Operatic Voice Research Articles

Operatic voices engage the default mode network in professional opera singers

Extensive research with musicians has shown that instrumental musical training can have a profound impact on how acoustic features are processed in the brain. However, less is known about the influence of singing training on neural activity during voice perception, particularly in response to salient acoustic features, such as the vocal vibrato in operatic singing. To address this gap, the present study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses in trained opera singers and musically untrained controls listening to recordings of opera singers performing in two distinct styles: a full operatic voice with vibrato, and a straight voice without vibrato. Results indicated that for opera singers, perception of operatic voice led to differential fMRI activations in bilateral auditory cortical regions and the default mode network. In contrast, musically untrained controls exhibited differences only in bilateral auditory cortex. These results suggest that operatic singing training triggers experience-dependent neural changes in the brain that activate self-referential networks, possibly through embodiment of acoustic features associated with one's own singing style.

Associations of postural activities and knowledge for voice with breathing issues and voice-physical-disorders among lyric singers

Objectives/HypothesisThe purpose of this research was to study the associations of postural activities and knowledge of the voice of opera singers, recognized in the literature for the specificity of their posture. Additionally, the link between vocal pathologies and body pains on one hand, and posture control on the other hand was investigated. MethodsA questionnaire including 90 questions was distributed to singers in France and overseas during 6 months. Ninety-eight opera singers participated in the survey. Data were analyzed using Excel and Stata software. ResultsThe results showed that the singers who paid more attention to posture, postural work while singing, had knowledge of anatomy and postural role in singing voice, healthy lifestyle and good body habits, had less vocal discomfort and pathologies, a better vocal preservation and used more costo-abdominal breathing. On the other hand, knowledge of postural role and postural work was linked with pain and vocal fatigue. Furthermore, a preventive need was revealed concerning the providing of knowledge and skills to singers, but also to singing teachers, speech therapists and stage workers. ConclusionOur study shows that benefits were found in the voice quality of opera singers with anatomical and postural knowledge and who work on posture as part of their vocal work compared to others. Postural work and knowledge increase attention to body pain and vocal fatigue. These results can inform health care providers, opera singers and their teachers and performers of the benefits of posture on operatic voice quality. Accordingly, this study sparks new ideas for postural work and therapy in lyric voice.

Hercules, Vampires, and the Opera of Attractions

ABSTRACT Opera’s specter has long haunted film and more recently, film haunts opera productions seeking to entice new audiences. Patrick Morganelli’s opera Hercules vs. Vampires (2010) harnesses the tension between live and recorded media. In this production, singers deliver their lines in loose synchronization with the film’s characters, dubbing over the original’s visuals with operatic voices. By encouraging an attentive rather than absorptive mode of consumption, Hercules vs. Vampires restores to both opera and film a joy and effervescence made possible through the pungent postmodern incongruencies of the high art of opera and the popular Italian sword and sandal film.

Effects of Chamber Singing in Works by K. Orff (Case Study of «Carmina Burana», «Catulli Carmina» Scenic Cantatas, «Kluge» Opera)

The purpose of the article is to highlight the specifics of chamber singing as a special expressive technique in canvases, generally designed for presentation on a large scene, which allows, on the one hand, to clarify the idea of K. Orff's stylistics, and on the other hand, to make a contribution to the theory of chamber art in the aspect of modeling its features in the conditions of a large-scale scenic embodiment. The methodological basis of the research is the intonation approach to the nature of music in the traditions of the works of the followers of B. Asaf'ev's concept in Ukraine in the works of O. Markova, O. Muravska, L. Shevchenko with a principle emphasis on stylistic-comparative, hermeneutic, historical-descriptive, and cultural- disciplinary for secretion of epoch stylistic status of works, essential in modernity significance of their expressive aspects, their explanation by the author, historic world-outlook interaction of music expedients with expedients of other types of arts. The scientific novelty of the study is formed by the originality of the vision of the data expressiveness in the title of K. Orff's works, as well as the discovery of the theoretical formulation of such a feature of chamber vocals as «hiding» the dynamic excess of expressing the capabilities of the operatic voice by placing the melody in extreme registers with appropriate textural indicators. Conclusions. Chamber vocal constitutes a typological expressiveness of singing, which is organically adjusted by the conditions of salon or salon-style voicing of works, but also has a symbolic expressive cut, which, as a special method of sound expression, is detected in works designed for dynamic large-scale presentation, but with artistically grounded techniques of chamber singing in zones of so-called "quiet" climaxes and starting points of "crescendoing" dramaturgy, as we find in two famous scenic cantatas and the extremely popular opera by K. Orff.
 Key words: chamber singing, musical piece; scenic cantata, opera, vocal.

