REVIEW DUMP. One big review and then some mini reviews!

#The Supernatural Voice: A History of High Male Singing by Simon Ravens, 2014

This came out in November, and apparently no one at all has reviewed it since then. I may very well be the only person who’s read it actually... poor book. Well AskHistorians world premiere, here’s the first ever review of this book.

So this is billed as a revisionist history of falsetto singing, which sounds fun of course (in my sad brand of fun), but I honestly didn’t find its conclusions that revisionary: the book wanders around for a while but basically comes to a pretty conventionally accepted stance in the history of singing, which is that most male singers (both castrated and intact) up through the 19th century probably used their falsetto range when they felt like it or needed to, with not much fuss about using it, and that our taboo on falsetto in tenors (see: today’s mandatory chest voice high C), and our idea of a dedicated falsettist/countertenor, are both very modern. He spends some good time debunking the idea of the countertenor as a dedicated falsettist in Renaissance choirs (arguing it was just a vocal part that ran against the tenor part, probably in the same range as him), and I think that work is very solid. There is a popular fondness for the idea of the male falsettist in early western music, like ohhh think of the falsetto singer who sings over the intro to the BBC’s Brother Cadfael TV show, the high male voice there is used as a shorthand for of medieval eeriness. And I think Ravens does a good job debunking that idea of the falsettist in early music.

Hoooowever. We have come to the hoooowever part of the review, and ladies and gents it is a doozy. It’s, somewhat unexpectedly, bad science.

So, there’s the observable phenomenon that humans are on average getting taller. Right, yes, not very controversial claim there. There’s also the observable stance that height and larynx length (in hormonally uninteresting people) are generally correlated. Still no controversy yet. There is also, as most people will guess, a correlation between larynx length and modal voice pitch. (Modal voice being your normal speaking voice in phonetics, in singing terms it basically means non-falsetto voice.) That’s pretty well known to all students of phonetics, even the most untalented such as myself. So we’ve got ourselves three interesting correlations here:

• the broad evolution of humans is towards an increase in height
• height is correlated with larynx length
• larynx length effects modal voice pitch

Now, what Ravens argues for is a pretty simple A-->B, B-->C, C-->D therefore A-->D, which is that the general global increase in human height means we’re having a matching global decrease in modal voice pitch. It’s an interesting argument, and I’m willing to consider it, but he argues it so quickly (I’m talking only 6 pages), and so utterly poorly, and then accepts it as fact for the rest of the book, that this bad science angle just about spoils the whole book. He cites breezy anecdotal evidence about the scarcity of tenors (...is there really a tenor rationing on? Seems to me you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a passel of signers all grappling to plant their asscheeks on Pavarotti’s vacant throne) and the glut of baritones, but fails to address many key things:

• He argues for baritones becoming more common, but argues basses are decreasing, how’s the math add up on that
• Why do contraltos (the rarest and lowest female voice type) continue to be… the rarest female voice type?
• Modal speaking voice and trained modal singing voice are not absolutely linked
• Modal voice changes through your life, even for adult voices, and preferred professional vocal classification can also change as a voice ages
• We don’t know what is causing the rise in human height, we only have hypotheses. Human height is a complicated thing, with the vagaries of onset of puberty, nutrition, prenatal stuff, goodness knows what else. And this is all a string of correlations: do we really know that whatever is causing the rise in height is truly correlating with a matching dip in vocal pitch? (Says the 5’2” woman with an amusingly low modal voice)
• There is, to my knowledge, no studies showing any of this, and he’s stuck making a A-->D correlation argument, which is a biiig jump to make, he really needs somebody to make some studies on average modal voice pitch, professional singing vocal classification, and height, before this idea can be used to argue anything about history

He makes a second observation, which is that the intermixing of ethnicities (with their different average heights and stereotypes for producing the best of X voice type) means that humans are “averaging out” in height and voice, and therefore we’ll be getting more and more average voices of baritones and mezzos. This is such garbage I am reluctant to even touch it. However I want to point at the garbage so everyone can know it is garbage, so I shall simply observe that the development of singing voice type classifications happened in his golden olden age of relatively homogeneous ethnic groups. The words tenore contraltino (or tenore leggiero, whatever you want to call a high tenor) and basso profundo are both Italian terms developed in Italy among Italian singers, indicating, well, both these extremes of intact male voice types came about in the Italian population (and you can repeat this in other countries’ music traditions), so it’s likely that all voice types naturally occur in some proportion when you have any sizable sample of the human animal, ethnically mixed or “pure.”

