With the newly merged Utah Symphony and Opera preparing for its upcoming season, it's time for an important question to be addressed: What's with all the vibrato?
You know the kind I'm talking about: that rafter-rattling Wagnerian "AH-ah-AH-ah-AH-ah-AH-ah-AH" produced by many opera singers. (The stereotype goes on — you know, fat lady holding a spear, shattering all the crystal in the room and so forth. Rest assured that many opera singers exercise and eschew iron accessories. But you might want to hold your wine glass carefully, just in case.)
In fact, perhaps we should be worried that the cellists and violinists of the symphony will adopt the more extreme vibrato of their newly adopted operatic brothers and sisters over their usual demure waggling of fingers and wrist.
Joking aside, vibrato — particularly operatic vibrato — is a surprisingly complicated subject. Culture, taste, physiology, time period, musical style and even architecture figure into it. Whole books have been written on the subject.
But of all the explanations of why vibrato exists, one of the most fascinating is that it resonates with natural human rhythms. "We have natural tremors in our body," said Ingo Titze, director of the National Center for Voice and Speech, a consortium that includes the University of Utah. "We are gigantic oscillating machines. Everything is going back and forth — chemical, mechanical, physiological. It's very difficult for us to remain still."
Simple example: Try keeping a laser pointer absolutely still.
Vocal vibrato, Titze says, is a naturally occurring physical tremor of the larynx that is cultured and refined by singers. It's quite physical. And to help her students produce it, Centerville Junior High School vocal instructor Sherryl Cazier has them bounce on their toes or shake their hand while singing.
And listeners expect to hear it. "When we hear voices without vibrato, we perceive them as being dull and lifeless," like an orchestra made up of tuning forks, said David Power, chairman of vocal studies at the U. "When vibrato is present, suddenly the voice has interest."
For reasons that no one can adequately explain, the human ear likes to hear vibratos that oscillate four to seven times a second. Faster than that, the music sounds shrill and bleating. Slower, as Utah Opera pianist and coach Tom Getty puts it, "sounds like starting up an '89 Chevy on a cold winter's night."
But that range shifts over time. Listen to Adriana Caselotti, the voice of Snow White in 1937's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves," and you'll hear a vibrato so fast it almost sounds comical to modern ears. And while music by its very nature is never entirely free of oscillation, original performances of baroque music, as far as researchers can tell, included no discernible vibrato at all.
"Music evolves," Getty said.
Style has something to do with it. Instrumentalists may have a heavy or light vibrato, depending on the type of music they're playing, but they will rarely adopt the more extreme vibrato of opera, and even that has evolved. Early opera singers performed in small theaters, where they did not have to push their voices to be heard. As venues got bigger and heavier orchestration became the norm, however, singers had to find ways to project.
A heavy vibrato was one way of doing that. "That's the case for a lot of musical innovations," said Robert Baldwin, director of orchestras at the U. "The music demanded it."
Culture also plays a part. In the West, particularly given our penchant for classical, romantic music, we are accustomed to heavy, constant vibrato. Asian music, on the other hand, has very little.
But there is some backlash. Titze, for example, an opera singer himself, believes opera today has too much vibrato. And it certainly contributes to the stereotype of the fat lady holding a spear and all that.
"That's one reason opera singers in the layman's world are perhaps not viewed as desirable to listen to," Cazier said. "It's part of that opera cliche."
There is something to be said for tradition, though. When asked whether opera might evolve to a lighter vibrato to accommodate tastes shaped by Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, Getty's response is, "Heavens to gimbles, no!"
E-mail: aedwards@desnews.com