Since the inception of my blog, much of my commentary has had to do with the structural properties of the voices I’m hearing, with periodic reference to past practices as encountered either in my own earlier operagoing or on the recordings of older generations of singers. These structural properties are most easily discussed in technical terms, as if they were entirely the product of how the voices in question have been trained. My own beliefs about technique naturally emerge from, or can at least be inferred from, these discussions, and I hope we can all agree to the proposition that how a voice is trained is central to how it behaves and how it endures. In this series, though, I’m concerned with the things that make up what we might call a voice’s structural preset. To the extent that these present problems in training (for we seldom encounter at a first lesson the “great natural voice”—long-ranged, full-throated, and free—and when we do, its owner doesn’t need us for long to get out there), the problems take the form of hard-to-break habits of use (elements poorly arranged and resistant) or of disuse (elements missing or too weak to be of structural value). Most often, we hear some combination of the two. Today, I’ll pay some attention to the second variety.

While missing elements come in many forms (the man who seems to be a tenor but has no high notes; the woman who seems to be a mezzo but has no low ones; the voice of pleasing quality but no endurance, or support, or breath control, etc., etc.), they all tend to have in common something I referred to two weeks ago as “laryngeal energization”—a simple failure, not only in singing but in the usages of everyday life—to send a signal to the point of vocal origin strong enough to establish the foundation of a sturdy operatic structure. Usually such voices are manifestly unstable or unresonant at least in part, or timid-sounding overall, but sometimes they can sound pushy and forced, so that the problem seems to be one of too much energy. But it’s not. It’s imprecisely directed energy, not enough energy in the right place, and by way of compensation too much in another. Anyone attempting complicated neuromuscular co-ordinations requiring a sustained high energy level (an athlete, a dancer) will meet up with analogous difficulties.

If, as I’m suggesting, there is an across-the-board lowering of laryngeal energization as compared with that of several generations back (a lowering that we, sensing in it a lack of aliveness, of eagerness, of light escaping from the dark, might well define as something having been “dismantled in the human spirit”), there’s an obvious likely culprit: the mike. ^(I) In an upcoming post, I’ll write more about the sending end of this most pervasive and determinant element in our “secondary aural environment”—the ways in which microphone usages have directly contributed to the tamping-down of vibratory energy and the the full flexing of vocal acoustics. For now, I’ll just leave you with a synchronicity. It’s the same one cited by my correspondent, who recalls experiencing greatvoiced singing up till 1974 or so, and points out that this corresponds to the fading of the last cohort of singers whose childhoods and early training would have occurred before WW2. That’s accurate. But the coincidence is also with the last generation who grew up before the mike had become the mediator of all vocal communication, and before the visual displaced the aural, even in opera. Those are things that were happening simultaneously with, but independently of, the war.