f e at u r e s
O F F K E Y d e p t.
F A C E
T H E
M U S I C
How can someone who passionately loves music also be
a terrible singer? In search of an answer, Tim Falconer
takes up voice lessons—and discovers the surprising
science of tone deafness.
Photog raphs by Kourosh K eshir i.
Tim Falconer , pic tured .
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T
in harmony—this is what Carew’s dollar metaphor was all
about—I admitted I never have any idea whether I’m singing
the right note at all.
Barnes understood. But he still asked me to sing a song.
“Oh, I can’t sing,” I insisted.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s a good place to start.”
Barnes seemed like a perfect fit for me: he’s into the
mental, emotional and psychological sides of singing, not
just the technical aspects. He didn’t think I had any “tone
impairment,” and said that, though I’d certainly need to
work hard, I could learn to sing. That was something I never
thought possible. And so, in the winter of 2011, I started my
lessons—and a sometimes-humiliating journey into what we
hear when we listen to music.
hat piano was mocking me, I’m sure of it.
A few years ago, I went on a writer’s
retreat at the Banff Centre. My studio featured a Bluthner baby grand piano, which I
had to water. Seriously. That part of Alberta
has an arid climate—it was an especially hot,
dry summer, too—and pianos require a certain level of humidity to prevent the wood from warping. A
couple of times a week, I filled a small plastic watering can,
stuck its long spout into the baby grand’s internal humidifier
and poured. I did this chore cheerfully, but otherwise I never
touched the piano. That’s because, although I love music, I
don’t play any instruments; in fact, I didn’t even sing back
then, because I was tone deaf.
Or so I’d always thought. One day, as I worked at my
desk beside the piano, listening to music on my Bose speakers, I wondered how someone with ten thousand songs on
his computer could be tone deaf. It was baffling. When I
hosted a musicale at the studio—my way of ensuring the
baby grand’s keys didn’t go untickled—several opera singers
showed up, and I asked them. They scoffed at the idea. One
even offered to prove me wrong.
The next day, mezzo-soprano Catharin Carew showed
me some breathing exercises, then asked me to match her
notes. Her verdict: I wasn’t singing the right notes, but I had
a good, resonant voice. She didn’t think I was tone deaf; I
could differentiate notes, and when I sung the wrong one I
was off by what she considered a perfect amount. “Instead
of being ninety-seven cents off,” she said, “you’re exactly a
dollar off.” I had no sense of why that was a good thing, but
Carew seemed pleased, so I eagerly repeated her explanation
to anyone who would listen, the way a kid shares a joke he
doesn’t really understand.
Studies indicate that, while 17 percent of us believe we’re
tone deaf, only 4 percent of people actually have amusia,
the oddly inappropriate technical term for a condition that
only the mean-spirited would consider amusing. Perhaps
the Zimbabweans have it right with the proverb, “If you can
walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.”
I sure know how to talk, so I screwed up the courage to
visit Micah Barnes. A tall, well-built singing coach with a
mop of dark hair and a small soul patch, he owns lots of
vinyl; among the albums on display when I first visited him
was The Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland. I really
just wanted to hang out and listen to that, but Barnes sat
down on his piano bench as I struggled to hide my panic. He
hummed a note and I tried to match it. He didn’t wince. We
did it again, and he pointed out that I was finding the right
note, though not right away, so we’d need to work on speeding up that mental process.
He told me I could sing harmony, though I didn’t have
the melody yet. When he asked me if I realized I was singing
While traveling through India in the 1980s, Andrew
Cash found himself on a packed train at 7 am. He was the
only Westerner in a car full of young men commuting to a
textile factory outside Bombay. Seeing his guitar, they asked
him to sing. He declined. Surprised, they pressed him again,
and when that didn’t work, one man said, “Okay, we’ll sing
first.”
The workers traded songs for half an hour until Cash
finally pulled out his guitar. The other passengers didn’t
know “Monday Morning on the Move,” a song Cash had
written about going to work, and they spoke little English. But they sang along anyway, making up the words
as they went.
