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If some of renowned bass Hines's "great singers" seem to have been included more for political reasons (after all, he had to work with these people) than because they were truly great, most of them do rate the title, and there's something for the singer to learn from almost all of them--about technique, learning music, developing the voice, preserving the voice--even if in a few cases it's what not to do. If nothing else, the book proves what an inexact science vocal pedagogy really is, and the anecdotes are worth reading. Hines's subjects include Birgit Nilsson, Joan Sutherland, Marilyn Horne, Luciano Pavarotti, and other operatic stars, primarily of the generation just passing, that which came to prominence in the '60s and '70s.
Book Description
Jerome Hines has interviewed 40 singers, a speech therapist, and a throat specialist to provide this invaluable collection of advice for all singers. This collection includes the commentary of Licia Albanese, Franco Corelli, Placido Domingo, Nicolai Gedda, Marilyn Horne, Sherrill Milnes, Birgit Nilsson, Luciano Pavarotti, Rose Ponselle, Beverly Sills, Joan Sutherland and many others. "Probably the best book on the subject." Publishers Weekly
Customer Reviews:
A must for students!.......2007-08-08
I was assigned to read this book and write ten critiques from ten article in this book. I first read this book as a student who loved the great singers of the past. This book is not a how to book in singing great, but it gives different points of view on how to sing well. I got a copy of the book to study it more indepthly. This book is great if you are going to teach students. There are exercises and hints from the great singers on how they warm up, their views on proper breathing and the fundamentals of singing. Each singer has their own point of view so that is also great for a teacher to consider because every one has their own way of explaining what works for them when it comes to singing correctly. Again, a great book for voice teachers and students!
Great Singers on Great Singing.......2007-07-29
My husband is an opera lover and has loved listening to the human singing voice his whole life. I bought this book for him for his birthday, and he is delighted with it. Any one of your opera-loving friends would enjoy receiving a copy.
Great Tips for the Well Trained Singer.......2006-03-22
I'm a mezzo soprano with more than 40 years of performance experience and I learned new things when I read this book. It's not for beginners as the technical references would be confusing. But for the experienced singer who always wants to learn and improve there is a wealth of information. On the first read through I just examined what the mezzos had to say...a good way to get info quickly for your particular voice type...then I sat down and read it all. This will be a permanent part of my music library.
Anectodal interviews with little sustance.......2006-03-04
As Head of Voice at a University Conservatorium, I had hoped to use this book as a text for a course about Performance Preparation.
Sadly there is little information about the true art of Singing or indeed of artists approach to their careers. Jerome Hines has used the format to recount his own experience while sychophantically "chatting" with the great singers, prefacing many remarks with "I said to him/her...."
I found it at times quite patronizing and very disappointing.
A wonderful Book.......2006-01-28
I read this book when I was young (borrowed it from the Library) then bought it later. At the time I first read it, I was studying singing myself and I really wanted to make sense of what teachers were saying and what great singers had to say about singing. I found the book wonderfully insightful, but completely contradictory. It seemed so few singers agreed with one another. It was like black was white to some of them. The descriptions of the passagio left me more than confused, "Making the throat space larger by making it smaller?" Or Corelli's idea of shoving your tongue down your throat to hold the larynx low (a thing that literally choked me!).
I concluded that there were as many ways of singing as there were singers. And NONE of their insight helped me one bit in understanding my own voice teacher (who I left because in the end, I was getting no where, and only getting a sore throat).
Once I had found a great teacher (a former very famous Wagnerian soprano) who really seemed to understand about freeing the voice, I began to understand what things meant. She was able to tell me what the different terms people used meant, and that sometimes terms that sound in contradiction really were explaining the same thing. At this point, I purchased the book and read it again. With this new insight I was able to make more sense of what the various singers were saying. It is true, they still contradicted each other as far as their methods, but at least I was able to see they were still talking about achieving the same things. Some of the singers were using the same technique I was being taught, and they explained it well enough (though in different terms) so I could see what they were all about. I also listened to their recordings and could hear the same things I was being taught.
