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By Guy Hayward
Have we got the promotion of singing back to front? One often hears people say, in one form or other, ‘Singing is good for you!’. This is like being told green veg, exercise or sleep is good for you. It doesn’t necessarily mean you will do any of these things any more than you would have done otherwise. What I hope to do here is show how singing, particularly with others, is completely embedded in human culture, and also show what it is for, whether that is good for us or not. (Although, despite the above warning, I will share some of its benefits…).
If one looks at singing traditions from around the world, ranging from those of local indigenous communities to international religious traditions, two phenomena seem to be associated with almost all them. Firstly, the experience of feeling sameness with a group of people, even if some of those people are outsiders to the group, and, secondly, that the singing was in some way doing ‘work’ (in either a mental, physical, and/or spiritual sense).
With any collective singing individuals are part of a larger whole, and therefore any contributions they make have to merge and synchronise with the contributions of others. By coordinating their actions to be ‘in time’ with the actions of others in the group, individuals can experience an embodied resonance and familiarity with those other people. Communal singing can also direct the rise and fall of emotional response in a body of people, coordinating what the majority of people in a group feel at any one time.
This relates to most forms of worship in which there is some form of surrendering of one’s individuality to dwell within something larger than oneself, this being anything from a worshipping community to an ultimate transcendent unity. In the case of some forest-based communities, group singing is employed to communicate with their immediate natural environment, the spirit world, and the cosmos—sometimes in a polyphonic way to mirror the multiple voices of the forest, for example—or to make appeals to spirits in other dimensions to heal sickness, feed the hungry, and even to ensure survival. In my own experience of walking and singing in Britain (with the British Pilgrimage Trust), I have also discovered that by singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, songs make more sense – i.e. songs have a physical ‘home’.
After an extensive review of many scientific studies on the effects of choral singing, one group of researchers summarized their conclusions as follows:
· Choral singing engenders happiness and raised spirits, which counteract feelings of sadness and depression.
· Singing involves focused concentration, which reduces worrying.
· Singing involves deep controlled breathing, which counteracts anxiety.
· Choral singing offers a sense of social support and friendship, which ameliorate feelings of isolation and loneliness.
· Choral singing involves education and learning, which keeps the mind active and counteracts decline of cognitive functions. [i]
An individual can also sing or chant specifically to bring health and psychological benefits to themselves as individuals—both through practice on their own, and with others. As well as a positive sense of belonging to a community and transcendence, the individual benefits can be also physically healing, resulting from the sustained vibration of vocal sound through the body that happens when we extend the vowels of speech, which is basically what singing is.
The benefits can also be intimately personal- Darwin once remarked that “love is still the commonest theme of our songs” [ii]. Nothing changes, from Schubert song cycles to modern Top 40 chart hits. He also studied the role of ‘singing’ in animal sexual selection, the idea being that individuals can attract sexual partners through excellent singing. Indeed, a recent study showed that when adolescent females were added to an audience that boy choristers were performing to, the boys actually changed their individual sound quality to impress the girls, but at the cost of a good choral blend [iii]. How naughty!
Singing and chanting can also make people aware of the ineffable—in particular, when archaic, non-vernacular, and nonsense languages are being sung or chanted. Indeed, some traditions believe that the power of song cannot be separated from the words, even if they cannot be understood. The effects of the text of a song might come from a combination of participants gaining teachings from what the text means and the fact that communities can restate their collective beliefs, creeds, identities, and traditions through ritual texts. More generally it is likely that listeners respond subjectively both to the text and the experience, and may even feel a connection with all those that have chanted in this way before them, sometimes over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And in group chanting, because individuals have to coordinate their movements and sounds with each other means that on some level they are also always taken beyond their own subjective experience.
But not all group singing is good! Singing can sometimes be used for aggressive and defensive purposes. It would seem that singing has power to unify a group, thus increasing a group’s violent or defensive potential against other groups of people, or even animals (e.g. football chants, the Maori Haka, or the chanting at Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies). Therefore, singing is not an inherently good or bad practice—what makes it one or the other is the intention of those performing, or listening to, the singing.
In conclusion, singing has power. For me, this is what is most compelling about it. Not the fact it is good for us, although it clearly can be, but the fact it transcends being good or bad, because it is simply a very powerful tool. May we use it well.
Practical Suggestion: Sit down, close your eyes, and sing the vowel ‘Ah’ on any note you like, holding the note for as long as you can, and listen to it. Repeat three times. And then listen to the silence.
References:
[i] Clift , S., Hancox, G., Marrison, I., Hess, B.,Kreutz, G., and Stewart, d. (2010) Choral singing and psychological wellbeing: quantitative and qualitative findings from English choirs in a cross-national survey. Journal of Applied Arts and Health 1, 19-34.
[ii] Darwin, C. (1885) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd ed). Murray, London, p. 571.
[iii] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01559/full
I’ve been very lucky in the course that my life’s singing journey has taken. I first sang as a boy chorister in Bath Abbey, where I later sang as a teenage baritone, eventually ending up as a choral scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. I have sung opera, choral, early music, traditional British folk-song, have trained in classical singing at a conservatoire, and today make a living as a satirical jazz singer.
However, after completing my PhD, looking at the way that singing creates community in traditions worldwide, I made a discovery through my practical collaboration with wandering minstrel Will Parsons. By singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, I discovered that songs have a ‘home’.
Songs make more sense when sung in their natural habitat. Since discovering this secret I have explored this forgotten connection between song and place, and as a result I have experienced songs in ways that no conservatoire training or stage career could have made possible.
My first experience of this was on a ‘pilgrimage’ to a destination that marked the place of a tragedy, about which a song was written by the survivors. Will and I had walked 6 days to the place where 37 gypsy hop-pickers drowned in 1853 after a bridge over the River Medway collapsed. When we got to the monument commemorating those who had died, we met a couple who happened to be there for those few minutes only and who had not visited the monument previously. They were descendents of three of the victims, and they had never heard the song before. After singing the song to them, we realised that we had in a sense and, by accident, returned the song to its bloodline, not just its location.
Every song is from somewhere, either in terms of where it was composed or where inspiration first reached its creator. These are usually specific locations in the landscape. And the songs are also embedded in the historical context of that place, and by extension its community, and tell the stories of that local culture.
However, just because they are connected with a community, songs don’t always need an audience. Sometimes the place itself is the best audience you could wish for. In 2017 I met Isabella Tree who told me that Knepp Castle Estate had the last remaining turtle dove colony in Sussex. In response, I suggested to her that we take a folk song called ‘The Turtle Dove’ to sing it to the doves. So Will, our friend Sam Lee and I made a pilgrimage from Rusper pub in Sussex where Ralph Vaughan Williams first recorded this folk tune for posterity, and walked and sung it at different points along the 18-mile route to Knepp. Here we ‘re-wilded’ the song by singing it to our final audience, a single turtle dove in a tree which we could hear but not see. My love for the song had come from singing it as a solo with the choir in the stone chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, to a human audience, but non-human audiences are often the most appropriate for folk songs.
We also journeyed with another song, ‘Jerusalem’ by William Blake and Hubert Parry, which we sang in multiple locations over twelve days, from London - where Blake and Parry are buried - to West Sussex where both the words and music were first written. In this journey we realised that the practice of singing a song in many of its associated places can reveal different meanings of its lyrics. For example, ‘our clouded hills’ gained new meaning at the Temple of the Winds, a misty hilltop that day overlooking Sussex; ‘nor shall my sword sleep in my hand’ hit home standing by a War memorial; and ‘I shall not cease from mental fight’ made more sense singing it in Blake’s workshop in his Felpham cottage.
Whatever song you may sing in its ‘home’ - which means either its place of origin or, alternatively, any appropriate place or context - with each performance the precise moment of time and place, and combination of elements like weather, the light of day, where you are standing, what you can see, who you are with, which animals are around etc. increase the value of each ‘performance’ - it will never be quite the same again. Furthermore, all these factors work together to strengthen your memory of the song by giving it a rich context, and will inform your future performances.
To conclude, songs do not come from a singer’s throat. As singers, or teachers of song, we are agents of the songs we offer, but we are not their sources. One response to this truth is to take songs home, either on your own or with your students. This could mean travelling to a hilltop to greet the sun with a sun song, or performing a nature song to a local woodland, or offering a water song to a river source. Or it could mean something more specifically local, like a traditional song that originated from a special place nearby (for this you can use the online resources of the ‘Full English’ song map of Britain from the English Folk Song and Dance Society, or the ‘Mainly Norfolk’ websites). I cannot exactly describe the feeling that this will create inside you and your students, but, for me, it roughly resembles joy.
INTERVIEW
JF - One of your first pilgrimages, to Hartlake Bridge, traced the source of a folk song. As a chorister and musicologist, how do you see the relationship of sound as a medium for reverence and transcendence in these ancient sites?
GH - Sound creates form, ‘in the beginning was the Word’, ‘Om’ etc. Most creation myths of the universe start with a sound. Even Tolkien’s Middle Earth was created by a choir of angels. Sound is also invisible and therefore seemingly spiritual, whilst being physical vibrations of matter too. By singing the correct songs with the most heartfelt resonance within a space, one can cast a spell over the space (and audience, if there is one), hopefully with the intention of increasing the peace, healing charge and holiness. Many of these ancient sites like cathedrals and prehistoric barrows and caves have interesting acoustic properties, leading to choral traditions that have formed over hundreds of years in these places. Forests too are also thought to sing back to certain tribes, e.g. the Aka Pygmies, in a kind of mutual musical conversation. Singing is a resonant way to interact with these spaces, as vibrating one’s own body creates a good mix of embodiment while tuning in with the divine. But instruments are good too, bringing other materials and their sounds into the space. Sound in general dissolves social boundaries in collective music-making and this can increase the feeling of transcendence. The long and short of it, is that the right song in the right place at the right time with the right heart will create reverence, transcendence and magic. It will change how we feel in these spaces and lift us to the heavens.-
JF - Elemental forces, dragon lines and fairie folk have been woven into the mythological tapestry of our lands. As ecological crisis restores people to nature and sacred space, how do you perceive the presence of land spirits or guardians, as an expression of the divine?
GH - Everything in nature needs to be looked after, and non-material beings are likely to be able to help faster and in more ingenious ways than more spatially-limited material beings. Land spirits are likely to live for longer due to their non-material basis, and therefore have a longer term view because that is what we need to get through this ecological crisis. Some elementals and fairie folk enchant the landscape and lift it with their sparkle. Guardians on the other hand have a depth of age and wisdom and seriousness of purpose that balances the sparkle with the gravitas of darkness. With dragon lines, we need to understand that the earth is connected by field-like networks of telluric currents, and these may function like earth’s nervous system. So, like neural nodes, there may be earth energy nodes at crossing points like Glastonbury, Avebury etc. The spirits of the land are what give it life.
JF - Can you speak to the power of intention and ritual, such as labyrinth walking and the use of talismans such as stones and shells, and their role in pilgrimage?
GH- Intention means to hold inward, so it is like charging up a magnetic core which then attracts experiences into one’s life that are in resonance with it. The intention - to bring something in to your life, let go of something or resolve a question - does not guarantee that change will happen in the manner you hope, but it makes it more likely. Either way, with the journey you will get what you need, or what you are ready for, and the intention can be more or less relevant for that, but it’s good to have one nonetheless. One method of charging up your intention is to hold a stone or shell in your hand and imbue it with your intention, and then walk with it, perhaps making contact with it to holy places along the way. Shells, stones and other talismans provide a tangible link with the pilgrimage as you are making it, and then become cherished souvenirs or touchstones to connect you with the experience in the future.Rituals are formal processes of behaviour that maintain similarity through time, sometimes hundreds or thousands of years. It is by doing the same action in the same way as past rituals that connects you with all those who have done it before you. Spirituality is largely to do with feeling connection with that which is bigger than you, and so traditional rituals are one way of achieving this connection. You can also invent personally meaningful rituals too and play with the meaning creation. Lighting candles, walking labyrinths, lying down and meditating on skies and ceilings, drinking wild water, asking trees questions, bathing in holy wells - these are example of pilgrimage rituals. Rituals tighten the field of pilgrimages around your intentions and remind both your conscious and subconscious of why it is you are there.-
JF - Do you see pilgrimage as primarily a solitary journey or one that is amplified by group consciousness?
GH - It is both solitary and collective, because we are always the only ones who can walk our own individual path, wherever we are. However, we are all connected to the influences on our life - our companions, strangers we meet, the wildlife and nature we encounter. Everything is always amplified by being in connection with more than ourselves, but we just have to decide how expansive our mind will be, and filter according to our capacity. But walking with others allows you to share memories, support each other emotionally, and it is also helpful if you are both mirrors to all the thoughts and feelings bouncing around inside each of you. Inevitably you need to accommodate each other’s needs when travelling with someone else, but this is necessary for the world we all want to live in! Large groups allow for lots of synchronistic connections to form, cultural exchange, getting lots of angles on the same experience, and the overall energy can feel stronger. Solitary journeys tend to allow more connection with strangers and local communities because you need them more. You also notice everything you walk past in more detail because you aren’t talking to someone else. For many, this is why they prefer the solitary journey, but for me personally I like travelling with a companion, and preferably a romantic one.
JF - What role might the act of pilgrimage play in ecopsychology and cultivating human and more-than-human communication?
GH - Ecopsychology is quite a new movement so pilgrimage, with its thousands of years of history and tradition, can bring it a lot of depth and roundness. The word pilgrimage has a magic of its own pointing to the questing narratives of delving into the woods, the mountains, the lakes and streams to expand our mind and find the holy grail etc. Walking through the land slowly inspires pilgrims into a state of awe and earthed connection. It connects us to our bodies, which is a huge part of healing our minds and planet. Our senses get heightened too and attune us ever closer to wildlife and Nature. Ecopsychology and land rituals of pilgrimage go well together (see above). The indigenous communities that you come across along the way can also bring one into a deeper relationship with the land. There is only one way to get to know a land and that is to move through it, preferably at walking speed.
