Seth Godin has argued persuasively that we no long have a mass culture: there are no longer things everyone has in common. What we have, Godin says, are ever-more tribes of like-minded people.
But in my choirs, I love to include some things we all know. Across years, there are certain pieces every one of my students has learned: standards. It means that you can stand with people you’ve never met and harmonize together. (In fact, we’ll be doing exactly that this Friday at my Rockford Aces 10th Anniversary Concert).
The Barbershop Harmony Society does it with their sets of “Polecats” – songs every singer worldwide strives to learn.
My state organization has recently implemented something like this: a rotation of five pieces that high school students use as their Honors Choir audition piece. In ten or twenty years, most participants in honors choir will have sung 1-4 of these pieces, and will be able to sing with many of their peers, even if of a very different age.
Do you have things all your students know? What can we do to unite our choirs beyond individual schools and organizations to create common knowledge, common bonds? What would that do to our musical culture to have more things we all know?