Despite profound historical changes in public-speaking styles, the voice has remained a vital instrument for inspiring, influencing, and convincing – a weapon of mass persuasion. Commanding and controlling it is just as crucial to the political leader in the modern digital world as it was in the Athenian polis. The voice hasn’t been displaced from the centre of public life; if anything it’s gained in importance. Tracking transformations in the public voice can tell us a lot about the evolving nature of public life – what we demand from politicians, actors, and other public figures now and in the past.
Ideas about the voice that developed in Ancient Greece have been extraordinarily influential, enduring right up until the 1960s. Although Aristotle described the voice in spiritual terms (‘Voice is a kind of sound characteristic of what has soul in it; nothing that is without soul utters voice’1), he also conceived of it as a major oratorical tool.2 With written texts only just beginning to be widely available, rhetoric (‘rhetor’ was the Greek word for ‘orator’) was critical to the art of swaying others.
In Greek cities public speaking had become so pivotal by 450 BC that ‘it was positively dangerous to neglect it’.3 So obsessed were the Athenians with the improvement of the voice that they employed three different classes of teachers for the purpose: the vociferaii to strengthen the voice, the phonasci to make it more sonorous, and the vocales, the finishing masters, in charge of intonation and inflection.4
Greek physicians were also fascinated by the voice. Hippocrates realised that the lungs and trachea played a role in its production, and the lips and tongue in articulation.5 He tried to label vocal states like clarity, hoarseness, and shrillness, and use them for diagnostic purposes. Galen, known as the founder of laryngology,6 declared that ‘the glottis is the principal organ of the voice’, and was the first to describe workings of the vocal apparatus.7 Finally, the writers of ‘physiognomics’, who claimed to be able to deduce character from physical qualities, expatiated on the relationship supposedly existing between certain kinds of voices and people.8 Between them, in this most oral of cultures, these specialists had at their disposal a rich vocabulary to describe the characteristics of the speaking voice.
Rhetoric was essential to the Roman Empire too. Although Cicero’s was so florid that he’s been accused of contributing to the degeneration of eloquence,9 his writings on the psychological dimensions of the voice now seem very modern. ‘For every emotion of the mind has from nature its own peculiar … tone … and the variations of his voice … sound like strings in a musical instrument, just as they are moved by the affections of the mind.’10 Cicero’s complete works were rediscovered in 1421 and exerted an enormous influence over the Renaissance. His style of oratory provided the model for public speaking until the spread of electronic media: when Harvard was founded in 1636, the first criterion for admission was to demonstrate an understanding of Cicero.11
But Quintilian, another Roman writer who outlined ‘the art of speaking well’ (both effectively and virtuously),12 was classical rhetoric’s most distinguished analyst. ‘Every human being,’ he argued, ‘possesses a distinctive voice of his own, which is as easily distinguished by the ear as are facial characteristics by the eye.’ When it rings with passion but is also controlled as a result of vocal exercises, ‘the voice, which is the intermediary between ourselves and our hearers, will then produce precisely the same emotion in the judge that we have put into it. For it is the index of the mind, and is capable of expressing all its varieties of feeling.’13 The study of rhetoric remained a central part of formal education for around two and a half millennia, until the arrival of the Romantic movement in the nineteenth century.14 The University of Oxford still has its own public orator, but oratory today is usually equated with pomposity and demagoguery, and despised for it.15
Theatre compels us to listen to the voice, but the actor’s voice has changed enormously over time. Greek theatre included highly rhythmical recited or chanted texts, for which actors trained carefully, even dieting and fasting to keep their vocal instrument in perfect condition.16 Clarity and projection were vital. Sophocles, it’s said, had to give up acting in his own plays because of his weak voice.17
