Before Pavarotti, There Was a Lemur
There is a certain kind of person who can persuade an entire room to stop talking simply by opening their mouth. Most of us can’t do this. We open ours and someone asks whether we’ve ordered the potatoes. But a singer, given the right voice and a reasonably sympathetic room, can interrupt dinner, suspend an argument, and make people forget for several minutes that they were about to say something terribly important. It’s an enviable arrangement.
Naturally, we’ve built quite an industry around it. There are lessons, auditions, special shoes, and buildings designed to make a voice sound as though it has a personal relationship with God. Opera has taken the proceedings particularly seriously. People dress beautifully to watch other people suffer at considerable volume, often in a language they don’t understand, and leave discussing whether the suffering was as good as it had been in Milan. An ordinary evening of jealousy and poor decisions becomes culture once someone supplies an orchestra.
All this preparation encourages a certain confidence about to whom the achievement belongs. Surely anything involving that much training, architecture, and expensive seating must be ours. We are generous about acknowledging nature’s talents in other areas. Flight, for example. Camouflage. The manufacture of a decent mango. But the finer accomplishments seem always to call for a human signature, preferably followed by several qualifications and a discreet acknowledgment of the sponsors.
Then someone points a camera into a tree in Madagascar, and the ownership question becomes awkward. Researchers studying the indri, a singing lemur, have found that it opens its mouth wider as its pitch rises - a pattern suggesting a resonance technique also used by trained sopranos. We claim no expertise in either opera or lemurs, but it does seem a little inconsiderate of the lemur. After everything we’ve invested in the business, there it sits on a branch, apparently making some of the same vocal adjustments without a single lesson. Before Pavarotti, there was, at the very least, another act worth hearing.
A Remarkable Voice. An Unconventional Address.
Madagascar lies off the southeastern coast of Africa, a location that has allowed much of its wildlife to develop without consulting the rest of the world. Among the results is the indri, a large lemur with a black-and-white coat, conspicuous ears, and an expression that suggests you have arrived at an inconvenient time.
It lives in the rainforest, where it spends its days among the trees and occasionally produces a sound for which its appearance has done very little to prepare you. We tend to expect an extraordinary voice to come with some advance notice. A commanding entrance, perhaps. At least a scarf.
The song is a rising, falling series of calls, eerie enough to make you pause whatever you were doing - which, if you are visiting a rainforest, is probably trying to establish what’s just landed on your neck. Other members of the family may join in, turning the performance into something between a chorus and a household with strong opinions. You needn’t know anything about music to find it arresting. Nor must you decide whether it’s beautiful. Some voices earn your attention before you have worked out what you think of them.
It’s tempting to imagine the forest as an opera house, although the comparison presents certain practical difficulties. The seating has ants, the roof is unreliable, and anything dropped from the upper tiers should be approached with caution. Still, the essential arrangement is there: a voice, a space through which it travels, and somebody listening. The singer has no need to come down and take a bow. It has other things to do, and whatever we may think of the performance doesn’t really matter, we were never the audience it had in mind.
All That Training, and the Lemur Just Opens Its Mouth
For a human soprano, a remarkable voice is generally the beginning of the work. There follow years of lessons, exercises, rehearsals, and instructions to do things with parts of the body most of us had been using without supervision. Breath must be managed. Posture requires attention. A promising sound must become one that can be produced reliably in front of several hundred people who have paid enough to develop expectations.
Talent gets you through the door; after that, someone will almost certainly have something to say about your jaw.
Which brings us to the lemur’s jaw. In the study that prompted this little excursion, researchers examined 83 videos of 19 wild indris and found that the animals opened their mouths wider as their notes rose in pitch. That may sound like the sort of discovery anyone could make by watching an uncle attempt the final chorus at karaoke, but there’s more to it. Changing the shape of the mouth can help reinforce a voice, just as the shape of a room affects the sound inside it. Trained sopranos use this principle, and the indris’ movements suggest that they may be doing something comparable. The researchers sensibly stop short of claiming the animals have worked out the theory. Nobody has caught one explaining it to a less accomplished relative as yet.
We couldn’t tell you exactly how a soprano does it. Presumably, the lemur couldn’t either, which gives us something in common, although only one of us appears capable of the performance. The interesting part is that an adjustment cultivated so carefully in one setting seems to occur quite naturally in another. Somewhere, a singing teacher is asking a pupil to relax and open a little wider. Somewhere else, an indri is getting on with it, unaware that this sort of thing costs extra in Milan.