Cash was in the respected Toronto punk band L’Étranger
and later started a successful solo career. His experience
in India was starkly different from the performance
dynamic back home, where concerts follow a predictable
routine: the band plays, the audience watches. Years later,
Cash, who is now a Member of Parliament, still marvels at
how comfortable the young men were singing out loud, in
public—and at such an early hour. “It was no big deal,” he
told me, “just something they did as a matter of course.”
Music is at least forty thousand years old—probably
older than speech. As a form of primitive emotional communication, it likely served an important evolutionary role.
One theory suggests that, because music creates social ties,
early humans who sang and played instruments together
had a better chance of survival. Another theory—one
favoured by Darwin and tested (with mixed results) by
every teenage guy who ever picked up a guitar—is that the
more musical the man, the more mates he attracts.
However it developed, we know that music stimulates
the ventral tegmental area in the brain. This pleasure centre
produces the chemical messenger dopamine and is linked
to reward and motivation; it’s also turned on by chocolate,
cocaine and love. When the VTA is stimulated, it triggers
emotional responses to music that are separate from our
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intellectual ones. So even someone who can’t catch blatant musical errors—wrong notes in “Happy Birthday,” for
example—can still tell if a song is happy or sad. Studies also
show that young children can differentiate between scary
and peaceful music, and that people can interpret emotion in
music even when a song is in another language.
But somewhere along the way, we screwed it up. While
just about everyone likes music, most of us rarely, if ever,
actually make it. True, we don’t need to be accomplished
sopranos to enjoy a song—just as we don’t need to paint to
enjoy Vermeer or Monet—but singing is an essential social
pastime in other cultures
around the world. In the
West, though, we’ve professionalized singing so much
that only the talented and
trained tend to do it in public. Unless we count alcohol-fueled karaoke fanatics or deluded contestants
on reality TV, all but the
most uninhibited among us
prefer to mumble through
hymns in church and lipsynch national anthems at
hockey games.
We’d rather leave it to
the pros. Indeed, despite the
rise of illegal downloading,
music remains a multi-billion-dollar business. Each
new technology—radio,
records, TV, tapes, CDs,
mp3s—increased music’s
popularity and altered the
way we relate to it. Couples
swoon to “our song” and
carefully choose the first
dance at their weddings.
Some people even select
what they want played at
their funerals. And, more
than ever, music helps
delineate our social tribes.
“Musical subcultures exist
because our guts tell us certain kinds of music are for
certain kinds of people,” writes Carl Wilson in Let’s Talk
About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. “It’s most blatant
in the identity war that is high school, but music never
stops being a badge of recognition. And in the offhand
rhetoric of dismissal—‘teenybopper pap,’ ‘only hippies like
that band,’ ‘sounds like music for date rapists’—we bar the
doors of the clubs we don’t want to claim us as members.”
So we load up our iPods and talk about “the soundtracks
of our lives.” Regardless of what attracts us to it, the music
we listen to helps us define ourselves. That’s not necessarily
a bad thing. But even as we enlist music to fashion our identities, few of us actually sing—unless it’s in the shower, the
car or anywhere else where no one can hear us.
at a Korean restaurant. Karaoke was a fairly new phenomenon in Toronto then, so I had no idea what I was in for.
Our friends sang a few songs, and soon we had no choice
but to try it. Carmen chose the Fine Young Cannibals’ cover
of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds.” By the time we got to
the mic, the lyrics were already crawling across the screen.
We scrambled to catch up, but before long, I heard the
woman at a nearby table groan, “Ah, you suck.”
Despite such public disgraces, music has always brought
me joy. At twelve, I went to my first concert, an all-day, allCanadian affair at Varsity Stadium headlined by the Guess
Who. By sixteen, I wanted
to be Marvin Gaye. In the
late seventies, I pogoed at
punk shows. Even today,
I still buy CDs, download
dozens of songs a month
and regularly go to gigs
where I am old enough to
be the father of everyone
else in the crowd.