Tragedy and comedy both relied on masks, which meant that the actor’s face had no role to play in creating effects – all was voice and movement. Masks fortified vocal power in another way because the space between them and the actor’s head provided an extra resonating chamber for the voice, helping the speaker control its direction and volume as well as rhythm and tone. From behind the mask he’d release a whole array of ritual laments associated with funerals. Greek and Roman amphitheatres were huge, and actors were expected to be vocally powerful enough to reach every corner, although they were helped by the superb acoustics – a modern writer has confirmed that in Epidaurus, even today, you can hear a pin drop distinctly in every one of its 14,000 seats.18
In the eighteenth century, acting began its divorce from oratory. The British actor, David Garrick, seemed to typify the new fashion: to most of his contemporaries he seemed entirely natural.19 And yet the declamatory style of performing survived for a long time.20 Nineteenth-century poets and writers, like nineteenth-century politicians, recited slowly and to modern ears over-melodiously, as if their voices were imprisoned in a relentless sing-song they were powerless to escape. Rhythm seemed to monotonise rather than enliven.21
On the British stage, heroic acting continued well past the middle of the twentieth century. There, voices like John Gielgud’s still twirled and paraded. Gielgud’s sonorities epitomised the voice beautiful: they’ve been described as ‘full of velvet and self-esteem’.22 At the same time whole schools of theatre were developing around a freer use of the voice and its connection with the personality. Alfred Wolfsohn, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, believed that the range of the human voice could be extended to seven or even nine octaves if actors realised that it was produced by many different parts of the body and resonated throughout it.23 His successor, Roy Hart, drew on a similarly uninhibited and cathartic wide range of vocal sounds.24
Regional accents were heard in British theatre and movies for the first time in the 1950s, ushered in by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and the new wave of film. The voices of so-called angry young men, instead of aspiring towards ‘proper speaking’, were propelled by the energy of dissent, their very acoustic a snub to the social order.25
Film liberated the actor from the need to project. Fluency was no longer the ideal – actors now tried to hesitate, falter and stumble in the style of the marginalised, those who could have been a contender. Too much vocal clarity had come to signal acting, rather than good acting. The Method school became associated with stuttering and incomprehensibility and Marlon Brando caricatured as the Great Mumbler. He insisted, ‘I played many roles in which I didn’t mumble a single syllable, but in others I did because it is the way people speak in ordinary life … In ordinary life people seldom know what they’re going to say when they open their mouths … They pause for an instant to find the right word, search their minds to compose a sentence, then express it.’26
The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century actor’s voice had made no attempt to conceal that it was repeating the dramatist’s lines; by the mid-twentieth century film actors tried to sound as if they’d dreamt them up themselves. The most acclaimed film stars of the time – Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift – gave off a brooding intensity that suggested psychic struggle, as though the voice were just the outward flickerings of an essentially interior process.27
Actors were responding to broader changes in the vocal culture. Male and female ways of speaking have always been shaped by the social values of the time, and even by its clothing. In the nineteenth century the boned corset limited the amount of breath that the ‘well-dressed’ middle- or upper-class Victorian woman could take in, severely constricting the sound that she could make. ‘The speaking voice which resulted would have been the breathy, thin, high and unresonant, rather childlike voices we associate with some of Dickens’ female characters.’28
If you listen to voices from the first half of the twentieth century today, they sound almost somnolent. George Eliot observed that in the nineteenth-century British drawing-room guests were stilled ‘by the deep-piled carpet and by the high English breeding that subdues all voice’.29 A 46-year-old man remembers that the voices of his youth ‘were more muted, an indication of a more general mutedeness in feeling and expression’,30 while a 63-year-old man recalls, ‘We had a far less frenetic voice – you have to raise your voice to be heard today.’31
As the pace of life quickened so did the voices. The rapid riffs of bebop – Charlie Parker’s soaring sax, with its fresh phrasing and harmonies – provided a new acoustic, while the beat poets (not for nothing was Allen Ginsberg’s most famous poem called ‘Howl’), hippies and, later, rap music played their part in dissolving vocal inhibitions, leading to an audible generational divide.
