Musing on Voice Fachs

In line with my attempt to get more readers by using frequently searched key words in my titles, I have come up with this one. Voice Fachs is certainly a term that people want to know about.

I am a dramatic mezzo-soprano.  I have some disagreements with the statements on the page that you get if you click on "dramatic mezzo-soprano" in that I would have chosen different roles and arias (I would not have included Adalgisa and would have included Azucena, for example and I would have used Dolora Zajick as the prime example) but that is my voice fach.  I don't (yet) have the range required; I basically sing comfortably in the two octave range from low A to high A (although my B flat is getting better by the minute and I am vocalizing solidly up to a high C every day), but I would most definitely have had the range if I had studied seriously even from my 20s on.  Certainly I believe that if I had kept studying I would have had a full dramatic mezzo voice with all its technical capabilities by the time I was 40.  (What type of "career" I would have had is anyone's guess, but that's another matter.)

What's frustrating in my life now, is that my primary outlet for singing is a church choir (and the occasional solo).

Most of the time I sing second soprano although if the parts are high, I will sing first alto.  If there are only two women's parts I usually sing soprano, which almost never involves singing above a G. This is more satisfying than singing alto because I get to use my head voice regularly, bu if I sing soprano I have to alter the color of my voice to sound like a lyric soprano.  Having grown up imitating Julie Andrews and the sopranos on my mother's Gilbert and Sullivan recordings, I know how to do that without choking off my voice, but that sound is not me.  If a piece has only two women's parts and the soprano part sits in too high a tessitura (requiring one to "float", say, a high A) I will switch to alto, which is usually frustrating because I never get to sing above a D, and often have to do a lot of singing below middle C or smack in the middle of my lower passaggio break.

So my dramatic mezzo voice is rarely showcased in any way.  It's always "sing softly" or "sing lightly", which of course I can do, but again, it is not what I do best.

One of my endless sources of frustration is that in this choir any time someone shows up with a high soprano voice with any training, that person becomes a "Golden Child" and everyone buzzes about and oohs and ahs.  So sometimes it feels like there is a choir, which is meant to be a group endeavor (I have certainly had the Diva in me squelched often enough to have had that drummed into me), but that really, to paraphrase George Orwell "Everyone is equal, but the highest soprano is more equal than others."

No one seems to really know that my voice fach is much much rarer than that of a lyric soprano, because the range I sing in is not that different from the ranges of female choral singers with no training.

Ditto when there are solos interspersed into choir pieces.  These seem to always be for whoever the highest soprano is that season, never for women with lower voices.  If something is marked "solo" and it is written for a woman with a lower voice, the choir director asks everyone to sing it - because they can.

This coming Sunday we will be singing Argento's "Gloria", which, because it is from an opera, sits in a high range for all four parts.  So I am singing the alto part which goes repeatedly up to an F sharp.  It is a dream of a part for me because it sits in the best part of my voice, but because it is an alto part, I can sing with my real dramatic mezzo voice.  And it has high visibility, which is a big treat.  But, you see, there are now a total of 9 altos including myself (one of the other second sopranos just decided to switch) and only 3 sopranos.  This is of course the exact opposite of how things are in the real classical singing world, where lyric sopranos are plentiful and dramatic mezzos, not to mention contraltos, are rare.

So how do I educate people about the fact that my voice fach is special and unusual?

P.S. This post covers some ground that I have covered in other blog posts, but I have tried to make it more informative and less personal, in case I decide to post it somewhere a little more public.