Tenor Voice Research Articles

Donizetti – Inediti per Tenore

Gaetano Donizetti is one of the most prominent figures in Italian opera, especially of the period known as the “belcanto era”. This article aims to present less known biographical data to readers, related to the life of the great Bergamo composer, carefully treating his years of study, a defining period in the formation of his character and personality. Donizetti composed countless arias for the tenor voice, either in the belcanto or romantic style. The discovery and promotion of lesser-known arias is for me one of the most important pragmatic aspects of the act of scientific research. The role of this article is to spark students’ interest in listening and start studying lesser-sung pieces from the Donizettian repertoire. Keywords: Gaetano Donizetti, belcanto, tenor, arias.

Bookshelf

Abstract: Debra Greschner reviews three recent publications. Singing Down the Barriers: A Guide to Centering African American Song for Concert Performers by Emery Stephens and Caroline Helton covers the history of African American song, cultural appropriation and other contextual considerations, and suggestions for encouraging performance of this repertoire. Stella Guo Chen and Carlo Alberto Petruzzi offer Word-by-Word Explanation of Italian Opera Librettos in Chinese in seven volumes, covering eight classic operas. Franco Corelli and A Revolution in Singing: Fifty-four Tenors Spanning 200 Years , Volumes II and II by Stefan Zucker are the concluding volumes in a trilogy devoted to the tenor voice.

A Vocal approach of the Bel Canto tenors

The revival movement of the Italian bel canto and the singing technique practiced by tenors of the early 19th century are some of the main topics of my research. The paperwork proposes to readers a comprehensive approach to the music terms “vocal virtuosity” and “bel canto” in connection with the tenor voice. I hope the results overcome the scientific barrier, and propose to the current generation of masculine singers real and applicable solutions to the problems of the bel canto repertoire, especially in understanding and solving the hardest virtuosity passages.

Anne Dawson Her Book (1716) ed. by Jon Baxendale, and: Toccatas, Suites and Preludes for Harpsichord by William Babell ed. by Andrew Woolley

Reviewed by: Anne Dawson Her Book (1716) ed. by Jon Baxendale, and: Toccatas, Suites and Preludes for Harpsichord by William Babell ed. by Andrew Woolley Graydon Beeks Anne Dawson Her Book (1716). Edited by Jon Baxendale. Tynset: Lyrebird Music, 2021. [302 p. ISMN 979-0-796670-14-0. €58.99] Toccatas, Suites and Preludes for Harpsichord. By William Babell, edited by Andrew Woolley. Tynset: Lyrebird Music, 2021. [302 p. ISMN 979-0-706670-16-4. €48.99] Lyrebird Music, the project of harpsichordist and musicologist Jon Baxendale, began publishing in 2020 and has already produced a remarkable body of work—at least twenty-two editions to date. It is not related to Editions L'Oiseau-Lyre, but like that series, is committed to making available practical editions of keyboard music that take advantage of the latest and best scholarship. Repertoire is heavily weighted toward French music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both familiar and little-known, but there are also volumes of works by Georg Muffat (Apparatus musicoorganisticus) and J. S. Bach (Die Kunst der Fuge), together with a projected edition of the complete organ works of César Franck. All volumes have a detailed critical apparatus with an emphasis on providing supporting information for the performer. The two volumes under review here contain music composed or circulated in England during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. They complement new editions of The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book and My Lady Nevells Book, which contain English music from the previous century. The first to be considered is Anne Dawson Her Book (1716), an edition of manuscript BRM 710.5 CR 71 in the Henry Watson Music Library in Manchester that Baxendale, the editor of the volume, has studied for some twenty years. The contents include keyboard transcriptions of instrumental works, idiomatic keyboard pieces, and songs with basso continuo accompaniment, most with obbligato instrumental lines. It has not been possible to identify the original owner of the book, but the editor suggests that she was likely a young 'cultured gentlewoman' and that it was prepared as part of her musical education, presumably at the behest of an unidentified music master who could possibly have also been the primary scribe. The bulk of the transcriptions are of concertos by Italian composers, primarily Antonio Vivaldi, but also Domenico Alberti and Francesco Manfredini. The overture to Bononcini's popular opera Camilla is included, as are sonatas by Arcangelo Corelli and Johann [End Page 348] Christoph Pepusch, who was active in London at the time, and Jean Baptiste Lully's famous 'Choeur de Cybèle' from his opera Atys. Of the five keyboard toccatas, at least one is by William Babell, while another is attributed to 'Sr. Hendel'. The final toccata is attributed elsewhere to Henry Purcell, Michelangelo Rossi, and J. S. Bach, but Baxendale suggests it is more likely to be by a North German composer, perhaps someone in the circle of Dietrich Buxtehude. Among the shorter pieces by French and German composers, John Weldon's three-movement Suite in F Major is the only piece definitely written by a native English composer. The transcribed arias, some of which have been transposed, are all apt for a soprano or tenor voice and are largely taken from Italian operas that were performed in London in the years preceding 1716. Because the continuo bass is so extensively figured, Baxendale suggests that these transcriptions may have been used to teach Ms. Dawson how to accompany at the keyboard. The second volume, Andrew Woolley's edition of Toccatas, Suites and Preludes for Harpsichord by the harpsichordist, organist, and composer William Babell (1688–1723), connects us with the life of a busy professional musician in early eighteenth-century London. Born in Germany into a family of French musicians, both he and his father acquired positions at the English Court, and both joined the orchestra of the newly established Italian opera in 1707. William presumably continued playing with that orchestra until 1717, but he became better known for his activities in public concerts. He also made keyboard arrangements of opera arias that were published by John Walsh. In later years, he became increasingly active as a church organist and...

