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Who's the guy that sings really high? They aren't the tenors. This week, we're going over the counter.
Howdy, howdy, howdy! I’m Solomon Reynolds, and this is: Saturday Morning Car Tunes! This morning… Have you heard men that can sing way up there? That’s called falsetto, and it’s all over pop music. But there’s nothing false about the Bee Gees or The Tokens. And falsetto is nothing new. Falsetto singing has been used since ancient times in rituals and folk music all over the world. During the renaissance, there were typically three types of male voices: the tenor, who sang the melody; the cantus, who sang above the melody; and the contratenor, who sang below the melody. A fourth voice was added, called the contratenor altus, which eventually became the English word “countertenor”: the line that sang above the tenor. Can you hear the higher voices in Thomas Morley’s ballett "Now is the Month of Maying"?
Around 400 years ago, the Italian Church didn’t let women sing in public. For the higher parts in vocal music, composers would use men who sang in falsetto, or young boys who still had high voices. Falsetto is sometimes out of tune, and boys’ voices get lower as they grow older. So, a third type of singer became super popular. Doctors surgically altered young boys so their voices would stay high as they got older. These singers were called castrati. While those surgeries don’t happen anymore today, history tells us castrati had the most amazing voices. They were as rich and famous as rock stars today. This is from the only recording made by the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, who died in 1922. Here he is singing Charles Gounod’s "Ave Maria."
Castrati were masters of singing, combining beauty and strength. To copy what they would have typically sounded like, the voices of a countertenor and soprano were mixed together for this aria from the 1994 film Farinelli.
After the castrati became less popular, composers stopped writing music for the high male voice. Alfred Deller, known as the “godfather of countertenors,” made the high male voice popular again. This opera role was written for him by Benjamin Britten. Isn’t it magical?
Countertenors can take your breath away, like from Handel’s opera Xerxes. Sometimes, composers wrote male roles for women, called pants roles. Recently, countertenors have been singing these male roles originally written for women, like Prince Orlofsky in Johann Strauss, Jr.’s Die Feldermaus. In the musical Chicago, Miss Mary Sunshine is a countertenor in drag. One of the coolest countertenors today is John Holiday. He won fifth place on Season 19 of NBC's The Voice. No prescription required! These men sing over the counter.
I’m Solomon Reynolds. I write and produce Saturday Morning Car Tunes with research assistant Carolina Correa and audio engineer Stephen Page, only on Classical California. Tune in—or out of your car—next Saturday morning!
