Naked at the Albert Hall

by Tracey Thorn

  This idea that vibrato is an affectation of the natural singing voice does not go away. Potter describes experiments carried out during the 1920s and 1930s at the University of Iowa in which recordings were made of singers’ voices, in order to analyse them, by means of listening to slowed-down versions of the recordings. This way the presence and extent of their vibrato could clearly be heard and measured. The trained singers were found to use vibrato almost all the time when singing, while untrained voices rarely possessed it naturally. Other research tried to establish whether people used vibrato in speaking, and in normal speech it was found not to be the case, only appearing when a speaker was emotionally roused in some way. This was especially true in the case of actors. So, there is a sense in which we inevitably associate vibrato in the voice with emotion, or passion, and that is why it has now become commonplace in singing. It is shorthand for feeling. An add-on to the plain voice of speech, which flags up the emotional content of the sound that is produced.

  It makes singing more patently stylised than speech, and for this reason has often been rejected by pop and rock singers, who fear its implicit lack of authenticity or naturalness and ascribe an almost moral failing to it. In an interview for Donna Soto-Morettini’s book Popular Singing, Paul McCartney says: ‘My tribe don’t like vibrato – we think it’s a fake, to cover up like it is in string playing, because you don’t know exactly where the note is, so you ‘vib’ either side of it… Notice that the Beatles didn’t do much of it. We used pretty much good straight notes, because there’s something honest about it.’ The pure sound of a real, honest voice is one with no vibrato – it’s a widely held belief, shared by Mozart and McCartney, and clearly one that isn’t going to go away. Like most rules, though, it’s made to be broken. I can’t think of a singer who uses more vibrato than Judy Garland; her voice throbs with it, every note pulsating, her body tense and alert like a startled hare. Yet she is the most movingly sincere singer, and far from sounding like she is trying to cover something up, she gives the impression of hiding nothing, leaving herself wide open at the end of every song; exposed, exhausted.

  The dislike of vibrato seems connected to a yearning for some of the quality of speech to remain present in singing. The music journalist David Hepworth once wrote in a blog piece that he likes singers who ‘sing like they talk’. He tells a great anecdote about being at The Word magazine and taking a phone call from ‘a Tony Bennett’, who, it immediately became apparent from his speaking voice, was the Tony Bennett. ‘The voice speaking to me was unmistakably the same one that had sung to us all those years. He could no more disguise it than fake his fingerprints.’ Hepworth goes on to talk about singers who sound like they speak, citing examples such as Christine McVie, and Frank Sinatra, who ‘slipped from speech to song without stopping to arrange himself into the posture of a singer’. He contrasts this naturalness with the irritating behaviour of those who ‘don’t seem to feel they’re performing until they’ve put on what they clearly think is a singerly voice’.

  Many of us share this belief, then, that singing is more true, more communicative, speaks to us more, when it is more like, well, speaking. Twentieth-century avant-garde composers, such as Arnold Schoenberg, have tried to formalise this idea, and create new ways of using the voice that, instead of taking it into the recognised sphere of singing, let it remain somehow connected to speech. In his 1912 work Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg came up with the idea of a kind of pitched speech, or Sprechgesang, setting out in his foreword to the piece rules for how it was to be performed, with a strict attention to rhythm. His description of the singing style is enormously esoteric, and I wonder how many actually understood it then or now. According to Potter’s Vocal Authority, it was important, said Schoenberg, ‘to emphasise fully the contrast between the sung note and the spoken note’; the singer, or ‘reciter’ must not ‘fall into a sing-song form of speaking voice’, must clearly differentiate between ordinary speech and a kind of musical speech, ‘But, again, it must not be reminiscent of song.’

  Well, that’s as clear as mud to me – how about you?

  Even Schoenberg was apparently not often happy with the resulting performances, and many people simply found it difficult to interpret exactly what his instructions meant. It seems possible that he just didn’t understand singing and singers, didn’t understand vibrato and how it worked.

  Others have noted that it is the very difference between singing and speaking which is the point, which elevates singing and gives it some of its meaning. Lavinia Greenlaw writes in The Importance of Music to Girls that ‘we reveal something of our nature when we sing, something that can be disguised in our speaking voice’. When Romy and I talked about that awkwardness of going from singing to speaking, we admitted that there can be something jarring about the transition, especially if, like me, you feel that your singing voice has a character not shared by your speaking voice. When singing, I can sound confident and in control, there is something mature about my voice, it’s even been described as ‘classy’. Well, my speaking voice isn’t like that; it’s more down to earth, chatty, a bit suburban and ordinary. And so something of the magic or mystery is lost. I felt this recently, watching Jessie Ware perform live – the contrast between her rich, sensuous singing voice and more raucous, humorous speaking was funny. It had a charm to it, definitely, and she is totally likeable on stage; but still, there was a sense of illusion being created, then destroyed by something more prosaic, and having to be recreated with each new song, which subtly undermined the coherence of the show. Audiences always think that they want you to talk to them, but it is a fine balance to strike, between being friendly and preserving the mood.

