Yes, I saw the two microphones, Joyce but assumed they were for recording purposes. I think we have to be careful and ensure we have good cause when shooting down Kiri, not just looking to backstab her at every opportunity. Cool, calm
raison d'etre must be our response mechanism. However, those two microphones look very much like the ones used by Hayley, Terfel and Carreras in their open air concert.
Peter S.
It is traditional in opera to not use amplification. In an opera house this is possible and there is a technique that opera singers can practice to help them produce frequencies higher than the orchestra.
It is crazy to criticise crossover and pop artists who are using a different style of singing for using amplification. And if it's an open air concert where the orchestra is amplified it is impossible to project over the top of it because the amplification affects the frequencies.
This business of needing microphones is something that the purists harp on about again and again. But this opera tradition only came about because opera houses and orchestras got bigger and there was a need to project over them.
That opera singers have more powerful voices than other types of singer has never been proven. What little evidence there is from a myth-busters examination is that the loudest singers with the most powerful voices are... guess... yes, rock singers. They may be amplified, but so are their instruments.
It seems to me that Dame Kiri, who has never been known for her IQ, just mindlessly parroted the same old arguments about pop music that have been used for generations:
1. they have weak voices and need microphones.
2. they never last long.
3. Classical music is much superior to pop.
The trouble with 3 is that the great composers may be superior to much pop music, but this doesn't make opera singers superior. This is one of the great fallicies of the purists. That opera singers somehow take on the qualities of the music they sing.
And the naked hatred directed at the popera singers is possibly because they lay bare the fallicy of operatic superiority.
So the opera people are desperate to discredit people like Hayley, Kathy Jenkins, Charlie Church, Watson, etc.
Decent and unpretentions people like Hayley, Russell, etc just don't fit in the "holier than thou" opera world. The problem is not that they are way below the opera people in quality, but that they are on a par with them.
Here is an excellent article by Graham Reid:
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Sing like you're winning | Mar 02, 2008 15:33
It was a little over a week ago that Dame Kiri Te Kanawa made her ungracious, arrogant and not entirely unexpected comments about Hayley Westenra and others she considered "fake singers".
Rather than leap into blogworld with a quick comment I thought I'd wait to see how it played out -- and I wasn't disappointed.
In our adversarial culture -- nurtured by the media where nuance is ironed out and everything is reduced to the simplistic codes and language of sporting encounter (Helen v John) -- it was little surprise that this potentially interesting discussion should become reduced to Kiri v Hayley.
Letters to the editor were very much "leave off our Hayley" although the odd dissenting voice -- in haughty tones beamed down from on high -- supported the Dame.
The great lady herself then resorted to the most wearying line of all, she said she her words had been taken out of context. That is usually the default setting resorted to by those unwilling to defend their comments because they are in a hole and know they should stop digging.
What no one discussed -- not that I read or heard anyway -- was just how much the Dame's comments were grounded in that notion of some hierarchy of the arts: you know, popular music is at the bottom, jazz (because it's more complex) a bit above that, classical music atop that and then somewhere in the rarefied air, almost too distant to see, is the wonderful world of opera.
From the lofty heights of the opera world -- where doors are opened for you and diva behaviour (rudeness, self-obsession, demanding self-entitlement) is not only tolerated and accepted but actually admired -- it must be easy to look down on everyone else. And one gets the impression Dame Kiri does.
Jobbing journalists who have had the misfortune of an encounter with her -- and I am pleased I never have, tetchy Neil Young was enough -- return to tell of being kept waiting for 90 minutes or more without explanation or apology, of dismissive answers and a generally superior air. That feedback is too common for it to be just rumour and innuendo.
I mention this because if you subscribe to that hierarchy of the musical arts and place opera in the realms of gold somewhere near the hand of God then you almost invariably consider it more morally superior or uplifting also.
I don't. (See below)
Because if that were true then the world of opera would be populated by saints . . . And it clearly isn't. You need only look at Dame Kiri's comments -- and those opera-loving souls who attacked Hayley -- to confirm this.
Opera -- and classical music in general -- isn't morally improving or empowering. A lifetime of listening to Wagner or Delius doesn't of itself make you a better person. The education that comes with it might help, but music of itself confers no moral improvement. (The converse however, that a lifetime of listening to Scandinavian death metal, might not hold.)
But still people are persuaded that opera is somehow "better" than popera. I don't know how people make a qualitative assessment of this: it is more complex, more demanding to perform and listen to, requires more attention and so on. But "better"?
More fool me but I thought such value judgements on art -- comparisons between genres and styles -- were rather outdated. You don't start with pop, graduate to jazz then make your way to classical and beyond as my schoolteachers seemed to hope for when I was carrying a Rolling Stones album to school in the mid 60s.
I don't mean to come over all post-modern about this, but isn't it possible to enjoy and appreciate all kinds of art without making spurious and unnecessary comparisons?
Last week before the Kiri v Hayley bout (TKO Hayley actually) we were in Wellington to see Ornette Coleman, a musician whose work and philosophy I have admired for many decades.
Among the many things I enjoy about Coleman's career is that it has never been exclusively rooted in genre: he has played in a jazz context, worked with string quartets, wrote a symphony, recorded with the Master Musicians of Jajouka in Morocco, had Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead on an album, improvised with Yoko Ono in a New York loft, has recorded with poets . . .
Coleman doesn't see any musical hierarchy, and I like that.
After his show -- stunning incidentally -- we went to Happy for a drink and there was a blues duo playing, Storehouse. We thoroughly enjoyed their take on old John Lee [censored] and Howling Wolf material.
This past week we went to hear the APO play Rhapsody in Blue, three excellent pieces by Jonathan Besser, some Dvorak and so on. It was a wonderful evening (I thought Diedre Irons was terrific in the Gershwin although didn't swing as much as I might have liked, but that's being picky). Afterwards we went to the Dogs Bollix to see Infinite Flying Kick, a rock band of young Taiwanese-Kiwis whose brand of noise owes a bit to grunge, punk and Lynyrd Skynyrd guitars solos. Messy but thoroughly enjoyable.
I didn't see too many others from the APO traipse up the pub to hear IFK -- or vice versa -- and that's fine. I didn't expect to.
But an enjoyment of Gershwin and IFK aren't mutually exclusive. Are they?
I don't listen to Hayley or Kiri that much, although I treasure a Kiri 45rpm of her singing Greensleeves and other English folk songs which I take to be from the late 60s (In her popera phase perhaps?)
But I wouldn't deny anyone taking musical pleasure where they will.
Actually I suspect Kiri was misrepresented slightly: she wasn't saying Hayley was rubbish when she said Hayley wasn't in her world, she probably meant to say in her "class".
I think it's time to, if I might paraphrase Ornette Coleman, remove the class system from sound.
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