Two notes into an aria, how do we instantly know Callas from Fleming, Butterfly from Brünnhilde? In a word, “color” is the key. The term has a long and vexed history in opera. Experts agree that a singer can’t be a star without its dramatic potency, but extreme color can also be a toxic recipe for vocal disaster. Unlike pitch, which is ideally matched by all voices, color is the distinctive timbre produced by impurities of tone, the basis for a voiceprint pattern as unique as a fingerprint. Finding the right words to communicate aural perceptions of color poses a challenge for singers, conductors, composers, and teachers, not to mention critics dodging the tendency to use cliché.
Vocal teachers and conductors around the Metropolitan Opera House use the term daily. Craig Rutenberg, head of music administration, defines color as “the specific invisible but aural means by which we identify the sound of an artist’s voice (much as an infant identifies a mother’s voice), the sine qua non of any great singer’s career. Without a unique color or timbre, I can think of no one who has made an impact on a major stage or in the recording studio.”
When Met general manager Peter Gelb recently appointed the renowned accompanist Brian Zeger as the joint director of both the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program and the Juilliard Opera, Zeger became czar of up-and-coming talent at Lincoln Center. He agrees that color is the singer’s signature. “In the most gifted singers, color is like the Hollywood star’s face which, no matter what the role may be, has a signifying presence.”
Zeger’s day can be a blur of auditions, but one factor makes a difference even when everyone nails the notes accurately. “Only a few of the 50 singers I might hear in a day have the colors you recall. It’s something we talk about constantly, because we are looking for that special color.”
Uptown from the Met on Riverside Drive, the neighbors of Gerald Martin Moore have the treat of riding the elevator with the likes of Renée Fleming, Natalie Dessay, Joyce DiDonato, and others who trust their cords to one of the world’s top teachers. Moore muses in his soft Anglo-Scots burr on the uses and abuses of color. Eager to move past stereotypes, the stock association of darkness with Russians and African-Americans versus the brightness of the Nordic or Anglo-Saxon singers, he says, “Many equate race or nationality with color, but I begin with the premise that the color that stays with you is intrinsic to your own spoken accent.” The basic palette comes from using the resonances in the mask and head to color the vowels: “That is where you find your own sound, as individual as a fingerprint.”
Reviewing great performances of the past, Moore focuses on how color (or its control) separated Kiri Te Kanawa, Janet Baker, or Peter Pears from Jon Vickers, Renata Scotto, or Maria Callas. “Is color more important than weight of voice? I would rather have Scotto and her range of colors than someone with more decibels.” He concludes with a humorous warning: “It’s pretentious for a conductor or coach to say he is looking for a ‘rainbow’ here or a ‘cerulean blue’ there.”
Neal Goren, artistic director of the upstart Gotham Chamber Opera, recently collaborated with Mark Morris on a hit production of Haydn’s L’isola disabitata. He opens with an art reference: “Michelangelo wrote, ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’ The perspicacious voice teacher can ‘see’ through a singer’s technical deficiencies to the vocal color that lies hidden within. The great teacher possesses the tools to unearth the true color by removing the obstacles that obfuscate it. The final step is to maximize resonance so vocal color can be heard clearly and consistently. All three must be accomplished for a singer to be worth hearing.”
From there, it becomes a matter of artistry. “Every singer with a good technique has a range of shadings within his or her natural vocal color that can be drawn upon,” he posits. “As a conductor, I look for singers who have the imagination to use them to communicate the drama and emotion of words and behind the words.”
The singers have their own way of registering color. Nicole Cabell’s seductive interpretations of Musetta (in a new film of La bohème) and Pamina (in her Met debut last season) are laced with hues as variegated as any Willem de Kooning painting. She reveals a few tricks of the trade: “A singer can choose to alter his or her natural color by smiling while singing a passage, which lightens up the sound. Adding a bit of a whisper through certain phrases or making the sound a bit ‘uglier’ through over-exaggerating the resonance (or focus) are also basic ways of changing the color.”
Cabell candidly describes her voice as “having a dark light color, which is a fabulous oxymoron meaning that it has a lot of lower overtones, akin to a mezzo, but with a light sound in terms of volume and lack of excessive heft.” She views physiognomy as coloristic fate. “As every body is different, so is every voice, and the color is strongly affected by the shape of the resonators (the facial bones and hollows) and the body supporting the voice. Technique and musical choices naturally affect it, but the initial color is always going to remain unique to the singer.”
Along those lines, Rutenberg adds, “Technique—solid breath support, relaxed facial and neck muscles (tongue included), and a knowledge of resonance in the head and chest—enables the singer to use basic timbre to express the vocal phrase and poetry at hand.”
