WHY DO WE SING
George Bachelor
December 3, 2006

When I began thinking about this service, I tried thinking of the many ways that music permeates what we do. And I began to focus on our singing. I asked myself: Why do we sing? What is the point?

Music is an expression of the human species. It is not simply a performing art. We are hard-wired to sing as much as we are hard-wired to talk. With language there is a speaker and listener, or a writer and reader. With singing we create sound and we listen simultaneously. Singing is primal, it is physical.

Music expresses of the weave of human heart and mind, and singing is the most intimate, and therefore the most powerful form of that expression.

We all sing. Some of us sound more beautiful than others, some of sing more confidently than others.

We sing to our infants to calm them into sleep. We sing to calm ourselves. We sing to celebrate life, we sing at baseball games and world cup soccer matches.

Here’s an irony: in America we have so much access to music. We have radio, we have I-pods and CDs and streaming music from our computers. We have music in so many flavors, and available in so many different media, from the grand symphony hall to the personal tiny MP3 player.

And yet as a culture, we tend suppress all but the most polished and professional sounds.

Most of us are not entirely comfortable with the sound of our own voice. The operatic director Peter Sellars once commented that one of the bravest things a human being can do is open its mouth and sing out loud. I would venture to say that most of us are more comfortable with seeing ourselves naked in the mirror than hearing ourselves sing on a tape.

How many of us have had one of those music teachers who have said to one of her choristers : “Johnny, you know you can be a good listener, why don’t you play the rhythm blocks instead”

And so it begins, a voice is suppressed.

So what do we do?

Sing out. Breathe, vibrate, sing: make a noise, as the Psalm says, make it a joyful noise. Like Dorothy Day’s pebble, your voice cast into the ocean of sound creates ripples that can reach out.

Some people find a release in singing Gospel music. I know I have. Why is that?

Certainly gospel rhythm, melody, call and response are all at the root of our popular music.

It is also the sound of liberation, drawing from the African American struggle for human freedom and dignity against oppression.

But perhaps the most fundamental power of gospel is that it comes from a tradition where God, the source of all creation, however you might conceive of it, speaks out, not from above, but from deep with each of us, calling to each other.

Ours is a faith of choice. We come together here not out of habit or fear, but out of desire for community, to be present to each other. We are a faith of action, of speaking out with a goal of social justice. For many of us, however, speaking out or singing out, does not come easy. We’re not sure of our selves, our notes. Our voices our not what we hoped for, they betray us.

Fortunately we have other.

We just have to move a little closer together, singing so we can hear and be heard. And then something interesting happens. It’s not just that we hear that note and say Oh Yeah – That’s It. When we hear each other singing that way, we start to resonate. We connect to each other, we feel it.

As with the Gospel tradition, I believe that each time we sing together, whatever we are singing, we sing for each other. It could be a folksong or a Bach chorale. It is a practice that awakens a living idea in sound, a kind of resurrection of the collective human spirit.

So: why do we sing? Literally and figuratively, we find our voice in each other. We must sing to resonate, we must listen to resonate. Singing together is our ritual practice of compassion.