Have we got the promotion of singing back to front? One often hears people say, in one form or other, ‘Singing is good for you!’. This is like being told green veg, exercise or sleep is good for you. It doesn’t necessarily mean you will do any of these things any more than you would have done otherwise. What I hope to do here is show how singing, particularly with others, is completely embedded in human culture, and also show what it is for, whether that is good for us or not. (Although, despite the above warning, I will share some of its benefits…).
If one looks at singing traditions from around the world, ranging from those of local indigenous communities to international religious traditions, two phenomena seem to be associated with almost all them. Firstly, the experience of feeling sameness with a group of people, even if some of those people are outsiders to the group, and, secondly, that the singing was in some way doing ‘work’ (in either a mental, physical, and/or spiritual sense).
With any collective singing individuals are part of a larger whole, and therefore any contributions they make have to merge and synchronise with the contributions of others. By coordinating their actions to be ‘in time’ with the actions of others in the group, individuals can experience an embodied resonance and familiarity with those other people. Communal singing can also direct the rise and fall of emotional response in a body of people, coordinating what the majority of people in a group feel at any one time.
This relates to most forms of worship in which there is some form of surrendering of one’s individuality to dwell within something larger than oneself, this being anything from a worshipping community to an ultimate transcendent unity. In the case of some forest-based communities, group singing is employed to communicate with their immediate natural environment, the spirit world, and the cosmos—sometimes in a polyphonic way to mirror the multiple voices of the forest, for example—or to make appeals to spirits in other dimensions to heal sickness, feed the hungry, and even to ensure survival. In my own experience of walking and singing in Britain (with the British Pilgrimage Trust), I have also discovered that by singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, songs make more sense – i.e. songs have a physical ‘home’.
After an extensive review of many scientific studies on the effects of choral singing, one group of researchers summarized their conclusions as follows:
· Choral singing engenders happiness and raised spirits, which counteract feelings of sadness and depression.
· Singing involves focused concentration, which reduces worrying.
· Singing involves deep controlled breathing, which counteracts anxiety.
· Choral singing offers a sense of social support and friendship, which ameliorate feelings of isolation and loneliness.
· Choral singing involves education and learning, which keeps the mind active and counteracts decline of cognitive functions. [i]
An individual can also sing or chant specifically to bring health and psychological benefits to themselves as individuals—both through practice on their own, and with others. As well as a positive sense of belonging to a community and transcendence, the individual benefits can be also physically healing, resulting from the sustained vibration of vocal sound through the body that happens when we extend the vowels of speech, which is basically what singing is.
The benefits can also be intimately personal- Darwin once remarked that “love is still the commonest theme of our songs” [ii]. Nothing changes, from Schubert song cycles to modern Top 40 chart hits. He also studied the role of ‘singing’ in animal sexual selection, the idea being that individuals can attract sexual partners through excellent singing. Indeed, a recent study showed that when adolescent females were added to an audience that boy choristers were performing to, the boys actually changed their individual sound quality to impress the girls, but at the cost of a good choral blend [iii]. How naughty!
Singing and chanting can also make people aware of the ineffable—in particular, when archaic, non-vernacular, and nonsense languages are being sung or chanted. Indeed, some traditions believe that the power of song cannot be separated from the words, even if they cannot be understood. The effects of the text of a song might come from a combination of participants gaining teachings from what the text means and the fact that communities can restate their collective beliefs, creeds, identities, and traditions through ritual texts. More generally it is likely that listeners respond subjectively both to the text and the experience, and may even feel a connection with all those that have chanted in this way before them, sometimes over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And in group chanting, because individuals have to coordinate their movements and sounds with each other means that on some level they are also always taken beyond their own subjective experience.
But not all group singing is good! Singing can sometimes be used for aggressive and defensive purposes. It would seem that singing has power to unify a group, thus increasing a group’s violent or defensive potential against other groups of people, or even animals (e.g. football chants, the Maori Haka, or the chanting at Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies). Therefore, singing is not an inherently good or bad practice—what makes it one or the other is the intention of those performing, or listening to, the singing.
In conclusion, singing has power. For me, this is what is most compelling about it. Not the fact it is good for us, although it clearly can be, but the fact it transcends being good or bad, because it is simply a very powerful tool. May we use it well.
Practical Suggestion: Sit down, close your eyes, and sing the vowel ‘Ah’ on any note you like, holding the note for as long as you can, and listen to it. Repeat three times. And then listen to the silence.
References:
[i] Clift , S., Hancox, G., Marrison, I., Hess, B.,Kreutz, G., and Stewart, d. (2010) Choral singing and psychological wellbeing: quantitative and qualitative findings from English choirs in a cross-national survey. Journal of Applied Arts and Health 1, 19-34.
[ii] Darwin, C. (1885) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd ed). Murray, London, p. 571.
[iii] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01559/full
I’ve been very lucky in the course that my life’s singing journey has taken. I first sang as a boy chorister in Bath Abbey, where I later sang as a teenage baritone, eventually ending up as a choral scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. I have sung opera, choral, early music, traditional British folk-song, have trained in classical singing at a conservatoire, and today make a living as a satirical jazz singer.
However, after completing my PhD, looking at the way that singing creates community in traditions worldwide, I made a discovery through my practical collaboration with wandering minstrel Will Parsons. By singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, I discovered that songs have a ‘home’.
Songs make more sense when sung in their natural habitat. Since discovering this secret I have explored this forgotten connection between song and place, and as a result I have experienced songs in ways that no conservatoire training or stage career could have made possible.
My first experience of this was on a ‘pilgrimage’ to a destination that marked the place of a tragedy, about which a song was written by the survivors. Will and I had walked 6 days to the place where 37 gypsy hop-pickers drowned in 1853 after a bridge over the River Medway collapsed. When we got to the monument commemorating those who had died, we met a couple who happened to be there for those few minutes only and who had not visited the monument previously. They were descendents of three of the victims, and they had never heard the song before. After singing the song to them, we realised that we had in a sense and, by accident, returned the song to its bloodline, not just its location.
Every song is from somewhere, either in terms of where it was composed or where inspiration first reached its creator. These are usually specific locations in the landscape. And the songs are also embedded in the historical context of that place, and by extension its community, and tell the stories of that local culture.
However, just because they are connected with a community, songs don’t always need an audience. Sometimes the place itself is the best audience you could wish for. In 2017 I met Isabella Tree who told me that Knepp Castle Estate had the last remaining turtle dove colony in Sussex. In response, I suggested to her that we take a folk song called ‘The Turtle Dove’ to sing it to the doves. So Will, our friend Sam Lee and I made a pilgrimage from Rusper pub in Sussex where Ralph Vaughan Williams first recorded this folk tune for posterity, and walked and sung it at different points along the 18-mile route to Knepp. Here we ‘re-wilded’ the song by singing it to our final audience, a single turtle dove in a tree which we could hear but not see. My love for the song had come from singing it as a solo with the choir in the stone chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, to a human audience, but non-human audiences are often the most appropriate for folk songs.
We also journeyed with another song, ‘Jerusalem’ by William Blake and Hubert Parry, which we sang in multiple locations over twelve days, from London - where Blake and Parry are buried - to West Sussex where both the words and music were first written. In this journey we realised that the practice of singing a song in many of its associated places can reveal different meanings of its lyrics. For example, ‘our clouded hills’ gained new meaning at the Temple of the Winds, a misty hilltop that day overlooking Sussex; ‘nor shall my sword sleep in my hand’ hit home standing by a War memorial; and ‘I shall not cease from mental fight’ made more sense singing it in Blake’s workshop in his Felpham cottage.
Whatever song you may sing in its ‘home’ - which means either its place of origin or, alternatively, any appropriate place or context - with each performance the precise moment of time and place, and combination of elements like weather, the light of day, where you are standing, what you can see, who you are with, which animals are around etc. increase the value of each ‘performance’ - it will never be quite the same again. Furthermore, all these factors work together to strengthen your memory of the song by giving it a rich context, and will inform your future performances.
To conclude, songs do not come from a singer’s throat. As singers, or teachers of song, we are agents of the songs we offer, but we are not their sources. One response to this truth is to take songs home, either on your own or with your students. This could mean travelling to a hilltop to greet the sun with a sun song, or performing a nature song to a local woodland, or offering a water song to a river source. Or it could mean something more specifically local, like a traditional song that originated from a special place nearby (for this you can use the online resources of the ‘Full English’ song map of Britain from the English Folk Song and Dance Society, or the ‘Mainly Norfolk’ websites). I cannot exactly describe the feeling that this will create inside you and your students, but, for me, it roughly resembles joy.
INTERVIEW
JF - One of your first pilgrimages, to Hartlake Bridge, traced the source of a folk song. As a chorister and musicologist, how do you see the relationship of sound as a medium for reverence and transcendence in these ancient sites?
GH - Sound creates form, ‘in the beginning was the Word’, ‘Om’ etc. Most creation myths of the universe start with a sound. Even Tolkien’s Middle Earth was created by a choir of angels. Sound is also invisible and therefore seemingly spiritual, whilst being physical vibrations of matter too. By singing the correct songs with the most heartfelt resonance within a space, one can cast a spell over the space (and audience, if there is one), hopefully with the intention of increasing the peace, healing charge and holiness. Many of these ancient sites like cathedrals and prehistoric barrows and caves have interesting acoustic properties, leading to choral traditions that have formed over hundreds of years in these places. Forests too are also thought to sing back to certain tribes, e.g. the Aka Pygmies, in a kind of mutual musical conversation. Singing is a resonant way to interact with these spaces, as vibrating one’s own body creates a good mix of embodiment while tuning in with the divine. But instruments are good too, bringing other materials and their sounds into the space. Sound in general dissolves social boundaries in collective music-making and this can increase the feeling of transcendence. The long and short of it, is that the right song in the right place at the right time with the right heart will create reverence, transcendence and magic. It will change how we feel in these spaces and lift us to the heavens.-
JF - Elemental forces, dragon lines and fairie folk have been woven into the mythological tapestry of our lands. As ecological crisis restores people to nature and sacred space, how do you perceive the presence of land spirits or guardians, as an expression of the divine?
GH - Everything in nature needs to be looked after, and non-material beings are likely to be able to help faster and in more ingenious ways than more spatially-limited material beings. Land spirits are likely to live for longer due to their non-material basis, and therefore have a longer term view because that is what we need to get through this ecological crisis. Some elementals and fairie folk enchant the landscape and lift it with their sparkle. Guardians on the other hand have a depth of age and wisdom and seriousness of purpose that balances the sparkle with the gravitas of darkness. With dragon lines, we need to understand that the earth is connected by field-like networks of telluric currents, and these may function like earth’s nervous system. So, like neural nodes, there may be earth energy nodes at crossing points like Glastonbury, Avebury etc. The spirits of the land are what give it life.
JF - Can you speak to the power of intention and ritual, such as labyrinth walking and the use of talismans such as stones and shells, and their role in pilgrimage?
GH- Intention means to hold inward, so it is like charging up a magnetic core which then attracts experiences into one’s life that are in resonance with it. The intention - to bring something in to your life, let go of something or resolve a question - does not guarantee that change will happen in the manner you hope, but it makes it more likely. Either way, with the journey you will get what you need, or what you are ready for, and the intention can be more or less relevant for that, but it’s good to have one nonetheless. One method of charging up your intention is to hold a stone or shell in your hand and imbue it with your intention, and then walk with it, perhaps making contact with it to holy places along the way. Shells, stones and other talismans provide a tangible link with the pilgrimage as you are making it, and then become cherished souvenirs or touchstones to connect you with the experience in the future.Rituals are formal processes of behaviour that maintain similarity through time, sometimes hundreds or thousands of years. It is by doing the same action in the same way as past rituals that connects you with all those who have done it before you. Spirituality is largely to do with feeling connection with that which is bigger than you, and so traditional rituals are one way of achieving this connection. You can also invent personally meaningful rituals too and play with the meaning creation. Lighting candles, walking labyrinths, lying down and meditating on skies and ceilings, drinking wild water, asking trees questions, bathing in holy wells - these are example of pilgrimage rituals. Rituals tighten the field of pilgrimages around your intentions and remind both your conscious and subconscious of why it is you are there.-
JF - Do you see pilgrimage as primarily a solitary journey or one that is amplified by group consciousness?
GH - It is both solitary and collective, because we are always the only ones who can walk our own individual path, wherever we are. However, we are all connected to the influences on our life - our companions, strangers we meet, the wildlife and nature we encounter. Everything is always amplified by being in connection with more than ourselves, but we just have to decide how expansive our mind will be, and filter according to our capacity. But walking with others allows you to share memories, support each other emotionally, and it is also helpful if you are both mirrors to all the thoughts and feelings bouncing around inside each of you. Inevitably you need to accommodate each other’s needs when travelling with someone else, but this is necessary for the world we all want to live in! Large groups allow for lots of synchronistic connections to form, cultural exchange, getting lots of angles on the same experience, and the overall energy can feel stronger. Solitary journeys tend to allow more connection with strangers and local communities because you need them more. You also notice everything you walk past in more detail because you aren’t talking to someone else. For many, this is why they prefer the solitary journey, but for me personally I like travelling with a companion, and preferably a romantic one.
JF - What role might the act of pilgrimage play in ecopsychology and cultivating human and more-than-human communication?
GH - Ecopsychology is quite a new movement so pilgrimage, with its thousands of years of history and tradition, can bring it a lot of depth and roundness. The word pilgrimage has a magic of its own pointing to the questing narratives of delving into the woods, the mountains, the lakes and streams to expand our mind and find the holy grail etc. Walking through the land slowly inspires pilgrims into a state of awe and earthed connection. It connects us to our bodies, which is a huge part of healing our minds and planet. Our senses get heightened too and attune us ever closer to wildlife and Nature. Ecopsychology and land rituals of pilgrimage go well together (see above). The indigenous communities that you come across along the way can also bring one into a deeper relationship with the land. There is only one way to get to know a land and that is to move through it, preferably at walking speed.
Dr Guy Hayward is a pilgrim, bounder and singer with a PhD in Musicology. He is the founder of the British Pilgrimage Trust.
