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Almost without voice.
Printed over the vocal line at the words it affects, usually with a soft dynamic. It describes vocal production for a phrase — breathy, barely voiced — and lasts until the singer’s next character marking or the end of the phrase.
It asks the singer almost to stop singing: a whispered, half-voiced sound that stays on pitch but loses most of its resonance. Debussy uses it for an intimate moment in his Bilitis songs. Keep the accompaniment very light so the effect can be heard, and keep it to a short phrase — sustained over long passages it is hard to project and tiring to produce.
Debussy, Trois Chansons de Bilitis, “La flûte de Pan”, voice, m. 25: “Presque sans voix”, at pp, with “Pressez un peu” in the same bar and “a Tempo” two bars later.
Presque sans voix is one of 1755 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary: the words, abbreviations and instrument names that appear in printed scores, plus the vocabulary composers use to talk about them.
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