"He had learned from his mother two hundred songs of which he knew every word in every verse."
This is a line from the biography of an Irish-Canadian priest that I'm currently reading. He was born in 1871.
How many songs do you know? Is the memorization of songs and poems declining? Is this something we should care about?
I've been concerned about the loss of oral lore for a long time. I've made conscious efforts to memorize poems and other things, but they have to be kept fresh in my mind or they fade away pretty quickly.
Reciting either "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe or "Ulysses" by Tennyson was my party piece for a few years. I never got the impression that my audience enjoyed it that much, though they humoured me.
One St. Patrick's Day about five years ago, I stood in the same tram carriage as a crowd of rowdy young people (teens or twenties). They sang song after song, obviously off by heart-- I forget the exact songs but they were mostly Irish-themed rock songs. (I think there was one Saw Doctors song). I found this reassuring.
Reassuring.
ReplyDeleteThey'll never outdo Zosimus
To this day there are far more church hymns than rock songs that I know by heart, despite the fact that grew up listening to rock six days a week and hymns only on Sundays. The difference of course is that we had to sing the hymns, without the help of a recorded singer, and while looking at the printed lyrics and sheet music in a hymnal.
ReplyDeleteSinging along with a record isn't the same thing at all, since the song goes on with or without you. You sing the bits you know, let the record do the rest, and thus never really practice singing "every word in every verse."
That's a very good point, and I'm very glad to hear you are doing your bit to keep oral culture alive.
DeleteI think choral singing is beautiful, and especially beautiful when it's NOT by a professional or practiced choir-- when it's just an ordinary group of people singing, not particularly in time and not particularly on note. Sometimes I stop singing along with a church hymn just to listen to it.