Singers And The Need For Powerful Communication

Singing is among the most esteemed of all high art forms precisely because of its unmatched ability to communicate mightily on an emotional level. Without doing so, singing could easily become nothing more than empty or irritating noise. Common sense communication is relatively simple—it’s easy to explain to any reasonable person the physical difference between a car and a bicycle, for example, or to show him that 2+2=4. Singing, by contrast, often deals with intangibles, with nuances of feeling and moods that defy easy and common sense communication.

Because good singing is demanding on both a physical and artistic level, it’s not surprising that many singers fail at meeting their obligation to communicate powerfully. They fail because they are unable to make the words that they sing, the emotions that they feel, and the message they are delivering, real, viscerally real, to the listener. Some singers meet this obligation occasionally, perhaps in a song or series of songs in a particular performance or recording. Some singers, like Michael Jackson, are able to communicate powerfully even in their youth, while others, such as Frank Sinatra, cultivate their communication skills as they mature, and reach their highest level of expression in middle age. Some great singers—and these are few and far between—are able to sustain exceptional artistic communication consistently throughout a lifetime. We might think of tenor Luciano Pavarotti, Stevie Wonder, and Aretha Franklin in this light.

While I was on tour with Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine in 1992, I recall listening to Sinatra singing one night at Radio City Hall in New York and bemoaning the fact that I had never heard the legend sing live in his prime. At this stage of his life, his performances were very inconsistent; sometimes his voice was passable and at other times, his voice sounded old, worn-out, and frayed. But on this particular night something astonishing happened: seemingly out of nowhere, he momentarily found his peerless sound and sang a few lines from his classic One For My Baby with power, tonal nuance, emotion, and understanding which moved some of us in the audience to tears. It was at that moment that I finally understood the meaning of authentic communication in singing.

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