Vocal vibrato 1500-1700 

Khajiit needs moon sugar to yowl at the moon. 7:21

agree!

Me too! My parents took me to an opera for my tenth birthday, and detested the "wobbling" but suppressed the urge to get up and out of there until the coloratura soprano started to warble. That was too much, and I apologised to my parents and fled the concert hall into the quiet outside. My father, bless him, played both classical violin(with vibrato) and Irish jig (without) and switched my musical development into the vibrato-free styles. Some 50 years later I still play and sing vibratoless early medieval and sing Irish "sean nos". Sean Nos uses other forms of variance with long melodic phrases and highly ornamented and melismatic lines of melody.

Fr

You're not alone. I loathe the sound. I always assumed I hated vocal music until the day I heard some straight tone recording of... I think it was a Pergolesi piece. "Ahhh that's nice. What is this?!" Then began my research...

John ... :: I'm not a musician, but it is very educational to understand these technical aspects of music and especially singing. I heard Nelson Eddy demonstrate vibrato after singing a phrase without. You could hear the subtle difference. His vibrato was something that added a totally different effect. I never would have known. I've also heard critics who find "vibratoless" voices to be a defect. Early-on, in my listening experience, I thought that was a positive trait (incorrectly associating vibrato with a wobble) and then I heard Nelson Eddy's vibrato. The critic who mentioned a vibratoless voice (when I was unaware of the value of vibrato), I couldn't wait to her her voice, thinking it was perfection. I will have to get back to you with the name of that singer.

John Rasmussen :: Teresa-Stich-Randall‼️

“Shaken with the wind of its own sound”-brilliant, and exactly “vibrato”

Incorrect research

@@aprilgonzalez7893 cmon, how are you going to drop a hot take like that and not expound… Expound!

The other thing to remember is the vast difference between modern instruments and period instruments. Small bore cornettos compared to modern trumpets were much softer and brighter sounding. These instruments were often combined with oboes because of their similar tones. A large bore Bach trumpet playing in a modern orchestra is a very different creature indeed and would never be considered a woodwind in tone or volume. They play straight or with vibrato according to the style and period of the music as well as the dictates of the conductor.

Indeed. And when we consider the venues of earlier performances (constructions of stone and marble), we can imagine that singers of polyphonic/contrapuntal music would limit undulations in order to lesson the echo and thereby distort intricate harmonies.

Hey, Alessandro Moreschi is my great-great-uncle !

Right. So this seems to suggest, not an affected voice tremble but one only naturally arising. Listening closely, "straight tone" can often have a very subtle tremble. This doesn't bother me. But I'm no expert... I just like what I like.

fred houpt my favorite kind is called “Dive bomb and shriek”

What you say is so true. Many modern opera singers try too hard and emote rather than express the music. I think the most important thing is to make sure the 'core' of the voice is stable and solid, and any natural vibrato will then be very pleasing. When I think of my favourite opera singers, especially the Wagnerians, they don't have the famous 'wobble'. Listen to Kirsten Flagstad, a huge voice with a solid tone and a natural vibrato, or Regine Crespin, another voice with a solid tone that was capable of great dynamic contrasts, a wide range of expression, and incredible sensuality, but neither of them wobbled! Apparently Flagstad said that singing Wagner should be as easy as putting on a comfortable pair of slippers, a great piece of advice, which was probably why she never forced the voice. There was also a greater emphasis on humbly putting across the text, another means of not exaggerating. Singers could apply these ideas to whatever they sing, and it would be more enjoyable from an audience point of view - there is nothing worse than being shrieked at!

I agree. Attempting to sing straight tone for me was tiring and had a negative impact on my intonation. While I don't do the jaw wobbling vibrato or the bobblehead vibrato, I employ a natural vibrato and my voice is at its most free

That is not true. Puccini roles were written for voices that would carry over a 90 piece orchestra. A singer modifying her technique to sing straight tone would not only be stylistically inaccurate for Puccini but inaudible. If you are listening to recordings of singers prior to WW1 you have to remember that sound recording was still very young. The reason why you might not hear vibrato in females singers in early sound recordings has to do with the ability of these early devices to pick up certain sound frequencies like higher pitches creating a distortion of sound. This is why you may think you’ve heard less vibrato in mostly female singers. It’s not actually due to the singers using less vibrato in their actual singing.

@@aprilgonzalez7893 Interesting.

Early music like Palestrina up to the renaissance do require less vibrato. Music didn’t start being notated until the ninth century and if you study things like Gregorian Chant and things like that, You’ll understand why there was no need for for vibrato stylistically. It’s always best to learn bel canto styles singing technique first which is about using vibrato and letting the voice be free and then once you master down that technique, then you can start singing straight tone. When you’ve mastered the bel canto style style technique, you can sing anything just as long as you remember to use the correct technique.

@@Wendylovespitties My voice teacher in my undergrad explained this all to me in one or two of my voice lessons. This Exact topic so that’s why I know. And he studied under Eileen Farrell. The famous dramatic soprano from the Met. I was very blessed in my music education.

The same could be said of those who build their careers on the idea of vibrato. I can live with the fact that some people add vibrato to everything. If they cannot live with me not using vibrato, what does that say about them?

