What is a Tenor
The Kiwi Tenor: Finding My Voice, and Learning to Leave It Alone
Hi all, it's been a while!
Prewarning - this is a longer blog post than usual... and as usual these are my musings alone, if you make it to the end... leave a comment, I will be proud of you!
To give you the quick rundown of the past few months, here's a quick-fire round of recent events:
Found a room to rent in the City of Love, Paris: flexible, relatively low-cost, and, for the time being, bringing an end to two-and-a-bit years of nomadic life.
Competed in the Cesti International Baroque Opera Competition, ate my weight in strudel, made it to the semi-finals, and enjoyed a few particularly precious days afterwards in Linz with some very important people in my life.
Competed in the Renata Tebaldi International Voice Competition in San Marino, received some excellent feedback, and came away with the possibility of some exciting things on the horizon.
Sang in London and made my UK debut in 'The Rape of Lucretia' with fantastic cast, conductor, orchestra and more. (will pop a recording at the end)
Returned “home” — which still feels a little strange to say — and began preparing for what will be a rather minimal and quiet season, thanks to some pretty questionable events. Message me if you're curious.
I also started a boosted page, for anyone interested in supporting this journey...but...more on that later another day!
Phew. Quite a lot, really.
What I will also do now is take oppourtunity to 'announce' my season, which consists solely at this stage of a Bel Canto opera for Days Bay Opera in New Zealand in February, a recital near Valentines Day, a study cover in Germany and a return to a short tour of magic flute in Toulouse, and that is about it!
Theres a major difficulty felt when having a quiet season, but the upside to the significant financial stress and the unknown of it all is the space to think, create, and reflect and pre-prepare for what might be ahead...so... here we go!
And that brings me to what I'm working on now: planning a beautiful Valentine's Day recital for Wellington audiences next February, featuring tenor, violin and piano. As I begin putting the programme together, I've found myself thinking about the nature of the tenor voice, the expectations we place upon it, and the rather peculiar business of trying to make a voice into something it isn't.
More specifically, I've been thinking about what it means to sound like yourself.
A Mediterranean fever dream
With a name like McCulloch, it doesn't take a particularly sophisticated genealogist to hazard a guess at some of my ancestry. Like many Pākehā New Zealanders, my family history reaches back to the British Isles, with Scottish and English roots. Add a dash of French, Italian and Chinese ancestry, and there you have it: the Kiwi tenor. Me.
A gloriously mixed concoction of Anglo-Saxon chicken-stealing, neighbour-fighting ancestors, transported across the world to the bottom of the South Pacific, where we have somehow developed a national identity involving rugby, flat whites, and apologising when someone else walks into us.
Recently, I spent a few years working with a manager who had a particular fixation on my acquiring more Mediterranean colours in my voice.
And so, dutifully — or, perhaps more accurately, blindly, in a mad dash to improve — I went off in search of this mythical Mediterranean aesthetic. The goal was to transform myself into a stubble-wearing, moody, rugged, dark-featured beauty, complete with a voice dripping in verismo, and filled with the sort of passion that can only come from being born eating pasta alla puttanesca.
Let me transport you, briefly, into a fever dream.
“YOU NEED TO EAT MORE GREENS BECAUSE YOU'RE TOO PALE!”
“YOU NEED MORE PASSION!”
“MORE VIRILITY!”
“MAYBE YOU NEED MORE SEX!” (Honestly - eye-roll)
As these comments — some of them actual quotations from said management — ricochet around my head, images of Roman gods feasting on overripe figs and wine flash before me. I see the effortlessly elegant, dark-eyed stars of Southern European film, theatre and opera, all tanned and golden, forever warmed by that low Mediterranean sun.
I hear the great Italian tenors, their voices seemingly forged in the heat of the earth itself. I imagine myself emerging from the other side of this transformation as a completely different person: brooding, magnetic, slightly dangerous, clad in either linen or leather and possessed of a voice capable of setting fire to the auditorium.
And then I wake up.
The mirror reveals a pale-to-the-point-of-red man. Tall. Broad. Light brown hair — fine, Europeans, BLOND. A staunchly Scottish build, a large backside, and the general height and width of someone apparently designed for rugby or farming. Neither of which interests me in the slightest.
And a voice.
A voice with a sweetness to it. A naturally soft-edged quality. A certain lyrical openness that doesn't necessarily announce itself by kicking the door down.
A voice that at times, rather inconveniently, belongs to me.
Now, before anyone wishes to scold me for such a statement, or gets too excited about the potential science of all this, I'm not suggesting that a person's ancestry determines the colour of their voice. Nor am I suggesting that southern european tenors all sound alike, or that the British Isles have some monopoly on softness, sweetness or lyrical singing, they don't, and it varies from person to person - and the following is soleley based on my own experience
But there is something worth examining in the expectations we attach to voices, bodies, nationalities and repertoire. We have inherited certain ideas about what a tenor ought to look and sound like, and sometimes those ideas become so ingrained that we mistake them for rules.
