Death, Sex, and the Semitone in Monteverdi’s “Pur ti miro, pur ti godo”
In this edition of Amazing Moments in Timbre, I will explore the timbral representation of sex (and maybe death) in “Pur ti miro, pur ti godo,” the final love duet between Poppea and Nerone in Monteverdi’s opera (on a libretto by Busenello), L’incoronazzione di Poppea. Martha C. Nussbaum, in Upheavals in Thought (2012), describes the duet as “an extraordinary depiction of lovemaking,” presumably in part because of the tension and release created by the numerous harmonic clashes and resolutions in the piece. Meanwhile, music librarian and blogger Pessimisissimo interprets the dissonance as follows:
Passaggio and Register in the Singing Voice
Passaggio, an Italian word translating to passage or transition, is the bane of many a classical singer and the secret weapon of folk-inspired vocalists like Dolores O’Riordan, Jewel, and Sarah McLachlan. In English we often refer to this as “the break.” One of the main goals of classical vocal technique is smoothing out register breaks. This requires finesse, patience, and perseverance. It is a process that cannot be rushed because singing in the passaggio for extended periods of time can mentally and physically tax even experienced singers, causing serious vocal fatigue.
The Singer’s Formant
Have you ever wondered how opera singers sing so loudly? In the voice studio, operatic singing is not actually thought of as loud but rather as possessing resonance (in singers’ terms, not acousticians’ terms), focus (sometimes visualized as a laser point), cut (a non-technical term meaning the voice can cut through the texture of an orchestra), or squillo (an Italian word for the buzzy quality in an operatic voice). A classically trained voice can be heard despite being accompanied by strings, percussion, woodwinds, and, in the case of Wagner’s Die Walküre, twenty-two brass instruments.
Flourish — Sarah Hennies
From the very beginning of the piece, Sarah Hennies’s Flourish for two vibraphone players, leads us into an extraordinary, mystical, new world of sound. What is so enigmatic about this piece is that a lot of the music happens in a realm of timbre beyond what is written and what is played. Precisely and cleanly scored in minimalist fashion of single-measure repeating cells, the atmospheric reverberations produced by the vibraphone are here left to write their own counterpoint….
Menotti’s Goya and The Timbre of Tinnitus
When considering the compositional problem of Goya’s deafness, Gian Carlo Menotti may have struggled to find the best approach. However, forty years prior to the première of Goya (1986), he had already explored the issue of muteness …
Envelope
In synthesis and sound recording and mixing, envelope describes how a sound’s amplitude (volume) changes over time. When recreating the timbre of an instrument (or other sounds such as a firetruck siren), it is equally important to get the overtone series right as it is to reconstruct or preserve the contour of the sound….