The Neighbors Have Requested Something Quieter
Of course, there is a difference between hearing a remarkable voice on holiday and living next door to it. The visitor stops beneath the trees, listens in wonder, and goes home with a story. The neighboring indris have rather more invested in the interpretation. These songs help a family announce its presence and defend its patch of forest. What we hear as an extraordinary musical encounter may arrive across the canopy as a fairly firm statement about property rights. Imagine discovering that the aria you’ve been admiring is largely concerned with where you’re allowed to have lunch.
This gives the performance a familiar quality. Human beings also enjoy making occupation audible. A car pulls up with its bass arriving several seconds ahead of it. Someone takes possession of a holiday rental and immediately introduces the surrounding district to their taste in music. Through an apartment wall, a devoted amateur tackles a song whose original performer had the advantage of actually being able to sing it. Each may consider this a private pleasure, although the neighbors have effectively been enrolled as unintended subscribers. The indri, at least, has a practical reason for wanting its presence acknowledged.
There’s something appealing about conducting a boundary dispute from a branch. No appointment needs to be arranged; the announcement travels to the interested parties, and everyone can consider their position from a suitable distance. That doesn’t make the singer peace-loving. A magnificent voice can deliver an unwelcoming message, as anyone who has been told “good evening” by a hotel receptionist at three in the morning will understand. Still, as ways of saying “we live here, kindly bear that in mind” go, a song has a certain elegance. It would be difficult to say the same of a fence topped with broken glass.
Every Family Eventually Starts a Band
So far, we have pictured our singer as a soloist, holding forth from a convenient branch. But indris also sing in family groups, which brings us into an entirely different area of show business. One impressive voice is a discovery. Several related voices suggest that somebody will eventually have an opinion about the arrangement. We can’t know whether an indri ever feels that another family member came in too early or has been making rather a lot of the high notes. Those are human concerns, although anyone who has shared a bathroom with siblings may find them difficult to keep out of the picture.
We have definitely made good use of the family ensemble ourselves. The Jacksons, the Bee Gees, the Corrs: quite different sounds, all requiring people who grew up together to agree, at least temporarily, on how a song should go.
It’s an impressive achievement when you consider how many families struggle to agree on where to eat. There’s something especially satisfying about voices fitting together, whether the singers share a surname or simply enough rehearsals. For a few minutes, people with separate lives and private grievances manage to make something that depends on listening to one another. Then the song ends, and someone can resume being unreasonable about the air-conditioning.
The indris’ family performances offer a pleasing shift in emphasis. A song that announces “we live here” can also make the “we” audible. That’s our interpretation, of course; the animals have not supplied program notes. But the appeal of hearing voices together needs little explanation. We recognize it in a choir, around a cocktail table late in the evening, or in a crowd singing a chorus with considerably more enthusiasm than accuracy. Sometimes the pleasure comes from the sound itself. Sometimes it comes from finding that, for the duration of a song, you have company.
Same Urge, Different Wardrobe
By now, opera has earned the right to loosen its collar. The soprano gave us our way into the trees, but she hardly has a monopoly on making people listen. A rock singer can bring a stadium to its feet. A crooner can make a crowded nightclub feel, briefly, like a conversation between two people. Someone singing in a kitchen can make you linger in the doorway, even when you came in to complain about the dishes. These performances have very different ambitions, but each offers the voice a chance to travel beyond the individual producing it. What happens when it arrives depends on the audience, the occasion, and occasionally how much everyone has had to drink.
We’ve developed an extraordinary range of presentation styles for the purpose. Opera permits emotions so large they require scenery. Rock allows a man in leather trousers to ask fifty thousand people whether they are having a good time, despite fairly persuasive evidence that they are. The crooner takes a quieter approach. Sinatra could stand at a microphone and make a song feel like something he had been meaning to tell you.
Dean Martin gave the impression that he had just wandered over from an excellent dinner and might return to it shortly. The apparent ease was part of the pleasure: all that command of a room, delivered as though there were nothing to it. Our lemur has fewer options for staging, although a branch does at least spare it the leather trousers.
There is a temptation here to give every performance the same motive, which would be convenient and almost certainly unfair to everyone involved. An indri defending its territory is not Sinatra working his way through a love song, however firmly both may hold the attention of the neighbors. Still, the comparison makes our elaborate distinctions rather enjoyable. We sort voices into genres, build appropriate venues, and decide which performances require us to sit respectfully and which allow us to spill beer on one another. Then a sound reaches us from somewhere unexpected, and we stop to listen before anyone has told us what category it belongs to. And in that moment, the world is something we listen to rather than explain.
