technique and art

Ando

Archtop, perhaps your corner is the most appropriate place to write about the subject of dexterity. To be candid, I think the entire issue is rather sterile because players and listeners can certainly do, and prefer to hear, whatever they want to do and hear. If that means extravagant displays of musical dexterity, fine with me. My preferences tend the other way, but I won't argue about it.

However, I came across an interview between two men named Bruce Duffie and Jon Vickers. The latter is perhaps one of the greatest heroic tenors in opera, ever, and he had the following thing to say about vocal technique and its relationship to art. I'm sure your readers will hear the relevant connections:

What have we got today in the operatic world? We have the cult of the personality. The personality now is using the art form, in my opinion, for personal glorification. Certain works that were in the archives have now been dug out because they are vehicles for the vocal gymnastics of particular types of vocal demonstrations. But when that happens, at any point of the onward movement of the operatic art form, the art form degenerates because the human voice is given to mankind as a vehicle of communication. That is its fundamental expression, and the magnificence of the human voice is that every human emotion is automatically reflected in the human voice. I can define what I say by the way I say it. I can say "pig" and you will know that I am not referring to a four-footed animal that eats out of a trough. The voice totally cuts through the definition and illuminates the definition. But when we use the great operatic art form (or music) to serve as a vehicle for our voices, a great inversion has taken place and we have become servants of our voices and our voices are no longer servants of our emotions, of our intellect, of our hearts. You understand what I'm saying? You are turning it inside out so the music itself becomes a vocal exercise, a technical vocal exercise, and there is no composer who wrote music only as technical exercises. None of the great composers that I have ever known, and I include the ones that I put little questions marks over. There was a depth and meaning behind every trill, a meaning behind every run, a meaning behind every sforzando that it is the responsibility of the vocal artist to digest and spew out as a revelation of the meaning of the music. If we degenerate and allow to continue to degenerate the approach to the vocal art so that it only becomes vocal gymnastics, then because there is no longer the element which is essential (which Beethoven articulated when he said, "I write from the heart to the heart") if that element is totally missing, and if we write from the ear to the ear, if we appeal to the audience through nothing but mere vocal gymnastics, if those gymnastics and that technical ability does not serve the higher meaning, the more profound understanding, the revelation of human emotion with which the great composers are concerned, then we are going to lose our audience just a certainly as the castrati was done away with. Why? Because they were no longer capable of projecting a true human emotion. They became only the emperor's mechanical canary.

This is obviously meant to be provoking, and I'm sure there are people here who would disagree. But the above position is very well articulated, and I thought it might be stimulating here.

Cheers,
Ando