Messa di voce

Messa di voce (Italian: placing of the voice) is a singing technique and musical ornament most idiomatically on a single pitch while executing a crescendo and diminuendo. It requires sustained control and masterly singing technique. It should not be confused with mezza voce, meaning to sing at half voice or half strength.

Technique
The messa di voce is widely considered an advanced vocal technique. To be properly executed, the only feature of the note being sung that should change is the volume, not the pitch, intonation, timbre, or vibrato. This requires an extremely high level of vocal coordination, particularly in the diminuendo. Thus the technique is not often explicitly indicated and is heard infrequently outside classical music. Currently the only known use case outside of classical music is in relation to trans voice work.

History
In Western art music, the messa di voce was historically associated with castrati. In the seicento, they performed both sacred and secular music. The papal court employed them in dramatic religious music, sometimes to promote religious conversion, as opera became a distinct genre. Popes and princes hired them from the Sistine Chapel.

In the preface to Le nuove musiche (1602), Giulio Caccini detailed techniques of a new style of singing. He described the messa di voce as a "crescere e scemare la voce" ("crescendo and decrescendo of the voice") and linked it to vocal pedagogy as the main way to master intonation. Its use was expressive, not merely ornamental, technical, or virtuosic.

Domenico Mazzocchi was likely first to mark it in a score. He applied it twice, using the symbol, in the 1638 Lagrime amare: la Maddalena ricorre alle lagrime of his Dialoghi e sonetti. In its three-page "Avvertimento sopra il precedente sonetto" ("Note on the previous sonnet"), Mazzocchi asked for performance "scritto à rigore" ("strictly as written"). With, Mazzocchi still permitted shifts in pitch, describing the execution as involving a quarter-tone rise in the crescendo. The symbol, he wrote, denoted "to raise the voice only in volume and spirit". Loreto Vittori plausibly performed the Lagrime amare for Urban VIII in 1640.

By the eighteenth century, Martha Feldman argued, the technique was a castrato hallmark entailing masterly breath control. Having visited Italy, Charles Burney wrote in his 1789 General History of Music that "none of all Farinelli's excellencies ... so far surpassed all other singers, and astonished the public, as his messa di voce, or swell". Farinelli's messa di voce inspired disbelief and even suspicion that he was somehow assisted by a musical instrument. Thus music historian Bonnie Gordon argued that the technique was also associated with instruments, to which singers were compared in terms of vocal control.

In singing the roles of castrati (most popularly in Baroque opera), mezzo-sopranos and countertenors later adopted the technique.

It was popular in bel canto opera, often as the opening dramatic flourish of arias. "Casta diva" from Bellini's Norma is a famous example. Verdi's "Pace! Pace, mio Dio", from La Forza del destino, is a later example in the transition from bel canto singing. Messa di voce became less common in the less stylized, speech-like singing of Romantic music of the mid- and late nineteenth century.

In the popular music of the West, messa di voce became even less common. It occasionally featured in some ornate styles, especially gospel and its stylistic descendents.

Examples in recorded repertoire

 * Handel's Alcina, Act II, "Qual portento" (Anna Bonitatibus as Ruggiero, Marc Minkowski conducting Les Musiciens du Louvre, Pentatone 5187084)