page_title: Tarja Turunen
section_title: Development
hierarchical_section_title: Tarja Turunen / Singing style / Development
caption_attribution_description: English: Tarja Turunen, former singer of Nightwish, at the International Book Fair 2007 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
context_page_description: Tarja Soile Susanna Turunen-Cabuli, known professionally as Tarja Turunen or simply Tarja, is a Finnish heavy metal singer-songwriter. She is a lyric soprano and has a vocal range of three octaves.
  Turunen studied singing at Sibelius Academy and Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe. She is a professional classical lied singer, and the former lead vocalist of the Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish, which she founded with Tuomas Holopainen and Emppu Vuorinen in 1996. Their combination of hard and fast guitar riffs with Turunen's dramatic, "operatic" lead vocals quickly achieved critical and commercial popularity. Their symphonic metal style, soon dubbed "opera metal", inspired many other metal bands and performers.
  Turunen was dismissed from the band on 21 October 2005 for personal reasons. She started her solo career in 2006 with the release of a Christmas album called Henkäys ikuisuudesta. In 2007, Turunen released My Winter Storm, an album featuring various styles including symphonic metal, and started the Storm World Tour.
context_section_description: Along with visiting the music school in Savonlinna, Turunen began serious classical vocal training at 17. After school, she began studying music (with a specialization in church music) at the Sibelius Academy. Due to her commitment with Nightwish, she had to interrupt her academic studies.
  From 2001 to 2003, she studied at the music academy Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe, where she trained as a soloist with further specialization in art song. Turunen originally applied to train as a choir singer. At the audition she attracted the attention of professor Mitsuko Shirai , who encouraged Turunen to apply for soloist training.
  As a classical singer, Turunen sings with classical vocal technique. She explained that in the early days of Nightwish, it was difficult to combine classical technique with the metal sound in a way that gave her liberty of action without damaging her vocal cords. Classical techniques helped her to play with her voice, so she decided not to pursue extra training in rock/pop singing.
  Towards the turn of the millennium, the combination of hard and fast guitar riffs with classical female lead vocals attracted a great deal of attention in the metal scene. The new music style of Nightwish quickly achieved critical and commercial popularity; this symphonic metal style was soon dubbed "opera metal". Turunen does not see herself as an opera singer. She has sung excerpts from operas at the Savonlinna Opera Festival, but she stresses that singing opera cannot be performed as a side project. She would need special training to perfectly sing an entire opera without a microphone.
  When asked how the association between the opera and metal genres may have arisen, Turunen said that despite the obvious differences, the two music styles have some similarities:
  The scenes are very similar. There are many people who would never go to an opera and the same goes for metal. But the real fans are incredibly loyal. And both styles are bombastic and express strong emotions.
  — Tarja Turunen, Metal Hammer interview, July 2002
  
  From the first Nightwish album Angels Fall First (1997) on, critics described Turunen's vocals using adjectives such as angelic or valkyrian. The Valkyrie image was later fostered by the second video for the single "Sleeping Sun" in which Turunen walks on a battlefield as if she were guiding the dead warriors.
  On the following albums the singing was technically more complex. On the Nightwish album Oceanborn (1998), her classical vocal training was much more noticeable. For the song "Passion and the Opera", Turunen performed a staccato coloratura reminiscent of the aria "Hell's vengeance boils in my heart", sung by the soprano role Queen of the Night in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. "Sleeping Sun" required a well-trained breathing technique. Turunen explained in an interview that when they recorded Oceanborn, she had serious doubts, fearing that she was not yet advanced enough in her studies to have mastered the required techniques.
  A challenge of a different kind was the cover version of Gary Moore's "Over the Hills and Far Away" (2001), as it required a deeper voice, far below the vocal range of an average soprano. In an interview with Breakout magazine, she reported that in the studio, the band members were shaken by a paroxysm of laughter as she tried to warm up for the vocal lines. As a side benefit of her efforts, Turunen gradually expanded her vocal range considerably into the lower range, which manifested even more on the following albums.
  For the album Century Child (2002), she experimented with a more "rock" sounding voice, where she maintained the classical singing technique, but, for example, sang with less vibrato. Turunen was not satisfied that she had successfully transitioned to this new style until the album Once (2004).
  I feel very comfortable with Once because I have tried to change my singing style with Nightwish already since Century Child because Tuomas requested that, the songs requested that ... It has been hard work and I didn't manage to do that on Century Child, I was not very happ
caption: Turunen at the International Book Fair in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 3 May 2007
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