Lea, in one of her columns wrote, "The birit is here to stay, for better or worse." She did not give the English equivalent of ‘birit’ but defined it as a style of singing that "requires far more physical strength than a lot of others due to the stratospheric heights that a singer’s voice must reach.

"Maybe that’s where the problem lies…the demand for this type of vocal calisthenics is such that it drowns out those for other styles…. As an art form, singing isn’t just about high notes; it’s also about appropriate rendition and telling a story…. However, things seem to have changed... and they’ve changed enough for people to cry out, ‘Enough!’" notes Lea.

It sounds to me like the singing style birit, is what was melisma: Not holding back from trilling a dozen notes where another singer would stay with one note. The audiences jump up in glee, to cheer hysterically when Mariah Carey and others do their melisma—whether from stages in Las Vegas or at a Fort Global City performances.

"In the popular music sense, it’s a series or group of notes surrounding the original pitch, usually maintained by one syllable, that’s used in a decorative fashion," explains Celeste Delgado, professor of vocal jazz and commercial music at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music.

Lea had indicated that birit (which I see as melisma) was an invention of Filipino singers in the very recent past. In fact, melisma goes back to Europe, to Biblical times. The further back one goes in the study of music, the more one encounters melismatic singing. I picked this up from a book in my library, "A Brief History of Christian Music, from Biblical Times to the Present, by Andrew Wilson-Dickson, Lion Publishing, London, ’97.

One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, mentioned by St. Paul in his Letters, is the gift of tongue extending to song. In its original Easter Sunday version, The Jubilus (Alleluia) singer is no longer the humble servant of the words. That one final Alleluia syllable ‘ah’ is, in Biblical times, sung to a 45-note melisma as an accepted impressive expression of praise of the Almighty in the abstract medium. No words; just the ah. Straight from the Bible, the melisma–as Mariah Carey and Celine Dion are doing now.

At this journalists’ gathering, the consensus was that the 16-year-old Cinderella-role should have been for one a generation younger than Lea Salonga. I remember Lea, beautiful, fabulous as the GRO in "Miss Saigon" which I saw twice at Covent Garden in London. Was that in the ‘80s? Those at my table last Wednesday proceeded to date Lea’s successes through the decades. My contribution to this "Back Then" was that Lea was the kindergarten classmate of my nephew at Montessori. This nephew is now a middle-aged physician.