The original idea for this book was for a single-authored volume by a singer, giving a broad historical overview of singing in a global context. One of the anonymous readers of the proposal for Cambridge University Press gently suggested that this might be rather a lot for one person to undertake, and sure enough, several missed deadlines later the project morphed into a book with two authors: one a specialist in Western singing and the other in non-Western music.

The first thing we should say is that it is a history of singing, not the history. This is not just because trying to write a comprehensive history of all the singing in the world really would, even if possible, require a vast team and not just two authors, but also because there is no way of knowing exactly what the history is. The chapter on origins makes it clear that the when, as well as the why and what, of the origins of singing cannot be established with any certainty. There is also a danger of getting bogged down in the question of what singing actually is. A great deal of vocal tract activity, often a long way from bel canto or crooning, is accepted as singing even if actual pitches are not always discernible. Inuit ‘throat singing’, the whispered songs of Burundi and even the singing of Tom Waits all rely on timbre and rhythm rather than pitch and tune yet are readily classified as singing. Laurence Picken, a biologist as well as a distinguished musicologist, wrote ‘This is indeed song: the fundamental frequency of phonation generated by the larynx is varied systematically. Song is nothing else.’ While we have a scientific description of singing we must distinguish between ‘song’ as physical act and ‘singing’ as meaningful human activity. Still, it would be impossible to write a history of singing without including some history of songs and singers.