Introduction

The evocative terms “wildness” and “untameability” of voice and references to sirens are often used as descriptions of particularly compelling operatic voices. Because voice is so intangible, performance – live performance and the joy of singing, and the effect of that joy on the audience – is often hard to quantify. Many people have tried to describe what it is in the voice that transfixes the listener, and have used terms like “ineffable” – something that is beyond words, beyond description, and “uncanny” – something strange and mysterious in an unsettling way. ¹ Enhancing both, when words and music are brought together, the sound of the voice adds something extra in crucially significant ways. Voice fascinates and seduces because it is of us and yet not; paradoxically, it extends our bodies into air and space, and is received from them. Voice can be discussed metaphorically and literally: the effect of its heightened use by way of chanting, orating, shouting, incanting, and singing, intrigues and disturbs. Augmenting the use of the voice, its timbre can manifest the most hidden feelings and belie the meaning of words spoken at the same time. The female voice in particular has long held a distinct fascination: not only were the voices of the sirens suspected of calling and fatally seducing the listener, but also dangerous was the abandon induced when voices were raised to music and used to alter states of mind, body, and soul. In a frenzy of rapture – in ancient Greece, and surely before – dance and song accompanied religious rituals and sexual rites of passage: voices were raised with heightened emotion, passion, and abandon and roused parallel feelings in the listener.