Someone made it up: spontaneous song and the reclaiming of folklore

What if we recognised that the songs we now call folklore from any tradition worldwide have most likely come to life the same way: someone, some-body (a human, at a particular time and place on Earth) made them up. I heard my hero Bobby McFerrin offer a delightfully simple definition of vocal improvisation: "making things up."

This is not to argue against composition, but perhaps to invite a review of our ideas about authorship, and the separation between 'improvisation' and 'composition' in the current way we make music, share it and reflect about it.

Decolonising voice?

It is also the starting point for an inquiry that I keep returning to: can spontaneous collective singing be a technology of the self, as well as a technology of community? A way to reclaim and decolonise our voices and our imaginations from structures we carry inside us, often without knowing it.

In terms of voice, it means for me asking what my musical education within the Western European canon taught us was acceptable: what counts as 'good singing', what counts as singing at all, what counts as music, even our ideas of beauty and artistry. Nina Eidsheim's work on the racial politics of vocal timbre put language to something I'd felt but couldn't quite name: how judgments we take to be purely musical (what makes a voice "good," "trained," "in tune") are cultural and often racialised constructs.

Virginie Magnat's writing inspires me to rethink 'voicework' and cultivate instead a vocality that is personal, contingent, and expressive, singular to who is singing and the moment they're singing in. This lives in the grain of the voice: something lived, felt rather than described. Something ever changing, that only exists in relationship with everything around it, the body producing it, the intention, the space, the listeners, the moment itself.

In terms of our imagination, the same inquiry about what's musical, what's 'interesting' or 'beautiful'? can be asked about the melodies, the ideas that we have, and how we bring them to life in the moment and develop them from there.

I'm interested in finding in myself, and helping others find, a way into more personal, embodied sound and intuitive creativity: discovering all the voices that live within, informed by our ancestrality (both literal and reimagined). Singing and making music closer to our essence, a truer way of expressing and sharing our aliveness through voice and music.

Reclaiming folklore

If we broaden the lens digging into the origin of any music we might now call folkloric: it started from an improvisational seed. The word folklore itself can be controversial as it was a creation of modern anthropology: a way to define different forms of traditional 'musicing' (from Christopher Small: a verb meaning "to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance"), box them, and sometimes classify them as inferior within a Eurocentric genealogy of music.

I want to invite a reclaiming of the term folklore, and of what it holds: folk-lore = the wisdom of the folk, the collective, alive in communities and in the cellular memory of every human being.

Understanding song-making as improvisational doesn't deny the thought and work put into composition, or acknowledging composers: is an invitation to honour the living, breathing process that music comes from, the improvisational, communal weave of human and non-human knowing, and value the process of co-creating alongside other forms of life.

What the music remembers

Spontaneous singing as reimagining, reclaiming, and re-enacting. The emergence of a music that comes from a felt sense in a human being, a relationship with nature, a desire to express and communicate something.

And then how that music can develop collectively: be remembered by other humans, resounded, spread, shared, transformed in community and by community, through the passing of time, through circulation and migration.

I love the anonymity of oral tradition and folklore: music that is simply part of the life of a community, anonymous in the sense that it belongs to everyone rather than someone.

This connects with what researchers like Ellen Dissanayake and Robin Dunbar have proposed: that making music together, well before it becomes "music" in any formal sense, may be one of the oldest ways humans bonded as groups, what he calls vocal grooming, a capacity for cohesion as much as for expression. The sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls this kind of alive, reciprocal relationship with the world "resonance," and contrasts it with the muted, instrumental relationship modern life often leaves us with.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira's writing describes modernity's dis-ease stemming from the root of modernity as a project: built on separating ourselves from the rest of life, and on valuing the finished product over the living processes that made it.

Singing together improvisationally, primarily a felt experience, a form of sharing, rather than a performance 'for' someone, might be one direct route back into resonance and a deeper sense of belonging. Encouraging the possibility of making music and expressing ourselves, to communicate something through it, to respond to others, to landscape and life cycles and circumstance, to celebrate, to grieve, to pray, and so much more.

Before language

Spontaneous singing also connects to research I've been drawn to that suggests this isn't just a poetic idea. Steven Mithen's work on the origins of music and language argues that our ancestors communicated through something musical (holistic, rhythmic, emotional) long before language existed, and certainly long before 'music' became a thing.

Iain McGilchrist's writing on the divided brain adds another layer: I wonder if spontaneous singing helps ignite the right hemisphere, our connected, all-encompassing way of relating to the world, while singing that has been unconsciously colonised, drilled into fixed rules and correct forms, is led predominantly by the left hemisphere, the part of us that narrows, categorises, and judges?

Spontaneous singing, its constant, ever-flowing invitation to voice feeling through invented (not excluding actual) language, without the constraint of literal meaning, may be one way to encourage and integrate our body's wisdom, all the forms of intelligence and sensitivity available within us beyond linear thought.

From performing to sharing

On a personal level, this shift has completely transformed the way I make music and sing. For many years I performed "repertoire" (fixed songs, arranged and rehearsed) and then took a hiatus of around five years to research spontaneous singing and collective improvisational practices instead. I recently came back to do a gig, and had a completely different experience of myself: the interplay with the band, with the listeners, felt much closer to sharing than to performing. I sang the same songs with a renewed freedom, feeling more resourced, more open, less self-critical.

Which leaves me with an open question : how might practising vocal improvisation, both individually and collectively, change the way we use our voices and make music that isn't necessarily improvisational?