* * *
The emotional power of song is, of course, central to many forms of religious worship, from the chants of Shaman in indigenous tribes, to Islam’s Call to Prayer (whose haunting strains I hear every Friday from the minaret of the mosque across the street), to the extraordinary “overtone singing” perfected by Buddhist monks in Mongolia: a hypnotic, unearthly style of vocalization in which the singer skillfully shapes the resonance chambers of throat, mouth, and lips to filter the vocal spectrum, accentuating certain overtones, muting others, so that particular pitches, ordinarily hidden within the rich array of harmonizing overtones, ring out with startling clarity, to create unearthly, piercingly high, whistling notes above the growling fundamental, like the zing of high tension wires in the wind. By filtering two overtones with differing frequencies that beat against each other, the most skilled throat singers can introduce a wowing rhythmic throb in the keening high tones, while simultaneously muting the growl of the phonating vocal cords. The effect (as this might suggest) is indescribable. Various other cultures and religions have developed forms of throat singing, including Tibetan monks and singers of a southern region of Siberia called Tuva, where the throat singers have incorporated the sounds into a religion of pastoral animism that sees all of nature, including animals, rocks and stones, running water and rushing wind, as infused with spirit, the uncanny whistling, groaning, growling tones produced by Tuvan shaman an evocation of the “voices” that emanate from all natural objects.
In Judaism and Christianity, the human voice is a metaphor for the soul. Because voice is produced by air pushed from the lungs and out through the lips, it necessarily evokes the original act by which God infused humans with life—literally “inspiring” us (from the Latin inspirare, “to blow into”), as described in Genesis 2:7: “And the LORD formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” In Islam, life is also engendered by the inspired breath: the Koran calls it al-Ruh (which also translates as “soul”). Allah blows al-Ruh into a human when life begins, and al-Ruh leaves the body at death.12 No wonder, then, that singing—extended musical exhaling—has propelled religious ceremonies for centuries, making of every “human being… a beautiful breathing instrument of music made by God after his own image,” as Hyun-Ah Kim puts it in her study, The Renaissance Ethics of Music: Singing, Contemplation and Musica Humana (2015). The very act of singing, she says, becomes a “way of engaging the whole self in praising of God.”13
In fact, the singing voice as an aid to religious worship in early Christianity gave rise to modern Western music as we know it, from classical to pop and everything in between. Jerry Lee Lewis called rock ’n’ roll “the devil’s music,” but rock’s origins, too, are in the liturgical singing of the Catholic mass of the eighth century, the Gregorian chant. The chant takes its name from the then-sitting pope, Gregory I (590–604), under whom two earlier strains of religious chanting, Gallic and Latin, merged. The Gregorian chant (especially when echoing off the stone walls of a cavernous church) creates a mood of worshipfulness through an array of vocal strategies, including rules that strictly govern how melodies move. Dramatic leaps in pitch from low note to high, or vice versa, are forbidden: although the chants often mount upward in an ecstatic ascent toward heaven, they can do so only one “step,” or note, at a time. Latin passages from the Bible supply the chants’ “lyrics,” which are always performed a cappella, that is, without any instrumental accompaniment, to put the greatest possible emphasis on the text, on the Word. The chants are usually performed in groups (or choirs), but are always sung in strict unison, every voice sounding exactly the same note, without any distracting harmonies, which in their ornamental prettiness (think Everly Brothers or Crosby, Stills & Nash) smack too much of worldly, sensual pleasure. The actual melodies, meanwhile, are restricted to a relatively narrow range (usually a single octave), which also lends a certain measured sobriety to the songs. But the Gregorian chant achieves its most hypnotic and unearthly effect from the absence of rhythm: no single syllable or word is ever emphasized (by an increase in volume or by being “held” longer than any other note), so that the singing is devoid of any beat. I believe that this device is used to “unhook” the chant from the internal metronome of the pulsing heart and blood, the time signature for everything else we do in life, from walking to talking. It places the chant in an ethereal realm that transcends time.
