Its debut album, "Wondervisions," is all instrumental, except for one track, "The Ballad of Speck and Pebble," that has a few words in a hazy chorale, and another, "Sugar Splash," with some modest vocal ahs.
That's why critics who complain about Ashanti's modest vocal gifts are missing the point: she's no gospel roarer, and that's one reason her songs tend to be so straightforward; her current single, "Breakup 2 Makeup," may not be quite pitch-perfect, but it's catchy and casual in a way louder, more histrionic songs never are.
Handel wrote Messiah for modest vocal and instrumental forces, with optional settings for many of the individual numbers.
The effect is more cacophonic than the recorded material suggests it would be, with the flourishing keys, wheezing accordion and modest vocals creating the backbone of the band's signature kitsch sound.
In the two settings of Goethe's dark "Erlkönig" that framed the first half — a dramatic rendering by Carl Loewe, a contemporary of Schubert's, and Schubert's electrifying version — he used modest gradations of vocal weight and color to capture the child's terror, the father's assurance and the Erlkönig's deathly seduction, but the distinctions could not have been clearer.
I'm just a beatboxer,' " he said, recalling the moment it dawned on him that what once had seemed a modest gift for vocal mimicry — beatboxers use their voices to evoke percussion instruments and other sounds — was now affording him entree to the world of symphony orchestras.
In 1950 John Tobin conducted a performance of Messiah in St Paul's Cathedral with the orchestral forces specified by the composer, a choir of 60, a counter-tenor alto soloist, and modest attempts at vocal elaboration of the printed notes, in the manner of Handel's day.
But hearing him sing Valjean made me wonder if his radiant stage charisma had not helped Broadway audiences (and we critics too) overlook the modest nature of his vocal resources.
The most serious mistake cited was a modest grant to a vocal group campaigning against the deportation of unsuccessful asylum-seekers.The Daily Mail, a right-wing tabloid, picked up the story and urged middle England to express righteous indignation, in writing, to the fund.
Alice, in "Gunsmoke," makes a modest living by doing odd vocal chores for movies -- the sounds of people eating and drowning in "Titanic," for example.
Janáček took these stylistic principles much farther in his vocal writing than Modest Mussorgsky, and thus anticipates the later work of Béla Bartók.
