- sound that tails off, rather in the manner of the speech of elderly person, whose consonants have become somewhat loose and lazy. This fits in with the context of the old person remembering kisses exchanged a long time ago.

Three voices
The narrator and the two voices of the couple (Voice A and Voice B) must all sound different. The narrator must sound neutral and ageless. Voice A must belong to a person who is very old and so it must not be too energetic or aroused, yet it must still sound animated. It must convey the ability of the person to remember and evoke some of the feelings associated with its past passions. One should aim for a feeling of suppressed excitement. Voice B must sound indifferent almost to the point of lifelessness. There is no looking back for this person, who is well past caring and is merely awaiting death with a resigned hopelessness ("hope is gone, vanquished, toward a black sky"). It is not known what sex each of the couple is. On balance, we assume that (in Debussy's mind at least) Voice A is female and Voice B is male from the fact that Voice B in set a lower tessitura than Voice A. But because Verlaine wrote the poem, it is possible that both halves of the couple are male. However, that doesn't matter. The importance is to convey the contrast in the mental states of the two people. There is no single way, and no easy way, to do this. Despite the title of the song, Debussy was no sentimentalist, and there are no obvious emotion-conveying devices written into the music that one can latch onto. All one can do is to use subtle shades of timbre, timing, dynamics and accentuation in ways that are as natural and honest as possible and to let the music speak for itself without any exaggeration. The most difficult piece of dialogue is perhaps that monosyllabic answer ("Non.") on a middle C and a nasal vowel. The length of the N must be just right, as must that of the following vowel, which must end cleanly without the help of a final consonant to stop the airflow. One can spend hours working solely on that "Non" and still not be satisfied!

Accentuation
The relative note values must be strictly observed, but the musical accents implied by the time signature and the barlines are best ignored because they often conflict with the natural speech rhythm. The most glaring mismatch of musical and verbal accents occurs in the first sung line: "Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé". The musical accentuation (Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé) must be absolutely disregarded. The phrase should be sung as it would be spoken: "Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé". A native French speaker would find this instinctive, but English speakers must remember that in polysyllabic words the emphasis tends to fall on the final syllable, in contrast with English where it tends to fall on the first syllable. And of course articles ("le") and conjunctions ("et") would no more be accented in French than they would in English.

* * *

After writing this I looked up "Colloque sentimental" in Pierre Bernac's The Interpretation of French Song. He ends his brief discussion of this mélodie by saying, "This is the kind of song one can work on for a lifetime..."

The text with literal translation:

Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé
In the old solitary and frozen park
Deux formes ont tout à l'heure passé.
Two forms recently passed by.

Leurs yeux sont morts et leur lèvres sont molles,
Their eyes are dead and their lips are slack,
Et l'on entend à peine leurs paroles.
And one can barely hear their words.

Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé
In the old solitary and frozen park
Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé.
Two spectres evoked the past.

Te souvient-il de notre extase ancienne?
"Do you remember our ecstasy of long ago?"
Pourquoi voulez-vous donc qu'il m'en souvienne?
"Why would you want me to remember it?"

Ton coeur bât-il toujours à mon seul nom?
"Does your heart still beat at [the sound of] my very name?"
Toujours vois-tu mon âme en rêve?
"Do you still see my soul in a dream?"
— Non.
"No."

Ah! Les beaux jours de bonheur indicible
"Ah those lovely days of unutterable happiness,"
Où nous joignions nos bouches:
"when we joined our mouths"
— C'est possible.
"Possibly."

Qu'il était bleu, le ciel, et grand l'espoir!
"How blue was the sky; and how great was hope!"
L'espoir a fui, vaincu, vers le ciel noir.
"Hope has fled, vanquished, toward the dark sky."

Tels ils marchaient dans les avoines folles,
Thus they walked through the waving cornfields,*
Et la nuit seule entendit leurs paroles.
And only the night heard their words.

*Avoine is a cereal (oats). It's difficult to reconcile this with the implied winter landscape (the solitary and frozen park) in which the scene is set. Perhaps it is late summer, but the park is frozen in time. Yet I have never heard the term glacé used in this way in French. For discussion...

Release

2008-12-19T10:54:00.005Z

The Louis Vierne album, officially released today, has taken an awful long time from conception to delivery, much longer than "Bonne Chanson" did. The biggest delay was caused by difficulties in getting hold of the music scores. Only three of the songs are in print, and I had to transpose one of those into a higher key. The rest required extensive searches, correspondence and bureacratic hurdles to overcome, both here in England and in France, before I could order photocopies from national archives. None of this would have been possible without the Internet. Or perhaps it would, but it would have taken a lot longer. Yet it is very unlikely that, without the Internet, I would ever have stumbled on these marvellous, neglected mélodies. Mireille Delunsch and François Kerdoncuff will never know how much I owe to them, for it was they, who made the first recordings of Vierne songs only a few years ago, who inspired me to explore this repertoire. I have often wondered where they found the scores. Perhaps a few still lurk in the libraries of conservatoires. I found one cycle in the library of the Royal Academy of Music in London and another cycle -- ex-library stock -- in a second-hand bookshop in New York.

As all of this music was new to both of us, we had to learn it. We recorded the music (two hours and ten minutes' worth) over ten sessions, but sessions were short, rarely lasting more than a couple of hours each, and always broken up with tea and chocolate éclairs. My diary shows the following recording dates in 2007: 19 January, 16 March, 21 May, 30 July, 19 October, 23 November. In 2008, the dates were 15 February, 4 April, 19 June and 1 October.

Of course I don't hope to sell more than half a dozen copies, but I would like to do my bit to help resurrect this forgotten repertoire. Why make CDs? A good question. I'd never do it again. Who now wants to buy music when there's YouTube and other ways of listening without having to pay? Friends and colleagues expect you to give them your music, and so it's embarrassing to say "It's available on Amazon." Most people haven't any idea how much it costs to produce an album. The difficulty, as I mentioned in a previous post, is that it's not possible to make small quantities of CDs cheaply in a format that Amazon will accept. A duplicated (burned) CD is not a sellable product as far as Amazon is concerned. When I brought out my first album, one colleague blithely told me she would borrow the album that I'd given to a mutual friend and she'd burn a copy for herself on her computer! She probably didn't even get that far, but it was on that day that I realised that recorded music (in contrast with printed books) was no longer something that most people were prepared to pay for.

So now that Vierne is out of my system, what next? Well, it's back to Debussy. There is so much in his late cycles to explore. I expect to discuss some of these elusive pieces here soon.