(Fr.).
A textless vocal exercise or concert piece to be sung to one or more vowels. The vocalise derives from two traditions. One dates from the early 19th century, when it became customary to perform and publish solfeggi and essercizi with piano accompaniment (e.g. Domenico Corri, The Singer's Preceptor, 1810; Manuel García, Traité complet de l’art du chant, 1840–47/R); by the middle of the century there were numerous publications of this kind. The singing instructor Heinrich Panofka, for example, published during his years in Paris five volumes of vocalises. The idea was that with a piano accompaniment even the most mechanical exercises would be performed in a more artistic manner. The other tradition was that of using existing compositions as vocal exercises without words. In 1755 Jean-Antoine Bérard provided, as a supplement to his L’art du chant, 20 compositions by Lully, Rameau and others, selected for the technical problems they offered (‘pour les sons tendres, légers, maniérés, majestueux’ etc.), and he added specific instructions as to how these problems were to be solved. In the 19th century most instruction manuals for the voice included original compositions specially composed for the same purpose: ‘melodies without words, offering the pupil a union of all the difficulties of song’ (García). Unlike the accompanied solfeggi, these were not just exercises but genuine compositions, though they seldom merited performance before an audience.
In 1848 Spohr wrote a Sonatina for voice and piano in which the voice is used very much like a solo instrument (a violin or a flute), but it was not until the early 20th century that leading composers turned in any great number to the vocalise as a concert piece. At first the genre was particularly cultivated in France (Fauré's Vocalise-étude and Ravel's Vocalise-étude en forme de habanera date from 1907), but it soon caught the attention of Italian composers, including Casella, Cilea, Giordano and Respighi. Among the most frequently performed works of this kind are Rachmaninoff's Vocalise op.34 no.14 (1912) and Vaughan Williams's Three Vocalises for soprano and clarinet (1958); the most ambitious are Medtner's Sonate-Vocalise and Suite-Vocalise op.41 (?1922–6). In the second half of the 20th century many composers produced one or two such works: among these are Peter Racine Fricker's Vocalise (1965) and Michael Finnissy's Songs.
The term ‘vocalization’ has been reserved by composers and singing teachers for the singing of vocalises (e.g. in the title of Crescentini's Raccolta di esercizi per il canto all’uso del vocalizzo, c1810), but it is often used in a more general sense for the practice of singing to vowel sounds or with closed lips (see Bocca chiusa and Cantilena (ii)). Vocalization in this sense may be for solo voice, as in Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony, or for chorus, as in Debussy's ‘Sirènes’ from the Nocturnes and Holst's The Planets. To use the word, as some have done, for the melismas of Gregorian chant and the coloratura of 18th-century opera is to dilute its usefulness as a musical term. For a discussion of the technique as applied to jazz, see Vocalese.
L.W. Stickler: Concert Vocalises for Solo Voice: a Selective Study (DMA diss., Indiana U., 1989)
K.S. Chilcote: The Vocalise Art Song (DMA diss., U. of Oregon, 1991)
K.R. DeJardin: The Accompanied Vocalise and its Application to Selected Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Twentieth-Century Songs and Arias (DMA diss., U. of Arizona, 1992)
OWEN JANDER