It's singing, but not as we know it

I was fascinated and a little baffled by the male contestant on Britain's Got Talent on Saturday with the striking, high pitched voice.

He said he was technically a counter tenor, but sang male soprano, as was popular in baroque music and earlier.

Now, I've had a bit of experience of counter tenor and alto singing. I sung alto for several years at school, and later sang in several choirs that featured male altos/counter tenors. The tone when singing like this is totally different from that of a woman in the same register. It works well on its own, but usually doesn't mix well with contraltos. Yet when you listen to Greg Pritchard sing without watching him, although there is a touch of falsetto strain, you could still suspect it was a woman singing.

What he didn't point out was that those male sopranos in early music days were not counter tenors (or even bargain-counter tenors, as featured in the works of PDQ Bach), they were castrati. (Anyone who has not come across Kingsley Amis's cracking alternate world book The Alteration should read this fascinating piece which envisages a modern world where the church still produces castrati.) Now our performer on Britain's Got Talent clearly wasn't a castrato - his speaking voice was quite normal - making his singing all the more remarkable.

I find myself in exactly the same position as Simon Cowell. I really don't know what to make of it. If you haven't heard him, decide for yourself.

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...

Search This Blog