A friend of mine recently left Cincinnati to move to a bigger city. At his send off party, I was struck by our own cultural backwardness, when we attempted to sing him a parting song. No two people knew enough of the same melody and lyrics to make music.

The benefit of song in moments like this is clear. Many voices are unified into one. A group of friends pauses the back and forth nature of conversation to meet the same rhythm and time. The emotion is shared. All together a group of friends can tell you they are “sorry for your going away.”

Eventually we cobbled together an awkward “Country Roads” and the project was abandoned. Very much not on theme for a move from urban Cincinnati to New York City.

Bygone Cincinnatians would consider us backward indeed. Singing is a long loved tradition in our city. Down the street from me sits the Goodfellows Hall, where the Goodfellows fraternal society met and held their Singing Club meetings. Around the corner is the Turner building, which also had a singing club. In 1880, the tavern at 1313 Vine, now Krueger’s, hosted regular meetings for six separate singing clubs.¹ 

Now Krueger’s does not host any singing clubs. Why? I couldn’t tell you. But often we lament the state of young people and their self-imposed screen isolation. Why aren’t they present and alive? Perhaps we stopped offering engaging alternatives. 

Singing is an engaging alternative. We idolize singing folk songs around camp fires. We all wish we lived The Sound of Music. We all sing “Happy Birthday” because it makes people happy. Singing by its nature brings people closer together. It’s a true expression of life.

Take it from one of America’s favorite singing families, the von Trapps. In her autobiography, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, Maria describes the joys of singing as a family, but also how in her own day the youth of Austria revived the country’s musical culture.

Everyone was anxious to have all his homework done before supper, because then came the most beautiful time of the day, the evenings spent together. A fire was lit in the fireplace. The older girls brought their knitting, the younger ones, their dolls or dwarfies; the boys and their father usually worked on wood, carving or whittling; and I, settling in a most comfortable chair, started to read aloud…After having read a couple of hours, I would say: “That’s enough for today. Let’s sing now; all right?”

That was the signal for everyone to drop whatever he was doing. We sat closer together and started out. First we sang rounds. You can do that for hours on end, and it is a wonderful schooling for the ear. It leads quite naturally to polyphonic music. The rounds teach you to “mind your own business”; sing your part, never to mind what your neighbor sings.

After the First World War the Catholic Youth Movement sweeping all over Austria and Germany had done a wonderful job for music. These young people were fed up with glee club stuff, with all that coy, sweetish, unnatural material which was sung everywhere. They wanted genuine music again. They went up and down the countryside, collecting real folk songs and folk tunes, delved into archives and libraries and copied unpublished music of the old masters, the great unknown ones. In mimeographed and hand-copied sheets this music went from town to town and brought about a radical change in musical life within a few short years.

Give singing with friends and family a try. As Maria tells us, rounds are a very good place to start. A round is a simple way to make very engaging music. It works like this: everyone sings the same melody, but group A starts at the beginning while group B waits until A gets to the appointed place before B begins singing from the beginning. Then you repeat as long as you like. This makes for very interesting harmonies seemingly by accident. For more complicated rounds you can add even more groups. Here’s a simple two group round to get you started, and you probably already know it.

A:   Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques,
B:   Dormez-vous ? Dormez-vous ?
      Sonnez les matines ! Sonnez les matines !
      Din, din, don. Din, din, don.

A:   Are you sleeping? Are you sleeping?
B:   Brother John, Brother John,
      Morning bells are ringing! Morning bells are ringing!
      Ding, dang, dong. Ding, dang, dong.

Today, we are in a similar place as the Austrian Catholic Youth Movement, fed up with coy, sweetish, unnatural material. But recovering a singing culture has been done before, and can easily be done again. Let’s make an effort to build a shared musical vocabulary, so the next time a friend moves away, we can send him off in song.

1. “The History and Names of 1313 Vine Street” – DiggingCincinnati.com ↩︎