I’ve been asked to create a choir specially for an inter-faith event.
There will be contributors from Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and more. Plenty of songs to choose from. But what about atheists? Will they be represented, and what songs do they sing?
This is an updated version of a post which first appeared as Singing from the same hymn sheet in April 2007.
Many people look back to the good old days when we all used to gather round a piano and sing for hours, or join in a good sing-song down the local pub.
But – apart from football matches – where does this kind of thing happen these days?
Most people seem to think there was a golden age where chimney sweeps sang in the streets, the pub would burst out singing at any opportunity and blokes warbled away whilst working with heavy machinery in the factory.
I do think this might be a bit of romantic wishful thinking though!
I have a book called “Daily Express” community song book which came out of the Daily Express’s Community Singing Movement launched at the Royal Albert Hall in November 1926. This movement seems to have been an attempt to get people singing together again. So it’s not a new problem.
The News Chronicle Song Book was a similar venture published around the same time. At the very least it shows that even then there was a desire for people to learn the same songs in order to sing them together in community settings. The implication being that the singing of songs together had started to die out.
It was this joy of singing together that prompted me to start my first choir back in 1997. I would often try to start a sing-along whenever a group of like-minded people gathered (see also How to have an English sing-along), but inevitably we would have no songs in common or would only know the words for the first few lines.
So I thought I would start a group and teach some songs so at least we’d have a bunch to call on whenever we were down the pub or fancied a good sing. It did take some while however before the first time we just burst into song in a pub without the need for lyric sheets or starting notes!
Things are getting a lot better now, and there is even a common set of songs known by an increasing number of community choirs across the country. So wherever we go in the UK and come across another choir, there’s a very good chance we’ll have at least one song in common that doesn’t need an associated religious ceremony!
I’m not a religious man, but it seems to me that nowadays people mostly sing together on religious occasions (or football matches – which amounts to the same thing!).
Many people only visit church at Christmas (or Easter) when pretty much everybody joins in with the odd carol. Most of us remember the hymns we learnt and sang at school assembly. And there are many songs associated with family occasions such as Jewish Passover and American Thanksgiving.
What unites these events is song.
An important part of the Passover Seder (the ritual feast which takes place on the eve of Passover) are the traditional songs. Every Jewish family will have learnt these as part of growing up. Similarly, most people brought up as Christians, even though they don’t attend church regularly, will know many of the familiar hymns. So, as well as being religious events, Easter and Passover are two examples of cultural occasions where people come together to sing songs that they have in common.
I was brought up as a Christian and only experienced my first Passover Seder a few years ago. What was interesting was that when the rituals had ended there was a desire to continue singing. However, once the few Hebrew and Yiddish songs that everyone knew had been exhausted, it became increasingly difficult to find songs that everybody knew.
Gradually the songs moved back into childhood: simple rounds, clapping games, playground songs, and finally theme tunes from children’s TV programmes, until eventually the whole enterprise fizzled out.
I’m sure it would have been the same after church on Easter Sunday. Even if people wanted to continue to sing, they would find it difficult (after they’d all sung Robbie Williams’ Angels and then perhaps Roll out the barrel) to find songs in common.
The desire is there, the willingness to join in and let the voice loose. The feeling of community and shared endeavour carries over from the hymn singing, but doesn’t last because we simply have so few songs in common other than those in a religious context.
I suppose the nearest equivalent in our increasingly secular society are the sing-alongs during rock and pop concerts and festivals where everyone there knows the lyrics and tune.
I came across an article in The Guardian today by Michael Hann. He says:
“There’s no greater joy than singing with your family, when it doesn’t matter whether you’re in tune, or if you don’t know the words.”
He’s absolutely right! The problem is to be able to find songs that cross the generations. That is why we often revert to childhood songs. But are these being passed on any more? Do we still sing to our children when they’re young?
One of the issues is that there is so much music readily available that the chances of two people knowing the same song are pretty thin. I will be writing a post about music being too freely available next week.
What do you do to promote community singing? Is it thriving in your area? How do we get over the problem of not knowing songs in common? Is community singing important enough to want to save? Do drop by and leave a comment.
