Mister Opera Takeover

‪@MisterOpera‬ analysis of "Desdemona" and Borna's most famous video

[@jimmychoo1857]

Guys this is not THIS IS OPERA . This is not opera at all. This guy never heard any great singer live. Hope he will not confuse any serious student with his stupid sententions

[@MisterOpera]

Which great singers have you heard live, and when and where, "jimmy Choo"?

[@delfajudith6930]

Thank you Jimmy. You are absolutely right.

[@MisterOpera]

20:00 is that good singing?

[@Thisisopera]

Digging up their singing is a bit low, @misteropera. It doesn't matter who is singing at 20:30 and if she was an original member and creator.

[@tinkerwithstuff]

Playing a solo match of channel pingpong while being misleading about it would be in character, sure.

[@michaelgeiger4043]

I watched nearly every This Is Opera video. First of all, I always got a sense, by reading carefully the accompanying texts, that the authors were non-english speakers. Their use of grammar etc., always looked like they were ESL people. Second of all, I came away from watching their videos, with an understanding that they were mostly about lamenting the lack of complete vocal training in modern opera singing. Before retiring, I spent 24 years on the opera stage. My home theater was a 3100 seat house originally designed for orchestral music but taken over by our opera company (50 million/year standard budget) when the orchestra moved to their new space. I heard hundreds of singers up close and personal on that stage and I came away from watching This Is Opera generally agreeing with their main point(s). When you play those clips at about the 30:00 mark, you are focusing on the audio aspect which you reveal as disingenuous. That's fine, but I don't think that's the point of the exercise from the TiO perspective. To my recollection, they were focusing on the lack of proper mode 1 (chest voice, voce di petto, heavy register, whatever you want to call it) training in young modern singers. You can detect the issues no matter what the amplitude of the audio signal. There are myriad examples of vocally underdeveloped female singers, for example, attempting to sing those notes from about f#4 on down who do so without proper development of the muscles necessary to produce those tones with appropriate vigor, and apparently without the knowledge that the pharyngeal resonators need still to be wide open when singing down there. One of the best examples of this is that famous video of Callas in a master class trying to convey this idea to a young singer (using this very aria, if I'm not mistaken) to show what she called "cover" or some other term to describe the chiaroscuro configuration necessary to achieve that big, giant, glorious, spacious and, most importantly, resonant, sound which is most desirable for this type of singing in this particular register in this particular style. I found the link! Their main concern seems to be that modern singers aren't being taught how to operate in that register and that is why we don't hear exciting singing anymore. Or very little exciting singing anyway. An aside, I found your Samson sound to be pretty exciting apart from the surrounding curtain and your lack of long hair! :) kzbin.info/www/bejne/a4DGeY2bbbNqetE&ab_channel=Thisisopera%21ARCHIVE

[@rjhe2894]

The conclusion is there is no more "this is opera!!!"

[@Thisisopera]

Riiiight, and also this isn't a computer and this isn't the planet earth and we aren't here. Since TiO broke objective/subjective, I guess nothing is anything and this isn't this.

[@sobeto28]

By the way, what happened to Brett? Did the virus get him? He was histrionic, to say the least, but was a much more honest individual than you. Even with all the coke and putang he enjoyed in Thailand as ways to have clouded his judgment. Ps: If you read this, Brett, I was just joking.

[@Thisisopera]

Are you talking about one of the original members?

[@sobeto28]

@@Thisisopera Brett, aka L'uomo del loggionr, who helped you (Castagner) take them down.

[@Thisisopera]

As far as we know, they imploded due to their own internal problems. Nobody "took them down".

[@MisterOpera]

​​@@Thisisoperawow, this sure blew up! I actually did a video some time after they went down, explaining it was really the internal scandals that took them out. For my channel, it was a dark day, because Mister Opera was built on pointing out their bullshit.

[@Thisisopera]

@misteropera please watch the language in our comments section. You're a guest here and we expect you to act accordingly.

[@KajiVocals]

Thank you Philippe. Much appreciated.

[@MisterOpera]

Thank TiO for letting me take over for a day

[@tinkerwithstuff]

"discerning good from bad singing cannot be objective" - not as-is, but if you agree to certain base premises, and I am rather certain a lot of people would, then it could. Among those might be: next to more obvious things like being well enough on pitch, having a too wide or/and uneven vibrato so as to make it uinclear what note is sung etc: Also, no weird alterations to sound quality popping up in portions of a singers range that indicate technical struggle and take away from the emotions to be conveyed for the piece, including losing focus in the sound / spectral spreading at the top of the range, pinching and squeezing noises, souding like Kermit the frog, and so forth... This is no different than trying to objectively assess _anything_ at all. Basic premises need to be agreed upon.