The effects of vowel, pitch, and dynamics on the emotional characteristics of the Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass Voices

Previous research on the soprano and tenor voices have shown that their emotional characteristics change with different vowel, pitch, and dynamics. This work continues the investigation with the alto and bass voices. Listening tests were conducted whereby listeners gave absolute judgements on the SATB voice tones over ten emotional categories with the data analyzed using logistic regression. High-arousal categories were stronger for loud tones, whereas low-arousal categories were stronger for soft tones. The categories Happy, Heroic, Romantic, and Shy had mostly upward trends across the pitch range, whereas Angry had an overall downward trend. Calm and Sad had an arch-shaped trend, while Scary had a U-shaped trend. Comic and Mysterious had different trends among the voices. The voices each exhibited different vowel trends, though vowel A was dominant for all the voice types in the categories Happy and Romantic. Dynamics had the strongest effect overall, followed closely by pitch, with both effects approximately twice as strong as the effect of vowel. Vowel U had the largest strength-of-expressiveness overall, with A second, O third, I fourth, and finally E last. These results give a quantified preliminary perspective on how vowel, pitch, and dynamics shape emotional expression in the SATB voices.

Voice Assignment in Vocal Quartets Using Deep Learning Models Based on Pitch Salience

This paper deals with the automatic transcription of four-part, a cappella singing, audio performances. In particular, we exploit an existing, deep-learning based, multiple F0 estimation method and complement it with two neural network architectures for voice assignment (VA) in order to create a music transcription system that converts an input audio mixture into four pitch contours. To train our VA models, we create a novel synthetic dataset by collecting 5381 choral music scores from public-domain music archives, which we make publicly available for further research. We compare the performance of the proposed VA models on different types of input data, as well as to a hidden Markov model-based baseline system. In addition, we assess the generalization capabilities of these models on audio recordings with differing pitch distributions and vocal music styles. Our experiments show that the two proposed models, a CNN and a ConvLSTM, have very similar performance, and both of them outperform the baseline HMM-based system. We also observe a high confusion rate between the alto and tenor voice parts, which commonly have overlapping pitch ranges, while the bass voice has the highest scores in all evaluated scenarios.

James Joyce's Favourite Songs by G. Molyneux Palmer et al.

