page_title: Voce faringea
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Voce faringea / History
caption_attribution_description: Drawing of Gilbert Duprez (1806-1896), French tenor
context_page_description: In vocal music the term voce faringea describes a historical singing practice developed and used especially by the bel canto tenors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to extend the upper range of the voice by modifying the falsetto, which is typically heard as a weak or feminine sound, into a vocal quality that is more tenoral and powerful.
context_section_description: Many tenor roles in the bel canto operas of the early 19ᵗʰ century have an exceptionally high tessitura with notes often well above C₅ or D₅. The best-known example is probably Arturo’s arioso “Credeasi misera”from Vincenzo Bellini’s I Puritani, which is composed up to F₅. Normally, such high passages are beyond the vocal compass of modern tenors, raising the question of how tenors in the primo ottocento would have coped with such tessitura and extreme high notes. 
  The concept of the voce faringea offers an answer to this question. Tenors of this musical period were trained to strengthen and modify the falsetto into a more virile and powerful vocal quality. The resulting sound was considered homogenous with that of the lower register and no longer perceived as a falsetto timbre. This register mechanism mirrors a pre-romantic vocal ideal of sound that seems clearly divergent from those prevalent today.
  In his 1851 work, the German singing teacher Ferdinand Sieber pointed out that tenors possessing this technique could sing with the greatest ease and practically without force up to highest tenor ranges. The quality of their high notes was so unlike a contemporary falsetto sound that it probably gave rise to the often-heard, and likely erroneous, opinion that they sang these high notes in chest voice. By balancing between vocal registers, the singer would gain a beautiful, marrow-like, mixed tone, seeming to retain the strength of chest voice and yet protect the voice as in falsetto, although without its feminine sound, as Friedrich Schmidt remarked in his 1854 vocal textbook. James Rennie wrote in 1825 that this vocal timbre was both the sweetest and the most brilliant sound the male voice could produce, possessing incomparably more pathos than any chest sound.
  Eighteenth and 19th century vocal pedagogical literature employed various, confusing, and even contradictory terminology for the different voice registers; however, most vocal pedagogues were in agreement regarding the particular aesthetic merits of each register—mainly, chest and falsetto. In addition to these two registers, some vocal treatises of the era make mention of a third register mechanism tenors could employ to particular artistic advantage. It was often described as an intermediate register or a special mechanism connecting the falsetto and the chest register, and was perceived as a mixture of the two, often called voix mixte (mixed voice). Vocal maestri and physiologists used different terms to denote this vocal mechanism, including head voice, falsetto or fausset/faucet, voce mezzo-falso or middle-falsetto, Schlundkopfregister, feigned voice, voix sur-laryngienne, and voix pharyngienne (pharyngeal voice or voce faringea). 
  The term pharyngeal voice was coined by Edgar Herbert-Caesari and was first used to describe this particular vocal mechanism in his 1950 article “The Pharyngeal Voice,” in The Musical Times, and further in a chapter from his book The Voice of the Mind. Herbert-Caesari explains that the term pharyngeal voice is translated from the Italian voce faringea and was used by exponents of the “old school” solely to describe a peculiar tonal quality produced by a distinctive mechanism. He adds that the tenors of the Rossini/Bellini/Donizetti period were taught to sing with voce faringea and furthermore, that this method enabled (particularly) tenors to sing their highest notes with ease and brilliance. 
  In accordance with formerly prevalent vocal ideals, at least according to historical written sources, these tenori di grazia did not produce their voices with dramatic force but rather with elegance and suppleness up through their highest range. And yet the special vocal technique they employed to produce high notes considerably beyond C₅ with absolute ease, security and facility gradually fell into obscurity. 
  During the second half of the 19th century, the vocal tradition of the great bel canto tenors ultimately went out of fashion, and a new, more dramatic verismo vocal ideal took hold. Musicological scholarship attributes Gilbert Louis Dupr
caption: Gilbert Duprez
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