I found this among my drafts the other day, originally written in 2023, but I failed to post it. About time I did.

The year 2023 has been interesting for me, musically speaking. In the first half, I took part in a research project entitled “The Shock of the Old”, in which participants explored the vocal techniques of bel canto singers who had been recorded at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th century. It was a fascinating exercise, in which I studied each phrase of a recording and tried to emulate the style and vocal technique. I chose to work on a recording of contralto Ada Crossley, singing Caro Mio Ben. Her timbre and basic technique is not too different to my own, so it was not too difficult to get the basics of the sound. The most challenging part was trying to apply a tremolo-like effect, somewhat disparagingly called the “bleat”, but which is perhaps like a fast laugh. I could get the effect, but not apply it with accurate pitch in my singing. That would require much more practice than I was able to commit to at the time.

One of the features of the style of the era was to use the chest voice as an artistic device. Modern classical sopranos and mezzos tend to avoid using chest voice, though my training didn’t discourage its use. My theory is that chest voice use in singing is a class marker, given that it is prized in popular music and discouraged in art music. Having explored the use of chest voice in the Ada Crossley emulation, I was tempted to look at the recording of Moreschi, who was a soprano castrato. His chest voice went quite high, as did his vocal range in the piece I studied: Ave Maria by Gounod/Bach. I decided to pitch shift this down a fourth and emulate the resulting pitch-shifted version. This made the chest voice range and vocal compass more achievable for me. It amused me to prepare this piece as a solo for the ROCS concert, which had the theme Hymnitation, given that I am imitating a castrato singing a hymn.

Not satisfied with just one hymnitation offering, I also decided to arrange the Dadabots entry into the 2022 AI Song Contest, Nuns in a Moshpit, for vocal ensemble. Thus we were a group of humans imitating an AI imitating a human gospel choir singing “Hail Satan” – among other things that the Dadabots put together in the piece.

In another random occurrence during the year, I ended up in an email exchange with Bas Jongenelen, who is the co-author of an English translation of a 16th century mock sermon in doggerel rhyme. This struck me as also fitting the hymnitation theme, being an imitation of a sermon. I set an excerpt of this to music, as a simple chant with choruses.

The concert theme also allowed an extract of my Missa LOLCat to be performed, being a parody mass, and my small group also performed three of my catches that move from an apparently religious theme to a quite different hidden message. Add to that several hymn-like choral pieces and a few songs with different perspectives on religion, we had an extraordinarily rich mix of works in the concert.