Yes, it was. We haven't heard anything like it.
There is a funny story told. I don't know if it's true. According to the story, Karen and a friend of hers were driving somewhere with the radio on and she was singing along with all the songs on the radio. Her friend said, "You have a great soprano. Why don't you ever use it?"
To which Karen replied, "The money's in the basement."
There is a funny story told. I don’t know if it’s true. According to the story, Karen and a friend of hers were driving somewhere with the radio on and she was singing along with all the songs on the radio. Her friend said, “You have a great soprano. Why don’t you ever use it?”
To which Karen replied, “The money’s in the basement.”
...
I wonder if Barry Gibb knows that.
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!