By Guy Hayward
Have we got the promotion of singing back to front? One often hears people say, in one form or other, ‘Singing is good for you!’. This is like being told green veg, exercise or sleep is good for you. It doesn’t necessarily mean you will do any of these things any more than you would have done otherwise. What I hope to do here is show how singing, particularly with others, is completely embedded in human culture, and also show what it is for, whether that is good for us or not. (Although, despite the above warning, I will share some of its benefits…).
If one looks at singing traditions from around the world, ranging from those of local indigenous communities to international religious traditions, two phenomena seem to be associated with almost all them. Firstly, the experience of feeling sameness with a group of people, even if some of those people are outsiders to the group, and, secondly, that the singing was in some way doing ‘work’ (in either a mental, physical, and/or spiritual sense).
With any collective singing individuals are part of a larger whole, and therefore any contributions they make have to merge and synchronise with the contributions of others. By coordinating their actions to be ‘in time’ with the actions of others in the group, individuals can experience an embodied resonance and familiarity with those other people. Communal singing can also direct the rise and fall of emotional response in a body of people, coordinating what the majority of people in a group feel at any one time.
This relates to most forms of worship in which there is some form of surrendering of one’s individuality to dwell within something larger than oneself, this being anything from a worshipping community to an ultimate transcendent unity. In the case of some forest-based communities, group singing is employed to communicate with their immediate natural environment, the spirit world, and the cosmos—sometimes in a polyphonic way to mirror the multiple voices of the forest, for example—or to make appeals to spirits in other dimensions to heal sickness, feed the hungry, and even to ensure survival. In my own experience of walking and singing in Britain (with the British Pilgrimage Trust), I have also discovered that by singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, songs make more sense – i.e. songs have a physical ‘home’.
After an extensive review of many scientific studies on the effects of choral singing, one group of researchers summarized their conclusions as follows:
· Choral singing engenders happiness and raised spirits, which counteract feelings of sadness and depression.
· Singing involves focused concentration, which reduces worrying.
· Singing involves deep controlled breathing, which counteracts anxiety.
· Choral singing offers a sense of social support and friendship, which ameliorate feelings of isolation and loneliness.
· Choral singing involves education and learning, which keeps the mind active and counteracts decline of cognitive functions. [i]
An individual can also sing or chant specifically to bring health and psychological benefits to themselves as individuals—both through practice on their own, and with others. As well as a positive sense of belonging to a community and transcendence, the individual benefits can be also physically healing, resulting from the sustained vibration of vocal sound through the body that happens when we extend the vowels of speech, which is basically what singing is.
The benefits can also be intimately personal- Darwin once remarked that “love is still the commonest theme of our songs” [ii]. Nothing changes, from Schubert song cycles to modern Top 40 chart hits. He also studied the role of ‘singing’ in animal sexual selection, the idea being that individuals can attract sexual partners through excellent singing. Indeed, a recent study showed that when adolescent females were added to an audience that boy choristers were performing to, the boys actually changed their individual sound quality to impress the girls, but at the cost of a good choral blend [iii]. How naughty!
Singing and chanting can also make people aware of the ineffable—in particular, when archaic, non-vernacular, and nonsense languages are being sung or chanted. Indeed, some traditions believe that the power of song cannot be separated from the words, even if they cannot be understood. The effects of the text of a song might come from a combination of participants gaining teachings from what the text means and the fact that communities can restate their collective beliefs, creeds, identities, and traditions through ritual texts. More generally it is likely that listeners respond subjectively both to the text and the experience, and may even feel a connection with all those that have chanted in this way before them, sometimes over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And in group chanting, because individuals have to coordinate their movements and sounds with each other means that on some level they are also always taken beyond their own subjective experience.
But not all group singing is good! Singing can sometimes be used for aggressive and defensive purposes. It would seem that singing has power to unify a group, thus increasing a group’s violent or defensive potential against other groups of people, or even animals (e.g. football chants, the Maori Haka, or the chanting at Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies). Therefore, singing is not an inherently good or bad practice—what makes it one or the other is the intention of those performing, or listening to, the singing.
In conclusion, singing has power. For me, this is what is most compelling about it. Not the fact it is good for us, although it clearly can be, but the fact it transcends being good or bad, because it is simply a very powerful tool. May we use it well.
Practical Suggestion: Sit down, close your eyes, and sing the vowel ‘Ah’ on any note you like, holding the note for as long as you can, and listen to it. Repeat three times. And then listen to the silence.
References:
[i] Clift , S., Hancox, G., Marrison, I., Hess, B.,Kreutz, G., and Stewart, d. (2010) Choral singing and psychological wellbeing: quantitative and qualitative findings from English choirs in a cross-national survey. Journal of Applied Arts and Health 1, 19-34.
[ii] Darwin, C. (1885) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd ed). Murray, London, p. 571.
[iii] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01559/full
I’ve been very lucky in the course that my life’s singing journey has taken. I first sang as a boy chorister in Bath Abbey, where I later sang as a teenage baritone, eventually ending up as a choral scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. I have sung opera, choral, early music, traditional British folk-song, have trained in classical singing at a conservatoire, and today make a living as a satirical jazz singer.
However, after completing my PhD, looking at the way that singing creates community in traditions worldwide, I made a discovery through my practical collaboration with wandering minstrel Will Parsons. By singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, I discovered that songs have a ‘home’.
Songs make more sense when sung in their natural habitat. Since discovering this secret I have explored this forgotten connection between song and place, and as a result I have experienced songs in ways that no conservatoire training or stage career could have made possible.
My first experience of this was on a ‘pilgrimage’ to a destination that marked the place of a tragedy, about which a song was written by the survivors. Will and I had walked 6 days to the place where 37 gypsy hop-pickers drowned in 1853 after a bridge over the River Medway collapsed. When we got to the monument commemorating those who had died, we met a couple who happened to be there for those few minutes only and who had not visited the monument previously. They were descendents of three of the victims, and they had never heard the song before. After singing the song to them, we realised that we had in a sense and, by accident, returned the song to its bloodline, not just its location.
Every song is from somewhere, either in terms of where it was composed or where inspiration first reached its creator. These are usually specific locations in the landscape. And the songs are also embedded in the historical context of that place, and by extension its community, and tell the stories of that local culture.
However, just because they are connected with a community, songs don’t always need an audience. Sometimes the place itself is the best audience you could wish for. In 2017 I met Isabella Tree who told me that Knepp Castle Estate had the last remaining turtle dove colony in Sussex. In response, I suggested to her that we take a folk song called ‘The Turtle Dove’ to sing it to the doves. So Will, our friend Sam Lee and I made a pilgrimage from Rusper pub in Sussex where Ralph Vaughan Williams first recorded this folk tune for posterity, and walked and sung it at different points along the 18-mile route to Knepp. Here we ‘re-wilded’ the song by singing it to our final audience, a single turtle dove in a tree which we could hear but not see. My love for the song had come from singing it as a solo with the choir in the stone chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, to a human audience, but non-human audiences are often the most appropriate for folk songs.
We also journeyed with another song, ‘Jerusalem’ by William Blake and Hubert Parry, which we sang in multiple locations over twelve days, from London - where Blake and Parry are buried - to West Sussex where both the words and music were first written. In this journey we realised that the practice of singing a song in many of its associated places can reveal different meanings of its lyrics. For example, ‘our clouded hills’ gained new meaning at the Temple of the Winds, a misty hilltop that day overlooking Sussex; ‘nor shall my sword sleep in my hand’ hit home standing by a War memorial; and ‘I shall not cease from mental fight’ made more sense singing it in Blake’s workshop in his Felpham cottage.
Whatever song you may sing in its ‘home’ - which means either its place of origin or, alternatively, any appropriate place or context - with each performance the precise moment of time and place, and combination of elements like weather, the light of day, where you are standing, what you can see, who you are with, which animals are around etc. increase the value of each ‘performance’ - it will never be quite the same again. Furthermore, all these factors work together to strengthen your memory of the song by giving it a rich context, and will inform your future performances.
To conclude, songs do not come from a singer’s throat. As singers, or teachers of song, we are agents of the songs we offer, but we are not their sources. One response to this truth is to take songs home, either on your own or with your students. This could mean travelling to a hilltop to greet the sun with a sun song, or performing a nature song to a local woodland, or offering a water song to a river source. Or it could mean something more specifically local, like a traditional song that originated from a special place nearby (for this you can use the online resources of the ‘Full English’ song map of Britain from the English Folk Song and Dance Society, or the ‘Mainly Norfolk’ websites). I cannot exactly describe the feeling that this will create inside you and your students, but, for me, it roughly resembles joy.
INTERVIEW
JF - One of your first pilgrimages, to Hartlake Bridge, traced the source of a folk song. As a chorister and musicologist, how do you see the relationship of sound as a medium for reverence and transcendence in these ancient sites?
GH - Sound creates form, ‘in the beginning was the Word’, ‘Om’ etc. Most creation myths of the universe start with a sound. Even Tolkien’s Middle Earth was created by a choir of angels. Sound is also invisible and therefore seemingly spiritual, whilst being physical vibrations of matter too. By singing the correct songs with the most heartfelt resonance within a space, one can cast a spell over the space (and audience, if there is one), hopefully with the intention of increasing the peace, healing charge and holiness. Many of these ancient sites like cathedrals and prehistoric barrows and caves have interesting acoustic properties, leading to choral traditions that have formed over hundreds of years in these places. Forests too are also thought to sing back to certain tribes, e.g. the Aka Pygmies, in a kind of mutual musical conversation. Singing is a resonant way to interact with these spaces, as vibrating one’s own body creates a good mix of embodiment while tuning in with the divine. But instruments are good too, bringing other materials and their sounds into the space. Sound in general dissolves social boundaries in collective music-making and this can increase the feeling of transcendence. The long and short of it, is that the right song in the right place at the right time with the right heart will create reverence, transcendence and magic. It will change how we feel in these spaces and lift us to the heavens.-
JF - Elemental forces, dragon lines and fairie folk have been woven into the mythological tapestry of our lands. As ecological crisis restores people to nature and sacred space, how do you perceive the presence of land spirits or guardians, as an expression of the divine?
GH - Everything in nature needs to be looked after, and non-material beings are likely to be able to help faster and in more ingenious ways than more spatially-limited material beings. Land spirits are likely to live for longer due to their non-material basis, and therefore have a longer term view because that is what we need to get through this ecological crisis. Some elementals and fairie folk enchant the landscape and lift it with their sparkle. Guardians on the other hand have a depth of age and wisdom and seriousness of purpose that balances the sparkle with the gravitas of darkness. With dragon lines, we need to understand that the earth is connected by field-like networks of telluric currents, and these may function like earth’s nervous system. So, like neural nodes, there may be earth energy nodes at crossing points like Glastonbury, Avebury etc. The spirits of the land are what give it life.
JF - Can you speak to the power of intention and ritual, such as labyrinth walking and the use of talismans such as stones and shells, and their role in pilgrimage?
GH- Intention means to hold inward, so it is like charging up a magnetic core which then attracts experiences into one’s life that are in resonance with it. The intention - to bring something in to your life, let go of something or resolve a question - does not guarantee that change will happen in the manner you hope, but it makes it more likely. Either way, with the journey you will get what you need, or what you are ready for, and the intention can be more or less relevant for that, but it’s good to have one nonetheless. One method of charging up your intention is to hold a stone or shell in your hand and imbue it with your intention, and then walk with it, perhaps making contact with it to holy places along the way. Shells, stones and other talismans provide a tangible link with the pilgrimage as you are making it, and then become cherished souvenirs or touchstones to connect you with the experience in the future.Rituals are formal processes of behaviour that maintain similarity through time, sometimes hundreds or thousands of years. It is by doing the same action in the same way as past rituals that connects you with all those who have done it before you. Spirituality is largely to do with feeling connection with that which is bigger than you, and so traditional rituals are one way of achieving this connection. You can also invent personally meaningful rituals too and play with the meaning creation. Lighting candles, walking labyrinths, lying down and meditating on skies and ceilings, drinking wild water, asking trees questions, bathing in holy wells - these are example of pilgrimage rituals. Rituals tighten the field of pilgrimages around your intentions and remind both your conscious and subconscious of why it is you are there.-
JF - Do you see pilgrimage as primarily a solitary journey or one that is amplified by group consciousness?
GH - It is both solitary and collective, because we are always the only ones who can walk our own individual path, wherever we are. However, we are all connected to the influences on our life - our companions, strangers we meet, the wildlife and nature we encounter. Everything is always amplified by being in connection with more than ourselves, but we just have to decide how expansive our mind will be, and filter according to our capacity. But walking with others allows you to share memories, support each other emotionally, and it is also helpful if you are both mirrors to all the thoughts and feelings bouncing around inside each of you. Inevitably you need to accommodate each other’s needs when travelling with someone else, but this is necessary for the world we all want to live in! Large groups allow for lots of synchronistic connections to form, cultural exchange, getting lots of angles on the same experience, and the overall energy can feel stronger. Solitary journeys tend to allow more connection with strangers and local communities because you need them more. You also notice everything you walk past in more detail because you aren’t talking to someone else. For many, this is why they prefer the solitary journey, but for me personally I like travelling with a companion, and preferably a romantic one.
JF - What role might the act of pilgrimage play in ecopsychology and cultivating human and more-than-human communication?
GH - Ecopsychology is quite a new movement so pilgrimage, with its thousands of years of history and tradition, can bring it a lot of depth and roundness. The word pilgrimage has a magic of its own pointing to the questing narratives of delving into the woods, the mountains, the lakes and streams to expand our mind and find the holy grail etc. Walking through the land slowly inspires pilgrims into a state of awe and earthed connection. It connects us to our bodies, which is a huge part of healing our minds and planet. Our senses get heightened too and attune us ever closer to wildlife and Nature. Ecopsychology and land rituals of pilgrimage go well together (see above). The indigenous communities that you come across along the way can also bring one into a deeper relationship with the land. There is only one way to get to know a land and that is to move through it, preferably at walking speed.
