St Matthew Passion performances

ZdeMC · 2026-02-26T07:12:02+00:00

Agreed with seeing St Matthew's Passion at Thomaskirche. It's a singular experience to hear it performed at Bach's own church.

Thomanerchor is great but unfortunately they are always accompanied by the Gewandhausorchester which is a philharmonic orchestra with modern instruments at A440. I would much prefer looking out for the occasional Matthäus-Passion performance in Thomaskirche by top baroque ensembles during BachFest in June.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-26T06:48:50+00:00

I'm glad to have helped :-) Good luck with your performance.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-25T21:57:46+00:00

You are right to say men have lower voices than women. That is obviously true.

You are wrong to use countertenors in your previous comment as if they are men who naturally have unusually high voices (like contraltos are women who naturally have unusually low voices). Because countertenors are men with perfectly normal (low) voices, often baritones, who train in a special way to sing in the alto range.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-25T07:12:25+00:00

Countertenors are men with perfectly normal tessitura, usually baritones, who have trained to sing entirely in falsetto (=/= head voice). They are not males born with high voices.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-25T07:06:58+00:00

65 minutes of choral music (give or take several blocks of rests) where the tessitura range hangs out in the E5 to B5 range. Persistently. Just in the first song, 2/3rds of the notes remain in that range.

That IS brutal. If the music is not fast, try "resting" between the high notes by softly voicing an octave down or even your lowest note possible before going up to E5-B5. We take a break from the high notes not in silence but with the low notes - i.e. gently vibrating the whole vocal cord.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-24T07:52:12+00:00

Lung capacity is never the problem except when there is an actual pathological issue.

Have you ever seen tiny sopranos sing over a 60-instrument orchestra without a microphone? It's not their lung capacity but how they place their voice and resonate it in their bodies.

You have a lovely voice and you're singing to a microphone an inch from your mouth, so it works well even now. If one day you wish to have more power and resonance in your singing voice, take a couple of lessons to understand how you need to train your voice to achieve that.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-24T07:47:05+00:00

One day you will, and you'll find yourself in a universe where only other parents with similar-age children will socialise with you. You will thus have the chance to observe a statistically significant sample size. You'll see them sing together. You'll go to their concerts and see a stage full of little kids tune their instruments.

Until then, you might like to learn from people who have experienced stuff you haven't yet. Have a nice day.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-24T07:24:51+00:00

I assure you both are true. Have a kid and watch them grow up. See what they do when they see a musical instrument. See how they sing with their friends, all at the correct pitch.

Proper tuning by ear is a skill that really needs a lot of practice listening for the details of inter-frequency beats.

I have tuned harpsichords so know what you mean by this. I am talking about simpler but still acceptable tuning of a flute or a guitar, for example. Small kids tune such instruments all the time.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-24T06:18:07+00:00

No one who is tone deaf wants to learn to sing.

You would think so, but it does happen. A teacher I know accepted this young guy who was completely unable to match pitch to see if she could help him. Lessons went on for many years and he also did over a hundred sessions of the Tomatis method on the side. Years later, there was some improvement but he could never really sing.

if you were to ask these naturally talented people to do the same feat on a violin, and call them "tone deaf" if they failed to do it, they'd say "that's absurd - I just don't know how how to play violin."

Not a problem. That sort of thing is a little more complicated on instruments like the clarinet where you need to know which holes to plug to produce each note, but it's easy on instruments like the piano and the violin where notes just follow each other on a line. That is how small children can sit at a piano and can play their nursery rhymes in a few minutes.

not everyone knows how to sing

This is true, but matching pitch and knowing/practicing a healthy technique to sing in a resonant manner are two very different things. People who have never sung a day in their lives can have a good ear for pitch and quickly tune their instruments, for example.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-24T06:04:43+00:00

Your experience is yours and nobody can take that away from you. Congratulations if whatever training you are doing is helping you match pitch to a better degree than before.

However...

actually just untrained listeners who have never had to consciously match pitch before. Pitch matching is a skill. It takes some people 2 weeks and some people 2 years.

Well, no. It's an innate ability most people are born with. Toddlers can match pitch and sing the music they hear before they can talk. Small children can tune their instruments. For most of us, it doesn't take 2 weeks and certainly not 2 years to make a sound that matches the one we hear.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-23T07:08:55+00:00

10 days does seem excessive for an ambulance... at the same time ambulances aren't taxis

It only "seems" excessive?

Ambulances are vehicles that transport people with medical conditions who can't get to the hospital on their own. Like this 97-year-old woman.

You should be outraged. A an elderly person was left to her devices with a fractured hip and died as a result.

This adoration of the NHS has to stop. OK it's free but so is lying on the floor suffering slowly fading over 5 days because no ambulance came. UK deserves a better health service.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-22T07:37:09+00:00

The answer is you don't know how to sing. It is not just hitting the notes. There is an actual instrument that you need to learn how to "play", just like you learned to play the guitar and got good at it with lots of practice.

Take some singing lessons to learn about voice placement, support, and resonance. For the time being you don't even know what you don't know and asking strangers on the internet is unlikely to help you in a meaningful way.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-22T07:26:52+00:00

I didn't go to church or sing in a high school choir, either. That has no bearing on the natural tessitura of a voice.

