The questions I left open in Why Garcia? need to be closed before I move on. I complained about the singing I hear today. I said that singers are sounding factory made. Well, I didn’t say that, but it is what I implied.
My friend Ron Carter had this to say about my last blog:
“What people will have a hard time following, in my opinion, is how the luminosity of voice such as yours or Frederica von Stade’s in the early part of her career were not like anyone else. You both had a vocal luminosity and transparency that immediately set you apart. This transparency and luminosity made anyone who sang with you sound veiled and odd in comparison. This is the natural quality I think Garcia mentions in his text.”
In some ways I wish Garcia had written about naturalness, but he actually walked away from defining the individual characteristics of the singer’s voice. I have no choice but to look elsewhere for help with which to explain what it was he refused to discuss and why. In Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy, James Stark gathers together into his second chapter “Chiaroscuro: The Tractable Tract” more than enough stuff from vocal literature to justify Garcia leaving the subject for others to wrangle with. Mr. Stark even gives us a little Garcia to chew on, and, because Stark does such a great job, I have no intent to plow this field at all. For the reader who can/will not afford the cost/effort to read Stark’s book I offer my summary of his second chapter:
“The well trained voice of a gifted person pursuing an operatic career has “Chiaroscuro”; a dual quality that has characteristics that are really hard to describe. Many who have attempted to define this brilliance plus roundness of tone get so hard pressed that they just call it unmistakable to the “conditioned, cultivated or experienced” ear.”
Garcia makes a statement with a similar premise of discernment to anyone who wants to teach singing:
“Often one needs an experienced judgement (sic) to recognize in the voice of the student the germ of the true qualities which it possesses. Generally, these qualities are only in the rudimentary state, or well veiled by numerous faults from which it is necessary to free them. The essential point is to first establish the existence of them; one then manages to complete the development of them by patient and orderly studies.”
translation:Donald Paschke Da Capo Press
By using a portion of the above quote and one from Why Garcia? I’ve built a statement incorporating Garcia’s own words: “one needs an experienced judgement (sic) to recognize in the voice of the student the germ of the true qualities which it possesses” in order to bring them out from behind any vocal faults the student’s voice may present. By so liberating these qualities everyone will be able to appreciate the singers “true qualities” which are the personal “outstanding differences which distinguish the voices of various individuals”. These qualities the experienced teacher should be able to hear as a “germ” in the untrained voice.
Garcia was not writing about Chiaroscuro in some kind of code. It is really unfortunate for the voice student that “The Quest for Chiaroscuro” seems to be the new “Quest for the Holy Grail” in the pedagogical world. I’m not suggesting that there is no value in trying to lasso Chiaroscuro, hog tie it and brand it with some kind of meaningful label. I am suggesting that it has become one of the important confusions in the mind of the pedagogue.
What makes a wonderful voice wonderful is NOT Chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro is only one quality that all wonderful operatic voices share. What makes a wonderful voice wonderful no one seems to be able to define. Garcia didn’t try. I am perfectly happy to admit that I can’t put it into words. I know a wonderful voice when I hear it. I know great singing when I hear it. Chiaroscuro is just along for the ride. Did I say this is a hearing thing, not a writing thing?
So let’s get back to my implication that many singers today sound factory made. Factories use tools to produce things. When the tools are correctly used the factory produces things of a quality and function that make everyone happy if the product is popular. Garcia gives us the list of tools he used and Chiaroscuro is notably missing. It’s missing because it is not a tool. The tools that Garcia displays on his work bench are few and very effective in their use. I will talk about them in Garcia’s Toolbox.
The books written by “factory workers” hold “Chiaroscuro” in high regard and get all technical about how this ideal may be achieved. No recorded examples are ever included. Notwithstanding all the written advice for the achievement of “Chiaroscuro”, the pedagogical results don’t seem great. What I’ve been hearing is a uniform pleasantness that neither offends nor impresses, like discount no label bulk vanilla ice-cream….. Maybe chocolate would be a better metaphor given what I’m about to assert. The confusion over how to describe “Chiaroscuro” withers into insignificance when one begins to believe that these workers don’t really know what Chiaroscuro sounds like. It seems that the consensus on the assembly line is that the inoffensive/pleasant voice is the correct example of “Chiaroscuro”. WRONG!!! That “inoffensive” voice is a great example of just one of the products that the misuse of a Garcinian tool will give you. That specific tool is Sombre Timbre. Please have a look at what I have to say about it. Tenors, don’t despair. For now, it’s the only tool described in Garcia’s Toolbox.
I have to admit that any tool that gets a quick result can be very useful. Sombre Timbre… Let’s make that a contraction: ST, OK? ST is without a doubt a really quick fix for many vocal inconveniences and its’ use is justifiable if you believe that Band-Aids are good enough for Battle Wounds. It does, however, have a progressively higher price attached to its use. The more ST one applies to the voice the more it covers over the “Chiaro” or brilliance of the voice. That brilliance is recognized in most of the old books as the key feature with which a solo voice can carry a composer’s melodies to the ears of the audience. It is the cutting edge of the Soloists’ voice and as more and more ST is applied to the voice that edge is ever more blunted and the singer has to push harder and harder to be heard in the theatre. That is if the singer wants to be heard in the theatre. When the student manages to apply ST to the max it can even cover the core personal color qualities with which the young singer started even if they were only in “germ” form. Using ST to establish a false “Chiaroscuro” in a young singer is bad factory work in my book! Garcia tells us to use ST but for completely different purposes. Did Garcia foresee this confusion and the logical result? I like to believe it to be so.
I have to thank Mr. Carter again for being so complimentary. His words, transparency and luminosity, really belong to the visual arts as does that pesky term Chiaroscuro. These qualities are achievable via good technique in whatever visual media an artist is manipulating. This is not true in singing. As metaphors, his words are valuable as helps in describing the vocal quality that “Chiaro” (clear) is meant to generally represent. None of these terms can give true understanding to someone who has not heard the voices Ron describes, but I just had to put Ron’s compliments in the blog, because Flicka is one of my very favorite people in the business, a great singer, and a big player in many good memories.
I’ve got to quit here or I might take another month to get it done. I will be visiting this issue again soon.