MUSICAL MACHISMO
Performing as Lindoro in Rossini’s L’italiana in Algieri at the Opéra de Lille in 2007 with mezzo-soprano Allyson McHardy. Photo: Frédéric Iovino
During last night’s episode of Heard Over The Piano, Sasha Cooke spoke a bit about the singer’s stigma of being a ‘good musician’. While that initially sounds like a compliment, early on in her career she had the impression that many believe that ‘being a good musician’ was really a euphemism for ‘not a good singer’.
In the interview, Sasha went on to say that she has come to realize that her excellent reputation as a musician has opened vocal and musical pathways for her that are unique and blessedly varied in ways she couldn’t have imagined, precisely because she is a good singer. But as she shared her story and feelings surrounding those early chapters of her career, I related strongly to her experience.
During my own young artist years, various coaches seemed to imply my musicality was interfering with my vocalism, and that my desire to sing softly or expressively was not good singing. Even though it was usually couched in what sounded like a compliment, I would find myself on the defensive. Back then, I often wondered if my defenses were kicking in because I knew deep down that there was truth to the feedback. Of course, there was a reason for criticism: the job of these coaches is to offer constructive comments in order to improve my performance as a singer. Yet in hindsight, I see that my homophobia alarm was sounding, and I was actually offended on a different level. Rather than helping me figure out how to sing softly or shape a phrase expressively in ways that would have a solid technical foundation, I was being told that I needed to change a certain aspect of my personality in order to be a good singer.
Similar to other languages, musical language is gendered. It’s not uncommon for musicians to refer to phrase endings as masculine or feminine – a feminine one being a phrase ending in which one tapers off or weakens the dynamic. In one of my last rehearsals before the lockdown, a conductor pointed out that we should dispense with these descriptors and find new ways of discussing phrasing that are not fraught with sexism.
The obsession with dynamic or volume is endemic in the opera house. We opera singers pride ourselves on the fact that we perform without amplification. Almost always, unless a contemporary musical score calls for it, opera singers’ only microphones are the resonators inside our bodies. Many of us find something heroic in this, and it’s tempting to feel like David fighting Goliath as we pit our lone voice against the gargantuan forces of the orchestra in cavernous opera houses.
When opera people are describing voices, it’s not uncommon to hear assessments of whether a voice is “big enough”. When discussing dynamic range, if a singer chooses to sing softly, it’s often described as “off the voice”. When a male voice chooses to use their head voice instead of their chest voice in order to sing high or soft (or both), the term for this is “falsetto”, which comes from the diminutive of the Italian word meaning “false” or “fake”. The homophobic stigma around this is a large reason why the countertenor voice has only in the past few decades gained legitimacy in modern-day opera houses. It is still not uncommon to hear “I’m just not a countertenor fan” or “I just don’t like countertenors” .
This culture of constantly needing voices to be louder and bigger is the kind of thing that might have sounded to many like musical machismo once upon a time. But to me, it’s always reeked of toxic masculinity. After a childhood of being told to not “be a sissy” and mocked for being a gay boy as an adolescent, I find that I am allergic to this kind of operatic discourse.
While it requires a lifetime of training to do it elegantly and sustainably, it is actually quite natural for the human voice to be able to soar over the din of an orchestra. It’s why we don’t bring babies to concerts. A baby crying in a concert hall will be heard in the majority of circumstances when an orchestra is playing, and an infant has absolutely no problem filling a 3,000 seat hall with the sound of its voice. Almost all of us have this natural ability.
Because of the nature of this 30-day challenge to publish a post every day, I can’t say that these are all fully-formed thoughts. But in a time in which the world is on pause, and dialogue about the ways in which bigotry of all kinds upholds the pillars of white supremacy and the patriarchy, this is just one of the many aspects of opera culture that I find myself questioning anew. Being an art form that has a culture of classifying human beings by putting them into boxes (the fach system) and that is obsessed with maintaining “tradition”, I think there is a lot to examine. As we learn to be anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist and embrace our fellow humans as individuals, I would hope we could apply the same principles to the operatic stories we tell and the human individuals who bring those stories to life with their beautiful, unique, and expressive voices.