He added: "I could sustain a note.
Mr. Newman's voice is gruff and woolly, struggling when it has to stay in tune or sustain a note.
During the bridge, Burke sings the lyrics standing in front of the camera without any props surrounding her; prior to sustaining a long note, Burke has her back to the camera and is nude from the waist up.
Occasionally, to sustain a dying note, he will use vibrato, but only a trace of it.
Just when you think he's at the top of his register, he'll fly an octave higher; when you expect him to pause and take a breath he'll find another tank of air and sustain a low note for another four bars; when you expect another instrument to take a solo, he'll do it himself, taking us on an Ornette Coleman-esque sonic journey around all four octaves of his vocal range.
(At times he resembled a singer he may never have heard: Aaron Neville from New Orleans, who similarly rushes into a phrase, pauses unexpectedly or sustains an aching note, at once tense and angelic).
In secular medieval music and in much folk and non-European music, instrumental accompaniments for singers consist of unison or octave duplications of the melody (sometimes with slight differences, creating heterophony, the simultaneous performance of variant versions of the same melody), of novel rhythmic features, or of a drone (sustained note or notes) played on wind or stringed instruments.
When Jeff Raines on guitar sustained a high tremolo note, Rich Vogel held a simmering Hammond organ chord and Mr. Stanton built a long, crescendoing drum roll, the dancing audience whooped and screamed like a trance-music crowd.
However, not only change, but also persistence, such as the sustaining of a note, can give rise to a peculiar Gestalt quality (Ehrenfels 1890; Smith 1988, 101).
