Writing for Singers

I'm titling this essay Writing for Singers and not Writing for Voices because I’ve found that, after 20 years of doing it, a voice isn’t anywhere near as uniformly addressed as a snare drum, a piccolo, or a piano.

The capabilities of instruments are generally known and standardized: range limits, how dynamics affect sound, which mutes to use, how to use them, and how long one must budget for a player to insert or remove them before they can be ready to continue playing.

Not so with singers. Singers do not have a set array of performance options that are uniform across voice types, styles, or any other parameter. They are individual.

And before you say, Well, instrumentalists are individuals too — you can hear the difference between Miles Davis and Freddie Hubbard, or Don Sinta and Cannonball, or Segovia and Kirk Hammett — of course you can. But the fundamentals of the instrument don’t change based on the player. In my experience, the fundamentals of a singer often only apply to that singer.

Anything written for high voice will sound completely different if sung by a soprano, a mezzo, a countertenor, or a child. If that singer works primarily in opera, musical theatre, jazz, or choral music, the sound will again be affected.

So, how do you write for singers?

I remember a particularly withering reading session with my wife, who at the time was a lyric coloratura soprano (high, fast, and loud). I had written a set of songs for her, and we were at the first reading session. It became very clear — painfully so — that I had taken her "high" designation a little too literally.

What on earth made me think that any soprano — let alone my wife, whose voice I thought I knew quite well — could (or should!) sing as sustainably high as I had asked her to, without any consideration for the articulation of the text, her level of fatigue, or the loudness that would be required?

The obvious: I hadn’t done it before, I hadn’t studied the repertoire in scores or recordings, and I hadn’t asked her.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the crux.

My first composition teacher also taught 20th-century harmony and orchestration. In his orchestration class, we were required to find excerpts for each week’s featured instrument, and then “simulate” the excerpts — meaning, keep the rhythm and change all the pitches. The desired effect was to understand idiomatic writing for the instrument as represented in the literature. Student instrumentalists would then come to play through everyone’s excerpts for the class and give feedback on the playability of the writing. (He also made us write everything out by hand. It was some old-school shit.)

We did every family of the orchestra and band. But we didn’t write for singers. That class didn’t exist at my school.

So again: how do you write for singers?

I could fill pages talking about range, tessitura, vowel shape, Fach, and other basics — all of which are important and widely available. But what I know for sure from experience is twofold:

1. Sing.

2. Write for the singers you’re singing with, get your ass handed to you, and learn — from them — how to do it better.

Yes, study the repertoire. Score study and listening to live and recorded performances are required. I’ve learned to write well for instruments I’ve never played (so I’m told) because I’ve studied how they work.

I’ve learned to write well for singers (also, so I’m told) because I’ve sung — and because I’ve had direct contact with the singers I’ve written for, and considered them to be collaborators.

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