Somewhat Baffling High Note Trends

Think it started with the 80s mega musicals and then got cemented with the popularity of Wicked. Now it's expected. It really is not sustainable, but musical theater is just turning so homogenous and now I go into a new musical expecting actors to be belting out crazy notes. There was a trend for awhile too of a lot of actors riffing for no reason. I think that's died down a little, thankfully.

Quote RiddepMan: "There was a trend for awhile too of a lot of actors riffing for no reason. I think that's died down a little, thankfully."

I forgot all about that. It really is so strange. I love Lillias White, but in How to Succeed she was just so strange for this very reason. And that was before Wicked and all that. I think that Wicked may well have been the big turning point. I feel like megamusicals aren't very successful anymore, though. Like, the most successful shows on Broadway recently are mostly either movie adaptations (Back to the Future), musicals with very digestible music (Hamilton, which actually has another huge singing problem that I'll likely make a thread about in the future if another musical does the same thing all of Lin's shows do), or just actually genuinely incredible pieces (Hadestown comes to mind. Probably the best musical of the whole 21st century so far. It's not exempt from this strange trend of high notes, of course, but somehow I'm more willing to forgive it because it rarely feels like it's high for no reason.)

Quote jasmiinda: "The mid-to-late 20th century was full ove relatively lower register singing so when people in the late-20th to early-21st centuries started using higher notes it felt kind of surprising and fresh and became the new trend?"

I can see this perspective too. It feels a little strange, though, just because high notes were borderline necessary in early musical theatre and have actually become more prolific now that they're unnecessary. That being said, in early musical theatre, you would have, as you said, singers in a lower register. Even though they did sing quite high to project over an orchestra, it was very much rooted in a slightly more forward operatic style of singing. Now the voices are, as a rule, lighter. The distinction between high notes and normal notes is firmly made by belting. I think that it's completely possible and even probable that the trend of using higher notes actually comes from a place of wanting to use higher registers, since audiences now don't immediately recognize how impressive, for example, a baritone F is. But it's easy to hear somebody clearly yelling at the top of their range and be impressed. I hadn't considered this angle, but it's actually very valuable to hear from somebody who isn't well versed in music on this particular topic. Thank you!

CATSNYrevival said: "How do you have this conversation without mentioning Jekyll & Hyde?"

There's a lot to mention about Jekyll and Hyde. I think that the difficulty of the lead role comes more from having like eight solos than anything else. When you actually look at it, Jekyll stays within the conventional dramatic tenor register, but with more material than you'd usually see in an opera, plus the necessary shifts in color to portray Hyde. In high school, I won a competition with Confrontation from that show, and I didn't understand what was so impressive about it. Now I get it, of course. I actually think that, although this show has its own problems, it's exempt from this trend... For the male lead, that is. The female leads exemplify this problem incredibly well. I'm drawing a blank on their names and the notes they sing because I'm mostly familiar with Jekyll's songs, but I remember excessive high notes for sure in their songs. I apologize for neglecting this show entirely in my long winded rant. I didn't mention several others that I thought were much more egregious, though. Bat Boy, Heathers, and Legally Blonde all come to mind. Laurence O'Keiff is a psycho.

The Distinctive Baritone said: "As a bass-baritone, I would argue that for men, Sondheim was the last major composer to really write for baritones. I think part of this was because he very lyric/character-driven, with many of his principal male characters not even requiring asinger with a "great" voice, but an actor who happens to sing well and knows how to interpret a song. Most men are baritones, and require training to sing higher than a D or E. Not all Sondheim roles (male or female) require highly trained voices since lyric, character, and an overall musicality was more important to him than the common perception that "high = more emotional and therefore better."

That said, musical theatre has always reflected pop music of the time to a certain degree, and nowadays, most pop music is pretty high."

