I wasn’t quite sure what to make my first post for this new adventure. But in the past couple of weeks, the subject of the passaggio has been coming up a lot. So I’ve decided to take that as a hint and start this adventure with this topic. It’s a pesky topic! Much has been written about it and everywhere there are charts and videos. Which is why I thought I would devote more than one post to it. I will start with this one and I will simplify for those of you who maybe are reading this having not yet studied a whole lot about voice.

The passaggio is quite literally “the passage.” It’s that part of your voice where you feel like the voice wants to break from one kind of sound into another. What happens is, whether you’re male or female, the voice moves from chest resonance to head resonance or falsetto. For those of you who are lay persons, that would be sounds close to your normal speaking voice and then that kind of airy, high angelic quality you might make to sound like a boy soprano. In between those two worlds, we have the passaggio. This is where the voice has to MIX what we call “registration” in order to go between these two acoustic worlds.

Each voice has their break in a different place and there are many charts and a lot of literature out there explaining where it happens and how and what you should do. Again, more on that soon. For today I just want to leave you with two videos of two famous singers discussing what they think about passaggio. These are IDEAS, ADVICE and their interpretations of what they feel and have learned. Watch and observe. But don’t consider this the be all and end all. For YOU, this may not feel quite right. But hopefully this will give some clarification.

One last note… In the Pavarotti video, he discusses covering. This notion of “covering” is also a bit complex. I believe when someone is singing well they’re doing some version of it even if they don’t call it covering. I myself, prefer not to use the term “covering” even though I agree with what he’s doing in the video. It matters more how it’s feeling and functioning than what you call it, ultimately.