Product Description

Half the range of the piano keyboard!

At last a serious critical examination of the utterly unique vocalist celebrated for her "four-octave voice," Yma Sumac! A confounding, sometimes heartbreaking, mixture of absurd show-biz hype, stunning virtuosity, and sometimes ravishing artistry, Yma Sumac was a firmly established recording artist of the folk music of her native Peru when she came to America to be "discovered." And discovered she was-by the publicity department of Capitol Records and the "Exotica" pop music maestro Les Baxter.

From there her story becomes ever more tangled and weird-and deeply interesting. Yma herself is an amazingly contradictory mix. Nicholas Limansky (a formally trained professional singer) is able to demonstrate that she was startlingly sophisticated technically even though almost entirely self-taught. What is perhaps even more astonishing than the celebrated 4-octave range of her voice-and its effortless clarity and sweetness-was the nearly incredible longevity-fully 4 decades!-of her ability to command it.

With the enthusiastic collaboration of her quixotic, charming, slightly rascally husband, she went along with the corruption of her artistic identity by the gleefully amoral record-company publicists, creators of her public persona-Inca Princess (sometimes Priestess!)-from a primitive mountain tribe (or, sometimes, descended from a line of kings that was said to go back several hundred years before there were any Incas)! Imperious as any diva with her intimates and musical collaborators, she maintained an unassailable dignity and unaffected graciousness as a performer and in relation to her fans.

All documented in this large, lavishly illustrated volume-an extensively researched biography (her birth date established once and for all!), many personal anecdotes of her intimates, technical discussions of her voice and her music, generous excerpts from reviews and priceless examples of publicity material.

About the author:

Nicholas E. Limansky studied voice at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and has a performance degree from the University of West Virginia. He has sung with The Bach Aria Group, Musica Sacra, New York Choral Artists (of the New York Philharmonic), and the Opera Orchestra of New York. He reviews new vocal releases of historical singers for Opera News, The Record Collector, Classical Singer and Opera Quarterly. His vocal specialty is the acuto-sfogato (extended-vocal-range) soprano. His work on Yma Sumac has covered nearly three decades.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #855254 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 296 pages

Customer Reviews

Clears Up the Hype, Removes Urban Myths
There have been countless stories published about Yma Sumac since she first burst upon the scene in the 1940s but nearly all have been filled with the hype and mistakes of her original marketing campaigns. However, Mr. Limansky has come up with this definitive tome after many years of extensive and thorough research that dispels most of the myths and provides the first true look at her life, music and vocal techniques.

Don Pierson, Yma Sumac Homepage and Archives - SunVirgin dot com

At long last, the details Yma fans have been waiting for.
Nick Limansky's wonderful biography of Yma Sumac is finally available and I really enjoyed it. Begun in 1980, it is full of fascinating interviews with musicians and key players who have not been around for years. It is brimming with great pictures. It is of course a biography and documents her whole career and its backstory, but Limansky also documents the Yma of pop culture: Thomas Meehan's wonderful Yma Dream,5 years of the wild YmaRama festivals in Santa Cruz, etc. Yma had such a unique place in between a few music genres and in so many ways what made her famous also destroyed her credibility as a serious artist and talent. After 27 years of collecting info and writing, it all could not be contained in the book so there is an additional CD-ROM available that contains 120 more pages, 140 more photos and better reproductions of all the photos included in the book. On the CD, Linmansky gives a track by track critical discussion of all of Yma's recordings. Because the book is written by a singer, it adds a perspective and understanding of her talent and craft that makes it a particularly good read for a non-singer, but a fan like me. Did I mention the glorious cover?

Complete study of Yma Sumac tells everything you ever wanted to know
"If anyone ever deserved the sobriquet "Legendary" it is Peruvian diva Yma Sumac. Her mysterious Andean background, ravishing beauty and thrilling voice of many octaves made her the absolute empress of the Exotica craze of the 1950s. Anyone seeking to understand her unique magic needs to look no further than this book. In a monumental undertaking of love, research, intuition, understanding and first-rate detective work, Nicholas Limansky has laid before the reader all the facts and all the fictions that continue to surround this remarkable artist. One of the singular careers in international show business is completely examined in a book so complete, thorough and well-written that it can only be called exhaustive. Limansky's deep knowledge of the technical and psychological components of singing - and his clear and incisive writing - enable him to explain the intricate details of her performances in a way that both reaches the experienced listener and is also completely comprehensible to the novice. In fact, to read his descriptions while listening to the referenced selection is to fast-forward one's total understanding of the mysteries of the singing voice. This is a remarkeable achievement and Ms. Sumac is one fortunate diva, indeed, to have such a sympathetic and accurate champion. Bravo!"

Freeman Gunter (former editor of Michael's Thing, Mandate, Soap Opera Weekly, and Classical Singer Magazines)