Living Song

Prior Research

Since the 1990s, many empirical studies have appeared demonstrating the measurable impact of community singing on participants (Livesey et al., 2012), in the areas of feeling, closeness, altruism, trust, identity, and co-operation. Some of these are associated with physical changes such as raised levels of oxytocin, associated with communal bonding. Shared embodied rhythm affects breathing and other biomarkers (Fancourt et al., 2016; Kreutz et al., 2004), such as heart rate, reduction of cortisol, ←3 | 4→improvements in heart rate, improved respiration for people with COPD, and even improvement in diseases associated with the autoimmune system (Grape et al., 2002; Müller & Lindenberger, 2011; Skingley et al., 2014). These approaches to singing come from many disciplines using many methodologies. They are seldom brought together; this volume brings together theologians, musicologists, and practicing musicians. The contexts range from the secular to the religious and have a variety of ends in view, ranging from entertainment to healing, therapy, mental health, and religious worship.

A variety of previous findings are supported in these chapters, such as the development of self-confidence, self-efficacy, connection, nurture, empathy, entrainment (both physical and emotional), and empowerment. Björn Vickhoff, in a study at the University of Gothenburg published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, links the emotional and the physical, by likening the breathing required to sing long phrases to yoga breathing which are also seen to affect mental states. These, he claims, will also, in its calming properties, regulate heartbeat (Vickhoff et al., 2013).

We live in an age when many new singing groups of various types are developing for groups, such as the elderly (Hallam et al., 2011; VanderArk et al., 1983); hospital patients (Preti & Boyce-Tillman, 2014); the homeless (Bailey & Davidson, 2002); the mentally ill (Morrison & Clift, 2012b); people with memory loss (Vella-Burrows, 2012); Parkinson’s sufferers (Vella-Burrows & Hancox, 2012); people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (Clift et al., 2013; Morrison & Clift, 2012a, 2012b) and trafficked women (Amies Choir, n.d.), to name but a few. Many of these chapters look at the adaptations necessary to keep these going during the pandemic. Much of the therapeutic writing on singing concentrates on the loneliness and isolation in our culture, which has increased in the pandemic, potentially countered by community singing (Morgan & Boyce-Tillman, 2016):

What then does aesthetic experience mean for Dewey? Together with aspects of artistic doings and contextualism of this doing, the aesthetic aspect of experience means a qualitatively different, fulfilling and inherently meaningful mode of engagement in contrast to the mechanical, the fragmentary, the non-integrated and all other no meaningful forms of engagement. (Westerlund, 2002. p. 191)

Themes of communitas (Turner, 2012), physical exertion, having fun, sounding good, a sense of place and transcendence through relationship ←4 | 5→are revealed by Dave Camlin (Camlin et al., 2020) in his study on the Fellowship of Hill and Wind and Sunshine project. They identify a sense of a shared goal and unity in adversity. The various dimensions such as the aesthetic and participatory were seen to combine to produce effects which they label paramusical. As the singing took place outdoors there were references to wider views of audience as including the surrounding mountains. This study shows clearly that the musical experience is polyvalent (Bowman, 2004, p. 30), including the different dimensions described in Boyce-Tillman (2016). It operates at the bodily, emotional, cognitive, and communal levels and the intertwinement of these produces liminal/paramusical/spiritual experiences.

Culture, Groups, and Individuals

The book is divided into three sections. One sets the sense of The Culture – the national, the religious culture, the singing culture, and the relationships singing can establish in various cultures. For example, in the last chapter, Filipino nurses were surprised not to find singing in our hospitals. Some of the multiple meanings are explored in this section including those involved in listening to singing, that “occur in a complex interplay between the listener, the music, and the context” (Västfjäll et al., 2013, p. 408). June Boyce-Tillman examined this in association with Antony Rooley (Boyce-Tillman, 2000, p. 98) and in this volume it is associated with Arvo Pärt. Jill Dolan writes of experiencing music theater that it reveals another dimension of human experience, which opens up insights which previously seemed impossible and illuminates moments of awareness (Dolan, 2005, pp. 6–8). She illustrates this from Stephen Sondheim:

And each time you see a performance of the same show, [Into the Woods] each time you go back into the woods, you learn something new about where you are in your life at that moment. (Dolan, 2005, p. 8)

The second section concerns Singing in Groups and offers a variety of projects in various contexts and contains a great deal of helpful practical ←5 | 6→considerations that may assist readers in getting and keeping groups going. This explores many of the themes in the literature, including those described by Randall Collins (2004) in his Chain of Interaction Rituals (to be explored more fully in Boyce-Tillman, Van der Merwe & Morelli, 2021). He links rhythmic entrainment with emotional entrainment and sees the need for bodily presence. These areas are problematic in the pandemic because of the problems with a shared pulse on digital platforms; a further question arises about whether contact through a computer screen is a bodily presence. Other aspects of Collins’s necessary features of an interactive ritual concerned the exclusion of outsiders and the sharing of a common focus and a common mood (Collins, 2004 p. 48). The regularity of meeting is also significant:

A theory of interaction ritual and interaction ritual chains is above all a theory of situations … It is a theory of momentary encounters among human bodies charged up with emotions and consciousness because they have gone through chains of previous encounters. (Collins, 2004, p. 3)

These chapters provide a variety of ways in which these chains and interconnection can be achieved: