Altos And Tenors And Genders, Oh My!
Singing is much on my mind today. And singing, for me, has always been tied in with issues of gender and the experience of outsider-ness, because, as an extremely low-voiced biological female, I have always sung in a nonstandard vocal range.
Unless you yourself are a singer with a similar problem, the above statement probably has little meaning or impact for you. But it kept me from doing any kind of vocal ensemble singing - which is one of the great loves of my life - for nearly half of my life.
If you have ever sung in a choir or other vocal ensemble, you probably know that there are four standard “voice parts” or ranges: Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass. Soprano and Alto are female voice ranges; Tenor and Bass are male voice ranges. This fourfold system of voice division is so common that sheet music written for a full choir is often simply labeled “SATB.”
Like most aspects of music, this is much more about tradition than it is about reason. At the deepest roots of music, certainly, there is science - the physics of the harmonic series, of vibration and resonance, waveform and frequency. But as soon as a frequency - say, 440 vibrations per second - becomes a musical tone (in this case, that’s the international standard frequency for the note A above middle C), it enters a very human realm of cultural interpretation and shaping. Study the music of other cultures, or even other time periods in our own culture, and you will find that many concepts which seem rock-bottom-basic to musicians of the Western world - such as the major scale (do re mi fa sol la ti do), or “the beat” as a simple steady background pulse (ONE two three four, ONE two three four) - simply don’t exist elsewhere, or exist only in altered forms. (For instance, Western music of the medieval and Renaissance period was based on modes, not scales... and to African drummers, “the beat” means whatever base rhythm is prevalent in the song, however complex it may be.)
This is certainly the case with the four vocal ranges. They’re widely considered standard today, but it sure took a long time for them to get that way. Those who perform Renaissance polyphony know this first-hand, because they are often confronted with a fifth voice part, appropriately called the Quintus, and the question of who the hell gets to sing it this time. (As a madrigal singer, I’ll testify that this can require some interesting reshuffling of personnel, as the ensemble tries to stretch its established four groupings into five!)
I have my suspicions about why the four-voice system won out and eventually took on its currently established form. And they are mostly not musical suspicions, but sociocultural ones. As someone who has done a fair amount of music arranging, I’m familiar with the challenges of writing for different numbers of voice parts, and there is nothing particularly magical about the number four; it works well in many circumstances, and is cumbersome in many others. One of my best and most complex a cappella arrangements is in only three parts, was a joy to write, is great fun to sing, and sounds more rhythmically and harmonically “complete” than many four-part arrangements I’ve heard. (Of course, I may be biased... but you are welcome to come and hear my group sing it, and then tell me what you think!)
Ah, but there IS something “magical” about the four-part system in other ways. It’s beautifully symmetrical. There are two male ranges (one high and one low) and two female ranges (one high and one low). The high male range (Tenor) exactly mirrors the high female range (Soprano) ; they’re defined by the same set of notes (generally an octave and a half spanning from C to G), but with an octave distance between them. The same goes for the male and female low ranges, Bass and Alto (each spanning an octave and a half from, conversely, G to C, at an octave distance from each other). They’re delightfully evenly spaced; each range neatly interlocks with its next higher or lower neighbor at the interval of a fourth or a fifth (and in musical terms, a fourth is just a fifth turned upside-down). How very aesthetically satisfying!
That alone, in my humble opinion, should be enough to make us suspicious. It all fits too well, too neatly. Since when did anything human fit so easily into such a simple filing system? Who would ever think of classifying, say, human heights into just four standard categories? Or, heaven forbid, shoe sizes? (We get away with this when it comes to T-shirts, of course, but never with clothing that really has to fit the body correctly, like boots or a formal jacket.) Surely voices are at least as individual as those things, if not more so!
The really interesting thing is that, in their original form, those terms were never intended to be labels for voices at all. They were invented as a way to classify the relative position of a line of written music, not the range of the voice that sings it. This may not seem like a huge difference. But think for a moment about what labels do, when applied to humans and to human identities, rather than to things or concepts. Labels carry their own shapes with them, and by their nature, they tend to create artificial limits by excluding any quality that doesn’t fit that shape. The assumption (and there can be a lot of social pressure to fit such an assumption) is: “If I am X, I should - in fact, must - have all the properties of X, and none of the properties of Y.”
