The Leading Tone
The seventh note of the musical scale is called the leading tone, and it is beautiful science: the leading note naturally resolves a scale for the ear, taking it back to its home. In the famous Rodgers and Hammerstein song, “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music, the line “tea…a drink with jam and bread” is about the leading tone.
Life has its leading tones too, those joyful moments that lead to a next career stage, and Concert of Arias offers a glimpse into an incredibly important stage of development in a gifted young artist’s professional life. It is worth remembering that prior to their arrival for tonight’s competition, each singer you will encounter has already attained a level of accomplishment achieved by very few young artists. Tonight will help them clarify what the next part of their journey may be, which for a lucky few may be an invitation to join Houston Grand Opera’s Butler Studio. Most certainly, this night will lead them somewhere.
For many reasons, Concert of Arias is the best night of the HGO season, but the chief reason is this: the accomplishment and enduring mystery of the human singing voice. Think for a moment about what singing actually is—the air of a theater, a space that is naturally silent, suddenly vibrates from a sound that emanates from one person and organically enters another, with no electronic intervention. That sound has a sonic imprint as unique as a fingerprint. In our era of highly mechanized everything, and of all kinds of artificial intelligences, singing remains one of the true natural miracles we can access.
The same is true of orchestras, who also play in natural sound, and voices inspire them—nothing changes an orchestra’s playing of Mozart, for example, more than a great singer of Mozart, while at the heart of that dialogue is the conductor, guiding how voice and orchestra speak to one another. If you ask a cellist or clarinetist what they most emulate to make the best sound on their instrument, their answer is likely—hopefully—to have something to do with singing, because all fine music-making aspires to vocalism. The voice is the compass point around which all other musical points turn, and this is especially true in opera, a truth that should be obvious, though very little in art is obvious any longer.
Imagine trying to evaluate the skills of a professional swimmer by putting them in a small lap pool instead of in the 164 feet of a 50-meter Olympic pool. For most of its illustrious history, and it has undoubtedly had a distinguished and long track record of success, Concert of Arias was a major operatic competition that lived with a major compromise: music conceived for orchestra was rendered solely on a piano. Truly, operatic pianists are dazzling and amazing, and the pianists who have played Concert of Arias over the years have been stellar. But for HGO to fully evaluate a singer’s career potential, they must be heard with opera’s central instrument: a full orchestra, which at HGO is our own wonderful Houston Grand Opera Orchestra.
Evaluating the size of a singer’s voice must be done with caution and nuance, because it is not actually size that carries a singer’s voice over an orchestra, but resonance. This size/resonance paradox is true of every instrument: the loudest sound in any orchestra can sometimes be the foot-long piccolo, which can handily drown out the 17 feet of tubing in a tuba, depending on the player’s resonance and the precise orchestration. A singer’s resonance is a technical skill that is acquired through careful teaching and coaching, and it increases with maturity. A great deal of what’s evaluated tonight will be where these artists’ voices might take them in a decade; they are not solely being judged on their performance on a single evening.
Opera’s greatest asset is always its greatest simultaneous challenge: it combines many arts—music and drama and all levels of accompanying arts—and its history has often been crowded with those various elements vying for supremacy. The focus of Concert of Arias is on opera’s future singing stars, and the relationship they have—or could have—with their own voice. The presence of our wonderful orchestra reminds us, and our contestants, that opera is also an orchestral art stretching from Handel, to Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner, Massenet, Puccini, Strauss, Britten, Adams, and Heggie—with many fascinating stops. Music is only ever fully ensouled when heard as a composer heard it, and we hope that tonight is the leading tone for opera’s future.