The voice is at the center of all music, all music aspires to be song — and the farther back in time you go, the truer it is
This MUSINGS column was first published in the September 2026 issue of EMAg, the Magazine of Early Music America
Looking back over a long stretch of highly opinionated columns that I’ve written for this magazine (and its predecessor, Historical Performance), I note that my emphases seem to chime with those of the wider music world — or at least the classical music world, or the far smaller early-music world. I spend most of my time writing about instrumental music, or about the instruments, the institutions, the people, that support and make instrumental music.
Why that is I can’t be sure. In fact, I think that the voice is at the center of all music, that all music aspires to be song, that singing is a central and indispensable part of music, of classical music, and of early music — and the farther back in time you go, the truer it is. Maybe I’ve said this before, but I don’t think it can be said often enough or loudly enough.
The voice is, after all, the only musical instrument that has not changed at all for far longer than the recorded history of human music. In the early-music world we spend a lot of time studying the instruments of the past for what they can tell us about the music that they were designed to play — we learn a lot about tuning, pitch, timbre, technique, and many other things from such study, and it has informed our understanding of that old music. And the changes in instruments over time has contributed to our sense of appropriate style.
But with the voice everything is different. In many conservatories in the past (surely not now!) there was one and only one way to sing, and that is what was taught — essentially continuous legato, continuous vibrato, and as loud as possible. That’s where the money is, of course — in the giant opera houses.
But we all know that the voice is really an instrument that can do almost anything. I think we tend to constrict it a lot. Yet the “early music” voice could mean a number of things: The straight-tone white sound of the English cathedral, the flexible and acrobatic sound of the Baroque and bel canto opera aria, the language-forward intimate sound we might imagine for the Medieval troubadour, the high-larynx car-horn sound that some imagine might be the sound of Renaissance choirmen.
And that’s just within early music. Think of the range of styles and vocal techniques that are used simultaneously in our own culture, from cocktail crooning and Broadway belting to Gospel, various sounds in rock, country, hip-hop, and on and on. (I’ve sometimes thought that certain kinds of Broadway singer might do better at Baroque opera than they think: The ability to look you in the eye and deliver a message is really what recitative is about.)
Not to mention singing in other cultures: that high-larynx sound and dazzling ornamentation of south Indian Carnatic singers, the raspy and endless epics recorded by Parry and Lord, the women’s choirs of Bulgarian folk music, the yokyoku of Japanese Noh theater, and on and on. “If you sing like that you’ll ruin your voice,” says the imaginary voice teacher of the past — and yet those styles persist, singers practice them for decades with no visible harm, and what is harsh and unpleasant to one is beauty personified to another.
I do expect that certain vocal styles were practiced in certain times and places, and that composers in, say, 16th-century Florence had a pretty good idea of what sound was appropriate for their music. But I also think that style changes over time: We certainly do not sing nowadays like the singers recorded at the beginning of the 20th century, with their doorbell vibratos and sometimes very nasal voices.
There’s a lot more to say. Future columns here might consider why classical music radio stations — remember them? — avoided vocal music. Or why we make such a fuss about vibrato in singing. But for now, let us rejoice in the voice, and join with William Byrd:
Since singing is so good a thing,
I wish all men would learne to sing.
Thomas Forrest Kelly is Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music at Harvard. He previously directed early-music programs at Wellesley, the Five Colleges, and Oberlin. He is past president and a longtime board member of Early Music America and the author, most recently, of Capturing Music: The Story of Notation (W.W. Norton).