Have we got the promotion of singing back to front? One often hears people say, in one form or other, ‘Singing is good for you!’. This is like being told green veg, exercise or sleep is good for you. It doesn’t necessarily mean you will do any of these things any more than you would have done otherwise. What I hope to do here is show how singing, particularly with others, is completely embedded in human culture, and also show what it is for, whether that is good for us or not. (Although, despite the above warning, I will share some of its benefits…).
If one looks at singing traditions from around the world, ranging from those of local indigenous communities to international religious traditions, two phenomena seem to be associated with almost all them. Firstly, the experience of feeling sameness with a group of people, even if some of those people are outsiders to the group, and, secondly, that the singing was in some way doing ‘work’ (in either a mental, physical, and/or spiritual sense).
With any collective singing individuals are part of a larger whole, and therefore any contributions they make have to merge and synchronise with the contributions of others. By coordinating their actions to be ‘in time’ with the actions of others in the group, individuals can experience an embodied resonance and familiarity with those other people. Communal singing can also direct the rise and fall of emotional response in a body of people, coordinating what the majority of people in a group feel at any one time.
This relates to most forms of worship in which there is some form of surrendering of one’s individuality to dwell within something larger than oneself, this being anything from a worshipping community to an ultimate transcendent unity. In the case of some forest-based communities, group singing is employed to communicate with their immediate natural environment, the spirit world, and the cosmos—sometimes in a polyphonic way to mirror the multiple voices of the forest, for example—or to make appeals to spirits in other dimensions to heal sickness, feed the hungry, and even to ensure survival. In my own experience of walking and singing in Britain (with the British Pilgrimage Trust), I have also discovered that by singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, songs make more sense – i.e. songs have a physical ‘home’.
After an extensive review of many scientific studies on the effects of choral singing, one group of researchers summarized their conclusions as follows:
· Choral singing engenders happiness and raised spirits, which counteract feelings of sadness and depression.
· Singing involves focused concentration, which reduces worrying.
· Singing involves deep controlled breathing, which counteracts anxiety.
· Choral singing offers a sense of social support and friendship, which ameliorate feelings of isolation and loneliness.
· Choral singing involves education and learning, which keeps the mind active and counteracts decline of cognitive functions. [i]
An individual can also sing or chant specifically to bring health and psychological benefits to themselves as individuals—both through practice on their own, and with others. As well as a positive sense of belonging to a community and transcendence, the individual benefits can be also physically healing, resulting from the sustained vibration of vocal sound through the body that happens when we extend the vowels of speech, which is basically what singing is.
The benefits can also be intimately personal- Darwin once remarked that “love is still the commonest theme of our songs” [ii]. Nothing changes, from Schubert song cycles to modern Top 40 chart hits. He also studied the role of ‘singing’ in animal sexual selection, the idea being that individuals can attract sexual partners through excellent singing. Indeed, a recent study showed that when adolescent females were added to an audience that boy choristers were performing to, the boys actually changed their individual sound quality to impress the girls, but at the cost of a good choral blend [iii]. How naughty!
Singing and chanting can also make people aware of the ineffable—in particular, when archaic, non-vernacular, and nonsense languages are being sung or chanted. Indeed, some traditions believe that the power of song cannot be separated from the words, even if they cannot be understood. The effects of the text of a song might come from a combination of participants gaining teachings from what the text means and the fact that communities can restate their collective beliefs, creeds, identities, and traditions through ritual texts. More generally it is likely that listeners respond subjectively both to the text and the experience, and may even feel a connection with all those that have chanted in this way before them, sometimes over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And in group chanting, because individuals have to coordinate their movements and sounds with each other means that on some level they are also always taken beyond their own subjective experience.
But not all group singing is good! Singing can sometimes be used for aggressive and defensive purposes. It would seem that singing has power to unify a group, thus increasing a group’s violent or defensive potential against other groups of people, or even animals (e.g. football chants, the Maori Haka, or the chanting at Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies). Therefore, singing is not an inherently good or bad practice—what makes it one or the other is the intention of those performing, or listening to, the singing.
In conclusion, singing has power. For me, this is what is most compelling about it. Not the fact it is good for us, although it clearly can be, but the fact it transcends being good or bad, because it is simply a very powerful tool. May we use it well.
Practical Suggestion: Sit down, close your eyes, and sing the vowel ‘Ah’ on any note you like, holding the note for as long as you can, and listen to it. Repeat three times. And then listen to the silence.
References:
[i] Clift , S., Hancox, G., Marrison, I., Hess, B.,Kreutz, G., and Stewart, d. (2010) Choral singing and psychological wellbeing: quantitative and qualitative findings from English choirs in a cross-national survey. Journal of Applied Arts and Health 1, 19-34.
[ii] Darwin, C. (1885) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd ed). Murray, London, p. 571.
[iii] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01559/full
I’ve been very lucky in the course that my life’s singing journey has taken. I first sang as a boy chorister in Bath Abbey, where I later sang as a teenage baritone, eventually ending up as a choral scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. I have sung opera, choral, early music, traditional British folk-song, have trained in classical singing at a conservatoire, and today make a living as a satirical jazz singer.
However, after completing my PhD, looking at the way that singing creates community in traditions worldwide, I made a discovery through my practical collaboration with wandering minstrel Will Parsons. By singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, I discovered that songs have a ‘home’.
Songs make more sense when sung in their natural habitat. Since discovering this secret I have explored this forgotten connection between song and place, and as a result I have experienced songs in ways that no conservatoire training or stage career could have made possible.
My first experience of this was on a ‘pilgrimage’ to a destination that marked the place of a tragedy, about which a song was written by the survivors. Will and I had walked 6 days to the place where 37 gypsy hop-pickers drowned in 1853 after a bridge over the River Medway collapsed. When we got to the monument commemorating those who had died, we met a couple who happened to be there for those few minutes only and who had not visited the monument previously. They were descendents of three of the victims, and they had never heard the song before. After singing the song to them, we realised that we had in a sense and, by accident, returned the song to its bloodline, not just its location.
Every song is from somewhere, either in terms of where it was composed or where inspiration first reached its creator. These are usually specific locations in the landscape. And the songs are also embedded in the historical context of that place, and by extension its community, and tell the stories of that local culture.
However, just because they are connected with a community, songs don’t always need an audience. Sometimes the place itself is the best audience you could wish for. In 2017 I met Isabella Tree who told me that Knepp Castle Estate had the last remaining turtle dove colony in Sussex. In response, I suggested to her that we take a folk song called ‘The Turtle Dove’ to sing it to the doves. So Will, our friend Sam Lee and I made a pilgrimage from Rusper pub in Sussex where Ralph Vaughan Williams first recorded this folk tune for posterity, and walked and sung it at different points along the 18-mile route to Knepp. Here we ‘re-wilded’ the song by singing it to our final audience, a single turtle dove in a tree which we could hear but not see. My love for the song had come from singing it as a solo with the choir in the stone chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, to a human audience, but non-human audiences are often the most appropriate for folk songs.
We also journeyed with another song, ‘Jerusalem’ by William Blake and Hubert Parry, which we sang in multiple locations over twelve days, from London - where Blake and Parry are buried - to West Sussex where both the words and music were first written. In this journey we realised that the practice of singing a song in many of its associated places can reveal different meanings of its lyrics. For example, ‘our clouded hills’ gained new meaning at the Temple of the Winds, a misty hilltop that day overlooking Sussex; ‘nor shall my sword sleep in my hand’ hit home standing by a War memorial; and ‘I shall not cease from mental fight’ made more sense singing it in Blake’s workshop in his Felpham cottage.
Whatever song you may sing in its ‘home’ - which means either its place of origin or, alternatively, any appropriate place or context - with each performance the precise moment of time and place, and combination of elements like weather, the light of day, where you are standing, what you can see, who you are with, which animals are around etc. increase the value of each ‘performance’ - it will never be quite the same again. Furthermore, all these factors work together to strengthen your memory of the song by giving it a rich context, and will inform your future performances.
To conclude, songs do not come from a singer’s throat. As singers, or teachers of song, we are agents of the songs we offer, but we are not their sources. One response to this truth is to take songs home, either on your own or with your students. This could mean travelling to a hilltop to greet the sun with a sun song, or performing a nature song to a local woodland, or offering a water song to a river source. Or it could mean something more specifically local, like a traditional song that originated from a special place nearby (for this you can use the online resources of the ‘Full English’ song map of Britain from the English Folk Song and Dance Society, or the ‘Mainly Norfolk’ websites). I cannot exactly describe the feeling that this will create inside you and your students, but, for me, it roughly resembles joy.
INTERVIEW
JF - One of your first pilgrimages, to Hartlake Bridge, traced the source of a folk song. As a chorister and musicologist, how do you see the relationship of sound as a medium for reverence and transcendence in these ancient sites?
GH - Sound creates form, ‘in the beginning was the Word’, ‘Om’ etc. Most creation myths of the universe start with a sound. Even Tolkien’s Middle Earth was created by a choir of angels. Sound is also invisible and therefore seemingly spiritual, whilst being physical vibrations of matter too. By singing the correct songs with the most heartfelt resonance within a space, one can cast a spell over the space (and audience, if there is one), hopefully with the intention of increasing the peace, healing charge and holiness. Many of these ancient sites like cathedrals and prehistoric barrows and caves have interesting acoustic properties, leading to choral traditions that have formed over hundreds of years in these places. Forests too are also thought to sing back to certain tribes, e.g. the Aka Pygmies, in a kind of mutual musical conversation. Singing is a resonant way to interact with these spaces, as vibrating one’s own body creates a good mix of embodiment while tuning in with the divine. But instruments are good too, bringing other materials and their sounds into the space. Sound in general dissolves social boundaries in collective music-making and this can increase the feeling of transcendence. The long and short of it, is that the right song in the right place at the right time with the right heart will create reverence, transcendence and magic. It will change how we feel in these spaces and lift us to the heavens.-
JF - Elemental forces, dragon lines and fairie folk have been woven into the mythological tapestry of our lands. As ecological crisis restores people to nature and sacred space, how do you perceive the presence of land spirits or guardians, as an expression of the divine?
GH - Everything in nature needs to be looked after, and non-material beings are likely to be able to help faster and in more ingenious ways than more spatially-limited material beings. Land spirits are likely to live for longer due to their non-material basis, and therefore have a longer term view because that is what we need to get through this ecological crisis. Some elementals and fairie folk enchant the landscape and lift it with their sparkle. Guardians on the other hand have a depth of age and wisdom and seriousness of purpose that balances the sparkle with the gravitas of darkness. With dragon lines, we need to understand that the earth is connected by field-like networks of telluric currents, and these may function like earth’s nervous system. So, like neural nodes, there may be earth energy nodes at crossing points like Glastonbury, Avebury etc. The spirits of the land are what give it life.
JF - Can you speak to the power of intention and ritual, such as labyrinth walking and the use of talismans such as stones and shells, and their role in pilgrimage?
GH- Intention means to hold inward, so it is like charging up a magnetic core which then attracts experiences into one’s life that are in resonance with it. The intention - to bring something in to your life, let go of something or resolve a question - does not guarantee that change will happen in the manner you hope, but it makes it more likely. Either way, with the journey you will get what you need, or what you are ready for, and the intention can be more or less relevant for that, but it’s good to have one nonetheless. One method of charging up your intention is to hold a stone or shell in your hand and imbue it with your intention, and then walk with it, perhaps making contact with it to holy places along the way. Shells, stones and other talismans provide a tangible link with the pilgrimage as you are making it, and then become cherished souvenirs or touchstones to connect you with the experience in the future.Rituals are formal processes of behaviour that maintain similarity through time, sometimes hundreds or thousands of years. It is by doing the same action in the same way as past rituals that connects you with all those who have done it before you. Spirituality is largely to do with feeling connection with that which is bigger than you, and so traditional rituals are one way of achieving this connection. You can also invent personally meaningful rituals too and play with the meaning creation. Lighting candles, walking labyrinths, lying down and meditating on skies and ceilings, drinking wild water, asking trees questions, bathing in holy wells - these are example of pilgrimage rituals. Rituals tighten the field of pilgrimages around your intentions and remind both your conscious and subconscious of why it is you are there.-
JF - Do you see pilgrimage as primarily a solitary journey or one that is amplified by group consciousness?
GH - It is both solitary and collective, because we are always the only ones who can walk our own individual path, wherever we are. However, we are all connected to the influences on our life - our companions, strangers we meet, the wildlife and nature we encounter. Everything is always amplified by being in connection with more than ourselves, but we just have to decide how expansive our mind will be, and filter according to our capacity. But walking with others allows you to share memories, support each other emotionally, and it is also helpful if you are both mirrors to all the thoughts and feelings bouncing around inside each of you. Inevitably you need to accommodate each other’s needs when travelling with someone else, but this is necessary for the world we all want to live in! Large groups allow for lots of synchronistic connections to form, cultural exchange, getting lots of angles on the same experience, and the overall energy can feel stronger. Solitary journeys tend to allow more connection with strangers and local communities because you need them more. You also notice everything you walk past in more detail because you aren’t talking to someone else. For many, this is why they prefer the solitary journey, but for me personally I like travelling with a companion, and preferably a romantic one.
JF - What role might the act of pilgrimage play in ecopsychology and cultivating human and more-than-human communication?
GH - Ecopsychology is quite a new movement so pilgrimage, with its thousands of years of history and tradition, can bring it a lot of depth and roundness. The word pilgrimage has a magic of its own pointing to the questing narratives of delving into the woods, the mountains, the lakes and streams to expand our mind and find the holy grail etc. Walking through the land slowly inspires pilgrims into a state of awe and earthed connection. It connects us to our bodies, which is a huge part of healing our minds and planet. Our senses get heightened too and attune us ever closer to wildlife and Nature. Ecopsychology and land rituals of pilgrimage go well together (see above). The indigenous communities that you come across along the way can also bring one into a deeper relationship with the land. There is only one way to get to know a land and that is to move through it, preferably at walking speed.
Dr Guy Hayward is a pilgrim, bounder and singer with a PhD in Musicology. He is the founder of the British Pilgrimage Trust.
