Recently I was at a monthly singing event called The Night Before Larry Got Stretched in the back bar of the Cobblestone in Dublin. There people take turns singing unaccompanied and unamplified while everyone else listens quietly, except when they join in. The singers sing old songs filled with heartache and loss and history and humour. Some people have very beautiful voices but when someone knows the words well, the quality of a voice doesn’t matter. It’s the care they give to the song that’s most important. It’s often very moving. Apart from the electric lighting and beer on tap, it’s a gathering that could have happened at any point in human history.
Why do we do this? Why do we do this weird thing where we vibrate our vocal chords to create different pitches? Why does it feel so meaningful? Singing teacher, therapist and performer Julia Hollander tries to answer that question in a book called, simply, Why We Sing. In each chapter Hollander moves from the very specific ways singing has affected her life, often with closely written descriptions of her singing experiences with babies, choirs, her Czech and Irish musical heritage, environmental protestors, Long Covid sufferers on zoom calls (singing has been found to be helpful for them), self-conscious teenagers she is teaching to express themselves and dementia sufferers in nursing homes — to the more cool-headed way scientists, anthropologists and singing professionals have learned to understand the practice.
The book is packed with facts about our relationship to music and the human voice backed up with reference to scientific research. Here are some of them: most babies have perfect pitch (though not “relative pitch” which is why they are, no offence to any babies reading, terrible singers); Those who make music when young have better hearing in old age (this is more complicated if, like this tinnitus-stricken writer, your youthful music making was very loud); singing causes the release of happiness-causing endorphins and serotonin and boosts the body’s natural analgesics; it can be a mnemonic aid for students but it can also, on a deep neurological level, tap into words forgotten by people who have lost the ability to speak (some people can access words when they sing that are beyond them otherwise); when choirs and chanting football fans hit their stride with their singing, their hearts start to beat in time.
Hollander also delves into the murky pre-history of singing hominids. Many experts now believe that singing developed as a way of communicating and bonding long before we managed to get our tongues and teeth around language. Indeed, the singsong way in which we talk to babies and toddlers and the “tuneful babble” with which they respond, may well be evoking something very old. This brushes up against a personal trauma at the heart of the book: the devastation Hollander felt when her second child, Immie, was born with severe disabilities that left her unable to connect with the world. Feeling that the healing power of singing had failed her, Hollander couldn’t sing for a year after Immie’s birth. But later when she and Immie’s sister sang to her, they realised that Immie was responding in her own way. A connection was being made through music.
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Hollander is understandably passionate about the power of singing. This is heightened by the fact that in the Covid-stricken era during which she wrote the book, group singing was forbidden, restricted to relatively unfulfilling zoom sessions. Why We Sing is satisfyingly laid out according to stages of life, in chapters with titles that include “Birth”, “Childhood”, “Work”, “Healing”, “Aging” and “Dying”.
Over the course of these chapters, Hollander explores the power of songs to bond us together, to aid our work, to communicate our identity, to galvanise our beliefs and to soothe our suffering. If anything, she tries to fit in a little bit too much, but I respect her zeal. For singers, this book will provide a scientific and anthropological basis for the strange transcendental feelings we sometimes have when we sing (Hollander likens singing Beethoven to becoming “a conduit for ideas that are bigger and deeper than I am”). And, rather fittingly, the story is bookended by life and death. In the first chapter, she sings lullabies to her babies and in the last, she sings to a dying woman. The simple answer to the question implied by the title is: love.
