Vocal Music At Turntable Club

Northern Advocate, 25 May 1949, Page 6

Vocal Music At Turntable Club

Presenting the fourth of his series of lectures on “What is Music?” to members of the Whangarei Turntable Club in the YWCA lounge last evening, Mr I. Menzies spoke on vocal music. He said composers were restricted considerably in writing for the voice. Reed and string instruments have been improved over the years, but the human voice has not altered greatly; a vocal range is very narrow, but it can portray emotion with more flexibility than man-made instruments.

Tracing the history of vocal works, Mr Menzies said that the Gregorian chants were probably the first known, and he illustrated this with a recording of a male voice leading a chant, with a chorus in the background. Then came further developments on the chant, and the chorus singers were given a little more scope in variation.

The early part-song, or round, followed the Church music, and then came the minstrels and troubadors. Around the 14th Century folk songs became known. Some time later the madrigal was introduced in Italy

But another century was to pass before vocal music really found a footing; Purcell, Wesley, Bach and Handel were leaders of this renaissance.

It was not until the 19th Century that the greatest use was made of the voice, and all present works are based on this material. DIVISION OF VOICES

Mr Menzies then went on to describe the sub-division of voices. He said that while the range is short, various styles—operatic tenors, lyric tenoi's, dramatic sopranos, coloratura sopranos and others—increased the scope in some measure.

Many composers were not able to limit the range for vocal work; they were so used to instrumental that they tended to create music far beyond the human voice. Schubert was an illustration of this.

Matching the music to the words was another difficult aspect, but here Schubert’s “Who is Sylvia?” was mentioned as being almost a perfect matching; the words fall, to the music almost as they would be spoken. A recording of the Don Cossack Choir-singing the First Psalm was used to illustrate this point. Two other numbers were used to show that some composers did pay great attention to this matching—Marion Anderson, singing “The Nut Tree,” and the Viennese Boys’ Choir singing a chorus from Strauss’ “Die Fliedermaus.” TRANSLATIONS Translation into English of foreignlanguage songs was commented on by the speaker. If a song originated in German, its vowels and intonations were suited to that tongue, but when translated it created quite a different idea—sometimes far away from the original—and an audience really got a wrong impression of the beauty of.the setting. For this , reason many noted vocalists preferred to use the correct language. In conclusion, Mr Menzies used a Brahms’ composition, sung by Marion Anderson, accompanied by the Philadelphia Orchestra, to show how vocal work can be varied by' use of obligatos, etc., wherein the singer is assisted by instrumerital work.

The president of the club (Mr N. L. Squires) closed evening with thanks to the speaker.