Reviewed by: James Joyce's Favourite Songs by G. Molyneux Palmer et al. Scott W. Klein (bio) JAMES JOYCE'S FAVOURITE SONGS. by G. Molyneux Palmer, Martyn Hill, Meriel Dickinson, and Peter Dickinson. London: Heritage Records, 2020. 1 CD. £13.25. James Joyce's Favourite Songs is a fascinating CD, but it surely does not contain James Joyce's favorite songs. Those would include Irish ballads; nineteenth-century bel canto arias and the operatic songs of William Balfe; the stray show piece from Arthur Gilbert and W. S. Sullivan's operettas; and a miscellanea of comic and sentimental songs of the late nineteenth century—the titles and lyrics to which can be largely found woven through the fabrics of Joyce's works from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake. The CD's contents are, however, settings of most of Joyce's first collection of poetry, Chamber Music, by the little-known Anglo-Irish composer Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer, and the songs of The Joyce Book, a collection of musical settings of Joyce's Pomes Penyeach by a series of Irish, American, and English composers, and published by the Oxford University Press in 1933.1 The adjective "favourite" for Joyce only applied to Palmer's settings. Joyce conceived of Chamber Music as fundamentally lyrical. He wrote, "It is not a book of love-verses at all, I perceive. But some of them are pretty enough to be put to music. I hope some-one will do so, someone that knows old English music such as I like."2 While several composers were attracted to the poems as lyrics for art songs, Joyce thought that Palmer's settings were the best. Palmer had written to Joyce in 1907 shortly after the publication of Chamber Music asking for permission to set some of the poems to music. By 1909, Joyce had approved of several of Palmer's songs and expressed the wish that he would eventually work with all of them, writing "if I were a musician I suppose I should have set them to music myself."3 Palmer was born of Irish parents in Middlesex and studied at Oxford and the Royal College of Music under the prominent Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford. He moved to Ireland in 1910, served as a church organist in the suburbs of Dublin, and died there—suffering from multiple sclerosis and cared for by his two sisters—in 1957. Palmer's Joyce settings were extensive. He composed them over a long period, from 1907 to 1949, well after Joyce's death. Despite this long compositional history, Palmer's style remained consistent. At the time of his own death, he had set thirty-two of Joyce's thirty-six poems to music, to create something like a forty-minute song-cycle, a relative rarity in the English song tradition.4 For years, they were believed lost. Palmer never published them—in part because of his physical condition, perhaps in part because of Joyce's then-status as persona non grata in Ireland—and they were only rediscovered in the archives at Southern Illinois University by the American researcher Myra Teicher Russel in 1981.5 [End Page 365] Palmer's settings are fluent and at times imaginative. If the settings form an integral cycle, the whole is less like Franz Schubert's Winterreise—a claim made in the liner notes—than his Die schöne Müllerin, a young man's emotional journey set to youthful-sounding music. The strengths of Palmer's settings reside in their consistent flow of melody—they were particularly tailored to Joyce's own high tenor voice—and, to Palmer's credit, their resistance to other composers' overt influences (although they do show occasional echoes of Richard Wagner and Gabriel Fauré, and in the case of XX, "He who hath glory lost" (Poems 33) a bit too much of Edward Elgar). If the songs tend to fall short of the best word-setting, the music is generally a good match for Joyce's lyrics, which are those of a young writer working out his relation to both archaism and modernism, feeling his way between Victorian conservatism and newer modes of expression. For a composer who studied...

Songs for Lyric Tenor: An Analysis of Five Francesco Paolo Tosti Songs

Selecting diverse repertoire for the undergraduate lyric tenor can be a challenging process for instructors of this voice type. Francesco Paolo Tosti, a lyric tenor and composer, wrote songs that exemplify technical concepts that should be cultivated in the undergraduate lyric tenor voice. This guide will present five Tosti songs that address technical issues, which the lyric tenor must overcome to progress into more advanced repertoire.

‘With sound of lute and pleasing words’: The Lute Song and Voice Types in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century England

AbstractThe Elizabethan and Jacobean lute song (1597–1622) represents one of the most iconic genres of all early music. Although much literature has been dedicated to this repertory, the issue of the voices for which this music was probably intended still remains surprisingly underexplored. This subject has, moreover, acquired greater significance in light of research undertaken by Simon Ravens (2014) and Andrew Parrott (2015), which has challenged the plausibility of the falsetto voice in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, particularly in sacred music.This paper explores the issue of the types of voices that most likely performed the Elizabethan and Jacobean lute song in three ways. Firstly, contemporary English evidence for lutes and viols is analyzed together with information regarding tuning and transposition. Secondly, the music itself is investigated, including the part names and clefs used alongside the tessitura of the melodic line. Finally, a detailed examination of evidence for the tenor and falsetto voice is presented, including a critical examination of the word ‘faine’ (usually assumed to mean ‘falsetto’). The collective results are then brought together to refine current ideas regarding the voices used in the Elizabethan and Jacobean lute song.

