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Moments Musicaux #20 : Vocalise - Songs Without Words

Classical Discussion

Last week I took a look at music which brought elements of speech into the style of a song. This week I'll switch to looking at the exact opposite -- pieces which remove the elements of speech from a song. This style is known as "vocalise" and refers to music sung by a human, but in which the music doesn't include any words, instead treating the human voice as a pure instrument.

While this style isn't as common as the recitative style in last week's post, there are still a fair number of excellent pieces which use it. I'll give a few of them here.

##Sergei Rachmaninov, Op.34 No.14, Vocalise

This piece is final and most famous of a set of 14 songs published by the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov in 1912. The original version of these piece was written for voice (either soprano or tenor) and piano, but it has been arranged to fit a positive plethora other instrumental ensembles, including the one for voice and orchestra posted here:

In performing this piece the singer is instructed to choose a single vowel and use it to sing the entire piece of music.

##Heitor Villa-Lobos, Bachianas Brasileiras No.5 for Voice and 8 Cellos, Part 1 - Aria, Cantilena

This next piece is from 1938 and forms the first of two movements in the fifth of a series of nine pieces called Bachianas Brasileiras by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. Although this is probably Villa-Lobos' most popular work, the entire Bachianas Brasileiras series is magnificent and I'll hopefully cover it in more detail in a future Moments Musicaux. These piece merge ideas of Baroque and Brazilian music folk and popular music, in this case the Italian aria style (along with the Renaissance form of a 'Cantilena') and a Brazilian ballad called the 'modinha'. In this piece, the singer is instructed to sing using the vowel 'ah', although there is a section with normal lyrics in the middle:

Although this is by far the best known piece that Villa-Lobos wrote in the style of a vocalise, it's not the only one. A nice example of another such piece forms the final section of Villa-Lobos' suite Floresta do Amazonas, which was arranged out of music he wrote for the film Green Mansions (although most of his music for the movie ended up being replaced with music by Bronislau Kaper):

##Reinhold Glière, Op.82, Concerto for Coloratura Soprano and Orchestra in F minor

This is a particularly nifty piece as it's a full on vocalise concerto, a first when this piece was written. It was written in 1943 and is one of the best known works by the Ukrainian, Russian, and Soviet composer Reinhold Glière. This piece highlights a particular style of singing most associated with opera known as Coloratura. This sort of singing is characterized by leaps, runs, trills, and basically other stuff which makes it impressive to be able to sing well:

##Other vocalise songs

Although the technique of vocalise isn't as wide-used as the recitative-style stuff I looked at last week, there's still far too many pieces in this style to include all the noteworthy ones here. Instead I'll just post a few other nice examples, unfortunately leaving out some other pieces of great merit. I won't go into each of these pieces individually, but I've chosen them to cover a few different styles and musical eras.

##Choral vocalise

Another somewhat common use of this style of singing is in the form of a wordless chorus. One really nice example of this occurs in Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly and depicts a bittersweet scene in which the protagonist Cio-Cio San stays up throughout night with her child awaiting the return of her husband Lieutenant Pinkerton:

This sort of choral vocalise has also seen some use outside of opera, for instance in this piece written in 1925 by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. Flos Campi is a lush and sensual work inspired by the text of the Song of Solomon.

There are many more examples of this sort of thing, but I'll just give one more. This is the final of a set of three nocturnes completed in 1899 by the French Impressionist composer Claude Debussy. It depicts the sea and "the mysterious song of the Sirens as they laugh and pass on".

Well there you have it! Hopefully you've enjoyed the music and will be able to spot the technique when you hear it in other contexts (for instance, you may recall an electronically-enhanced version of vocalise playing a prominent role in a certain science fiction movie).

###Other posts:

Link to list of other Moments Musicaux posts

Requests? Questions? Comments? Suggestions? PM me or post a comment.

Posted Mar 20, 2013, 12:59 AM UTC · edited

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