Beyond thrilled 2 share my holiday single "All I Want For Christmas Is You But Just The Alto 2 Part From When My High School Chorus Sang It" pic.twitter.com/ytwhDXAoHB
— Natalie Walker (@nwalks) December 23, 2016
९ डिसेंबर, २०१७
"My favorite shares of this are girls who feel the need to let everybody know they are sopranos when they share it. Textbook soprano behavior."
From the Twitter thread, quoted in this Metafilter discussion of the tweet "Beyond thrilled 2 share my holiday single 'All I Want For Christmas Is You But Just The Alto 2 Part From When My High School Chorus Sang It'":
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३५ टिप्पण्या:
Ha! As an alto, I appreciate this.
Bob and Ray did an interview with a singer who unfortunatly only knew tenor parts of songs.
Textbook Soprano behavior.
They sent Furio and Paulie around to have a talk with someone?
"Ha! As an alto, I appreciate this."
Exactly. I sang alto in high school chorus. You know the songs, but the non-melody you have to sing is more like the experience of being actively deprived of singing the song.
And it was sort of like being relegated to the category of less feminine and therefore deserving of punishment.
My daughter, who also sang chorus and was very impatient with this whole topic. Because it was such a big deal and so much "high school high drama."
But she also trained with a "classic voice" teacher (can you say mid size sedan payment?) so she got lots of solo attention.
I just liked to listen, pretty dad-uncritically.
-XC
Me too me too! This is a running joke in my family with my girls. They are all instrumentalists, but enjoy hearing me complain about all the Ooooooooooos I was relegated to in my six years of school chorus.
My middle and youngest are both sopranos and flutists, so they are slightly mystified and amused by the mild irritation my eldest daughter (the altos, and she plays French horn) and I share by never ever getting the melody. She has taken to making her own arrangements just for fun so she can play stuff at home and play the actual song.
Very cute, very pleasant.
She sounds infinitely better than Mariah Carey. It's a low bar, admittedly.
Welcome to three of the Four Tops life.
We deplorable altos will make singing great again.
Misplaced, I had (have) a friend who played trombone, who complained once they never get to play the melody. It never occurred to me until he mentioned it.
Wilbur,
Trombones never get the melody because you can't trust any instrument that changes shape while you play it.
What distinguishes a gentleman trombonist from the others? One who can play but chooses not to do so.
How do you make a trombone sound like a french horn? Stick your hand in the bell and miss about a third of the notes. (See what I did there?)
Just getting warmed up, here.
Equal time:
How many clarinetists does it take to pick out a lightbulb?
Only one, but he has to go through an entire case of them to find "just the right one."
The female lower register, or chest voice, can be quite alluring. Karen Carpenter and Alice Faye come to mind.
This is funny. I was a soprano.
I am thankful that all of the women in my life are altos. I never did like shrieking supranos, but as I get older, I lose more and more of the higher registers in my hearing. So, to the extent that I hear high pitched female voices, they are not pleasant, and become less so, year by year. So, if you have alto daughters, just assure them that the older they get, the more males will prefer their voices over those of their higher pitched sisters. And be able to hear them.
@misplaced - played French Horn into college. Not 1st chair, so never the melody. Loved the instrument, except for marching. One of the worst instruments for marching band, with the tiny mouthpiece and having to support its weight with only your right arm/hand. Haven’t played in over 40 years, but still my favorite instrument.
I have never been in a choir.
Have been in rock bands where I have done back-up vocals: ooooooh, aaaaaah, yeah-yeah-yeah: that kind of thing.
My voice is a bit 'pitchy', but I prefer to think of it as 'authentic'.
Of course I do.
- james james
(I don't actually have a singing voice nice enough for a choir, but no one had yet made the situationally required joke, so...)
Exactly. I sang alto in high school chorus. You know the songs, but the non-melody you have to sing is more like the experience of being actively deprived of singing the song.
And it was sort of like being relegated to the category of less feminine and therefore deserving of punishment.
Ditto.
I sang alto and sometimes contralto. In chorus, I usually was singing with the boys. Not standing with, but singing the same parts. I didn't feel punished though. Mostly bored with the parts we were assigned.
I sing soprano and am always so jealous of the altos. Melody is boring and it's often pitched in a middle register, which is not the soprano sweet spot.
It's quite funny that this pretty, stylish girl opens her mouth and hits a sustained pedal tone.
Trombone and French horn are the same length and have the same notes available.
But owing to the smaller mouthpiece the French horn plays harmonics of the trombone that the trombonist has to be good to reach.
Also harmonics are slightly out of tune, meaning you have to shade the bell on French horn to tune them, or use intermediate positions on the trombone to play them.
My favorite deep alto is Cyndi Boste (Australian)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg2Yw0_u-q0&list=PL3E0JPmtRvlGQLey27gyQfRYiI21mayJ8
Another Cyndi Boste deep alto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF4MosWV_88
rrhardin
Thanks for the musical links to Cyndi Boste. I was not familiar to her work.
I love her vocal range. I can sing along! She is one of my new favorites.
"How many clarinetists does it take to pick out a lightbulb?"
Hey! As a former clarinet player in high school, I resemble that remark!
Not soprano in her regular singing, mezzo maybe. The high part was falsetto.
Blogger Bruce Hayden said...
"@misplaced - played French Horn into college. Not 1st chair, so never the melody. Loved the instrument, except for marching. One of the worst instruments for marching band, with the tiny mouthpiece and having to support its weight with only your right arm/hand. Haven’t played in over 40 years, but still my favorite instrument."
@Bruce: Dittos. You eventually learn to like after beats.
"Sopranos don't have brains, they need that space for resonance."
Oh! Played rhe viola and sing alto. But honestly, I prefer it. Harmonies are so much more interesting to me. I rarely sing the melody, even when I am in the car listening to the radio.
I was just telling
I was just telling my daughter that I can sing the hell out of "Do You Hear What I Hear" alto part. I ended up in voice lessons as an adult and the teacher told me I am a soprano. I still sing alto, unless I am specifically asked to sing soprano.
It takes more skill to sing or play harmony than melody, and the non-melody lines really make a musical piece worthwhile; most tunes aren't much without the chords that give them color.
Altos shouldn't feel less feminine than sopranos. Alto is a woman's voice. It's not tenor, even with some overlap. Anyway, most sopranos use head voice, or even full falsetto, to reach higher.
In high school, when we had just finished a first run-through of a rather modern choral piece, the director winced slightly and commented to no one in particular, "Tnere's nothing so lost as a soprano without the melody." Bad for the ego, but true. One of my friends was a baritone and we liked singing carols together. exchanging parts -- interesting sound. Good times.
Karen Carpenter and Alice Faye come to mind.
Funny, I had precisely the same thought about Karen Carpenter! I even mentioned her to my girlfriend today, saying Carpenter had an amazing, beautiful lower register. Just remarkable.
Altos sell way more records than sopranos, anyway. So they have their revenge.
Let's not leave out Cass Elliot!
"...the mild irritation my eldest daughter (the altos, and she plays French horn) and I share by never ever getting the melody."
Ha! When I took up French horn in junior high, my mother explained to a friend of hers, "Playing French horn in the band is like singing alto" Six years of playing -pah (to the trombones' oom-) later and I understood what that had meant.
Fortunately we had a high school band director who appreciated a good mid-brass section and tried to pick at least one or two songs during concert season that gave the horns, baritones, and trombones something more interesting to work with.
I only had to march with a French horn once or twice. For field shows and parades, we had marching horns and mellophones.
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