Posted on 05/25/2018 9:42:50 AM PDT by Morgana
The Carpenters were one of the biggest-selling American musical acts of all time. Between 1970 and 1984 brother and sister Richard and Karen Carpenter had 17 top 20 hits, including "Goodbye to Love", "Yesterday Once More", "Close to You" and "Rainy Days and Mondays". They notched up 10 gold singles, nine gold albums, one multi-platinum album and three Grammy awards. Karen's velvety voice and Richard's airy melodies and meticulously crafted arrangements stood in direct contrast to the louder, wilder rock dominating the rest of the charts at the time, yet they became immensely popular, selling more than 100m records.
Richard was the musical driving force but it was Karen's effortless voice that lay behind the Carpenters' hits. Promoted from behind the drums to star vocalist, she became one of the decade's most instantly recognisable female singers.
But there was a tragic discrepancy between her public and private selves. Offstage, away from the spotlight, she felt desperately unloved by her mother, Agnes, who favoured Richard, and struggled with low self-esteem, eventually developing anorexia nervosa from which she never recovered. She died at the age of 32.
In 1996 journalist Rob Hoerburger powerfully summed up Karen Carpenter's tribulations in a New York Times Magazine feature: "If anorexia has classically been defined as a young woman's struggle for control, then Karen was a prime candidate, for the two things she valued most in the world – her voice and her mother's love – were exclusively the property of her brother Richard. At least she would control the size of her own body." And control it she did. By September 1975 her weight fell to 6st 7lb (41kg).
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
I don’t understand their weight conversions.
6 stone = 84lbs.
41 Kg = 90.38lbs.
Oops, I read it wrong, they’re correct
I thought a cubit was the distance from the king’s nose to the end of his middle finger if he held his arm out straight, and a yard was two cubits—from one middle finger to the other if both arms were held out straight.
Whitney Houston
Janis Joplin, only 27........both who also died tragically at their own hands.......
Then there was Patsy Cline - only 30 years old when she died in a plane crash.
To her credit, her impact in music history was only 3 albums and only five and a half years in the industry. She seems to have been the most well balanced of all of them.......
The second factor is the shape of the facial mask, for it is the upper partial tones that resonate--more so than the pitch of intonation--and determine the richness of the vowel sounds produced by the vocal cords, just as the body of a violin or guitar gives richness to the plucking of a string. The leaner and more muscular the face muscles, the better the sweetness of the sound.
Over many years I have seen some of the finest male bass voices are possessed by runty, skinny-lean, men to whom genetics has contributed (apparently) longer span to their vocal cords, and a thin, but well-hardened masque.
For those individuals whose occupation depends on the quality of one's speaking or singing, the strengthening of the voice box and its sound-generating components yields a richness from its use that you generally do not find in the common person.
And there is something in the heart that responds with a pleasurable and sympathetic reaction of the hearer when the thoughts that one wishes to project are ride in the vehicle of those rich sounds. You have to be an apt and alert singer to realize how good it makes one feel to produce the practiced, room-filling tones that please you to the tip of your toes the way they are coming out. It is like a drug--so desirable that you just want to keep on with it, more so tha with a habit-forming drug. Any real singer knows that eating prior to performing quenches the production of those pleasurable tones; the more you eat beforehand, the worse it gets, and it hits heaviest in the lower ranges.
And so, after rehearing Miss Carpenter again, and rejoicing with her own joy of singing, it is no mystery at all to me why she might be more overwhelmed by the complimentary effects of refusing to overeat that makes the fame of ones performance so enjoyable--like an assiction--to the point ato which it becomes dysfunctional and fatal, in the end.
It seems to me that assigning the consequences to a domineering mother can be overdoing the Freudian aspect way too far overboard.
Enriching those lower tones is where not only the money, but to the singer the pure rush of sensory satisfaction, lies the desire to follow whatever makes it possible.
