Publisher's Synopsis
This text surveys the history, the present position and the possible future of the counter-tenor voice: it examines the male head-register from its early origins as the "falsetto" effect to its position today.;Part One, History, covers many aspects of the counter-tenor voice: its development, the Classical period, Bach and the later classical period, the forgotten decades (about 1904 to about 1934) and the post-war renaissance.;Part Two, Technique, covers, with the aid of technical diagrams, the vocal mechanism, registers and ranges, the "feigned voice" and early theorists, the falsetto family and pitches.;The book adopts something of an alternative approach to a controversial, historical musical subject. Though it owes much to conventional, convergent method, the importance of divergence and intuitive thinking is stressed too. Standard musicology is complemented rather than complimented.;Though championing and celebrating the counter-tenor voice range, the author is by no means uncritical of some aspects of it, as heard at present.;This book should be valuable reading for all those interested in this small-voice family: an important survivor from male-voice training methods which were swept away in the 19th century.