When the Showroom Closes
There was a particular sort of room in which a singer like Sinatra or Dean Martin made perfect sense. Small tables, low lighting, a waiter who could deliver a drink without becoming part of the performance. Whether in a nightclub or a grand Las Vegas showroom, the evening had somewhere to settle. You sat down, someone sang, and for a while there was very little you needed to do about anything. Even your troubles had the decency to wait until the end of the number. The bill, naturally, remained committed to its entrance.
That world hasn’t vanished entirely, but much of it has changed, and the old saloon singer has become a less familiar figure. Rooms close, hotels reinvent themselves, and an intimate stage turns out to be standing exactly where someone would prefer a more profitable attraction. The songs survive, of course. Sinatra can still find you in a taxi; Dean Martin may turn up while you’re buying tomatoes. Yet something goes missing when a voice loses the room around it - the expectant hush, the clink of a glass, the sense that the singer is spending this particular evening with you. A recording preserves the performance. It can’t quite save your table.
The indri has a considerably more serious version of the venue problem. Its forests are shrinking, and the species is critically endangered.
There’s no need to make the comparison more complicated than it is: the place where it sings is also the place where it lives. It can’t accept a residency elsewhere, and a tribute act would be unlikely to help. People in Madagascar are working to keep those forests and their inhabitants standing, which seems a more useful response than waiting until we have only recordings to admire. We ‘ve become rather accomplished at celebrating voices after they are gone. It would be really nice to get the timing right for once.
Before Pavarotti, There Was a Lemur / One More Before We Go
By this point, the lemur has acquired quite a resume. Soprano, property manager, member of a family ensemble, and reluctant participant in a discussion about the decline of the nightclub. It asked for none of this. It was sitting in a tree, conducting its affairs, when we arrived with recording equipment and a need to relate everything to someone with a better publicist. There is something reassuring about its indifference. We spend so much of our lives trying to establish what we are that it’s a relief to encounter a creature apparently satisfied with being one.
There comes a point when a chair, a drink, and someone who can sing strike us as a perfectly adequate plan for an evening. We no longer need the evening to change our lives. Getting through it without being asked to download something would be enough. A voice with a little weather in it, a song that has survived a few disappointments, and a room where nobody feels obliged to improve the experience can do quite nicely. We’ve become very inventive about entertainment, but there’s still a great deal to be said for sitting still while someone makes us feel something we had been too busy to notice.
The rooms matter. We tend to remember the name on the marquee and forget the bartender putting out the glasses, the musicians unfolding themselves into a cramped corner, the people who made it possible to walk in from a difficult day and find somewhere to spend the rest of it. A forest has its own lives going on around the singer, most of which will never make the marquee. Maybe that’s where our attention could linger a little longer. We’re good at discovering something remarkable. Staying interested once the novelty wears off has always been the more demanding part.
Somewhere in Madagascar, an indri will sing again, provided there’s a branch, a family, and enough forest left for the neighbors to hear. It will have no idea that we found the performance sophisticated, or that we compared it with a man who could fill an opera house. Those are our little contributions to the occasion. Its contribution is the voice. I think I’d like to hear it one day, standing beneath the trees with nothing useful to add.
Authors Note: After all that listening, we arrive at the small commercial interruption. There is no interval bar, but there is breakfast, something for the wall, and a book for anyone whose interest in lemurs now extends beyond their unexpected qualifications for the stage.
The lemur has entered the breakfast business, where the hours are less forgiving, but nobody expects an encore. Nature’s Path EnviroKidz Leapin’ Lemurs combines chocolate and peanut butter in an organic, gluten-free cereal, and the company supports animal and habitat conservation through its EnviroKidz programme. A modest opportunity to do some good before becoming disappointed with the morning’s news. Milk remains your responsibility.
For those who would appreciate a lemur keeping an eye on the appointments. This twelve-month wall calendar brings a little Madagascar into the daily business of remembering birthdays, missing deadlines, and discovering that it’s somehow November again. The lemurs can’t improve your schedule, but they can provide a more agreeable face to consult about it. Consider it a year’s residency with no dressing-room demands.
Jenny Kellett’s book offers more than 100 lemur facts, photographs, a quiz, and a word search for younger readers whose curiosity deserves something better than another afternoon of scrolling. It also gives the adults a chance to learn a few things before the children begin correcting them. No guarantee is offered that the children will wait. A good introduction to the animals behind the performance - and a reminder that a creature needn’t sound like Pavarotti to be worth knowing.
As always, any purchases made through these links help support the continued production of essays examining the thin and increasingly questionable line between human civilization and organized nonsense.
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