Another Anthony, Melisma is like a cooking ingredient which needs to be brought out very occasionally for wow factor, only by a very highly trained operator, and if used constantly is just a turnoff. Like, I don’t know, Fugu fish.

At heart, it is the fault of a poorly-conceived musical education. Over-reliance on melisma is the musical equivalent of a good performance of Polonius: you do it to cover up the fact that you have no real idea what the ferck you’re talking about.

“Oh, those poor Dutch kids.”

Right now I’m not at a high-speed connection and so I can’t check out the link, but I’d bet dollars to donuts the comedy derives from that old stand-by, continental Euro-kids having no effing idea how to sing in an Anglo-Afro-American R & B idiom. (But of course I could be wrong about this.)

But why should they? Anglophone musical culture has very distinct historical differences from Continental development (the Celtic and African influences are a start, but really only a start). Ask some Dutch kids to sing Bach’s “Cantata 78″ and I bet they’d beat the pants off the kids in my parish choir. There’s no particular reason everyone in the world should be able to sing “Voodoo Chile” or even “Blue Bayou” properly; I certainly can’t do Canto-pop any justice.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled performance of “Diamonds Are Forever” as sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Melisma badly done is the scourge of our time.

And we hatesssss it with the burning fury of a thoussssand sssunsssss, yesssss we doesssss.

Melisma badly done is the scourge of our time. Melisma as done by, say, Sam Cooke, is pure bliss. Oh, and congruent with Jobby’s observation, Sam Cooke like lots of soul artists got his start in a Christian group (the Soul Stirrers)

And you’ve gotta admit, in creating and promoting the show, they’ve done a lot for the public visibility of dance.

You say this as if it’s a good thing.

I hate the over-ornamented vocal style that is the current vogue

It’s called ‘noodling’.

The musical term for it is “melisma” and it’s a scourge of our time.

However, I am glued to Oidol whenever I can make time for it as it’s a cornucopia of crass. I’m happy to report that the melisma seems to be on the way out.