In the end, though the book was written to help curious people understand what makes these particular singers "wonderful", again one must never use it to teach yourself or anyone else proper singing technique. If you used all you read, you would tie your throat into a knot.
For me, what I found most interesting was learning what these various singers were trying to achieve in their singing, and that was very insightful and beneficial. Even Jerome Hines shares a time period where he lost his confidence (and as far as I can learn, I think he had about the longest active singing career of any singer in living memory), where he actually when to see a therapist to discover what suddenly was overcoming him and ruining his ability to produce like he used to. The psychological aspects of singing are seldom talked about in any technique, but he reveals some super important ideas about what and how we feel about ourselves and how they can actually destroy what we are trying to do (and that bad technique doesn't even have to be a part of that).
No matter the real value of the book, I have to say that what is written in these interviews is often the closest we will ever come to what these singers thought about when dealing with technique and singing, and some, like Sutherland, openly admit they really can't explain what they do and only have vague understanding of what is actually going on (and yet, with all this lack of really understanding her own technique, when retired and in old age, this woman would sit in masters classes and judge good singing -- perhaps she could hear what was good, but obviously even throughout her own career couldn't figure out for herself why it is good).
I am glad he wrote this book, just because it is interesting to read, but like I say, you really do need some vocal study background to really figure out what they are talking about, and even then, there is no guarantee what they say will make that much sense.
Book Description
Wonderful compilation of advice and instruction from operatic immortals: Nellie Melba on voice training and preservation, Alma Gluck on building a vocal repertoire, Geraldine Farrar on the will to succeed, plus contributions from Caruso, Galli-Curci, Garden, Lehmann, many more. Indispensable for singers, any opera lover. Introduction. 24 photographs.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent book for what it has to offer.......2006-01-28
A warning to begin with: the book is written in that dry academic way that was common in those days when these singers were interviewed. So, it isn't going to be "fun reading" in that sense.
The book is valuable for insight into what these great singers thought about singing, but the explanations were not so detailed as to teach you "how to sing" under their various methods of singing. One will often find that they actually don't agree with each other at all. The real issue to deal with when reading this book is you really have no clue, based on what is written, about the various vocal methods taught. The most famous is that of Mathilde Marchessi, who was the teacher of a number of the singers in the book. We have all her "scales" and the lot published by various companies now, but fully understanding her method today is really impossible. Though she taught a fully balanced and even scale, she required all her singers be ultimately very high lying Coloratura sopranos. That highwire palatal placement gave a lovely high sound but was unable to produce great volume or dramatic quality (see Melba's totaly failure and stupidity in singing the Siegfried Brunhilde).
If one is going to read the book, I recommend LISTENING to recordings of these various singers. The recordings will be horrible because they will be extremely old and from a time long before quality recording. So, remember, you are getting only a ghostly image of their voices. One will often HEAR what they are talking about, even if it is impossible to actually figure out how they did it.
Books like this are often written to show really interested and searching singers and voice students a glimpse of the past, when singing was supposedly at its height. It is like, if we could only see how they did it, and follow their "secrets", we will sound as good. Well, this book makes it clear that you will NEVER learn their secrets (even with singers like Caruso who are more forth-coming with what they tell you), simply because they never tell you those things they are doing which were wrong, and in spite of themselves and their technique, not because of it, they produce great sounds.
It is a great book to understand the singers of that day, but it must NEVER be considered a text book on singing. You will become more confused, more unable to figure out what to do, by reading the different and conflicting ideas of correct singing than imaginable. And if you listen to their singing, with open ears, you may actually learn that these singers quite often didn't follow their own advice, and often did things that we would call simply unmusical and in opposition to the style of the music they sang.
