In late 2014, one particular video of a singer became immensely popular on Facebook. At first I thought my perception of its popularity might be skewed; I’m a singer, and have many friends who are singers, so there’s probably some selection bias in my sampling of popular posts on social media. But eventually I actually clicked on one of the many postings of the video on my feed, and with its 7.4 million views, it seemed likely that it was more than just my singer friends who had been watching it:
Overtone singing, defined in Grove Music Online as “A vocal style in which a single performer produces more than one clearly audible note simultaneously”, has been in existence for thousands of years, most famously in east central Asia. But I had never seen this much attention focused on it at once. The video is jaw-droppingly cool, in part because what’s happening doesn’t seem possible. But then, not that many people understand how singing just one note at a time actually works.
Simply trying to explain everything that happens when we breathe and phonate (i.e., make a vocal sound) requires discussion of various complex, unconscious physical phenomena. As the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments article “Voice” puts it:
Phonation takes place during exhalation as the respiratory system supplies air through the vibrating vocal folds, which interrupt and break the air stream into smaller units or puffs of air. The resulting sounds are filtered through a resonator system and then transmitted outside the mouth. Singing, speaking, humming, and other vocal sounds usually involve practised regulation of air pressure and breath-stream mechanics, and balanced control of the inspiratory (chiefly the diaphragm) and expiratory muscles (chiefly the abdominal and intercostal muscles).
Even after understanding all that, it’s clear that what’s happening in the video above is not a typical vocal performance. So when you hear those overtones coming from Anna-Maria Hefele, just what exactly is happening?
Fortunately for all of us, Hefele also made another video which addresses the physics of this phenomenon:
When you sing different vowels, your mouth changes shape to form those vowels. You pull your lips to the side to make an “eee” sound, and your tongue arches up in your mouth; when you make an “ooo” sound, you purse your lips and your tongue flattens out. When you do this, you’re actually changing the shape of your instrument, which in turn changes the harmonics that are stressed above the fundamental frequency (the pitch at which you’re speaking or singing). This is why the vowels sound different from one another. This is clear in Hefele’s training video, where the loudest overtones change from vowel to vowel.
Stress of different overtones is one of the ingredients of timbre, or the quality of a sound beyond its pitch and amplitude. Timbre is what allows us to distinguish between, say, a flute and an oboe playing the same pitch. They simply sound different. This is partially (no pun intended) dependent on the stress of different overtones due to the varying shapes and materials of each instrument.
The neat thing about the voice is that, while we don’t usually change the material, the shape is very flexible, and we can manipulate it to change our timbre. Overtone singing like Hefele’s takes an element of vocal sound and turns it into a new sort of instrument, inverting the typical relationship between instrument and timbre.
Anyone who’s listened to master impressionists or Bobby McFerrin (beyond “Don’t worry, be happy”) can attest to the versatility of the human voice. Vocalists are the shape-shifters of the instrument world. But comparing the 52,251 views of Hefele’s visualization video with the 7.4 million views of her performance video, it seems like we also appreciate the masters of timbre-bending the same way we appreciate magicians; most of us would rather watch the trick than see it explained.
In the newly published second edition of the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, the voice is called “The quintessential human instrument.” But while almost all of us have voices, very few of us understand what is happening when we use them. Every once in a while I think it’s beneficial to see something extraordinary, if only so we remember to look at what seems ordinary a little more closely.
Headline image credit: A Sennheiser Microphone. Photo by ChrisEngelsma. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The post The quintessential human instrument appeared first on OUPblog.
Jessica Barbour
Marilyn Horne, world-renowned opera singer and recitalist, celebrated her 84th birthday on Wednesday. To acknowledge her work, not only as one of the finest singers in the world but as a mentor for young artists, I give you one of my favorite performances of hers:
Click here to view the embedded video.
Sesame Street has always been a powerful advocate for utilizing music in teaching. “C is for Cookie,” a number that really drives its message home, maintains its cultural relevance today despite being first performed by Cookie Monster more than 40 years ago. Ms. Horne’s version appeared about 20 years after the original, and is an excellent re-imagining of a classic (with great attention to detail—note the cookies sewn into her Aida regalia and covering the pyramids).
Horne’s performance shows kids that even a musician of the highest caliber can 1) be silly and 2) also like cookies—that is, it portrays her as a person with something in common with a young, broad audience. This is something that members of the classical music community often have a difficult time accomplishing; Horne achieves it here in less than three minutes.
Fortunately, many professional classical musicians have embraced this strategy. Representatives of the opera world (which is not known for being particularly self-aware) have had a particularly strong presence on Sesame Street, with past episodes featuring Plácido Domingo (singing with his counterpart, Placido Flamingo), Samuel Ramey (extolling the virtues of the letter “L”), Denyce Graves (explaining operatic excess to Elmo), and Renée Fleming (counting to five, “Caro nome” style).
Sesame Street produced these segments not only to expose children to distinguished music-making, but to teach them about matters like counting, spelling, working together, and respecting one another. This final clip features Itzhak Perlman, one of the world’s great violin soloists, who was left permanently disabled after having polio as a child. To demonstrate ability and disability more gracefully than this would be, I think, impossible:
Click here to view the embedded video.
