I’ve had enough of writing about political and social issues all the time, as I suspect many of you are, so I’m taking the week off to cover a pleasurable topic.
As we all know, two attributes that humans have which animals don’t are (1) speech and language (never mind parrots and mynahs who can imitate human speech but don’t understand what they’re saying), and (2) music, which evolutionary biologists can’t explain because, as Dennis Prager has observed, it has no adaptive value. Even more remarkable than either alone, however, is our ability to sing, which combines saying words with sounding musical notes. (Again, never mind songbirds whose chirping is “preprogrammed.”) How do we do it?
Before getting into the physiology of singing, let’s look at how songwriters are able to put together words (i.e., lyrics) and music. Obviously, there are three possibilities: music first; lyrics first; or both at the same time, accomplished through an interactive process which we will illustrate by examples.
First, before there were Rodgers and Hammerstein, there were Rodgers and Hart. Composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Lorenz Hart met when they were working as summer camp counselors in the Catskills and teamed up to write successful musicals. Hart set the style by insisting that Rodgers compose the music first so he could be “inspired,” whereas Rodgers would have preferred to fit the music to the lyrics, which to me sounds more natural. Moreover, the process is by no means automatic, as Hart had to compose three different sets of lyrics to fit Rodgers’ melody until he arrived at “Blue Moon.”
The collaboration ended when Jerome Kern declined Hammerstein’s offer to work on a show based on “Green Grow the Lilacs,” while Hart declined Rodgers’ independently made offer to work on the same project. At that point, Rodgers and Hammerstein, who had collaborated two decades earlier on the 1920 and 1921 Varsity Shows at Columbia University, reunited and found they were in sync with each other. Hammerstein wanted to write the lyrics first to “get into” the character, which suited Rodgers’ preference to fit the music to the lyrics. In fact, they were so compatible that their respective wives were both named Dorothy. And so, beginning with Oklahoma in 1943 and culminating with The Sound of Music in 1959, after which Hammerstein passed away, they produced some of the greatest musicals in Broadway history.
As for the interactive approach, it clearly applies when one genius, whether it be Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, or Stephen Sondheim, writes both the music and the lyrics. I do have an example involving two people – the Gershwin brothers, composer George and lyricist Ira. I remember hearing Ira being interviewed as a senior citizen when he recalled that, on one occasion, George came up with a melody using just four notes. Ira said, “George, if you add two more notes, I can write ‘The way you wear your hat,’” so George did, and Ira did, and the result was a delightful song, “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.”
Moving on, once the song is composed, it must be written down on special music paper with two staffs, one for the treble clef and the other for the bass clef, to cover the usual range of notes, with additional staffs underneath for orchestration. Absent a vocal recording of the song, there is a discipline, “sight reading,” by which singers are able to translate the score into the tones they need to sound.
Now comes the tricky part. The singer has a mental idea of how the words and music go together, and must produce the desired result with his or her vocal cords (more accurately, folds). As far as I can tell, the actual process transcends the conscious mind, but in the background is a complex interplay of nerves and muscles (you can find a summary on vocalwisdom.com).
Briefly, the “vocal instrument” consists of three components: the vibrator, a material capable of vibrating when activated; the activator, which sets the vibrator into motion; and the resonator, which amplifies the vibration from the vibrator. For the human singer, these three components are identified as follows in the article “Vocal Physiology for Singing” on vocalwisdom.com: “The Vibrator for our voice are the Vocal Folds, which are located inside of the Larynx. The Activator for the Vocal Folds to vibrate is the air compressor of our Lungs and Breathing Muscles. The Resonator that amplifies the vibrations from the Vocal Folds is the Pharynx or throat cavity.” In addition, we have a fourth component that no musical instrument has: an articulator, consisting of the mouth cavity, tongue, lips and teeth, which allows us to make the consonant sounds needed to form words.
Let us conclude by examining a question my mother, a”h, raised: If we all have the same vocal cords, why can some people sing well and others not? Actually, it isn’t quite true that we all have exactly the same vocal cords (or the other elements that produce the voice as well). Although the anatomy is similar, there can be slight differences in the size of structures or in breathing capacity, for example. Most people can improve their singing ability with vocal coaching, focusing on skills such as vocal phrasing, articulation, enunciation, correct lyrics, pitch, volume (e.g., when to sing softly and pensively, or when to sing more loudly and energetically), breath taking (e.g., when to breathe during a song to minimize awkwardness and maximize breath availability and relaxation), rhythms and overall approach to the song, or vocal technique instruction. And if all else fails, there’s always the phenomenon of sounding better singing in the shower, which I believe arises from the hard walls producing a crisp reflected sound wave to superpose on the initial sound wave the singer emits.
Whatever our personal ability, we should be grateful that G-d has given us the gift of song, especially since research has found that hearing music can stimulate the brain of dementia patients, bringing back memories and at least temporarily improving cognitive function. Who knew?
