A Sing....a long song!
Jul. 15th, 2023 04:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressWas chatting with a friend today and we got a bit on the topic of singing. Here are some of the things I dumped on them, all at once, in a series of texts. I am fun to know and overenthusiastic!
Singing has become _increasingly_ important to me in the last...eight?ish years. "a few years before the pandemic started". This is honestly probably one of those things I can just categorize with the other perfect-year-life-shifts1 and even though I expect it was a year or two earlier, that'll be close enough for government work.
It's important because I've discovered folksinging, and pubsings, and shapenote, and other kinds of singing that are not performative. For most of my life, song was something talented people did for other people to listen to. Like...there was also girl scout songs, and there was the very important evening song circles at Wyo, but that's different, that's ~camp~.
(It's not actually different, and I wish I had known that at the time. That this is good, and that it can continue to be good!)
It's important because I believe in song as a _deeply_ human endeavor. Or more accurately, I believe in art as a human endeavor. Making art is good! As the title of a book I bought from a random woman at the public market goes, "shit art is better than no art" and gawdamn did I embrace that like a fucking manifesto! Humans like drawing stupid little doodles with each other, and singing, and telling stories, and making jokes! These things don't have to be professional, and in fact _should not_ be professional2. Much like the way humans play games, humans make art and that is a Good Thing.
So singing in group has become a really steadying and joyous part of my life. I am not in a choir, I do not know _parts_ of the music. I like the song of the folk, I like opportunities for rousing goofy choruses (if you check my little list above, basically all of the songs I can lead are on the loud and raucous side of the table), I like words that can be quickly picked up and faked and joined with. I like song as community! It is one of the most glorious things there is, I feel.
Singing is good, and I would like to do it with you sometime. And yeah, this is reminding me that it's been a _long_ time since the last time I had a musicals sing-along party, and I am wondering if maybe that is something I could figure out a way to do within decent covid safety restrictions sometime. At minimum though, please let me continue singing songs with you. It is a good thing for us all!
~Sor
MOOP!
1: 28 is a mathematically perfect number, and also the weekend of my 28th birthday was the weekend I started a new job, hobby, and relationship (all of which are going _excellently_). A few months later I broke up with my exhausting ex. Apparently at the NEFFA before, I attended the pubsing at NEFFA run by The King's Busketeers, so yeah, that was like...year two of me starting to get into sing, I'm calling it.
2: I mean, I'm not saying professional art is bad! Quite the opposite, I love a great many of professional artists and support them in their work! But by and large, I think all of us should make more shitty, silly, non professional art as a way of interacting with each other.
I spent most of my life convinced I couldn't sing (in part because mom and my youngest sister definitely CAN) and remain really grateful for a friend inviting me along to shapenote at NEFFA like 8 years ago because that totally shifted my perspective
I have been saying for ages that "I can carry a tune in a bucket but I can't do anything else with it". I mentioned that in front of mom at ESC this year, and they totally jumped on the metaphor, pointing out that I am very capable of singing when there's something for me to sing against/with (the bucket!)
I really like group sings and should go to more pubsings, but am going to remain really reluctant to lead anything that I don't know SUPER well
(Mary had a Little Lamb. MacIntyre. Rattlin Bog. Poisoning Pigeons in the Park , although that's harder for me to get in-range. Circle Game, which I forgot about this year and should lead more often because of how much I love it.)
I do this pretty often when I'm oot and aboot! Biking + singing is hard on the lung capacity but really enjoyable!
(My go-to is SJ Tucker's "Cheshire Kitten". Not sure how it became the official "song I sing to myself when I am walking/biking places" but I really enjoy it, and it has a place in the chorus where I change the lyrics based on my mood and that's a really good way to check in on myself)
Singing has become _increasingly_ important to me in the last...eight?ish years. "a few years before the pandemic started". This is honestly probably one of those things I can just categorize with the other perfect-year-life-shifts1 and even though I expect it was a year or two earlier, that'll be close enough for government work.
It's important because I've discovered folksinging, and pubsings, and shapenote, and other kinds of singing that are not performative. For most of my life, song was something talented people did for other people to listen to. Like...there was also girl scout songs, and there was the very important evening song circles at Wyo, but that's different, that's ~camp~.
(It's not actually different, and I wish I had known that at the time. That this is good, and that it can continue to be good!)
It's important because I believe in song as a _deeply_ human endeavor. Or more accurately, I believe in art as a human endeavor. Making art is good! As the title of a book I bought from a random woman at the public market goes, "shit art is better than no art" and gawdamn did I embrace that like a fucking manifesto! Humans like drawing stupid little doodles with each other, and singing, and telling stories, and making jokes! These things don't have to be professional, and in fact _should not_ be professional2. Much like the way humans play games, humans make art and that is a Good Thing.
So singing in group has become a really steadying and joyous part of my life. I am not in a choir, I do not know _parts_ of the music. I like the song of the folk, I like opportunities for rousing goofy choruses (if you check my little list above, basically all of the songs I can lead are on the loud and raucous side of the table), I like words that can be quickly picked up and faked and joined with. I like song as community! It is one of the most glorious things there is, I feel.
Singing is good, and I would like to do it with you sometime. And yeah, this is reminding me that it's been a _long_ time since the last time I had a musicals sing-along party, and I am wondering if maybe that is something I could figure out a way to do within decent covid safety restrictions sometime. At minimum though, please let me continue singing songs with you. It is a good thing for us all!
~Sor
MOOP!
1: 28 is a mathematically perfect number, and also the weekend of my 28th birthday was the weekend I started a new job, hobby, and relationship (all of which are going _excellently_). A few months later I broke up with my exhausting ex. Apparently at the NEFFA before, I attended the pubsing at NEFFA run by The King's Busketeers, so yeah, that was like...year two of me starting to get into sing, I'm calling it.
2: I mean, I'm not saying professional art is bad! Quite the opposite, I love a great many of professional artists and support them in their work! But by and large, I think all of us should make more shitty, silly, non professional art as a way of interacting with each other.
no subject
on 2023-07-15 12:41 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2023-07-28 05:27 pm (UTC)100% -- I'm always down for a good sing-along. (We had one that met monthly pre-pandemic; I miss it terribly.)
Yeah. One data point there: our local SCA post-revels used to involve a lot of singing. But a couple of friends were really, really good singers / guitarists, with a stockpile of their own stuff, and that had a very slow effect of people asking them to sing more and more, and everybody else getting shyer and shyer about singing themselves, on the theory that they sounded bad by comparison.
The moral I take away from that is that it's great to have some great singers -- but if so, it becomes even more important to consciously spread the message of, "This space is for everyone, and shouldn't be dominated by anyone, even the best singers".