American children’s music, as described in the new article on Grove Music Online [subscription required], has typically been produced through a tug of war between entertainment and educational objectives. The songs on Sesame Street succeed in both, while also showing kids something about classical music itself: it’s not just for grownups. It’s a part of life that belongs to everyone. After all, who doesn’t appreciate that the moon sometimes looks like a “C”? (Though, of course, you can’t eat that, so…)
Jessica Barbour is the Associate Editor for Grove Music/Oxford Music Online. You can read her previous blog posts, “Foil thy Foes with Joy,” “Glissandos and Glissandon’ts,” and “Wedding Music” and learn more about children’s music, Marilyn Horne, Itzhak Perlman, and other performers mentioned above with a subscription to Grove Music Online.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
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The post C is for Coloratura appeared first on OUPblog.
By Jessica Barbour
Portrait of Benjamin Britten by Yousuf Karsh, via Wikimedia Commons.
One of
Benjamin Britten’s strengths as a composer was writing music for children. Not just music for children to enjoy — many of his works, particularly his operas, are not really kid-friendly affairs — but for them to perform. I’m thinking particularly of choral music, where he excelled at writing songs that I found both beautiful and really fun to sing when I was very young.
That’s not to say that these songs are easy, of course; much of Britten’s music was described by critics (often derogatorily) as “clever,” and can be highly challenging. But that’s one of the joys of singing it. His songs felt like puzzles we were given solve, and I remember feeling pretty clever when we finally pieced them together.
I was about 10 years old when I first saw A Ceremony of Carols, Britten’s multi-movement Christmas work for treble chorus and harp. I left that performance awestruck, especially by the song “This Little Babe,” which has, off and on, been stuck in my head ever since. In the years after that concert my sister and I hoped emphatically that our church’s choir would sing that song in an Advent service one Sunday; they did, eventually, but not at the breakneck speed we were hoping for.
“This Little Babe” is a Britten puzzle-piece. It begins with all voices singing one line in unison, then, like several other movements in A Ceremony of Carols, uses a canon-like structure. (In a canon, one part of the choir begins a melody, another part joins in after them singing the same melody, and the overlapping of the two or more parts creates harmony. This concept is deftly explained here by a frustrated Stephen Colbert to the band Grizzly Bear.)
But “This Little Babe” isn’t quite a round or a canon. It’s not like “Row, row, row your boat” where each voice sings exactly the same melody as every other. Nor are the entrances of each part spaced out in a way that makes the resulting harmony similar in every measure. The second verse splits the choir into two parts, the third verse in three, and each entrance in the split follows so quickly after the last (only a beat apart) that there’s a ripple effect; it doesn’t sound like harmony so much as like echoes in a racquetball court.
Performing this effect is difficult, and demands focus from the singers. The parts all end simultaneously despite their starting at different moments, which means that the second and third lines are shortened (and, therefore, melodically different) versions of the first line. These slight differences and the speed of the song make it imperative that the chorus members know their parts cold. At a length of about a minute and twenty seconds, however, the song doesn’t demand that the kids learn very much material, just that they learn it well.
Britten began work on the carols in 1942, during a sea voyage to England. He had been living in America for three years as a conscientious objector to WWII, but returned that spring. He’d recently been commissioned to write a concerto for harp, and brought some harp manuals to study on his way home. The boat he was traveling on made a stop in Halifax before crossing the Atlantic, and while on shore there he bought the excellently titled book The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems.
Among this book’s contents are Robert Southwell’s “New Heaven, New War” (from which the stanzas that make up “This Little Babe” were taken) and four other 14th-16th century poems used in A Ceremony of Carols. Britten completed drafts of seven of the carols in the five weeks before he landed in England while working concurrently on another choral piece. He reported to a friend that this happened simply because “one had to alleviate the boredom!” (Trying to calculate how many Ceremonies of Carols I could have written while bored on long trips myself has yielded depressing results.)
The final aspect of what makes “This Little Babe” so thrilling to perform is the words. The first verse begins:
This little Babe, so few days old, is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake, though he himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak unarmèd wise, the gates of hell he will surprise.
If you’re the kind of kid (as I was) that preferred the Christmas carols she sang to be in a minor key, and to invoke some scary images (“We Three Kings,” “What Child is This,” or “Coventry Carol,” for example) then getting to sing the words “Satan” and “hell” in concert is something you might relish. And it’s not just that these ideas are involved — you also get to sing about their being vanquished by a tiny baby. Being a child and singing about another child who fights and wins against evil is a glorious sensation — especially when all voices come together in unison again to sing the final line: If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy, then flit not from this heavenly Boy.
“In Freezing Winter Night,” a foil to “This Little Babe,” is slower, and quieter, but its text, also by Southwell, is thematically similar. It addresses the paradox of God existing as a human baby with all the attendant weaknesses, like vulnerability to cold, but in “In Freezing Winter Night” the baby is first described as pitiful, his shivering portrayed in the chilly harmonies in the choir and dissonant harp tremolos.
Click here to view the embedded video.
It also utilizes a sort of canon, and in this one the top two voices do sing exactly the same line. But the harmonies shift underneath them, making the role of the D-sharp sung by the first voice-part different from the role of the D-sharp sung by the second voice part. This gives each line individual musical responsibility — a feeling that both are uniquely vital to the piece.
That is Britten’s gift to children’s choruses. He trusted them with exciting text and difficult music, and gave them the opportunity to make real art despite their age. Children can tell the difference. I’ve read that he originally intended this piece to be performed by a women’s choir, and I recently got to perform it with the women’s ensemble I’m in, but the best parts of that performance were the ones where I felt I was singing like a little kid, foiling my foes with joy.
Jessica Barbour is the Associate Editor for Grove Music/Oxford Music Online. You can read her previous blog posts,
“Glissandos and Glissandon’ts,” “Wedding Music,” and
“Clair de Supermoon,” or learn more about Benjamin Britten on Grove Music Online.
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