My ideal choral tone is transparent.
I asked my students to define transparent tone, and none of them could quite get to what I was asking for, so I gave them my definition. In short, a transparent tone is a sung tone with as little affect as possible.
Young singers, especially, fall into affectation traps a lot. They try to sound more mature, more cursive, more like Adele, more this or that. All of these affectations are fine, and an important part of each person finding their own distinctive voice. But in an ensemble, those affectations can detract from the ensemble sound.
But singing does need to sound refined, sophisticated, mature – it’s not just sustained talking, whatever Harold Hill might say.
So I find that a great approach to finding that transparent tone is to take on various affectations as group. use shared tonal vocabulary, either from well-known singers or from past group listening.
For example, sing this 8 bar phrase:
- Like Adele
- Like a middle school choir
- Like an 80+ community choir
- Like the U of M Men’s Glee Club
- Like Laufey
- Like the King’s Singers
- Like Chanticleer
- Like Jacob Collier
- Like Ben Platt
always ending with
- like yourselves
The practice of exploring affectations can help give you edges to your tonal range, and help you identify the spot that we can call transparent tone. From there, we can add or subtract, changing things to suit the music.