Published on January 1, 2025 12:50 PM GMT
Singing together in groups can be a great feeling, building a sense oftogetherness and shared purpose. While widespread literacy meansgetting everyone singing the same words isn't too hard, how do youget everyone on the same melody? This has often been a problem forour secular solstices, but is also onemany groups have handled in a range of ways. Here are the options Iknow about:
Use broader cultural knowledge:
Choose songs that are already well-known. A random group ofpeople in the US will have maybe a few hundred songs they could getthrough well with no prep, that people learned from hearing them overand over. Some are children's songs (Old MacDonald, Ba Ba BlackSheep), others are well known older pop songs (Hey Jude, YMCA),holiday songs (Jingle Bells, Rudolph), folk songs (This Land Is YourLand, Amazing Grace), movie songs (A Spoonful of Sugar, Over theRainbow), etc.
Write new words to well-known songs. At our gatherings we'vesung songs adapting the music from TheMary Ellen Carter, TheTwelve Days of Christmas, WhyDoes the Sun Shine, SinnerMan, etc.
Use written music. Many churches traditionally took thisapproach, some using shaped notes to beeasier to learn, and it can expand to sight-reading four-part harmonyfor a very full sound. This does require more advance work: it's notenough to have a song leader and accompanist, you also need to find,buy, or draft an arrangement in appropriate notation. This also onlyworks within a culture of singing from written music, or if your groupis a big enough deal in participants lives (ex: weekly gatherings)that many will learn to read music specifically for your events.
Build up your own songs. If you keep doing the same songs withthe same people, after 2-5 repetitions the group will know them. Noone knows Brighterthan Today outside the secular solstice context, but since we doit every year (and some of our attendees have heard it at eventselsewhere) it goes well. This works a lot better with groups thatmeet more often: weekly is great; yearly is hard.
Send out recordings in advance. If people listen to recordingsin advance they can show up with the melody learned, ready to singtogether. Many people will only need to listen once or twice beforethey can join in with others singing as a group. This also requiresmore work from organizers, though, and attendees are often notinterested in listening through.
Performances. Expect that most people in the group won't singalong, and a few people who already know the song or are especiallygood at picking it up do join in.
Call and response. The leader sings a line, the group sings itback with the same melody (ex: ChasingPatterns in the Sky). Unlike the others here, this doesn't evendepend on literacy or a method of getting words in front of people.But it also really restricts what you can do musically, since mostsongs aren't a good fit for this format.
Easy songs. Some melodies are much easier to pick up thanothers. The more the melody does the obvious thing, avoids jumps, andis repetitive, the more a group of people paying attention can pick itup during the song. This is part of the approach of praisemusic.
Verse and chorus. The verse is sung as a performance, thechorus is easy and people pick it up. This lets you do something moremusically interesting than if the whole song had to be this easy. Ifyou're doing this you probably don't want to put up lyrics for theverse, or people will try to sing it too.
Visual guidance. A leader can use the height of their handabove the floor to roughly indicate the pitch of the next note, or thewords can be accompanied by indications of the melodic contours.The imprecision means it's more of a hint than exactly communicatingthe melody, but because it's intuitive it doesn't depend on yourattendees having learned a system for communicating melody.
Muddle through. Sometimes you just really want to singsomething new and difficult collectively. It won't sound great, butthat's not the point.
These can also combine: if you have a song that some people knowbecause they listened in advance, others because they heard it lasttime, and others because they can read the written music, that couldcover 60% of the crowd, even if none of those could individually. Andtrying to pick something up while singing along with a group where 60%already know it is much easier than one where only the leader iscommunicating the melody.
A nice illustration here is the evolution of SomebodyWill at our gatherings. It is absolutely not an easy song: it hasa wide range, makes some large jumps, isn't all that intuitive, changeskeys, and has so many sections that I've colorcoded them on the musician slides I use. The first time we did itI think it sounded really rough. The second time we tried doing it asa performance, but we got a lot of feedback that for this specificsong, which is thematically about participation, people really wantedto be singing along. But through sending out recordings in advance tosome people, and then by repeating it often enough that a lot ofpeople have picked it up, we now have it in to an ok place.
I was pretty sure I already wrote this, but when I wanted to send alink to someone I couldn't find it. If you do remember seeing thisbefore send me a link? I'd be curious to compare!
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