How modern singing was invented

Modern singing – whether on the charts or Eurovision – is radically different to the kind familiar to our ancestors.

There was hysteria in the air at 81st Street Theatre in New York. Deep within the building, behind its white neoclassical arches and away from the steady chatter of crowds of adoring fans outside, a new kind of celebrity singer was walking onto a black-and-silver stage.

But that night, as Vallée began the opening lines of a characteristically sentimental song, the crowd exploded with rapturous applause. The venue had achieved record-breaking sales, mostly with women: so many had turned up, the police had to be called to contain them. His was no longer just a voice for radio.

As it happens, the evening did more than catapult Vallée to global stardom. The singer was one of the first singers to practice the art of “crooning”. This new style was a kind of soft, intimate singing, often likened more to lullabies than to the belting operatic or classical performances audiences were used to in the early 20th Century. Today the term is less well-known, but the style is still as popular as ever. In fact, this was the birth of modern singing as we know it.

A matter of projection  

For much of the Middle Ages, singing may have sounded distinctly odd. Though the echoes of these ancient voices have been lost forever, there are hints in the historical record that the style of the day was somewhat ‘nasal’, to match the tones of the woodwind and string instruments popular at the time.  

By the 17th and 18th Centuries, a number of famous European singers were castrati – men who had been castrated as children, and consequently never experienced the voice-deepening effects of puberty. Their powerful, ‘metallic‘ voices were the dominant sounds at concerts, churches and palaces for generations, often moving audiences to tears and standing ovations. However, eventually genital mutilation of this sort came to be viewed as unethical and the castrati’s distinctive sound went out of fashion. Their ‘angelic‘ singing vanished – and somebody had to fill the void.

“They had had such extraordinary voices, being a large male body just with a tiny childlike larynx, they had incredible vocal facility,” says John Potter, a singer and author based in the UK. In their place emerged conservatoires and music schools, “where people learnt to do extraordinarily complicated things, loud things.”

The idea that singing should be studied soon became well established, and soon technique came to be valued above all else. The best performers, it was agreed, had clear, dramatic voices. Flourishes such as vibrato, which involved rapid oscillations in pitch, became ubiquitous. “That hadn’t really happened much before that, ” says Potter. “Before the 18th Century, people more or less sung as they spoke, as far as we can tell.” This included their regional accents: if you were from the British Midlands, this is what you sounded like as a singer, he explains.

“We do see a major shift during the period,” says Allison McCracken, a professor of American studies at DePaul University, Chicago, and author of Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning in American Culture. Criteria emerged for what constituted a good singer. “Often the qualifications were that they would be able to project, that they would be able to enunciate in certain ways, and that they would have what we would consider a trained voice.”

For example, one of the most venerated singers of the late 19th century was German soprano Lilli Lehmann. In the manual How to Sing, she provides minutely detailed instructions for aspiring professionals, such as how to keep a breath vibrating in the mouth to achieve a certain note. 

However, while tastes for different styles of singing have been continually evolving, all professional singers before the 1930s had one thing in common. In an era before artificial amplification, they had to be loud. That was the only way for their voices to fill a large concert hall.

A transformational technology

This changed with the carbon microphone, which was thought up simultaneously by three inventors in the 1870s. These early devices used carbon granules sandwiched between two metal plates to convert sound into electrical signals.

The technology was an immediate hit and became an essential part of radio and telephone technology. It also led to a public and bitter feud over whose version came first, including accusations of theft and plagiarism.

Meanwhile, the technology was being quietly improved. By the 1920s, microphones were so good, they could be used to broadcast reasonable-quality audio around the world. The popularity of radio boomed – and the way people sung started to change.

“The big advantage was that you didn’t have to project your voice in the back of a hall,” says Potter. “So you could just sing in a much more natural way. And you get the colours of your own personality coming through.”

Enter the first crooners. This group of charismatic, mostly male performers pioneered a style of soft, seductive singing, typically involving romantic lyrics, that rapidly became wildly popular with young women. It was “said to be peculiarly devastating in its effect on the heart of the emotional flapper“, wrote one journalist in 1929. Unlike their contemporaries, these musicians sounded as though they weren’t performing at all, but rather whispering sweet sentiments directly into the listener’s ear.

This new type of singing was assessed by different criteria, centred on conveying feeling, says McCracken. Technical considerations like projection or hitting high notes became less salient. “What becomes most important is that they sound sincere.” Crooners weren’t allowed to be anonymous voices performing for an audience. They had to seem authentic – and for that, they needed personality too.

An unwelcome development  

Like all cultural innovations, crooning had its critics. Traditionalists were horrified, with one cardinal publicly condemning the style as a “degenerate form of singing” and “imbecile slush” – even going so far as to criticise its perpetrators as “whiners and bleaters defiling the air”. Established musicians and conservatoires weren’t thrilled either: crooners were accused of lacking skill and corrupting the youth.

However, the crooners weren’t finished, and the march of technology enabled musicians to push the style still further. The 1930s saw the development of directional microphones, a variety that pick up sound from a particular direction, minimising background noise. Singers who got close to those microphones discovered the ‘proximity effect’, which created an even more intimate tone, says McCracken. “People really liked that sound.”

With these new singing techniques came a new kind of celebrity. “Rudy Vallée was really the first pop idol,” says McCracken. And along with this new lofty status came another invention: the adoring superfan. “The fan letters to him basically say, ‘I don’t know why I’m in love with the voice, I don’t understand why this is happening to me.'”

The term crooning eventually fell out of fashion, but the trend still lingers in popular music today. “Anyone who’s using popular music in order to communicate their emotions is crooning,” says McCracken. “They’re using microphones, they’re singing love songs to a popular audience… that’s what crooning is.”

We might imagine that people have always sung like Taylor Swift, or the contestants on Eurovision. But for most of history they didn’t. Singing as we now know it was invented in the 1920s.

Ubiquitous as the style now is, in those early days it seemed like a fad. One critic predicted, rather hopefully, that crooning would soon go the way of “tandem bicycles, mah jong and [miniature] golf”. Given that all those things remain popular, he wasn’t wrong.