Xun, I
prefer female vocalists, but it isn't as if there is a shortage of male singers I like.
Sounds you might still have some leftover congestion. I don't see how your range would be suddenly affected unless you're going through puberty. Are you still coughing or having some minimal congestion? I usually sleep on my stomach with my body tilted downward toward my head slightly when I'm sick to prevent any of that congestion from getting stuck in my throat. Otherwise, it collects while I'm sleeping and I get a massive throat/lung infection when I wake up.
I agree.
I didn't have time to expound while I was at work, but he actually reminded me of the book I mentioned when he said he had been drinking a lot of honey tea; the author mentioned at one point that because no drinks actually come into contact with the vocal chords themselves, the effects of any drinks will be necessarily secondary. It is sort of part and parcel of the whole issue with determining problems in the throat from sensations; it feels nice in the throat, but the honey tea is really only directly affecting (if at all) the esophagus.
And I have that same issue when I have a cold. I had that earlier this week - I walk up and the phlegm in the back of my throat made it physically painful to talk before it cleared up.
Anyhoo, I got my update back. More favorites!
Dusty Springfield
Dusty was another singer I was introduced to on another forum. I wasn't necessarily drawn to her at first; I listened to a couple songs and enjoyed them, but didn't listen much more. I actually then forgot about her for awhile, and it was only when I rediscovered her on my own that I really fell in love with her. She has a wonderful lyric mezzo soprano voice, with this beautiful texture to it. She definitely sounds at her best when she is singing in her chest voice, and definitely sounds more comfortable when she's lower; it's one of the weird things about her most acclaimed albums, Dusty in Memphis, that she spends so much of it singing in her falsetto where she's clearly not as comfortable vocally.
I read a book recently called Dusty! Queen of the Postmods, which is a series of essays about her influence on popular music from her image to her music to her singing to her popularization and evangelization of African American musical styles to European and most particularly British audiences. I really enjoyed these excerpts about two of her songs:
The first example, "
Di fronte all'amore," might well be considered the mother of all pop arias. Though "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me (originally "Io che non vivo piu ei un ora senza te") was to become the biggest chart success of Dusty's career, her relatively unknown recording of "Di fronte all'amore" is an equally affecting model of the melodramatic pop aria genre. In terms of the two features previously mentioned - strategically placed modulations and the threat of vocal collapse - "Di fronte all'amore" displays their clearest, most concentrated, and most thrilling use. Literally packed with modulations, the song's first seciton (an AABA design) begins in Bb minor and circles back to it by 1:32 after traveling through three other key areas: to B minor at 0:27, to C minor at 0:50, and to F minor at 1:09. The Bb minor "middle eight" instrumental section (1:32 to 1:53) serves as a tonal bridge both closing off the first section and providing a launch for the second. Section two (BA) would seem to be reenacting the modulation sequence of section one, but the tonal scheme has been truncated (gasp!), and we lunge into F minor without first going through C minor. It looks like this: Bbm -> Bm -> Cm -> Fm -> Bbm -> Bm -> Fm (middle eight in italics). The overall effect of this large number of modulations within such a short time span is one of dangerously escalating tension and instability, with an element of extreme urgency added by part two's truncation. A spectacular congruence of dramatic elements occurs between 2:10 and 2:16: It is here that we leap over C minor, reach the highest point of the melody (c") on the word pero [but], and become aware that the voice has been driven by the modulations to the very end of its range and is starting to crack. The singer hurtles into the song's final line and highest notes, imploring, "non avere paura di me" [don't be afraid of me], with an orchestra playing at full volume and crashing timpani announcing an equally crashing silence at 2:38, directly before the cadential "di me." On this vocal precipice and with the singer's previously repressed emotions now on full sonic display, we are held at full throttle until the very end of the song.
and!
"I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten," also by Clive Westlake, foregorunds modal shifts rather than modulation; the clear association of major/minor with the protagonist's shifting assessment of her own situation is the song's chief musical conceit. The shifts progress as follows: minor until 0:56, major until 1:30, minor until 2:09, major until 2:43, minor to end. The four shifts in mode create a seesaw effect expressing the singer's vacillation between belief (major) and disbelief (minor), optimism and pessimism concerning the love object ("it's a feeling so unreal I can't believe it's true"). The song would seem to end in a draw, having spent half its time in major and the other half in minor. Though we might expect the voice, once it reaches its highest notes, to be the deciding factor, it only reaffirms the ambiguity by saying one thing (the optimistic "you're still here") while accompanied by the other (the pessimistic minor mode). Though the existential dilemma remains unresolved, the singer succeeds in expressing the crippling doubt that the song's introduction foretold. She achieves this musically only at the end of the song, when she is catapulted into her upper register through the simple device of an octave leap at 2:52. Poised on the vocal brink, she repeats the phrase "I close my eyes and count to ten and when I open them you're still here" through the song's fade. While the voice survives this expression of extreme doubt, the fact that the song ends in minor and without the closure of a final cadence suggest that the doubt, unfortunately, survives also.
She was also a tremendously versatile singer; listen to her
Live at the BBC for a good sampling of what she did. She sang in quite a few genres and styles, as well as singing songs in Spanish, Italian, and German. I also love the
emotion in her voice; she communicates the emotion of a song so well in her voice. Obviously I really love singers like Mariah or Whitney, but I certainly recognize the criticism that sometimes there's an emotional disconnect with what they sing. I feel like Dusty is more one of those
singers whose emotions are more clearly discernible when they sing, or at least more consistently.