As a music student, many years ago, I can’t count how many times I heard the admonition (and often delivered angrily): “You’re singing below your range!” To which my bewildered response was: ... I’m what? Does that even make sense? Doesn’t my range consist, by definition, of all of the notes I can sing, as long as I can sing them well and clearly?
Apparently it did not, because I was never allowed to sing anything below the lowest treble A or occasionally G - and even in high school, with my voice not yet fully settled into its adult range (this takes some time, even for female-bodied individuals), I could easily go a fourth or fifth lower than that... in other words, the distance of an entire other range. Meanwhile, the notes I was expected to sing felt excruciatingly high, sounded awful, and hurt my throat.
What was going on, of course, was that I was being “fitted” into a proper female range, even though it did not genuinely fit me. Had I been physically male, I would easily have been classified as a Tenor - but as a female, I obviously had to be an Alto. So efforts were made to teach (i.e., force) me to sing “properly”.(i.e., like a girl). By the established definitions and practices of Western classical music, my gender was more important than the actual measurable characteristics of my voice.
Of course this was extremely frustrating, in part, because of my gender identity issues. I wasn’t comfortable with the girls in the Alto section and would have much rather been with the boys in the Tenor section. (I got along just fine as the only non-male in the trumpet section in my high-school marching band, and missed it terribly when marching season was over.)
But, gender identity aside, it also meant that I never really got to use my musical abilities to their full extent. The few times that I met privately with a voice instructor, all of his energies were focused on pushing me into that higher range; I never got to work on any of the musical nuances that my natural voice could have produced. In my college jazz choir, I seethed at knowing I’d never be allowed to audition for a solo part - not even an improvised one, and I was a damned good scat-singer - unless I could do it in my “proper” range. (And this wasn’t an assumption on my part; I knew it because I’d been told it, verbally, by the director, the one time I tried to do otherwise.) I certainly didn’t dare audition for any advanced group, regardless of my overall musical skills (which were frankly quite high, especially at sight-singing, which is a formidable skill for most musicians to learn), because of this same stricture.
Of course, the vocal didacts can quote a thousand reasons why this musical gender division is entirely proper and necessary, and must be preserved. A few of them have some degree of merit in certain specific contexts, but most of them are based mainly on attachment to musical tradition, and the habit of treating that tradition as if it were science. It’s tempting to launch into a detailed refutation of some of these right here and now, but since this installment is already getting way too long, I’ll spare you the technical stuff. (Although maybe I’ll write a separate article on the subject later on, and link it from this blog site, for anyone who’s interested!)
For the moment, I’ll just point you to another instance of this musical gender clash, for your consideration. A few years ago, a male contestant on “American Idol” stymied the judges with a flawlessly gorgeous performance of the aria “Nessun Dorma” - in the Soprano range, way higher than any man “should” be able to sing. The stunned panel seemed to see his ability merely as an amazing trick - a variety-show gimmick - rather than as a display of musical talent, and so they hesitated to let him continue in the competition. In the end he did get a pass, but not before famously acerbic judge Simon Cowell had had his say: “That’s just wrong. It’s like a dog meowing.”
Interestingly, this extremely high male range does have an official name - Countertenor. It’s not one of the standard four, but it’s used by a few all-male vocal ensembles. (Check out recordings by the King’s Singers, a classically-trained British a cappella sextet, or by the male choir Chanticleer.) And of course there are many other names for ranges that aren’t part of the standard four. For instance, if your voice falls between that of Soprano and Alto, you may be called a Mezzo-Soprano; if you sing somewhere between Tenor and Bass, you’re a Baritone.
However, there is - tellingly, I think - no name for a range that lies between Alto and Tenor. Such a range does not officially exist, I believe (though I have met many people who sing in it), because it would have to be classified as a mixed-gender range, made up of both higher-than-Tenor men and lower-than-Alto women. And that’s not something we’re comfortable with. In our system, voice ranges are definitive of gender.
