the.com/tenor

means The general drift or settled direction of something — what it's basically getting at — and also the highest ordinary adult male singing voice, the one that sits just below the falsetto range.

from From Latin tenor, 'a holding on, an uninterrupted course,' from tenere, 'to hold.' In medieval music theory, the tenor was the voice that held the main melody — usually a plainchant line — in long, sustained notes while other voices moved around it; other singers quite literally had to hold their pitch against it. Over time the musical sense narrowed to the vocal range itself, while the older Latin sense of 'holding a steady course' survived separately as 'the tenor of a conversation' or 'the tenor of one's life' — same root, two careers.