The concept of timbre-role in ukrainian opera: interpretation and development prospects

The concept of timbre-role in ukrainian opera: interpretation and development prospects

The Operatic Roots of Performativity: Bodies Decontextualised in Butler, Brecht and Busoni

AbstractIt has long been claimed that opera can give expression to the uneasy relationship between the body and the voice. Operatic voices seem to exceed the capacity of the bodies that produce them in a way that conveys a sense of mechanisation or limited agency, inviting metaphorical comparisons to marionettes. Yet recent studies of gesture have suggested that bodies are not simply passively inscribed with meaning but that they also mediate the process of inscription. Investigating the implications of this claim for opera, this article discusses two recent essays by Judith Butler, in which she draws from Walter Benjamin's account of gesture in Brecht's epic theatre to argue for the performative power of incomplete or decontextualised bodily actions. It then traces this idea to a moment in epic theatre's own prehistory, focusing on Ferruccio Busoni's opera Doktor Faust. The article makes both a theoretical point and an historical claim: it highlights how bodies and words that are decontextualised can perform a critical function despite not enjoying the usual citational supports necessary for a speech act; and it argues that Busoni's Doktor Faust and his theory of opera were a part of the intellectual prehistory to Butler's conceptualisation of bodily performativity.

Rubbled Cities – Sounds and Silence: A Travelogue

AbstractA travelogue of an Israeli musicologist, descendant of German Jewish émigrés, her real and imaginary sonic journey roams between ruins and rubble in Germany and Israel/Palestine. She takes ruins as iconic, allegoric, and reverberating; partially resisting the ravages of time, enshrining sounds and memory. She deems rubble as formless, plain, and voiceless, devoid of identity, transient, and forgetful. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce by the Romans is her starting point, and the currently occupied East Jerusalem by Israeli armed forces is where she ends. The imaginary soundscapes she unfolds resonates forlorn heavenly voices, Nazi youth's ditties, Israeli pop songs, operatic voices, and redemptive and subversive German and Israeli oratorios.

Broadcasting the Italian voice’s broadcasting: opera and Italy on the air, 1920s–1930s

ABSTRACT Within the early twentieth-century Italian radiophonic imagination, opera occupied a complex position. The overriding ‘voice’ of Italy and its radio empire under Fascism, opera supported the new technology as a political and cultural tool, even as it challenged it as a geographical and perceptual fantasy. This article has two aims. First, drawing on materials from 1920s and ‘30s radio magazines, it sketches a history of early radio listening that restores vision and touch to a more central position than they have had in previous scholarly accounts. Second, it investigates radio and the Italian operatic voice as two mutually broadcasting technologies, ones whose critical co-construction was more than an accident of the fraught political moment. Contemporary definitions of radio as bel canto and of bel canto as radiophonic rested on a subtler, conceptual alignment between the two media, each of which foregrounded a tension between sound and meaning and implied the radial dissemination of voice ‘out’ in all directions. This article thus seeks to answer two questions. Did opera, a fundamentally audiovisual genre, become invariably ‘sonified’ through radiophonic transmission? And what happened when that old broadcasting technology, the Italian voice, met the new communications medium?

The Singing Voice and the Delighted Listener

This article focuses on the way in which cinema in recent decades has been listening to the operatic voice and exploring its perception. It is suggested that this interest has been stimulated by Roland Barthes’ S/Z (1970), which, like Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrazin, centers on the moment when the listener encounters and admires the sing- ing (operatic) voice. The connection of this S/Z fragment with the chapter Admiration in Fragments of a Love Speech and with Barth’s experience as a listener, reflected also in his other works (The Grain of the Voice), is emphasized. Barth’s S/Z is considered in line with the reflection on music set by Søren Kierkegaard in his treatise Either/Or (1843). In this line, the author includes Charles Baudelaire’s letter to Richard Wagner (1860) and its analysis by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in Musica ficta (1982–1991) to indicate the “operatic climate” of the 1980s and the intensity of the discussion of the phenomenon of opera in which the cinema has become involved. Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981) is considered as an example of a response to Barthes’ text; the criterion for the selection of other films (by Fellini, Herzog, Szabó, Russell, Demme, Darabont, Almodóvar) is the captured encounter between the (operatic) voice and homo audiens. It is a cinema that observes “the gaze of our hearing” (Alexander Mikhailov), reaches a new level (a new depth and intimacy) of relationship with opera and looks for ways to the very core of operatic magic, exploring the point of erotic encounter between voice and hearing. The article dis- cusses the opposition of the “intellectual vs sensual and erotic” in the performance, perception and exploration of music (Roland Barthes, Caroline Abbate, Vladimir Yankelevich) and the ability of cinema to offer the listener in front of the screen a musical experience similar to that of the listener on screen and allow the listener to be “delighted” himself — passive and “captivated,” according to Barth. The process of listening unfolds in time, structured by the musical form, which cinema is also able to reflect in its movement, that is, it is able to convey “the tensions of feeling” (Lacoue-Labarthe).

