In May of 1975, my parents … (Wait…that’s 40 years ago? I’m really old.)…as I was saying, my parents saw Frank Sinatra in concert. He was just a few days shy of his 60^th birthday so the pipes weren’t what they used to be, but, as you might imagine, he packed the place. At the time, the arena that held the concert held just under 18,000 people for hockey; a couple thousand more on the floor made it somewhere around 20,000 folks to hear Frank sing.

My mom is a long-time choral singer and a good one. She’s one of those perfect-posture-folder-held-high-watch-the-conductor singers (there should be a poster on the wall of the rehearsal hall with her picture just to show you how it’s supposed to be done), so she wasn’t your average starry-eyed screaming fan. When I asked her the next morning how it was, she smiled and said it was fantastic and then sat down to tell me why.

I had been singing in choirs for quite a few years and she always enjoyed passing knowledge down the family tree, but this particular conversation stuck with me (yeah…for 40 years…ouch). Frank had of course been greeted with a thunderous ovation and then sat on a stool, lit a cigarette and spoke for a few minutes. After that, the band played a somewhat extended introduction to the first number, a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” (yup, I remember that, too…I told you it stuck with me) and Frank started singing.

And the place shut down. Silence from the 20,000. All that could be heard was his voice and the band. This continued for the whole show; he owned the place. Massive applause between numbers and then he grasped them in the palm of his hand and took over. My mom said she’d never seen anything like it. When I asked her how he did it she said, “You could understand every letter of every word of every song he sang. You HAD to listen. It never occurred to you to make any noise because he was singing to YOU.”

Listen to an old Sinatra piece on YouTube or a record player (kids, ask your parents) and you’ll discover that he was a master at it. Every consonant was crisp, diphthongs had shape and movement. He loved to hold the “n” at the end of a word, but never gave up on it, ending it solid with a “nuh” to let you know the word was over. You never miss the presence of the “s” at the end of a word, but it’s so subtle that it doesn’t hiss. You can learn a whole lot by listening to a few songs sung by Sinatra.

In a group, this is all magnified because not only do you need the consonants to be understood, but you also need to do it together (which is impossible with 100+ voices; you can get close but there’s still going to be a little mushiness). With the sheer size of the sound, you have to make them MORE crisp than when you speak (or Frank sings). How many times have you heard Susie ask for a massive “KUH” sound at the beginning of a word or seen her give that little pinching direction to have all the “t” sounds hit at the same time at the end of one?

The difference between singing words like they’re spoken and singing them like they should be SUNG is surprising and takes both practice and trust in the director (because it sounds completely different to you than it does to your audience). It’s also the difference between “fy mi do du moo n le mi pay amu du saw” and “Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars”.

Frankly, I prefer the second one.

(The blogmeister does NOT apologize for puns, no matter how sad. Period.)