Today’s article will doubtlessly be of keenest interest to voice professionals—singers, teachers, coaches—but I hope it will also be of use to devotees who may have had little or no vocal training, but who listen closely with an ear cocked toward connoisseurship. I’m always writing about voice in these posts, usually in the context of specific performance events, but sometimes by way of analyzing the singing of artists who exemplify technical command and/or intriguing deviations from it. I’ll provide a listing of such pieces at the end of this post, and encourage selective referral to them by way of background. Here, I will be presenting what I consider a refinement on my previous way of framing how voices work—or should work—developed in part through preparation for two talks I have delivered to the membership of the Jussi Björling Society, which some of you may have seen. [Here is a link to the first of these talks, which is the more relevant to today’s subject. It includes recorded samples.] And I’ll add a few words concerning the possible uses and misuses of a view on breath control (“support,” if you will) that was part of a line of descent in German pedagogy that had a degree of prominence over here in the postwar years. It has, so far as I’m aware, vanished from the conversation, yet might have something to contribute to our thinking. Please bear in mind that while we’re talking here about the dynamics that create the pre-requisite conditions for wonderful singing, it is ultimately the ear, guided by the singer’s aesthetic and dramatic imagination, that must direct those dynamics toward an artistic result, and that must be cultivated and re-directed from the start, in conjunction with our functional work.

The term “triune” happens to convey, precisely and concisely, the incorporation of three varieties of balance into a single point of concentration that illustrates my ideal of technical accomplishment in singing. If its theological implications give some readers pause when speaking of our vocal trinity, with hints of blasphemy on one hand or of pretentiousness on the other, we can call it simply the three-in-one oil of the voice. The Jussi Björling Society was a natural venue for exploration of this idea, since the great Swedish singer perfectly demonstrated its consummation in a lyrico-spinto tenor voice. In Opera as Opera, I proposed the existence of two broad categories of singers, one comprising those whose voices could be best described as bright, lean, and taut, the other of voices more accurately heard as dark, plump, and loose. (These are relative categories, of course, with most voices partaking of some qualities of both.) I also suggested that all great singers—male or female, higher or lower in range, and of any “weight” of voice—operate very close to the dividing line between these categories, and that any good singer is not far from it. In my teaching, I sometimes use the playground image of trying to stand on a teeter-totter: if your feet are equidistant from the center bar, with equal weight to either side, you can maintain your balance. But if one foot is farther from the bar in either direction, you must overcompensate with your weight distribution, and will not be upright for long. In the book, I use pairings of great singers whom we can define as slightly to the B/L/T side or over on the D/P/L one, to make the distinction as clear as possible. And I trace a migration of general usage throughout the 20th Century, from brighter/leaner/tauter in the early years to darker/plumper/looser by the postwar decades, which saw the last generations of what I term “greatvoiced” singers.