Letters to the Editor: Singing together in a choir gives us real connection
Jim Cosgrove writes that singing together should be recognised as an essential input, rather than an extra developmental attribute in the school curriculum. Stock image
Peter Stobart offers a compelling, comprehensive, and persuasive case for singing together in “commune” (‘Singing together can help build community in divisive times’, Irish Examiner Opinion, April 23).
Outlining the social, cognitive, emotional, and physical benefits from choral pursuits across the age range, he captures the baseline quintessential in his final comments on the matter:
"At a time when people want to feel more connected, more grounded, and more engaged, singing together is the answer.”
He hits the mark for sure with his salient commentary, and the fact that there has long been a vibrant choral tradition of some guise in every corner of the country, recent enthusiasm for engagement has spiralled exponentially, with a veritable tsunami of choral clusters developing apace. How delightful.
There is, however, a significant, unfortunate gap, I feel, which has been endemic for manys a year.
Drawing from several years of experience as a music therapist in different disadvantaged schools, working with boys who exhibited a range of serious emotional and behavioural issues in Dublin’s inner city, I regularly employed vocal improvisatory templates of engagement to empower and enhance personal expressive patterns, which afforded creative confidence to sing with a freedom hitherto unavailable.
It helped to address and improve the social-emotional behaviours as well as seeding a creative confidence in productive vocal prowess.
The natural coyness and shyness of many children at various developmental stages around singing is not always afforded appropriate remediation via focused encouragement and independent confidence-building regarding their melodic vocal. If one takes a nominal primary school class of, say, 20 schoolchildren aged six to eight, the regular likelihood is that around five will automatically be able to hit pitch and hold a simple melody with relative ease; around 10 will struggle a bit, but will master it with a little bit of focused attention; and around five will really struggle even to hit pitch.
It doesn’t mean that the last five cannot sing, it’s just that they haven’t been able to realise the pitch and melodic contour internally within their head. They would require a dedicated series of “intense” vocal training exercises, to establish the internal brain awareness of their “self-sound” using recorded playback of their own voice etc.
Often, appropriate attention is not available for these children, and thus they are flagged as “non-singers” and excluded from formalised “singing together” performances. Such children are likely then to begin a lifelong self-exclusionary journey from singing, as they were deemed non-musical from an early age.
We must remember that, scientifically, there are a mere 4% of children with congenital amusia (tone-deafness), all others can improve their pitching and melodic line with help. They won’t all become Pavarottis, but they will be able to join in, a vital inclusion. The timbre of their voices will always vary, as that pertains to the anatomical format of the skull, its precise sinus and vocal chord configuration.
Of course, school timetables frequently don’t allow for individual focus in the “singing department”, but I feel it should be recognised as an essential input, rather than an extra developmental attribute, and far from superfluous, for all the rich personal reasons that Peter Stobart so elegantly describes. In addition, the idea of hyper-competitive choral singing can accentuate this dilemma somewhat, despite the extraordinarily scintillating performances that can be achieved, offering phenomenal transcendence at times.
Having been involved in various choirs over many years from national school days, and competed in the Cork Choral Festival and elsewhere, I cherish those experiences for sure, but always wonder how many people have been sidelined and overlooked in the fundamental access to a “singing life”, via the intense priority of high-end competition.
It’s an awkward conundrum for sure, with all and any choral activity being so valid and valuable in the round, as per Peter Stobart’s outlines.
One wonders how much highbrow competitive nuancing can contribute to the choral communities in the wider sphere. For me, the crucial stage is spending time to indulge those less immediately “in-pitch” voices at a young age and rescue them from a lifetime of vocal-melodic withdrawal.
I find it rather worrisome to see so many people embracing conspiracy theories in explaining events.
The covid-19 pandemic not only brought health concerns, but social isolation, economic instability, and a sense that the world is changing in unpredictable ways. During such turbulent times, many individuals felt lost and fearful.
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It’s a natural response to crave solid ground in an effort to gain a sense of clarity amid the chaos. Historically, this craving for certainty has often led people to seek out leaders and ideologies that offer simple, definitive answers.
One stark example is the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1930s Germany. After the First World War and during the economic disaster of the Great Depression, Germany was in turmoil. Many people were desperate for an explanation for their suffering and a promise of better days.
Hitler offered a clear, simple narrative: Germany’s problems could be blamed on particular groups, such as Jews, and his authoritarian vision was presented as a path back to strength and stability. This example illustrates a fundamental human tendency: When life feels precarious, many people are drawn to ideologies that provide certainty — even if those ideologies are hateful and destructive.
The 'Irish Examiner’s front page story on defence spending/url] (April 27) provides food for thought and bullets to be bitten. The vanishingly small fraction of our national budget that is allocated to our defence is an unsustainably bad policy choice and an even worse signal for Ireland to be sending out into a more dangerous and less orderly world.
Twenty-five years ago, as a nation and as a State, we sought to exempt ourselves from the normal sovereign governmental responsibility to house all of our people. It was done quietly in a smooth executive and legislative fashion.
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The government of the day simply stopped building public housing and allocated the responsibility for the creation and maintenance of that housing stock to private enterprise. This privatisation was then exacerbated by loopholes and statutory exceptions which enabled builders and developers to avoid building social and affordable housing by simply paying a fee to the local authority.
Almost overnight, a core competence of government was abandoned to the tender, erratic embrace of market forces. This policy was not adopted maliciously, and in the morbidly obese years that preceded the cardiac arrest of the Celtic Tiger, it may have seemed like a good idea to some.
But in no time at all, when combined with the global financial crash and the subsequent sovereign debt crisis that saw foreign institutions running the country in the form of the troika, government discovered that the hand of private enterprise is well and truly invisible when it comes to public housing. It is a hand that will lobby and guide the legislator’s pen behind the scenes in boom (and “boomer” times), but it will not dirty itself with the gritty enduring necessity for bricks and mortar when money is tight.
This was a gigantically erroneous and consequential policy choice. The seismic electoral effects of that are still being felt, and are capable of destabilising the State itself.
At the moment, we seem to be exempting ourselves from another core competence of government in a normal sovereign democratic state. We will not pay for our own defence. For decades, we have preferred to let other countries patrol our skies, and lately we have even been allowing others to half-heartedly and self-interestedly guarantee the integrity of our territorial seas.
This sleepwalking, freeloading attitude to the least dispensable function of normal sovereign government has never ended well for any nation, anywhere, at any time in history, and it is a stain upon our national reputation when we seek to negotiate and combine with our gallant allies abroad.
God only knows what our enemies are making of it. I suppose we will just have to wait for the somnambulance to arrive and hope that our neighbours in Britain will provide us with emergency care.
This is another extraordinarily reckless policy choice, and it needs to be remedied as a matter of urgency.