By Guy Hayward
Have we got the promotion of singing back to front? One often hears people say, in one form or other, ‘Singing is good for you!’. This is like being told green veg, exercise or sleep is good for you. It doesn’t necessarily mean you will do any of these things any more than you would have done otherwise. What I hope to do here is show how singing, particularly with others, is completely embedded in human culture, and also show what it is for, whether that is good for us or not. (Although, despite the above warning, I will share some of its benefits…).
If one looks at singing traditions from around the world, ranging from those of local indigenous communities to international religious traditions, two phenomena seem to be associated with almost all them. Firstly, the experience of feeling sameness with a group of people, even if some of those people are outsiders to the group, and, secondly, that the singing was in some way doing ‘work’ (in either a mental, physical, and/or spiritual sense).
With any collective singing individuals are part of a larger whole, and therefore any contributions they make have to merge and synchronise with the contributions of others. By coordinating their actions to be ‘in time’ with the actions of others in the group, individuals can experience an embodied resonance and familiarity with those other people. Communal singing can also direct the rise and fall of emotional response in a body of people, coordinating what the majority of people in a group feel at any one time.
This relates to most forms of worship in which there is some form of surrendering of one’s individuality to dwell within something larger than oneself, this being anything from a worshipping community to an ultimate transcendent unity. In the case of some forest-based communities, group singing is employed to communicate with their immediate natural environment, the spirit world, and the cosmos—sometimes in a polyphonic way to mirror the multiple voices of the forest, for example—or to make appeals to spirits in other dimensions to heal sickness, feed the hungry, and even to ensure survival. In my own experience of walking and singing in Britain (with the British Pilgrimage Trust), I have also discovered that by singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, songs make more sense – i.e. songs have a physical ‘home’.
After an extensive review of many scientific studies on the effects of choral singing, one group of researchers summarized their conclusions as follows:
· Choral singing engenders happiness and raised spirits, which counteract feelings of sadness and depression.
· Singing involves focused concentration, which reduces worrying.
· Singing involves deep controlled breathing, which counteracts anxiety.
· Choral singing offers a sense of social support and friendship, which ameliorate feelings of isolation and loneliness.
· Choral singing involves education and learning, which keeps the mind active and counteracts decline of cognitive functions. [i]
An individual can also sing or chant specifically to bring health and psychological benefits to themselves as individuals—both through practice on their own, and with others. As well as a positive sense of belonging to a community and transcendence, the individual benefits can be also physically healing, resulting from the sustained vibration of vocal sound through the body that happens when we extend the vowels of speech, which is basically what singing is.
The benefits can also be intimately personal- Darwin once remarked that “love is still the commonest theme of our songs” [ii]. Nothing changes, from Schubert song cycles to modern Top 40 chart hits. He also studied the role of ‘singing’ in animal sexual selection, the idea being that individuals can attract sexual partners through excellent singing. Indeed, a recent study showed that when adolescent females were added to an audience that boy choristers were performing to, the boys actually changed their individual sound quality to impress the girls, but at the cost of a good choral blend [iii]. How naughty!
Singing and chanting can also make people aware of the ineffable—in particular, when archaic, non-vernacular, and nonsense languages are being sung or chanted. Indeed, some traditions believe that the power of song cannot be separated from the words, even if they cannot be understood. The effects of the text of a song might come from a combination of participants gaining teachings from what the text means and the fact that communities can restate their collective beliefs, creeds, identities, and traditions through ritual texts. More generally it is likely that listeners respond subjectively both to the text and the experience, and may even feel a connection with all those that have chanted in this way before them, sometimes over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And in group chanting, because individuals have to coordinate their movements and sounds with each other means that on some level they are also always taken beyond their own subjective experience.
But not all group singing is good! Singing can sometimes be used for aggressive and defensive purposes. It would seem that singing has power to unify a group, thus increasing a group’s violent or defensive potential against other groups of people, or even animals (e.g. football chants, the Maori Haka, or the chanting at Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies). Therefore, singing is not an inherently good or bad practice—what makes it one or the other is the intention of those performing, or listening to, the singing.
In conclusion, singing has power. For me, this is what is most compelling about it. Not the fact it is good for us, although it clearly can be, but the fact it transcends being good or bad, because it is simply a very powerful tool. May we use it well.
Practical Suggestion: Sit down, close your eyes, and sing the vowel ‘Ah’ on any note you like, holding the note for as long as you can, and listen to it. Repeat three times. And then listen to the silence.
References:
[i] Clift , S., Hancox, G., Marrison, I., Hess, B.,Kreutz, G., and Stewart, d. (2010) Choral singing and psychological wellbeing: quantitative and qualitative findings from English choirs in a cross-national survey. Journal of Applied Arts and Health 1, 19-34.
[ii] Darwin, C. (1885) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd ed). Murray, London, p. 571.
[iii] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01559/full
I’ve been very lucky in the course that my life’s singing journey has taken. I first sang as a boy chorister in Bath Abbey, where I later sang as a teenage baritone, eventually ending up as a choral scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. I have sung opera, choral, early music, traditional British folk-song, have trained in classical singing at a conservatoire, and today make a living as a satirical jazz singer.
However, after completing my PhD, looking at the way that singing creates community in traditions worldwide, I made a discovery through my practical collaboration with wandering minstrel Will Parsons. By singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, I discovered that songs have a ‘home’.
Songs make more sense when sung in their natural habitat. Since discovering this secret I have explored this forgotten connection between song and place, and as a result I have experienced songs in ways that no conservatoire training or stage career could have made possible.
My first experience of this was on a ‘pilgrimage’ to a destination that marked the place of a tragedy, about which a song was written by the survivors. Will and I had walked 6 days to the place where 37 gypsy hop-pickers drowned in 1853 after a bridge over the River Medway collapsed. When we got to the monument commemorating those who had died, we met a couple who happened to be there for those few minutes only and who had not visited the monument previously. They were descendents of three of the victims, and they had never heard the song before. After singing the song to them, we realised that we had in a sense and, by accident, returned the song to its bloodline, not just its location.
Every song is from somewhere, either in terms of where it was composed or where inspiration first reached its creator. These are usually specific locations in the landscape. And the songs are also embedded in the historical context of that place, and by extension its community, and tell the stories of that local culture.
However, just because they are connected with a community, songs don’t always need an audience. Sometimes the place itself is the best audience you could wish for. In 2017 I met Isabella Tree who told me that Knepp Castle Estate had the last remaining turtle dove colony in Sussex. In response, I suggested to her that we take a folk song called ‘The Turtle Dove’ to sing it to the doves. So Will, our friend Sam Lee and I made a pilgrimage from Rusper pub in Sussex where Ralph Vaughan Williams first recorded this folk tune for posterity, and walked and sung it at different points along the 18-mile route to Knepp. Here we ‘re-wilded’ the song by singing it to our final audience, a single turtle dove in a tree which we could hear but not see. My love for the song had come from singing it as a solo with the choir in the stone chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, to a human audience, but non-human audiences are often the most appropriate for folk songs.
We also journeyed with another song, ‘Jerusalem’ by William Blake and Hubert Parry, which we sang in multiple locations over twelve days, from London - where Blake and Parry are buried - to West Sussex where both the words and music were first written. In this journey we realised that the practice of singing a song in many of its associated places can reveal different meanings of its lyrics. For example, ‘our clouded hills’ gained new meaning at the Temple of the Winds, a misty hilltop that day overlooking Sussex; ‘nor shall my sword sleep in my hand’ hit home standing by a War memorial; and ‘I shall not cease from mental fight’ made more sense singing it in Blake’s workshop in his Felpham cottage.
Whatever song you may sing in its ‘home’ - which means either its place of origin or, alternatively, any appropriate place or context - with each performance the precise moment of time and place, and combination of elements like weather, the light of day, where you are standing, what you can see, who you are with, which animals are around etc. increase the value of each ‘performance’ - it will never be quite the same again. Furthermore, all these factors work together to strengthen your memory of the song by giving it a rich context, and will inform your future performances.
To conclude, songs do not come from a singer’s throat. As singers, or teachers of song, we are agents of the songs we offer, but we are not their sources. One response to this truth is to take songs home, either on your own or with your students. This could mean travelling to a hilltop to greet the sun with a sun song, or performing a nature song to a local woodland, or offering a water song to a river source. Or it could mean something more specifically local, like a traditional song that originated from a special place nearby (for this you can use the online resources of the ‘Full English’ song map of Britain from the English Folk Song and Dance Society, or the ‘Mainly Norfolk’ websites). I cannot exactly describe the feeling that this will create inside you and your students, but, for me, it roughly resembles joy.
INTERVIEW
JF - One of your first pilgrimages, to Hartlake Bridge, traced the source of a folk song. As a chorister and musicologist, how do you see the relationship of sound as a medium for reverence and transcendence in these ancient sites?
GH - Sound creates form, ‘in the beginning was the Word’, ‘Om’ etc. Most creation myths of the universe start with a sound. Even Tolkien’s Middle Earth was created by a choir of angels. Sound is also invisible and therefore seemingly spiritual, whilst being physical vibrations of matter too. By singing the correct songs with the most heartfelt resonance within a space, one can cast a spell over the space (and audience, if there is one), hopefully with the intention of increasing the peace, healing charge and holiness. Many of these ancient sites like cathedrals and prehistoric barrows and caves have interesting acoustic properties, leading to choral traditions that have formed over hundreds of years in these places. Forests too are also thought to sing back to certain tribes, e.g. the Aka Pygmies, in a kind of mutual musical conversation. Singing is a resonant way to interact with these spaces, as vibrating one’s own body creates a good mix of embodiment while tuning in with the divine. But instruments are good too, bringing other materials and their sounds into the space. Sound in general dissolves social boundaries in collective music-making and this can increase the feeling of transcendence. The long and short of it, is that the right song in the right place at the right time with the right heart will create reverence, transcendence and magic. It will change how we feel in these spaces and lift us to the heavens.-
JF - Elemental forces, dragon lines and fairie folk have been woven into the mythological tapestry of our lands. As ecological crisis restores people to nature and sacred space, how do you perceive the presence of land spirits or guardians, as an expression of the divine?
GH - Everything in nature needs to be looked after, and non-material beings are likely to be able to help faster and in more ingenious ways than more spatially-limited material beings. Land spirits are likely to live for longer due to their non-material basis, and therefore have a longer term view because that is what we need to get through this ecological crisis. Some elementals and fairie folk enchant the landscape and lift it with their sparkle. Guardians on the other hand have a depth of age and wisdom and seriousness of purpose that balances the sparkle with the gravitas of darkness. With dragon lines, we need to understand that the earth is connected by field-like networks of telluric currents, and these may function like earth’s nervous system. So, like neural nodes, there may be earth energy nodes at crossing points like Glastonbury, Avebury etc. The spirits of the land are what give it life.
JF - Can you speak to the power of intention and ritual, such as labyrinth walking and the use of talismans such as stones and shells, and their role in pilgrimage?
GH- Intention means to hold inward, so it is like charging up a magnetic core which then attracts experiences into one’s life that are in resonance with it. The intention - to bring something in to your life, let go of something or resolve a question - does not guarantee that change will happen in the manner you hope, but it makes it more likely. Either way, with the journey you will get what you need, or what you are ready for, and the intention can be more or less relevant for that, but it’s good to have one nonetheless. One method of charging up your intention is to hold a stone or shell in your hand and imbue it with your intention, and then walk with it, perhaps making contact with it to holy places along the way. Shells, stones and other talismans provide a tangible link with the pilgrimage as you are making it, and then become cherished souvenirs or touchstones to connect you with the experience in the future.Rituals are formal processes of behaviour that maintain similarity through time, sometimes hundreds or thousands of years. It is by doing the same action in the same way as past rituals that connects you with all those who have done it before you. Spirituality is largely to do with feeling connection with that which is bigger than you, and so traditional rituals are one way of achieving this connection. You can also invent personally meaningful rituals too and play with the meaning creation. Lighting candles, walking labyrinths, lying down and meditating on skies and ceilings, drinking wild water, asking trees questions, bathing in holy wells - these are example of pilgrimage rituals. Rituals tighten the field of pilgrimages around your intentions and remind both your conscious and subconscious of why it is you are there.-
JF - Do you see pilgrimage as primarily a solitary journey or one that is amplified by group consciousness?
GH - It is both solitary and collective, because we are always the only ones who can walk our own individual path, wherever we are. However, we are all connected to the influences on our life - our companions, strangers we meet, the wildlife and nature we encounter. Everything is always amplified by being in connection with more than ourselves, but we just have to decide how expansive our mind will be, and filter according to our capacity. But walking with others allows you to share memories, support each other emotionally, and it is also helpful if you are both mirrors to all the thoughts and feelings bouncing around inside each of you. Inevitably you need to accommodate each other’s needs when travelling with someone else, but this is necessary for the world we all want to live in! Large groups allow for lots of synchronistic connections to form, cultural exchange, getting lots of angles on the same experience, and the overall energy can feel stronger. Solitary journeys tend to allow more connection with strangers and local communities because you need them more. You also notice everything you walk past in more detail because you aren’t talking to someone else. For many, this is why they prefer the solitary journey, but for me personally I like travelling with a companion, and preferably a romantic one.
JF - What role might the act of pilgrimage play in ecopsychology and cultivating human and more-than-human communication?
GH - Ecopsychology is quite a new movement so pilgrimage, with its thousands of years of history and tradition, can bring it a lot of depth and roundness. The word pilgrimage has a magic of its own pointing to the questing narratives of delving into the woods, the mountains, the lakes and streams to expand our mind and find the holy grail etc. Walking through the land slowly inspires pilgrims into a state of awe and earthed connection. It connects us to our bodies, which is a huge part of healing our minds and planet. Our senses get heightened too and attune us ever closer to wildlife and Nature. Ecopsychology and land rituals of pilgrimage go well together (see above). The indigenous communities that you come across along the way can also bring one into a deeper relationship with the land. There is only one way to get to know a land and that is to move through it, preferably at walking speed.