Lyric or Dramatic - Vibrato Analysis for Voice Type Classification in Professional Opera Singers

Vibrato is one of the most frequently investigated parameters in singing. Most studies examine a very limited number of sound samples to answer specific questions. In the novel approach of our interdisciplinary vibrato project, a comprehensive database of 1723 sound samples was compiled, containing examples from 30 operas, one oratorio and 73 vocal exercises. Single tones undisturbed by orchestral sound were selected in the vocal registers soprano, tenor, baritone and bass according to a standardized classification system dividing voices into either a lyric or dramatic voice type. Various algorithms were implemented in a Matlab environment to automatically evaluate sound samples, with respect to vibrato extent and rate. An AM/FM demodulation scheme is presented with postprocessing required for automatic calculation of these two parameters. The vibrato extent was higher for the dramatic compared to the lyric voice type in soprano and tenor voices. In contrast, the extent of lyric baritones was significantly higher than for dramatic ones. Moreover, the vibrato rate was slightly lower for the dramatic voice type in all vocal registers. It turned out that the classification of bass voices into lyric and dramatic, unlike the other vocal registers, was not scientifically reproducible with our methods. Further vibrato results regarding aging, intra-individual and general stylistic development over time are presented and their possible relevance for vocal pedagogy are discussed.

A Conceptual Falsetto: Re-imagining Black Childhood Via One Girl’s Exploration of Prince

A young Prince scoffed at a single story of identity, i.e., dominant social constructions of race, class, gender, and youth associated with inadequacy and confinement. Inspired by Prince, this autoethnography introduces a conceptual falsetto framework (CFF). Like Prince’s falsetto which resists the constraints of his tenor voice, CFF resists the tenor of a single story of Black childhood—it goes higher. CFF calls Black scholars to (re)imagine Black childhood into ideologies of love (Delgado 1995 in The Rodrigo Chronicles; Dumas and Nelson, 86(1), 27–47, 2016; Duncan, 8(1), 85–104, 2002), by using reflexive practices to write about one’s own childhood on multiple tracks. Identifying and examining the social/cultural and political material of their childhoods, Black scholars can produce new ideas and approaches to research on Black childhood more generally—swelling a new discourse on Black childhood from the margins of society into the public discourse. “Many feminist writers advocate starting research from one’s own experience… using personal knowledge to help them in the research process” (Ellis 2004:48). I illustrate CFF by analyzing my childhood journal (1986–1988) which examines and emulates Prince’s artistry. Findings reveal Black childhoods are spent resisting, creating symbolic universes, being in relationship, bonding around intellectuality and abstract ideas—choosing to love something and being in pursuit of it.

Prefaces to Scalia/Ginsburg: A (Gentle) Parody of Operatic Proportions

Scalia/Ginsburg is for me a dream come true. If I could choose the talent I would most like to have, it would be a glorious voice. I would be a great diva, perhaps Renata Tebaldi or Beverly Sills or, in the mezzo range, Marilyn Horne. But my grade school music teacher, with brutal honesty, rated me a sparrow, not a robin. I was told to mouth the words, never to sing them. Even so, I grew up with a passion for opera, though I sing only in the shower, and in my dreams. One fine day, a young composer, librettist and pianist named Derrick Wang approached Justice Scalia and me with a request. While studying Constitutional Law at the University of Maryland Law School, Wang had an operatic idea. The different perspectives of Justices Scalia and Ginsburg on constitutional interpretation, he thought, could be portrayed in song. Wang put his idea to the “will it write” test. He composed a comic opera with an important message brought out in the final duet, “We are different, we are one”—one in our reverence for the Constitution, the U.S. judiciary and the Court on which we serve. Would we listen to some excerpts from the opera, Wang asked, and then tell him whether we thought his work worthy of pursuit and performance? Good readers, as you leaf through the libretto, check some of the many footnotes disclosing Wang’s sources, and imagine me a dazzling diva, I think you will understand why, in answer to Wang’s question, I just said “Yes.” Preface by Justice Antonin Scalia: While Justice Ginsburg is confident that she has achieved her highest and best use as a Supreme Justice, I, alas, have the nagging doubt that I could have been a contendah—for a divus, or whatever a male diva is called. My father had a good tenor voice, which he trained at the Eastman School of Music. I sang in the Georgetown Glee Club (directed by Washington Post music critic Paul Hume, whom President Truman rewarded with a valuable letter for his review of Margaret’s singing). I have sung in choirs and choral groups much of my life, up to and including my days on the D.C. Circuit. And the utter peak of my otherwise uneventful judicial career was an evening after the Opera Ball at the British Ambassador’s Residence, when I joined two tenors from the Washington Opera singing various songs at the piano—the famous Three Tenors performance. I suppose, however, that it would be too much to expect the author of Scalia/Ginsburg to allow me to play (sing) myself—especially if Ruth refuses to play (sing) herself. Even so, it may be a good show.