Speaking as an amateur, but also as a researcher, these are within my experience in publicly performing and competing. Probably the most informative opus that I have run across is the volume "On the Sensations of Tone: The Theory of Music" (click here), by Hermann von Helmholtz (click here), not only an experienced physician, but an acclaimed physicist as well (who formulated the Helmholtz Free Energy principle), and attained recognition as a practical psychologist as well. I suspect anyone with n interest in musicology would have read it through, as I did about fifty years ago.
Poor Miss Carpenter, but she did not go to her grave without the super-intese thrill of being gifted with, and consciously immersed and fully fulfilling the potential of the vocal experiece of entertaining and being publicly honored for her use of that gift.
I do hope that somehow she would have come into the knowledge of trust in Christ for her eternal reward. Oh, what she could teach others that have gone there, into God's presence!
Make believe it’s your first time, and I’ll make believe it’s mine. I burst out crying when I heard that line.
Why posting this 8 year old article today?
I think her voice was lower than his.,
But in opera, they have what are called countertenors. They’re pretty much up there in Bee Gee rang, but their natural range is usually baritone. David Daniels is perhaps teh most prominent operatic countertenor.
(BTW, I do a pretty good Bee Gee. I’m told it sounds like Maurice.)
I felt the same way!
Have you told that to opera singers?
I know; I’m in the choir at church. (Bass section.)
It’s interesting how the Carpenters got their first hit. This is the story Karen told on the summer replacement TV show they had.
In 1963, Burt Bacharach and Hal David had written a song. They gave it to Dionne Warwick with no results, so they tried a few other singers. Nothing. They even tried giving it to the actor Richard Chamberlain for an album of essentially talk-singing he was doing. Nothing.
Now, they were with A&M Records, and the A in A&M was Herb Alpert of the Tijuana Brass. Burt was talking to Herb one day and kind of complaining about that song and why it hadn’t gone anywhere.
“Well,” said Herb, “I have these kids I just signed. They just won the Battle of the Bands at the Hollywood Bowl. I think they could do a great job with your song.”
“What can it hurt?”, Burt said.
So Herb Alpert passed the song along to them. Richard arranged it, because he knew how to arrange perfectly for his sister’s voice. It was called “Close to You.”
Thank you.
People hear Karen’s lovely voice, and they don’t appreciate what an excellent arranger her brother was.
“We’ve Only Just Begun” was a Crocker Bank commercial. Richard recognized its potential as a pop song.
Fairly quickly in succession, they had “Close to You”, “We’ve Only Just Begun”, “For All We Know”, and “Rainy Days and Mondays” and they were established stars.
(BTW, when my mother heard “For All We Know”, she said Karen reminded her of a Big Band singer named Margaret Whiting.)
Trivia: “For All We Know” was the theme from what movie?
“Karen Carpenter’s voice was liquid gold; one of the greatest voices of all time.”
She did a cover of “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina,” that I love. It’s on YouTube I’m pretty sure.
Another woman with a perfect voice was Linda Ronstadt. Her rendition of “Skylark” is one of my favorites.
You mentioned Janis Joplin. Above is a link to a song from Jefferson Airplane's first album with Signe Anderson singing “Chauffeur Blues”. Different style, but what a voice!
“Lovers and Other Strangers” (1970).
Opera musicians know much more about the physics of their trade than amateurs like myself do. But they are on a different wavelength than Broadway musical singers, who themselves are different in their genre than popular music stars. The Carpenters did not have to conform to demands of other arrangers when the brother could shift the keys and the tempo to find the best one for any song such that the vowel sounds and breathing fitted the resonances of his sister's voice.
Perhaps you have not experienced the sense of muffling and stifling that comes from having a melody played in the wrong key (even a half note the wrong way) and/or in an environment for which the resonances are not fit for the song or one's voice. Matching the elements is a science of its own, for which the composer can only partially compensate. You'd be surprised why so many songs are arranged in B-flat, F, or G for the Western human voice.
There is much more about the business of musicianship than the lay person is likely to comprehend. Living with it as a source of income and talent development sets the practitioners apart, often not able or willing to go into all the details with the consumers of their art.
Thanks for sharing this story. Sounds like a Paul Harvey tale, with the best part at the end, eh?
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