I really appreciate your agreeing with my point about Sondheim not writing super high. His songs are demanding, but they're made with human limits in mind. They're a challenge and a puzzle to figure out, but they aren't punishing and horrible like Andrew Lloyd Webber or Laurence O'Keiff. I will say, Bill Finn has written a good number of roles that are great for baritones, including all three leading men in Falsettos (although none of them are bass-baritones)

Sondheim certainly wrote for the actors he had. All great composers do. Chip Zien can't comfortably sing above a G and his best sounding place is around a D4. Some composers would throw him out for somebody with a higher voice. Sondheim wrote specifically for him and made a score that sounds rich and beautiful in his voice and is actually a bit hard for anybody else to sing as well as Chip.

I could agree that it is largely reflective of modern pop music. But I don't think that's exactly it. There aren't really whistle tones in musical theatre, there's a lot of belting that isn't really present in pop music, there's a lot less falsetto than in pop music. I think that there's a trend in the theatre itself. Probably due to successful shows by ALW and Stephen Schwartz.

The Distinctive Baritone said: "I'm not sure how often Sondheim wrote forspecificactors. I remember reading that he wrote the title role in Sweeney Todd with Len Cariou in mind after working with him onA Little Night Music,but I would be interested to find out how much his original actors' vocal ranges affected his writing. I believe that most famously, "Send in the Clowns" was written after Glynis Johns had been cast and was already in rehearsals and/or workshops, and tailored to her low, raspy voice."

He's actually jokingly quipped "I won't write a note until the show's cast." Some is conjecture, like I personally love to think that Jack in Into the Woods was written for John Cameron Mitchell based off of one single bonus track on the Into the Woods album, despite there being no documented evidence of him even being in any workshops of the show. It is known, though, that Sunday was written very specifically for Mandy and Bernadette (two great voices that tend lower, which is ironic because they're a tenor and a soprano)

I think that he often would just write for whatever actors he had cast. Maybe not always, but in shows that developed during their runs like Sunday, Into the Woods, etc he has stated that he wrote it with specific people in mind. And it's known that he wrote Beadle Bamford specifically for Jack Eric Williams, which is why every single professional version of Kiss Me Quartet other than the original sounds empty.

He explained this with a piece of wisdom that kind of circles back around to the main topic:

When something is very deeply personal, it will become universal. That's something so brilliant and so true that really changes how I think about theatre and art and life in general.

...

So, tell me, why would you make it the opposite of personal by writing something that nobody can sing just to appeal to the masses?

But I'm preaching to the choir, I don't think any huge fan of theatre exactly "likes" that a lot of shows tend to equate high belting to emotions

It's worth mentioning along with the "Send in the Clowns" story: arguably the greatest and most popular male singer of the twentieth century, Frank Sinatra, had a rather small, weak voice and a limited range, once he lost his boyish falsetto. He didn't have much of an instrument, technically speaking, but you'll never hear anyone say Sinatra was a **** singer, because he knew how to use what he had, and how to interpret a song to suit his own vocal stylings better than anyone else. You can call him a cliche, but you can't call him generic. He did more with his two or so octaves than a lot of Big Voices do with their four.

I'm not a singer or trained vocalist so apologies for anything I might've gotten wrong, but a lot of this comes from anecdotal experience as well as other threads that might've mentioned part of this before.

For things like opera where the singers are unamplified, I believe the high notes are written with vocal pedagogy in mind so that they will resound the most and be able to carry, but I think a lot of musical theater performers early in their careers may not be trained in the same way (maybe it's different now that a lot of singing teachers get a low level of Youtube/Tiktok fame, but Ramin Karimloo comes to mind), and I think they push themselves to go higher to sound more "impressive" which is probably also perpetuated by other people singing high notes--I think the trend of "American Idol-ification" has been noted in other places, where the voices that get attention are the voices that have the most range.

I think the idea of paying attention to the actual timbre of a voice has sort of been lost with a few exceptions, and from what I understand, some drama schools like AMDA sound like they develop their students in a way to make them the most "castable" and thus lose out on some of the individuality in each performer (so the main way they express how good they are is usually through their high range and sometimes melisma). It's been noted elsewhere on this board but we don't really seem to have an up and coming generation of "old broad voices" like Ethel Merman/Angela Lansbury/Patti LuPone, because everyone sounds more or less the same--somewhat Disney princess or just a generic pop belt.