The emergence of the Gregorian chant marked the moment when church composers began to write down vocal melodies with a notation system that uses the familiar musical staff, with notes arranged in step-wise fashion—an exceedingly useful technology for a religion with expansionist ambitions. Because the all-important liturgical chanting no longer needed to be taught face-to-face in the oral tradition, it could now be widely disseminated, in the form of sheet music, with ease. And it was. While this helped to power the spread of Christianity around the globe, it also helped musicians, by making the structure of vocal music “visible,” to manipulate melodies and organize notes into specific groupings, which the church called “modes,” and which are related to the sequence of notes that we call scales, or keys (depending on which note we designate as the “root” of the scale.)
Gregorian chants use a different mode according to what mood the composer seeks to evoke. The church borrowed ancient Greek terms for these modes; the sad-sounding mode (a minor scale) they called the Aeolian; the happy, upbeat mode (a major scale) they called the Ionian. Over time, eight different “church modes” emerged, mixing “happy” and “sad” moods in different proportions, and each was given a (sometimes very daunting-sounding) name from the ancient Greek, like the Mixolydian, which is simply a scale (sing: do re mi fa so la tee do), with the tee flattened by a semitone. Songs written with the notes of this scale have an ambiguous mood, blending the “happy” major scale feel of the first six notes with a tug into inchoate sadness from that flattened seventh—as in John Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood,” which is in Mixolydian. Not that he knew it; Lennon couldn’t read a note of music, but he knew how to evoke, through the grammar of song, the mixed excitement and despair of tumbling into an extramarital affair—or nearly doing so. Mixolydian’s off-kilter mood also proved useful for evoking 1960s psychedelia, which is why Lennon used it for “She Said She Said” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
The latter song, incidentally, has lyrics that Lennon lifted verbatim from a translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Buddhist text that describes what happens after death. Whether intentionally or not, the Beatles’ arrangement of the song imitates Tibetan throat singing by setting up a single drone on C that carries through the whole song (like the low tone throat singers establish with the vocal cords) over the top of which Lennon sings, in his distinctively buzzing, “velar” voice,14 a sinuous line of melody in Mixolydian (“Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream…”), which mimics how the throat singers shape the resonance chambers to create an unearthly melody that soars above the hypnotic, meditative, timeless drone.
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Science is learning what millions of people have known for millennia: singing heals spiritual malaise. In 2012, a team of investigators reported a significant decrease in anxiety and depression in cancer patients who were encouraged to sing,15 and similar positive effects have been reported for people suffering from illnesses including arthritis and chronic pain. These positive effects are not simply psychological but are rooted in measurable physiological responses, including an increase in production of an immune system protein that fights infections in the upper respiratory tract.16
The most striking discoveries about the therapeutic effects of song involve choral singing. Even at an amateur level, the act of blending your voice with others in song causes the brain to secrete the chemical oxytocin, a hormone that creates the warm sensations of bonding, unity, and security that make us feel all cuddly toward our children and others we love—or infuses us with spiritual awe.17 The hormone is found
in all mammals, which suggests that it evolved as a way to encourage cooperation and group bonding. In early humans, group singing seems to have evolved as a tool for encouraging our natural sociality, for building loyalty, and for giving solace in moments of shared grief and pain.
This is how President Obama used it in that Charleston church service for the victims of the mass shooting. Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisor throughout his presidency, revealed in an appearance at the Aspen Institute in 201518 that she and Michelle Obama expressed skepticism when Obama told them, on the helicopter flight from Andrews Air Force Base to the memorial service in South Carolina, that he might sing. “Why on earth would that fit in?” Mrs. Obama asked, according to Jarrett, who had actually begged him not to sing on an earlier occasion: a fundraiser at New York’s Apollo Theater in 2012. He had defied her by bringing down the house with a short snatch from Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” That had gone well, but Jarrett was no more enthusiastic than Mrs. Obama about the president singing at the church memorial. Obama, however, explained why he thought he should sing. He felt no special desire to perform a solo. “I think if I sing,” he told them, “they might sing along with me.” Intuitively, Obama knew what researchers had discovered about the healing oxytocin flood that comes with choral singing. And his gamble paid off. He was not three words into “Amazing Grace” when the entire congregation was on its feet, singing with him. For the first time during that service, they were smiling.
