28 December

There’s a real elitism in a lot of singing, opera singing is often taken as the gold standard against which singers should be judged. And a lot of the theory of singing derives from there, all the stuff about chest voices and head voices etc. But opera singing evolved to basically allow a human being to bellow across a large hall and still be heard, meaning it leaves much less room for nuance and phrasing. Listen to an opera singer sing a popular song and it so often sounds completely wooden, French and Saunders did an hilarious take on that. The microphone enabled an entirely different type of singing, one where singers could introduce sophisticated and nuanced phrasing to the way words were sung. None of that could have been heard in an opera theatre or even in a stage musical. To this day some elitists scoff at singers who ‘need’ microphones. It misses the point I think, microphones aren’t just about volume.