“I Figure Singing and Playing Is the Same”: Louis Armstrong and Barbershop Harmony

ABSTRACTRecent research has shown that the counterpoint of New Orleans jazz derives from the application of the principles of barbershop harmonization to the instruments of a jazz ensemble. This essay argues that what have become known as “blue notes” are the result of tenor and baritone voice leading in a barbershop quartet. When these principles are applied to an improvised solo a blues inflected solo results. I explore how Louis Armstrong used barbershop principles in 12-bar-blues recordings of the 1920s in relation to dominant harmony, and that by the application of these principles, Armstrong introduced altered intervals (ninths and fifths) to his solos.

Musical Theater Songs

Musical Theater Songs [Brooklyn, NY]: Musical Theater Songs, 2013-. http://www.musicaltheatersongs.com (Accessed 4 January 2017). [Requires a Web browser and an Internet connection. Institutional subscription pricing is based on full time enrollment and the total number of full time music and theater faculty and students. Individual subscriptions are S29 per month or $79 per year.] Introduction Musical Theater Songs currently indexes 11,000 songs front 150 years of the musical theater repertoire and continues to grow. In addition to all of the well-known standards, it includes rare finds from shows that had limited runs or that closed out of town. The purpose of Musical Theater Songs is to help performers, students, and teachers find songs, discover new repertoire, and locate sheet music and recordings. Steven Gross, the founder and CEO of Musical Theater Songs, created the index to streamline the process of finding repertoire. This process once required searching multiple catalogs and multiple scores, which cut into the valuable time that could be spent actually preparing for auditions. Gross began cataloging theater scores for his own use, and this ultimately led to the creation of Musical Theater Songs in 2013. According to Gross's biography on the Musical Theater Songs site, the founder has over twenty years of experience working on Broadway and the West End as a music director, conductor, pianist, sub, and vacation conductor. He earned a Doctor of Musical Arts in Conducting from Yale University and has held faculty positions in musical theater at Baldwin Wallace University and Coastal Carolina University (http://musicaltheatersongs.com/about, accessed 27 January 2017). Searching In order to help users find the songs that are best suited for their needs, Musical Theater Songs allows for the selection of up to 20-plus search parameters. Despite this large number, the search interface is intuitive and easy to use. Basic search criteria include character's age, voice type, tempo, and tone (comedic and/or dramatic). More precise searches can be conducted by plugging in additional historical and/or musical criteria. These additional options include searching by composer, lyricist, song title, show title, decade or year (including a range), time signature, the original key, and the level of difficulty for the accompanist. Users can select a voice range on a pop-up piano keyboard, and even have the option to select the exact highest and/or lowest note that they would like to appear in the song. There are over one hundred descriptive tags that users can select as well, including various styles, accents, and themes. Finally, users also have the option to limit their searches to rarities that are seldom performed. While there is no browse function, users only need to select one search condition. Simply inputting the user's voice type will still yield a very large number of results that can then be browsed or sorted by title, show, composer, age range, voice type, tempo, or tone (comedic or dramatic). As of this writing, there are 1,800 songs for the soprano voice; 3,600 songs for the mezzo/belt/alto voice: 1,700 songs for the tenor voice; and 3,800 songs for the baritone/bass voice. Results To learn more about a song, users can click on the title in the results page to go to a song details page. …

Review of Anna Zayaruznaya,The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet(Cambridge University Press, 2015)

