The Singing Village: a multilayered metaphor

A ‘place’ for the imagination, and a way to be in community, reimagining ancestral ways. An alchemy of skills and co-operation, a simultaneity of many happenings. Singing within living soundscapes.

I began using the metaphor of a singing village to invite participants to imagine, individually and collectively, what it was like to make music when music was not a ‘thing’ but an integral part of daily life and ritual.

For how long, across human history, might this have been the case? How might humans have sung together, and why? What was it like to ‘sing’ when there were most likely no singing teachers, no famous vocal artists, and no idea of what a ‘good voice’ was?

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There are countless ‘singing villages’ across the planet and throughout human history, each one different and unique, with its own life, language and music. Real and imagined. Forgotten and remembered.

In my experience, this invitation helps people to broaden their perspective and ease the huge pressures our culture places on singing. It softens judgement of oneself and of others. It gives people space to reclaim everyone’s right to express, share and communicate through the sound of their voice, wherever they are coming from musically and vocally, just as they are.

The singing village process is a concrete practice that grew out of these reflections: a collective improvisational immersion. Each session usually lasts about an hour and invites a flow of sound, movement and symbolic use of space, recreating an imaginary village with different spots: a place to dance, a place to pray, a place to rest, a place to work… For that hour, people commit to engaging with each other entirely without words.

Over time, working with groups of improvisers, I have found that the metaphor has many other ramifications.

Shared skills in the village

A village depends on an alchemy of different skills, all of them essential to the community’s thriving: the cooks, the hunters, the builders, the healers… This helps people to consider what their own strengths are, and how they bring them to the community.

In vocal improvisation, it also encourages people to value skills beyond the conventional musical ones, such as being a creative initiator, a daring soloist, or having the strongest voice.

For example, recognising depth, humour, presence and stillness as vital contributions can dissolve any imagined hierarchy and help everyone to find their place in the whole as their unique, brilliant selves.

This is in no way meant to discourage rich musical creation, people’s fundamental wish to make and share ‘beautiful music’, or even the pursuit of musical and artistic excellence. The aim is to place these in a wider context and to include rather than segregate. It also puts the more musically skilled in service of the whole, not on a pedestal.

Most importantly, a moment of spontaneous collective singing becomes more than the sum of each individual’s music-making roles (generators of ideas, supporters, bringers of the ‘new’…). It creates an ecology in which every skill is valued, and everyone can take part and stay in relationship.

The songs of humanity

The singing village pedagogical approach encourages people to reconnect with what I call the archetypal songs of humanity. Each time I invite people to travel in their imagination far back to the time of our ancestors and ask them why humans sang, a long list emerges:

to put the babies to sleep

to keep warm at night

to accompany someone ill or dying

to grieve someone who has passed

to welcome a newcomer or a newborn

to say farewell

to celebrate a good harvest

to pass the time when bored

to accompany a repetitive task

because a bird sang and someone responded

to pray for rain, or sunshine

to express gratitude

to give courage

to warn of danger

to mark the seasons and life transitions

to invoke spirits

to keep the stories alive

And many more…

Used as prompts for improvisational pieces, these become useful tools for giving shape and purpose to spontaneous music. They give the group a shared intention as a starting point, which helps to shape and organise a collective vocal improvisation. They also bring in feeling and embodiment, so that these can inform the music-making process.

Singing within soundscapes

In the Western world, we often forget that singing has always happened within a landscape and a simultaneity of happenings, and we deny ourselves this experience. This forgetting has consequences: it can heighten self-consciousness and make collective singing feel very exposing.

I invite people to remember that for millennia humans sang within soundscapes, and sometimes noise, both human and non-human. Singing in the artificial setting of total silence (a recording studio, a practice room or a venue) is very new for our nervous system, and it is much easier to relax, free ourselves and sing more spaciously when there is a soundscape.

This seems true even when the soundscape includes the sometimes overwhelming simultaneity of many voices coexisting. In the ‘village’, for example, some elders might be singing a prayer together while the children play and shout, people sing a song to help carry heavy wood uphill, and someone tries to put a baby to sleep with a lullaby.

Beyond the individual voice

The singing village metaphor also helps people to re-enact the anonymity of a song that emerges spontaneously in the village and grows into a collective moment. Of course, someone always starts a song, but it doesn’t matter who. Being in the village takes the weight off who originated the music and allows everyone to join in if they feel moved to.

For example, if someone is singing an element of the soundscape, such as the sound of an insect,, the singing village metaphor allows them not to think of their sound as ‘less than’ the ‘human’ voice that began the song. Instead, they can sense that the song, in that moment, wouldn’t be the same without that insect ringing in the air.

Making ‘the human who creates music’ less central and considering the whole context, can not only stop individuals from tipping into self-assertion or self-doubt, but also shift the prevailing human-centred perspective and the separation that it can bring.

It allows everyone to enjoy being on the planet and to feel part of it, interwoven with the land and the landscape.