Episode 34 - Vineel Mahal

I went to undergrad at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

And...

I was in choir all throughout there, worked under the wonderful director, Dr. Pamela L. Rod Huffman.

She introduced me to a lot of very beautiful choral music.

And then in grad school, I had...

So in the West, we have these things called voice parts.

I mean, in choir, you have soprano, alto, tenor, bass.

In the opera world, we kind of expand things.

You very rarely will call a singer an alto if they're an opera singer.

They will either be a mezzo or a mezzo-soprano.

That's what that's short for.

um, middle soprano, or they'll, they'll be a contralto, contralto, uh, which is a bit of a rarer voice part.

It's, um, usually assigned female at birth person who sings very low.

Um, A very thrilling type of voice.

We have tenors, baritones and basses as well.

But there are even different classifications of those.

We have like leggero tenor, which is a lighter, higher voice, dramatic tenor, which is a bit heavier, maybe a bit louder.

Helden tenor, which is basically a baritone who just pushes really hard.

I'm oversimplifying.

Don't come at me, opera people.

And all these different classifications.

There's a very special classification called a countertenor.

A countertenor is a person with thick vocal folds, often assigned male at birth, who will sing in their falsetto.

or mode two, a lot of pedagogues will call, not the heavier mechanism that many people use for speaking.

This sort of lighter voice, some people will speak up here, every now and then I do, but...