The world is full of clichés at the moment: “We’re living in unprecedented times”, “Every cloud has a silver lining”, “Getting used to the new normal”.
With everything in such turmoil, now might be a good time to re-evaluate your relationship with singing.
Once upon a time you could only hear your favourite song if you travelled to a live performance. It was a special, one-off, shared experience.
If we wanted to hear Central African pygmies singing, we would have to travel to the Central African rainforest. But then recording arrived . . .
This post was inspired by a recent article in The Guardian: music needs to be precious again.
Initially wax cylinders were rare, delicate and expensive – as was the equipment that played them. But then came gramophone records and cheaper record players.
Next radio came and we could listen to live performances in the comfort of our own home with no effort at all. We could even hear strange songs from far-flung countries that we’d never heard before.
And now we have CDs, MP3 players, the internet, smart phones ... music at our fingertips. This is a good thing, BUT it has some serious downsides.
At this very moment I’m using the Last FM plugin to my Firefox browser to listen to tunes that My Neighbourhood has suggested. It’s great background music, but I’m not really paying attention, I don’t know who’s playing and I can skip to the next track if I’m bored.
I really don’t like how my attitude to music has changed. Although it’s great that we have so much music available and we can listen to music that we would never have come across before, I believe that we have lost something in the process.
We’ve lost:
“Music and culture have never been divorced for me. How can you go to somewhere like Cambodia and have no sense of the history and the politics of the place? Music does not exist in isolation. It's dynamic, like language. It's self-referential and always changing.”
From an interview with Andy Kershaw in The Observer.
Do you agree that we’ve lost something by having music so freely available? Maybe I’ve missed out some of the things that we’ve lost, or perhaps you don’t agree with me at all. Do drop by and leave a comment.
Somebody created that song you’re singing. They may never have written it down, and you may not know their name, but somebody, somewhere, somewhen, made the effort to compose a beautiful piece of music.
By singing it, you are benefitting from that person’s creativity. Shouldn’t they get some acknowledgement? That’s where copyright comes in.
Jut because a song might be ‘traditional’ or hundreds of years old, it still means that somebody wrote it. Even if it says ‘Anon’ on your copy. That person might not have been a professional musician, but surely they should get some credit or acknowledgement?
What if you had spent weeks finely crafting a beautiful song, then somebody heard it and began to pass it off as their own? Wouldn’t you – at the very least – be a bit miffed?
And what if they wrote down your song (from hearing you singing it), published it in a songbook which sold in its thousands and made a handsome profit?
Of perhaps somebody took your song and changed some of the words and moved some of the notes around in order to make it ‘better’.
What if you planned to sell your new song, but then found that somebody had photocopied the score you had written and passed it around for free among their mates?
Maybe somebody came across an old songbook with your song in it, recorded it for their new CD (without asking you) and made millions. Or perhaps they then used it as part of a film score which went on to make the director a fortune.
It might be that none of these things bother you. But surely it would have been nice if somebody had bothered to ASK YOU if it was OK?
This what copyright is for. Copyright was invented in order to protect the creators of original work, to help stop their work being ‘stolen’ or copied (without their permission) and to enable them to get paid for their creations (if they choose to).
Essentially it enables creators of original work to control how that work is used and to ensure that its integrity is protected.
Many times I go to singing workshops and am taught songs by ear with no reference to who might have written or arranged them. Do those teaching the songs realise that they should have permission to pass the songs on (especially if they’re making money from running the workshop)?
Then there are participants who record the workshop or who come up afterwards to ask for copies of the songs they’ve learnt. Do they not realise that they ought to go out and buy the songbook or CD? Just because a song is passed on orally doesn’t affect copyright or ownership.
What about people who learn a song at a workshop, go home and record the parts which they then distribute to their choir? Just because the song hasn’t been written down doesn’t mean that they can avoid copyright issues.
Just the other day somebody wrote to me and said there was “some confusion” about passing round copies of sheet music in their choir. Well, I’m here to tell you that there is NO confusion. If the songs are copyrighted, then you (usually) DON’T have permission to copy them at will and hand them around – whether you give them out for free or otherwise.
In this series of posts I’m going to try to demystify the issue of copyright, although it is a bit of a minefield!
Do let me know if you have any specific questions in this area and I’ll try to answer them.
Next week I’ll begin to look at copyright in more detail as it relates to songs (music, lyrics, arrangements, recordings, performances, sheet music, etc.). First off I’ll consider what the basic principles behind the concept of copyright are.
