The essay below was written before the horrific events of the last days, the mass shootings at Brown University and Bondi Beach, the stabbing of a righteous couple. I wondered this morning, if it would be frivolous to post it. But it ends with thoughts of having to create light when there is none, reminders of making a world shine during difficult circumstances. I think that core message is what we need. So here goes….

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Hah! The universe tells me to think, not mope.

I had barely started to whine about the fact that I miss live singing, both as a participant and a listener, when, within 24 hours, interesting pieces about singing popped up in my news feed, in publications as diverse as The Guardian, Nature and High Country News.

It began with listening to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, familiar from childhood. In retrospect, it seems as if we sang not just in this season but all the time in the 50s and 60s – in class rooms, at services, at demonstrations, at parties, on school field trips in the busses, and eventually at live performances. Belting out the newest hits from the Beatles or the Kinks, Procul Harum, the Stones, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Traffic, Jonny Halliday and Gilbert Bécaud, you name it. Informed by listening to Radio Caroline or Radio Luxembourg under the covers on contraband tiny transistor radios, strictly prohibited in my boarding school. No matter how much I loathed being stashed there, when we sang, a sense of community took over.

(Portraits today of people of that – my – generation. I always wonder what someone’s musical taste might be, why I stereotype many of them as (Grateful)Deadheads, and if I’ll ever find a match to my idiosyncratic musical preferences.)

Later I joined choirs, until chemo wrecked my voice; then regularly attended choral concerts, until the Covid pandemic shut down my ability to be in close proximity to large crowds. These days what goes for singing is croaking along to my Bandcamp collection in the privacy of my car on solo rides to my nature outings. Oh well. Could be worse.

I was squarely reminded of that, when I read about people who have made it their business to sing to people on their deathbeds. The assumption is that it calms the dying, and allows them to cross the threshold, accompanied by soft, slow melodies and harmonies sung by up to 4 practiced people who travel to homes and hospices. Importantly, they only sing their own compositions, assuming that more familiar tunes would “keep” you from letting go, clinging to or (re)living the past. Hmmm.

I am firmly convinced that we have no agency in the choice of timing our exit, as I have discussed previously, and so nothing we do or don’t do, will have any influence. But would a music lover feel more comfortable with simplistic, if sweet tunes by these threshold choirs, than the familiar sounds of, say, a Mahler or Schubert song cycle? For that matter, would one feel comfortable with strangers in the room (though still better than the traveling harpists so prevalent in local hospitals…)? You can read all about the choirs here.

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As it turns out, not surprisingly, hard times, punctuated by traumatic events like 9/11 or the pandemic, have an impact on songs. Interesting research, recently published in Nature, analyzed 50 years of song development (1973 – 2023) for the lyrics of songs on the US Hot 100 Billboards. (Heads up for sampling bias: certain genres are not reflected in these charts, from rap to early punk, which was censured, just think Ramones or Sex Pistols. Reggae and Latin music was extremely popular but did not make it into these charts since at the time based in club culture.)

But for the general popular music we see clear trends: across time, themes of stress and negativity increased, while simultaneously the lyrics got less and less complex. Across the same 50 years, rates of depression and anxiety increased, as did the negative tone in the media and fiction books, amidst recent drops in IQ and PISA test scores.

Preferences in music consumption could mirror what is going on in the surrounding culture and one can speculate about what emotional regulation we choose in response to what is happening around us. We can select music that aligns with our current affective state (stressed), or we can listen to music that brings us closer to a goal state (happy) – in short, we can regulate our moods by choosing particular musical coping mechanisms. The research here was interested if that happens in ways we can predict for society as a whole, particularly during periods of traumatic events.

As it turns out the prevalent mood congruent trends were NOT amplified during 9/11 or Covid; in other words, people did not listen more to upsetting music when they felt particularly frightened. If anything, people chose to listen to more positive music instead, modulating their mood perhaps in ways that allowed them to make it through these hard times.

The complexity of lyrics – or absence thereof – is currently affected by yet another variable: the arrival of AI on the scene. Here is Timothy Snyder’s description of the AI renditions of classic Christmas songs, musical score intact, lyrics changed, as experienced in a coffee shop just a few days ago. In his inimitable prose:

My guess would be that someone, somewhere, entered an instruction to generate winter and Christmas songs that avoided “controversial” subjects such as divine and human love. And so we get mush. In a reverse sublimation, the sacred becomes slop. …

The carols bear a message about love, one that that no machine will understand, and that those who profit from the machine perhaps do not want us to understand. Love begins humbly, takes risks, recognizes the other, ends in pain, returns as song. And begins humbly again.

As always, his essay is worth a quick read.

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Let’s end on a more positive note, though, keying in on A or C major (preferred keys by Earth, Wind and Fire, one of my favorites, as it turns out.)

I found the poem below about singing songs that are also centered on love, incredibly perceptive as well as motivating. The poet Valencia Robin was a recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, her poems have appeared in a wide-range of journals, anthologies and podcasts including The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Poetry Daily. Here she cites a quite familiar line from The Essential Earth Wind and Fire, album 2002, track 9 All About Love, a song that inspired the poem:

“And if there ain’t no beauty, you gotta make some beauty,” 

Have Mercy,

Listen to me Y’all……

Ars Poetica

I woke up singing
my favorite song as a kid 
and I mean, really singing, 
catching myself all morning, 
asking myself what it means, 
a reminder perhaps
that we can be strange
— we wake, we sing, 
we wonder why we’re singing, 
we realize how seldom we have a song 
in us anymore, remember how we 
used to play/be Aretha and Anita 
or Earth, Wind and Fire — Maurice 
bringing it, sending us on one of the few oldies 
where the words ‘right on’ don’t sound silly,
standing in the middle of the room 
giving our all to the olive-green sofa
and wood paneling, mama at work
— we even had his little laugh down
and when’s the last time we believed 
what we were saying so completely, 
all that 70’s positivity, all that gospel
pretending to be the devil’s music
— and is that what ruined us, why we’re so bad 
at real life — practically screaming the last line, 
And if there ain’t no beauty, you gotta make some beauty, 
deciding without even knowing we’d decided 
that that — Lord help us — was the dream.

by Valencia Robin.

It’s still the dream. And about time, that poems titled Ars Poetica don’t just give a nod to Horace (he wrote the very first poem with that title about the craft of writing poetry), but acknowledge the likes of Maurice White whose poetic lyrics motivated and uplifted generations.

And now excuse me while I slink off to hum this and grab the camera to make some beauty out of a dreary winter landscape. You can come along, if you sing!