Everybody Sings

There is a growing movement, spreading out across the land from my Vancouver Island home. This movement is about the joy of singing. It started in Victoria, and has crawled up the Island as group after group popped up in one town after another. These groups are led by talented leaders who believe that singing is a gift, and that everyone and anyone can find the joy of singing to be a benefit in their lives.

These groups (most groups deliberately don't call them choirs) are interesting because their focus is not performance, although the members of any particular group might sometimes choose to perform. The main focus of these choirs is the companionship and experience of people making music together with the most natural instrument of all, our voice.

It is a great source of sadness to me, when I hear yet another person say "I can't sing", or "I never sing where anyone can hear me." The sad stories of people having been told to just mouth the words in school choirs where somehow the performance had become more important than the learning experience enrage me.

I am of the firm belief that anyone who does not actually have a hearing deficit can learn to sing — in tune. I studied a method of teaching music in class rooms which was developed in Hungary by the composer Kodaly and his students. The Kodaly method uses singing to teach all the essentials of a music education. My friend who studied this method for a year in Hungary says that in this situation, where all the children started singing every day in pre-school, and continued to sing every day of their school lives, she never heard anyone singing out of tune above grade two level. Its the singing itself which tunes up your ears, and, mostly what makes people sing out of tune, is the lack of practise singing.

So, the best thing to do if you think you are a bad singer, is to sing and sing some more. Sing with the radio in the car. Sing with a CD while you clean house and do the dishes. The more you sing, and listen, the better you will get a matching your voice to the sounds around you.

These pictures show our local "Everybody Sings" group. They illustrate one of the immediate differences between our group and a traditional choir. We sit or stand in a circle to sing, so that we can hear each other better. At any point, a member of the group might stop singing and move into the middle just to listen to how wonderful it sounds, and then when they are ready, move back into a place in the circle. In the summer we take a break from our weekly meetings but we can't stop singing. We end up at the beach several times every summer, singing around a beach fire and enjoying each others company.

This group has been meeting on a Thursday morning in a church hall near the centre of our town. The same two leaders run another group on Tuesday evening in another church hall near the outskirts of town.

The groups are a mixture of people who have sung in groups a lot and people who have never sung in a group before. It is not necessary to be able to read music to sing with us. We learn the largest part of our repertoire by rote. We sing a lot of songs in languages other than English and encourage people struggling with the words to learn the tunes first by singing la, la, la.. and concentrate on learning the lyrics once they can sing the tune and enjoy the song.

We often sing in two, three or even four parts, and I am amazed at the way our less experienced singers manage this challenge. We give them lots of support, lots of repetition, and the experience of sitting in the middle of the section to hear the part all around you.

And they get it. For a group that is not focused on performance, we create amazing sounds some times. On occasion I have seen the whole group just pause and take a breath for a minute to revel in the wonder of the sounds they have just produced. The effects of the different parts blending, and the music surrounding us in the lovely acoustics of the old church hall where we meet can be very striking.

We sing a lot of music that lifts your spirit. Some of it has new age lyrics with a very positive bent, some is gospel where the rhythm and energy pulls you forward, some is inspired by native cultures of the various continents. Many times, I leave sessions with one of the melodies running through my mind, and often this tune will haunt me for hours or days, returning to my consciousness unbidden to comfort me.

I sing because I have to sing to live. I have always sung my way through life. I sung walking to school as a child; now I sing driving in the car or doing housework. I know its good for my soul.

Singing in a group is even better. I believe all those vibrations from other people's voices passing through your body literally have a healing effect. I am so glad to live in a place where we have this opportunity to sing together in such a comfortable, rewarding way. I would like to express my appreciation to Cyndi Jackelman and Shirley Whitelaw who lead our Everybody Sings! group and to Shivon Robinsong and Denis Donnelly who started the whole movement with the "Gettin' Higher Choir" in Victoria. My life is a better place because of this work they do.

PS Thanks to Cyndi for the permission to use her photographs.