National Singing Styles - France (II)

The French found a way of compensating for most singers’ tendency to spend less time on consonants in singing than in speaking. They intuitively understood what we now know scientifically, that to reach a threshold of intelligibility, a brief acoustic event such as a consonant needs to be higher in amplitude or longer in time. They also understood the expressive parameters in amplitude and duration to convey meaning and feeling. With consonants voiced on a precise pitch, we can be virtually certain that subvocal “scooping” was not a general feature of French singing at this time.

Both Mersenne and Bacilly describe a quality of the ideal singing voice that is related to harmonie, a certain quality of body or focus in the sound that was independent of the overall size of the voice. Mersenne describes this quality as being like “a canal which is always full of water” as opposed to a “thin trickle,” while Bacilly describes it as the “amount of tone or harmonie present in the voice” that “nourishes the ear.”


Because of the degree to which consonants were “sung” in the French school, proper pitch control was of great importance. Mersenne’s comments on intonation and evenness make it clear that vibrato was an ornament in the French school. He indicates that there should be no fluctuation in pitch when sustaining a tone, even when there is a crescendo or decrescendo.

By the early eighteenth century, we can document several types of ornamental vibrato used by the French. One type, produced in the throat, Michel Pignolet de Montéclair terms the tremblement feint, in which the beating was “almost imperceptible.”  The flaté was a breath vibrato appropriate for long notes, in which the amplitude was so small that it did not “raise or lower the pitch.” This is perhaps more akin to what we would regard as intensity vibrato today. Montéclair described a third type of vibrato: “The balancement which the Italians call tremolo produces the effect of the organ tremolo. To execute it well, it is necessary that the voice make several little aspirations more marked and slower than those of the flaté.” Montéclair also describes a nonvibrato tone appropriate for long notes: “The son filé is executed on a note of long duration . . . without any vacillation at all. The voice should be, so to speak, smooth like ice, during the entire duration of the note.”

Délicatesse was a quality highly prized by the French, especially in the execution of ornaments, as Mersenne indicated in describing the trill:

And if one wishes to do this trill with all its perfection, one must even more redouble the trill on the note marked with a fermata [d’un point dessus], with such a délicatesse that this redoubling is accompanied by an extraordinary lightening [adoucissment] that contains the greatest charms of the singing proposed.

Mersenne is describing a kind of singing so delicate that the finest nuances of throat articulation could be executed. This is chamber singing at its most subtle. The visual analogue to the delicate filigree of French ornamentation style is the lacelike decoration of the silver furniture at Versailles (most of which was melted down to pay for Louis XIV’s aggressive wars).

Perhaps the most important characteristic in an ideal French singing voice was douceur, a quality of sweetness that Bacilly felt came naturally to a belle voix and that could be cultivated in others. Mersenne wrote,

But our singers imagine that the esclamationi and the accenti which the Italians use in singing smack too much of Tragedy or Comedy, which is why they don’t want to do them, though they ought to imitate what is good and excellent in them, because it is easy to temper the esclamationi and to accommodate them to the douceur Françoise, in order to add what they have more of in the Pathetic to the beauty, clarity and sweetness of trills, which our musicians do with such good grace, when having a good voice they have learned the method of proper singing from good masters.

There is no extended discussion of vocal registers in French sources until the late eighteenth century.68 One possible conclusion is that they used primarily only one register, at least for a given piece. The French, who favored equality over variety, clearly did not employ a vocal concept similar to the Italian “pyramid.”

The French did recognize the existence of natural and falsetto registers. Bacilly observed that natural-voiced singers scorned falsettists and that the falsetto voice tended to be more brilliant (éclatante), the natural voice, more in tune. Bacilly preferred small voices and high voices and generally felt that female voices (and falsettists) were at an advantage over male voices, though not entirely. He writes,

It is established that feminine voices would have the advantage over masculine ones were it not for the fact that the latter have more vigor and strength for executing runs and more talent for expressing the passions than the former. For the same reason, falsetto voices bring out much more clearly what they sing than natural voices. However, they are somewhat harsh and often lack intonation, so that instead of being well cultivated they seem to be faded [passé] in nature. In addition I cannot avoid mentioning in passing an error all too common in the world concerning certain falsetto voices . . . whether because one is set awry in spirit or perhaps because these sorts of voice are in some fashion against Nature, it is easy to scorn them and to speak ill of those who possess such voices. Although upon reflection one must observe that they owe everything in their vocal art to their voices thus elevated in falsetto, which renders certain ports de voix, certain intervals and other charms of singing quite differently than the tenor voice.

Bacilly distinguished different qualities of voices—pretty, good, light, big, expressive, brilliant—but viewed them as qualities in different singers, not incorporated in one voice. The French recognized the individual variety in the human voice and felt that not every singer was equally suited to every type of expression.

Bacilly considered the following to be vocal faults: singing in the nose; poor voice projection; poor trills and accents; placing ornaments incorrectly, such as at the end of a song; executing runs with the tongue and with unevenness and rushing (avec certaine inégalité & précipitation); poor pronunciation; and confusing long and
short syllables. Bacilly preferred to hear the musical talents of a singer rather than the vocal quality in and of itself.

Both Mersenne and Bacilly identified four general voice types: basse (or bassetaille), taille, haute-contre, and dessus. Of these four, the haute-contre has been the least well understood and was for Lully perhaps the most important, for he wrote many title roles for this voice type, reflecting the French preference for higher voices of both sexes. It is generally accepted today that the French haute-contre was not a falsetto voice, but a very high natural one with a range from g to a', extending occasionally to b'.

The French stressed the qualities of intonation, evenness, clarity, flexibility, sweetness, sonority, and body in the ideal singing voice. French singing was expressive in the small, highly nuanced details of text delivery—especially in the consonants— and ornamentation. There was a clear demarcation between principal notes
and notes of ornamentation. This is a vocal aesthetic substantially different from that cultivated by modern singing methods.

(by A Performer's Guide to Seveteenth-Century Music)