Abstract:
The paper contains an analysis of the winning songs from every second year of the Czechoslovak pop music festival Bratislava Lyre in the period of 1966-1998. It focuses mainly on the vocal rendition of Czechoslovak songs based on their aural analysis. When analyzing the renditions, the author focuses on the vocal range, the vocal registers and the tessitura, and evaluates the progress or regression of the songs in the development of Czech and Slovak pop music. The winning performers usually used the chest register, with baritone tessitura in the case of male voices and the chest register and the belting technique in the case of mezzo-soprano female voices. However, the songs at Bratislava Lyre are most often rendered with the bel canto technique and its modifications, with female singers occasionally applying belting, which began to be used around the 1930s for singing chansons, cabarets and, later, musicals. In the 1960s, belting was adapted for pop and rock music globally.