[1] Anna Zayaruznaya's book, The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet, presents an intriguing new perspective on a relatively small, complex, and much-scrutinized repertoire. The book is an expansion of the concept behind her important 2009 article, which portrays voice crossing in Machaut's motets as Fortune turning the tables on the usual position of voices, just as in the composer's poetry she is wont to level kings and raise the ignoble. In The Monstrous New Art, Zayaruznaya expands her purview to ars nova motets generally, and beyond voice crossing to any atypical patterning that effects (audible) divisions in a motet. For the author, "features which seem strange or unusual are places to look deeper rather than anomalies to gloss over" (20) and "the lens through which [she has] chosen to examine this repertory magnifies rifts and fissures, allegorical as well as psychological" (220). Zayaruznaya thus carves out a new subgenre of the ars nova motet that flourished in the half century between Fauvel (1310) and the 1360s, a significant bestiary comprising some twenty out of ninety extant ars nova motets (173). "Monstrous" here are those works whose text(s) treat themes of division and disunity, broadly construed to reference the character of historical people, mythological creatures (chimera, centaur, siren), allegorical figures (Fortune, Love, courtly lady, triune God), objects of piecemeal construction, and more subtly the stratified organization of "bodies" like medieval civil and clerical classes. Her vital connection is made when "motets whose upper voices dwell on a series of fragmented creatures. . . turn out to have musical forms that are equally fragmented" (62).[2] Zayaruznaya stresses that the relation between hybridity in textual subject matter and musical organization is an abstract one. Ars nova motet composers pursued what she calls the broader congruence of "form-idea relations," driven by analogy and allegory (18). Zayaruznaya situates this relationship as an "important early chapter in the history of musical hermeneutics" (234) before the more direct mimesis of Renaissance text painting.[3] The first chapter is devoted to a question upon which the acceptance of the monstrous subgenre is predicated: how can a motet have a body? Zayaruznaya finds ample evidence of this creaturely ontology. Not only do medieval bestiaries align meaning with morphology (21), "medieval music treatises are replete with body parts" (25). We are reminded of familiar analogies like Guido's hand, Grocheio's likening of the tenor to a skeleton that gives structure to the whole, the varying note heads of mensural notation, and tails [caudae] tacked on to the end of antiphons.(1) Having established a concern for taxonomy and the proper arrangement of parts, Zayaruznaya brings an eye for division to bear on musical structure, showing in the case studies that follow how composers explored and exploited the new compositional possibilities afforded by an increasingly well-ordered motet genre.(2)[4] As ars nova composers developed tenor isorhythm, an early form of intrinsically musical structure not based upon a poetic scheme (as in the formes fixes), they experimented with boundaries as a natural process in the very effort of defining them (see 222-25). Because the ars nova motet was an organic whole made up of interdependent parts, it could be conceived of as bodily. And if bodily, anything but the perfect alignment and coordination of all parts can be interpreted as deformity. Matching their potential for hybridity in form, many ars nova motets are also polytextual and speak from (or embody) three unique voices simultaneously. While the upper-voice poetry of many motets serves to amplify and interpret the classical subject of the tenor voice, it may also contradict the tenor, dividing the whole.(3) Exploiting unity as a norm in the greater quantity of non-monstrous motets, motets based upon divided materia could play with that expectation as a means of expressivity; they could distort, subvert, and otherwise comment upon wholeness. …

