Choir directors were served up some bleak, bleak news via a webinar sponsored by NATS, Chorus America, ACDA, the Barbershop Harmony Society, and the Performing Arts Medical Association. It was hard to hear the information the scientists, physicians, and vocal music experts shared and not feel pessimistic about the near-term possibilities for singing together.
But I know in my heart, we will keep singing. Singing is, truly, at the heart of what we do as human beings. Two quotes that I keep returning to:
Krista Tippett: Because we do — we talk a lot, and there’s a lot of study of how we learn language and the kind of elemental template in us, however that functions. And for you to point out which — we don’t need any scientist to prove this to us, right? That singing also emerges, that sound emerges just as naturally. It’s a possession almost.
Alice Parker: It is. It’s one of the things that we’re born with. And it’s the great international, inter-everything language because it’s dealing with our inner emotional life. It’s as if singing is the language of the emotions.
From On Being
For virtually all of us, music has great power, whether or not we seek it out or think of ourselves as particularly “musical.” This propensity to music shows itself in infancy, is manifest and central in every culture, and probably goes back to the very beginning of our species. Such “musicophilia” is a given in human nature…it lies so deep in human nature that one must think of it as innate.
Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia
If we have to create innovative ways to teach vocal music in the near-term in order to save lives, then we will. I don’t know what it will look like, but I know that we will figure it out. I have a lot faith in choral leaders.
Let’s figure it out together. We will keep singing.