Tessitura and ambitus
“Seth Riggs explained us that he wanted to record an album of lyrical songs with Michael Jackson,
When Seth Riggs met Michael Jackson, the latter already owned a very broad ambitus. Quincy Jones, the artist’s producer and arranger, wanted at that time to reduce by a minor third the tone of some songs of the album ‘Off the wall’ so as to give the singer’s voice more ease, suppleness and a timbre richer at the register’s extremities. So Seth Riggs worked to further broaden the singer’s ambitus and made him gain another fourth. Over daily sessions, his method of work and the exercises he required him to carry out had a view to (and this is an essential element of Seth Riggs’s Speech Level Singing) gaining and retaining a vocal homogeneity on all his tessitura – Michael Jackson’s one ranged from E1 to G#4 without resorting to head voice or falsetto – erasing the color interruptions and sensations of going from one register to the other. Cultivating, all along his career, the melodic, clear and expressive vocality of a tenor but also of a baritone, Michael Jackson even started working on the French lyric repertoire, although this work has remained unedited for strategic commercial reasons.
Apart from this work on ambitus and equality between registers, the goals fixed by Seth Riggs were acquiring and maintaining vibrating tones by means of a constant harmonic balance and a relaxation vibrato allowing the artist to sing without being tired. Many exercises had also a view to managing the breathing, which was essential for the dancer.
We have to underline that the choice of Seth Riggs as a vocal coach clearly fell within Michael Jackson’s quest of authenticity, since his method of work, although generically called Speech Level Singing, allows him to tailor and respect his pupils’ vocal specificities.
Resonance
So with his vocal technique, Michael Jackson covered the resonance stratums evoked by Allan F. Moore linked to the voice’s physical localization: head voice, nasal voice or chest voice. By erasing the changes of register, he allowed a unicity of transversal vocal emission that was contrary to the association that was generally admitted for pop music singers in terms of timbre inequality.
An emblematic example of this sounding head voice is the song « Don’t stop ‘til you get enough »
If the voice’s nasal position is seldom taken into account in Michael Jackson’s habits, the head voice is far more used although very often imperceptible thanks to a homogeneous management during the change of register. This head voice, confined to a very high-pitched tessitura no more goes with a loss of clarity and vocal strength than the extremely low-pitched chest voice of a song such as ‘2000 watts.’ It is worth highlighting that Michael Jackson’s use of a de-toned head voice is due, in the few existing cases, to environmental or emotional reasons and not to a technical flaw – part of the work with Seth Riggs being focused on the vocal enrichment of vowels and their purified and distinct enunciation, even in the far ends of the tessitura.
Tessitura and ambitus
Seth Riggs explained us that he wanted to record an album of lyrical songs with Michael Jackson,
When Seth Riggs met Michael Jackson, the latter already owned a very broad ambitus. Quincy Jones, the artist’s producer and arranger, wanted at that time to reduce by a minor third the tone of some songs of the album ‘Off the wall’ so as to give the singer’s voice more ease, suppleness and a timbre richer at the register’s extremities. So Seth Riggs worked to further broaden the singer’s ambitus and made him gain another fourth. Over daily sessions, his method of work and the exercises he required him to carry out had a view to (and this is an essential element of Seth Riggs’s Speech Level Singing) gaining and retaining a vocal homogeneity on all his tessitura – Michael Jackson’s one ranged from E1 to G#4 without resorting to head voice or falsetto – erasing the color interruptions and sensations of going from one register to the other. Cultivating, all along his career, the melodic, clear and expressive vocality of a tenor but also of a baritone, Michael Jackson even started working on the French lyric repertoire, although this work has remained unedited for strategic commercial reasons.
Apart from this work on ambitus and equality between registers, the goals fixed by Seth Riggs were acquiring and maintaining vibrating tones by means of a constant harmonic balance and a relaxation vibrato allowing the artist to sing without being tired. Many exercises had also a view to managing the breathing, which was essential for the dancer.
We have to underline that the choice of Seth Riggs as a vocal coach clearly fell within Michael Jackson’s quest of authenticity, since his method of work, although generically called Speech Level Singing, allows him to tailor and respect his pupils’ vocal specificities.
Resonance
So with his vocal technique, Michael Jackson covered the resonance stratums evoked by Allan F. Moore linked to the voice’s physical localization: head voice, nasal voice or chest voice. By erasing the changes of register, he allowed a unicity of transversal vocal emission that was contrary to the association that was generally admitted for pop music singers in terms of timbre inequality.
An emblematic example of this sounding head voice is the song « Don’t stop ‘til you get enough »
If the voice’s nasal position is seldom taken into account in Michael Jackson’s habits, the head voice is far more used although very often imperceptible thanks to a homogeneous management during the change of register. This head voice, confined to a very high-pitched tessitura no more goes with a loss of clarity and vocal strength than the extremely low-pitched chest voice of a song such as ‘2000 watts.’ It is worth highlighting that Michael Jackson’s use of a de-toned head voice is due, in the few existing cases, to environmental or emotional reasons and not to a technical flaw – part of the work with Seth Riggs being focused on the vocal enrichment of vowels and their purified and distinct enunciation, even in the far ends of the tessitura.”
