At 1:07 AM -0700 5/18/11, Mark D Lew wrote:
On May 16, 2011, at 10:42 AM, John Howell wrote:
Classical singers, voice teachers, and musicians in general take
it as an article of faith that men's and women's voices are an
octave apart, and in a lot of situations that works just fine.
Another thought: Although I never really formulated it as such, I
guess I think of the distance between men's voices and women's voice
more like a ninth rather than an octave.
For example:
- chorus altos on low G is like chorus basses on low F
- chorus tenors on high G is like chorus sopranos on high A
- baritone soloist's high F is like mezzosoprano soloist's high G
etc
An interesting concept, and certainly applicable in SOME situations,
depending on the voices available. With college voices, for example,
the sopranos will tend to have had more years of voice lessons than
the tenors, and the voice teachers will be trying to turn altos into
mezzos.
The only problem I can see is that in a huge majority of standard
choral repertoire, because of the imitation of lines between men's
and women's voices, they ARE used with octave displacements. In ALL
of the polyphonic choruses in "Messiah," for instance, and in the
choruses that included trumpets, and had to be in D major because
Handel's trumpets were in D, both tenors and sopranos have to handle
high As. (Of course what pitch standard was used in London, or
Dublin, or elsewhere in England at the time is also an open question!)
John
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:john.how...@vt.edu)
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.
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