You might find these other posts interesting:
Singing together: despite the recent interest in programmes on TV about singing, we still don’t sing together much.
The devil doesn’t always have the best songs: about secular choirs including religious songs in their repertoire.
Is all choral music religious?: a question from Bangladesh prompted an examination of the religious roots of choral singing.
Shama is from Bangladesh. She loves choral singing, but wonders if all choral music is religious.
Shama writes:
“I love singing and have been singing since I was 9. Although I started out with learning Bengali classical music, I have also been really interested in English music. I love listening to choral music.
But such opportunities are not available in our country, as far as I know. I really do not have much knowledge about choirs. I was hoping you can tell me about the significance of religion in choral music.
Church choir groups exist all over the world, including our country. But I think they would be reluctant to let me join them, as I am from a different religion. My parents will be negative about it too.
Do choirs always have to be religious? Are there choir groups who do not focus on the religious side of the music, but only on the beauty of it? If not in our country, hopefully in other countries?”
Not trying to be difficult here, but it depends on what we mean by ‘choir’ and ‘choral music’!
By ‘choir’ I mean a group of singers who come together on a regular basis to learn and perform songs in a formal or semi-formal way. Most choirs sing in four-part harmony with or without musical accompaniment.
“a body of singers who perform together. The […] term is very often applied to groups affiliated with a church (whether or not they actually occupy the quire) …”
The connection with churches is reinforced by the other meaning of the word ‘choir’:
“Architecturally, the choir (alt. spelling quire) is the area of a church or cathedral, usually in the western part of the chancel between the nave and the sanctuary (which houses the altar).”
However, the notion of the ‘chorus’ is pre-Christian and goes back to ancient Greek drama. The oldest unambiguously choral repertory that survives dates from 200 years BCE.
There are many groups of singers throughout the world who sing regularly, but without the formality of a choir. In such cultures there is no separation between singer/ performer and audience. Everyone sings and everyone joins in. Children learn the songs from a very early age so there tends not to be any kind of formal training.
If you accept that a choir sings in harmony, then that immediately rules out the traditional music of many cultures. Asian cultures, for example, tend not to have a harmony singing tradition, whereas Eastern European cultures have a strong harmony tradition going back thousands of years.
I’ve written on the subject of harmony singing traditions in Why don’t you sing songs from India?
In the West, the term ‘choral music’ has come to mean music that is written down, has been composed by a known composer, is often ‘classical’, and is very often Christian church music.
But there are many ‘choirs’ who sing ‘choral music’ that doesn’t fit this tradition.
I’m not an expert in this area by any means, so please take this as a very rough guide!
Harmony singing in the Christian church goes back to the 14th century in Western Europe. During the Renaissance, sacred choral music was the principal type of formally-notated music in Western Europe. It is still a very strong influence in the Catholic church and the Russian Orthodox church, as well as the hymn singing tradition of the Anglican church.
When the West began to colonise other countries, they took their religion and their music with them. This meant that harmony singing was introduced to cultures that had no such tradition.
Countries such as New Zealand and South Africa embraced this new musical style with gusto and incorporated it into their own singing traditions. The legacy of this is the rich harmony traditions of Maori songs and South African church singing.
Although originally the Christian missionaries would have taught religious songs to these cultures, the harmony techniques have also been applied to folk songs and other non-religious music.
The short answer is “No”.
If you like Western classical music, there is a lot of religious repertoire, but also a great deal of non-religious material.
If you like traditional and folk music, there are many cultures throughout the world which have strong, non-religious harmony singing traditions.
There are choirs throughout the world with are based in churches, but also many, many choirs which have no religious affiliation at all (in fact, I know of several choirs which completely ban any kind of religious music!), but which are based in the community that they serve.
I don’t know about Bangladesh I’m afraid, but I’m sure if you look hard enough you will find a non-religious choir.
Some people have very strong objections to singing songs from religions other than their own. Some people who are atheists or agnostics refuse to sing any songs that have any religious overtones at all.