There was always a place, though, for traditional rousing oratory. Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC on 28 August 1963, is often singled out as the most powerful example of twentieth-century public speaking. A formal speech that brilliantly evoked the American dream and how far it had yet to be fulfilled in black Americans’ lives, it started slowly and built in pace, volume, and urgency. King used his voice in a musical way, in places almost singing: by rhythmically repeating phrases like ‘Now is the time’ he worked the crowd. As one witness declared:
Three centuries of the rhetoric of the South were pulled together in one exalted outburst. Every device ever contrived by every preacher of the South, black or white, was put to use, until his huge audience, black and white, had been carried beyond itself, no longer merely the sum of its members. He bit into the gathering ‘Amens,’ the answering ‘Yeah! Yeah!’, the thundering applause, for they were not to be allowed to rest, but were to be carried to a higher pitch with each ejaculation.32
By the 1980s the sound of Woody Allen’s kvetch, Richard Pryor’s falsetto and Bob Geldof’s Live Aid roar were markers of just how unbuttoned the public voice had become. Today’s voices are far less clipped and fluting, their vowels much less strangulated and their consonants less precisely articulated than those of even a half-century ago. At the same time the attenuation of public speaking produced far less resonant voices than those of previous generations. By the early 1990s contemporary speaking voices were already lighter than a decade earlier, and few could fill a space without being electrically boosted by a microphone.33
Although the postmodern experiments of performance artists like Laurie Anderson treated the voice like another instrument, splicing together snatches of monologue with music and sound effects, it could still act as a bridge for characters (like Samuel Beckett’s) otherwise divided by their misunderstandings, bodies and despair. In Beckett’s Not I,34 first staged in 1972, a woman sits on a darkened stage, the only thing visible her red mouth – as if the voice were the final embers of life.
Today, with the preservation of the speeches of many major twentieth-century figures,35 the afterglow of the voice has been infinitely extended. The story of twentieth-century politicians is in a sense a story of the voice, of successful leaders able to inspire a nation through vocal skill.
By the time Americans sat down beside their radio sets on Sunday evening, 12 March 1933, to listen to President Roosevelt, the Great Depression had put a quarter of them out of work, and every bank in America had been closed for at least eight days. In his ‘fireside chat’ (the first of thirty-one), FDR announced that the banks would reopen the next day, and that most of their deposits would be guaranteed by the federal government.
Although Roosevelt’s administration didn’t call it a fireside chat – that term was coined by CBS’s Harry Butcher in a press release before the second, on the New Deal – the description stuck and soon the President was using it himself. It served to emphasise their colloquial nature:36 though FDR wasn’t sitting by the fireside himself, only his listeners, the President made it sound by his intimate delivery as if he were there too.37 When he got before a microphone, his secretary of labour recalled, ‘His head would nod and his hands would move in simple, natural, comfortable gestures. His face would smile and light up as though he were actually sitting on the front porch or in the parlor. People felt this, and it bound them to him in affection.’
Roosevelt was one of the earliest to understand the difference between broadcasting and other public speaking. He didn’t orate.38 Instead, a friend recalled, he ‘made any speech that he delivered so much his own that it was what he might say in conversation. He never seemed to be reading to an audience. Neither did he seem to be reciting’.39 He appeared, said another observer, to be ‘talking and toasting marshmallows at the same time.’40
FDR was also the first American president to use radio to project his ideas and personality directly into American homes, and bypass newspapers that were critical of him.41 As the political commentator David Halberstam has pointed out:
He was the first great American radio voice. For most Americans of this generation, their first memory of politics would be sitting by a radio and hearing that voice, strong, confident, totally at ease. If he was going to speak, the idea of doing something else was unthinkable. If they did not yet have a radio, they walked the requisite several hundred yards to the home of a more fortunate neighbor who did … Most Americans in the previous 160 years had never even seen a president; now almost all of them were hearing him, in their own homes. It was literally and figuratively electrifying.42
Radio allowed FDR to conceal his handicap: his disembodied broadcast voice could be transformed in the listener’s imagination into the emanation of someone able-bodied, with the ability to travel unimpeded.43
Roosevelt’s urbane and self-assured voice has been compared to a bell in the darkness. As it developed from patrician to paternal, it had a containing effect on listeners, and helped give the nation hope in the Depression, just as Churchill’s voice would during the Second World War. ‘Roosevelt’s voice,’ said the philosopher T. V. Smith, ‘knew how to articulate only the everlasting yea.’ Its measured pace and level tone seemed to guarantee Americans safety, no matter how volcanic the events of the world.44
Hitler’s voice – aggressive, resolute, and staccato – incarnated Nazi ideology. He used it to galvanise himself and the public. It was an instrument for the incitement of mutual frenzy.
