If you’re walking down the street and some nosy reporter sticks a camera in your face and asks you to sing your favorite song, chances are good that you won’t sing the alto part–you’ll sing the melody. For most people, the melody is the song and all the other parts are simply there for backup.
A number of cosmic forces, some understood and some mystical, have combined to create a situation which is profoundly unfair: in a startlingly high percentage of cases the melody, the actual “song” in most people’s minds, is given to the sopranos. Not surprisingly, this persistent injustice has contributed significantly to the reputation of sopranos as smug and arrogant. The word “diva” has its roots in the Italian noun meaning “a female deity” and the secret motto of the Sisterhood of Sopranos (please don’t call them the “SS”) is based upon it: “DIVA: Dominate, Intimidate, Violate & Agitate.” Unfortunately, some sopranos have taken this image and run with it, leading to an occasionally prickly relationship between the sopranos on the one hand and the altos, tenors and basses on the other.
From the composer’s perspective, once the necessities of a good melody for the darling sopranos and a sensible bass line have both been provided for, the remaining pitches must be divided up between the tenors and the altos. As tenors are somewhat delicate creatures and are typically in short supply, they are therefore usually offered the smaller challenges. This leaves the awkward leaps and the difficult-to-find notes for the altos to negotiate. It also leads to situations in which the altos find themselves sitting on an E-flat for chord after chord, while all around them the other parts are winding through luscious harmonies and winning all the praise and attention. Then, just as sleep is about to claim them, the composer throws the altos a curve ball in the form of a leap to a new pitch so strange and remote, so unnatural and bizarre, that only a random number generator could love it. This happens with sufficient regularity that, over a period of time, altos simply learn to cope with it, and gradually become the best readers in the choir.
Your typical composer is no dummy. Knowing that the altos, having been prepared by singing all of these seemingly unrelated pitches, can handle most anything with grace and minimal complaint, it is an easy choice to rely on that resource day after day. And thus an alto line is born: the offspring of an advanced skill set and the needs of the music, it may resemble the sinuous slitherings of a drunken snake with a head cold finding its way through a tangle of yarn during a fog in darkest night, but it will allow the composer’s ideas to be presented with seeming ease and inevitability. All this will happen beneath the awareness of the listener and with a cool, effortless professionalism which the sopranos, tenors and basses can usually only envy.
And what sort of individual is drawn to this particular challenge? As a group, they tend to be fully as varied as any other section of the choir but they frequently hold in common a level of commitment and determination which makes them the Marines of the ensemble. So, when you have a note or an interval or, more likely, a whole series of them which you know would cast any other section of the choir into hopeless panic, quivering in their robes, send the altos. They’ll take that hill and the one beyond it and keep on advancing. It’s about all a composer can ask for.
But they don’t take prisoners.
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Because it is often quite subtle in a piece of music, the alto voice can be difficult to hear. It is not uncommon for the alto line to be written in a speaking range, which can get lost in the middle (though you miss us when we are not there). Once our choir director in college, in frustration at not being able to hear us, arranged the entire choir in SATB order around the room (NOT in the usual sections but actually blended together). He directed us to begin at a certain measure and then for the rest of the piece only the ALTOs could be heard. I admit to experiencing a huge amount of pride in that moment, not only could we sing our part, we could drown out the others (who did not know their parts well enough to be heard over the ALTOs).
As an Alto, I approve this message. ?
Amen!! As our beloved Maestro Salamunovich would say, the altos are the “hub” of the sound, the foundation of the choir, they can change the chord from Major to minor, they sweeten the tenors. They are warm honey. They are MY ALTOS!