The world of wobble
It’s one of the most divisive phenomena in our musical lives, one of the most complained about facts of most classical music culture, and the thing that keeps more people away from the opera house and from classical singing than anything else.
I’m talking about vibrato: the wobble, the tremulous vibration of pitch and intensity in singers’ voices that many are so allergic to – at least going by some of the letters we get sent at BBC Radio 3. The following are typical:
‘My dictionary of music describes [vibrato’s] use as a “detestable device”. Would it be so bad to have less of it?’; or another: ‘Why is wide-vibrato warbling tolerated and encouraged in “classical music?”’
Well: the first cliché about classical vibrato to scotch is that there’s something unusual about the tremulation of a voice like Jamie Barton’s or Maria Callas’s. Vibrato doesn’t define classical singing: it’s a natural function of the way that adult voices work. (Children’s voices are much ‘purer’ in tone, that’s the way our vocal cords are made in early life – think of the difference between a boy treble and a mature soprano singing the same melody). Vibrato is simply part of the way that human vocal cords function, which is why singers in all genres use it, from pop from jazz, from Adele to Billie Holiday, from Whitney to Britney, from heavy metal to crooning.
But what is special about classical and operatic singers is the way they control the speed and size of the variation in pitch, the microscopic trill that defines all vibrato. There’s a difference between the tolerable range of pitch and the speed of the tremulation in the performance practice of a Puccini peroration, which tends to be larger and slower, as opposed to an aria in a Bach cantata or
Vibrato is simply part of the way that human vocal cords function
a Mozart opera, likely to be narrower and faster. In fact, Mozart himself said the ideal speed for singers’ vibrato was six shakes a second. The cliché comes from the uncontrolled wobble at the top of a tenor or a soprano’s range, but the reality is much more subtle: singers are employing vibrato in a spectrum from artificially refraining from any shaking at all to using a con belto vibratissimo.
The alternative to using vibrato is to try and suppress it completely, as some instrumentalists and conductors do in specific repertoires. But for singers, to perform entirely without vibrato is to repress a natural warmth in the way that adult voices resonate. There’s a common misperception that early repertoires were made for voices singing without vibrato. The truth is, they weren’t: and if we ask female vocalists to sing without vibrato, we’re asking them, effectively, to sing like children rather than adults. Why are we scared of vibrato? Are we frightened of the world of feeling, of warmth, empathy and sensuality it evokes? The vibrato wars will continue, but I know which side I’m on.
Tom Service explores how music works in The Listening Service on Sundays at 5pm