This article by Jeffrey Charles Palmer was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 6 March 2020. To see the article in full, click here.
Jeffrey Palmer at Carnegie Hall, photographed by Geraldine Petrovic
I’ve always known that I could sing. Ever since I began spinning around the living room singing along to Handel’s Messiah at the age of three or four, people seemed to take note.
Like many young boys, my voice was rather high, soaring to heights well beyond the soprano high C. However, I found what made me slightly different from other children was my capacity to match pitch, memorise more complex melodies, and achieve a strength and clarity within the sound I produced – all of which laid the foundations for the career path I would one day pursue.
Shortly after I began formally studying voice around the age of nine, my teacher brought me in to sing the Pie Jesu as part of a performance of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem mass. Any nerves I felt leading up to the performance melted away as soon as the first few notes escaped my lips. I was home, and the reaction of all those listening made it even more apparent to me that this is what I was meant to be doing.
A few short years later, however, another theme emerged to combat the praise for the height and “sweet” timbre of my voice to which I had become accustomed: I was suddenly being questioned as to why I chose to “sing like a girl”, not only by my peers at school, but by adults.
I was completely caught off guard. Not only had my voice not gone through any sort of a change yet, but in no way did I feel that what I was doing had anything to do with alignment with a specific gender. I simply felt I was using whatever gift I had been given, in the purest and most authentic way.
In my early teens, the confusion and occasional bullying that my voice elicited from some, including individuals I loved and respected, caused me a great deal of inner turmoil. Why was doing something that felt so natural causing others to spout off such vitriol? Why were some deeming it better for me to sing in a way that was uncomfortable, and at times even painful, in order to better blend in with the boys?
I’m incredibly grateful that, for whatever reason, I never wavered in my inner belief that I was doing the right thing, but that certainly didn’t make handling the criticism easy. I started to wait, with a strange mix of apprehension and longing, for the day my voice would change. I would certainly mourn the loss of my soprano, but at least I would no longer stand out so much as something “unnatural”.
Little did I know, my voice had other plans.
Unlike most adolescent boys, my voice never broke. During my teen years, my voice gradually deepened and took on a richer tone, but no morning ever dawned when I woke up to find my voice had dropped by two octaves. At 18, that soprano high C was still there.
During this period, I studied with some truly fantastic teachers who encouraged me to take advantage of the fact that the transition into my adult voice was so seamless, and to continue to use my upper register. And thus, a countertenor was born.
The confusion my voice had caused certainly didn’t evaporate as I got older, but the vast majority of audiences I sang for continued to resonate with what I was doing. This was in part, I’m quite sure, due to my assuredness in that what I was doing was right.
I’ve found that people, no matter their background or experience, tend to respond to truth, whether they fully understand what they’re witnessing or not.
By the time I moved from Virginia to England in 2006 to study music at university, I had fully embraced the countertenor identity. The wonderful music faculty at Bath Spa University allowed me to sing with the sopranos in the choir, at my request, and did all they could to help me more deeply explore the countertenor repertoire, which I found exhilarating.
However, that exhilaration soon began to diminish as I discovered that what was deemed “appropriate” for countertenors to sing was rather limited in scope.
I have been fortunate in more recent years to collaborate with composers writing exciting new works for countertenor, as well as curate my own series of recitals around the world full of music I simply love to sing. In addition to the masterfully crafted works by Handel, Purcell, and Britten in the countertenor canon, I have peppered my repertoire with everything from romantic pieces for mezzo-soprano, to Irish folk music, to songs by Björk.
I know where my voice shines, and it is far more important for me to sing pieces that allow it to do so than to worry about fitting into any sort of box.
While being a countertenor does perhaps allow one to stand out a bit more than other singers, one is easily attacked from both sides, as it were. On the one hand, the classical purists may scoff at a countertenor who sings anything outside of the traditional repertoire, while the outside world questions why a man would choose to sing in such a “feminised, unnatural” way.
I’ve been asked if I’d been castrated, if I take hormonal supplements, and have had endured countless assumptions made about my sexuality and lifestyle simply because of how I sing.
Yet, the simple fact that, after hearing me sing, so many individuals who were self-proclaimed “countertenor un-enthusiasts” have had their opinion on the matter turned upside down completely outweighs any negativity I’ve encountered. From the mountains of Tennessee, to the streets of Ukraine, to Carnegie Hall, the overall reaction to what I am doing remains largely the same. When I sing and truly believe in what I am singing, it resonates with people.
Music, and particularly the human voice, has a way of transcending culture, time, national boundary, and political ideology. The music one chooses to sing, whatever it may be, should be used as a vehicle for one’s voice to touch human hearts in the most authentic way possible. That is the point of art.
So, the next time you hear someone singing in a way not exactly expected, don’t be too hasty to dismiss it. If you really listen with an open mind and open heart, after a moment or two, you’ll know if what you are hearing is the truth.
And if it is, let it be.