III.

Western Classical Singing

In medieval European church music, high, clear-toned male voices were apparently favored, resulting in a vocal quality that could help the listener hear the interwoven melodies of vocal polyphony (multipart music). The highest parts were sung by boy sopranos and adult male falsettos, although by the 15th century composers had begun to explore the bass range. The bel canto (Italian, “beautiful song”) style that dominated Western singing from about 1650 to 1850 is thought to have developed in the mid-16th century as a result of new musical styles. The madrigals and other secular vocal genres that flowered in Italy, for example, required adult female voices to perform expressive, ornamented, often virtuosic melodic lines. Inseparable from opera (developed about 1600), the emerging style was also used in church music. Forbidden, however, to use female singers, the church began to employ eunuchs, or castrati (sing., castrato)—men who could produce full-voiced adult sounds in the soprano and alto ranges. The castrato voice soon entered opera, dominating that form in the 18th century and falling out of use in the 19th.

Singing technique in the bel canto era was grounded in using the breath to regulate intensity of sound and in thorough knowledge of the different registers of the voice. In the 19th century larger concert halls and, eventually, new aesthetic goals, led to modifications in bel canto technique. Seeking to produce sounds that would fill large halls and balance the volume of expanded orchestras, teachers such as the Polish tenor Jean de Reszke and the Spaniard Manuel García (1805-1906) developed new techniques to increase vocal resonance. In the late 19th century composers such as the German Richard Wagner demanded heavier vocal colors: New vocal categories such as “dramatic soprano” and Heldentenor (German, “heroic tenor”) emerged.