Madonna Louise Ciccone

With Like a Prayer (1989), Madonna again entered a new phase, musically. The album introduced live recorded songs and incorporated different genres music, including dance, R&B and gospel music. Madonna continued to compose ballads and uptempo dance songs for Erotica (1992) and Bedtime Stories (1994). She tried to remain contemporary by incorporating samples, drum loops and hip hop into her music. Her voice grew much deeper and fuller, evident in the tracks like "Rain" and "Take a Bow". During the filming Evita, Madonna had to take vocal lessons, which increased her range further. Of this experience she commented, "I studied with a vocal coach for Evita and I realized there was a whole piece my voice I wasn't using. Before, I just believed I had a really limited range and was going to make the most it." Continuing her musical evolution with Ray Light, the track "Frozen" displayed her fully formed vocal prowess and her allusions to classical music. Her vocals were restrained and she sang the songs in Ray Light without vibrato. However, the intake breath within the songs became more prominent. With the new millennium came her album Music in which Madonna sang in her normal voice in a medium range, and sometimes in a higher register for the chorus. Fouz-Hernández commented that "Throughout her career, Madonna's manipulation her voice shows us that, by refusing to be defined in one way, she has in fact opened up a space for new kinds musical analysis."
Influences
According to Taraborrelli, "Almost certainly, the defining moment Madonna's childhood—the one that would have the most influence in shaping her into the woman she would become—was the tragic and untimely death her beloved mother." Psychiatrist Keith Ablow suggests that her mother's death would have had an immeasurable impact on the young Madonna at a time when her personality was still forming. According to Ablow, the younger a child is at the time a serious loss, the more pround the influence and the longer lasting the impact. He concludes that "some people never reconcile themselves to such a loss at an early age, Madonna is not different than them." Conversely, author Lucy O'Brien feels that the impact the rape is, in fact, the motivating factor behind everything Madonna has done, more important even than the death her mother: "It's not so much grief at her mother's death that drives her, as the sense abandonment that left her unprotected. She encountered her own worst possible scenario, becoming a victim male violence, and thereafter turned that full-tilt into her work, reversing the equation at every opportunity."