For a while, I tried to become the singer I thought I was supposed to be.
The trouble was that I was chasing an aesthetic rather than developing an identity.
And there is a difference.
The voice I kept overlooking
Those years of trying to become something else have made me increasingly interested in singers who demonstrate just how much can be achieved without sacrificing the natural character of the voice.
As I prepare this recital, I've been listening to recordings of some of the great recitalists and operatic tenors of the twentieth century. I've found myself particularly drawn to singers whose voices possess a certain softness around the edges, a quality that allows them to communicate intimacy and vulnerability without losing their ability to fill a hall, sustain a phrase, or deliver an emotionally charged operatic climax.
One such singer is the Welsh tenor Stuart Burrows.
Burrows had an extraordinary career, particularly in Mozart, but his repertoire extended well beyond it, encompassing French opera, Italian bel canto, concert works and song. He was a singer of remarkable musical intelligence, and one whose artistry was never dependent upon making every phrase sound like a declaration of war.
There is a lovely intimacy to his singing. The voice can sound gentle without becoming insubstantial, refined without becoming bloodless, and beautiful without ever feeling emotionally remote.
Tonight, for example, I've been listening to his television series Stuart Burrows Sings, in which he performs Stephen Foster's beautiful song Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair.
I mean, listen to that.
Is it the stereotypical Mediterranean tenor sound? No.
Does it have a softness to it? Yes.
Can you hear him? Absolutely.
Does the singing communicate something? Of course it does.
Is anyone sitting there wishing he would stop being so lyrical and start sounding more virile? I sincerely hope not.
What I love is the absence of self-consciousness. There is no apparent need to make the voice into something more imposing than the music requires. The line is allowed to breathe, the words are allowed to mean something, and the emotional effect emerges from the singing itself.
Now, let's move to something rather different.
Burrows also sang Amor ti vieta, the short but wonderfully intense aria from Umberto Giordano's Fedora.
Give the strings a moment at the beginning. It's worth it.
Now, you cannot tell me that this isn't passionate, full-bodied, ringing singing. The voice has presence, it has urgency, and it has that thrilling ability to gather energy and project it into a phrase all wrapped up into this anglo-saxon informed sound.
It is not the same sound as Pavarotti, or Mario Del Monaco, or the countless Italian tenors whose recordings we rightly adore. But why should it be?
Burrows doesn't need to abandon his natural vocal character to communicate the intensity of Italian opera. The passion is there, not because he has manufactured a particular colour, but because he understands the musical and dramatic demands of the phrase.
That, to me, is the interesting part.
The same instrument that can sing Foster with tenderness can sing Giordano with urgency. The underlying vocal identity remains recognisable, but its expressive possibilities are vast.
And isn't that what versatility ought to mean?
Not the ability to sound like five different people, but the ability to communicate five different worlds through one voice.
The company I want to keep
Burrows is hardly alone in demonstrating this. In fact, the more I listen, the more I realise that some of the singers I admire most have built their artistry around precisely this combination of natural vocal beauty, expressive depth and technical versatility.
Take Jussi Björling.
The great Swedish tenor is often remembered for the purity of his tone, his apparently effortless legato, the clarity of his upper register and the remarkable balance of his singing. His voice could ring with extraordinary brilliance, but there was also a lyrical, almost inward quality to it. He could make a phrase feel deeply personal without having to smother it in exaggerated emotion.
Listen to Björling sing a lyrical song, then listen to him in Puccini or Verdi. The voice retains its essential character, but the dramatic temperature changes. There is tenderness, longing, pain and fire. His singing can be ardent without becoming mannered, and powerful without sacrificing the line.
Björling's example matters because he challenges the notion that passion must always be demonstrated through weight, darkness or vocal aggression. His singing reminds us that intensity can exist within restraint, and that a beautifully shaped phrase can sometimes communicate more than a dozen emphatic gestures.
Then there is Fritz Wunderlich.
Wunderlich possessed one of those voices that seems to make the act of singing itself sound effortless. His Mozart was celebrated, his German song singing was extraordinary, and his repertoire extended into Strauss, oratorio and other demanding musical territory. His sound was bright, generous and immediately communicative, with a purity that never prevented him from expressing genuine warmth or dramatic feeling.
There is something particularly instructive about Wunderlich's combination of youthful freshness and vocal substance. He could be light without sounding slight, elegant without sounding detached, and ardent without sacrificing musical refinement. His voice had the capacity to open out magnificently, but the beauty of his singing was not dependent on constant display.
He makes a convincing case for the idea that lyricism is not a limitation. It is a resource.
And then there is Jerry Hadley, whose singing I think deserves far more attention in conversations about the modern lyric tenor.
Hadley had a warmly lyrical voice, a natural affinity for Mozart and bel canto, and a remarkable capacity for communicating text and character. His work also extended into American opera, contemporary music, operetta and musical theatre. He could inhabit very different musical languages without losing the human warmth at the centre of his singing.
