Fricative

What it means

Fricative is a term from phonetics and designates a friction sound: a consonant in which the air flows through a narrowing in the mouth and thereby produces a rubbing noise. In German this includes, among others, f, w, s, sch, and ch. For singing the group is important because these sounds consume air, interrupt the flow of tone, and can be shaped in their duration — unlike stops, which are punctual.

Musical use

In the treatment of the text, the handling of fricatives decides intelligibility and sound. Executed too short they are lost in the room, too long or too strong they disturb the line and become unpleasant on recordings. In choral singing they must be spoken together, otherwise a hissing arises that tears the sound apart; that is why it is often fixed where exactly a final consonant falls. In the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, friction sounds are also used as material in their own right: whole passages consist of noise-like sounds without pitch, notated with signs of their own.

Performance practice

Form fricatives short and precise, and place the final consonant in the group on an agreed beat. Keep the airstream ready for the vowel so that the note stands immediately after the consonant. With s-sounds, watch for sparing execution, especially before a microphone. Practise text passages first spoken in rhythm to hear how much consonant is necessary. With contemporary works with noise-like sounds, settle beforehand how loud and how long these sounds are meant, because the notation for this is not uniform.

Bear in mind that fricatives at the end of a word are especially conspicuous in a choir: an unagreed s produces a hissing that tears the sound apart. Settle on which beat the final consonant falls and practise it separately. In a solo it holds that a fricative formed short and precisely is clearer than a long one. Before the microphone, sparing execution and a slightly off-axis stance are advisable.