“It Must Be Preserved”: Adolph Bolm's Revival of Le Coq d'Or

“It Must Be Preserved”: Adolph Bolm's Revival of <i>Le Coq d'Or</i>

The Female Sublime: Domesticating Luigia Todi’s Voice

Abstract This article delves into the puzzling reception of opera singer Luigia Todi (1753–1833) in order to explore how the traces left by pre-phonographic voices contain long-forgotten cultural histories. Operagoers in 1790s Venice claimed that Todi’s moral qualities allowed her to overcome her “vocal defects,” and, in turn, taught her listeners to become good citizens. Hearing vocal difficulties as a manifestation of interiority, rather than as poor training, marked a significant departure from what were then the predominant aesthetics of operatic voice. In attempting to smooth over this gap, listeners pieced together narratives about Todi’s subjectivity based on the unstable, fragmented sounds of her voice. This article argues that such remediations of Todi’s singing were subtended by two seemingly irreconcilable ontologies of female voice, one of them rooted in ancient myths of sublime song and the other born of Enlightenment ideologies of domesticity. I thus read inscriptions of Todi’s voice through a network of late eighteenth-century Italian cultural anxieties, drawing on literary reimaginings of Sappho, debates over the nature of musical skill, discourses on women’s education, and more. By interrogating the narratives about one woman’s unusual voice, I offer a new origin story for still resonant assumptions about the relationships between gender and disability, politics and domestic labor, and, fundamentally, bodies and voices.

The Changing Aesthetics of Vocal Registration in the Age of ‘Verismo’

Abstract The idea that classical singers should join the notes of the vocal line by maintaining a consistent vocal colour is a relatively recent historical construct. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, singers in the Italian tradition were loyal to a very different vocal aesthetic, which valued the distinct differences in timbre between different vocal registers, as this article shows through a comparative analysis of pedagogical writing and pre-1925 recordings. The latter reveal that, in the early twentieth century, old and new techniques for uniting the vocal registers coexisted, and reflected an aesthetic transition towards a more gendered quality of the operatic voice. This process was intertwined with profound transformations in Italian operatic culture. The demands of a new realistic idiom known as verismo required a new type of vocalism, which prompted singers to re-conceive the ‘art of vocal registration’.

Does a Systematic Vocal Exercise Program Enhance the Physiologic Range of Voice Production in Classical Singing Graduate-Level Students?

Purpose The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of vocal function exercises (VFEs) on the physiologic range of the operatic voice. The primary outcome measure was total voice range profile (VRP) area. Method Forty graduate-level opera majors were randomly assigned to experimental (training with VFE + vocal hygiene) and control (vocal hygiene only) groups. All participants underwent an acoustic voice assessment (modified VRP) pre and post 10 weeks of the assigned intervention. VRP total area was calculated and compared between and within the two groups. The total VRP area was subsequently divided into three area thirds (low, medium, and high). Results A significant improvement (increase) was observed in the VFE group for the primary outcome measure of VRP area when pre- and postvoice conditions were compared for total area, upper third, and middle third. No significant improvement was found in the vocal hygiene-only group. Conclusion Vocal training with VFEs over a 10-week period demonstrated positive effects on physiologic voice range as evidenced by an increase in the total VRP area and therefore may enhance the potential of those who already have professional voice training.

Interpretation, resonance, embodiment: affect theory and ethnomusicology

ABSTRACT Theorising the relationship between music and affect is nothing new; scholars have long engaged the ways music expresses and influences emotions and bodily intensities. Why is it, then, that (ethno)musicologists now find themselves following rather than leading a theoretical debate that adopts so many concepts we have used for generations: intensity, embodiment, performance, resonance? This Special Issue will draw on (ethno)musicological literature that anticipated the contemporary resurgence of affect theory, and also call for an intervention in which fine-grained, ethnographically informed analysis can newly invigorate theories about the inbetweenness and intensity of encounter. The interpositions we propose centre on three ethnomusicological concepts that complicate, nuance, and refine affect theory: interpretation, resonance, and embodiment. The introduction will explicate these theoretical propositions, and the following articles will ground those concepts in fieldwork and musical particulars. The broad-ranging articles will discuss electronic dance music in Berlin, nineteenth-century operatic voices in the USA, tambura music in the USA, and musical experiences of grief. These studies will investigate and critique both affect theory and ethnomusicological methods and analysis.