This is the first in a series of seven posts about songs and copyright:
Since I wrote this post I’ve written two others that might be of interest:
Choirs and copyright: a beginner’s guide for the bewildered
Copying music: how to stay on the right side of the law
Music and singing are auditory experiences. We don’t need to see the musicians or singers to appreciate their music. So why do we bother going to live music events? Why don’t we just stay at home and listen to a recording?
Photo by shaggy359
I can think of plenty of good reasons not to leave the comfort of your own home so the live performance had better be very good to persuade people to go out and spend money.
I can only think of a few reasons (but not many) why going to a live music gig might be a good idea.
Yet despite this imbalance, I still go (sometimes) to live concerts. Why is that?
It reminds me of that scene in Kramer vs. Kramer when Dustin Hoffman’s character makes a list of pros and cons for seeking custody of the kid: his cons far outweigh his pros and yet he still goes for custody.
There some deep down instinctive need to see music performed live, and no amount of logic can tease it out.
Or maybe you can? Do let me know if you can think of any really good reasons why bothering to go out in the cold and dark to a live music performance might be a good idea.
I’m mainly talking here about choral performances and other live music events which are mainly sit-down gigs. I think pop and rock concerts and summer music festivals are a whole other beast.
If we are going to ask members of the public to leave home and spend their money attending one of our concerts, we’d better know what we’re offering them!
Here are my two lists of reasons – pros and cons. Let me know what you think.
What do you think? Why do you go to live performances? As choir leaders and choir members we surely need to know why before we can expect an audience to bother to come to one of our own performances!
The other day I was reading one of the few blogs out there about choirs and singing – Podium Speak – which mentioned a guy who seldom hits a wrong note, knows lots about music and how it works, is very keen, but who can’t ‘sing’. (Do check the post out as it has a really good description at the end of what it means to be part of a choir)
It got me thinking about what people might mean by ‘sing’. In the Podium Speak blog entry, the point being made was that the guy couldn’t really sing musically. i.e. it’s not just enough to sing on pitch, get the notes in the right order, be exact with your timing, etc. there’s also a need for musicality. It’s partly to do with phrasing, feeling, going with the flow, expression, meaning it, etc. – things that are somewhat intangible (although you can teach some of them!) but which we notice very clearly as an audience. It’s like the X-Factor: you know immediately when someone’s got it, but also when they haven’t. This particular guy seems to approach the whole act of singing very mathematically and technically whilst forgetting the humanity that needs to lie behind the singing voice.
This ability to bring musicality to a song is something that we all want and is the main thing that we look for when auditioning people. (I’m going to be writing about auditions in a later post) But what about open-access community choirs where everyone is welcome? All the choirs that I run are open-access and founded on the principle that everyone can sing. However, there are still people who won’t join such a choir because they believe that they can’t sing, even though there are no auditions, no particular standard to adhere to, and no expectations other than to have fun! Why is this?
It’s clear that such people believe that they can’t ‘sing’. Whatever that means. When asked, it turns out that they each have their own particular notion of what being able to sing actually is! Some people believe that real singers only have to hear a song once and will then know it (and the words!) perfectly; some people think that the only proper singing is professional or opera singing and anything less is forbidden; some people think that because they can’t hit a particular high note it means that they’re no good at singing; some people don’t like the sound of their own voice and because they don’t sound exactly like the singers on TV they shouldn’t ‘inflict’ their voice on anyone else; and some people think they can’t sing because they think they can’t hold a tune, even though they can sing Happy Birthday note perfectly.
All these are, of course, myths. But quite prevalent and persistent myths. It’s quite hard to disabuse some people of these erroneous beliefs. One way (which I have tried!) is to offer workshops to organisations but don’t tell them that you’ll be doing singing. Start off with a few warm-up games, some running around and being silly, being playful with the voice (call and response silly sounds, for example), then quickly teach them a very simple three-part round. Afterwards I point out that they’ve just been singing unaccompanied three-part harmony which is a very, very difficult skill. In the process they’ve proved that they’re all excellent singers, so now I’m going to teach them a song. Always works!
I’ve just spent the last two weeks travelling through the
The Lonely Planet Guide said: “Song is the soul of the Balts. And nowhere is this expressed more eloquently than in the national song festivals that unite
And the Rough Guide said: “The characteristic Baltic singing festivals – hugely popular events – played a major role in expressing the national identities of
Unfortunately most of the big folk song festivals had already happened earlier in the year!
