Repertoire Selection and Tessitura: Finding the Perfect Match - Linda Barcan
As the new year begins and we re-open our singing studios, many of us will be engaged in one of my favourite activities: repertoire selection. As we browse song anthologies or trawl through the internet’s digital libraries, our students’ individual voices and needs will be top of mind. When selecting repertoire, I like to remind myself of John Nix’s words:
“It is the teacher's task to carefully choose repertoire that ensures success and progress while it challenges but does not defeat the student” (Nix, 2002, p. 217).
Some of us have curricula to guide us, such as the AMEB syllabus or a school syllabus. Singing pedagogues like John Nix, Jean Ralston and Christopher Arneson have also created rubrics to help the independent studio teacher evaluate and grade repertoire, based on personal factors such as age, developmental level, emotional maturity and temperament (Nix, 2002), as well as on musical and technical factors such as range, tessitura, rhythm, phrasing, diction and harmonic and lyrical content (Ralston, 1999). For me, in order to ensure that my students feel comfortable practicing pieces over and over (hopefully!), it is important in repertoire assignment to find a perfect match between song tessitura and singer tessitura.
Tessitura may simply be defined as “the part of the range most used” (Sadie, 1994). Ingo Titze breaks this classification down further into “song tessitura” and “singer tessitura” (Titze 2008, p. 59). Song tessitura relates to pitch dominance, or the highest occurrence of a note in a piece. Singer tessitura refers to the most comfortable area of the vocal range. I personally respond to Janclaire Elliott’s description of singer tessitura as the area where the voice “blossoms” (Elliott, 2004, p. 248). One of our tasks as voice teachers is surely to allow that blossoming to occur by, initially at least, avoiding tessituras that are uncomfortably high or that sit in a tricky passaggio zone.
Although voice scientists have developed measurement tools called “tessiturograms” (Rastall, 1984; Thurmer, 1988; Titze, 2008), a singing teacher’s ear and eye, as well as their knowledge and experience of vocal repertoire, can go a long way towards finding the perfect match referred to above.
According to Titze, singer tessitura can be determined by locating the area of the vocal range in which a singer can crescendo and decrescendo on a sustained note (the messa di voce exercise) with the most ease.
Song tessitura can be determined by a simple visual scan or by a note count, remembering to take duration into account. Titze (2008) demonstrated the importance of duration as a variable when he conducted a tessitura analysis of the tenor aria “Il mio tesoro” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In an initial analysis, he counted a dominant pitch of C4. However, when he took note duration into account, the dominant pitch shifted upwards to F4. This is significant, since F4 falls at the top of the tenor’s secondo passaggio, an area where, for many young tenors, time and patience is needed for the voice to blossom.
Do we need to automatically reject beautiful or favoured pieces of repertoire to avoid discomfort? Not necessarily. There are many online tools and digital applications for key transposition, allowing us to explore a rich range of repertoire whilst maintaining comfort and ease.
References
Elliott, J. (2004). Frequency, duration, and pitch or what make