So in short, I think the high notes are coming back because it's just what's deemed "most impressive" right now and kind of guaranteed to generate an audience response. It's funny because I was just having a conversation about how a lot of people don't like Billie Eilish or think she can't sing because she does a lot of whisper-singing but it actually shows off how impressive her vocal control is.

SporkGoddess said: "For women at least, I wouldn't even say that it's so much high notesas BELTING high notes, or a mixture of belting with high "legit" soprano notes. Or the high notes are sustained in a way that makes them very difficult to sing consistently (the famous example being Christine's cadenza in Phantom of the Opera)."

That's very true. I think that there's a distinct difference between operatic and belted high notes in how they're written in music, in that an operatic high note is meant to be unforced and be a part of the melody and the line of the song, while a belted high note is designed to stick out and wow the less musically inclined audience members. It's just objectively healthier to sing in a classical style. But ALW had to ruin that too with Phantom... I will say, though, you'd be hard pressed to find a mezzo soprano piece that lies nearly as high as Defying Gravity in any opera. That's what I really mean by "high notes"-- repeated excessive high notes

Charley Kringas Inc said: "Honestly, I think it's as simple as the fact that vocal pyrotechnics are a cheap way to thrill the audience. Everyone gets excited when the lead unhinges her jaw and belts like a tornado siren, and then they go and tell their friends about it, or they post an audio clip on tiktok, which makes the rounds as free advertising. Mozart's (arguably) most famous aria is based entirely around exploiting his sister-in-law's absurd upper register and people still buy tickets for The Magic Flute specifically to hear those high notes"

This is an astute observation. It is true that certain operatic composers (namely Mozart and Rossini) liked to write excessively high and demanding vocal lines to impress people. That being said, a lot of opera people kind of resent Mozart's music for one reason or another, for me personally it's mostly just how he has such insistence on adhering to musical symmetry. His music is indeed more complex than what people were used to at the time, but people were starting to experiment with things like operetta and multiple movement arias and duets and quartets and all these things that, while fairly straightforward and digestible, wind up a lot more interesting down the line than Mozart's innovations that mostly fell flat for me. But never mind that. What I really mean to say is that, even for somebody like me who doesn't particularly like Mozart, I can admit that The Magic Flute is a whole heck of a lot more than the Queen of the Night singing a few high F's. That is indeed a very impressive aria, but there also is a very particularly impressive bass role in the piece. High notes in opera were often necessary and really a lot more feasible on account of the fact that they weren't performed multiple times per day and they were always performed by people who specifically were trained for that kind of singing.

SporkGoddess said: "Yes, good point about "Defying Gravity." Opera also takes into account the weight of the singer's voice and works with it, so high notes that need to be sung aslight and floaty can be sung that way,as opposed to musical theatre where mics allow audiences to hearhigh notes that aren't sung the way high notes are *supposed* to be sung in terms of vocal health and technique.

Like, "Glitter and be Gay" is brutal, but at least those high notes are light, flexible, and (for the most part) staccato. Mozart wrote a ridiculously high tessitura for Queen of the Night, but he didn't ask for her to sustain that F6, either.

Not to mention the range. Some of these modern female musical roleranges are just ridiculous."

It's a very similar story for male voices, although somehow the opposite. While sustaining notes at the top of a coloratura soprano's range is an extremely strenuous undertaking, doing the same in a tenor's range is ironically a lot healthier. Singing long, legato high A's over and over in a Puccini aria is a whole lot better for a singer's voice than jumping around in a similar range like "You're in the Band" from School of Rock does. It's because it's a different register of the voice used. And vocal ranges of characters are certainly absurd. In opera, if a singer is demanded to sing up to an A or a B, very rarely will they also have to sing a low C and essentially never will they sing below it. Christine in Phantom immediately comes to mind as a role that breaks that rule. And male roles, too, Evan Hansen has multiple low G's and A's as well as constant high G's and a handful of A's and even one B for good measure.

chrishuyen said: "a lot of people don't like Billie Eilish or think she can't sing because she does a lot of whisper-singing"

I loathe it. It's just a tiresome affectation to my ears.

Updated On: 5/2/24 at 08:32 AM