Singing concertos, symphonies, and other instrumental music might seem at first like a gimmick, but this vocal ensemble provides both an enjoyable and light-hearted approach to old standards in the classical music repertoire. In fact, the unusual "instrumentation" causes the listener to pick out nuances that familiarity with the works may have downplayed before.
Imitating instruments with the voices is certainly not a new thing: when the American Federation of Musicians went on strike in 1942-1944, singers (and other "non-musicians") were recruited to fill in the gap. From imitating instruments to providing vocal back-up, singers enabled record producers to keep turning out more music. Quite possibly this switch to instrumental imitation was aided by the earlier development of scat singing, a technique of wordless singing made famous by jazz musician Louis Armstrong. In classical music, wordless vocals emphasize long vowel sounds, but in scat singing, the syllables are full of soft consonants (such as "b" and "d"), imitating the up-tempo rhythms and slightly percussive timbre of the jazz band.
In the 1960s, under the direction of Ward Swingle, the Swingle Singers took this jazz-inflected style of scat and applied it to composers such as Mozart and Bach in a Euro-Jazz/Classical fusion. Big bands in America had been "jazzing the classics" at least since the Swing Era, and across the pond in France and England, the Swingle Singers continued the tradition up through the 21st century. Though they perform predominantly wordless vocal arrangements of instrumental works, the Swingle Singers do have a few choral pieces in their repertoire, most notably African-American spirituals. Their crisp, straight tone (little vibrato) adds a great deal of spice to favorite classics.
For some introductory listening, try the compilation album, The Swingle Singers.
For further information, read a history of the Swingle Singers.