This ability, when he first became aware of it in a beer-hall in 1919, thrilled him. As he wrote in Mein Kampf, ‘What before I had simply felt within me, without in any way knowing it, was now proved by reality: I could speak!’45 Hitler preferred the spoken to the written word, believing it had magic power.46 He tried to refine his oratorical skills by studying the techniques used by Weiss Ferdl (a popular Munich comedian) to capture the attention of noisy beer-hall crowds before beginning his act. Hitler also scrutinised the Munich beer-halls’ acoustics, adjusting the pitch of his voice to suit each one.47
What Hitler said was unoriginal.48 His voice was metallic, its timbre harsh compared with Goebbels’, which was beautiful. He spoke for too long, and was often repetitive and verbose. ‘These shortcomings, however, mattered little beside the extraordinary impression of force, the immediacy of passion, the intensity of hatred, fury and menace conveyed by the sound of his voice alone.’49
Today Hitler is seen as a ranting, mob-inciting, demonic figure, carried away by the hysterical tenor of his own oratory, a view created largely by short clips – now iconic images – from 1930s’ newsreels. In reality he made sophisticated, calculating use of public-speaking techniques. Speaking from rough notes – mainly a series of jotted headings with key words underlined – rather than reading his speeches, he conveyed an impression of spontaneity and freshness. He could deal expertly with hecklers (although so could his police).50 He understood the exact moment to resume speaking through applause just after it had started to drop off.
‘He did not rant and rave all the time – a physical impossibility for a man who spoke normally two hours or more – but addressed his audience in quiet tones at first, even hesitantly.’51 The whole performance was carefully choreographed. Hitler would delay his entry into the hall. Once there, he’d begin with a pause ‘that seemed to become utterly unbearable’.52 Then he’d start speaking softly and slowly, a low-key opening designed to allow tension to mount. Gradually he’d grow louder or, taking up a more fighting tone in response to a catcall, insert biting sarcasm. Deliberately repeating words like ‘smash’, ‘force’, ‘ruthless’ and ‘hatred’, he’d lash himself up ‘to a pitch of near-hysteria in which he would scream and spit out his resentment’.53 His voice became hoarse, sometimes croaking, as his tirades reached a climax. But for all his seeming abandon, he never lost control.54
When an American professor of the time analysed Hitler’s voice, he found that it had a typical frequency of 228 vibrations per second, compared with the usual frequency for anger of 200 vibrations per second. ‘It is this high pitch and its accompanying emotion that puts the people in a passive state,’ he maintained. ‘He stuns them with his words in much the same fashion as we are stunned by an auto horn.’55 So aggressive were Hitler’s harangues that they left listeners only one option: if they were not to become the object of his attack, they had to identify with the aggressor.
His gatherings resembled revivalist meetings. Men would groan or hiss and women sob involuntarily ‘if only to relieve the tension’.56 The German writer Joachim Fest has compared Hitler’s speeches and the public response to a collective orgy. ‘The sound recordings of the period clearly convey the peculiarly obscene, copulatory character of mass meetings: the silence at the beginning, as of a whole multitude holding its breath; the short, shrill yappings; the minor climaxes and first sounds of liberation on the part of the crowd; finally the frenzy, more climaxes, and then the ecstasies released by the finally unblocked oratorical orgasms.’57
According to Traudl Junger, Hitler’s infatuated secretary, ‘The same man who made speeches … with that rolling “r” and that roaring – I never heard him speak like that in private. He would speak in such a flattering, such a moderate tone. In his private life he had that gentle Austrian intonation too.’58 And yet Hitler himself admitted, ‘I must have a crowd when I speak. In a small intimate circle I never know what to say.’59
His relationship with large crowds was symbiotic: he communicated an excitement to them that in turn provided fresh impetus to his voice.60 Hitler used his speeches to make himself feel alive and intoxicate himself, ‘whipping himself and his audience into anger and exultation by the sound of his voice’.61
His giant gatherings also used hypnotic drum-rolls to make the crowds more receptive and breathe in unison.62 Applause-manipulation facilities were built into the very design of the Nuremberg stadium. Strategically positioned microphones were wired to amplifiers hidden behind the rostrum so that the cheers and chants of ‘Heil Hitler’ could be amplified but also played back at the crowd. The artificial source of the increased fervour was invisible to the newsreel cameras.63
Radio carried Hitler’s voice not only across Germany but throughout the world. In September 1938 Virginia and Leonard Woolf heard the Nuremberg rally live on the radio. She wrote in her diary, ‘Hitler boasted and boomed but shot no solid bolt, mere violent rant, & then broke off. We listened to the end. A savage howl like a person excruciated; then howls from the audience; then a more spaced and measured sentence. Then another bark … the voice was frightening.’64 Because of the time difference, Hitler’s voice was often heard on American radio in the morning just as listeners were going to work. The very sound of his voice, some later recalled, convinced them that danger lay ahead.65
So important was Hitler’s voice to his leadership that one of the dafter ideas to issue from the Office of Strategic Services, the American intelligence agency, was a plan to slip female sex hormones into his meals so as to raise the pitch of his voice.66
Hitler’s raucous style of speaking had become so identified with tyranny and genocide that never again would it find favour. Except perhaps for some Eastern European/Soviet bloc despots, no postwar politician would thunder and bellow themselves into a frenzy. Hitler made demagoguery suspect. Today we expect the persuasive voice to be smooth and cajoling, to caress and flatter the listener rather than harangue them into acquiescence. We expect it to sound more female.
