On Jul 21, 2005, at 1:34 PM, John Howell wrote:
A countertenor is a male alto, or more rarely a male soprano. Therefore any piece of music that has an alto and/or a soprano part is suitable for countertenor. Q.E.D.
Though I totally agree with the overall argument from which this is snipped, I must say that this particular bit of reasoning is semantic gobbledegook.
Just because a countertenor is called a male alto does not make him physiologically or acoustically--or musically--the same as a female alto. With rare exceptions (Russell Oberlin comes to mind) countertenors are falsettists with some reinforcement from the chest. Altos sing primarily from the chest, w. reinforcement from the head voice (which, very significantly, is not considered a "false" voice in the female). The two sound different, and (again w. rare exceptions) are immediately identifiable to the ear as one or the other. Thinking it over, it seems to me that the only times I have heard a male voice and mistaken it for a female have been from certain pop tenors who would never be considered either altos or countertenors.
That said, however, the question of whether a countertenor may legitimately sing a given alto line (let's leave the sopranos out of it--I never heard of a countertenor who could hit a C above the treble clef and live to tell about it) is entirely a matter of what would have been considered appropriate at the time and place that the music was created. For almost all the choral repertoire of the Renaissance and Baroque, the countertenor is perfectly appropriate; for most 19th - 20th c. music it is not. I wouldn't want to hear that sound, for instance, in Schoenberg's Friede auf Erden or Brahms' German Requiem, any more than I'd want to hear recorders on those composers' flute lines.
On the third hand, though, there's also the question of what you can get away with. If a chorus has 8 (female) altos, the inclusion of one countertenor in addition is not going to spoil the sound. Common sense IMO must be the final arbiter in all such matters. And by the same token, if you're going to sing a Renaissance mass w. women on the altus and cantus lines, you can hardly object to countertenors showing up for Schubert or Debussy!
Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://home.netcom.com/~kallisti/
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