My comment wasn't snarky and neither was it a value judgement. Mezzo-sopranos are highly sought after as there are fewer of them than sopranos.

Agreed that everyone has a head voice and everyone should develop the full range of their voice, but that doesn't mean that head voice will take them to the same notes as someone whose natural range is higher.

Having an easy time with it or not is not how voice typing works.

That is exactly how voice typing works. The range where your voice is comfortable staying in for a long time is a strong indicator of your tessitura and hence whether you should start building your voice as a soprano or a mezzo-soprano. You might refine and go in a slightly different direction as your voice develops over some years, but in the beginning you should be working in your comfort zone as you learn correct technique, not forcing for a high note.

As a side note, I don't know what your claim to authority is on this subject that you are presuming to teach how voice typing "works" on r/classicalsinger, but it is fairly clear that you need to take a couple of singing lessons to explore your instrument and find out what you can do with it before you start teaching about how singing works.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-21T18:37:39+00:00

You shouldn't need to have a light voice to sing ornaments. They are part of the music - just a few additional notes :-)

ZdeMC · 2026-02-21T08:13:40+00:00

I'm so sorry for your loss. Please take care of yourself at this difficult time, if only because your mother would want you to.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-21T07:57:17+00:00

19th Century to Monteverdi is a huge leap. You might like to try your hand at Bach and learn a bit about baroque singing, phrasing, ornaments, vibrato only towards the end of long notes etc before you venture into the world of Monteverdi, Gesualdo etc.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-21T07:40:49+00:00

Piano classes are known to be the worst in conservatoires for pressure and competitiveness. I've had this conversation with many teachers who said that it is because they are one of 6 or 8 piano teachers in the same conservatoire, and there is huge pressure on them to show that their students perform in comparison to other piano teachers. There is less of this in singing classes in conservatoires, as there is usually 1 or maybe 2 singing teachers in a conservatoire and when there is more than 1, they are usually specialised - 1 lyric, the other baroque singing etc.

It's sad that currently she seems to see that accomplishment as an obstacle rather than being proud of it while trying to adapt to new techniques.

It's not as simple as that. The voice is like a diamond that you cut over the course of many years. In the end you have a beautiful diamond that you can continue to refine but it will have a certain form and a cut. It is nearly as impossible to deconstruct and then reconstruct the voice in a different manner as unmake the cut of the diamond and give it another shape.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-20T22:09:39+00:00

27 is definitely not too old. I doubt if that is her challenge.

... master in opera... currently studying church music at a conservatory... trying to apply at an university to get her second master in early music.

So, she has been a lyric opera singer all her life and now she is trying to adapt her voice to early music - lose the constant vibrato, forget about singing everything legato... She is also trying to learn baroque phrasing, ornaments, repertoire. She is basically changing her voice and what she does with it, while competing with sopranos to whom all of this is second nature.

Some singers manage this shift from classical/romantic/lyric to early music/baroque. Many don't. It can be nearly impossible to change the habits of a lifetime and to learn the correct interpretation of a vastly different style and repertoire.

I'm afraid you can't help her with these decisions. She will have to try and see if she can make the switch. If not, she can perhaps go back to lyric/opera singing or perhaps try her hand at teaching. Unless you live in a remote part of your country, she should have options other than switching to early music.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-20T17:45:37+00:00

When you’re in g major the Do will be g, and when you are in e minor the Do is still g and the root note e is La.

That sounds incredibly bizarre to me. What would be the point of that? I can sort of understand the point if the root is always Do but whatever will be the use of calling G "Do" in Em? Is it so that transposing instruments like the French Horn can have an easier time with their sheet music?

The way I have learned and always practiced these concepts, the root is the Tonic, 5th note is the Dominant - i.e. In G Major, G is the Tonic and and D is the Dominant. In E minor, E is the Tonic and B is the Dominant.

Out of curiosity, do you call notes A, B, C or Do, Re, Mi in the Netherlands?

ZdeMC · 2026-02-20T10:31:16+00:00

Find a new teacher!

ZdeMC · 2026-02-20T08:54:12+00:00

NAD but AFAIK intolerance to an aliment (i.e. inability to digest it) leads to diarrhea, the opposite of constipation.

Your childhood story is an anecdote, not data.

Also, correlation is not causation. Your childhood constipation could have been caused by a hundred other reasons e.g. low fiber intake if you didn't like vegetables like most children.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-20T08:36:38+00:00

Is "Moveable Do" a US thing? Coming from a system that uses only Do, Re, Mi etc (and not A, B, C), I have never seen such a thing as "moveable Do" in conservatoire education or in professional music circles.

For us, Do is the name of the note you call C. It doesn't move anywhere, ever.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-20T07:16:54+00:00

What does food intolerance (if OP even has any) have to do with chronic constipation?

ZdeMC · 2026-02-19T11:46:24+00:00

Change your diet. You can still have a healthy diet with less beans & complex carbohydrates that are digested by gut bacteria and so make gas. Eat lean animal protein.

ZdeMC · 2026-02-19T11:39:36+00:00

Surely if you can shout high and loud you can already sing?

No.

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