In the spirit of thinking out loud…

Today’s New York Times has an earnest article about community singalongs (on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section), which got me thinking. The article, “Shared Song, Cultural Memory” by Ben Ratliff, starts off like this:

EAST LANSING, Mich. They meet on the first Monday of the month at the Universalist Unitarian [sic] Church here, not to worship but to sing. Just to sing. There are song leaders, some with a guitar or banjo or an autoharp, but this isn’t a class or a choir; the singers, not the leaders, choose the tunes. Most hold copies of a spiral-bound songbook of folk music called Rise Up Singing. They perform songs like “Keep On the Sunny Side” and “This Land Is Your Land.” No one minds a voice gone off-key.

From Hawaii to Santa Cruz to the Philadelphia suburbs, in living rooms, churches, and festival tents, similar gatherings — called community sings, or singalongs — draw together the average-voice and bring old songs into common memory.

Anyone who has hung around mainline churches, or folk music circles, long enough will recognize the phenomenon Ratliff describes — although I have heard them called “song circles,” or even “Rise Up Singing” after the book that is commonly used, but not “community sings” (which is perhaps a midwestern term?). The Unitarian Universalist church I grew up in has a monthly song circle they call “Rise Up Singing,” which last I heard was attracting about twenty people a month. Summer church camps of all denominations frequently feature informal group singing sessions. It’s a fairly widespread phenomenon, worth paying attention to.

This is a long post, so I’ll put a break here — read on if you’re interested!

I’ve been thinking about the song circle phenomenon recently because our church here in New Bedford will be hosting a song circle at the end of this month. Our motivation for doing so is unique — as part of our 300th anniversary celebration this year, we want to honor the Tryworks Coffehouse, a folk music coffeehouse that ran for over thirty years out of our church, and Tryworks had participatory singing on a regular basis. Tryworks was an interesting place, by all reports — its organizers made a point of welcoming young people, and Tryworks encouraged quite a few young New Bedfordites to pursue music as adults, either professionally or as serious amateurs. But Tryworks had at least three layers of participation: there were weekly performances by professional musicians to listen to; there was occasional participatory singing (similar to “community singalongs”); and every so often there were “open hoots,” what we’d now call “open mic nights.” So you could start out just listening; then join in casual singing once in a while; then, if you got serious, do a song at an “open hoot”; and if you really got serious, you could wind up playing a gig yourself at Tryworks.

In contemporary American culture, most of us don’t get beyond the level of listening to other people perform music. Oh, sure, we might sing along with a recording of a favorite song; but that doesn’t involve any human interaction. And you can run into serious obstacles if you try to get to the next level: classical music and most church choirs require that you know how to read music; joining a band (whether pop, rock, jazz, etc.) requires a substantial time commitment; other musical ensembles have auditions or other barriers to casual participation. The “community singalong” is a way to get to the next musical level, that of singing with other human beings instead of with a recording, for the casual singer or musician.

So why are so many of these “community sings” based at churches? I believe it’s for the simple reason that churches are one of the few institutions left that nurture the skill of listening to other human beings. If you attend worship services, you learn how to listen to the liturgy and to the preaching. If you get involved in church governance at any level, you have to listen to other volunteer workers and lay leaders. If you take spiritual practice/discipline seriously, you’re going to have to listen to spiritual teachers, to peers who help you with discernment, and/or to the still small voice within. In short, churches are places that (should) foster good listening; a “community singalong” can be another tool to practice listening.

And there’s another reason: churches are what some scholars call “communities of memory.” That is, churches are places where shared memory fosters a sense of continuity across time, and (ideally) across diversities of age, race, gender, etc. This kind of shared memory appears to be tied deeply to the survival of some key moral and ethical teachings, e.g., the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth have been kept alive over millennia by Christian (and now post-Christian) communities. One way Christian and post-Christian communities keep memory alive is through music, especially singing — hymns, praise songs, carols, etc. — for music is a fantastic aid to memory. You could argue that the music industry as it exists today aims at eradicating memory: they depend on you forgetting how much you liked an old piece of music, so that you will relentlessly seek out and buy new musical products. It is not a coincidence that Rise Up Singing, the book most used by the “community singalong movement,” contains many songs with a high moral/ethical content.

If all this makes “community singalongs” sound a little too earnest and maybe a little dull — well, let’s face it, they can be that way. When you have forty people singing in unison and five guitars chunking along in exactly the same rhythm, a “community singalong” can get a little dull. When there’s resistance to working on a song to get it to sound fantastic — Ratliff writes that singalong leaders say that “If someone picks a song, and it takes more than 45 seconds for everyone to learn it, let it go” — that can be a little dull, too. But it doesn’t need to be that way — the song circles I have been a part of often start out with easy songs, and then move on to more difficult songs and more difficult arrangements after an hour or so. And while Rise Up Singing can be a little too earnest and politically correct in its choice of songs, there are lots of other songbooks out there.

The real point is there’s a tremendous power to be found in getting a bunch of people to just sing together. It’s easy to look down your nose at “community singalongs” as being too hippie-ish or too folkie or too whatever — e.g., the Times article has a slight tone of the typical patronizing attitude I term New-York-Times-intellectually-pretentious. So you can look down your nose, but what’s the alternative? — not allowing people to sing at all except in intellectually-acceptable performance groups, or (more likely) money-making enterprises like rock bands? People who sing together lose a great deal of the passivity that is forced upon us by contemporary consmuer culture. I think if you really want to radicalize a church, a good start might be getting them to sing together.