Their greatness is not in question, and that is because they proved by their lives and their careers that they were excellent (and if you see the list of equally great compeditors they sang against, you will understand just what they were up against to become the greatest of the great they were; there were great singers by the thousands in those days, even if they never became world famous or made it to the US -- which helped them become great and known here -- they were extremely good, and not all the best wanted to sing all over the world, many were happy being house singers, for in those days, there was financial security in that; and the public knew what was good singing and what was not; at this time, opera and concert singing was still the "Popular singing of the day" and those standards were expected of anyone becoming a singer or entering the world of professional singing; today such singing is confined to classical music, and the popular music of the day often requires no technique, not even good pitch or tone quality to become famous; but at this time, these singers were seen as the top of the list, a list which included many exquisite singers, and many of these singers were also great teachers -- Lilli Lehmann, who also wrote a book on singing, very informative, but again, leaving too much to the imagination of the reader because she could not provide recordings to demonstrate what she was saying --- and thus they tried to keep their art going).
As I said, a truly insightful book about the people who are now distant memories of a long forgotten time. But not a book designed to give you that "secret" to producing a great sound. it is nothing more than asking them to explain how they did what they did, and it is amazing how little they really could explain.
Customer Reviews:
Valuable but grating.......2005-03-11
I will keep this short and simple: Friedwald is a bad writer. This book contains a lot of bad jokes, forced analogies, a juvenile prose style and some occasional mistakes. However, this book is invaluable for someone who knows little about jazz singing, for it contains much information and most, if not all, the really important names in vocal jazz. However, if you are a more experienced listener, you will be put off by his off-handed dismissals of legends like Helen Merrill and talented minor figures like Lee Morse and Julie London, with little or no justification for his dislike of them. But he praises people like Perry Como, Dinah Shore and Doris Day.
Hmmmm.
Love and grumbling.......2003-12-17
Jazz Singing covers 20th jazz singing from classic blues to post-bop singers. The book is notable for breadth, Friedwald's often sharp humor, and a knack for exploring underrated singers such as Kay Starr and Helen Humes. Though I don't always agree with him he is passionate and knowing.
Jazz Singing is more of a commentary than a history of jazz singing and lacks the thoroughness and balance of a book written by a cultural historian as opposed to a fan/critic/liner note writer/compiler.
The book is haunted by a defeatist nostalgia the author is too young for and obvious theses repeated ad nauseam. The author holds simplistic notions of how black and whites sing and never actually differentiates between adult and kiddie pop. Is this simply a matter of musical sophistication or assumptions about how love can be expressed? The assertion (one shared w/ Stanley Crouch and Donald Clarke) that adult pop is dead, is one that must be argued not simply asserted.
It is also peculiar that Friedwald never devotes any attention to the fact that kiddie pop novelties, pre and post Mitch Miller largely define the careers of many singers he praises including Bing Crosby, Jo Stafford, Peggy Lee and Doris Day--(who,for example indulged w/ novelties during her Les Brown stint).
Jazz Singing is also growing dated, a hazard of such a nostalgically minded, cynical book. Strangely even in the 1996 edition Jimmy Scott (who came back in the '90s) and Shirley Horn (who came back in the '80s) are absent, [except very brief comments] Blues/R&B-based singers w/ jazz-oriented careers (i.e. Ruth Brown, Etta James, early Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin) are overlooked. Finally, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Kevin Mahogany, Dianne Reeves, Patricia Barber, Diana Krall, Kurt Elling, etc. whose careers overlap the 1996 edition are barely mentioned [except a mention of Elling]
This is a fun book but more useful as a consumer guide based on its discography and several choice passages. If you want a history of jazz singing you would do better to check out Gary Giddins' anthologies (where is his jazz singing book?!) and instrumental and vocal jazz histories by Giola and Shipton, respectively.
Four and a half stars.......2002-12-03
Friedwald has definitely got to be the currently most prolific writer on all matters related to the "Great American Songbook" and its performers. His name appears constantly on CD liner notes, his voice is regularly heard on NPR, and his face appears on television whenever an assessment of a recently expired pop star or jazz great is called for. It stands to reason that his opinions wield influence, so as a champion of the music that is the subject of his discourse, I can only hope that his pronouncements are for the better.
