Introduction: Singing as Community, Singing into Community, and Growing the Singing Community

Making music with the voice is a powerful thing. Singing can activate brain regions associated with sight, hearing, touch, speech, syntax, movement, emotions, logic, memory, and reward. When we sing, we reach deeply into our bodies and balance the forces of breath, muscle, and mind. Our singing can be light and inconsequential, or deeply significant. Sung texts transmit history, celebrate the change of seasons, and lament the loss of loved ones. They can also resound with the unspoken; as Lawrence Kramer writes, “voice brings … music into a space of potential or virtual meaning even when actual meaning is left hanging” (2021, 54). Community singing—group enactment of the singing phenomenon—exploits all the above mechanisms, but layers on others. Singing in community can be vibrant, resonant, and collegial—greater than the sum of its parts. Through group singing, we form communities, express shared values, and practice ways of getting along with each other. Some people prize the intellectual challenges they find in community singing. Others find a sense of belonging as they seek to quell feelings of loneliness and isolation in a seemingly unbalanced world. The importance of singing together has been documented as early as the 19th century BCE in Babylon (present-day Iraq) and community singing continues to thrive in countless cultures today.

In planning The Oxford Handbook of Community Singing, the editors focused exclusively on our first musical instrument—the voice—and embraced an open-ended interpretation of socio-musical practices we consider to be “community singing.” We exemplify community singing as an interdisciplinary field of study that encompasses diverse methodologies and objects of inquiry, and in the process we bring together recent research from the fields that have historically engaged with the practice of group singing, including group dynamics, ethnomusicology, music history, music education, music therapy, community music, church music, music performance, sociology, political science, Latin American and North American studies, media studies, embodied psychology, theology, and philosophy. Throughout this Handbook, authors consider why communities are motivated to sing, what their activities mean, and how practitioners can improve the experience of singing together.¹

Both of the present editors work from academic positions as historical musicologists, but each of us has long been committed to interdisciplinary work. In her 2016 monograph, Singing and Wellbeing: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Proof (Norton 2016), as well as in subsequent research and teaching, Kay Norton argues for the centrality of the inflected voice in human experience using anthropological, evolutionary, historical, musicological, philosophical, and emerging medical evidence.² Esther Morgan-Ellis both engages with and contributes to research into participatory music-making across disciplines, having employed diverse methodologies and published in journals dedicated to music education (2019), psychology (2021a), community music (2021b), and health and wellness (2021c), in addition to music history. She is also an active musician and community singing organizer.

Although group musicking has deep evolutionary and historical roots, community music has congealed into a scholarly field in the past half century. In The Oxford Handbook of Community Music, editors Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Lee Higgins and their chapter authors celebrated an unprecedented upswing in community music scholarship (Bartleet and Higgins 2018); they also hoped to provide an authoritative and comprehensive review of the subject starting with the late 1960s, even as they looked toward potential future developments. Their Introduction is an excellent source for historical overview, relevant debates about definitions and terminology, and global milestones. They close that chapter with the question, “does community music need a definition or (re) definition in the twenty-first century?” This Handbook does not respond directly to the earlier volume; in fact, it cannot be considered an outgrowth of the community music “movement” at all. Nevertheless, shared values of inclusivity, for example, suggest a kinship with the field of community music.

Rejecting the notion of universal truths about what constitutes a relevant practice, the editors commissioned culturally specific studies that examine narrow instances of community singing, each confined to a given time and place, in significant detail. Our authors interpret community singing to suggest one of two phenomena. The first is the practice of singing as community—the utilization of collective song by communities of place or preference. The second is the singing of community into existence—the creation or identification of a new community, through singing, that did not exist before. Both practices can profoundly affect participants.

Singing as community is exemplified in Anne Haugland Balsnes’s chapter about Norwegian school children who belong to a place-based learning community that would exist with or without singing. Balsnes documents the reasons that teachers and leaders value singing, including the feelings of belonging, wellbeing, identity, and self-esteem it engenders among the children. The Jewish communities described by Rachel Adelstein and Lior Shragg also initially congregate for reasons other than to make music; they are anchored primarily by a shared heritage and faith. Collective singing, however, affirms connections between individuals and congregations, keeps collective memory alive, and projects identity to non-local Jews and non-Jewish locals. Group bonding and identity formation are also central to Alisun Pawley’s study of singing in quite a different type of community: groups of friends who frequent pubs and nightclubs in the North of England. For these and other pre-existing communities examined in this Handbook, singing is a vitalizing force.

The process of singing community into existence is perhaps best exemplified in mediated practices, such as the app-based participatory singing examined by Byrd McDaniel or the Stay At Home Choir described by Cole Bendall. In both cases, individuals collaborate in a virtual space, having made a connection on the basis of shared musical tastes and an interest in singing. They may have little other than those shared preferences in common, and are brought into community by their participation. Devotees of mediated practice also attest to the life-altering benefits of group singing.