Arias for a Tenor from Mozart's Vienna

Arias for a Tenor from Mozart's Vienna Joshua Neumann Arias for Vincenzo Calvesi: Mozart's First Ferrando. Edited by Dorothea Link. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Classical Era, 84.) Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2011. [Acknowledgments, p. vii; introd., p. ix-xxvii; texts and trans., p. xxix-xxxv; score, p. 3-107; crit. report, p. 109-18. ISBN/13,978-0-89579-717-9. $130.] Vincenzo Calvesi (fl. 1777-1811), the tenor-turned-impresario who created the role of Ferrando in Così fan tutte, was, in Dorothea Link's words, "obviously very good" (p. ix). Throughout his career, Calvesi sang predominantly in dramma giocoso, beginning in Rome. After his known debut in 1777, he had engagements in Florence, Lucca, Trieste, Verona, Padua, Treviso, and Venice before arriving in Dresden in 1781, where he stayed until 1784. Before settling in Vienna in 1785, Calvesi sang in Bologna and twice more in Trieste. Of the twenty-four known roles of Calvesi's early career, twenty-two were comedic—dramma giocoso (twenty) and [End Page 321] opera buffa (two). Upon arriving in Vienna, Calvesi sang Sandrino in Giovanni Paisiello's Il re Teodoro in Venezia. Calvesi's versatility as a lyric tenor enabled him to create several leading roles, in addition to Ferrando, for Martín y Soler (Una cosa rara and L'arbore di Diana), Antonio Salieri (La grotto di Trofonio and Axur, re d'Ormus), and Stephen Storace (Gli sposi malcontenti and Gli equivoci). Aside from 1788-89 when he sang in Naples (Annibale in Pasquale Anfossi's I matrimoni per fanatismo, Pantaleo in Domenico Cimarosa's I due supposti conti, Leandro in Vincenzo Fabrizi's L'incontro per accidente, and Marchese Astolfo in Pietro Alessandro Guglielmi's La pastorella nobile), Calvesi was a fixture in the Viennese operatic world. He would sing the last of these roles again, in Vienna, in 1791. Calvesi remained in Vienna through 1793, after which he returned to Rome for the 1794 carnival season. His last known singing engagement was on 4 April 1795 in Florence, where he sang the primo mezzo carattere role in Paisiello's I zingari in fiera. Upon retiring from singing, he became one of the foremost impresarios in Rome, working from circa 1796 and continuing at least until 1811. It appears that he was less successful as an impresario than as a singer. While Link offers few details, she highlights the financial difficulties of at least one company with which Calvesi worked. Link's collection of arias written for Calvesi reveals his strengths as a singer, situates the social role of the primo tenore in late-eighteenth-century Vienna, and places him in the development of the tenor voice. One of the most striking aspects of Link's description of Calvesi is her defense of him as a first-rate singer. Since Così premiered in Calvesi's fifth season in Vienna, Mozart had many prior opportunities to observe him in at least twenty-one roles, and even contributed music for him in Francesco Bianchi's La villanella rapita in 1785. Link astutely postulates that the difficulty of the music for Ferrando reflects the high regard in which Mozart held Calvesi and his singing technique. Many have cast suspicion on Calvesi's abilities, often claiming that Mozart himself cut the aria, "Ah lo veggio quell'anima bella," from Ferrando's part during the initial production. Link reveals the two assumptions feeding this claim are erroneous. One is that Mozart did eliminate the aria; the other is that its thirteen high B-flats were too much for Calvesi. For the first of these, Link points to Ian Woodfield's recent study (Mozart's Così fan tutte: A Compositional History [Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell, 2008]) that reveals a misreading of Mozart's annotations in the autograph regarding the aria. Link reiterates Woodfield's conclusion that because Mozart did not cross out "segue l'aria di ferrando" (sic, p. ix), the two remarks in the autograph form a single instruction for the court theater's copyist, "Ferrando's aria follows; after this comes scene 7: accompanied recitative for Fiordiligi and rondò" (p. x). Link asserts that while significant cuts occurred within...

Lute music from Dowland to Weiss

We have here a wide selection of music involving the lute family from around 1600 to 1760. First for consideration are five CDs of Dowland and his contemporaries. This Dowland 450th anniversary year has brought a variety of new recordings, some closely following the conventions that have been established over the past decades and others more innovative. John Dowland: Sorrow stay (ABC Classics abc476 4998, rec 2012, 60′) is one of the former: a beautifully performed solo song recital to the lute. Justin Burwood’s light, clear tenor voice strongly characterizes each song. Rosemary Hodgson accompanies sensitively and plays three solos with the fine tone we heard on her two solo albums, Rosa and Forlorn hope fancy. All the songs are well known, and performed in a manner that will not raise any eyebrows. The same cannot be said for John Dowland: Tunes of sad despaire (Satirino sr121, rec 2013, 66′) from the countertenor Dominique Visse with bass Renaud Delaigue, viol consort Fretwork and Eric Bellocq on liuto forte and orpharion. Almost every aspect of this recording raises questions and it is disappointing that the liner notes are silent on the rationale for the arrangements and instrumentation used. For example, the countertenor voice requires transposition in nearly all the music, up to a 4th lower than written. This makes the music sound even more lugubrious than usual, gives the bass voice a challenge and forces the lute accompaniments to be reworked. Bellocq’s solution for much of the disc is the self-styled ‘Lute for the 21st century’ in his own tuning. The sound is reminiscent of a harp and lacks the subtle, plaintive quality of a traditional lute. On the remaining tracks he plays a metal-strung orpharion with conventional tuning, which is nice to hear and historically appropriate.