In most instances, his judgements seem sound, and he usually expresses them with a directness and verve that make for engaging reading. Among the better moments in the book are his dismissal of a Michael Feinstein, a Johnny Mathis, or an Andy Williams as subjects worthy of discussion in a serious book about American popular music.
The musicians he devotes chapters to are all deserving, and he provides no small amount of insight into the historical significance and unique talents of his subjects. Still, he can strain a bit too hard to make a case for a singer such as Bing Crosby, proclaiming him a better all-around musician than Sinatra and insisting that the man, if anything, got better with the passing of time. I get the sense that Friedwald knows quite a bit about music, but perhaps not quite enough. And it's not clear that he's ever had much experience performing music. If he had, he'd be more aware of the differences in vocal production, say, between a stand-up singer and a pianist-singer. Or of the kind of risk that is present not only in Sinatra's persona but in the approach to a lyric and its elocution that are part of his music. Bing may have a good ear and good time, but even on his noisy (thanks to Bregman's orchestration) Sinatra-style 1950's session, his time is leaden. He's thinking two-beat instead of 4/4 swing, and he plops his syllables right on top of each beat in order to be able to "think" the 2nd beat that characterizes his Dixieland approach.
But if there's any genuine disappointment with the book, it's with what's been left out. Whether it's because he's too busy writing or completing his Crosby collection, Friedwald seems totally unaware of singers like Jack Jones, Shirley Horn, Nancy Lamott and, most notably of all, Etta Jones. One can only hope that a book such as this will lead readers to make their discovery.
Brings You Back to the Music.......2000-10-08
Friedwald has written a great book--precisely because it's opinionated, un-pretentious, filled with passionate likes and dislikes. Friedwald has apparently listened to every jazz-sung record in history, and his book makes you want to listen to all of it too--in my case, for the first time. For that I'd love to thank him personally. If you believe that understanding the conventions of an art form helps you appreciate it fully, "Jazz Singing" is an eduacation in what to listen for...in how to listen to jazz singing. I don't always agree with Friedwald and neither will you, but so what? A wonderful book about an art that seems unfortunately to be dying out--a book that helps, along with all the CD re-issues that thankfully come out, to keep it alive.
A Jazz Affair.......2000-08-28
Will Friedwald loves his subject and it shows. I learned a lot and agree with, perhaps, 95% of his judgments. But some of his dismissals sound perfunctory and I'm not even sure that he even reviewed the relevant material. Example: Jonny Mathis in the "Must Avoid" Department. Generally true, but certainly not the very first albumn (CK 64890) which has some excellent vocals and arrangements in the jazz idiom. "Easy to Love" and "Star Eyes" are splendid and his "It Might as Well be Spring" is one of the best, at least to my ear. But I almost forgive him since he praises the much-neglected Dakota Staton. Almost, but not quite. And, please, David Raksin deserves to have his name spelled straight. Anyone who could compose "Laura" and "The Bad and the Beautiful" deserves editorial accuracy.
Product Description
A series of personal study talks with the most renowned opera concert and oratorio singers of the time, especially planned for voice students.
Average customer rating:
- Good book to read
- IT IS THE WORST BOOK!!
- Britney Spears Retired
- YOU GOTTA BUY THIS BOOK
- No regrets! It's great!
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True Brit: The Story of Singing Sensation Britney Spears
Beth Peters
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
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ASIN: 0345436873
Release Date: 1999-06-28 |
Book Description
POP PRINCESS
Britney Spears is putting girls back on the map in the pop music world. With the effervescent and intoxicating sounds of her first album, ...Baby One More Time, Britney shot straight to the top of the charts--in just the first week of the album's release. Her ripe style and smart lyrics have captured the hearts of millions of fans, young and old.
