There is something about singing in public that gets everyone's attention instantly and demands a reaction. Wherever it happens, it makes its own weather system. Singing that is off-tempo and off-key can be ignored. The singer's emotional state is declared when the singing is beautiful, and it replicates it in the listener in a moment of shared attention.
In the past few weeks, we have seen and heard this in videos that have gone viral. The MPs were singing the Ukrainian national anthem as they returned to parliament. Parents sing folk songs to their children in underground stations. A young girl singing Let it Go from Frozen silenced the other inhabitants of a Kyiv Bunker. Speech rarely stops us in our tracks when we sing.
I like to sing. I have sung to myself in the shower, in the car, or along the corridors at work for most of my adult life. Three years ago, I joined a choir. The leader of our choir is a leading scholar of the form and I live in a city with a rich shanty tradition. We were singing these rough-hewn sailors work songs to accompany the hauling of ropes on the ship. Women outnumbered men in our group, as they do in most choirs, and we didn't look like we could heave up an anchor. I get sick on the ferry. I found that singing in unison and harmony with others is a joyful thing and that the sense of incongruity soon wore off.
The first time I had sung for an audience since I was a child was in pubs and bars. My only other creative outlet, writing, connects with its readers one-sidedly and remotely. As if you dropped a stone down a deep well and heard the response months or years later, the tiny splash of a reader's response as it hit, it generated polite interest or indifference. The response was instantaneous when we sang. We woke up in the middle of the night.
I have always loved to sing to myself – in the shower, in the car. Then, three years ago, I joined a sea-shanty choir
Covid silenced us. Choirs migrated online with varying success. We had a couple of desultory meetings and realized that you can't sing in unison because of the time lag. The urge to sing was still there. I started singing to karaoke to raise my spirits in the midst of being locked up. Frank Sinatra, Glen Campbell, and David Cassidy are some of the singers who sing in the same keys as me. On my daily walk, I would turn a corner and sing to the dog walker.
It was worth the awkward encounter. I think singing has helped me through the last two difficult years. The benefits of mental and physical health are well established. It has been found to reduce stress and increase the body's tolerance of pain. The evidence has been gathered for more than 30 years by the professor of music education. The effects of singing are related to its status as a primordial act and the core emotional states that are central to the human condition. You feel your lungs filling and emptying when you sing. It reminds you that you are a living, breathing, sentient body, taking up space in the world and making noise. Singers tend to think they sound good. The sound of a voice is better for it's owner than it is for an audience. We find recorded versions of our voices to be thin and disappointing. I like the sound of my voice.
The voice is the most complicated musical instrument. The sound of the air rising up from the lungs against the glottis is made by an exhaled breath, which is then transmitted through the jaw, tongue, lips and teeth as the air travels through them. Every aspect of our carriage and posture affects our singing. The sound that comes out of our mouths can be affected by a bit of tension in the shoulders, chest or abdominal muscles. It's your vocal tone that's unique to you. You can't be indifferent to the face that greets you in the mirror, but you can be indifferent to it. It is you, like it or not.
Even the most angelic-sounding voice still feels like a human, with its own quirks and flaws. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum believes that we measure aesthetic achievements against the constraints of the human body. The Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute is just, but only just, within the limits of human lung power and vocal range. This kind of singing feels like it could be done by a mortal, but still.
In her book about singing, Naked at the Albert Hall, the musician points out that there is more thinking in singing than you might think. The singer needs to learn to breathe in all the right places, take little top-up breaths where they can, work their tongue round the harder vowels, and train their swallowing muscles to sit still while the larynx does all the work. Managing the transition between the deeper and thickerchest voice and the higher and lighter head is what opera singers call the passaggio.
Even the most angelic-sounding voice still feels fully human, with its own knotty grain and texture
I don't like the bravura style of singing on The Voice and other TV talent shows, with its love of portamento and melisma. It feels like singing is a sport, with all the vocal fireworks at the expense of the words. Learning a song is about getting to know the words and savouring them in the mouth before letting them flow into the melody and metre. It means paying attention to the chewier diction, thinking carefully about stress and intonation, and noting where you need an extra breath to sing through a line break.
You can hear yourself improving when you sing every day. I found my tone getting better, my range expanding and my breath holding up for longer notes and phrases. Singing gave me at least some measure of progress as the days went by and the days became a mass. I would love to sing in a group again. Group singing was one of the last activities to be released from coronaviruses restrictions because of the respiratory droplets and aerosols that singers are thought to make it high-risk.
Singers would worry about their voices, their health, and their air conditioning, or even a tickle that might be a cold, before Covid. The voice is like life itself, a fragile, mortal, capricious thing that can fall apart without warning. As we get older, the muscles in the vocal folds become thinner and the lungs lose power. The voice is the only musical instrument that is alive and the only one that dies with its owner.
The voice is so magical because of its fragility. The ugly and unreliable mechanics of singing are not visible. The voice has no place in the body or anywhere else, it is only in space. It feels like a small miracle when it materialises in the presence of other people.
To sing is to tell people that life is to live, that love is there, that nothing is a promise, but that beauty exists, and must be hunted for and found. The heroes of Greek epics speak, which fly like feathered arrows to pierce their audience, and leave them changed. The shanty choir will perform in public for the first time in over two years at the end of March. I feel like I have wasted a lot of my life singing to myself. I will sing to anyone who wants to hear it.
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