  For the distinction between singing and speaking is fundamental; the singing voice reaches both depths and heights untouched by the speaking voice, and singing is more revelatory. If we recognise as much, then we don’t need to make singing more like speaking in order for it to be true. Even singing that we regard as highly stylised and artificial – operatic singing, say – can contain as much veracity as the plainest plainsong. There’s a passage in Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life where he describes how, during his intense grief after the loss of his wife, he developed a love of opera. He’d never liked it before – ‘Operas felt like deeply implausible and badly constructed plays, with characters yelling in one another’s faces simultaneously.’ But now, in his state of grief, ‘it seemed quite natural for people to stand on stage and sing at one another, because song was a more primal means of communication than the spoken word – both higher and deeper’. At this point he realises that opera is not really about the plot, but that ‘its main function is to deliver the characters as swiftly as possible to the point where they can sing of their deepest emotions. Opera cuts to the chase – as death does.’

  And if singing is ultimately more revelatory than speaking, giving away things we might prefer to conceal, then it is no surprise that most of us would be happier to speak in public than to sing. Singing, even if we were to sing the same words we might speak, turns those words into a performance, draws attention both to the words and to the singer him or herself. I have not sung on stage since 2000, but in 2013 I found myself travelling around the country appearing at promotional book events where I sat on a stage in front of an interviewer and an audience, and it was much easier and less stressful than singing. I don’t suffer anywhere near the same stage fright when sitting on stage reading and speaking as I would if I were performing. (Although that’s not to say I don’t suffer at all, and a combination of beta blockers and wine is usually required to get me through.) The fact that I can do it confirms this idea that there is a level of exposure involved in singing which is much less in the case of speaking, but it does rather give the lie to my claim that I don’t like to be looked at. I find when I’m sitting on stage talking that I don’t much mind being looked at. And I think this is because I’m just chatting, making the odd joke. I’m not expected, in other words, to give a performance
as a pop star.

  Although one night, in Hull, I almost did. Asked what was a favourite lyric I had written, I thought for a moment and replied, ‘“Protection” is a good one.’ ‘Sing it!’ shouted a voice from the crowd. And for some reason, I thought, yes, I will. I paused, took a breath, and in that brief pause the interviewer asked the next question. I don’t know what would have happened if I had stepped over that line from speaking to singing – probably nothing – but it certainly would have created at least a moment of unexpectedness, and a change of mood.

  Speaking is a more grounded experience; the spoken word never takes flight the way that singing does, partly because song lyrics tend to be more like poetry, a different register of language that is tacitly acknowledged as being emotional in tone. Singing would elevate the performance to a higher emotional level, but with the attendant risk of falling, and the greater sense of danger is where the fear lies. It’s where the thrill lies, too, for the listener and for the performer, both of whom might enjoy the element of risk. For most people the gap between speaking and singing probably also incorporates a sensation that when singing they are amateurs, and fear losing control over their voice and the sounds or words it might utter. It’s enough to make any of us feel vulnerable. It shouldn’t be the case for the trained or professional singer, yet still I’m not sure that the vulnerability and potential for loss of control ever quite goes away – hence the angst we keep coming across in so many great singers.

  The lesser anxiety involved in speaking, however, must be a result of the fact that with the spoken word we usually stay within the realms of the real, the normal, the everyday. As soon as we sing we move into new worlds; more fantastical, otherworldly, numinous. This can be used to great effect in drama, like the moments in Dennis Potter’s plays when characters break into song. Potter was a great believer that, however shallow or meaningless popular songs may be, the emotions they evoke and trigger are not. The songs become useful conduits for all the emotions that people cannot speak. In his great 1994 interview with Melvyn Bragg, Potter addressed this directly, talking about the use of songs and lip-synching in Pennies from Heaven: ‘I wanted to write about – in a sense it sounds condescending, and I don’t mean it quite this way – I wanted to write about the way popular culture is an inheritor of something else. You know, that cheap songs, so-called, actually do have something of the Psalms of David about them. They do say the world is other than it is. They do illuminate. This is why people say, “Listen, they’re playing our song”, or whatever. It’s not because that particular song actually expressed the depth of the feelings that they felt when they met each other and heard it. It is that somehow it re-evokes and pours out of them yet again, but with a different coating of irony and self-knowledge. Those feelings come bubbling back. So I wanted to write about popular songs in a direct way.’

  Wittgenstein wrote that, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’, but as Ian Bostridge points out in his A Singer’s Notebook, ‘That we cannot speak about, as Wittgenstein realised in his late philosophy, we do not pass over in silence, but endlessly mull over in art, religious doctrine and, perhaps above all, music.’

  Songs, then, allow us to sing what we can’t say.

  16

  SONG TO THE SIREN

  I

  f singing is more revealing than speech, it can also be more dangerous and transgressive, with the potential to bewitch and enslave the listener, and I want to look at how this idea has been frequently explored in literature. I’m always fascinated when I come across singers in novels or poems, intrigued by what different characters or scenes can reveal about the ways in which singing is regarded, and what it symbolises for us at different times and in different places.

