11/20/2024
Guys, this is what makes Songtuary so great! Next Harrisonburg Songtuary is Saturday, December 14th -- free & open to anyone.
"If you can talk you can sing."
https://www.songtuary.org/events
"And this moment singing isn’t just about singing. We’re encountering a fundamental idea: that we don’t need to be good at something, anything for us to join in. That we belong here anyway. That we deserve to exist. Others – much more than we think – are like us; they’re not judging us harshly most of the time; they’re wishing that they, themselves, could take the step we’re taking and – in fact – they are finding some of the encouragement they need precisely in our own inept, gloriously out of key but utterly genuine and beautiful efforts."
-School of Life
Most of what we would really like to do is annihilated long before its possible birth by a relentlessly forensic and masochistic sense of our own incompetence. We can’t possibly invite people to dinner at home because we’re not great cooks; we can’t show anyone the poem we’ve written because it’s not quite right yet. Few activities fit more neatly into this category of throttled aspiration than singing.
How deeply we would like to give it a go, but how well we know our absurdity. Singing is amongst the most basic forms of expression at which no one could ever be bad. More or less all societies except our own have made collective singing a central ritual of communal existence.
The ideal collective anthem has an easy enough, forgiving tune – we can follow the phrasing and the lilt of the melody, even if we’re never quite in key. We’re aware, as we sing, that others are saying – believing – the same things: they, like us, are breaking through the barrier of embarrassment.
The greatest glory of collective singing isn’t performance by a famous choir. It’s when people who can’t really sing manage to sing together, giving voice to the buried longings of their flawed, lonely, and yearning hearts.
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