And while there are now some all-female groups that admit very low-voiced women - such as those associated with the women’s Barbershop singing society, the Sweet Adelines - there is still no official name for any female range below Alto. (Male Barbershop singing has a long tradition of its own in which the four parts are labeled Bass, Baritone, Tenor, and Lead, and female Barbershop groups have simply followed this same tradition - in other words, they use these terms more like their original inventors had intended, to refer to the ordering of parts on the page, rather than the vocal ranges of the people who sing them.)
Of course, all of this will eventually become an academic problem for me; as I physically transition from female to male, my voice range will suddenly become “standard”... not to mention it’ll most likely drop even lower under the influence of testosterone (although I hope not so low as to make it impossible for me to sing Tenor, as I really love the Tenor parts). In the meantime, I’m immensely grateful to have finally found, about four or five years ago, a few musical spaces in which I could be myself and sing in my own comfortable voice range, regardless of gender: in particular, my extremely good church choir, and the little close-knit circle of talented friends that is my a cappella group.
And so I write this for all of those who have not yet found spaces where they feel empowered to sing with their own voices, and whose experience of musical outsider-ness cannot be “fixed” as mine finally will be, after half a lifetime. I write it for all of the female tenors out there who are comfortably female and plan to remain that way... and for all of my trans-sisters who can’t easily undo the effects of that first, male puberty on their voices... and for all of the gifted Countertenors who must make a choice between hiding their lights under bushels or being considered unmasculine.
Let us question the old rules.
Let us question anything that prevents us from singing with our own voices, whether literally or metaphorically or both.
Unless you yourself are a singer with a similar problem, the above statement probably has little meaning or impact for you. But it kept me from doing any kind of vocal ensemble singing - which is one of the great loves of my life - for nearly half of my life.
If you have ever sung in a choir or other vocal ensemble, you probably know that there are four standard “voice parts” or ranges: Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass. Soprano and Alto are female voice ranges; Tenor and Bass are male voice ranges. This fourfold system of voice division is so common that sheet music written for a full choir is often simply labeled “SATB.”
Like most aspects of music, this is much more about tradition than it is about reason. At the deepest roots of music, certainly, there is science - the physics of the harmonic series, of vibration and resonance, waveform and frequency. But as soon as a frequency - say, 440 vibrations per second - becomes a musical tone (in this case, that’s the international standard frequency for the note A above middle C), it enters a very human realm of cultural interpretation and shaping. Study the music of other cultures, or even other time periods in our own culture, and you will find that many concepts which seem rock-bottom-basic to musicians of the Western world - such as the major scale (do re mi fa sol la ti do), or “the beat” as a simple steady background pulse (ONE two three four, ONE two three four) - simply don’t exist elsewhere, or exist only in altered forms. (For instance, Western music of the medieval and Renaissance period was based on modes, not scales... and to African drummers, “the beat” means whatever base rhythm is prevalent in the song, however complex it may be.)
This is certainly the case with the four vocal ranges. They’re widely considered standard today, but it sure took a long time for them to get that way. Those who perform Renaissance polyphony know this first-hand, because they are often confronted with a fifth voice part, appropriately called the Quintus, and the question of who the hell gets to sing it this time. (As a madrigal singer, I’ll testify that this can require some interesting reshuffling of personnel, as the ensemble tries to stretch its established four groupings into five!)
I have my suspicions about why the four-voice system won out and eventually took on its currently established form. And they are mostly not musical suspicions, but sociocultural ones. As someone who has done a fair amount of music arranging, I’m familiar with the challenges of writing for different numbers of voice parts, and there is nothing particularly magical about the number four; it works well in many circumstances, and is cumbersome in many others. One of my best and most complex a cappella arrangements is in only three parts, was a joy to write, is great fun to sing, and sounds more rhythmically and harmonically “complete” than many four-part arrangements I’ve heard. (Of course, I may be biased... but you are welcome to come and hear my group sing it, and then tell me what you think!)
