Informal singing-as-learning

Dave Warlick is delivering a keynote at the Pennsylvania Music Educators' Association annual conference. His tweets on the subject got me thinking. Apparently the music teachers were all singing at one point, and Dave (who implies that he is not very musical - I have no idea how true that is) was somewhat daunted at the thought of having to follow that!

I have been a member of various choirs and bands all my life, and there have been numerous situations when I have been one of many people who have 'jammed' in one way or another. On the train with the school choir on the way to a television audition. In someone's lounge at a barbecue. In someone else's lounge at a church worship team meeting. In a coach on the way back from a performance of Fiddler on the Roof in another town.

Hearing a whole bunch of people singing in unison is stirring enough. But when it's a bunch of musicians, each with a trained ear... well, it fair makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

What happens is that the musicians don't all sing the same tune. Nor do they follow some canned path set by a piece of sheet music. They listen to one another and seek out a harmony. What my neighbour is doing influences and informs what I do, but does not dictate to me.

In some parts of the world, this musicality is inculcated almost subliminally. Growing up in South Africa, I would hear the singing of groups of labourers working on the roads. Many of them would have been illiterate and unschooled. Yet they understood music. With no perception of the complexity of what they were achieving, they would sing in counterpoint and harmony, following musical patterns unique to that part of the world. I imagine that a child growing up in a Welsh mining town probably also grew up taking in music with their mother's milk (hence the superior quality of the singing from the Welsh supporters at any rugby match!).

In southern Africa, not only do they sing spontaneous tunes, they sing spontaneous words, too. Someone will sing a single phrase over and over. Others will pick up on it and start to weave around the first person, creating a tapestry of sound, unique to the moment. Not to be recorded or remembered - just something that seems to suit the here and now.

No-one taught them. No-one sat them down and said, "Today we are going to study fugues. Somebody give me an A." They just sang. They sang and they encouraged participation.

So going back to my bunch of musicians who've been singing harmonies of their own devising on the coach. When they get where they're going, they pile out of the bus and take to the stage. There, they will follow the music exactly as it is written. They will watch the conductor like a hawk and do exactly as directed. They will apply to this formal, structured, rigid situation the same passion as they did to the ad hoc, make-it-up-as-you-go-along singing they did on the way over. They know the sounds of one another's voices. They know the feel of the soundwave vibrations when they get it just right.

They all know what to do. They have practised formally and informally. They have poured their hearts into both the formal and informal situations and they have held nothing back.

Sigh. Why can't learning in the office be more like that for more people?