In this fascinating video, Nahre Sol composes accompaniment for an isolated Billie Eilish vocal in the styles of various canonical composers.
The combination of Billie Eilish and Mozart is predictably weird, but not for any “musical” reason. There is not such a wide disconnect between Billie Eilish’s melody and classical music. The weirdness is due to the fact that Billie Eilish is a microphone singer, not a concert hall singer. It’s strange to hear microphone singing over classical-style accompaniment!
Classical voice comes from the time before microphones. Singers had to be heard and understood in every seat of a large auditorium, over all the instruments. This requires good strong breath support and control of tone, as well as exaggerated articulation. The typical way to record classical singing is to recreate the experience of being in the concert hall. You place the mics at a distance from the performer, so you are mainly capturing the sound of their voice bouncing off the walls and ceiling of the hall rather than the sound coming directly out of their mouth. Check out this video of Maria Callas: the microphone is not visible in the shot, because it was nowhere near her.
Here is a compilation of various classical voice performances. The one thing they all have in common is the microphone technique: placed at a distance from the performer, to create the feeling of a large, reverberant space with the singer at one end and you at the other.
This is not the way most contemporary music gets recorded! The standard technique for pop vocals since the crooner era is called close miking, which is exactly what you think it is: the microphone is a few inches away from the singer’s mouth (or even closer than that.) Not only does this sound different from classical-style miking, but it also enables a radically different singing style. You can sing quietly and conversationally, using casual enunciation, and still have every detail of your voice be clearly audible. Here’s a classic example:
Here’s a more extreme example. Al Green sings so quietly on this track that he’s practically doing ASMR.
We are all so used to close-miked singing that we can’t experience how weird it actually is. In the early days of recording, singers were cutting grooves into wax cylinders with the physical force of their lungs. Even if you weren’t singing classical music, you still needed to have strong breath support and exaggerated articulation. Bessie Smith sounds like she’s singing at the top of her lungs because that was the only way she could be heard on the recording, the same as when she was singing unamplified in a room.
But starting with electrical recording, it was suddenly possible to sing quietly and be heard just as clearly. This was a shockingly intimate experience! You weren’t hearing Bing Crosby as if he were on a stage a hundred yards away; he sounded like he was murmuring directly into your ear.
If singing unamplified in a concert hall is like tennis, singing into a microphone is like ping-pong. They are superficially similar activities, but they have very different physical demands. Concert hall singing requires both precision and power. Microphone singing requires just as much precision, but hardly any power.
Even though classical singers are “better” than pop singers, they do not necessarily do well in a close-miked situation. The over-enunciation you need in the concert hall sounds stilted and awkward in the booth. The “correct” technique can sound excessively formal and grandiose.
In a sense, mic singing is “easier” than classical singing. To project like Maria Callas requires years of rigorous training. To croon like Bing Crosby or Billie Eilish, you just come as you are. (Bing Crosby did in fact have a trained voice, but he didn’t need it for his style.) That does not mean that you can stick just anyone in front of a microphone and have them sound good, though! The intimacy of microphone singing makes it psychologically intense, like being in bed with the listener. That may not be so physically demanding, but it does require emotional strength. Also, it takes practice to get the best sound out of a microphone. Billie Eilish hasn’t had any voice training that I’m aware of, but you can believe she has put in some quality practice time recording herself singing.
Nahre Sol points out that Billie Eilish has a classical music connection: her song “Goldwing” quotes Gustav Holst’s “Hymn to Vena“.
But Billie Eilish doesn’t sing like a choral singer, she sings like a pop singer. This isn’t a value judgment. Like most people, I mostly listen to microphone singers and find classical singing to be alienating. I haven’t heard much classical music sung by microphone singers. This doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea! Now that I have heard this, I want to hear more. But it is definitely going to take some getting used to.