![]() ![]() MIRANDA: There was something, like, very fabulous and larger than life about her, and she never let that go. Carolina Miranda says her music endured with a fan base who cherished her campiness. She even had a 40-city tour of the Soviet Union. SIMON: Yma Sumac did perform in plenty of other places across the U.S. And for a long time, she did not go to Peru. They saw her almost as corrupting the culture. MIRANDA: Peruvians for a long time, you know, had an arm's-length relationship with her. SIMON: Yma Sumac also appeared in movies - with Charlton Heston in the 1954 adventure movie "Secret Of The Incas." While she may have been a star in the U.S., that was not the case in her native Peru - at least not at first. ![]() SUMAC: (Singing in non-English language). (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TAITA INTY (VIRGIN OF THE SUN GOD)") It was a stew of international sounds - Asian gongs, pan flutes, drums, these kind of dramatic and florid vocal stylings. MIRANDA: If you think of what the soundtrack to some jungle epic or a tiki bar would be, that was exotica. She wore gold jewelry, big bracelets, an elaborate headpiece and a large necklace. On the cover of her first album, Yma Sumac was posed before a smoking volcano, flanked by images of pre-Columbian sculptures. And here's an example of how Capitol Records gave the singer the Hollywood treatment. SIMON: That's Carolina Miranda, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a lifelong fan of Yma Sumac. And so Capitol Records took all of these stories from Andean Indigenous history, and basically Hollywooded (ph) them and her right up. And then, as many ambitious entertainers do, she decided to move to Hollywood.ĬAROLINA MIRANDA: Nobody really had much use for Andean folk music in 19 - late 1940s Los Angeles. She became a folk singer, drawing on what were believed to be Incan traditions. She claimed to be a descendant of the last Incan emperor. SIMON: Yma Sumac was born in the Andes, and several towns claimed to be her birthplace. ![]() Let's listen to "Chuncho," where her voice growls. That's about twice as large as any ordinary singer. She had an enormous vocal range - at least four octaves, maybe even five. She would have turned 100 years old this month, either on September 10 or September 13 - some of the details of her life are a little fudgy. SIMON: That's the late Yma Sumac, the Peruvian singer with a singular and stunning sound. She married 2 times Moises Vivanco but divorced in 1965.Now a voice for the ages - whichever age that was. He described Sumac's voice as not having the "bright penetrating peal of a true coloratura soprano", but having in its place "an alluring sweet darkness. Haley favorably compared Sumac's tone to opera singers Isabella Colbran, Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot. In 2012, audio recording restoration expert John H. In 1954 classical composer Virgil Thomson described her voice as "very low and warm, very high and birdlike", noting that her range "is very close to five octaves, but is in no way inhuman or outlandish in sound". She was also apparently able to sing in an eerie "double voice". Both low and high extremes can be heard in the song Chuncho (The Forest Creatures) (1953). She was able to sing notes in the low baritone register as well as notes above the range of an ordinary soprano. Yma Sumac recorded an extraordinarily wide vocal range of slightly over four octaves from E2 to B♭7 (approximately 107Hz to 3,7kHz). She became an international success based on her extreme vocal range, which was said to be "well over five octaves" or otherwise was claimed to span over five octaves, at the peak of her singing career. She was able to sing notes in the low baritone register as well as notes In the 1950s, she was one of the most famous proponents of exotica music. Yma Sumac (/ˈiːmə ˈsuːmæk/ Septem– November 1, 2008) was a Peruvian soprano. ![]()
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