You may at this point rightly question what on earth any of this has to do with falsetto singing. Well, the argument is that as human modal voices are lowering, we will see more men using their falsetto range to sing. Seems a very minor argument to spoil your book over, but it is not my book.

Ah well, I said my piece. If you’re into falsettists/countertenors and want to read some “revisionist” history, even if the a) revisionist bits are pretty mucky and b) the overall conclusion is not really revisionist, give this a go.

These past two weeks I have been very interested in the life during the occupation of France, thanks to my grandmother who shared a bit of what she lived during those years.

Doing some quick reading on the Internet, I found a radio program ( a daily show about history ) and the guest was Arnaud Benedetti who last October published a book called I served Pétain ( unfortunately it is only available in French but might be translated later according to the author ) which is basically an very long interview with a man called Paul Racine who is the only person still alive ( 101 years old ) to have been close to Pétain and to have worked with him. So we have the story of this man and the analyzes of the historian because well, Paul Racine is not very objective but he makes some very fascinating points that are rarely discussed.

The book has not yet been delivered to me but I managed to read bits here and there on the Internet and the summary is extremely intriguing ( home made translation, please forgive me ) :

Paul Racine is the last witness of Marshall Pétain's cabinet during the Nazi occupation of France. Paul Racine will be 100 years old in 2014. Severely wounded in June 1940 on the Belgian front, he took office in the secretariat of the French State in 1941. Under the authority of Doctor Menetrel, he takes care ( among other things ) of the propaganda and the prisoners of war. For four years, he lives with the intrigues, the conflicts and the blips of Vichy. He shares the daily life of Pétain and his circle and met the main figures of the collaboration from Laval to Darlan but also more surprisingly many actors of the Resistance such as François Mitterrand or General Groussard. In a crepuscular atmosphere, he saw the armed evacuation of Pétain by the Germans in August 1944. His testimony is all the more exceptional that he gives a particular attention to the complexity of a period that never stops interrogating us. Paul Racine has not forgotten. Seventy years later, the young Frenchman that he was draws us the tragic scenery of men fighting each other in the clash of History without avoiding any of the most terrible questions the time. Be it about the roundups, the repression of the Resistance, the Compulsory Work Service or the diplomacy he talks very freely about the regime he served and opens us to questions that keep gnawing at historians. In November 1942, why did Pétain refuse to leave for Algeria ? Why during the first days the Marshall believed the Americans would at one point or another enter the war and win ? Finally, why did accept to sink every day more and more into submission ? Who are these men forming his entourage ? And who are these men whom from the inside of this loosing regime would help and flip into the Resistance ? And he, patriot left for dead on the field of battle and moved by a deep hatred for the occupying force, why did he serve Pétain ?

I really can't wait to start reading the full book. It is simply a point of view that is almost never talked about ( in French schools and culture at least ). It's a shame though that it has not yet been translated in English, I know people who would enjoy it.

Sooo, it's okay for me to request sources of information on a particular subject in this thread, right? (Never done this before.)

If there are any people here who know a lot about the Warring States period of Japanese history, I'd like to know if there are any sources of information on Akechi Mitsuhide I should see other than what's cited in his English Wikipedia article. The only easily accessible source is the website of a Japanese history enthusiast, but that page itself doesn't have any embedded citations.

I also want to find more personal info about him, but I'm guessing he might be a bit of a nobody in history, other than betraying, trapping and causing Oda Nobunaga to commit suicide. No (English) books about him on Amazon. Nothing in my college's library system.

I can read a bit of Japanese, but the subject is a little difficult for my level--especially considering there are so many names and historical terms in his Japanese Wikipedia article.

tl;dr books where i can learn some more about akechi mitsuhide please

Does anyone know some good books on the German economy & currency starting from pre-WWI to WW2 (or even until the destruction of the Berlin wall) Thanks :)

What are some books about the Greek successor states in Central Asia? Everything I know about that part of the world comes from Wikipedia and trips to the Seattle Asian Art Museum, but I find it totally fascinating that there were Buddhist Greeks on the Asian steppes.

As to level of book, I'm a very interested amateur. I've taken some undergrad history, but I don't have a degree.

Thanks!