‘He who enjoys the gift of oratory,’ wrote a 21-year-old Winston Churchill, ‘wields a power more durable than that of a great king.’67 So the young Winston set about cultivating it, despite the inhibitions caused by a slight stammer and lisp. He analysed Disraeli’s speeches and copied their rhetorical devices – short syllables and punchy, dramatic, cathartic endings,68 sometimes spending more than ten hours composing a single speech.
Compared with the standard, high-pitched voices of the British upper classes in the 1930s and ‘40s Churchill’s timbre was deep, warm, and fruity.69 ‘The people of Britain had the lion’s heart,’ he said. ‘I had the luck to give the roar.’ And roar he certainly did – one historian has described ‘the growls, the sudden leonine roars, the lyrical sentences, the cigar-and-brandy-toned voice, the sheer defiance coming straight from the viscera insisting upon no surrender in a war to the death’.70
A recent BBC radio experiment compared a recording of an extract from Churchill’s ‘Finest Hour’ 1940 address to the House of Commons with one of the same speech made by the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. Bragg’s version lasted 60 seconds, as against Churchill’s 90.71 Churchill not only spoke slower but also inserted dramatic pauses into almost every prosodic phrase. As for pitch-range, both Bragg and Churchill spanned an octave, but Churchill’s voice was three semitones lower than Bragg’s and his stresses idiosyncratic throughout. Churchill’s low pitch made him sound like some elemental force. In his ‘Battle of Britain’ speech, by so dramatically dropping his voice on the words ‘but if we fail’,72 he evoked the abyss of a new dark age.
Ronald Reagan was the first actor to become President – proof, in some people’s eyes, that in modern America the two roles were now indistinguishable – and his voice played an important part in his popularity. He was known as ‘the Great Communicator’, although some think he just read autocue better than any president before or since.73 His was a reassuring voice – soft and folksy, that put people at ease. One observer commented that Reagan’s voice ‘recedes at the right moments, turning mellow at points of intensity. When it wishes to be most persuasive, it hovers barely above a whisper so as to win you over by intimacy, if not by substance … He likes his voice, treats it like a guest. He makes you part of the hospitality. It was that voice that carried him out of Dixon and away from the Depression.’74
Listeners responded to his self-deprecating wit and the relish with which he told stories. Through the warmth of his voice and his narrative skills he seemed to breach the distance between president and citizen. And yet Reagan, an experienced film actor, made skilful use of the feminine, expressive dimension of his voice. Recalling the death of American soldiers in the bombing in Lebanon, he had a catch in his voice and a tear in his eye, pursing his lips as if to control strong feelings75 – the ‘acted sincerity’ techniques that Tony Blair would come to use later, albeit less convincingly. Reagan spoke informally and sentimentally: he had a picket-fence, small-town-decent-American-values kind of voice.76
Reagan mastered television the way Roosevelt mastered radio. His stint as radio announcer had honed his vocal skills, but he also understood the difference between the two media.77 He was one of the earliest users of the autocue, which came to be called his ‘sincerity machine’.78 It enabled him to look directly at his audience instead of having to refer to notes, so creating the impression that he was speaking impromptu rather than delivering speeches crafted for him by others.
And yet Clinton, as much as Reagan, deserves the title of Great Communicator. Though Clinton’s voice was often hoarse, it electrified people, one describing it as like molasses dripping through cornbread.79 Through his voice he established a rapport with many different kinds of Americans, expressing a much-parodied ‘I feel your pain’ empathy.
