Classicalism: On The Performance Of Vocality In Musicals

Opera, as a mature artistic genre, has experienced centuries of prosperity, and has inevitably left some influences upon the singing of musicals. These influences speak properly for themselves since Bel canto as an operatic style has developed a set of scientific sounding mechanism after hundreds years of evolution and growth. Its features include meandering breath, relaxed smoothness, natural spontaneity, clear articulation, unified cohesion, and a consistent harmony of sound quality. It plays a very significant role in musical performances. However, Bel canto arose in the operatic era and causes the modern-day musicals to differ essentially from the opera since it pursues more up-to-date and approachable sound. The singing in musicals, inheriting and developing the Bel canto style, bases itself on bel canto, adopting natural, relaxed and high-pitch-biased blended chest breath output with short time consumption; lyrical in expresion and pure in emotion, it demands no great skill of vocality or wide-ranging sound register since it mostly lies in mezzo area, smooth in breath and articulate in singing.In the recent 100 years, the opera has been more and more treated as "the spring snow", preserved in the art palace. It has the few representative creation works, which can be truly appreciated by rare audience. Because this kind of audience must has the certain opera general knowledge and musical self-control. It needs the audience to meet the certain requirements of esthetic, therefore, most of its audience are called "the colleagues". Simultaneously, with the after-industrialization time changing into the information time, the movie, television, network has exerted the profound influence on the masses and changed people's esthetic demand to great extent. The trend of entertainment became broader. People can obtain the information from one kind of artistic form. Therefore, the musical gradually occupied the opera market share and became the mainstream of modern music plays because of its modern characteristics of fashion, popularity and so on.