Ah, but there IS something “magical” about the four-part system in other ways. It’s beautifully symmetrical. There are two male ranges (one high and one low) and two female ranges (one high and one low). The high male range (Tenor) exactly mirrors the high female range (Soprano) ; they’re defined by the same set of notes (generally an octave and a half spanning from C to G), but with an octave distance between them. The same goes for the male and female low ranges, Bass and Alto (each spanning an octave and a half from, conversely, G to C, at an octave distance from each other). They’re delightfully evenly spaced; each range neatly interlocks with its next higher or lower neighbor at the interval of a fourth or a fifth (and in musical terms, a fourth is just a fifth turned upside-down). How very aesthetically satisfying!
That alone, in my humble opinion, should be enough to make us suspicious. It all fits too well, too neatly. Since when did anything human fit so easily into such a simple filing system? Who would ever think of classifying, say, human heights into just four standard categories? Or, heaven forbid, shoe sizes? (We get away with this when it comes to T-shirts, of course, but never with clothing that really has to fit the body correctly, like boots or a formal jacket.) Surely voices are at least as individual as those things, if not more so!
The really interesting thing is that, in their original form, those terms were never intended to be labels for voices at all. They were invented as a way to classify the relative position of a line of written music, not the range of the voice that sings it. This may not seem like a huge difference. But think for a moment about what labels do, when applied to humans and to human identities, rather than to things or concepts. Labels carry their own shapes with them, and by their nature, they tend to create artificial limits by excluding any quality that doesn’t fit that shape. The assumption (and there can be a lot of social pressure to fit such an assumption) is: “If I am X, I should - in fact, must - have all the properties of X, and none of the properties of Y.”
As a music student, many years ago, I can’t count how many times I heard the admonition (and often delivered angrily): “You’re singing below your range!” To which my bewildered response was: ... I’m what? Does that even make sense? Doesn’t my range consist, by definition, of all of the notes I can sing, as long as I can sing them well and clearly?
Apparently it did not, because I was never allowed to sing anything below the lowest treble A or occasionally G - and even in high school, with my voice not yet fully settled into its adult range (this takes some time, even for female-bodied individuals), I could easily go a fourth or fifth lower than that... in other words, the distance of an entire other range. Meanwhile, the notes I was expected to sing felt excruciatingly high, sounded awful, and hurt my throat.
What was going on, of course, was that I was being “fitted” into a proper female range, even though it did not genuinely fit me. Had I been physically male, I would easily have been classified as a Tenor - but as a female, I obviously had to be an Alto. So efforts were made to teach (i.e., force) me to sing “properly”.(i.e., like a girl). By the established definitions and practices of Western classical music, my gender was more important than the actual measurable characteristics of my voice.
Of course this was extremely frustrating, in part, because of my gender identity issues. I wasn’t comfortable with the girls in the Alto section and would have much rather been with the boys in the Tenor section. (I got along just fine as the only non-male in the trumpet section in my high-school marching band, and missed it terribly when marching season was over.)
But, gender identity aside, it also meant that I never really got to use my musical abilities to their full extent. The few times that I met privately with a voice instructor, all of his energies were focused on pushing me into that higher range; I never got to work on any of the musical nuances that my natural voice could have produced. In my college jazz choir, I seethed at knowing I’d never be allowed to audition for a solo part - not even an improvised one, and I was a damned good scat-singer - unless I could do it in my “proper” range. (And this wasn’t an assumption on my part; I knew it because I’d been told it, verbally, by the director, the one time I tried to do otherwise.) I certainly didn’t dare audition for any advanced group, regardless of my overall musical skills (which were frankly quite high, especially at sight-singing, which is a formidable skill for most musicians to learn), because of this same stricture.
Of course, the vocal didacts can quote a thousand reasons why this musical gender division is entirely proper and necessary, and must be preserved. A few of them have some degree of merit in certain specific contexts, but most of them are based mainly on attachment to musical tradition, and the habit of treating that tradition as if it were science. It’s tempting to launch into a detailed refutation of some of these right here and now, but since this installment is already getting way too long, I’ll spare you the technical stuff. (Although maybe I’ll write a separate article on the subject later on, and link it from this blog site, for anyone who’s interested!)