Have we got the promotion of singing back to front? One often hears people say, in one form or other, ‘Singing is good for you!’. This is like being told green veg, exercise or sleep is good for you. It doesn’t necessarily mean you will do any of these things any more than you would have done otherwise. What I hope to do here is show how singing, particularly with others, is completely embedded in human culture, and also show what it is for, whether that is good for us or not. (Although, despite the above warning, I will share some of its benefits…).
If one looks at singing traditions from around the world, ranging from those of local indigenous communities to international religious traditions, two phenomena seem to be associated with almost all them. Firstly, the experience of feeling sameness with a group of people, even if some of those people are outsiders to the group, and, secondly, that the singing was in some way doing ‘work’ (in either a mental, physical, and/or spiritual sense).
With any collective singing individuals are part of a larger whole, and therefore any contributions they make have to merge and synchronise with the contributions of others. By coordinating their actions to be ‘in time’ with the actions of others in the group, individuals can experience an embodied resonance and familiarity with those other people. Communal singing can also direct the rise and fall of emotional response in a body of people, coordinating what the majority of people in a group feel at any one time.
This relates to most forms of worship in which there is some form of surrendering of one’s individuality to dwell within something larger than oneself, this being anything from a worshipping community to an ultimate transcendent unity. In the case of some forest-based communities, group singing is employed to communicate with their immediate natural environment, the spirit world, and the cosmos—sometimes in a polyphonic way to mirror the multiple voices of the forest, for example—or to make appeals to spirits in other dimensions to heal sickness, feed the hungry, and even to ensure survival. In my own experience of walking and singing in Britain (with the British Pilgrimage Trust), I have also discovered that by singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, songs make more sense – i.e. songs have a physical ‘home’.
After an extensive review of many scientific studies on the effects of choral singing, one group of researchers summarized their conclusions as follows:
· Choral singing engenders happiness and raised spirits, which counteract feelings of sadness and depression.
· Singing involves focused concentration, which reduces worrying.
· Singing involves deep controlled breathing, which counteracts anxiety.
· Choral singing offers a sense of social support and friendship, which ameliorate feelings of isolation and loneliness.
· Choral singing involves education and learning, which keeps the mind active and counteracts decline of cognitive functions. [i]
An individual can also sing or chant specifically to bring health and psychological benefits to themselves as individuals—both through practice on their own, and with others. As well as a positive sense of belonging to a community and transcendence, the individual benefits can be also physically healing, resulting from the sustained vibration of vocal sound through the body that happens when we extend the vowels of speech, which is basically what singing is.
The benefits can also be intimately personal- Darwin once remarked that “love is still the commonest theme of our songs” [ii]. Nothing changes, from Schubert song cycles to modern Top 40 chart hits. He also studied the role of ‘singing’ in animal sexual selection, the idea being that individuals can attract sexual partners through excellent singing. Indeed, a recent study showed that when adolescent females were added to an audience that boy choristers were performing to, the boys actually changed their individual sound quality to impress the girls, but at the cost of a good choral blend [iii]. How naughty!
Singing and chanting can also make people aware of the ineffable—in particular, when archaic, non-vernacular, and nonsense languages are being sung or chanted. Indeed, some traditions believe that the power of song cannot be separated from the words, even if they cannot be understood. The effects of the text of a song might come from a combination of participants gaining teachings from what the text means and the fact that communities can restate their collective beliefs, creeds, identities, and traditions through ritual texts. More generally it is likely that listeners respond subjectively both to the text and the experience, and may even feel a connection with all those that have chanted in this way before them, sometimes over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And in group chanting, because individuals have to coordinate their movements and sounds with each other means that on some level they are also always taken beyond their own subjective experience.
But not all group singing is good! Singing can sometimes be used for aggressive and defensive purposes. It would seem that singing has power to unify a group, thus increasing a group’s violent or defensive potential against other groups of people, or even animals (e.g. football chants, the Maori Haka, or the chanting at Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies). Therefore, singing is not an inherently good or bad practice—what makes it one or the other is the intention of those performing, or listening to, the singing.
In conclusion, singing has power. For me, this is what is most compelling about it. Not the fact it is good for us, although it clearly can be, but the fact it transcends being good or bad, because it is simply a very powerful tool. May we use it well.
Practical Suggestion: Sit down, close your eyes, and sing the vowel ‘Ah’ on any note you like, holding the note for as long as you can, and listen to it. Repeat three times. And then listen to the silence.
References:
[i] Clift , S., Hancox, G., Marrison, I., Hess, B.,Kreutz, G., and Stewart, d. (2010) Choral singing and psychological wellbeing: quantitative and qualitative findings from English choirs in a cross-national survey. Journal of Applied Arts and Health 1, 19-34.
[ii] Darwin, C. (1885) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd ed). Murray, London, p. 571.
[iii] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01559/full
I’ve been very lucky in the course that my life’s singing journey has taken. I first sang as a boy chorister in Bath Abbey, where I later sang as a teenage baritone, eventually ending up as a choral scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. I have sung opera, choral, early music, traditional British folk-song, have trained in classical singing at a conservatoire, and today make a living as a satirical jazz singer.
However, after completing my PhD, looking at the way that singing creates community in traditions worldwide, I made a discovery through my practical collaboration with wandering minstrel Will Parsons. By singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, I discovered that songs have a ‘home’.
Songs make more sense when sung in their natural habitat. Since discovering this secret I have explored this forgotten connection between song and place, and as a result I have experienced songs in ways that no conservatoire training or stage career could have made possible.
My first experience of this was on a ‘pilgrimage’ to a destination that marked the place of a tragedy, about which a song was written by the survivors. Will and I had walked 6 days to the place where 37 gypsy hop-pickers drowned in 1853 after a bridge over the River Medway collapsed. When we got to the monument commemorating those who had died, we met a couple who happened to be there for those few minutes only and who had not visited the monument previously. They were descendents of three of the victims, and they had never heard the song before. After singing the song to them, we realised that we had in a sense and, by accident, returned the song to its bloodline, not just its location.
Every song is from somewhere, either in terms of where it was composed or where inspiration first reached its creator. These are usually specific locations in the landscape. And the songs are also embedded in the historical context of that place, and by extension its community, and tell the stories of that local culture.
However, just because they are connected with a community, songs don’t always need an audience. Sometimes the place itself is the best audience you could wish for. In 2017 I met Isabella Tree who told me that Knepp Castle Estate had the last remaining turtle dove colony in Sussex. In response, I suggested to her that we take a folk song called ‘The Turtle Dove’ to sing it to the doves. So Will, our friend Sam Lee and I made a pilgrimage from Rusper pub in Sussex where Ralph Vaughan Williams first recorded this folk tune for posterity, and walked and sung it at different points along the 18-mile route to Knepp. Here we ‘re-wilded’ the song by singing it to our final audience, a single turtle dove in a tree which we could hear but not see. My love for the song had come from singing it as a solo with the choir in the stone chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, to a human audience, but non-human audiences are often the most appropriate for folk songs.
We also journeyed with another song, ‘Jerusalem’ by William Blake and Hubert Parry, which we sang in multiple locations over twelve days, from London - where Blake and Parry are buried - to West Sussex where both the words and music were first written. In this journey we realised that the practice of singing a song in many of its associated places can reveal different meanings of its lyrics. For example, ‘our clouded hills’ gained new meaning at the Temple of the Winds, a misty hilltop that day overlooking Sussex; ‘nor shall my sword sleep in my hand’ hit home standing by a War memorial; and ‘I shall not cease from mental fight’ made more sense singing it in Blake’s workshop in his Felpham cottage.
Whatever song you may sing in its ‘home’ - which means either its place of origin or, alternatively, any appropriate place or context - with each performance the precise moment of time and place, and combination of elements like weather, the light of day, where you are standing, what you can see, who you are with, which animals are around etc. increase the value of each ‘performance’ - it will never be quite the same again. Furthermore, all these factors work together to strengthen your memory of the song by giving it a rich context, and will inform your future performances.
To conclude, songs do not come from a singer’s throat. As singers, or teachers of song, we are agents of the songs we offer, but we are not their sources. One response to this truth is to take songs home, either on your own or with your students. This could mean travelling to a hilltop to greet the sun with a sun song, or performing a nature song to a local woodland, or offering a water song to a river source. Or it could mean something more specifically local, like a traditional song that originated from a special place nearby (for this you can use the online resources of the ‘Full English’ song map of Britain from the English Folk Song and Dance Society, or the ‘Mainly Norfolk’ websites). I cannot exactly describe the feeling that this will create inside you and your students, but, for me, it roughly resembles joy.
INTERVIEW
JF - One of your first pilgrimages, to Hartlake Bridge, traced the source of a folk song. As a chorister and musicologist, how do you see the relationship of sound as a medium for reverence and transcendence in these ancient sites?
GH - Sound creates form, ‘in the beginning was the Word’, ‘Om’ etc. Most creation myths of the universe start with a sound. Even Tolkien’s Middle Earth was created by a choir of angels. Sound is also invisible and therefore seemingly spiritual, whilst being physical vibrations of matter too. By singing the correct songs with the most heartfelt resonance within a space, one can cast a spell over the space (and audience, if there is one), hopefully with the intention of increasing the peace, healing charge and holiness. Many of these ancient sites like cathedrals and prehistoric barrows and caves have interesting acoustic properties, leading to choral traditions that have formed over hundreds of years in these places. Forests too are also thought to sing back to certain tribes, e.g. the Aka Pygmies, in a kind of mutual musical conversation. Singing is a resonant way to interact with these spaces, as vibrating one’s own body creates a good mix of embodiment while tuning in with the divine. But instruments are good too, bringing other materials and their sounds into the space. Sound in general dissolves social boundaries in collective music-making and this can increase the feeling of transcendence. The long and short of it, is that the right song in the right place at the right time with the right heart will create reverence, transcendence and magic. It will change how we feel in these spaces and lift us to the heavens.-
JF - Elemental forces, dragon lines and fairie folk have been woven into the mythological tapestry of our lands. As ecological crisis restores people to nature and sacred space, how do you perceive the presence of land spirits or guardians, as an expression of the divine?
GH - Everything in nature needs to be looked after, and non-material beings are likely to be able to help faster and in more ingenious ways than more spatially-limited material beings. Land spirits are likely to live for longer due to their non-material basis, and therefore have a longer term view because that is what we need to get through this ecological crisis. Some elementals and fairie folk enchant the landscape and lift it with their sparkle. Guardians on the other hand have a depth of age and wisdom and seriousness of purpose that balances the sparkle with the gravitas of darkness. With dragon lines, we need to understand that the earth is connected by field-like networks of telluric currents, and these may function like earth’s nervous system. So, like neural nodes, there may be earth energy nodes at crossing points like Glastonbury, Avebury etc. The spirits of the land are what give it life.
JF - Can you speak to the power of intention and ritual, such as labyrinth walking and the use of talismans such as stones and shells, and their role in pilgrimage?
GH- Intention means to hold inward, so it is like charging up a magnetic core which then attracts experiences into one’s life that are in resonance with it. The intention - to bring something in to your life, let go of something or resolve a question - does not guarantee that change will happen in the manner you hope, but it makes it more likely. Either way, with the journey you will get what you need, or what you are ready for, and the intention can be more or less relevant for that, but it’s good to have one nonetheless. One method of charging up your intention is to hold a stone or shell in your hand and imbue it with your intention, and then walk with it, perhaps making contact with it to holy places along the way. Shells, stones and other talismans provide a tangible link with the pilgrimage as you are making it, and then become cherished souvenirs or touchstones to connect you with the experience in the future.Rituals are formal processes of behaviour that maintain similarity through time, sometimes hundreds or thousands of years. It is by doing the same action in the same way as past rituals that connects you with all those who have done it before you. Spirituality is largely to do with feeling connection with that which is bigger than you, and so traditional rituals are one way of achieving this connection. You can also invent personally meaningful rituals too and play with the meaning creation. Lighting candles, walking labyrinths, lying down and meditating on skies and ceilings, drinking wild water, asking trees questions, bathing in holy wells - these are example of pilgrimage rituals. Rituals tighten the field of pilgrimages around your intentions and remind both your conscious and subconscious of why it is you are there.-
JF - Do you see pilgrimage as primarily a solitary journey or one that is amplified by group consciousness?
GH - It is both solitary and collective, because we are always the only ones who can walk our own individual path, wherever we are. However, we are all connected to the influences on our life - our companions, strangers we meet, the wildlife and nature we encounter. Everything is always amplified by being in connection with more than ourselves, but we just have to decide how expansive our mind will be, and filter according to our capacity. But walking with others allows you to share memories, support each other emotionally, and it is also helpful if you are both mirrors to all the thoughts and feelings bouncing around inside each of you. Inevitably you need to accommodate each other’s needs when travelling with someone else, but this is necessary for the world we all want to live in! Large groups allow for lots of synchronistic connections to form, cultural exchange, getting lots of angles on the same experience, and the overall energy can feel stronger. Solitary journeys tend to allow more connection with strangers and local communities because you need them more. You also notice everything you walk past in more detail because you aren’t talking to someone else. For many, this is why they prefer the solitary journey, but for me personally I like travelling with a companion, and preferably a romantic one.
JF - What role might the act of pilgrimage play in ecopsychology and cultivating human and more-than-human communication?
GH - Ecopsychology is quite a new movement so pilgrimage, with its thousands of years of history and tradition, can bring it a lot of depth and roundness. The word pilgrimage has a magic of its own pointing to the questing narratives of delving into the woods, the mountains, the lakes and streams to expand our mind and find the holy grail etc. Walking through the land slowly inspires pilgrims into a state of awe and earthed connection. It connects us to our bodies, which is a huge part of healing our minds and planet. Our senses get heightened too and attune us ever closer to wildlife and Nature. Ecopsychology and land rituals of pilgrimage go well together (see above). The indigenous communities that you come across along the way can also bring one into a deeper relationship with the land. There is only one way to get to know a land and that is to move through it, preferably at walking speed.
Dr Guy Hayward is a pilgrim, bounder and singer with a PhD in Musicology. He is the founder of the British Pilgrimage Trust.