When I was ten or
eleven, my sisters and I discovered a copy of the Hair
soundtrack at the Muskoka
cottage my parents rented
every August. Some of the
songs were already radio
hits, but I soon learned
the others and started singing, “Masturbation can
be fun,” from “Sodomy,”
everywhere I went. The
au pair my mother had
hired pulled me aside. “Do
you know what that word
means?”
When I admitted I
didn’t, she suggested, “Well,
I don’t think you should
sing it until you do.”
Although I found this
conversation more puzzling than awkward—at
least until my vocabulary
improved—it reinforced the message I’d received at school.
A girl in my class complained to Mrs. Lennox that my offkey singing was a real problem for her, so would I please stop
it or move. I stopped singing. In public, anyway.
I’m not alone. My friend Kelly Crowe, who grew up in
small-town Ontario, was about ten when she joined the
United Church junior choir, which was short of members.
But the choir leader asked her to stand in the back and
insisted that, rather than sing, she just mouth the words.
“And so that’s what I did,” says Crowe, who has since
learned to play guitar. “I’ve been mouthing the words ever
since, too terrified to sing a note.”
Ask a group of kindergarteners if they can sing and
they’ll all put their hands up; ask high-school students
and only a few will. It’s learned behaviour—or, rather,
it’s behaviour caused by a lack of learning. Drawing is the
same. Stephen Zeifman, a former high-school teacher who
now runs an art school in Port Rexton, Newfoundland,
While I’ve long resigned myself to never singing in pub-
lic, I have tried karaoke. About two decades ago, after an
office party, my not-yet-wife Carmen and I found ourselves
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says that as young kids we all think we can draw—our
parents even hang our stick-figure masterpieces on the
fridge. But at some point we decide we’re no good at it,
probably because we see someone who’s better. That’s an
understandable response, but it’s also silly. After all, we
don’t stop playing sports just because we aren’t the best on
the team. Zeifman says he can teach just about everyone to
draw, and with a few simple tests, he can identify the tiny
minority who simply can’t learn.
Singing is also something we should all be able to do,
even if we do it badly. Voice is one of the most basic forms of
human expression. According to ethnomusicologist Gillian
Turnbull, when we speak our intonation, timbre and register can convey even more meaning than our words; in music,
these qualities interact with melody, pitch and rhythm to
make singing even more powerful. The guys I play hockey
with on Friday afternoons have regular jam sessions with
guitars, keyboards, drums, a banjo and a flute. And I long to
join them, to step up to the mic and croon away.
sics, is pitch deafness—difficulty recognizing or reproducing
relative pitch.
This is how we hear music: sound waves move from the
outer ear through the ear canal to the eardrum, causing it
to vibrate. These vibrations move tiny bones in the middle
ear, transferring the movement to the cochlea in the inner
ear. Fluid inside the cochlea vibrates tiny hairs, called cilia,
which stimulate nerves. The nerves then send signals to the
brain, which interprets the signals as sound.
For a few of us, though, something goes wrong—not in
the ear, but in the brain. We don’t process what we hear as
well as we should. Impaired pitch recognition and production suggests a problem in the brain’s action-perception
network—specifically, a neural structure called the arcuate fasciculus. Made of nerve fibres, it connects the lateral
temporal cortex (home of the primary auditory cortex) with
the frontal lobe. When researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center and Harvard Medical School used MRIs to
compare brain images of amusics and regular folk, they discovered that the latter had larger pathways. Neuroscientist
Psyche Loui speculates that these pathways may be more
active in non-amusics, too. If this theory is right, it means
I have a bad connection in my head. Unfortunately, I can’t
just hang up and dial again.
