Sex and singing, or gender and diction
4:46 p.m.
Today I thought I would lay a heavy on you, which just goes to show how old I really am if I�m still using such an out-dated expression. I met a man who was once a woman. That in itself is not so strange, but I knew a little bit about this person, so meeting him kind of capped it for me. I shall call him Kim, which is as non-gender-specific a name as I can think of.
Kim was a woman who liked men, married one and had three children. She divorced that man, and took other lovers after that, all men. When her children were still quite young, she initiated the process of becoming a man. Apparently it takes many years. There are surgeries involved as well as hormone treatments, and I guess he must continue to take testosterone forever, since his body is incapable of manufacturing it naturally. The children adjusted, as they had to, and got used to the new lay of the land. In the meantime, Kim still liked men, and took up with a homosexual partner. For the children, this was probably the least weird part, since Kim had always had male lovers anyway. I�m sure it was difficult for his family to accept, though.
So I met Kim today. He is a short man, heavily bearded, a little tubby (hey at this age, so many of us are!), and he has a relatively high voice, but not uncharacterstically so. He has a weak handshake but seemed friendly enough in spite of all that. I wish that I had not known all this about him before I shook his limp hand because it certainly colours the way I see him. This is stuff for a novel, if anyone out there needs inspiration.
Apart from that, it�s been pretty quiet around here. The temperature is still in the basement, a high of -23�C for those of you keeping track. There was an article in the Montreal Gazette which Hubby cut out about why sopranos are unintelligible when they sing high and loud. I already knew why, but it�s nice to see it in print. It has to do with the impossibly wide open mouths we must affect to get all that sound out. You see, if you were to measure the actual opening of the vocal folds when a soprano is singing a high note, you would be very surprised to see that it is tiny. So she must enlarge the resonating cavity as much as is humanly possible to take advantage of the wind power from her lungs, which she controls by judicious use of her epigastrium. This means that an �ee� or an �oo� will be distorted out of recognition, becoming �ah� more often than not. Actually, everything becomes �ah� to a certain degree. I take personal pride in the fact that my words are almost always intelligible, but even I must make concessions if I want the sound to be open and beautiful. This is why a relaxed jaw is of utmost importance. There is no way to make the vowels open and understandable if the jaw is tight. Hey, I�m a singing teacher, that�s what I do!
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