I have found no reliable evidence of any increase in the rate of injury among classical singers. (Pop/rock vocalism is another matter⎯⎯sign in on the Adele furore.) There’s a lot of talk about it and, as always, a few prominent cases, acknowledged or suspected, to fuel the talk, but nothing much in the way of factual support. My sense is that there has probably actually been a decrease, given the ubiquity of medical and pedagogical supervision and the atmosphere of therapeutic caution that pervades most training. Compared with their forebears, today’s singers endure some of the same stresses experienced by our athletes. That’s surely true, for instance, with respect to travel⎯⎯its frequency, distance and speed, its hassle⎯⎯and the strains of the promoted celebrity life. And while on the whole today’s singers don’t perform more often, they do rehearse more, with greater obligation to textual and directorial stricture. Still, they don’t  seem to me to be suffering so much from an increased rate of attrition as from not having developed functional sturdiness in the first place. Their comfort zones don’t extend to the heroic, so they don’t try to be heroes. They don’t sound reckless, but merely protective. Their voices don’t break down (well, some do); they just peter along.

Granting that the key causes of this shortfall are most likely those I suggested above, I still sometimes get an ill-defined sense that there’s a more basic biological element at work, perhaps triggered by environmental factors. One that has intrigued me for its possible vocal implications is the de-virilizing and otherwise sexually distorting effect of endocrine disruptors. Information about this worrisome  development has been turning up in the science pages and columns of the lay press; I’ve followed it most consistently in New York Times op-ed reports by Nicolas Kristof, which have popped up every so often over the past few years. Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that interfere with hormonal regulation. They are found in plastics and other packaging materials, in cosmetics, in the receipts from ATMs and gas pumps. They wind up in the water supply, in our bloodstreams, in the fetal environment, in breast milk. Thus, their effects sometimes emerge only in a second generation. Many of the products and processes (e.g., the microwaving of food in their packaging or in plastic containers) have been with us only long enough for their influence to now become apparent.

We can reduce our exposure to these chemicals, but we can’t avoid them altogether, and in the USA especially, they are woefully under-regulated. They have been scientifically associated with cancer, obesity, and other serious health problems. Some⎯⎯ like bisphenol-A, for example⎯⎯have come to public attention (though not to significant political action), but except for infrequent journalistic outings like Kristof’s, many others have stayed within the purview of medical journals. Among these last are some that behave like estrogen. Their effects seem to have been first noted in sexual weirdness in certain populations of frogs and fish wherein the males were feminized to the point of androgyny or hermaphroditism, and their species threatened with an inability to reproduce. More recently, analogous effects have become evident in human males. Most alarming (see Kristof’s column of 3/12/17) has been a precipitous decline in the number, quality, and swimming ability of sperm, sufficiently widespread to cause worry among endocrinologists over future human reproducibility.