While amusia can sometimes be caused by brain trauma,
its congenital form is more like dyslexia or dysphasia. The
deficit runs in families, and is probably the result of a genetic
variation. Statistically, there’s a 40 percent chance my siblings also suffer from amusia. Though they all like music, my
mother and three of my four sisters received relatively low
scores on BRAMS’s online test. (We’re pretty sure the sister
who didn’t take it is the most tone deaf of the bunch.) And
my late father had to have been tone deaf as well.
My results in the BRAMS tests all pointed to tone deafness. In the five-tone test, I was able to detect a quartersemitone change in pitch less than 40 percent of the time.
(A semitone is the difference between two adjoining piano
keys.) So while not all notes sound the same to me, I can’t
tell if something is only a little off. That’s why BRAMS scientists call this kind of amusia “a disorder of fine-grained
pitch discrimination.” Many amusics are also bad at recognizing and remembering melody. I like to think I have
a knack for recognizing songs, but my melody memory is
poor, as indicated by my low score on the test that asked me
whether two melodies were the same or different.
But I’m distinct from a lot of amusics in one important
respect. Most congenitally tone-deaf people can’t enjoy
music, though few admit this, for fear that they’ll be considered inhuman. In the lab, BRAMS researchers have
heard people talk about their indifference and then, an
hour later, say on camera, “Of course I love music!” One
amusic told Gosselin that, during his divorce, his wife said,
“You don’t understand emotion. The proof of that is you
don’t like music.”
But the two enduring passions in my life are hockey
and music. Peretz and Gosselin were surprised to hear this.
Skeptical, in fact. They asked if I liked only certain kinds of
music and suggested I might merely be reacting to the words.
While it’s true that I have a fondness for literate songwriters—Elvis Costello, John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats,
John K. Samson of the Weakerthans—the lyrics aren’t what
first attracts to me to a song; after all, it usually takes a few
listens to really catch the words. And with some music I
Isabelle Peretz made me an espresso in her office. This, I
would soon realize, was the equivalent of giving a cigarette
to a man about to face the firing squad. Peretz, a cognitive
neuropsychologist and a professor at the Université de Montréal, is a founding co-director of the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research, known by the
acronym BRAMS. As we waited for the coffee, Nathalie
Gosselin, a BRAMS researcher at the time, told me, “Like in
Hitchcock, we create tension with music.”
I’d traveled to the lab, which is in a former convent on
the north side of Mont Royal, to be tested for amusia—to
determine once and for all whether I was really, scientifically tone deaf. Another researcher, Mihaela Felezeu, sat
me down in front of a computer and gave me a set of headphones. As a program played pairs of melodies, I had to
indicate whether they were the same or different. I found
this extremely difficult; by the time I was listening to the
second melody, I couldn’t remember the first. I blamed it on
my wandering mind.
A second test measured my ability to detect metre. It
asked me if a piece of music was a waltz or a march, which
have different time signatures. (They all sounded like
waltzes to me.) Then I had to listen to five tones and indicate whether the fourth was the same as the others. The
listening session done, Felezeu recorded me singing “Happy
Birthday,” followed by “la la la” to the tune of “Happy Birthday,” then “aaah” from low to high to low again. It was truly
embarrassing. After a spatial test, Felezeu recited a string
of numbers, which I had to repeat backwards. The strings
became longer and longer as we went, but I could tell by the
look on her face that I was acing this one.
I’d already had two lessons with Barnes. I knew I was a
dreadful singer; the recordings of our sessions were painful
to listen to, even for me. Still, I expected Peretz to tell me
that I was just untrained, not really tone deaf.
No such luck. I was, the tests made clear, a typical amusic—part of a tiny, hopeless minority.
“Tone deaf” is a term people throw around with relish—
it’s also a diss in politics, public relations and writing—but
congenital amusia is a specific disorder that affects the way
the brain processes music. Some people may be beat deaf
and have trouble with rhythm, though this appears to be
extremely rare. Much more common, at least among amu-
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like—early R.E.M., for example—who knows what the
singer is saying?