I don’t have a religious bone in my body, but I absolutely LOVE gospel music, Russian church music, shape note songs, South African church songs, Jewish Niggunim, etc. etc. Does that mean I can’t sing them?
I’ve written about secular vs. religious songs in The devil doesn’t always have the best songs!
As long as I respect the tradition that a song comes from, and as long as I’m not singing anything overtly religious (personally I draw the line at singing about Jesus, but I’m happy to sing about the Lord or the Spirit), I continue to sing and share beautiful music. After all, the music was created by human beings and is a celebration of our inner spirit whether you are religious or not.
There is a very interesting discussion on ChoralNet about a pagan woman who asks if she can be a choral conductor. She believes that:
“no matter how PC or multicultural people try to make it – there are no SATB choirs anywhere in the world outside of the Christian tradition that created it.”
I’m not sure that I totally agree with that, but it has sparked off an interesting discussion about whether you need to believe in what you’re singing or conducting.
It turns out that the devil might not have the best tunes after all. Although I run a secular choir (I don’t have a religious bone in my body!) we do end up singing a lot of sacred songs. This is purely because some of the tunes and harmonies are fantastic! In fact, because the sacred songs go down so well, I even created a one-day workshop called Sacred Songs to Soothe the Soul.
In a comment on my last post (Singing together) Deb said:
“I gather that many choirs had their roots in religious settings. Where that is the case, it would not be surprising if some choir members and some audience members were less than happy if the choir’s repertoire is extended to secular pieces.”
I guess the opposite applies also: if a choir is purely secular and then starts including a lot of religious songs, some of the choir and audience might be a bit upset! I know of several secular choirs that strongly object to any religious songs being sung. Some exclude them entirely, whilst others simply change the words. (I have even heard of one musical director changing all occurrences of the word ‘God’ to ‘dog’!).
I’ve covered the subject of the joys of community singing and why so much singing happens only in religious contexts (Singing from the same hymn sheet), and also the difficulty of finding suitable venues so often ending up performing in churches (Not enough venues to go round). I’m always surprised by how strongly people feel about solely religious or solely secular choirs and repertoire. I know of many non-religious people who simply won’t come to see a musical performance (of any kind) in a church since they assume it will be overtly religious. I also know of people who will only go to concerts if they have strong religious content. I remember going to see the Harlem Gospel Choir expecting an evening of superb music, but it turned out to be more like an evangelical meeting!
There is a more general issue here other than just secular vs. religious: how much can a choir change its repertoire and still keep it’s members and audience on board? When you join a choir, you sign up to its particular style, approach and repertoire. If that were to suddenly change, then you would be justifiably upset. However, all choirs need to grow and develop, and as long as such changes are gradual, there should be no problem. The difficulty comes when a choir (or band or song-writer) becomes associated strongly with a particular style or genre and the public expect them to always deliver in that style. A problem of becoming too successful?!
Deb goes onto say:
“I’m a member of a “world music” choir — while I don’t think we have consciously avoided religious or praise songs, the pieces we have sung so far have virtually all been secular. I don’t know for sure, because I haven’t asked, but I would expect this is one of the reasons why we have one of the most visibly diverse memberships I have ever seen, including people from several continents and with a range of beliefs.”
We, too, are a world music choir. Whilst being clearly secular, we do have a lot of sacred songs in our repertoire. We don’t do overtly ‘praise songs’, we tend to avoid any ‘Jesus’ references (‘Lord’ is OK as it’s more inclusive), and I always try to cover a range of different faiths. I guess it may be a bit easier in my choir since we sing in the original language so the meaning is not to the forefront, rather it is the beauty of the music and harmonies. The main difficulties are in gospel and South African church songs when the lyrics are in English. I try not to change lyrics, but I do select songs carefully.
The fact is, the harmony singing tradition of countries such as
Like Deb’s choir, I try to encourage as diverse a membership as possible. Since the choir has no allegiance to any particular faith or culture (I try to cover songs from as wide a range as sources as possible), it should be equally attractive to all. I like to think that our choir is neither secular nor religious, but just celebrates good songs whatever their source.