  Once upon a time, learning a little piano and a little singing was a commonplace accomplishment for a young lady, another way in which she could be gently decorative and entertaining at social events. In the novels of Jane Austen, there are occasions when the ladies sing, but the singing has a strict social function, it’s not expressive singing. Mary Bennett in Pride and Prejudice sings and plays at Netherfield, but her singing is out of tune and embarrassing, just as she is always a disappointment; the plain, dreary sister, to whom nothing ever happens. Her inability to sing is in keeping with her other shortcomings, and her overall status of being unattractive and unmarriageable – the worst failing for a woman. This kind of singing was operating under social constraints; the requirement was for it to be suitable, feminine, undemanding. Not too emotional, certainly nothing to rouse or unsettle the listeners, and perhaps it was also necessary for the singing not to be too good.

  In Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, for example, there is a brilliant scene that shows how dangerous singing could be if it were done too well. The eponymous Shirley sings for a small audience, a traditional love ballad that she performs with unexpected fervour and passion. The result is something transgressional which disquiets her audience: ‘On leaving the instrument, she went to the fire, and sat down on a seat – semi-stool, semi-cushion: the ladies were round her – none of them spoke. The Misses Sympson and the Misses Nunnely looked upon her, as quiet poultry might look on an egret, an ibis, or any other strange fowl. What made her sing so? They never sang so. Was it proper to sing with such expression, with such originality – so unlike a school girl? Decidedly not: it was strange, it was unusual. What was strange must be wrong; what was unusual must be improper. Shirley was judged.’

  Shirley gives too much of herself away, moves beyond the constraints and expectations of polite parlour singing and expresses herself, in a way that embarrasses and unsettles the other ladies. Her singing is regarded as being almost sexually explicit; it has moved so far beyond what is required or expected. From the response, you might imagine that she has done a full Jerry Lee Lewis at the piano, hitching one leg up onto the keyboard, letting rip with unrestrained passion; the effect she has on her listeners is like Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show. When the rules are so narrow and the limits of propriety set so tightly, it is not difficult to break them, to cross the threshold of decency. And so the forceful, passionate singing of a love ballad sets her apart and brings down the judgement of her peers.

  In Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth sings as much as any young lady was expected to but her singing is more ornamental than anything else: ‘She had the rare advantage of looking almost prettier when she was singing than at other times’. Singing, playing piano, doing needlepoint, a little sketching – these were the time-passing achievements expected of women of a certain class; none would have been regarded as art, nor were they required to be practised with any high degree of skill or commitment. In fact, too much commitment or involvement would be unladylike, and a threat to the status quo. In Daniel Deronda this socially acceptable form of singing is challenged by the book’s Serious Artist, the musician Herr Klesmer, who describes the belittling effect of Gwendolen’s type of singing. It is puerile and fatuous, he asserts: ‘There is a sort of self-satisfied folly about every phrase of such music; no cries of deep, mysterious passion – no conflict – no sense of the universal. It makes men small as they listen to it.’

  But really this is the whole point of this kind of singing: to keep things and people in their place. And the fear of singing going further than it should – as it does in Shirley – reveals an awareness that singing can be dangerous. It has a power, an allure, a connection with sex. The legend of the sirens dramatises this notion fully, and introduces us to this thought: that singing can corrupt, defile and destroy; that it may have a negative impact on the listener, and may come from some dark place in the world’s psyche.

  Are the Odyssey’s sirens literature’s most famous singers? Certainly the tale of the sailor-adventurer Odysseus – who stopped his men’s ears with wax and had them lash him to the ship’s mast so that he could hear the sirens’ song but not be lured to his death – endures, and is taken up over and over again by other writers who seek to make something new
of it, or retell it, or explain it. In the original telling, the sirens use their voices to mesmerise and murder. Their singing is dangerous, even lethal, and eternally fascinating. We long to know what they sounded like, what their song was, which contained such demonic power. The story evokes a host of terrors concerning female sexuality, the ability of the femme fatale to seduce and destroy, and it speaks of ambivalence about the beauty of women’s song, and the power it exerts over us. Joyce’s Ulysses, the most famous retelling and homage to the Odyssey, is full of music and singing, and bases a whole passage on the story of the sirens. (James Joyce was a good singer himself, even considering it as a career option at one point, and I longed to find a recording of his voice so that I could devote a chapter to him. I would have called it ‘James Joyce Had a Lovely Voice’, but sadly I couldn’t find any evidence of what he sounded like, only descriptions, full of adjectives.) In the sirens episode Bloom is tempted by the barmaids, and also captivated by the singing of Simon Dedalus, Ben Dollard and Bob Cowley, whose yearning love ballads enthrall the whole bar: ‘Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves in murmur, like no voice of strings of reeds or whatdoyoucallthem dulcimers, touching their still ears with words… Good, good to hear: sorrow from them each seemed to from both depart…’ Bloom stays longer than he intends in the bar, seduced both by the barmaids and by the songs, but he escapes in the end.