The surprising thing about the young Margaret Thatcher’s voice is how light and charming it sounds compared with her later one.80 Encountering the prejudice against women’s voices and their supposed shrillness, emotionalism, and lack of authority examined in Part Two, Thatcher effected what was probably the most significant change in any modern politician’s voice.
Her retinue of advisers had already identified her supposed vocal failings. Tim Bell, the advertising executive she brought in to run the Conservative Party’s election-publicity campaigns, recalls:
Physically she had a problem in that she spoke from the top of her chest… had a slightly stressed larynx, and was prone to coughs and colds. Her voice would sound strangulated when she was tired, and the voice would get tired sooner than anything else … [such as] the legs. When she first became leader of the opposition she had a schoolmarmish, very slightly bossy, slightly hectoring voice. It was a voice from the 1950s that was long gone.81
Britain had started to proletarianise and we wanted to reach out to … ordinary people rather than the upper-middle classes. So we – Gordon Reece, her publicity adviser, and me, head of Saatchi and Saatchi – wanted her voice to deliver a message that was simple and to the point and lightweight, e.g., you can’t spend more than you earn. If you deliver that in an upper-class voice you sound patronising. If you deliver it in a B1, CD or Estuary voice, you don’t. The BBC voice she spoke in has been completely discredited – her voice was grand and rather bossy and heavyweight … We knew that she’d developed the ability to project her voice in Parliament and meetings but she’d do it too on TV and it doesn’t work – TV is chatty. She … [didn’t] do small talk and chatty.82
In 1978, before she became Prime Minister, Bell and Reece took Thatcher to Laurence Olivier for vocal advice:
We sat in his place in Hampstead for four hours while he talked about how he had invented the theatre and acting and how he had made Shakespeare come to life. When, after four hours, she went … [to the toilet] Gordon said, ‘Can we talk about Margaret Thatcher’s voice?’ and Larry said, ‘Absolutely typical of a politician – all they want to do is talk about themselves.’ He gave her half an hour’s advice on how to project her voice – mostly about learning to speak from down here rather than from the top and to talk to the person at the back of the hall in a public meeting because this helps you project.83
In spite of this, certain venues remained challenging for her throughout her tenure as Prime Minister: according to someone who knew her well, she had particular difficulty in the House of Commons, where she faced interruptions ‘and the acoustics were curious’.84 The playwright Ronald Millar, another adviser on communication issues, remarked that ‘the selling of Margaret Thatcher had been put back two years by the mass broadcasting of Prime Minister’s Question Time, as she had to be at her shrillest to be heard over the din’.85 Millar taught her that lowering the voice brought the speed down to a steadier rate, and recommended holding to a steady and equable tone at Question Time eventually to drive through, not over or under, the noise.86
Tim Bell also tried to shape Thatcher’s broadcast voice to her message:
When she did a party political broadcast we used to use a simple technique. We’d have two drinks ready – ice-cold water, and warm water with lemon and honey … If she was coming to a point where she was trying to sound sympathetic and sensitive, we’d give her the honey-and-lemon water to soften and relax her voice. If she wanted to sound forceful we’d give her the ice-cold water.87
That Thatcher received voice training has become part of political lore, and yet it’s dismissed by Bell, who worked closely with both Thatcher and Reece, neither of whom mentioned any such training to him. ‘I’d be amazed if anyone popped up and said, “I gave her coaching lessons” – though they’d attract gales of publicity. So she probably just chose to lower it.’88 She was certainly conscious of pitch: scribbled next to some of her pre-1979 speeches are notes on their ideal delivery.89
On the other hand, most people believe that it was Gordon Reece himself who directed the vocal change. As one journalist put it, she ‘had high notes dangerous to passing sparrows’ and, because her accent had changed when she was at Oxford, the effect was ‘a bad case of stage posh’.90 Reece advised her to speak more slowly and, on radio, closer to the microphone, which made her sound huskier. In 1977, within two months of him working with her, her voice was so much softer and lower that one interviewer unwisely asked her, ‘Have you got a cold?’91 In a BBC tape Reece can be heard coaching her to say the words, ‘The socialists must learn that enough is enough,’ and trying to encourage her away from her more derided duchess tones.92
Women’s pitch, as we’ve seen, has dropped over the past four decades; Margaret Thatcher lowered hers in just one. When a linguist analysed recordings of Thatcher’s voice over a span of ten years, she found that it had been artificially lowered by 60 Hz, or about half the normal difference between a female and a male voice. ‘Not only was she speaking in an acoustic “no-person’s-land”, but there is a strong possibility that she was committing vocal abuse which could lead to the more serious pathological condition of vocal nodules”.93 The news, many years after she left office, that Thatcher’s doctors had advised her to do no more public speaking, seems to bear out this prediction.
