Why Do We Sing? Lauren Elkin's 'Vocal Break' Asks the Question

Farrar, Straus and Giroux has published an excerpt from Vocal Break, the new book by essayist Lauren Elkin, that opens with the largest possible question and ends in a personal confession: why do humans sing, and why did the author stop?

The excerpt, released with the publisher's permission (copyright © 2026 by Lauren Elkin), begins with Linda Ronstadt's answer to the first question. People sing, Ronstadt suggests, for the same reasons birds do: "They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day. They sing so that subsequent generations won't forget what the current generation endured, or dreamed, or delighted in."

Elkin accepts the premise and pushes further. We sing at school, on birthdays, in religious services. We sing to mourn, to protest, to connect. The singing voice, she argues, is our "least socialized" voice and therefore the most vulnerable — even trained singers keep a private everyday voice, the one that surfaces while doing the dishes or stripping the beds.

What does the science actually say?

The excerpt cites research on group singing with a list of claimed benefits:

• stabilizing mental health
• reducing stress hormones
• bolstering the immune system
• increasing lung capacity
• helping with postpartum depression
• stimulating memory in people with dementia

Elkin's conclusion is blunt: "Singing is reparative. We should all be singing!" She attributes no specific studies, and the skeptic should note that the claims arrive without named papers. But her philosophical framing is attributed — her friend Emily Laurent-Monaghan's remark that humans "are the animal with a problematic relation to corporeality," uniquely able to agonize over what the body produces.

Her evidence for that torment is Kiri Te Kanawa. The New Zealand soprano retired in 2016 and told the BBC she never once left a stage satisfied. "I never actually came off stage saying, 'I've really nailed it,'" Te Kanawa said. "Never. I always thought there was a mistake in it."

Why did Elkin leave musical theatre?

The middle of the excerpt turns autobiographical, and the temperature rises. Elkin sang before she spoke. At sixteen she commuted forty minutes to a performing arts high school, the Cultural Arts Center, spending half the day there before returning to her own school for English and French. She dropped math and science after tenth grade because theatre programs "didn't care what classes you took, as long as you were good."

The professional world judged more than ability. Adult professionals told her to have her nose done and to lose ten pounds to be competitive. She was seventeen and already slim. "I can't remember who precisely told me these things," she writes. "It was so prevalent I can't assign blame."

The typecasting compounded it. Her lyric soprano meant playing the ingenue, and ingenues were skinny with small noses — a mold she says she didn't fit. The joy of singing was "gradually replaced by the fear of being found inadequate," and the range of parts would only shrink as she aged. She walked away.

She does not frame the exit as triumph. "I am disappointed in myself, looking back," she writes. "I should have stayed to fight." She names singers and actors on and off Broadway who refused to reshape their bodies for casting directors, including women her age who faced identical shaming.

Why writing won

Her explanation for the switch is structural, not sentimental. Among trained singers, everyone sounds good, and one good voice is rarely distinct from another. "It seems that most of the women you hear on Broadway today have, with few exceptions, interchangeable voices," she writes — a claim offered as impression, not data, though its sharpness will invite argument.

Writing, by contrast, took her as she was. The blank page offered freedom from competition; she could be judged on content, not only sound or form. "In music, I could only ever be as good as everyone else," she writes. "I went quiet."

Not entirely quiet. Singing remains, in her formulation, "a crucial part of my life, not as necessary as eating or breathing, but certainly as showering or drinking coffee" — a private itch to scratch, at the piano in empty afternoons until the doorbell and the post bring her back. She sings not to be heard. The voice that cracks, she notes, is a more visceral failure than a passage that doesn't land.

The excerpt closes on that tension rather than resolving it. What the full book holds — whether Elkin revisits the theatre world, the casting directors, or the science of singing with the investigative edge her prose promises — readers will find in Vocal Break, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

By Tom Whitfield