* * *
There is, I believe, a reason that Valerie Jarrett and the first lady discouraged President Obama from singing that day. Singing leaves us unusually naked and exposed. Think how easy it is to prattle away in conversation with your work colleagues—and how mortally embarrassed you would feel if required to sing “Happy Birthday” to them in a solo, a cappella performance. Even highly experienced performers feel the gulf between tuning the vocal cords to speech and tuning them to song. In 2017, the comedian and actor Bill Murray collaborated, as a singer, with cellist Jan Vogler, and as he told the New York Times, “something really different happens when you sing, it’s not like talking or even telling a joke. When you sing, it’s really, you are expressing yourself. It is a representation of yourself.”19 Murray doesn’t explain why singing should be any more a “representation” of the self than speaking, but we know instantly what he means. By accentuating the rhythmic and melodic channel of the voice over that of the earthbound plod of articulate speech—by riding the exhaled breath through a sequence of pitches and beats that imposes on the air a pattern of vibration that we recognize as beautiful, healing, unifying, and emotionally nourishing—we not only cut to the quick of our humanity, but we reveal private dimensions of the self in ways that the cagey rhetoric of language can obscure. It is for this reason, I believe, that Jarrett and Mrs. Obama discouraged the president from daring to launch his solo voice into song: by doing so, he placed himself in a particular kind of peril, the peril that attends an unguarded opening of the heart in public view—not something that presidents (or their advisors) ordinarily expect the commander in chief of the world’s largest military to do. Which might explain why Barack Obama was the only sitting president in history to risk it.
* * *
Even the most highly trained classical singers recognize that producing a musical note with the voice represents the purest and most naked self-revelation. In her 2004 memoir, The Inner Voice, the celebrated opera soprano Renée Fleming calls singing “an exercise in vulnerability”20—a vulnerability all the greater for divas, like Fleming, who deliberately place themselves under the scrutiny of critics and aficionados whose expertise in spotting flaws in technique or expression can be paralyzing. Fleming’s memoir offers the best account that I have been able to find of how a singer blends her natural, “untamed” gifts with the rigors of extensive training—while still maintaining and, indeed, even enhancing the emotional power of her singing. The daughter of singing teacher parents, Fleming grew up in an environment saturated by song (“Music was language in our house,” she writes. “It was air”),21 and she clearly inherited a lot from her parents: not only in the genetic lottery of her vocal instrument, the suppleness and health of her vocal cords, the size and shape of the resonating chambers of her chest and neck and head, but in the infectious passion her parents had for singing. Even before Fleming could speak, her mother was prompting her to “parrot back” sequences of notes sung to her—a feat the infant Fleming could perform with remarkable precision. In school, she landed the leading parts in musicals (at twelve, she played Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady), but as with any art form, shaping raw talent into a long and successful professional career is another story altogether, and Fleming writes, fascinatingly, of the technical mastery behind what she calls the soprano’s “cultivated scream.” It took her years to learn the physical and mental techniques that go into producing the impossibly loud and high notes she can make. Newborns do it instinctively—positioning the tongue and lips and larynx in the optimal arrangement for boosting certain overtones in the voice spectrum, to achieve house-shaking volume without excessive strain on the lungs or vocal cords.
In opera, the amplification of vowel overtones is called the “singer’s formant,” and Fleming learned to do it through creative visualization. She “imagines” that she is projecting her voice into highly specific targets in her body—“aiming sound mentally,” as she puts it. For the highest notes, she targets the “mask”—the nose, cheekbones, and sinuses. Only then can she engage the involuntary muscles in the diaphragm, larynx, tongue, and face that allow her to project her voice “to the back of the hall without strain.”22 How she shapes that sound into something we deem “beautiful,” so that each note hangs for a moment in the air, as present as an abstract Brancusi sculpture—shaped and shimmering in space, textured, polished, and conforming to all the criteria of proportion and harmony that Plato said embody perfection in the arts—well, that’s another question entirely.