Listen to:
I Only Want To Be With You,
You Don't Have To Say You Love Me,
Anything You Can Do,
You Don't Own Me,
Son Of A Preacher Man,
Goin' Back,
All I See Is You,
Heat Wave,
You Can Have Him
Barbra Streisand
I mentioned this earlier when talking to 3pheMeraLmiX earlier, but the thing that probably amazes me most about Streisand isn't her perfect placement or her absolutely incredible breath control - it is that she claims to be untrained and not really conscious of what she's doing. There are so many singers in popular music who
struggle to sing even halfway competently because of poor vocal training, and yet she sings so perfectly. Babs is also actually a surprisingly versatile singer given her reputation as purely a showtunes singer; something such as
Like A Straw in the Wind is rather different from what I had come to expect of her, anyway. But I still think her best material are those
silly television specials.
And her voice just seems to melt over a phrase - I don't think anyone in vernacular music sings lines quite like she does, where it just seems to drip from one note to the next. I remember the first time I listened to her cover of
I Loves You Porgy and something about the way that she sang it, I actually listened to the lyrics. I don't know how many times I listened to Whitney's (brilliant) 1994 AMA medley performance of I Loves You Porgy, And I Am Telling You, and I Have Nothing, but listening to Barbra's studio performance was the first time I actually paid attention to the words. It is close call between her, Ella, and Aretha for being able to deliver a song quite like that.
Oh, and her
dynamics are nothing to sneeze at.
Listen to:
Somewhere,
Memory,
I Got Plenty of Nothin',
If I Loved You,
Putting It Together,
Since I Fell For You (that climactic G5 is amazing),
My Melancholy Baby / Everybody Loves My Baby,
Poverty Medley
Tim Buckley
I started listening to Tim Buckley a few years ago, and listened to almost everything I could find on Youtube as quickly as I could. I was really enamored with his vibrato in particular; it sort of reminds me of Grace Slick, though not quite so pronounced. I was not really into his live performances as much, though, until recently. I purchased Dream Letter, which contains a full two hour concert Tim Buckley performed in 1968, at the age of 21. I've read a couple CD insert hagiographies at this point, and they always refer to his voice using the same word "golden." He really was spectacularly gifted, with incredible versatility (folk, psychedelia, funk, soul, jazz, even the introduction of neoclassical elements), and unlike a lot of singers who simply rely on the ability of their voice to naturally suit different styles of music without fundamentally changing
how they are singing, Tim was really willing to experiment with his voice. He sounds so completely different on
Song to the Siren compared with
Sweet Surrender compared with
Phantasmagoria in Two compared with
Phantasmagoria in Two live compared with
Monterey compared with
I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain compared to
Knight Errant compared with
Troubador live. I learned about Tim after I learned about Jeff, but I really prefer Tim's voice. It has a more resonant, deeper, more masculine quality to it, particularly the vibrato. You can really hear the similarity in their voices when Tim sings higher outside his real comfort range - something like the sustained E5s on Sweet Surrender are remarkably similar to Jeff on Grace, for instance.
Truth be told, though, I prefer him on material where he sings more "straight" and without straining, grunting, or yelling, though he is given to doing that on some of his material. But I do love that stuff in doses, as well. Oh, and yes: I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain was about his son Jeff and his estranged wife.
Listen to: The stuff I mentioned earlier, and also
I Must Have Been Blind,
Aren't You The Girl,
Song of the Magician,
Valentine Melody,
Buzzin' Fly
Jussi Bjorling
Silver.
I think that's the best way of describing his voice; every famous opera singer seems to have a color that you can associate with their voice, and "silver" seems to be the best way of describing Jussi's timbre. And interestingly, it is probably the only descriptor everyone seems to agree on. I read the biography his wife wrote, and in the numerous concert review excerpts she included, his voice was described as anywhere from below-average to huge in size; anywhere from average to very loud in volume; anywhere from light lyric to spinto in weight. I think he was generally agreed to be a lyric tenor, though when he died prematurely he was starting to develop the vocal weight to take on roles - at least in studio, if not on the stage - that required a weightier sound. So maybe not quite tenore spinto but starting to acquire some of those qualities. I know deeper tenor voices can become baritones later (e.g. Placido Domingo has begun to sing baritone roles now), so I suppose a lyric tenor might be able to make the move to deeper part of the tenor fach as his voice changes with age. I think that whatever the actual size of his voice, his voice had this wonderful combination of richness, slight brassiness (see Je crois entendre encore or Di quella pira for that), and clarity to it that I haven't heard from other tenors. He had a fabulously long career, starting when he was only a child as part of a group of touring singers along with his brothers and lasting until his premature death in 1960.
I'd particularly like to thank DarkhawkX for introducing me to this absolutely incredible performance
Nessun Dorma, sung at a slower than normal tempo. His breath control is just incredible, and that final vincero sustained for about fourteen seconds is incredible for a covered note held for that long. I thought that the ordinary version was the best Nessun Dorma, but this was truly spectacular and one of my favorite Bjorling's performances.
Listen to:
O Helga Natt,
Pearl Fisher Duet,
Che gelida manina,
Je crois entendre encore,
Questa o quella,
È lucevan le stelle (and that diminuendo on 1:38
is sublime),
Cujus Animam,
Adelaide,
Di qeulla pira,
Ingemisco,
O soave Fanciulla
), but 