By Guy Hayward
Have we got the promotion of singing back to front? One often hears people say, in one form or other, ‘Singing is good for you!’. This is like being told green veg, exercise or sleep is good for you. It doesn’t necessarily mean you will do any of these things any more than you would have done otherwise. What I hope to do here is show how singing, particularly with others, is completely embedded in human culture, and also show what it is for, whether that is good for us or not. (Although, despite the above warning, I will share some of its benefits…).
If one looks at singing traditions from around the world, ranging from those of local indigenous communities to international religious traditions, two phenomena seem to be associated with almost all them. Firstly, the experience of feeling sameness with a group of people, even if some of those people are outsiders to the group, and, secondly, that the singing was in some way doing ‘work’ (in either a mental, physical, and/or spiritual sense).
With any collective singing individuals are part of a larger whole, and therefore any contributions they make have to merge and synchronise with the contributions of others. By coordinating their actions to be ‘in time’ with the actions of others in the group, individuals can experience an embodied resonance and familiarity with those other people. Communal singing can also direct the rise and fall of emotional response in a body of people, coordinating what the majority of people in a group feel at any one time.
This relates to most forms of worship in which there is some form of surrendering of one’s individuality to dwell within something larger than oneself, this being anything from a worshipping community to an ultimate transcendent unity. In the case of some forest-based communities, group singing is employed to communicate with their immediate natural environment, the spirit world, and the cosmos—sometimes in a polyphonic way to mirror the multiple voices of the forest, for example—or to make appeals to spirits in other dimensions to heal sickness, feed the hungry, and even to ensure survival. In my own experience of walking and singing in Britain (with the British Pilgrimage Trust), I have also discovered that by singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, songs make more sense – i.e. songs have a physical ‘home’.
After an extensive review of many scientific studies on the effects of choral singing, one group of researchers summarized their conclusions as follows:
· Choral singing engenders happiness and raised spirits, which counteract feelings of sadness and depression.
· Singing involves focused concentration, which reduces worrying.
· Singing involves deep controlled breathing, which counteracts anxiety.
· Choral singing offers a sense of social support and friendship, which ameliorate feelings of isolation and loneliness.
· Choral singing involves education and learning, which keeps the mind active and counteracts decline of cognitive functions. [i]
An individual can also sing or chant specifically to bring health and psychological benefits to themselves as individuals—both through practice on their own, and with others. As well as a positive sense of belonging to a community and transcendence, the individual benefits can be also physically healing, resulting from the sustained vibration of vocal sound through the body that happens when we extend the vowels of speech, which is basically what singing is.
The benefits can also be intimately personal- Darwin once remarked that “love is still the commonest theme of our songs” [ii]. Nothing changes, from Schubert song cycles to modern Top 40 chart hits. He also studied the role of ‘singing’ in animal sexual selection, the idea being that individuals can attract sexual partners through excellent singing. Indeed, a recent study showed that when adolescent females were added to an audience that boy choristers were performing to, the boys actually changed their individual sound quality to impress the girls, but at the cost of a good choral blend [iii]. How naughty!
Singing and chanting can also make people aware of the ineffable—in particular, when archaic, non-vernacular, and nonsense languages are being sung or chanted. Indeed, some traditions believe that the power of song cannot be separated from the words, even if they cannot be understood. The effects of the text of a song might come from a combination of participants gaining teachings from what the text means and the fact that communities can restate their collective beliefs, creeds, identities, and traditions through ritual texts. More generally it is likely that listeners respond subjectively both to the text and the experience, and may even feel a connection with all those that have chanted in this way before them, sometimes over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And in group chanting, because individuals have to coordinate their movements and sounds with each other means that on some level they are also always taken beyond their own subjective experience.
But not all group singing is good! Singing can sometimes be used for aggressive and defensive purposes. It would seem that singing has power to unify a group, thus increasing a group’s violent or defensive potential against other groups of people, or even animals (e.g. football chants, the Maori Haka, or the chanting at Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies). Therefore, singing is not an inherently good or bad practice—what makes it one or the other is the intention of those performing, or listening to, the singing.
In conclusion, singing has power. For me, this is what is most compelling about it. Not the fact it is good for us, although it clearly can be, but the fact it transcends being good or bad, because it is simply a very powerful tool. May we use it well.
Practical Suggestion: Sit down, close your eyes, and sing the vowel ‘Ah’ on any note you like, holding the note for as long as you can, and listen to it. Repeat three times. And then listen to the silence.
References:
[i] Clift , S., Hancox, G., Marrison, I., Hess, B.,Kreutz, G., and Stewart, d. (2010) Choral singing and psychological wellbeing: quantitative and qualitative findings from English choirs in a cross-national survey. Journal of Applied Arts and Health 1, 19-34.
[ii] Darwin, C. (1885) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd ed). Murray, London, p. 571.
[iii] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01559/full
I’ve been very lucky in the course that my life’s singing journey has taken. I first sang as a boy chorister in Bath Abbey, where I later sang as a teenage baritone, eventually ending up as a choral scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. I have sung opera, choral, early music, traditional British folk-song, have trained in classical singing at a conservatoire, and today make a living as a satirical jazz singer.
However, after completing my PhD, looking at the way that singing creates community in traditions worldwide, I made a discovery through my practical collaboration with wandering minstrel Will Parsons. By singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, I discovered that songs have a ‘home’.
Songs make more sense when sung in their natural habitat. Since discovering this secret I have explored this forgotten connection between song and place, and as a result I have experienced songs in ways that no conservatoire training or stage career could have made possible.
My first experience of this was on a ‘pilgrimage’ to a destination that marked the place of a tragedy, about which a song was written by the survivors. Will and I had walked 6 days to the place where 37 gypsy hop-pickers drowned in 1853 after a bridge over the River Medway collapsed. When we got to the monument commemorating those who had died, we met a couple who happened to be there for those few minutes only and who had not visited the monument previously. They were descendents of three of the victims, and they had never heard the song before. After singing the song to them, we realised that we had in a sense and, by accident, returned the song to its bloodline, not just its location.
Every song is from somewhere, either in terms of where it was composed or where inspiration first reached its creator. These are usually specific locations in the landscape. And the songs are also embedded in the historical context of that place, and by extension its community, and tell the stories of that local culture.
However, just because they are connected with a community, songs don’t always need an audience. Sometimes the place itself is the best audience you could wish for. In 2017 I met Isabella Tree who told me that Knepp Castle Estate had the last remaining turtle dove colony in Sussex. In response, I suggested to her that we take a folk song called ‘The Turtle Dove’ to sing it to the doves. So Will, our friend Sam Lee and I made a pilgrimage from Rusper pub in Sussex where Ralph Vaughan Williams first recorded this folk tune for posterity, and walked and sung it at different points along the 18-mile route to Knepp. Here we ‘re-wilded’ the song by singing it to our final audience, a single turtle dove in a tree which we could hear but not see. My love for the song had come from singing it as a solo with the choir in the stone chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, to a human audience, but non-human audiences are often the most appropriate for folk songs.
We also journeyed with another song, ‘Jerusalem’ by William Blake and Hubert Parry, which we sang in multiple locations over twelve days, from London - where Blake and Parry are buried - to West Sussex where both the words and music were first written. In this journey we realised that the practice of singing a song in many of its associated places can reveal different meanings of its lyrics. For example, ‘our clouded hills’ gained new meaning at the Temple of the Winds, a misty hilltop that day overlooking Sussex; ‘nor shall my sword sleep in my hand’ hit home standing by a War memorial; and ‘I shall not cease from mental fight’ made more sense singing it in Blake’s workshop in his Felpham cottage.
Whatever song you may sing in its ‘home’ - which means either its place of origin or, alternatively, any appropriate place or context - with each performance the precise moment of time and place, and combination of elements like weather, the light of day, where you are standing, what you can see, who you are with, which animals are around etc. increase the value of each ‘performance’ - it will never be quite the same again. Furthermore, all these factors work together to strengthen your memory of the song by giving it a rich context, and will inform your future performances.
To conclude, songs do not come from a singer’s throat. As singers, or teachers of song, we are agents of the songs we offer, but we are not their sources. One response to this truth is to take songs home, either on your own or with your students. This could mean travelling to a hilltop to greet the sun with a sun song, or performing a nature song to a local woodland, or offering a water song to a river source. Or it could mean something more specifically local, like a traditional song that originated from a special place nearby (for this you can use the online resources of the ‘Full English’ song map of Britain from the English Folk Song and Dance Society, or the ‘Mainly Norfolk’ websites). I cannot exactly describe the feeling that this will create inside you and your students, but, for me, it roughly resembles joy.
INTERVIEW
JF - One of your first pilgrimages, to Hartlake Bridge, traced the source of a folk song. As a chorister and musicologist, how do you see the relationship of sound as a medium for reverence and transcendence in these ancient sites?
GH - Sound creates form, ‘in the beginning was the Word’, ‘Om’ etc. Most creation myths of the universe start with a sound. Even Tolkien’s Middle Earth was created by a choir of angels. Sound is also invisible and therefore seemingly spiritual, whilst being physical vibrations of matter too. By singing the correct songs with the most heartfelt resonance within a space, one can cast a spell over the space (and audience, if there is one), hopefully with the intention of increasing the peace, healing charge and holiness. Many of these ancient sites like cathedrals and prehistoric barrows and caves have interesting acoustic properties, leading to choral traditions that have formed over hundreds of years in these places. Forests too are also thought to sing back to certain tribes, e.g. the Aka Pygmies, in a kind of mutual musical conversation. Singing is a resonant way to interact with these spaces, as vibrating one’s own body creates a good mix of embodiment while tuning in with the divine. But instruments are good too, bringing other materials and their sounds into the space. Sound in general dissolves social boundaries in collective music-making and this can increase the feeling of transcendence. The long and short of it, is that the right song in the right place at the right time with the right heart will create reverence, transcendence and magic. It will change how we feel in these spaces and lift us to the heavens.-
JF - Elemental forces, dragon lines and fairie folk have been woven into the mythological tapestry of our lands. As ecological crisis restores people to nature and sacred space, how do you perceive the presence of land spirits or guardians, as an expression of the divine?
GH - Everything in nature needs to be looked after, and non-material beings are likely to be able to help faster and in more ingenious ways than more spatially-limited material beings. Land spirits are likely to live for longer due to their non-material basis, and therefore have a longer term view because that is what we need to get through this ecological crisis. Some elementals and fairie folk enchant the landscape and lift it with their sparkle. Guardians on the other hand have a depth of age and wisdom and seriousness of purpose that balances the sparkle with the gravitas of darkness. With dragon lines, we need to understand that the earth is connected by field-like networks of telluric currents, and these may function like earth’s nervous system. So, like neural nodes, there may be earth energy nodes at crossing points like Glastonbury, Avebury etc. The spirits of the land are what give it life.
JF - Can you speak to the power of intention and ritual, such as labyrinth walking and the use of talismans such as stones and shells, and their role in pilgrimage?
GH- Intention means to hold inward, so it is like charging up a magnetic core which then attracts experiences into one’s life that are in resonance with it. The intention - to bring something in to your life, let go of something or resolve a question - does not guarantee that change will happen in the manner you hope, but it makes it more likely. Either way, with the journey you will get what you need, or what you are ready for, and the intention can be more or less relevant for that, but it’s good to have one nonetheless. One method of charging up your intention is to hold a stone or shell in your hand and imbue it with your intention, and then walk with it, perhaps making contact with it to holy places along the way. Shells, stones and other talismans provide a tangible link with the pilgrimage as you are making it, and then become cherished souvenirs or touchstones to connect you with the experience in the future.Rituals are formal processes of behaviour that maintain similarity through time, sometimes hundreds or thousands of years. It is by doing the same action in the same way as past rituals that connects you with all those who have done it before you. Spirituality is largely to do with feeling connection with that which is bigger than you, and so traditional rituals are one way of achieving this connection. You can also invent personally meaningful rituals too and play with the meaning creation. Lighting candles, walking labyrinths, lying down and meditating on skies and ceilings, drinking wild water, asking trees questions, bathing in holy wells - these are example of pilgrimage rituals. Rituals tighten the field of pilgrimages around your intentions and remind both your conscious and subconscious of why it is you are there.-
JF - Do you see pilgrimage as primarily a solitary journey or one that is amplified by group consciousness?
GH - It is both solitary and collective, because we are always the only ones who can walk our own individual path, wherever we are. However, we are all connected to the influences on our life - our companions, strangers we meet, the wildlife and nature we encounter. Everything is always amplified by being in connection with more than ourselves, but we just have to decide how expansive our mind will be, and filter according to our capacity. But walking with others allows you to share memories, support each other emotionally, and it is also helpful if you are both mirrors to all the thoughts and feelings bouncing around inside each of you. Inevitably you need to accommodate each other’s needs when travelling with someone else, but this is necessary for the world we all want to live in! Large groups allow for lots of synchronistic connections to form, cultural exchange, getting lots of angles on the same experience, and the overall energy can feel stronger. Solitary journeys tend to allow more connection with strangers and local communities because you need them more. You also notice everything you walk past in more detail because you aren’t talking to someone else. For many, this is why they prefer the solitary journey, but for me personally I like travelling with a companion, and preferably a romantic one.
JF - What role might the act of pilgrimage play in ecopsychology and cultivating human and more-than-human communication?
GH - Ecopsychology is quite a new movement so pilgrimage, with its thousands of years of history and tradition, can bring it a lot of depth and roundness. The word pilgrimage has a magic of its own pointing to the questing narratives of delving into the woods, the mountains, the lakes and streams to expand our mind and find the holy grail etc. Walking through the land slowly inspires pilgrims into a state of awe and earthed connection. It connects us to our bodies, which is a huge part of healing our minds and planet. Our senses get heightened too and attune us ever closer to wildlife and Nature. Ecopsychology and land rituals of pilgrimage go well together (see above). The indigenous communities that you come across along the way can also bring one into a deeper relationship with the land. There is only one way to get to know a land and that is to move through it, preferably at walking speed.