In contrast to the work of most choirs (see Abrahams and Head 2019), community singing always suggests musical activity in which participation overrides performance. Although “participation” can be difficult to define in the field of music, Thomas Turino provides a working definition that neatly sums up the guiding principle of this collection: “In participatory music making one’s primary attention is on the activity, on the doing, and on the other participants, rather than on an end product that results from the activity” (2008, 28). Most of the practices described in this volume have no presentational component; there is no rehearsal, no concert, no audience, no professional recording. Little or no value is placed on musical improvement, and the (usually) iterative act of singing is its own end. Several chapters do explore the activities of performance-oriented choirs, although in each case, the participants have a non-musical reason to gather as a community, and in each case the act of “rehearsing” is meaningful for reasons beyond preparation for a performance. Jane W. Davidson, Benjamin P. Leske, and Amanda E. Krause illuminate the ways singers navigate emotions in two Australian choirs, while Marquisha L. Scott and Aleysia K. Whitmore consider the social justice mission of a choir dedicated to the performance of Negro Spirituals. Other chapters, such as Jesse P. Karlsberg’s analysis of festival performances by Sacred Harp singers, disrupt the participatory/presentational dichotomy in other ways. Karlsberg highlights the arguably artificial presentation (at folklife festivals) of a participatory practice (shapenote singing), framed by festival organizers and documentarians to endorse values not necessarily shared by the community itself.

In parts of the world where community singing is currently integrated into public life, the phrase “community singing” connotes a specific, organized activity in which citizens engage in the mass singing of mainstream repertoire, likely of cultural or political significance. Engagement with community singing of this sort can be situated or mediated, as studies of ongoing practice have emphasized (Bergman 2010). In this volume, chapters by Dorothy Glick Maglione and co-authors Esther M. Morgan-Ellis and Alan L. Spurgeon consider the historical, US-based community singing movement of the early 20th century. This movement, which faded after World War II, carried significant connotations of class, ideology, and nationalism that are not necessarily implied in other discussions of community singing.

Other historical phenomena under consideration here include 19th-century groups whose work (fur trading, Glen W. Hicks) or wartime incarceration (during the South African War, Erin Johnson-Williams) threw them together, with collective singing as one of the outcomes. Laura Lohman surveys the collective singing practices of Republicans and Federalists in the first decades of the United States, Marek Payerhin writes about protest songs utilized in 1970s and ’80s Poland, Marcel Silva Steuernagel traces the development of Latin American protest music, and Malcolm Cook examines the ways that singalongs have been used to advertise, beginning in the early 20th century. Long-standing traditions receiving close attention include US ballpark singalongs (Matthew W. Mihalka), secular English caroling (Ian Russell), and Masonic hymnody in the United States (Andrew Schaeffer). June Boyce-Tillman frames her theoretical nexus between spirituality and wellbeing against an abbreviated chronology of congregational singing in the Church of England.

In his field-defining monograph, Community Music in Theory and in Practice, Lee Higgins offered a tripartite vision of community music as constituting “(1) music of a community, (2) communal music making, and (3) an active intervention between a music leader or facilitator and participants” (2012, 3). This broad definition embraces a range of historic and contemporary practices, but Higgins trains his focus on the third category, as do many other self-identified scholars of community music. Several chapters in this Handbook satisfy that definition and clearly fall under the rubric of “community music,” narrowly defined. Trudi Wright, for example, describes her own activities as a songleader in a college setting, and Anna E. Nekola and Kayla Drudge consider inclusivity in community music groups.

However, demonstrating the fact that community singing groups evolve in step with their respective societies, other chapter authors’ findings and theorizations will challenge readers to re-think received mechanisms of community singing. Relevant to Higgins’s third point, Roger Mantie and Glenn Marais advocate a leadership model that de-emphasizes the leader-participant dichotomy and affords everyone comparable influence. Fiona Evison theorizes about how the composer might adapt in order to better interface with community singing activity. Holly Patch describes a group of community singers who are hard at work re-defining excellence in order to accommodate differences among individuals who have been required to “fit in” to a hegemonic paradigm.

Author perspectives, too, enter into instructive counterpoint with each other and with received understandings about the social benefits connected to our topic. Susan Bishop’s and Amanda Weber’s divergent accounts of community singing within women’s prisons demand careful consideration; alongside the chapter by Emilie Amrein and André de Quadros and the chapter section by Catherine Birch, they contribute to a more finely grained understanding of a complex singing environment than has previously existed. As Cameo Flores documents, racial discrimination can be turned on its head in order to voice solidarity within a marginalized group. Sometimes, however, the singing itself becomes a tool of racism, as Moshe Bensimon and Shiran Hen reveal. Breadth of application is also diversely represented in these chapters; Birch and her co-authors, Ruth Currie, Wayne Dawson, and Stephen Clift, highlight what is to be learned by comparing the particularities of individual groups as they pursue joy, meaning, and solidarity through group singing. Guy Hayward, on the other hand, theorizes broadly about the behavioral and cognitive underpinnings of the human motivation to sing in community.