@@therealzilch Vibrato is a semi-voluntary reflex resulting from the body's need to be dynamic and not static (if you statically tense a muscle for long it will start shaking). When a note is sung well, the muscles involved are set for that very note - the muscles are static. To relive that, the body starts sending the air in puffs, causing the vocal folds to be repetively pushed out and then return - a vibrato. This will only happen if there are no tensions present when singing. So, a straight tone is either the result of tensions, or an effort to prevent the body from doing what is natural.

@@celibidache1000 Can you give me a source for this information? In my experience- fifty years of singing in small ensembles and choirs, both as an amateur and professionally- I've known many singers who sang well, without apparent tension, and naturally, both with and without vibrato. Your claim sounds like a pseudo scientific justification for your own personal taste. I don't know about you, but I have no trouble whatsoever holding my muscles- say my outstretched arm- static with no trembling for far longer than any singer can hold a note, so that contention is nonsense. If you prefer to use and listen to vibrato, that's of course your prerogative. But to claim that singing without vibrato is not singing well, that it's unnatural, and that it's tense, is a gratuitous putdown.

@@therealzilch so, because you don't agree with what I say, or it differs from your experience, you readily accuse me of dishonestly using pseudo-science to justify my taste? Do you always act this defensively when faced with information that does not conform to your ways? I'm a professional singer and choir conductor, and I have worked with voices for over 20 years. I'll gladly have this conversation with you, if you can leave your cognitive dissonance out of it. Or will this be a case of "you can't teach an old dog new tricks"?

@@celibidache1000 Just cite your sources.

I don't know that eliminating vibrato harms clarity of polyphony. If you listen to the sistine choir sing Palestrina , sure it sounds different, but clarity is not lost. Believe it or not, some clarity is added. This is due to vocal onset and attack being exact and on the voice, and air and sound being exactly coordinated. This results in the wavering quality, and the vibrato adds a certain colour. That choir has also been singing that rep since the day it was written. So it's fair to say that this passed down tradition of singing is more likely what was done ubder the hand of Palestrina.

@@Operaandchant90 I said "excessive vibrato", "lyric vibrato"...I don't know if the Sistine Choir sings in the Palestrina real style, probably in 450 years many things have changed and the taste of the moment has influenced the executive style. Unfortunately, as always, we have no records of the various ages and we must satisfy ourselves with written testimonies that are rarely accurate in this regard.

What is a lyric vibrato?

This statement is often true. But in this episode we showed several sources where it is quite clearly not the case. Or perhaps you can demonstrate what you mean when referring to the specific sources?

Thank you for your comment, We are aware of this but we wanted to propose a more direct translation.

The discussion of vibrato can also be about aging inside of a choir. There have been many articles on how and when to "retire" older sopranos because of their pitch problems and uncontrolled vibrato. Because fewer men actually engage in music, it seems to be more of a problem with sopranos and their high range issues. The problem with men is encouraging them to sing at all and to stay with the program.

@Richard Horsley I think it was the predecessor of rock music and gospel (particularly the screaming!) :-)

Thank you for your comments. We do indeed take other sources into account, like the vast documentation around the creation of the undulating organ stops. The first tremulants are recorded in Germany around 1510, in France around 1526 and in Italy probably since 1519, but certainly in 1537. The one source you mention, Rossetti, is in fact quoting Aristotle in a list of pathologies related to the voice. This is not relevant in the study of vocal undulations considered pleasant enough to be imitated by organs and other instruments. Agricola (1529) and Ganassi (1535) mention those pleasant undulations too, and Ganassi teaches how to perform them on the recorder with the specific purpose to imitate the human voice. Doni speaks of a certain type of tremolo which he finds effeminate, but he nevertheless thinks it should be used in certain dramatic passages. It is not possible to state that "vibrato is almost unanimously condemned" in the 17th and 18th centuries, first of all because they never use the word "vibrato." As for the "tremolo" and other undulations, they are sufficiently often described as highly pleasant by Roger North (1695 and 1710, in particular about the castrato Nicolini), Dodart (1706, who specifically describes them as the distinctive quality of the singing voice), Riccati in 1767 and Gervasoni in 1800 (both linking the undulations to the effect caused by detuning the 'voce umana' in the organ), Leopold Mozart (1756, in his long chapter on the violin tremolo, which should be used in long and final notes), Kirnberger (1771 in his entry "Bebung" in the Sulzer Theory of the Fine Arts), Wolfgang Mozart (1778, stating that the voice trembles in a pleasant way), and the infinite list of authors who mention it as an ornament.

@@lisandroabadie9757 Well, I said "tremolo i.e. vibrato", making clear that the term "vibrato" was not used then. But I admit that I should have said more precisely: "Later in the 17th century [...] continuous tremolo i.e. vibrato is almost unanimously condemned". Of course it was generally accepted as an ornament.

And 1930s pop singers will croon! (Straight tone with vibrato at the end. Think Broadway style.) :-)

You mean like a castrato and other healthy phenomena created by the spa of baroque culture?

@@danyelnicholas Castrati0on didn't make their voices were unhealthy, any more than a boy's voice is inherently unhealthy.

@@Ruffiello I merely wanted to point out that health was not necessarily the primary concern in the baroque era. Neither was freedom.

Thank you for your interest. Yes, the "tremblant doux" was often associated with the "voix humaine". In Germany the "sanfte Schwebung" was especially built for the "vox humana". An article I wrote will soon be published, discussing these issues in more detail. For now, I can recommend this excellent article on the French "tremblants": www.voxhumanajournal.com/young2019.html

Fafner888 i think they did something like that here ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qFPW9ENtNKA.html