This three year international post-doc project (2015–2018) is founded by the Swedish Science Council.
The purpose is to analyse gender aspects in opera vocal technique and determine how the dominance of the male vocal aesthetic in opera technique affects female voices by examining the Garcia School. Despite his aim to improve male voices, Manuel Garcia (1805–1906) and his successors had more success with female singers. I believe that some parts of Garcia’s vanished techniques may be considered as significant factors to their success with female singers, especially high sopranos and coloraturas. It concerns primarily Garcia’s controversial term Coup de la glotte, his definition of breathing support, and his term for a high larynx position voix blanche. Main research questions:

• How do Garcia’s techniques coup de la glotte (hard tone onset), lateral breathing support (higher breathing support than used today) and voix blanche (high larynx position) affect female opera voice progression?

• Does the Garcia School have any relevance today?

The material consist of two parts 1) recordings of singers from the Garcia/Marchesi school from the early twentieth century, 2) experiments together with seven sopranos, three professionals and four opera students at the Bern University of the Arts. All participants have been singing the same Garcia exercises and the same aria, a part from Lucia’s mad-scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. These experiments have been completed by filming the singer’s glottis while they sang with Garcia’s techniques.

I have found that some of Garcia’s techniques really are useful to some high sopranos in bel canto repertoire and earlier operas. I have also found that Garcia was old fashioned already during his own contemporary and that the singers from the Garcia/Marchesi school linger in older techniques longer than other singers from the same period of time. Therefore, I suggest the Garcia school as a historical window useful to singers who want to sing in historical ways, even before the nineteenth century.

The project consists gender-critical discussions of opera and voice, aspects of female opera singing in a male defined world, conducted originally mainly by Susan McClary and Carolyn Abbate.

Poster

Picture: Garcia checking the glottis with his laryngoscope
(Garcia: Hints on Singing, 1894, p. VII)