Alto, Soprano, Whatever
Patrick Dupré Quigley directs the choir with the deeply cool name of Seraphic Fire. He wanted to honor MLK with a program of spirituals and gospel music, but he says there was a problem:
"After the first few rehearsals, I thought `This is going to sound like Palestrina with different words,'" Quigley said. "This can't happen!"He finally found the way to free his singers from their training in a move I find absolutely brilliant:
"We didn't have the large, round sound you traditionally get from African-American choirs," Quigley said. "Because the voices tend to be lower, there's a lot more `chest sound' used in the singing."Read the whole thing right here.
After much trial and error, Quigley finally hit upon an imaginative solution. He decided to simply switch his female sections around to get the richer, more robust effect of a genuine gospel choir.
"My altos are all singing soprano for this concert and my sopranos are all singing alto," Quigley said. "The sopranos can all bring their chest voice up higher, whereas the altos can use a big round sound in the low sections. When we did that, that was the turning point for us."
Umie the Umlaut says, "ask your doctor about the Fredösphere!"
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