What I find compelling about Hadley is the sense of a real person behind the voice. There is generosity in the sound, but also vulnerability. His singing could be tender and inward-looking, yet it could also expand into something thrillingly expansive and dramatic when the music called for it.
He was not confined to a single emotional register, nor was he dependent on one vocal colour to convey every dramatic situation.
These are not identical voices, of course. Björling, Wunderlich, Hadley and Burrows each had their own instruments, technical characteristics, strengths and artistic personalities. I don't want to flatten their individuality into a single category of “soft-edged tenors”.
Rather, I hear a shared lesson in their work: a voice can retain its distinctive character while revealing enormous expressive range.
Softness is not the opposite of strength. Sweetness is not the opposite of passion. A lyrical sound is not an admission of limited dramatic capacity.
And a voice does not have to be dark to possess depth.
What do we actually mean by passion?
I think we sometimes get ourselves into trouble by deciding how particular repertoire ought to sound, often based on a handful of celebrated recordings. We hear the great Italian tenors and begin to associate their distinctive colours, ringing high notes and extraordinary intensity with the emotional truth of Italian opera itself. Having auditioned in Italy, I know that my naturally lyrical sound might not be what everyone there is looking for, even if I can sing the coloratura cleanly.
There is nothing wrong with admiring singers like Pavarotti and Del Monaco. But admiration can become imitation, and imitation becomes a trap when we mistake one vocal aesthetic for the only legitimate way to express an emotion.
We hear brightness and ask for darkness, delicacy and ask for virility, restraint and assume a lack of passion. Yet passion is not a single sound. It can live in the intimacy of a phrase, the shape of a long musical line, or the urgency of a single word. Sometimes the most moving performance is not the one that displays an emotion most dramatically, but the one that makes us believe the singer is genuinely experiencing it.
Of course, a soft-edged voice still needs resonance, core, projection and technical control. Developing greater power, focus and dramatic intensity is valuable work. But these are questions of technique and artistic growth, not of adopting somebody else's identity.
The goal is not to make every voice sound the same, but to help each voice become the most complete and expressive version of itself. It took me longer than I would like to admit to understand that distinction.
The problem with trying to become somebody else
I don't want to turn this into a story about villains and victims. The people who encouraged me to seek a different vocal aesthetic may genuinely have believed they were helping. The industry is competitive, and repertoire, casting expectations and vocal development all matter. There is a legitimate difference, though, between helping a singer discover their capabilities and asking them to conform to an imagined ideal.
For me, the search for a more Mediterranean sound became entangled with a much bigger question: was the voice I already had enough? Was its natural sweetness enough? Could it be passionate, masculine and interesting enough to sustain a career?
When feedback becomes a question of identity, it stops being simply about singing. It begins to affect how you see yourself and how much you trust your own instincts. I found myself imagining a more legitimate version of me: darker in sound, more Mediterranean in appearance, more overtly dramatic in personality. Someone who might finally meet the expectations being placed upon him.
But you can spend years perfecting an imitation while neglecting the person who was there in the first place.
I still have plenty to learn. I want more freedom, more colour, more depth, more power and greater dramatic possibility. I want to become a better tenor.
I simply no longer believe I have to become a different tenor to do it.
The Kiwi tenor
Which brings me back to the recital, and to the slightly absurd business of being a New Zealand tenor with a name like McCulloch.
My Scottish, English, French, Italian and Chinese ancestry is a mixture of histories and identities, but it is not a vocal classification. It doesn't determine my timbre or dictate how I should sound. What it does shape is the person standing behind the music: a New Zealander, Pākehā, with a complicated family history, who has spent years travelling, studying and singing in Europe, and who now sees home a little differently.
I don't need to pretend I grew up in Naples to sing Italian repertoire with conviction. I need to understand the language, the style, the score and the human experience at the heart of the music. The music asks for honesty, not ancestry tests.
I can admire the Mediterranean tenors, learn from their passion and technical command, and take inspiration from Björling's line, Wunderlich's ease, Hadley's warmth and Burrows's musical refinement. They can show me possibilities, but they cannot supply my identity.
And that, I think, is where I'm beginning to find some peace. I still have plenty to learn. I want more freedom, more colour, more power and more dramatic depth. But I want to develop those qualities by understanding my voice, not by trying to make it into somebody else's.
Perhaps my voice will change considerably over the next ten years. I hope it does. But I want those changes to be an expansion of my identity, not an escape from it.
The voices I return to most often are those that make me believe I'm hearing a human being with something particular to say. That is the kind of singing I want to pursue: softness where softness is needed, brilliance where brilliance is needed, and passion that comes from the music rather than from a preconceived idea of what passion ought to sound like.
And if that means the future of the tenor voice in question is a tall, pale, broad-shouldered Kiwi with Scottish ancestry, a complicated family tree and a naturally sweet sound, then so be it.
There are worse things to be.
After all, the Mediterranean sun is lovely. But so is a summer spent on the shores of Lake Te Anau.
See you at the recital. And if you made it this far... here's me singing some Britten:
You have truly come home to yourself x
Such a great read, my friend!!
You are amazing!