Colm Keena on why it's not the lyrics, it's the voice that casts the spell

Irish Times

2 days ago

Sitting in the sunshine in the Wicklow mountains recently while having desultory chats with some friends, the conversation visited, momentarily, the topic of the great opera singer, Maria Callas, the subject of a recent biopic.
There was mention of her fame, her being from Greece, her love of Paris, and her relationship with the Greek shipping tycoon, Aristotle Onassis. I for my part chipped in to say some argued it was because she had a far from perfect voice that it was so captivating. A perfect voice can run the danger of having no character, while others, perhaps less perfect, can be distinctive in a way that grabs your attention.
'Ah,' said one of the group - a diehard fan - 'like Dylan.'
In his 2018 book, Innate: How the wiring of our brains shapes who we are, Kevin Mitchell, the associate professor of Developmental Neurobiology and Genetics at Trinity College, Dublin, wrote (if my brain is still functioning as well as I hope it is) about how each of us gets our unique chromosomal inheritance before going through a developmental stage in the mother's womb that involves a complex to-and-fro interaction between our genes, our developing body, and the mother's body, so that in the end out pops an individual different from all the other humans on the planet.
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Given that there are currently approximately eight billion of us, and the existing population is subject to relentless churn, that's something. Not only that, but because each of us then proceeds to interact with the outside world by way of our unique body, and change and develop as we do, we become, so to speak, ever more unique.
We are born different, according to Mitchell, and become more different as we go through life. It an interesting proposition, though all of us of a certain age who have watched our dearly beloved friends become more and more barmy as the years pass, already know it to be the case.
It's nice to consider that not only is each person's fingerprint identifiable, but so is each person's face, and each person's singing voice. One day at lunch in our house my late mother, then almost 90, and even smaller and slighter than she'd been during the earlier decades of her life, agreed to give us a song having already endured (sorry!) the pleasure of hearing her grandchildren perform.
The fact that her lungs may not have been servicing her vocal cords quite as efficiently as they used to did not diminish the aesthetic effect of the sound she produced. Quite the contrary. I had no memory of having heard her sing before, and the experience of hearing her sing then was powerfully moving and something I will never forget.
I might say that I perceived her existence and her history in an entirely new way, but if someone probed that expression, I might find it hard to say what I mean. Nevertheless, while she was singing, my consciousness of her existence had a new and very moving quality. Callas, though she was never as groovy as my mother, can do that too. You just have to listen.
The idea of our innate difference to one another was touched on by the writer, Hanif Kareishi, in the extraordinary tweets he posted from his hospital bed in Rome after he fainted and broke his neck in December 2022. Addressing the craft of writing, he advised writers that the characters they create should have fascinations and idiosyncrasies.
This chimes with Mitchell's book. A character lacking idiosyncrasies can suck the air out of a story in much the same way a singing voice lacking character can suck the life out of the best of songs. Perhaps the attraction of a voice, or a face, lies in the individuality it reveals (which may explain why bizarrely white teeth, or Botoxed foreheads, can have the opposite effect to the one their owners aspire towards).
For me, and obviously for millions of others around the world, the voice of the late, great Bob Marley has the special quality of making you want to listen. His colleague, Bunny Wailer, had a full, clear, impressive voice, but Marley's, to my ears a more delicate, weedier, voice, draws you in more. Sometimes his lyrics are about matters of Rastafarian belief that may not be of particular concern to non-believers.
But it's not the lyrics, it's the voice, that casts the spell. Somebody that's not you, singing from the other side of the high garden wall, is making a sound you feel speaks to you precisely because it emphasises the individuality that is core to human nature.