Choral voices vs. Solo voices -- Similar, but Different

Many working professional singers will have this sort of encounter while they’re out on the road at a gig somewhere. You’ll be attending a local church service or some other event with general/public singing, and afterwards some nice well-meaning person from a nearby pew will compliment your singing with words to the effect of, “You have such a beautiful voice… YOU should be in that choir up there!” 

One tries to be gracious and accept the compliment in the spirit in which it was obviously given… but after a few repetitions it really does begin to grate on your nerves. I suppose that’s partially because it’s not the sort of thing one would hear from a random stranger at a church service a couple of generations ago. Being a singer “of a certain age” now, I’ve witnessed in the past (and occasionally experienced) the compliment as it used to be expressed: “You have a beautiful voice. Do you sing professionally?”

But also because, “You should be up there in that choir!” betrays such a fundamental misunderstanding of/unfamiliarity with voices and how they function…. and specifically, what kind of “beautiful voice” is desirable and useful in a choral setting, and what kind isn’t.

Good choral singing is a wondrous thing, much to be desired, sought out and experienced by concert-goers and fans of classical music. But the vocal demands placed on the average choral singer (even by composers writing large, musically difficult or complex works) tend to be quite different from what those same composers will write for their soloists. A good lyric soprano voice can soar and thrill in the choruses of Bach’s b-minor Mass, or Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana for example… but could be completely inadequate to even make it through (much less thrill in) the soprano solos in those works.

So why is that?  Basically, it’s a matter of degree… the vocal demands that classical composers make of their soloists often tend to be orders of magnitude more difficult than what is required of their choruses. The range of the solo parts are usually greater than that of the choral parts; the tessitura (the general area where a piece of music “lies” in the voice) is often higher; a larger sound with more amplitude of resonance and a greater palette of colors is often required from the soloist. Or, a soloist might be required to have more technical facility with dynamics, or ease with singing fioritura (fast passages, runs, scales and ornaments) than the same work’s choristers. The professional soloist will need to have a greater facility with a wider range of languages than the average amateur chorister.  And a whole host of other skills and technical abilities tend to distinguish the two.

Obviously then, if a singer has studied and coached and diligently worked and trained their voice, investing years of their life (and likely many thousands of dollars, even after their college education) in preparing to take on the challenges of the solo parts in Bach, Haydn, Handel, Brahms, Beethoven, Britten, Mahler, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Vaughn Williams, Verdi and the like, they just might be a bit off-put by the casual listener/random stranger saying, “Why, you should be singing in that choir!”. Possibly they could, but it’s more likely that a decent choral conductor with perceptive ears would hear them sing and say, “Thank you, but your voice is too large/rich/distinctive to fit into this group.”  Good chorus voices need to be strong and agile, but not especially large or colorful or distinctive. The idea behind creating a cohesive and beautiful choral sound is making a group of people (often with varying regional accents, vocal skills and timbres) sing in unison, with unity of pitch and vowel. Those skills may overlap a bit with what’s required of a good solo voice… but only by a bit. Likewise, a skilled solo singer may be able to “pare back” the amount and the color of sound their voice produces for the purpose of singing in a choral ensemble, but that’s not what they’ve been preparing and studying to do. Indeed, one of the things that distinguishes a soloist from a “choral singer” is the unique character of the soloist’s voice.

All that being said, many young aspiring soloists will often start out early in their training and professional careers singing in choral ensembles (not as many of them as should, but that’s a subject for another blog post!).  And there are singers who can and do make very successful careers as professional choristers… musicians who have studied, and trained their voices to function to a high standard, often in a dizzying array of complex and challenging ensemble and choral repertoire. Their instruments may not have the size and distinctive color/timbre that is required for many choral solos and operatic roles, but they HAVE learned how to sing successfully in an ensemble… developing the musicianship to sight-read what may be complex and tricky music, to match timbres with the other voices around them, and to listen for gradations of dynamics and unity of vowel sounds. These musicians tend to be in heavy demand, and are worth their weight in gold to choral conductors!

But in much the same way that your average bicycling enthusiast probably wouldn’t be successful competing in a triathlon, or the way that even a Heisman Trophy winner doesn’t always become a success in professional football, the average church choir singer probably wouldn’t succeed as a professional chorister, or a concert/opera soloist (and vice versa). The degree of vocal endowment and technical skill required is truly orders of magnitude different.