No doubt many of you have read Will Crutchfield’s article “A Mike at the Opera” in the November 1999 issue of Opera News, which deals with the decision by the New York City Opera to use “sound enhancements” (miking) in its productions. Mr. Crutchfield makes excellent points against the practice without dwelling upon them, stating that the fact of its use would seem to make further argument useless. Instead, he concentrates on the probable outcome as regards vocal aesthetics, using the universal miking in and subsequent decline of musical theatre singing today as a cautionary tale. He urges those of us who love good singing, both listeners and voice professionals, to do what we can to guide the inevitable changes in technique which miking in the opera house will bring.
As Mr. Crutchfield states, the real fear associated with miking is that opera companies will be free to cast singers with inadequate vocal techniques but beautiful bodies and acting ability in the major roles because the microphone can easily mask shortcomings in technique and vocal size. He fears that this “changed sound environment” will mean that the traditional care used in training singers for an operatic career will be no longer needed and will therefore be inevitably lost.
Mr. Crutchfield points out that a “changed sound environment” will be slow and incremental, perhaps enough “so that nobody will be able to pinpoint the moment at which ‘the real thing’ was lost.”
Well, what is “the real thing”?
The fact is that classical singing as we have come to know it could not have existed before the advent of opera in the early 17th century. Until then there was no need for a style of vocal production which could reach the ears of thousands of people at a time, and singers most often performed with accompanying instruments such as the lute and harpsichord, which generated light, and by our standards almost inaudible sounds.
It seems to me that the evolution of classical vocal training grew more out a need for the type of acoustical resonance strong enough to carry over an orchestra and to fill ever-larger concert halls than for any aesthetic sense of vocal beauty. Based on the development of such an acoustic, what we have come to accept as beautiful (operatic) singing is the inevitable result of that evolution. What would pre-operatic (say 15th and 16th century) musicians have thought of the sounds we make before the need for such sounds evolved? Is it possible that they might think them unrefined and overproduced?
It is easy to point to the decline of singing skills of musical theatre singers since microphones in performance became widely used. Strong vocal skills are not necessary because the microphone covers up vocal problems. Nasal, hoarse, small voices can be and are successfully presented because the mike allows such sounds to carry. The microphone therefore becomes a leveler: Nobody sounds very bad, but nobody sounds very good either. Everyone tends to sound like everybody else.
Since such sounds are now common in commercial and popular music, it is assumed that people’s ears have become used to, and therefore accepting of them, and Broadway composers sometimes write with such sounds in mind. The consensus seems to be that individual and beautiful sounds of a John Raitt or a Barbara Cook are no longer needed or even preferred by general audiences.
Except that I don’t believe it.
I have attended too many concerts and spoken with too many people from all backgrounds ever to believe that really — or even almost — beautiful voices go unappreciated, no matter what the genre. To the contrary, those people become very excited when they hear a truly beautiful voice, but only so long as its possessor is singing music which “speaks” to them.
How else do we explain the success of “Master Class” or of Juilliard-trained singer Audra McDonald and her three Tonys? Or that Mario Lanza has suddenly been rescued from obscurity and is being touted as an overlooked American artist? Mass audiences are eager to hear McDonald sing or to listen to Lanza’s old recordings.
How is it that Andrea Boccelli is now beloved by audiences all over the world? Whatever can be said about the merits of his vocal technique, Boccelli’s presence in popular genres has caused mass audiences to want to hear someone whom they perceive as having a beautiful Italianate (to them operatic) sound. Other pop artists are trying to emulate him because there is money to be made. And money to be made has been, and always will be, the guiding force in mass entertainment.
Am I defending the New York City Opera’s decision to use sound enhancements in order to attract and hold audiences? The fact is, I deplore the decision, but not so much for one of the reasons that Mr. Crutchfield stated in his article (which was the freeing of opera companies “to cast roles principally according to body type and acting ability.”) These attributes had long been thought to have been ignored in the opera house in favor of the divas and primi uomini who can generate the most beautiful and exciting sounds.
In reality, “body type and acting ability” have always been thought to be important in all but the most rarely gifted singers. Adelina Patti sang like an angel. She was also extremely good-looking, as was Malibran, who could also act. As was Ruffo, Melba, Farrar, Jeritza, Pinza, Martinelli, Muzio, Lily Pons, Callas, Correlli, Tebaldi, Moffo, and on and on up through Von Stade, Bartolli, Fleming, Hampson, etc., etc. The only real exceptions seem to be the Wagnerians whom we take as we can get them. In general, opera is as much about looking as about listening.
