The relaxed, casual, intimate model dominated mainstream American popular music for some thirty-five years, cross-pollinating with mike-adapted versions of jazz, blues, and country styles, and buttressed by a sprinkling of quasi-operatic manly-man baritones, ingenue sopranos, womanly contraltos, “radio tenors,” and the era’s version of crossover trespassers from the classical firmament. European vocalities, though always reflecting more strongly the deeper penetration of their traditional higher cultures, underwent analogous transformations. It’s not too much to say that in those decades, the microphone created popular musical culture as we understand it, and saturated the modern ear. And that was plenty of time for a couple of generations of young singers, including classical aspirants, to absorb the notion that expressiveness in singing should incorporate a relaxed, “warm” affect, a kind of murmured, in-your-ear intimacy, that is energetically altogether different from the ways acoustical singers evoke emotional experience and bring it close across long distances. The microphone vocalist eases into the onset, softens the support. The young ear, captured by its moody, seductive properties and—unless attached to the pate of an adolescent recluse or monk—so regularly tuned to it that its routings into the ear-to-motor complex have become virtually hardwired, now brings its shadings, its sensed bodily state of being, to his or her first lesson, even if the dream is Otello or Isolde.

In my book, I write of a shift in the timbral and behavioral characteristics of operatic singing, marked by exceptions but general enough to be categorized, starting in the years just prior to WW2 and proceeding apace after it. I describe it (with many illustrative examples) as moving from a brighter, leaner, tauter paradigm to one that is darker, plumper, and looser. I don’t believe the microphone is solely responsible for this shift. But I do believe it was a major participant in it, and particularly in the weakening of sheer vocal calibre that followed. Bing Crosby (to make of him an exemplary stand-in for a thousand more) found his identity at a moment (a very long moment, embracing the aftermath of the first World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War) when the yearning for comfort, laced with carefree assurance and whistling-through-the-graveyard good cheer, was pervasive, and when a sheltering in the private and personal seemed like the only protection. A turn toward a cozier, softer-textured aesthetic was probably indicated, technology aside. But the technology was a mighty catalyst. And though the prevalent fashions in non-classical music have changed, they have served only to further de-nude voices of overtone and melodic sustainment. They are more than ever separate from the traditions of the acoustical voice, and even less constructive in the cultivation of young ears.

Amplification itself has changed radically, too. Under many circumstances, including those of the theatre, the eye factor has been minimized for the singer. ^(I) Stage mikes placed out of the field of vision or on its periphery, body mikes worn on a lapel or in a wig, free the singer from trying to direct the sound, but leave her with the awareness of an ever-more sensitive, sophisticated electronic eavesdropping environment that is unaccommodating to the sorts of imperfections associated with big-voiced efforts, and more forgiving—welcoming, even—to slenderer, blander kinds of vocal engagement. And in many cases, the eye-awareness, and the ear-to-voice inhibition that accompanies it, returns with the gaze of the camera, with its love of the affectless look and the small gesture, and its threat of embarrassment over anything too theatrical. Thus is completed the singer’s self-image of a creature roaming an electronic sight-and-sound field whose limits must be always sensed, and never violated.