But Britney didn't just come out of nowhere: she is a multitalented entertainment sensation who can't remember a time in her life when she wasn't singing, acting, or dancing. She broke into the biz at the tender age of eight, and it wasn't long before she made her mark. TRUE BRIT gives you all the backstage info, from her first audition for The New Mickey Mouse Club to her exciting decision to go solo. You'll also find out what it was like for Brit to work with the boys of 'N Sync, the rumors of romance, and her dazzling life beyond the stage.
Britney is more than just a singer--she's a performing phenomenon. And TRUE BRIT is your ticket into her amazing world.
Customer Reviews:
Good book to read.......2003-10-09
My 9 yr. old daughter is a huge Britney fan & loved this book. It is well writen & has lots of info!
IT IS THE WORST BOOK!!.......2000-09-24
This was the worst book I ever read.
Britney Spears Retired.......2000-01-05
7 Years Ago Britney Spears Retired From the mmc mickey mouse club and till recriet
YOU GOTTA BUY THIS BOOK.......1999-08-09
well iam a big BRITNEY SPEARS fan and than i buy this book and man this book is great is not like other book well this book will make u happy that u buyed this one .it has picture and quize
No regrets! It's great!.......1999-07-07
This book is the best book I have ever read. SERIOUSLY! It's wonderful. Beth Peters uses a great technique of writing to make it very interesting. It's not just a book that you sit down and read through. It's got quizzes about Brit, facts (from her fave things to the address of where to get a script of the play "Ruthless" that she stared in), and information on her former MMC stars and where they are now. In between all that, it tells the story of super star, Britney Spears. If you like Brit, and want to learn cool facts that you probably don't know, but don't feel like sitting and reading a whole book, get this. It's interactive, and a bunch fun. GO GET IT!
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Great Singers on Great Singing
Manufacturer: Proscenium Pub
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 9994491415 |
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Singers in the Marketplace: The Economics of the Singing Profession
Ruth Towse
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0198163479 |
Book Description
This is a study of the economics of the singing profession in Britain, particularly in relation to the training of "classical" singers, performers, and teachers. The book analyzes the complexities of the labor market for singers, and answers questions about how it works. Written by an
economist, this book asks and answers questions such as: How do singers train? what employment is available? and how much do singers earn?
Book Description
During 1980 and 1990, a series of bitter political and culture battles over issues of sexuality convulsed the nation--battles over the regulation of pornography, the scope of legal protections for gay people, the funding of allegedly "obscene" art, the contents of safe-sex education, and more.
This book is a collection of essays written during that time, generated as part of other, larger activist efforts going on at the time. Read together, the essays trace the progress of the conversations between different activist groups, and between the authors of the pieces, Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter, creating a bridge between feminists, gay activists, those in politics, and those in the law.
Since the 1995 publication of Sex Wars, the political landscape has altered significantly. Yet the issues and essays--are still relevant today. This anniversary edition will contain a new chapter dealing with the changes in the law since the book's publication, including Lawrence v. Texas.
Customer Reviews:
Represent, Feminist Lesbian Academics!.......2004-08-11
Professor Duggan taught a gay studies course that I took at Brown University and she was so awesome. I read this book about two years after taking that class. I think the times that cultural studies scholars and legal scholars get together are pretty rare, so this is an excellent example of collaborative potential. This book asks and answers many questions. For example, why did most feminist historians not join anti-porn movements? The discussion on the Supreme Court's "Bowers" decision may seem dated in light of "Romer" and "Lawrence," but at the time it was pretty eye-opening. I think I may have cited it for a sociology paper. Duggan takes a swipe at Joan Scott that makes me wonder how progressive academics gossiped about it. This is a wonderful collection by two tremendous scholars and I highly recommend that many critically-conscious people peep it.
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- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
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- How to Succeed in the Game of Life: 34 Interviews with the World's Greatest Coaches
- Images in the Dark: An Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Film and Video
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The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer
How to Sing
Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing
Great Singers on the Art of Singing
Caruso's Method of Voice Production