The role of music in my life clearly intrigued Peretz. “I
am stunned. And I’ve seen many amusic cases,” she said. “I
would love to be in your brain.”
shake the question that had nagged me since my diagnosis:
“Am I like the colour-blind guy who wants to be an interior
designer?”
Seven months after my initial visit, I returned to BRAMS.
The first day was nearly eight hours of misery: cooped up in
a tiny booth, staring at a computer screen with headphones
on, failing test after test—first with Sean Hutchins and then
Marion Cousineau, both post-doctoral fellows. I left the old
convent, put in my earbuds and moped my way to the metro
station, thinking, “Screw the singing lessons. I give up.”
I went back for more poking and prodding the next day.
When Cousineau was finished with me, Felezeu took over.
Her last experiment was an auditory test, just to make sure
my embarrassing flaw wasn’t due to a hearing problem.
Despite all the loud concerts I attend and the cranked volume on my iPod, my results were above average. I hadn’t
even lost the ability to hear high frequencies—unusual for
someone my age. “Finally,” I said, “after three days in this
lab, some good news.”
I was about to get more. Before I left BRAMS, I sat down
with Hutchins, who had the results from the tests he’d given
me the day before. He’d asked me to sing “baa” at different
registers: low, medium-low, medium, medium-high and high.
Then his computer randomized them and he recorded me as
I tried to match my own notes. This was an expanded version of a test I’d taken when I first visited the lab—and a
comparison of the two showed “modest improvement.”
I asked Hutchins if he thought I should continue my singing lessons. “You do have pitch-perception abilities that are
below what you’d find in most people,” he said. “When you
go through any music lessons, you’re not able to use what
you consciously hear to influence your singing as much as
other people might. So you’ll need more practice to improve
your singing than someone else.” He didn’t want to oversell
my potential, but he thought I should go for it.
When I emailed Barnes, he responded: “This is good
news about your forward motion…it’s scientifically tested.
Makes your coach happy.”
The inside of my brain was not a serene place in the days
after my diagnosis. Three musicians, including a professional singing coach, had concluded that I was trainable.
Plus, since most people who believe they’re tone deaf actually aren’t, I thought the odds were in my favour. It’s one
thing to be afflicted with something common; it’s quite
another to learn that you’re some kind of subhuman freak.
I was devastated.
Even today, I’ve told few people that I am amusic. I
like to think I have a reputation as a knowledgeable music
fan—someone who turns friends on to great new albums
and curates much-appreciated mix CDs; the guy who buys
the tickets and rounds people up for shows. What would my
friends think once they knew I was tone deaf? I’d be ruined.
Barnes spent most of my next singing lesson trying to talk
me out of my funk. He said the diagnosis only reinforced
what we already knew: I’d have to work hard. “The worst
thing about all this is the emotional, underlying shit that
stops us from learning. That’s all I ever deal with, whether
it’s you or a recording artist or a Broadway actor,” he said.
“What I’m watching for is whether you get downhearted,
whether you go away saying, ‘This fucking sucks’ and ‘I hate
that guy’ and ‘I can’t do this.’ The fact that you love music is
a compelling argument for your ability to focus on this.”
Always quick to offer positive reinforcement, Barnes
regularly insisted that my ability to match his note was
improving, that I was getting it on the second try instead
of the third or fourth. At one session, after I’d sung along
to Freddy Frender’s version of “Before the Next Teardrop
Falls,” Barnes asked how I thought it sounded.
“It sounds the way it always does when I sing along:
great,” I replied.
A few days later, I was driving to Georgian Bay by myself.
My iPod was in one of its ebullient moods, pumping gem
after singable gem into my car’s sound system: Joe Strummer’s “Silver and Gold,” the Hold Steady’s “Stuck Between
Stations,” the Neko Case cover of Neil Young’s “Dreamin’
Man.” As I bombed along the empty highway, I belted out
each song loudly, gleefully—and, I soon realized, tunelessly.