Thatcher’s new voice aimed for a forceful but caring sound; in reality it appeared strained, abnormally low, and contemptuous, making her sound as if she had the tiresome task of talking to an uncomprehending small child.94 (The writer Keith Waterhouse declared, ‘I cannot bring myself to vote for a woman who has been voice-trained to speak to me as though my dog had just died.’95) Not only did her new voice end up more caricatured than her old one, but it also gave the impression that Thatcher was trying to emulate men – that in order to sound authoritative she’d had to make herself sound male.
Her new pitch may have had another unintended consequence. When television interviews with Thatcher were compared with those of another British prime minister, Jim Callaghan, the surprising finding was that Thatcher was interrupted almost twice as often as Callaghan. Surprising because Thatcher seemed much more domineering in interviews than Callaghan, and usually tried to talk through interruptions to finish what she was saying.96
Was she interrupted more than Callaghan because she was a woman and in these interviews questioned by a man? Another explanation is that, although falling intonation usually provides a cue to when one speaker has finished talking and another may begin, Thatcher’s intonation fell even when she hadn’t finished a clause and wasn’t ready to give way. By artificially changing her voice, Margaret Thatcher may have interfered with the paralinguistic cues that help smooth switches between speakers.97
Tony Blair’s voice marked a significant break with those of previous British politicians. Like Clinton’s, it brimmed with emotion, both of them using their voices to show empathy. At the same time they also had to avoid sounding effeminate. Sounding ‘feminine’ is a taboo for both male and female politicians yet, paradoxically, Clinton and Blair’s voices signal the feminisation of the male public voice.
This was achieved partly by language,98 but also through the voice. Unable to use the female glissando (slide in pitch), Blair falls back on a cracked-voice register break. Only immense self-control, this seems to be saying, enabled him to contain his overwhelming identification with other people’s pain. The voice he used after the death of Princess Diana has been employed so routinely ever since that it now sounds as if the poor chap is almost perpetually choked with feeling, constantly on the verge of tears. How can he be moved by so many different things, so emotionally incontinent?
In fact, since Blair possesses the fluency of most educated modern politicians, he gives the impression of having deliberately injected hesitancy into his voice in order to create a sense of authenticity. And by over-using the device, he’s drawn attention to it. This has happened over a relatively short period of time: if you listen to Tony Blair talking in 1997, he sounds not only much younger but also much less prone to the voice-crack. In the years since then, he’s begun to impersonate himself.
Added to this, he sometimes roughs up his articulation and loosens his vowels: in certain circumstance the Blair ‘I’ emerges as an ‘ah’, or an Estuary-style mini-glottal stop suggestive of the common touch is inserted. Perhaps this too is a way of masculinising his voice, of restoring a sense of blokeishness and ensuring that the emoting hasn’t over-feminised him or made him cissy (for the wobble in his voice must never give the impression of a wobble in policy or resolve).
Together these mannerisms have backfired, making Blair sound tremendously contrived. A 1999 Internet survey (though it may have polled the self-selected) found only 31 per cent of people considering the Prime Minister’s voice trustworthy.99 In 2003, after one parliamentary Question Time had been broadcast, a radio listener emailed the BBC to rail against Blair’s ‘smug, lisping, slightly effeminate, pseudo-Geordie, pseudo-Estuary, pseudo-Middle English, pseudo-public-school voice that, like Tony, tries to be all things to all people’.100 How, increasingly, we warm to the unspun voice.
Yet Tony Blair’s voice isn’t simply a personal confection – it’s also an expression of the new intimacy. Presentation in politics has become paramount, with the voice now a central part of impression-management (see chapter 17), leading to a corresponding cynicism about its manipulation. Blair, many voters now believe, ‘seems to base his policies on trying to charm the nation’.101
But then never before was being a nice bloke such an essential attribute for political leaders (effectiveness was). Today, by contrast, one of the prime requirements of a politician is the ability to act sincere.102 Yet should the effort of it, the art of it, become audible, the loss in credibility is enormous.
