Bas-profundo ( Italian. Basso profondo - deep bass) - a very low male voice .
Bass profundo is a term accepted in Western culture (European basis). In Russia, deep basses are often used in church choral music. Singers with this type of voice are also called octavists by the name of their function ("an octave lower than the bass") in Orthodox church singing.
The assertion that “octavists sing an octave below the bass” is not entirely true, because although they go down willingly, they are almost an octave lower than the usual (high) bass (in some cases, going down to the controctave fa (43.7 Hz) and even lower) but they mostly sing the part of the 2nd bass. Octavists are most often used in a chord warehouse, with a low sound. The acoustic effect of the participation of octavists is in the fusion of the sounds of the chord , which in relation to the main tone is like overtones (therefore, it is most natural to use bass profundo when singing the bases of major triads). It should be used carefully, taking into account the instructions of the composer and the style of the work.
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Octavist Register Phonation
A more accurate definition of the octavist’s voice is the assertion that these performers are able to extract - in addition to the main chest and head registers common to all singers - in the third, lower register, which requires the ability to start oscillations of another part of the “pharynx” when moving from the lowest notes of the chest register. Research work using video recording of ligament vibrations, spectrum analysis and waveforms from sensors located on the neck, etc. sometimes claim that the technique works on the basis of the simultaneous use of ligaments and “false ligaments” of the singer. This differs from “ strohbass ” (in American English “vocal hissing”, vocal fry , in British English creaky voice ), in which there are no involvement of ligaments, that is, “voices”, but only fluctuations of false ligaments.
As a result, the third (octavistic) way of sound production (or phonation), with a strong voice, extends one octave below the lowest note of the chest register, typically for men - to the E-salt of the contract, although many performers are known (for example, Mikhail Zlatopolsky and Tim Storms ), who sang before before the contract. Below this octave with a voice, the sound production becomes very quiet and more and more “noise”, as the spectrograms show, turning into “shtrobass”.
Such sound production is available to both male and female voices, today YouTube also stores examples of a teenage girl whom her father taught to extract individual sounds before the la-sol controctava. The tradition of female singing using the octavist register (that is, up to an octave below the lowest note in the chest register) is unknown.
Lack of training
The traditions of singing in the octavist range go back centuries, however, today none of the institutes for the training of singers known in Europe, the USA, and Russia teaches the technique of phonation in the third, octavist range. Today there are few practitioners of such singing, and most of them consider the ability to extract low notes “a rare gift, one in a million” (see, for example, an interview with Vladimir Miller on the Dutch television channel). However, we can say that all the singers who go down to the salt of the controctave and lower use the octavist phonation technique, whether they are aware of it or not, and that it is incorrect to attribute them to the pectoral range - direct evidence of this can be seen on spectrograms and forms of sound vibrations recorded on their notes.
Traditions of low singing in different genres
In academic singing, profundo is considered the most inactive voice of all. However, Osmin’s part in the opera “ Abduction from the Seraglio ” by Mozart is richly decorated with coloratures . As a result of this, the singers singing this part can be called “coloratura profundo basses”, although this term does not actually exist.
In the opera, one of the main requirements is covering the voice of large halls (up to the first thousand listeners), and “cutting” the orchestra. Trained only in the use of the pectoral range, but not in the "octavist" technique, opera singers cannot take powerfully the sounds below the large octave. For this reason, notes below to the big octave are not used in the opera. The voices of famous octavist singers have no opera sound, but are heard against the background of the church choir. In the Orthodox Church, the tradition of rejecting the use of musical instruments was chosen, and, as a result, ancient singing with very low voices has survived to the present day and is found in all countries where the "Greek" church is present, for example, in Serbia, Greece, Romania, in churches ex-USSR, etc.
In the Western tradition, the voices of “profundo bass” are very common (USA) when singing “gospels”, church hymns of the Protestant church. These performers have a lively "entertaining" (as opposed to "harsh" and slow Orthodox church music) manner of singing, and often use low notes as stage gimmicks, exclusively microphone singing, which meets with applause and cheers in the audience sitting in the church or hall. Famous performers (dozens and dozens of them only in the second half of the 20th century, today they are registered with multiple videos on YouTube) can be attributed, for example, to the following: John Daniel Sumner , Ken Turner, Tim Riley, Roger Menis and Tim Storms .
After the revolution of the 1960s, modern pop music intentionally focuses on high effeminate voices for male performers (respectively, allowing, on the contrary, lower pectoral voices for women), and therefore basses capable of picking notes with “octavist” technique, in country, rock , Western pop music is virtually nonexistent.
Interestingly, in past centuries in Europe, bass was also considered the voice of a buffon (comic roles) or a very old person, as well as a negative hero, and “beautiful singing” was assumed to be higher male voices. Famous opera bass roles confirm this position - for example, Osmin’s aria - the aria of the guardian of seral (i.e. castrato), who sings with bass (comic impossibility).
Classical Opera Bass Profundo Parts
- Claudio Monteverdi : Charon (“ Orpheus ”), Neptune (“The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland ”), Seneca (“ Coronation of Poppea ”)
- Alessandro Scarlatti : Alfei ( Electra )
- Georg Friedrich Handel : Claudius ( Agrippina )
- Jean-Philippe Rameau : Pluto ( Hippolytus and Arisia )
- Antonio Salieri : Mr. von Bar (The Chimney Sweep )
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart : Osmin (“ Abduction from the Seraglio ”), Commander (“ Don Giovanni ”), Zarastro (“The Magic Flute ”)
- Ludwig van Beethoven : Rocco ( Fidelio )
- Gioacchino Rossini : Moses (“ Moses in Egypt ”)
- Fromalet Halevi : Gian Francesco ("The Jew ")
- Giacomo Meyerbeer : Marseille (The Huguenots )
- Gaetano Donizetti : Balthazar (“ Favorite ”)
- Richard Wagner : Daland (The Flying Dutchman ), Fafner, Hunding and Hagen (The Ring of the Nibelung ), King Mark ( Tristan and Isolda ), Titurel and Gurnemanz ( Parsifal )
- Giuseppe Verdi : Sparafucile ( Rigoletto ), Jacopo Fiesco ( Simon Boccanegra ), Padre Guardiano (The Force of Fate ), Grand Inquisitor ( Don Carlos )
- Karl August Peter Cornelius : Abul (The Baghdad Barber )
- Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov : Duda (" Sadko ")
- Richard Strauss : Baron Oaks (The Rose Chevalier )
- Hans Pfitsner : Pope Pius IV and Cristoforo Madruzzo (“ Palestrina ”)
- Benjamin Britten : John Klaggart ( Billy Budd )
- Gyurgy Ranki : King Lipstick (" New Dress of King Lipstick ")
- Ildebrando Pizzetti : Fourth Tempter ( Murder in the Cathedral )
- Harrison Paul Burtwistle : Doctor ( Punch and Judy )
- Krzysztof Penderecki : father Ranzhe (" Devils from Luden ")
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky : Zaretsky and Prince Gremin ( Eugene Onegin )