Ian Sidden

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Cassio and VoceVista

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These past few months since Le nozze di Figaro have been mostly pretty quiet. I’ve completely switched back to tenor, and I’ve been obsessing over a few technical issues while learning the role of Cassio in Verdi’s Otello.

I’m performing Cassio and Roderigo this summer with Center Stage Opera. This is a local opera company here in Pennsylvania that performs ambitious operas with impressive local talent. I am extremely impressed with my fellow cast members, and in our few rehearsals together I feel as if I’ve learned a ton from them.

Technically, I’ve been working on the passaggio like mad. What is it? Why is it? How do I deal with it? How have great singers dealt with it? Part of my motivation is Cassio himself: like other high Verdi tenor roles, he sits high and has a lot of step-wise motion through the passaggio. It has to be solved in order to be sung well, and so I’ve obsessed.

One way I’ve approached the problem is through reading a lot. I’ve been reading and re-reading Great Singers on Great Singing to find clues to what they did. The language is inconsistent, but I have found some great tidbits.

I’ve also been using Donald Miller’s program VoceVista to analyze my voice as it moves through its range. Thanks to his book Resonance in Singing: Voice Building through Acoustic Feedback and its accompanying musical examples, I’ve been able to train myself to hear voices more clearly. His research states that great singers tend to use similar resonance strategies at relatively similar areas of their voices. Rather than make the whole voice louder, great singers find ways to make one or two overtones much louder than the others.

This is discovered by analyzing voices with the program VoceVista:

As you sing, you can see the harmonics and their relative strengths. Since it responds to my voice in real-time, I can get a strong sense of what strategies work and what don’t.

I’ll write more about this at another point, but this has changed the way I view singing. I’ve been working with it since November of last year, and I’ve even worked with students using these strategies. Good results can come very quickly once the ideas are learned.

So I’m excited! I’m really looking forward to the final product of Otello and everything I’ll learn from that, and I’m excited for whatever comes after.

10 Greatest Composers

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“I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.”

–Richard Strauss

At the New York Times, music critic Anthony Tommasini is compiling a list of the ten greatest composers. He acknowledges that:

…the resulting list would not be the point. But the process of coming up with such a list might be clarifying and instructive, as well as exasperating and fun.

Mr. Tommasini’s basic guidelines are that the composers be from the late Baroque and before our lifetime. So neither Josquin nor Barber could be considered. As justification, he says in the comments:

I find it almost possible to compare the achievements of, say, Schumann and Beethoven. How do you compare Schumann and Dufay?

If composers before Bach could be considered, I’d find room for Monteverdi definitely and possibly Josquin and Palestrina. But then we do get into a mess because you could make a good case for Phillipe de Vitry, Leonin, Machaut, Dufay, and Perotin. Hmmm.

The limitation is essential for this.

How to Decide

So what would be your list? And more importantly, what would you use to decide?

I would have to balance quality and influence. Of course, then you would have to decide what having “quality” means (see Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) and how to measure influence. Is it influence on myself or on other people regardless of my feelings about that composer’s music?

Mr. Tommasini’s starting point is J.S. Bach. Certainly most of us could agree on that, yes?

Then we begin stating obvious choices…Mozart…Beethoven…Haydn? Handel? Brahms? Where is Wagner, Verdi, and Schubert? How about Berlioz and Gluck? Does Debussy stand on his own? How about Ravel? And the Russians, where are they? How about pianists like Chopin and Liszt? Does the vast output of Telemann put him in this league?

My Current List

So here’s my – if you had a gun up to my head – 10 Greatest list. This is not necessarily in any order either:

  • J.S Bach
  • Mozart
  • Beethoven
  • Wagner
  • Schubert
  • Debussy
  • Brahms
  • Verdi
  • Haydn
  • Tchaikovsky

I defined quality through a mixture of conscious understanding of technique and my own emotional reaction to these composers’ music. I’ve picked pretty obvious composers – I believe – so their influence is understood if not totally fleshed out here. Since I’m a singer, I am biased toward vocal music composers.

My analytical brain really questions Tchaikovsky, but I’m not sure who would replace him (Mahler maybe? Schumann?). Besides, I just love listening to his stuff.

It is unfortunate that there are no English (Britten and Purcell are both disqualified) nor American composers nor any women. Most come from the Germanic countries and Vienna in particular. I don’t know what to do about this though. If Mahler and Schumann were added, then this skew would be further exaggerated. Alas.

I would love love love to know if you’re putting together your own list and how you would do it. Let me know what you decide.