Michael White says if we can finally get Britain’s children singing, it might just filter upwards and no longer be ignored.
As you recover from Black Friday, Cyber Monday and whatever else reduces Christmas to a frenzied retail opportunity, here’s an important question for this time of year. What’s calming, therapeutic, healthier than drugs, could well prolong your life, and might assist you in the life to come (an optional advantage that depends on where and why you do it)? Answer: singing in a choir.
It’s not a new discovery: there are endless D Phil dissertations on the subject, libraries of research, and celebrity endorsements that predate Gareth Malone by several centuries. Martin Luther, I recall, had things to say about it. So did St Augustine, and whoever wrote the Psalms.
But people have short memories. So every time another academic paper publishes, it gets into the news – which was what happened this week when Oxford Brookes University came up with the latest “singing is good for you” revelation.
In fairness, there was a specific angle to this latest study, which compared the collective experience of choral singing to that of taking part in team sports. Choirs apparently win hands down, because there’s “a stronger sense of being part of a meaningful group”, related to “the synchronicity of moving and breathing with other people”. And as someone who since childhood has used singing as a refuge from the sports field, I take no issue with that.
As you recover from Black Friday, Cyber Monday and whatever else reduces Christmas to a frenzied retail opportunity, here’s an important question for this time of year. What’s calming, therapeutic, healthier than drugs, could well prolong your life, and might assist you in the life to come (an optional advantage that depends on where and why you do it)? Answer: singing in a choir.
It’s not a new discovery: there are endless D Phil dissertations on the subject, libraries of research, and celebrity endorsements that predate Gareth Malone by several centuries. Martin Luther, I recall, had things to say about it. So did St Augustine, and whoever wrote the Psalms.
But people have short memories. So every time another academic paper publishes, it gets into the news – which was what happened this week when Oxford Brookes University came up with the latest “singing is good for you” revelation.
In fairness, there was a specific angle to this latest study, which compared the collective experience of choral singing to that of taking part in team sports. Choirs apparently win hands down, because there’s “a stronger sense of being part of a meaningful group”, related to “the synchronicity of moving and breathing with other people”. And as someone who since childhood has used singing as a refuge from the sports field, I take no issue with that.