Recently I wrote an article about reasons why so many singers are just yelling.
This was not aimed as a rant about performers who are just bellowing on-stage in lieu of actual singing, but a frank and honest look at various reasons why. I hinted in one passage that there’s also cultural reasons for this, and I wanted to dive a little deeper into this today. It’s a thought-provoking subject, but if you’ve started to notice a difference in quality between singers of today vs yesteryear, then I would encourage you to have a read and a ponder for yourself.
1) Who do we look up to?
Quick history lesson: Once upon a time, high male singers did not sing high notes with great power.
Above chest voice, they would switch to a much lighter headier tonality, not entirely dissimilar to the sound of falsetto. This was after/alongside the period where castrati were also important for much of high male vocal work, but this is not within the scope of this article.
Then, in the early 1800s, an opera singer (Gilbert-Louis Duprez) sang a C5 (tenor high C) in a sound not unlike full chest voice. This was in a performance of the opera Guillaume Tell (or William Tell).
By all accounts his rendition was not of supreme quality, but the power he demonstrated there paved the way for powerful high male singing.
Improvement over the decades
From there, singers tried to imitate, improve and refine that sound he inspired. If you listen to recorded pieces as sung by (say):
– Manual Garcia II (late 1800s);
– Jussi Bjorling (early 1900s);
– Luciano Pavarotti (mid-late 1900s); and
– Jonas Kaufmann (early 2000s)…
…you will hear a clear trajectory to vocal development over the last 100-150 years. This illustrates the vocal sound becoming more and more masculine, progressively darkening and thickening to become the mammoth sounds you hear from the best opera singers today.
My point is, that over time, each generation of the studious singer spent time immersed in and learning from the generation before them. The generation before them had done the same, learning the ins and outs of the generation before them and what they had implemented in their addition to the progress of great singing. And so on so forth.
Actual Study and Critical Listening
With the complexity and immense depth of the classical repertoire, each new crop of singers had to spend time immersed in actual study. This involved not just listening and imitation, but learning and understanding why things were the way they were, not simply blindly parroting based on what they heard.
This also required identifying developmental “cul-de-sacs”, to then identify which avenues would enable progressive improvement. The result of this, is that history of singing is littered with singers who irrecoverably damaged their voice due to the wrong approach they adopted. This is the very cornerstone of the scientific method, and is the logical approach that has enabled progress across a plurality of disciplines.
NOTE: This wrecking of one’s own voice is not just a modern phenomenon. However I would say it is a far less acceptable outcome for singers now, given the centuries of knowledge that have been amassed about good singing and (more importantly) what constitutes bad or unsafe singing. Wrecking one’s voice now speaks more to ignorance and constantly overstepping one’s ability than “just one of those things“.
The Up-shot
If a serious singer of yesteryear wanted a lifetime of singing, rather than blowing out their voice in an era with no vocal surgery and no studio tricks, they had no choice but to get it right, and this involved deep study.
Whereas today, we have something altogether different… which brings us to point number 2.
2) Slippage of the culture of excellence
“The fundamental cause of [trouble] in the modern world [is that] the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
Bertrand Russell
The following is an extract from Quote Investigator, in relation to this quote by Bertrand Russell:
“In 1989 the poet Charles Bukowski was interviewed in a literary journal called “Arete”. The following excerpt begins with a question posed by the interviewer. Bukowski’s reply included an instance of the saying particularized to the domain of literature:
“Interviewer: Your poem ‘friendly advice to a lot of young men” says that one is better off living in a barrel than he is writing poetry. Would you give this same advice today?
Bukowski: I guess what I meant is that you are better off doing nothing than doing something badly. But the problem is that bad writers tend to have the self-confidence, while the good ones tend to have self-doubt.”
If you read that again with any instance of “writer” replaced with “singer”, you’ll get the gist.
Now I’m not saying that all our modern day singers are awful, but merely highlighting that our current culture celebrates charisma over competence. When actual ability plays second fiddle to how attractive or winsome someone is, it is inevitable that the bar for the next crop of singers gets lowered. This is in stark contrast to the development I highlighted in point 1.
Add on top of this the heavy fixation of our current culture on youth, to the detriment of those with hard-won experience – which inherently comes with age – we can see the root cause of the slippage of a culture celebrating excellence.
Concluding thoughts
While this is just Bukowski’s opinion, I would say this fairly accurately describes the general state of singing – and aspirations of singing – that we encounter today. The post-truth era we find ourselves in has also ushered in this idea of “there is no right or wrong, there’s just your own truth“.
When it comes to singing, there are indeed right and wrong approaches. Some approaches will yield progress, others may seem glittering and fruitful at first, but soon derail a voice. It therefore follows that there is a definable spectrum of singing from good to bad.
This is the reason why people have spent centuries on exploring good vocal development, and as such I’m surprised there’s even questions surrounding people wishing to try out approaches that we already know destroy voices (let alone sounding bad). But thanks to insta-fame of social media, television, etc leading to charisma being more important than competence, even this concept of critical listening has fallen by the wayside for most. When knowledge and access to means of self-improvement are more accessible than they have ever been, intentional ignorance has arguably never been higher. Perhaps an educational equivalent of the bystander effect?
At least in part because of this change in culture and attitude towards excellence, we find ourselves inundated with charismatic, confident and cocksure performers, rather than inundated with capable and competent singers. Focus on vocal quality and actual ability becomes but a footnote to many “singers“, rather than a critical piece of foundation that singing and artistry should be built on. In turn, this then becomes the current standard to which people rise, or to which they arguably sink.