Voice-overs

A History of Singing. By John Potter and Neil Sorrell. Cambridge University Press; 355 pages; £19.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

THE first music that humans made was song. All music arrived, the early Hindus believed, through the yoni, or birth canal, of Vedic chants. The Abrahamic religions also based their music on the chanted word, often equating instruments with pagan frivolity. From the earliest known praise songs of the Sumerian king Culgi of Ur, 3,000 years ago, singing voices have celebrated, seduced and bound tribes together.

Yet this obvious truth cannot be proven. Until recording technology arrived, hard evidence was limited to images of open mouths on walls and pots, and medieval singing manuals. Luckily, this has not stopped musicologists from trying to sketch out a history of singing. John Potter, a singer formerly with the Hilliard Ensemble, and Neil Sorrell, a composer and expert in Asian music, approach this challenge with brio.

Their survey bristles with facts. Though written for the expert, it is equally accessible to the amateur alto. Who knew, for example, that bel canto, an Italian opera term, came to define European classical singing mainly because the open vowels of Italian were easier to sing than French or German? Or that the virtuosic soprano of the castrato was due to his artificially small and flexible larynx, combined with supersized lungs?

Today’s singers, the authors argue, sound nothing like those gone by. By the mid-19th century, the anatomy of the vocal tract was well understood, and singers responded by dropping the larynx to achieve a voice of greater strength and colour. The book dwells rather too long on the Western classical tradition, and gives short shrift to popular forms like jazz, blues and hip-hop. But the authors’ passion shines through in asides on everything from Bollywood to Egypt and Mongolia, and especially in Mr Sorrell’s descriptions of Hindu ragas, which reflect Indian mathematical genius through the elaboration of a few notes into dazzling patterns.

Two main ideas emerge from the book. One is the absurdity of thinking of music as a “universal language”. Singing is culturally defined; what one group finds pleasing another will find unlistenable. The second thesis is more surprising. For most of history, song has been an improvisational, creative act. Composers’ and conductors’ “ownership of the music”, enshrined in written scores, is recent and perhaps short-lived. Opera, the grandest form of singing in the 19th century, has long since died as the “living engine of vocal creativity”, the authors conclude. In the 21st century, thanks to jazz, singer-songwriters and teenagers recording covers of their favourite songs with digital technology, humans may be returning to a mode of individual creativity that is the essence of singing.