I.
The other night I was at a concert listening to a band that I had never heard of before (that was opening for a band that I had heard of before) when my girlfriend, Meg, leaned over to me and said something pretty surprising: “I think I like girls’ voices better when they sing harmonies. I dunno why…”
For some context, the lead singer of band we were listening to was a girl, who grew up locally, with a voice and sound that reminded me a lot of a great artist from my youth, Lizzie McGuire. She was talented and had a fun stage presence, and I thought little more of her performance than “oh, she sounds pretty good; it’s cool that she get’s to be the opener”. So, I was struck by the aforementioned comment, mostly because it expressed a sentiment that was so distant from the one I’d been reflecting on that I didn’t know what to do with it. I have been thinking about the comment ever since.
Part of the reason I am hung up on it is that I think I might agree. That I could prefer female voices to function in the role of harmonizer, rather than as carrier of the melody is not a thought I’ve had before. And in our current cultural climate it seems like a thought that would be best kept to myself. Otherwise, I risk bearing my ‘internalized patriarchal proclivities’ to the world, which is never great. However, I am going to proceed with this thought because ultimately, I think it speaks incredibly highly of women, insofar as it underscores a prototypically feminine disposition to constructively contribute to the pursuit of fullness, unity, and perfection – something I see as rather obviously venerable and worthwhile.
II.
First things first, let me clarify that my view is not an endorsement of a sentiment anything like “women can’t sing well enough to carry the melody”. It is a bit annoying that I should need to make such a statement explicitly, but such is life.
Some of the greatest voices of all time have belonged to women, and even in our current time, when I think of the voices I find most impressive, the majority of them belong to women. (I’m thinking Adelle and Whitney Houston and Celine Dione and Fergie (nah I’m just kidding)). Such women and many others whose musical abilities I admire greatly may carry the melody whenever they would like. I am not (nor was Meg) trying to make the point that men have better voices or are more musically talented than women. That’s a dumb point.
The real point, I think, to take away here is that high harmonies – harmonies whose notes are higher than those of the melody – sound better than low harmonies – whose notes are lower than those of the melody.
I know from personal experience singing that high harmonies are easier to pick out. That is, it is easier, when listening to another person sing the melody of a song, to sing along with them, to harmonize as it were, when I sing notes that are higher than what they are singing, as opposed to lower. Now this is not always possible for me; it depends entirely upon who I am singing with. But typically, if I am singing with another person whose (vocal) range is similar to mine, then I will choose to harmonize using higher notes than the ones they are singing for the melody.
This sentiment appears to be backed up by what little research I tried to do on the subject while writing this article. See for instance this Stack Exchange thread which discusses how harmonies are most often written (and seem to sound the best) using notes that are a 3rd higher or a 6th lower (which I am pretty sure is just the same note as a 3rd up but in the immediately lower octave) than the notes of the melody, as opposed to notes which are a 3rd lower than the notes of the melody. [I apologize for the somewhat amateur use of such technical music jargon. See here for a bit of background on harmonizing in thirds.]
Whether this phenomenon of higher harmonies sounding better is ubiquitous or even legitimate, I have no idea. There is no research or data that I can find on the phenomenon (though I didn’t look extremely hard), but it does appear to accord with my experience and the experience of others with whom I have made music. A rather selection-bias-riddled group, I will admit, but enough of a group to make me think that this pattern is worth exploring.
III.
Art, as they say, imitates life, and this is particularly true of music. More specifically there are certain mutual patterns shared between life and music. There is, I think, a reason that the word ‘harmony’ is used to describe both the concurrent expression of properly aligned musical notes and a sort of accordance between and unity of entities in the world. Music, as a representation of life, offers us the unique opportunity to experience the latter form of harmony by our experiencing the former. That is, if you are paying attention and participating with good faith in the harmonies music affords, then you will (for at least a short time) experience the sort of completeness and fulfillment that life will rarely and momentarily afford you on its own.
For there is something we are after when we make music, something that is higher than us and our circumstances; something that is harmony, peace, fulfillment and more than all these things; something that is present within us but also above us and beyond us. If you have engaged music before than you have joined in the search, whether you know it or not. And by this search, music gives us insight into the way in which it might be possible to live our lives. Music offers us an immediate connection to those aspects of life that can seem far off in the course of our day-to-day. In music we find those brief moments of harmony in which all is in accordance with itself and everything else, a glimpse of a moment when life-as-it-is reflects well life-as-it-should-be.
Moreover, we understand on a deep, intuitive level that life-as-it-should-be is higher than life-as-it-is. We know that we look up toward perfection, rather than down at it. (This is why, for instance, we think of heaven as, in some sense, above the clouds and talk about “looking up to” those they admire and refer to particularly wicked people as the “lowest of the low”.) And this is reflected in our music as well. We prefer the sound of high harmonies because they represent that which is good and above us. They pull us, those hanging around at the melody, up toward the harmonious perfection above.
In music, as in life, that which is above has the ability to bring us closer to that which is the highest, toward the perfect unity and harmony occupying the highest seat.
IV.
What then of the idea that “girls should sing harmonies”?
There is a proclivity these days to shrug off characteristics as primarily (or, God forbid, uniquely) feminine, to say that women are more suited for such and such a thing merely by dint of their being a woman. But this seems to me a rather misguided way to handle this topic. Of course, there are outliers in all things; no sex, female or male, is a monolith. However, the presence of outliers is not a defeater for characteristically feminine/masculine traits, dispositions, etc.
Women on average have higher voices than men, and therefore, it is they who must sing the high harmonies. This is, of course, not always the case, and it is quite cool to hear a male sing harmony over a female’s melody (see: “Leather and Lace” by Stevie Nicks and Don Henley). But naturally, it is women who are tasked with singing high harmonies, and thus, it is women who have the privilege of serving to pull the melody toward that harmonious perfection I just described.
This phenomenon, however, in keeping with the theme of music as reflective of life, also maps onto a moral role in life beyond music, one I see as a profoundly worthwhile and fundamentally feminine – that of improving men’s character and actions.
Here I might sight any number of works of art which depict a basic truth about humanity: men are most often the ones who need working on and women are most often the ones who know what working needs to be done. Don’t lie to me and say that isn’t true. It’s embedded so deeply in us that it serves as a major plot point in almost every romcom that’s ever been made. Such movies, along with stories like Beauty and the Beast and tropes like the incredibly capable wife who whips her dopey husband into shape, reflect a particular pattern, the same pattern that I believe was reflected in Meg’s original comments about girls singing harmonies – that is the proclivity for women to drive improvement in men, be it physical, intellectual, or moral.
[It is worth noting briefly that such a proclivity on the part of women is well in line with the theory of females as the driving force for sexual selection (over and above natural selection pressures) in humans, with only those men who are most fit according to female preferences having the chance to reproduce. This a topic over which much ink has been spilt, and a full analysis of this relationship is outside the scope of both is paper and my non-existent scientific expertise. But I do think it is as important point to make.]
This is what I mean when I say that a thought like Meg’s comment underscores a rather venerable and worthwhile fact about women. In life, as in music, it is women who pull men out of their self-focused, broken existence toward the harmonious perfection at which we should all aim. I know what you are thinking, but perhaps singing harmonies above the melody means more to us than just a pretty sound. Perhaps it reflects real accordance and harmony and the role the feminine plays in the pursuit of such things.
Very interesting, liked III section especially.