“Obama, tall and handsome and blessed with a weighty baritone…” Newsweek
Salon, always on the lookout for a story with a hook, posits that “there is something in the very essence of Obama’s voice — its tone, its timbre, its resonance” that inspires trust.
Author Frank Browning delves into what one might call “Le Mystère des Voix Baracks” with the James Carville of vocal coaches, Lotfi Mansouri, who sternly admonishes “you cannot manufacture timbre artificially.”
Browning further links Obama’s velvety Fach with everyone from Frank Sinatra (“the story he was telling in his songs [was] the elemental, physical story of his own life”) to Freudian psychoanalyist Theodor Reik (“…the true baritone is an evocation of the ancient shofar, the ram’s horn that came from Abraham‘s sacrificial sheep but was also the instrument Moses used to call the wandering tribes together at Sinai to hear the thundering words of God”.)
Hillary Clinton‘s speaking voice, it seems, is not, perhaps, so soaring and pesante an instrument as her opponent’s. Says political consulatant Lynn Meyer, “That’s the voice who told you to eat your spinach, take your elbows off the table, asked you where’s your homework.”
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
