...then I heard Tom

A few years ago, my mum decided to try to work out her family tree. She didn't get any further than her grandparents when she came across someone called Tom Burke. She couldn't work out if he was a relative, or just a very close friend of the family, but she remembered hearing stories about him, and she remembered that he was a singer. So she looked him up. Turns out he became the greatest tenor in the world in his time!

I won't go on about him now — fact is, we found some recordings of him singing, and I was amazed; I had never heard singing like it. I got fascinated; I started listening to singers from that era and before; right back to the first singers who made records.

Quite a few of them were taught by one Mathilde Marchesi, and she wrote a book: Bel Canto, A Theoretical & Practical Vocal Method. On the cover it says, 'Mathilde Marchesi, Teacher of Melba and Calvé, successor to Garcia'.

I took this book to my singing teacher, showed her the exercises in it, and asked her what she thought of them. She laughed and said, "Well, they're a bit old fashioned, aren't they, dear?"

Unfortunately, not very long after that, Rae became too old to teach me any more, and I didn't know where to go to find another teacher as good as her. But I knew that if I was going to sing, I was going to sing in that old fashioned way. So I turned to Marchesi's book. I turned straight to page one, and began to read. On almost every page there was a revelation waiting for me. I worked my way through every exercise; I was determined to get through the whole book, even though at times it seemed impossible.

But I did it. I got through it, and I had the recordings of her students, the superstars of their day, to listen to and copy, so that I could try to really sound like a Marchesi student.

Because it was a family tree that got me started on this journey into the Past, I decided to work out my own family tree. My mum's been getting on very well with our biological tree; she's discovered a cousin she never knew she had, who has traced our family right back to the 17th century, which is really cool. But it also turns out my singing pedigree is really impressive!

The first great singing teacher that we know of is the Big Daddy of Bel Canto, a guy called Porpora, who was born in the 17th century. Via both my singing teachers, I can trace my lineage straight back to Porpora, passing almost every singing legend of the last 300 years on the way!

So if anyone still wants to argue that I don't know what I'm talking about with regards to Bel Canto, argue with this!

P.S. There are a lot of names missed off here, for space reasons!

...where have all the contraltos gone?

The above recording is, I think, one of the best examples of a great contralto voice. A contralto is a woman who has a very strong chest register — that's those strident low notes that sound quite shocking to modern ears, because the chest voice has gone out of fashion and no one uses it any more. 

Which means our contraltos have all disappeared, because now they're just using the middle voice, which ought to rule the next octave above the chest notes. It has a softer sound, but in contraltos is still very strong and rich. Modern singing technique pushes the middle voice too high and too low, so that the low notes fade away and can't be heard, and the high notes turn into screams.

And if you can't scream the high notes, they call you a mezzo soprano, which means a 'half soprano', which basically means 'the loser category', because you can't get the high notes, and you can't get the low notes, and you don't get any of the good numbers to sing.

At the moment, we have a glut of mezzo sopranos, because really they're either contraltos who haven't found their chest voice, or they're sopranos who haven't found their head voice. And if the head voice doesn't come back into fashion some time soon, the high soprano will go the same way as the contralto and the dodo, and we won't hear the likes of this ever again:

...what a range!

From my very first words I spoke in a very low voice. My parents didn't know where I'd got it from, but it seemed to be natural to me. It frightened strangers a lot, I think:

"Aw, hello!" they'd say, "How old are you, then?"

And I'd croak back at them, "Five!"

"Ah! Is it possessed?" they'd cry.

And I wanted to sing down there, too. By that I mean in a bass register, the kind of range that children don't sing in. As Marilyn Horne said in an interview titled 'How to sing Bel Canto', "I think I began as a soprano because I began so damn young! Who's got any chest voice at five years of age?" At which Luciano Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge all laughed heartily.

I had, Marilyn. I had a chest voice at five years of age. And this worried my piano teacher, who liked to hear me sing a lot, she thought I'd do some damage to my voice. So she made me sing songs that were very high, which I found a real struggle, but after years of doing it, it started to feel natural to me and I found it more comfortable singing high than singing low.

Now, there are two kinds of female voices. Common belief today is that there are three: soprano, mezzo soprano and contralto. But, less than a hundred years ago, mezzo soprano and contralto were basically different words for the same voice type. There were sopranos, who could sing very high, and contraltos, who could sing very low. There is occasionally, however, a third type, when a woman can sing the whole range.

It is possible to extend your range, if you do it very carefully and slowly and always stop if it hurts or feels uncomfortable. I've been trying to do this for a long time because, for me, the high notes have always been really hard to reach. Yet I felt like a soprano, and Rae thought I was a soprano. She took a long time to decide it, but after I had been having lessons with her for a few months she turned to me one day and said, "You know, dear, I think you're a soprano." And after that she would get very annoyed if anyone suggested I wasn't!

Now, my whistle voice still hasn't come back, but it has helped to extend my range up to a D, which was out of my range before.

And it so happens I'm one of those very unusual voices: although I feel like a soprano, I have a very strong baritone as well, which I'm not really sure I have much musical use for, but it means I now have a range of over three octaves. Which is nice.

...we all need a break sometimes

Apologies for my long absence. The reason for the break between my first blog and this is that I lost my voice just days after making the accompanying video. I was out Christmas shopping and on the way back it started to rain and my feet got wet, and that was it. If you have ever read a classic novel in which someone goes out in the rain and gets their feet wet and develops a terrible fever and nearly dies, you might have thought it was just a plot device, but it always happens to me! I'm a 19th century cliché.

BUT an interesting thing happened. I literally couldn't speak for two weeks, which was particularly annoying because I wanted to record my new blog and demonstrate the work I have been doing on my high notes. I had just discovered my whistle voice. Now, a whistle voice is a range of high notes that sopranos have. Some people can sing them naturally, for others it takes a long time to find them. They're so high and shrill they sound like a whistle, hence the name. I've never known how it was done, but some months ago I suddenly found them by mistake! I was pretending to be a kettle and then I realised I could pitch the sound. I was really excited and wanted to record it for the blog, but then I lost my voice and completely lost my whistle notes, and I still haven't got them back.

Now, the really weird thing was that there was a gap in my voice all of a sudden. I couldn't sing a B, a C, a C#, or a D. These four notes I couldn't get in my whistle voice or my normal (head) voice. And I couldn't join my head and whistle voices up. I could sometimes slide down from the whistle voice, but I couldn't slide up to it, and there was a big break every time I tried to come down a scale.

But last Monday (30th December) I tried to do some exercises again. I could just about talk by then, so I started humming, and then I started doing some scales, and I started taking the scales a bit higher and a bit higher and a bit higher and I thought, 'This is going a bit higher than I usually do in a warm-up.' I went right up to a C, no problem. All of a sudden I can sing up to a D, or even an Eb, and it's not my whistle register, because that has taken a holiday, but my voice has just extended itself, which is really exciting, because it's something I've wanted for years.

I think this seems to prove that sometimes, even though the only way you can really achieve something you want is through hard work, doing a little bit every day, sometimes we all need a bit of a rest, and your body knows that. I'd been doing a lot of singing just before I lost my voice and it was like my throat said, "You know what, take a couple of weeks off" and then it just sorted itself out on its own.

So the lesson learnt here is: We all need a bit of a break sometimes.

But don't just take it from me. As the great Manuel Garcia said: "After an enforced rest, when work is resumed, actual progress seems to have been made."