For the moment, I’ll just point you to another instance of this musical gender clash, for your consideration. A few years ago, a male contestant on “American Idol” stymied the judges with a flawlessly gorgeous performance of the aria “Nessun Dorma” - in the Soprano range, way higher than any man “should” be able to sing. The stunned panel seemed to see his ability merely as an amazing trick - a variety-show gimmick - rather than as a display of musical talent, and so they hesitated to let him continue in the competition. In the end he did get a pass, but not before famously acerbic judge Simon Cowell had had his say: “That’s just wrong. It’s like a dog meowing.”
Interestingly, this extremely high male range does have an official name - Countertenor. It’s not one of the standard four, but it’s used by a few all-male vocal ensembles. (Check out recordings by the King’s Singers, a classically-trained British a cappella sextet, or by the male choir Chanticleer.) And of course there are many other names for ranges that aren’t part of the standard four. For instance, if your voice falls between that of Soprano and Alto, you may be called a Mezzo-Soprano; if you sing somewhere between Tenor and Bass, you’re a Baritone.
However, there is - tellingly, I think - no name for a range that lies between Alto and Tenor. Such a range does not officially exist, I believe (though I have met many people who sing in it), because it would have to be classified as a mixed-gender range, made up of both higher-than-Tenor men and lower-than-Alto women. And that’s not something we’re comfortable with. In our system, voice ranges are definitive of gender.
And while there are now some all-female groups that admit very low-voiced women - such as those associated with the women’s Barbershop singing society, the Sweet Adelines - there is still no official name for any female range below Alto. (Male Barbershop singing has a long tradition of its own in which the four parts are labeled Bass, Baritone, Tenor, and Lead, and female Barbershop groups have simply followed this same tradition - in other words, they use these terms more like their original inventors had intended, to refer to the ordering of parts on the page, rather than the vocal ranges of the people who sing them.)
Of course, all of this will eventually become an academic problem for me; as I physically transition from female to male, my voice range will suddenly become “standard”... not to mention it’ll most likely drop even lower under the influence of testosterone (although I hope not so low as to make it impossible for me to sing Tenor, as I really love the Tenor parts). In the meantime, I’m immensely grateful to have finally found, about four or five years ago, a few musical spaces in which I could be myself and sing in my own comfortable voice range, regardless of gender: in particular, my extremely good church choir, and the little close-knit circle of talented friends that is my a cappella group.
And so I write this for all of those who have not yet found spaces where they feel empowered to sing with their own voices, and whose experience of musical outsider-ness cannot be “fixed” as mine finally will be, after half a lifetime. I write it for all of the female tenors out there who are comfortably female and plan to remain that way... and for all of my trans-sisters who can’t easily undo the effects of that first, male puberty on their voices... and for all of the gifted Countertenors who must make a choice between hiding their lights under bushels or being considered unmasculine.
Let us question the old rules.
Let us question anything that prevents us from singing with our own voices, whether literally or metaphorically or both.
I don't see any reason gender has to be associated with the different ranges. I've always known bio women who sing tenor whether they're female or not, and one of my favorite characters on the show Glee is Kurt Hummel, whose actor sings as high as the sopranos, and his voice is beautiful. Pentatonix also has a male singer who sings very high. I feel that everyone should be encouraged to sing the notes that are their actual range, and no one should ever be told what they can and can't sing based on their gender. Perhaps this is yet another area where we need to push for change. When I was a little girl first learning to sing, I always sung higher than my peers because singing the notes around middle c hurt my voice. I was yelled at regularly and told if I wouldn't sing in the correct octave I wasn't allowed to sing at all, and if I sung by myself where people would hear they would tell me my voice was too high and to stop singing because I was hurting their ears. That sort of response to anyone attempting to explore their musical abilities is damaging.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading and for contributing your thoughts, himitsugami!
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry you had such a rotten childhood experience with singing - I hope you've moved beyond it and found your voice. I've met adults who refused to sing their whole lives because of incidents like that. We need to remember, when critiquing someone's singing, that our voices are a part of us - not like an instrument, which is just an object. Criticism of someone's voice feels a lot like criticism of their body - it is felt on a very personal level.
And I think that the musical world IS gradually opening up to the idea that the old rules aren't written in stone - certainly more so than when I was first studying music - but it'll still take more work to keep that shift coming. So I agree - let's push! :)