[@MisterOpera]

"losing focus in the sound". I'm interested in that. You claim it's objective? Can you confirm that you believe there's an objective quality you fall "focus"? Can you tell me what measurment you can use to confirm focus objectively? How about the objective and measurable qualites I discussed in the live stream? Those have measurements to go with them. For instance, metal in the voice can be measured with an EGG, or by inverse filtering you can get it from the original signal. That's equally true for clarity as I defined it (contact quotient). You maybe can't measure it on an old recording, but certainly you can measure those things TODAY and train your ear to identify them consistently. I'll play. Let's see what you can REALLY tell me about objective qualities of singing voices, and then we can see whether you really ever had a reason to be talking this way. If you're making up garbage about objective qualities that don't actually exist, is it possible you're actually part of the problem and always have been since you started making comments? If it turns out the things you say have been a mistake this whole time, are you willing to change? Or is the very idea of someone telling YOU that you're wrong almost unthinkable, or a sign of madness? Let's work it out. One or both of us is wrong. Who is it?

[@MisterOpera]

Here's what I found about what focus is, objectively, when talking about light: geometrical optics, a focus, also called an image point, is a point where light rays originating from a point on the object converge.[1] Although the focus is conceptually a point, physically the focus has a spatial extent, called the blur circle. Now you tell me what your focused sound is. Objectively.

[@michaelgeiger4043]

a focused sound is non-noisy - not breathy - efficient - with certain harmonic attenuations in place according to style. sort of like the CVT modes curbing, overdrive and edge but with pharyngeal spaces open and un-perturbed except for the vowel configurations at hand. That's my rough understanding at the moment @@MisterOpera

[@MisterOpera]

@@michaelgeiger4043 I agree, that seems like a very rough understanding. With a heaping side of word salad.

[@DCBfanboy]

​@@michaelgeiger4043Don't worry about that guy, he's a rude idiot. He insults everyone everywhere he goes, and really never makes a point. As someone who values rigorous reasoning, I agree with you : we need the premises. The premises technically _are_ debatable, but it should be more or less obvious that the singer must have good diction (=clear vowels), have a strong enough voice to carry over the orchestra, and a timbre that's not either really "screechy" or too "woofy" to the point where the voice sounds extremely unnatural. But then again, I suppose it is debatable.

[@babk7964]

Thank you, it was a useful article . 🙏

[@Thisisopera]

We are trying to give both "sides" of the "debate" a way to present their view, so the audience can decide for themselves. Unfortunately, none of the original members want to be associated with TiO, and the people currently leading their "claque" just don't have the courage to sign their names to anything. Hopefully someone with a spine will contact us. We can even make the stream key available for live videos. Unfortunately we can't give the key to anyone anonymous, and also we can't allow anonymous people to post videos responding to someone who is in plain view. [e-mail]

[@babk7964]

@@Thisisopera your effort is correct don't worry 👍

[@bencopeland3560]

I'm gonna need the abridged version of this.

[@Thisisopera]

This guy talked about opera stuff.

[@bencopeland3560]

Do we get to the bottom of the girl he dragged? Is she actually This Is Opera or just collateral damage in his feud? @@Thisisopera

[@Thisisopera]

@bencopeland3560 Desdemona. Ask in the live chat.

[@michaelgeiger4043]

2:05:30 "quoque" Italianized Latin, it is an open o vowel, not closed the way you demonstrated, so it's not a substituted vowel, it is exactly the correct vowel. Admittedly, Jerry's Latin was not perfect as it might have been. Adding the glided (j or y) in the middle of the words "eus" (ejus) and "Deus" (Dejus) is a big American failing when handling this language.

[@MisterOpera]

You're confusing grammar with sound. He's got neither what you call closed o nor open o - it's an "a" vowel that is only slightly darkened. You could splice this vowel into another phrase that calls for the vowel "a" on this pitch, and it would work fine. The sounds used, if we put them in speech, would be something like mee-kee-kwa-kweh. He's using the vocal mode CVT calls edge. Like many before him and many after him, the oh vowel gets turned into "ah" and then the singer uses misdirection to make it seem like the right vowel. If you try this in the same vocal mode, but you insist on th vowel, one of two things will happen: your larynx will come up, or you'll reduce the density and metal and fall into the mode called "curbing" aka "all sweat no sound". I can understand not preferring this, and sticking to overdrive based approaches that work great with oh. But I can't understand insisting it was an unmodified oh - either closed or open. If someone said that to me, I would start thinking their hearing is very unsophisticated and untrained, or that they are very motivated to hear something they want to hear.

[@rodolfolomelig8349]

Yess!! everything I criticize from this is opera about the different samples they use, the new ones are detailed as hell and the old ones always sound as a fart with diarrhea.

[@SentryWater]

Yes!! You are back!

[@MisterOpera]

Who's that singing right after 21:30? 😂

[@misio15]

You’re back!!!!! ❤❤❤❤❤❤