In the 19th century, great collections of folk lyrics and tunes were made: over 1.4 million folk lyrics and 30,000 tunes have been written down in
I also read in a local guide book that if you ask a Lithuanian about his country’s traditional culture, you would most likely hear about Lithuanian songs and love of singing. Apparently, only a few decades ago, most women of the Dzukija region still knew a hundred songs; the most accomplished singers remembered as many as four hundred. Often, people sang more than they spoke!
The choral folk and runo-song arrangements of Estonian composer Veljo Tormis are very popular, having influence as far away as the Estonian community in
So how come in the restaurants and shops the music was Russian pop or Bob Marley or classical muzak, and the new Baltic MTV was full of Baltic rock of the bad 1970s kind? Where was this vibrant traditional culture that I’d been reading so much about?
I was also yearning to see some kind of authentic folk craft in the shops rather than the usual watered-down tourist rubbish (is that what people really want, or do we buy it because it’s the only thing on offer?).
It got me thinking about how visible so-called traditional culture is in any particular society. There is clearly a rich and vibrant folk tradition in the Baltics in both music and applied arts, yet on an everyday level it is invisible. What happens to all those thousands of people who join in the song festivals the rest of the year? Do they simply stop singing? What is a culture’s folk tradition any way? I guess you could say that the derivative Baltic pop music on the radio, and the buying of cheap Russian clothes imports in the markets is an expression of today’s traditional culture. Yet my background reading suggests that there is a lively, current interest in songs and music that has been handed down over generations – songs for every occasion: weddings, rye harvest, summer solstice, funerals. It is an integral part of Baltic society and runs deep. So why did I have to go hunting in modern record shops to try and find recordings of folk music hidden amongst the stacks of death metal and American pop?
What would a foreigner’s impression of our folk traditions be if she arrived at Heathrow, took the tube into
I met a painter in a gallery today and he asked me if I was an artist or had any interest in fine art. I told him that I didn’t paint, but that I worked with music and that I was also fascinated by the creative process. He then asked me: “Where do you think the music resides? Is it in the written score?”. I was rather lost for words at that moment and didn’t really understand the question. Finally I answered: “I believe that music resides in the humanity of the people creating it”.
We went on to talk about how some people are attracted to the purity of the written score and the idea of the perfect realisation of it in practice. Of course, one can never perfectly realise a written piece of music (not least because music notation is not an exact system) because the people who create the music are error-prone and not perfect creatures. But even if we could do that, wouldn’t that be rather like machine-produced music? I for one don’t really enjoy choral concerts where the singing is so, so, ever so precise. The enunciation is perfect, as is the blend of voices – so much so that it can sometimes sound like a single voice singing. No! Give me some humanity! I love the different textures of all the individuals in the choir, I appreciate everyone’s unique contribution to the overall sound. I enjoy it when not everyone is singing exactly the same pitch – that is where the harmonics, overtones and fullness of the sound come from. I adore it when each person’s timing is slightly different, when small errors are made. In short, I love it when all the imperfections that we human beings are made up of are fully expressed through the singing.
I have heard singers who have ‘beautiful’ voices, who sing perfectly in tune, whose technique and talent are remarkable, and yet they leave me unmoved. However, I can hear some rusty old recording of a group of elderly villagers in the Balkans giving voice to an age-old traditional song, and I can be almost moved to tears. They are communicating with me, they are telling me the story, they are working as one to express their humanity and their joy, and I in turn am moved.
This weekend I was in the rare position of running three entirely different workshops in three different places with three different sets of participants. It reinforced for me what happens in workshops. All three were open access, no experience necessary, no musical scores in sight, no real expectations (except to have fun!), and yet they all produced the most wonderful, magical sounds. The whole experience was uplifting both for me and the participants. It reminded me how universal singing is, and how egalitarian and levelling singing harmony together can be. I had no idea who these people were, what they did for a living, or if they had had any singing training or experience. The only instruction was to sing a part that they felt was comfortably within their own range. People ended up standing next to strangers who they had only just met, and yet they worked as a team helping to create an overall sound. Nobody was really worried about whether they had a ‘beautiful’ voice or not as they were soon taken over by the music itself. And I just stood back and listened to the most beautiful harmony singing and was moved once more by the power of the music. And where did the music reside at that moment? In the hearts and souls of every single person who made up the group.
Yet still – unfortunately – people believe that they can’t ‘sing’ or that music-making is not meant for them. One of the workshop participants wrote to me: “I’m completely new to this kind of thing, having believed all my life that singing in choirs was something that ‘other people’ do.” Luckily he realised that singing is open to all of us and has now joined a local choir.