“Shit,” I said to the Canadian Shield. “The only thing these
lessons are doing is making me hear what a terrible singer
I am.”
Later, I adopted a more optimistic take: if I can tell that
I suck, maybe Barnes is right—my ear is slowly getting better. My vocal lessons weren’t exactly fun, but I didn’t dread
them. Barnes was patient and encouraging, and we made
each other laugh. I always felt better after a session.
Practicing, however, was another matter. I crammed,
ignoring my exercises until a few days before the next lesson, then going hard. Not hard enough, apparently. At my
eleventh lesson, Barnes dropped the nurturing approach and
finally played the hardass. “You have to get serious about
this,” he chastised me. “You’re not really engaged with this
process I’m doing with you. You haven’t jumped in. It’s a
heavy thing for you to go from ‘I can’t sing’ to ‘I can sing.’”
As chewing-outs go, it was fairly tame, though he apologized the next week. But I knew he was right. I couldn’t
WHEN HE WAS IN UNIVERSITY, Frank Russo snagged a job
looking after special guests at Toronto’s Ontario Place. One
day, B.B. King came to play the Forum, the park’s music
venue at the time. A fan and a musician himself, Russo took
the opportunity to chat with the great guitarist and noted
his calm, reserved demeanour. Five hours later, though,
Russo was struck by King’s performance style. The arched
back, shaking body and frenzied facial expressions were
startlingly at odds with what he’d seen earlier. He started to
wonder about the visual side of music.
Russo is now a psychology professor at Ryerson University, and he came to the field through music. “For me, it was
a lens to understand myself, other people, how we think,
how we remember things,” he said. “Eventually it came to
my attention that there are people studying the psychology of music.” Russo is now the director of Ryerson’s Science of Music, Auditory Research and Technology Lab. He
believes that what we perceive when we “listen” to music
is, on some abstract level, movement: we can hear it, see it
and feel it.
When we watch someone sing, for example, we subtly
activate our facial muscles to mimic the singer’s facial
movements. We can’t normally see this, but Russo can
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detect it by recording changes in the electrical potential
at the surface of the skin. Within 250 milliseconds of seeing and hearing a singer smile, the audience will smile in
response. If this automatic process goes on long enough,
the smiling will rub off and influence the audience’s mood.
We also feel music: deaf people, for example, can dance at
clubs because they sense the bass. Russo co-developed the
Emoti-chair, a device that allows deaf people to feel music
through vibro-tactile stimulation, but even those of us with
normal hearing perceive music partially through the vibrations of sound waves.
All this has convinced Russo that we don’t hear music
the way we think we do. “We think our experience of music
is about sound and it’s about pitch,” but there’s more to it
than that, he said. “Music is this mushy signal that is deeply
moving, but we don’t really know what it is, what it’s trying
to convey. That’s maybe part of its beauty—trying to sort
out what it is.”
When I first contacted Russo, he was just about to start a
study examining people who have normal pitch and rhythm
perception but are indifferent to music—the opposite of
me. “It did not really occur to me that folks like you might
exist,” he emailed back. But my case didn’t surprise him. He
believes that not everyone has the same ability—or willingness—to be absorbed by music. And he doesn’t think that
music absorption—the ability to become lost in it—is determined by musical aptitude.
Even the pitch-impaired can recognize songs based on
the rhythm of the first few notes, which might explain
why I’m good at playing name-that-tune despite my poor
melody memory. “I’m sure you’re hearing things in the
music,” Russo said. “They’re just not the things that we
tend to think about in the Western classical tradition, in
the science of music.” In the West, music is mostly about
pitch and rhythm—especially pitch. But there’s a lot more
going on than pitch (the highness or lowness of the sounds)
and interval (the relationship between pitches). Some of
the other elements of music are contour (the path of the
melody), rhythm (the pattern of sounds in time), metre (the
organization of a recurring beat) and timbre (how a voice or
instrument sounds).