Shirley Verrett’s masterclasses often return to the same tonic theme: “Sing with your own color.” One of the craft’s thorniest technical challenges, the gap between head and chest resonance, can be solved by “coloration,” according to Marilyn Horne. As she told Jerome Hines for his book Great Singers on Singing, “I have the ability to color my voice in so many ways in the famous break area that I don’t even consider it a problem area.” Callas was pragmatic and precise when applying the term in the Juilliard masterclasses that Terrence McNally bravely dramatized. Working on “Casta diva” she advised, “Be careful not to change the color of your voice in the ornaments.”
Yet misunderstandings abound when it comes to what color specifically means in the music studio. Ask a tenor to produce a “white sound” (mouth wide open horizontally and a spreading of the back of the throat while the tongue is pulled back to block the colors that pervade vowels), and coaches often get a blank look. An odd but influential pamphlet issued in 1969 by the American Academy of Teachers of Singing to codify terminology consigned color to the “non-scientific” underclass of psychology, dismissing it as the “metaphoric description of varied qualities of voice which are likened to visual sensations such as bright, dark, pale, white, golden, silver, muddy, etc.”
In a similar effort to standardize terms, a three-year research project on the “perception and verbalization of voice quality in western lyrical singing” convened voice teachers, choir directors, and singers together with speech pathologists and acousticians to present a “listening-oriented grid” at a conference on musicology held in Estonia in August 2007. They drew on oenology and textiles to try to pin down color jargon, in all its subjectivity, as precisely as the more quantifiable pitch and volume.
The spoken vowel is the starting point not only for Moore and other teachers, but also for a brilliant new theory of composition by colors advanced by Wayne Slawson in the Winter 2005 issue of Perspectives of New Music. That 76-page article in a gravely academic journal may not have been bedtime reading for many singers, but it pointed to a revolutionary new direction in vocal composition that may, decades from now, prove as prophetic as Arnold Schoenberg’s similar call for a theory of harmony based on colors or the ideas of the two composers most associated with operatic color, Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner.
If color begins with natural speech, as Moore, Slawson, and others purport, this raises a question about the future of opera. Just as many Russians arrived in the international ranks en masse over the past few years, many are predicting a similar influx of Chinese and other Asian singers. To use the four tones of Mandarin as an example of a conversational palette that is distinct from Continental or American vowels (and a major stumbling block for Westerners trying to learn Chinese), is it possible that new and potentially exciting colors will be heard on stage as Chinese singers bring their own linguistic makeup to familiar scores? Spoken Chinese is a strikingly different range of colors with which to begin.
The bond between song and color may be even more natural than speech. The endlessly fascinating neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of Musicophilia, used brain scans to track the common physiological origin (strongest in infancy) of visual and aural color, delving such phenomena as absolute pitch as well as synaesthesia. The earliest cases were recorded by Francis Galton who, in 1883, also happened to have discovered the singularity of fingerprints. Sacks describes the mnemonic benefits of “color-key association” (a patient who hears B-flat major when looking at a golden yellow glass on the office windowsill) and explores the ways in which the “extra sense” naturally enhances the thinking of opera composers such as David Caldwell and Michael Torke.
Yet for all its seductive beauty, color also harbors danger. Rutenberg is wary of the Faustian bargain implicit in reaching for colors that are unnatural: “Every great artist has a rainbow of fundamental colors available to him or her, but must remain faithful to what Mother Nature gave him or her genetically. Any attempt to manipulate the color to sound like someone else is an artistic, and sometimes vocal, death sentence.”
Moore, entrusted with gently tending the vocal health of Fleming and other stars, has seen it happen: “There is a difference between exploring the natural range of colors in the voice and other manufactured colors that are dangerous because they are over-weighted. Conductors can cause harm by asking for colors that could be disastrous. Many singers have come to grief emulating the palette of Callas—one reason why it has been difficult to cast Norma or Tosca, because that wealth of color can come at the expense of vocal health.”
Color itself faces a threat in our time from trends in the studio and conservatory. Over-edited recordings wash out timbre in deference to sustained, bright notes digitally corrected to clean pitch. The bleached-out sound plagues DVDs and YouTube clips, especially when played through poor-quality computer speakers or headphones.
“We’re too obsessed with technical perfection in the recording studio and in schools,” cautions Moore. “My aim is to bring out the natural color and not produce a lot of pretty voices that are indistinguishable.”
Color may be just a metaphor, but of the good kind, animating our teaching and listening and informing the conversation about what we love most in opera—the individuality of the human voice.