Have we got the promotion of singing back to front? One often hears people say, in one form or other, ‘Singing is good for you!’. This is like being told green veg, exercise or sleep is good for you. It doesn’t necessarily mean you will do any of these things any more than you would have done otherwise. What I hope to do here is show how singing, particularly with others, is completely embedded in human culture, and also show what it is for, whether that is good for us or not. (Although, despite the above warning, I will share some of its benefits…).
If one looks at singing traditions from around the world, ranging from those of local indigenous communities to international religious traditions, two phenomena seem to be associated with almost all them. Firstly, the experience of feeling sameness with a group of people, even if some of those people are outsiders to the group, and, secondly, that the singing was in some way doing ‘work’ (in either a mental, physical, and/or spiritual sense).
With any collective singing individuals are part of a larger whole, and therefore any contributions they make have to merge and synchronise with the contributions of others. By coordinating their actions to be ‘in time’ with the actions of others in the group, individuals can experience an embodied resonance and familiarity with those other people. Communal singing can also direct the rise and fall of emotional response in a body of people, coordinating what the majority of people in a group feel at any one time.
This relates to most forms of worship in which there is some form of surrendering of one’s individuality to dwell within something larger than oneself, this being anything from a worshipping community to an ultimate transcendent unity. In the case of some forest-based communities, group singing is employed to communicate with their immediate natural environment, the spirit world, and the cosmos—sometimes in a polyphonic way to mirror the multiple voices of the forest, for example—or to make appeals to spirits in other dimensions to heal sickness, feed the hungry, and even to ensure survival. In my own experience of walking and singing in Britain (with the British Pilgrimage Trust), I have also discovered that by singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, songs make more sense – i.e. songs have a physical ‘home’.
After an extensive review of many scientific studies on the effects of choral singing, one group of researchers summarized their conclusions as follows:
· Choral singing engenders happiness and raised spirits, which counteract feelings of sadness and depression.
· Singing involves focused concentration, which reduces worrying.
· Singing involves deep controlled breathing, which counteracts anxiety.
· Choral singing offers a sense of social support and friendship, which ameliorate feelings of isolation and loneliness.
· Choral singing involves education and learning, which keeps the mind active and counteracts decline of cognitive functions. [i]
An individual can also sing or chant specifically to bring health and psychological benefits to themselves as individuals—both through practice on their own, and with others. As well as a positive sense of belonging to a community and transcendence, the individual benefits can be also physically healing, resulting from the sustained vibration of vocal sound through the body that happens when we extend the vowels of speech, which is basically what singing is.
The benefits can also be intimately personal- Darwin once remarked that “love is still the commonest theme of our songs” [ii]. Nothing changes, from Schubert song cycles to modern Top 40 chart hits. He also studied the role of ‘singing’ in animal sexual selection, the idea being that individuals can attract sexual partners through excellent singing. Indeed, a recent study showed that when adolescent females were added to an audience that boy choristers were performing to, the boys actually changed their individual sound quality to impress the girls, but at the cost of a good choral blend [iii]. How naughty!
Singing and chanting can also make people aware of the ineffable—in particular, when archaic, non-vernacular, and nonsense languages are being sung or chanted. Indeed, some traditions believe that the power of song cannot be separated from the words, even if they cannot be understood. The effects of the text of a song might come from a combination of participants gaining teachings from what the text means and the fact that communities can restate their collective beliefs, creeds, identities, and traditions through ritual texts. More generally it is likely that listeners respond subjectively both to the text and the experience, and may even feel a connection with all those that have chanted in this way before them, sometimes over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And in group chanting, because individuals have to coordinate their movements and sounds with each other means that on some level they are also always taken beyond their own subjective experience.
But not all group singing is good! Singing can sometimes be used for aggressive and defensive purposes. It would seem that singing has power to unify a group, thus increasing a group’s violent or defensive potential against other groups of people, or even animals (e.g. football chants, the Maori Haka, or the chanting at Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies). Therefore, singing is not an inherently good or bad practice—what makes it one or the other is the intention of those performing, or listening to, the singing.
In conclusion, singing has power. For me, this is what is most compelling about it. Not the fact it is good for us, although it clearly can be, but the fact it transcends being good or bad, because it is simply a very powerful tool. May we use it well.
Practical Suggestion: Sit down, close your eyes, and sing the vowel ‘Ah’ on any note you like, holding the note for as long as you can, and listen to it. Repeat three times. And then listen to the silence.
References:
[i] Clift , S., Hancox, G., Marrison, I., Hess, B.,Kreutz, G., and Stewart, d. (2010) Choral singing and psychological wellbeing: quantitative and qualitative findings from English choirs in a cross-national survey. Journal of Applied Arts and Health 1, 19-34.
[ii] Darwin, C. (1885) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd ed). Murray, London, p. 571.
[iii] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01559/full
I’ve been very lucky in the course that my life’s singing journey has taken. I first sang as a boy chorister in Bath Abbey, where I later sang as a teenage baritone, eventually ending up as a choral scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. I have sung opera, choral, early music, traditional British folk-song, have trained in classical singing at a conservatoire, and today make a living as a satirical jazz singer.
However, after completing my PhD, looking at the way that singing creates community in traditions worldwide, I made a discovery through my practical collaboration with wandering minstrel Will Parsons. By singing traditional songs in the actual place with which they are associated, I discovered that songs have a ‘home’.
Songs make more sense when sung in their natural habitat. Since discovering this secret I have explored this forgotten connection between song and place, and as a result I have experienced songs in ways that no conservatoire training or stage career could have made possible.
My first experience of this was on a ‘pilgrimage’ to a destination that marked the place of a tragedy, about which a song was written by the survivors. Will and I had walked 6 days to the place where 37 gypsy hop-pickers drowned in 1853 after a bridge over the River Medway collapsed. When we got to the monument commemorating those who had died, we met a couple who happened to be there for those few minutes only and who had not visited the monument previously. They were descendents of three of the victims, and they had never heard the song before. After singing the song to them, we realised that we had in a sense and, by accident, returned the song to its bloodline, not just its location.
Every song is from somewhere, either in terms of where it was composed or where inspiration first reached its creator. These are usually specific locations in the landscape. And the songs are also embedded in the historical context of that place, and by extension its community, and tell the stories of that local culture.
However, just because they are connected with a community, songs don’t always need an audience. Sometimes the place itself is the best audience you could wish for. In 2017 I met Isabella Tree who told me that Knepp Castle Estate had the last remaining turtle dove colony in Sussex. In response, I suggested to her that we take a folk song called ‘The Turtle Dove’ to sing it to the doves. So Will, our friend Sam Lee and I made a pilgrimage from Rusper pub in Sussex where Ralph Vaughan Williams first recorded this folk tune for posterity, and walked and sung it at different points along the 18-mile route to Knepp. Here we ‘re-wilded’ the song by singing it to our final audience, a single turtle dove in a tree which we could hear but not see. My love for the song had come from singing it as a solo with the choir in the stone chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, to a human audience, but non-human audiences are often the most appropriate for folk songs.
We also journeyed with another song, ‘Jerusalem’ by William Blake and Hubert Parry, which we sang in multiple locations over twelve days, from London - where Blake and Parry are buried - to West Sussex where both the words and music were first written. In this journey we realised that the practice of singing a song in many of its associated places can reveal different meanings of its lyrics. For example, ‘our clouded hills’ gained new meaning at the Temple of the Winds, a misty hilltop that day overlooking Sussex; ‘nor shall my sword sleep in my hand’ hit home standing by a War memorial; and ‘I shall not cease from mental fight’ made more sense singing it in Blake’s workshop in his Felpham cottage.
Whatever song you may sing in its ‘home’ - which means either its place of origin or, alternatively, any appropriate place or context - with each performance the precise moment of time and place, and combination of elements like weather, the light of day, where you are standing, what you can see, who you are with, which animals are around etc. increase the value of each ‘performance’ - it will never be quite the same again. Furthermore, all these factors work together to strengthen your memory of the song by giving it a rich context, and will inform your future performances.
To conclude, songs do not come from a singer’s throat. As singers, or teachers of song, we are agents of the songs we offer, but we are not their sources. One response to this truth is to take songs home, either on your own or with your students. This could mean travelling to a hilltop to greet the sun with a sun song, or performing a nature song to a local woodland, or offering a water song to a river source. Or it could mean something more specifically local, like a traditional song that originated from a special place nearby (for this you can use the online resources of the ‘Full English’ song map of Britain from the English Folk Song and Dance Society, or the ‘Mainly Norfolk’ websites). I cannot exactly describe the feeling that this will create inside you and your students, but, for me, it roughly resembles joy.
INTERVIEW
JF - One of your first pilgrimages, to Hartlake Bridge, traced the source of a folk song. As a chorister and musicologist, how do you see the relationship of sound as a medium for reverence and transcendence in these ancient sites?
GH - Sound creates form, ‘in the beginning was the Word’, ‘Om’ etc. Most creation myths of the universe start with a sound. Even Tolkien’s Middle Earth was created by a choir of angels. Sound is also invisible and therefore seemingly spiritual, whilst being physical vibrations of matter too. By singing the correct songs with the most heartfelt resonance within a space, one can cast a spell over the space (and audience, if there is one), hopefully with the intention of increasing the peace, healing charge and holiness. Many of these ancient sites like cathedrals and prehistoric barrows and caves have interesting acoustic properties, leading to choral traditions that have formed over hundreds of years in these places. Forests too are also thought to sing back to certain tribes, e.g. the Aka Pygmies, in a kind of mutual musical conversation. Singing is a resonant way to interact with these spaces, as vibrating one’s own body creates a good mix of embodiment while tuning in with the divine. But instruments are good too, bringing other materials and their sounds into the space. Sound in general dissolves social boundaries in collective music-making and this can increase the feeling of transcendence. The long and short of it, is that the right song in the right place at the right time with the right heart will create reverence, transcendence and magic. It will change how we feel in these spaces and lift us to the heavens.-
JF - Elemental forces, dragon lines and fairie folk have been woven into the mythological tapestry of our lands. As ecological crisis restores people to nature and sacred space, how do you perceive the presence of land spirits or guardians, as an expression of the divine?
GH - Everything in nature needs to be looked after, and non-material beings are likely to be able to help faster and in more ingenious ways than more spatially-limited material beings. Land spirits are likely to live for longer due to their non-material basis, and therefore have a longer term view because that is what we need to get through this ecological crisis. Some elementals and fairie folk enchant the landscape and lift it with their sparkle. Guardians on the other hand have a depth of age and wisdom and seriousness of purpose that balances the sparkle with the gravitas of darkness. With dragon lines, we need to understand that the earth is connected by field-like networks of telluric currents, and these may function like earth’s nervous system. So, like neural nodes, there may be earth energy nodes at crossing points like Glastonbury, Avebury etc. The spirits of the land are what give it life.
JF - Can you speak to the power of intention and ritual, such as labyrinth walking and the use of talismans such as stones and shells, and their role in pilgrimage?
GH- Intention means to hold inward, so it is like charging up a magnetic core which then attracts experiences into one’s life that are in resonance with it. The intention - to bring something in to your life, let go of something or resolve a question - does not guarantee that change will happen in the manner you hope, but it makes it more likely. Either way, with the journey you will get what you need, or what you are ready for, and the intention can be more or less relevant for that, but it’s good to have one nonetheless. One method of charging up your intention is to hold a stone or shell in your hand and imbue it with your intention, and then walk with it, perhaps making contact with it to holy places along the way. Shells, stones and other talismans provide a tangible link with the pilgrimage as you are making it, and then become cherished souvenirs or touchstones to connect you with the experience in the future.Rituals are formal processes of behaviour that maintain similarity through time, sometimes hundreds or thousands of years. It is by doing the same action in the same way as past rituals that connects you with all those who have done it before you. Spirituality is largely to do with feeling connection with that which is bigger than you, and so traditional rituals are one way of achieving this connection. You can also invent personally meaningful rituals too and play with the meaning creation. Lighting candles, walking labyrinths, lying down and meditating on skies and ceilings, drinking wild water, asking trees questions, bathing in holy wells - these are example of pilgrimage rituals. Rituals tighten the field of pilgrimages around your intentions and remind both your conscious and subconscious of why it is you are there.-
JF - Do you see pilgrimage as primarily a solitary journey or one that is amplified by group consciousness?
GH - It is both solitary and collective, because we are always the only ones who can walk our own individual path, wherever we are. However, we are all connected to the influences on our life - our companions, strangers we meet, the wildlife and nature we encounter. Everything is always amplified by being in connection with more than ourselves, but we just have to decide how expansive our mind will be, and filter according to our capacity. But walking with others allows you to share memories, support each other emotionally, and it is also helpful if you are both mirrors to all the thoughts and feelings bouncing around inside each of you. Inevitably you need to accommodate each other’s needs when travelling with someone else, but this is necessary for the world we all want to live in! Large groups allow for lots of synchronistic connections to form, cultural exchange, getting lots of angles on the same experience, and the overall energy can feel stronger. Solitary journeys tend to allow more connection with strangers and local communities because you need them more. You also notice everything you walk past in more detail because you aren’t talking to someone else. For many, this is why they prefer the solitary journey, but for me personally I like travelling with a companion, and preferably a romantic one.
JF - What role might the act of pilgrimage play in ecopsychology and cultivating human and more-than-human communication?
GH - Ecopsychology is quite a new movement so pilgrimage, with its thousands of years of history and tradition, can bring it a lot of depth and roundness. The word pilgrimage has a magic of its own pointing to the questing narratives of delving into the woods, the mountains, the lakes and streams to expand our mind and find the holy grail etc. Walking through the land slowly inspires pilgrims into a state of awe and earthed connection. It connects us to our bodies, which is a huge part of healing our minds and planet. Our senses get heightened too and attune us ever closer to wildlife and Nature. Ecopsychology and land rituals of pilgrimage go well together (see above). The indigenous communities that you come across along the way can also bring one into a deeper relationship with the land. There is only one way to get to know a land and that is to move through it, preferably at walking speed.
Dr Guy Hayward is a pilgrim, bounder and singer with a PhD in Musicology. He is the founder of the British Pilgrimage Trust.