To accomplish goals of interdisciplinarity and granularity, and to highlight fresh perspectives on group singing, the editors invited acknowledged leaders in their fields, early- and mid-career scholars, and graduate students to contribute to this heterogeneous volume. Most authors are publishing scholars, but a few bring rich insights from careers spent in the fields of community music practice. Some, such as Alexander K. Khalil (Greek Orthodox congregational singing), situate their contributions at the nexus between practice and scholarship as they rigorously analyze community singing activities from a participant or facilitator perspective. Further, our author group displays a range of personal engagement with the phenomena they study; some are deeply invested in the practices they chronicle, while others take a more skeptical attitude toward the subject matter, considering the shortcomings or even dangers of communal singing practices. Many singing groups under study are anglophone, but others include a community of women in rural North India (Kamlesh Singh, Suman Sigroha, and Bharti Shokeen), displaced Estonians in Australia (Naomi Cooper), Korean protest singers (Jarryn Ha), a mixed-ethnicity group of children in Denmark (Lars Ole Bonde and Stefan Ingerslev), and Zimbabwean youth (Simbarashe Gukurume).

The proposal for this volume was submitted to Oxford University Press in January of 2020. Two months later, the coronavirus pandemic upended community singing practices around the globe. Naturally, this affected the contents of our Handbook—a minor inconvenience compared to the lives and livelihoods lost. Some authors had to abandon their planned topics in favor of pandemic-specific investigations; Joshua S. Duchan, for example, ended up interviewing collegiate a cappella singers about their online activities during the semesters of online and hybrid learning, while Nathan Myrick, Benjamin Gessner, and Johnathan Alvarado were forced to abandon their plans to study singing in 20 Georgia congregations and instead examined what the loss of singing meant to churchgoers in one Baptist and two Methodist groups. Other authors followed through with their original plans, but felt compelled to address the impacts of COVID-19 on their subjects; for example, Gregory Camp’s historical overview of Disney sing-alongs extends through the organization’s Disney Family Sing-Along, broadcast during April 2020 from the homes of quarantined performers. Unfortunately, some authors had to withdraw altogether, either because their research became impracticable or because pandemic workload or working conditions made research impossible.

Although much was lost from this volume due to COVID-19, much was gained. Our authors documented the ways that singers adapted to online environments, deriving insights into how those changes both sustained and reshaped singing communities. Many of these changes—for example, the increased use of online platforms for collaboration, the production of “virtual choir” videos, or the use of social media to find new community members—will prove permanent. Even if singers can return to unfettered in-person activity, they have acquired new skills, visions, and understandings of their singing cohorts. Issues of access have also come to the fore. With the move to online platforms, some found fresh opportunities to participate in music-making as barriers related to transportation, scheduling, and disability fell away. Others were cut off from an important singing outlet due to lack of equipment, technical skill, or internet.

As Joni Mitchell wrote, “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone” (“Big Yellow Taxi,” 1970). The pandemic has underscored the significance of community singing and singing communities to the lives of those who participate. In many cases, organized communal singing activity did not come to an end. Instead, individuals and groups went to extraordinary lengths to reimagine music-making and community using the tools available. But in many other cases, singing was halted, and members of congregations, nursing homes, community choirs, and shapenote groups had to cope with the loss of an activity that had enriched their lives. When we conceived of this Handbook, we had not imagined a world without group singing. Now we know that such a world is only one super-spreader event away. The full ramifications of the pandemic—in terms of communities broken and formed, livelihoods lost and reshaped, singing habits adopted and abandoned—have yet to be witnessed or understood, but this volume offers insight into the activities and innovations that sustained singing communities during a period of forced separation.

Readers of this volume should not expect all chapters to resonate with one another. Which threads unite Amy Clements-Cortés and Joyce Yip’s scoping literature review on therapeutic singing for cancer patients and caregivers, Charles McGuire’s historical account of mass choirs used in the performance of Handel oratorios during the 18th and 19th centuries, and Eve McPherson’s reflections on a local Ohio Sing Along group committed to leftist activism? Though we may find themes of community formation in common, readers should first value each chapter on its individual merits.

The contents of this volume are divided into eight sections or Parts, each of which explores an important context of community singing. Our groupings emerged organically and emphasize themes that resurface across contributions.

Interdisciplinarity on this scale produces a wealth of potential overlaps and linkages. Each individual chapter might have been placed in more than one section, and no section offers a complete view of its subject matter. Some broader threads reappear in more than one section; for example, identity is a central concern in Parts II, IV, and V. In making organizational decisions, we considered how the contributions complemented or problematized one another and sought diversity in perspective and methodology. In the section introductions, the editors commented on and extended some of the connections we found among the respective chapters, as well as some links we observed between those subsections. We encourage readers to utilize this collection of outstanding scholarship in as many ways as possible; we can attest that a complete read has stretched the boundaries of our preconceptions, and believe it has the potential to do the same for others.