At what point in music did we as a human race decide that it’s a good thing to skip around and slide from note to note instead of making clean transitions? I mean, if you sing the notes as written, you’re not going to sound like Whitney Houston.

So when did we decide we weren’t going to sing the notes as written?

I mean, let’s look at “By Faith” which is written by Keith and Kristyn Getty and Stuart Townend. I don’t think I have permission to post the sheet music as a whole, so I’m just going to post the first five measures for reference.

Now, this video is sung by the Galkin Evangelistic Team, and if you look at the sheet music they get pretty close to following the notes, although they do slide a little bit (their transitions aren’t clean).  But when you listen to the same song sung by Kristyn Getty (one of the authors), not only is the sliding between notes more pronounced, she doesn’t follow the timing and she even adds extra notes in there that aren’t in the sheet music.  And if we go by how many people prefer the Getty version of singing in all different genres of music today I think that one is more popular.