Okay, I have a terrible confession to make: I like to sing. When I’m in my car, I will sing along with my favorite songs. But it’s worse than that: sometimes I will sing without any accompaniment.
While my principal musical training was in playing the double bass, I sang in choirs all through high school, I directed my high school choir for a year and a half, I would occasionally sing in church choirs for money, I sang in what may have been the very first performance by the Tanglewood Festival chorus in 1971, and I can also say with no small amount of smugness that John Williams (yes, THE John Williams) used to call me “la voce,” as he seemed to like the tone of my speaking voice. He never heard me sing. Too bad for him.
So having made this full disclosure, I now ask this question: why don’t other people sing very much? I don’t mean professional musicians, nor do I mean people who are active in choral societies. What I mean is the average human being.
One bit of singing that no longer exists is movie theater “sing-alongs.” Back when people used to go to movie theaters instead of sitting at home alone watching television, part of the “program” (of selected shorts, newsreels, cartoons, and a feature movie) was often an animated sing-along cartoon. You didn’t need any vocal training, and you didn’t need to know the lyrics.
Since we don’t go to movie theaters much anymore, this kind of “community singing” no longer occurs. I would be curious to see what would happen if one of these things was played in a crowded (or perhaps even more interesting, an uncrowded) movie theater today.
When I played with the Boston Pops, we had numerous “sing-along” pieces. Perhaps it is my imagination, but from my perspective I felt that over the years, the audience became less and less interested in singing along. Of course, part of the problem is, no one knows the lyrics to “Columbia, The Gem of the Ocean,” including me. The Christmas concert sing-alongs were particularly gruesome. The audience just didn’t want to sing. In recent years I saw the conductor go out in the audience and urge people to sing, with precious little success.
It wasn’t that long ago that kids hanging out on street corners would harmonize and sing little doo-wop songs. And once upon a time, it was very common for men to get together and sing barbershop quartets. When I was a teenager, every other kid had an acoustic guitar, and could sing any number of folk songs. This all seems to have disappeared. There is no singing in Guitar Hero.
Of course, there’s plenty of singing going on, but now it all seems to be done by professional surrogates. On those rare occasions when I hear a nonprofessionals singing together, well, Baptist churches aside, it has a rather subdued feeling. I never hear teenagers singing; of course, the music they listen to is so overproduced, and so much of it is lacking in a core singable melody, I can see why. And rap music, of course, isn’t really singing at all.
I think singing is important, not because it improves anyone’s math scores, but because it creates a sense of community and unity. Having a song “that we all know” and singing it together gives us a lovely ritual for a collective feeling of togetherness. It’s not surprising to me that there are radio stations that play Christmas Carols all year, as those songs are eminently singable and are universally recognizable. They embody a sense of continuity and tradition, they create a sense of connection and belonging that we desperately need. Having such songs to serve as community togetherness rituals is important, and they are sorely lacking.
This brings me to the last notable bit of singing that seems to be missing these days, and that has to do with the wars we are currently fighting. We’ve been at war for 10 years now, and there is yet to be a single song that has managed to capture the collective feeling about the whole situation. This is not to say that there are no songs about the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, but on a cursory glance/search thru youtube, they all seemed to be of the glorification and deification of the soldiers rather than just being an honest expression of the feelings of being separated from loved ones. There is no contemporary version of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” or “Lily Marlene.” Where is the “Dog Faced Soldier Song”? Where is a new version of “Der Feuhrer’s Face”? While I am second to no one in my admiration of the men and women in our armed forces, only playing songs about heros and freedom, i.e., songs that always place these soldiers on a noble pedestal, can have the unintended consequence of making them feel socially isolated. Whether it praises the overall war purpose or just comments on life in the sand and dirt far from home, we really need a song about this experience that we can all sing together.
© Justin Locke
5 Responses to When Did the Singing Stop?