I believe that what American mass audiences, at least, do not like to hear are overproduced “sausage factory” operatic sounds. These sounds might be pretty but are essentially boring to listen to for three or four hours because they have no more individuality or personality than do already miked Musical Theatre singers.
What I deplore about City Opera’s use of sound enhancements is that they place a barrier between singer and audience which serves only to remove the audience still further from the art of communication through song. Instead of finding a way to engage a questing audience with fresh music, fresh ideas, and fresh visual experiences, a foreseeably useless tack is taken. It sells both audiences and singers very short, the equivalent of throwing up your hands and saying that people only want a Disney-style “show” and that there is nothing to be done except to give it to them. And that is both depressing and patently false, not to mention shortsighted.
I have strong anecdotal evidence to support such a statement. This past November, my sister literally dragged me to see a Maureen McGovern concert at Baltimore’s Myerhoff Symphony Hall with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. I felt exactly the same as any leery gentleman who is forced by his wife to go to the opera for some “culture.” I was expecting to be bored to tears.
What I heard was a fine entertainer, celebrating her 25th year in show business, whose voice displayed all the attributes of good training: suppleness, clarity, excellent intonation, easy production, and fine dynamic control, sporting a full soprano range of a good two-and-a-half octaves.
However, what I found about two-thirds of the way through the performance was that, no matter how beautifully she sang nor how well she communicated text, the mike in her hands meant that subtleties in her sound were masked. After 15 or so songs, I was hearing nothing that I had not heard several times over. All the songs were starting to sound alike and I was beginning to look at my watch.
Then Ms. McGovern did a wonderful thing. In the midst of the first line of the refrain of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” singing a cappella, she put the microphone behind her back. It was a very brave and exciting moment. Her voice, full and rich-sounding over the mike, was then presented to us in its naked state: small, but still clear and supple and easy. Tiny subtleties of vibrato and shading were audible — and yes, a few imperfections as well. Though she could not fill the hall the way her operatic counterpart could, Maureen McGovern completely engaged her hushed audience. It was as if everyone in the place was holding his breath, and you could literally have heard a pin drop. I began to feel tears in my eyes and when she had finished the last note, the audience erupted into a spontaneous, protracted applause, the most enthusiastic of the evening. In that moment she made me supremely happy that I had come because she had chosen to share herself with us in the most intimate way a singer can.
Would we have wanted to hear a whole evening of such a small voice unmiked in such a large hall? Surely not. She is not able to present herself that way for an entire evening nor does she pretend to. But, she wanted us to hear her just the same. She wanted us to know who she is. And the audience loved her for it and patiently waited to hear all she had to say. Just as it has for generations of great singers.
Unlike fine commercial singers, classical singers are trained to present themselves vocally for a whole evening, unsheathed and unprotected. That is what live performance is for us and it is the promise we make to our audiences. That we will share ourselves with them one on one, unaltered and unenhanced save for our techniques.
If an audience will listen appreciatively to even one song from a singer untrained in such techniques, is it not presumptuous on our part to assume that they are too ignorant, too impatient to know or to care what the difference is when “the real thing” is masked? What reason is there to suppose that they have, after all, lost their ability to listen, their desire to be surprised or their capacity to be amazed by “the real thing”?
Businesses, especially in the arts, are tied to the bottom line. But all smart businesses, when they are in trouble, look to see if the basic product they offer is still of interest to the consumer. If what we present in the opera house fails to draw, if masses audiences do not come, it is because they do not like what they hear. If they do not like what they hear, perhaps we need to examine the content of what we present and then try to determine whether or not presenting it louder and smoothed out electronically will do any good over the long term.
I think there is every chance it will not. Perhaps we as teachers and guides must try to influence what is written by training our students to sing music that will be of real interest to their audiences. What such music is I cannot say, but if it is current, it may necessitate changes in training techniques. Technical change is not new in the world of singing and neither are complaints about the deplorable state of training and the singing it engenders. That any change must be based upon what knowledge has come before goes without saying. That this knowledge has been ever-changing for the whole history of its development and must continue to be so in order to serve current musical needs, also seems to me to be true.
If our students have songs to sing that others want to hear, if they sing them with supple, clear, easy sound production, if the acoustic is well-balanced and intonation true, I believe that their listeners will wait patiently to hear what is being said.