Species Counterpoint with a Moveable Tenor (SCAMET): Comparing Species Counterpoint and Polyphonic Music Without aCantus Firmus

[1] This article applies a modified species-counterpoint model, entitled species counterpoint with a moveable tenor, or SCAMET, to compare species counterpoint and (as it is so often called in the classroom). The aim of the model is to show how species counterpoint exercises might be compared with works of polyphonic music without a species cantus firmus. To my knowledge, this has not been undertaken in a systematic manner suitable for the modern classroom (although near the end of the article, I shall discuss some noteworthy instances in which the question has been raised). While something like SCAMET appears in the work of other scholars (notably Henry Martin's Counterpoint: A Species Approach Based on Schenker's Counterpoint [2005] and Peter Schubert's Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style [1999, 2008]) under the rubrics of mixed values, mixed or free nowhere is a comparison between species counterpoint and actual musical scores presented with the clarity of this model.[2] Species counterpoint is normally used as a vehicle for teaching basic voice leading in the form of contrapuntal exercises. The principal limitation forbidding its application to actual music lies in the cantus firmus part, a slow-moving melody against which counterpointed voice parts are placed in regulated measure (one counterpoint note against one cantus note, two counterpoint against one cantus note, etc.). While the slow moving cantus is excellent for teaching basic species counterpoint, a slow cantus-like melody confined to one voice part is a rarity in real music. This complicates comparison between actual musical scores and species-contrapuntal exercises.[3] The model described here remedies this problem. In lieu of a slow-moving cantus firmus or melody, it proposes a succession of individual notes of varying durations. These hard are not necessarily confined to one voice part, but instead can move between parts (for example, from the actual tenor voice for a whole note, to the altus for a half note, and then the bassus for a quarter, etc.). In essence, the hard note is the note of longest duration at any given moment, in any voice. Counterpointed voices are led against the hard note in corresponding duration (in the measure of the species as appropriate) and in any voice part. In applying SCAMET to real music, then, the student observes the voice-leading relationships of the moveable hard note to the in counterpointed voices as these might compare with a species-counterpoint exercise.[4] The voice-leading rules observed in this article are taken largely from Salzer and Schachter's esteemed Counterpoint in Composition (1969), and the rules therein for two-part species counterpoint: first species (pages 12-20), second species (39-46), third species (56-65), fourth species (78-86), and fifth species (101-106). I have drawn on this text in counterpoint classes, but any other clear articulation of species rules (such as Henry Martin's, noted above) could take the place of Salzer and Schachter's text. Regardless of text or particular rules, the SCAMET method is intended to complement an undergraduate course in species counterpoint. Advanced work along the lines of SCAMET but oriented toward analysis would require a more subtle and exhaustive framework of contrapuntal rules and guidelines along lines set forth, for example, by Peter Schubert (2008).[5] The aim of this article-to show how species counterpoint might compare with instances of real music-is framed by the desire to bring musical scores into the species-counterpoint classroom. To this end, I draw upon modern performance editions readily available to students (and where necessary note editorial decisions or characteristics of the original score notation that might have an effect upon SCAMET decisions). I apply the SCAMET model to excerpts of works taken from Lasso, Isaac, Ockeghem, Purcell, Gesualdo, J. …

Passaggio in the Professional Tenor Voice—Evaluation of Perturbation Measures

Vocal stability throughout the passaggio region in professional singers is an unclarified area of research. The acoustic and electroglottographic signals of ascending and descending frequency transitions from 220 to 440 Hz (and vice versa) on the vowels /a, e, i, o, u, æ/ were analyzed in eight professional tenors. The frequency transitions were accompanied by shifts in register conditions, from modal to unmodulated naïve falsetto and modal to voix mixte (and vice versa). For ascending tasks, it was found that frequency perturbation values (jitter and relative average perturbation) were higher for the frequency transition and upper frequency produced in naïve falsetto or voix mixte compared with lower frequency produced in modal register. No such higher values were found for descending tasks. Shimmer was increased during frequency transitions between modal and naïve falsetto. The electroglottographic contact quotient showed a positive correlation with the sound pressure level for the modal register and voix mixte but not for the naïve falsetto. In our study, ascending tasks, including register transitions, are different from descending tasks with regard to frequency perturbation in professional tenors.

Voice characteristics of amateur female tenors are comparable with those of male tenors

In order to explore the suitability of adding female voices to the tenor sections of amateur choirs, six male and six female tenors were screened for voice characteristics. Audio signals and signals from an electroglottograph were analyzed by means of VoceVista computer software. All subjects produced closed quotients of 60% or higher in singing with a loud chest voice. There was more variance between the individuals than between groups of male and female singers. Long-time average spectra showed a general trend in the presence of a high-intensity peak between 4 and 5 kHz. The results revealed no significant differences in the most important voice characteristics between female and male tenor voices.