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Now Let Us SingMay 07, 2006 Today started with singing -- well, it started with two loads of laundry, one of which didn't get hung before I was due at the Unitarian church and so spent the next two hours outside in a big canvas bag. The service was about building community through music. Well, no, it wasn't really about building community through music: it was building community through music. Our fledgling group was literally the centerpiece. We sat in a circle in the middle, with the congregation in concentric circles around us -- circles as concentric and as round as can be built with four-seat pieces. The sanctuary is fairly small, fairly square; sunlight poured through the windows and glowed in the wood walls. We sang one song by ourselves: "Now Let Us Sing." The rest Roberta taught the congregation and we helped build confidence; on "Amazing Grace" most of us sang an alternate melody just above the familiar one or a descant above that. In between songs Roberta told a little about how she had come to sing with Ysaye Barnwell, long-time member and now leader of Sweet Honey in the Rock, who offers workshops in building community through music from the African American tradition. She noted that singing together was a lot like living in community: you listen carefully to all the other voices, all the other parts, while holding to your own. The first song she taught was a chant from the African rain forest. It's two simple lines with the same words in both and only a slight change in the notes, so everyone picked it up quickly. Then we made it a round in four parts. I listened as I sang: layer upon layer of sound, like the background noise of the rustling, chattering forest (and not unlike the pinkletinks -- spring peepers if you don't live on Martha's Vineyard; unassuming tree toads -- whose communal song filled the woods a few weeks ago), or even of the beach. I don't know what the native singers of this chant hear and feel and think as they sing it, converging from different parts of the forest toward a gathering place, but I think I heard a glimpse of it this morning. With modern sound equipment you can start with a single voice, or maybe no voice at all, and build a similar sound, no other people required. Just in case you're wondering where the community went . . . Not that I'm knocking sound equipment: Pete Morton's Swarthmoor is playing on the boombox right this minute, and I drove home from the barn this afternoon with Flying an Unknown Flag in the CD player. After about three years of hunting for CDs by Morton, a singer-songwriter from the north of England, and attempting to order direct from the U.K. (some black hole evidently ate it), I finally found a North American distributor, eFolkMusic in North Carolina. All four Morton CDs in their catalogue arrived at my post office Friday (the other two are Hunting the Heart and Trespass). When Morton records or performs, it's usually one guy and a guitar; at most there are two more instruments and maybe one more voice. Many of his songs are perfect to walk by -- which shouldn't be too surprising, because some of them are about walking. Like "Listening to My Boots":
And, probably my favorite at the moment, "The Shepherd's Song," in which the Northamptonshire poet John Clare (1793-1864) is walking to London for a less-than-eagerly-anticipated meeting with his publisher:
(Both songs © Harbourtown Music) Pete Morton's range and mine are close enough that I can sing his songs in the same key he does. If it weren't for technology he wouldn't be riding in my truck without even knowing it. Still, singing in a roomful of people is great. And I've got several pairs of boots worth listening to.
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