What? Me Sing?

… is the chapter title about singing in my book Play, Sing & Dance. Here’s what I wrote back in 2002: 

 

Let me begin with a confession: I don’t sing. I came to music through the prestidigitation of curved fingers on the organ keyboard, deciphering those black dots that followed Trudy Treble and dropping the needle on my parents’ 78s and 33s. When those neural connections were supposed to be wired by my mother’s soothing lullabies and family sings, something else must have been happening. I don’t blame her, but since I ended up as a music teacher, it has made things challenging. 

 

School didn’t help much. I put in my Erie Canal time, but never had the experience of being guided towards more tuneful singing. Of course, given the situation today, it was a miracle that I had music at all—and twice a week at that. But I only remember three songs and we never played instruments and we didn’t improve in singing. It makes me wonder what we were doing all that time!

 

My main memory in high school was a mandatory try out in glee-club. “Sing a scale” asked the director. I had played scales throughout my seven years of organ and piano lessons, but no one had ever asked me to sing one. I tried. When he said, “Thank you very much. Next!” I shouldn’t have been surprised. 

 

These were also those teenage years singing along—well, almost—in the back seats of cars to the Beatles, Beach Boys and James Brown. (My friends were kinder than the teacher and didn’t kick me out of the car.)

 

Things picked up in college. I joined the audition-free Antioch College chorus and rode on the coattails of my fellow basses all the way to Europe. The music was actually quite difficult in some ways—the sacred Masses of Guillame Dufay and Johannes Ockeghem were hardly familiar to my ear. But the notes kindly stepped from one to another without too many leaps and the beauty of singing in Notre Dame and Chartres Cathedrals was enough to lift some kind of song from me.

 

After college, I moved to San Francisco and after a couple of years supporting myself  giving piano lessons and accompanying dance classes, suddenly here I was, the music teacher at The San Francisco School. We had a singing time. Every day. And I was in charge. 

 

Thanks to Alan Lomax, Doc Watson and Peter, Paul & Mary, I scraped together a reasonable repertoire of folk songs for kids, practiced my three chords on guitar and off we went. Most of music class was playing around on Orff instruments, dancing, playing games—the whole nine yards of Orff Schulwerk. But in the daily singing time, we sang. Every day. And I was in charge…”

And on we went, with me leading the singing for 15 years and then sharing it with my colleagues James and Sofia for 30 more. When I left The San Francisco School 5 years ago, the thing I thought I might miss the most is that daily singing time. To some extent, that has been true. 

But where there is a will, there is a way, and I’m happy to report that in the last three weeks alone, I have both created and responded to opportunities to lead group singing with all sorts of people of all ages. With seniors at the Sequoia’s Center for Senior Living and the Jewish Home for the Aged, with 2^nd and 3^rd graders at New Traditions School, with families coming to my neighborhood at the SIP Tea Room and on the annual Trolley Ride, with old friends and new at a Mexican Posada gathering, a Jewish Latkes party and our neighborhood Christmas Caroling and yesterday at a friend’s apartment who is bedridden with illness, with his wife and two other friends. 

When people gather, a shared song changes everything. That’s the greatest joy the venture brings to me, that power that this kid who rarely sang, grown to the teacher that sang every day, now has—and uses— to elevate any gathering with the simple technology of shared songs. It is a blessing I never could have imagined a lifetime ago singing Erie Canal out-of-tune in my New Jersey elementary school. 

 

That’s the greatest joy the venture brings to me, that power that this kid who rarely sang, grown to the teacher that sang every day, now has—and uses— to elevate any gathering with the simple technology of shared songs. 

 

And likewise a blessing that this is a time of year—in fact, the only time of year—where singing takes on an important cultural function. Whatever else you feel about the Winter Holiday season, it is the only time a group of diverse strangers might know and sing together a common body of sung music. Where there's a whole body of recorded material constantly playing on the airwaves. (Imagine recordings like Boo!! Ella Fitzgerald Sings Halloween Songs/ It's Turkey Time! Frank Sinatra's Thanksgiving Album/ Taylor Swift's Easter Songs— like I said, when it comes to music, there's nothing like this Holiday Season.) Imagine this time without Winter Wonderland, Deck the Halls, Frosty the Snowman, Silent Night and dozens more. How different it would be! 

So sing on, my friends and as 16th century composer William Byrd suggests at the end of a little treatise in praise of singing: 

 

                                    Since singing is so good a thing

                               I wish that all would learn to sing

                               Omnis spiritus laudet Dominum