Listening to Singers: A layman’s Guide

I’d like to share a few thoughts about listening to classical singers for folks who haven’t been exposed to much classical vocal music before. Because our contemporary musical culture is rather different from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Verdi and Ravel and Puccini were writing (to say nothing about the times of Mozart, Bach and Handel), the modern perception of what “singing” is, and what to listen for, has shifted tremendously since those days.

The average consumer of popular music today is awash in a plethora of choices, with many different styles of music, genres, performers, venues. Unfortunately for most classical musicians performing and seeking to attract audiences today, the vast majority of those choices involve electronic amplification. In the course of my travels I’ve run into countless young people (and some who aren’t so young) who tell me that they have literally never heard singing of the type I do. They’ve never heard a performance by a classically trained, non-amplified human voice!  Most of the music consumed today is via recording, which means that in addition to listening to the music you’re also listening to electronic devices. Classical music (especially music written before, say, the mid-20th century) was conceived and intended to be heard without amplification, in a performing space designed to hold a finite number of people, conducive to hearing the sounds of the performers.

In classical vocal music, the quality of the voice is the primary factor. The singer must have the ability to access and control the huge palette of sounds that the human voice can produce as a musical instrument. Clarity and quality of vowels being sung is another key factor, especially in music that’s setting poetry in Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc). Emotion tends to be communicated more with changes of vocal color and vowel length, rather than by emphasis on consonants (as in English & German diction). 

For an example, listen to this performance of the “Chanson Romanesque” from Ravel’s song cycle Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, sung here by the Belgian bass-baritone Jose van Dam:

In this performance you hear van Dam’s voice as an expressive musical instrument … inflecting and coloring the French vowels to create the emotion of the poetry, and enhancing the piano part.

The cool thing about a live performance by a non-amplified voice is that there is a directness and immediacy to the sound that listeners don’t get from recordings: a kind of raw, visceral thrill that comes from hearing the human voice, the original musical instrument, communicating poetry and emotion directly from the performer to you, the listener! There’s nothing else quite like it in the whole world, and that’s one reason I love the work I do. That kind of immediacy and connection, and seeing a live performer pouring their heart and soul into communicating directly with YOU … you can’t beat that kind of musical experience! Whether it’s one singer in a small room accompanied by a piano or a guitar, or an ensemble of singers in a recital hall, or even a large chorus in a concert hall with a symphony orchestra: the immediacy and impact of the live human voice is unlike anything else. If you’ve never experienced that I urge you to look for a concert series near you and give it a try!