Commentary on Neumann's "Phenomena, Poiēsis, and Performance Profiling: Temporal-Textual Emphasis and Creative Analysis in Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera"

This commentary situates Neumann's research within the existing literature on musicological ontologies of the musical work as well as scholarship on the analysis of performance and recordings. The response focuses on the interdisciplinary strength of the author's method while offering a few caveats about the analytical tools used. Although Neumann ventures into an under-explored territory (i.e. the analysis of operatic voices), I urge the author not to isolate this analysis from other elements of performance, including both visual content and listening experience

From the Editor's Gable

From the Editor's Gable

Maria Callas’s Waistline and the Organology of Voice

During my first few weeks at music conservatory, my voice teacher asked who my favorite opera singer was. “Maria Callas,” I replied. My teacher was surprised, but commented only that Callas had an “unusual voice.” At that time, Callas existed for me simply as a wonderful artist, a singer whose recordings I played on endless repeat. But as I began to learn about the Callas legend, I came to understand what my teacher had meant. Callas’s voice gives rise to highly polarized reactions, from devotion to disgust. As an artist, Callas was judged as “temperamental,” “out of control,” unreliable due to her walkouts; while Callas-the-voice was considered “mesmerizing,” “terrible,” ruined through “ferocious dieting,” and also “out of control.”1 During my decade and a half of work on voice, body, and materiality, I have been continually reminded of Callas’s case and its resonance with how we listen to female operatic voices today.

The Operatic Voice of Leoni the Jew: Between the Synagogue and the Theater in Late Georgian Britain

AbstractMichael Leoni, a leading singer in late eighteenth-century London, became famous for his role in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's anti-Jewish operaThe Duenna. He was discovered, however, at the Jewish synagogue, where his singing enthralled non-Jews in the early 1770s. Tracing Leoni's public reception, this article argues that the performative effect of his singing had a multifaceted relation to his audience's psychology of prejudice, serving to both reiterate and reconfigure a variety of preconceptions regarding the Jews. Leoni's intervention through operatic singing was particularly significant––a powerful, bodily manifestation that was capable of transforming listeners while exhibiting the deep acculturation of the singer himself. The ambivalence triggered by his performances would go on to define the public reception of other Jewish singers, particularly that of Leoni's protégé, John Braham, Britain's leading tenor in the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, the experience of these Jews' performances could not be easily deconstructed, as the Jewish performers' voices were emanating from within written, sometimes canonical, musical works. This representational impasse gave rise to a public discourse intent on deciphering their Jewishness, raising questions of interpretation, intention, and confession.

Lay Listeners Can Evaluate the Pitch Accuracy of Operatic Voices

Lay listeners are reliable judges when evaluating pitch accuracy of occasional singers, suggesting that enculturation and laypersons’ perceptual abilities are sufficient to judge “simple” music material adequately. However, the definition of pitch accuracy in operatic performances is much more complex than in melodies performed by occasional singers. Furthermore, because listening to operatic performances is not a common activity, laypersons‘ experience with this complicated acoustic signal is more limited. To address the question of music expertise in evaluating operatic singing voices, listeners without music training were compared with the music experts examined in a recent study (Larrouy-Maestri, Magis, &amp; Morsomme, 2014a) and their ratings were modeled with regard to underlying acoustic variables of pitch accuracy. As expected, some participants lacked test-retest reliability in their judgments. However, listeners who used a consistent strategy relied on a definition of pitch accuracy that appears to overlap with the quantitative criteria used by music experts. Besides clarifying the role of music expertise in the evaluation of melodies, our findings show robust perceptual abilities in laypersons when listening to complex signals such as operatic performances.

Le parlé-chanté dans Phèdre de Jean Racine et Partage de midi de Paul Claudel

In this article we will seek to answer how, in Phèdre to Jean Racine and Noon’s Sharing to Paul Claudel, the « parlé-chanté » is particularly significant. To do so, this article will be divided in three parts. In the first part, the « parlé-chanté » will be defined and linked to Arnold Schoenberg’s Sprechgesang. While the second part will issue on Phèdre by Jean Racine, the third and final part will focalize on Paul Claudel's Noon’s Sharing. By focusing on the two aforesaid plays we will try to prove that the operatic voice is always present in the acting choices and that the two playwrights accustomed the dramatic rules of their time.