There was a slight nervousness in the first notes, but then with confidence and authority the rich sound took possession of the room. Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing. The sound filled and honeycombed the collected room, making the rapt audience one with itself, a great golden object rising slowly through space. …

There was in the singing an elusive sense of drama, a mounting atmosphere, as if the audience were sitting forward in their chairs ready to participate in some marvellous transfiguration. Yet Denis himself seemed by now almost invisible, so much had he made sound sovereign over vision.

— From The Unicorn, by Iris Murdoch.