Russo figured that, when I listen to music, I respond
to these “extra-pitch characteristics.” So while I may be
weak on pitch and metre, perhaps I make up for it by
being strong on contour and rhythm. He believes music,
emotion and motion are closely linked. And, he assured
me, my problems with pitch don’t necessarily mean my
friends should ignore me when I recommend a band.
Music is “massively over-determined,” he said, meaning that musical phrases are conveyed through several
often redundant cues: for example, the first beat tends to
be strong, and the first note is usually one that’s important in the key of the piece. The path of the melody may
resemble an arch going up and then coming down, and the
final pitch will be longer, on average, than other notes in
the phrase. Music also conveys emotion in several ways. A
sense of melancholy can be created by a minor key, slow
tempo, narrow pitch range or lower pitch level. So I may
be adept at picking up on subtleties in, say, timing and
timbre that other people aren’t concerned with because
their brains are so focused on pitch.
Gillian Turnbull, though, isn’t convinced by Russo’s
movement theory. In fact, she’s doesn’t think I hear music
any differently than most other people who simply lack
training. As an ethnomusicologist, she studies music and
culture, including the way we use and experience music. At
Ryerson and York University, she’s taught students who
don’t have backgrounds in music, and they tend to focus
not on pitch, but on lyrics, beat and timbre. They also
struggle with the concept of pitch, can’t hear chord changes
and have trouble distinguishing between “high” and “low.”
In other words, they are not that different from me.
While Turnbull doubts I’m even tone deaf, Russo is optimistic about the brain’s ability to retrain itself. He suggested
that, if I continue my lessons, it’s possible I could not only
learn to sing, but even pass amusia tests. “There’s something
atypical in the way that you’re hearing pitch,” he said. “But
I suspect, if you get enough feedback about what’s right
and wrong, your brain is going to figure this pattern out.”
In 1944, seventy-six-year-old Florence Foster Jenkins played
Carnegie Hall. If her age didn’t make the event unusual,
the American soprano’s complete lack of singing ability
certainly did. She had no sense of pitch or rhythm, and her
voice had a tendency to disappear on high notes. And yet
she held annual recitals at New York’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel
until she booked Carnegie. “She was exceedingly happy in
her work,” wrote Robert Bager in his New York World-Telegram review of the sold-out show. “It is a pity so few artists
are. And her happiness was communicated as if by magic to
her listeners…who were stimulated to the point of audible
cheering, even joyous laughter and ecstasy by the inimitable
singing.” For her part, Jenkins, who died shortly after the
infamous gig, said, “People may say I can’t sing, but no one
can ever say I didn’t sing.”
Tim Falconer
is the author of four books, most recently Drop the
Worry Ball: How to Parent in the Age of Entitlement (Wiley), written with
Dr. Alex Russell.
I will never make it to Carnegie Hall, just as I’ll never play
right wing in the National Hockey League. I’m okay with
both of those disappointments, but I still play hockey three
hours a week, and get a lot of delight out of it. All I really
want is to be able to make music as badly and enjoyably as I
play old-timers hockey.
I could simply say, “Oh, well, I can’t sing. No big deal.”
But researchers are finding fascinating and powerful links
between music and health. They’re using music in cancer
treatment, pain management and end-of-life care, in therapy
for Alzheimer’s and stroke patients, and to help people with
Parkinson’s disease walk more steadily and quickly. As for
singing specifically, the health benefits include elevated
mood, greater lung capacity and a strengthened immune
system due to lower stress levels. Cervantes was probably
onto something when he wrote, “He who sings scares away
his woes.”
I never hoped to become a professional musician, or even
join a garage band—I just want to be able to sing along,
without embarrassment, when my friends bring out their
guitars. Now that I’ve taken my first stab at it, I can’t help
thinking about one of the most charming myths of popular
music: Robert Johnson went down to the crossroads of two
Mississippi highways, sold his soul to the devil and returned
an incredible bluesman. That’s a deal I’d gladly make just to
sing in tune. 
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