Science has been trying to penetrate that mystery and Fleming is unusual, as one of the world’s most successful singers, in having lent herself to the effort. In 2017, she volunteered as a guinea pig for experiments into the neuroscience of singing conducted by the Kennedy Center and the National Institutes of Health. She spent two hours lying inside the narrow tube of an fMRI scanner, repeatedly singing one of the most emotionally resonant songs in her repertoire: “The Water Is Wide,” a plangent Scottish folk ballad. All the expected areas of her brain “lit up” with activity: her Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas (as she produced the lyrics), her motor cortex (as it sent instructions to the larynx and articulators), her limbic structures (as they processed the song’s emotions), and areas on the right side of the brain (that compute melody and rhythm). In short, the same structures activated in speech. Apparently, even the most high-tech wizardry is as yet powerless to explain why singing is so powerful as singing.
The most illuminating reflections on the power of singing that I have come across are from people who have spent their lives helping others achieve the fullest emotional expression with their voice. Laurie Antonioli is a singer, recording artist, singing coach, and chairperson of the Vocal Program at the California Jazz Conservatory. She believes the voices that move us the most have achieved a ruthless honesty of expression: they have been quenched of the mannerisms, affectations, trendy ornaments, and derivative stylistic tics that may make for massive pop hits, but whose emotional penetration is less than skin deep: true auditory cheesecake (or “ear candy” in music biz parlance). This type of singing is especially frowned upon in the musical genre that Antonioli specializes in: jazz. Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit,” Nina Simone scatting at the end of “Feeling Good,” Joe Williams and Jon Hendricks singing “Going to Chicago” with Count Basie, Aretha Franklin singing anything—these are experiences at the furthest possible remove, aesthetically, emotionally, “spiritually,” from an ear candy pop hit.
You don’t have to be a music e
xpert to know this. You can hear, and feel, the difference in emotional depth and power between the singing of any of the above-named artists and even as gifted a pop belter as Ariana Grande or a vocal gymnast like Beyoncé. But it is not always so easy to explain those differences. Antonioli calls it “authenticity”23—then instantly admits that “authenticity” can’t be defined. “But everyone knows it when they hear it,” she says. “I hold these workshops where people get up and sing to the group. People want to please listeners, to sound good, so they make the mistake of manipulating the voice. They’ll try to sound seductive or sexy. Or powerful and commanding—whatever the song dictates. But when a singer gets to that authentic voice, when they get past the conscious manipulation, a totally different sound comes out and everyone in the class just gasps—they literally go ahhhhh! It’s unmistakable. It has nothing to do with technical perfection. The voice could be shaky or soft, or whatever. It’s the heart and soul.”
The Self escaping into the Open.
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The word “soul” comes up a lot when people talk about singing. Fleming uses it in her memoir. Antonioli used it. Everyone uses it. The soulfulness of singing is (as we’ve seen) at the basis of the art’s central role in virtually all religious observance, back to stone age tribes and their chanting Shaman. Darwin, however, explained the deep emotions triggered by singing not as the stirring of a God-given soul, but as a physiological reaction that, in early humans, evolved to aid us in our survival and reproduction. In the Descent of Man, he said that the emotive content of all vocal expression—from singing, to poetry recitation, to public oratory—is an inheritance from our animal ancestors, and he even allows himself to wax poetic in describing how the stirring power of the human voice results from a kind of collective memory of ourselves in an earlier state of our evolutionary development: “The sensations and ideas thus excited in us by music, or expressed by the cadences of oratory, appear from their vagueness, yet depth, like mental reversions to the emotions and thoughts of a long-past age.”24 A few pages later, he expands on this: “The impassioned orator, bard, or musician, when with his varied tones and cadences he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers little suspects that he uses the same means by which his half-human ancestors long ago, aroused each other’s ardent passions, during their courtship and rivalry.”25
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