This marks a singular change in the history of public life. Before 1868, natural expression lay outside the public realm, and the language of politics was at one remove from intimate life. Since then, and particularly over the past decade, ours has become a culture of personality,103 which has to be laid out for public perusal. See how perfectly the following description of the end of public culture, first published in 1977 when Tony Blair was barely out of university, fits him:
It became logical for people to think of those who could actively display their emotions in public, whether as artists or politicians, as being men of special and superior personality. These men were to control, rather than interact with, the audience in front of whom they appeared … now what matters is not what you have done but how you feel about it … The modern charismatic leader destroys any distance between his own sentiments and impulses and those of his audience, and so, focusing his followers on his motivations, deflects them from measuring him in terms of his acts … It is uncivilised for a society to make its citizens feel a leader is believable because he can dramatise his own motivations. Leadership on these terms is a form of seduction.104
Tony Blair conducts his campaign of seduction primarily through his voice.
Geniality, as a result, is no longer just an asset but an essential prerequisite for successful public office, one that the American politician can demonstrate through the voice. Whatever his intellectual superiority, Al Gore’s stiff, sanctimonious monotone – often compared to that of a robot or metronome – put him at an enormous disadvantage beside George Bush’s vocal affability. Even towards the end of the 2000 presidential campaign, when the body-language specialists had gone to work on him, trying to defrost Gore’s timbre and limber his inflections, there was little suppleness of pitch or tone-colour.
The Howard Dean story, by contrast, is one of vocal excess. When, in 2004, the Vermont governor hoping to be selected as Democratic presidential candidate came a poor third in the Iowa caucuses, he made a raucous shriek of a concession speech, straightaway dubbed his ‘I have a scream’ speech, that immediately ruled him out of contention. If he couldn’t control his voice, went the thinking, then how could he possibly keep the country or world in check?
Like Gore, John Kerry suffered from a lack of vocal charisma. His flat, stentorian speaking style105 belonged to another era. His language and voice separated him from voters rather than bringing him closer: if his voice was to be believed, Kerry couldn’t articulate their pain and certainly couldn’t feel it. Voters never felt they were glimpsing the man within – Kerry offered none of the new intimacy.
The 2004 presidential election was distinguished by the number of voice coaches publicly analysing the candidates’ delivery and offering advice. They berated Kerry’s lack of vocal range, arguing – naturally – that he needed decent voice training. ‘Kerry’s got that deep, deliberate voice … He isn’t the sort of person you want to sit down and have a drink with, necessarily … He is somebody whose speech was formed in boarding schools,’ offered a Stanford University linguist.106
Critics faulted him for the lifelessness of his voice, its lack of dynamism and emotion,107 which marked him out as aloof and patrician. He needed to de-Brahminise his delivery,108 and take frequent dramatic pauses, varying tempo and register, volume and pitch.109 Again and again commentators and journalists referred to the voice, sometimes even finding voters who regarded it as critical. ‘I think a quality as seemingly trivial as vocal tone will play a factor in swaying as yet undecided voters.’110 The playwright Arthur Miller said that political leaders everywhere have come to understand that to govern they must learn how to act.111 Kerry, even though he was apparently assisted by a coach who graduated from the Yale Drama School, never did.112
George W. Bush, on the other hand, sold himself not just as the defender of the free world but also as the kind of bloke you’d have round for a barbecue. His voice positioned him as a regular guy, though in reality he was the scion of a powerful family. He constructed a persona of ordinariness that, combined with an ideology of conviction and the language of westerns, counted for more than his gaffes and malapropisms. As one commentator put it, ‘Mr Kerry has a problem with rhetoric. He doesn’t have his own sound. You may hate Mr Bush’s sound but it’s his, and a lot of people like it. He sounds normal, which for all its pluses and minuses as a style does tend to underscore the idea that he is normal.’113 Indeed, Bush’s many stumbles may have even endeared him to Middle America, which remains suspicious of East Coast fluency and uncynical about folksiness.
Among the other factors determining the outcome of the 2000 and 2004 American presidential elections, Gore’s and Kerry’s voices and personalities were a major element. An ability to communicate over the airwaves, which in a politician like Roosevelt had seemed like a serendipitous personal gift, is now mandatory. The modern political voice, compared with the ancient one, has been demoticised. Rhetoric is dead: the new orator must sound like a buddy.