Singing for Our Lives

Campaign Choirs Writing Collective

Description

The Campaign Choirs Network is a loose affiliation of like-minded choirs across the UK sharing a belief in a better world for all and dedicated to taking action by singing about it; the Campaign Choirs Writing Collective is a part of that network.

The book intends to inspire the reader to engage with this world: to find out more, to join a choir in their community, to enlist their local street choir to support campaigns for social change and, more generally, to mobilize artistic creativity in progressive social movements.

It is an introduction to street choirs and their history, exploring origins in and connections with other social movements, for example the Workers Education Association, the Clarion movement, Big Flame and the Social Forum movement. The book identifies the political nodes where choir histories intersect, notably Greenham Common, the Miners’ Strike, anti-apartheid and Palestinian struggles. The title of the book is taken from a song by the respected American musician and activist Holly Near, and is popular in the repertoire of many street choirs. Exploring the role of street choirs in political culture, Singing For Our Lives introduces this neglected world to a wider public, including activists and academics.

Signing for Our Lives also elaborates the personal stories and experiences of people who participate in street choirs, and the unique social practices created within them. The book tells the important, if often overlooked, story of how making music can contribute to non-violent, just and sustainable social transitions.

www.singing4ourlives.net/about.html 

Sujets

• Styles
• Genres
• Social History
• HISTORY
• MUSIC
• Multiple signal classification
• Expressive therapy
• Social movement
• Singing
• Choir
• Cultural Studies
• Choral

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 17 juillet 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910849293
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

Singing for our lives

“Choirs can be an incredible force for telling the stories of our times, the stories of the world around us. This book rightly champions those choirs who take their singing out of those warm rehearsal rooms and onto the streets.” Boff Whalley, Chumbawamba and founder of the Commoners Choir.
“This is a gem of a book. If you’re not actually listening to – or singing with – the harmonious voices of these rebels, singing truth to power, then reading their testimonies of the highs, lows and disc(h)ordant moments of the street choir is surely the next best thing.” David Harvie, University of Leicester, S¡ng Meanwood and Commoners Choir.
“This book gives a unique opportunity to read about the growth of political choirs from as far back as the early 40s to their being a widespread phenomenon today.” Frankie Armstrong, founder of the Natural Voice Network.
SINGING FOR OUR LIVES: STORIES FROM THE STREET CHOIRS
© Campaign Choirs Writing Collective 2018
The right of Campaign Choirs Writing Collective to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ePub ISBN-13: 978-1-910849-29-3
ISBN-10: 1910849118
Cover design and typeset by Eva Megias
http://evamegias.com
Singing for Our Lives: Stories from the Street Choirs/ Campaign Choirs Writing Collective
1. Music 2. Social Movements 3. Community Heritage 4. Social History
5. Politics 6. Cultural Studies
First published in 2018 by HammerOn Press
Bristol, England
https://www.hammeronpress.net
HammerOn Press is an imprint of Intellect
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
www.intellectbooks.com
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We, the Campaign Choirs Writing Collective, have been lucky enough – and, frankly, have worked more than hard enough! - to obtain funding from the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust and the Sharing Heritage programme of the Heritage Lottery Fund. Both partners have understood the reach of our oral history project, which extends beyond the more usual boundaries of the local or regional to covering three nations and even casting its eye internationally to trace musical, political and communal connections. Apart from our funders, we have also been fortunate in getting sustained academic support from Gavin Brown at the University of Leicester. Gavin was able to extend his support to doing – we hope you’ll agree – a great job in editing this volume. Pete North at the University of Liverpool also supported the project, particularly through some daunting early days. Resisting the temptation to ‘go off on one’ about the neoliberalisation of the university, suffice to say here that there is not much in this project – certainly no cash and probably no kudos from ‘management’ – that benefits our academic supporters. What there is, we sincerely hope, are the satisfactions of working in solidarity with grassroots activists in a vibrant social movement. Our supporters have helped us to offer knowledges that might otherwise have been lost to an audience that includes activists and academics as well as a wider public. Next, thanks to our supportive publisher, HammerOn, especially to D-M and cover artist Eva Megias. We also thank Holly Near for generously letting us borrow her song title ‘Singing for Our Lives’. Not to duck a cliché, last but not least , we are delighted to acknowledge the support we have had from the Campaign Choirs Network, particularly those choirs who participated directly in the research, made us so welcome, let us join in their singing, and shared their stories. These choirs put themselves out to accommodate our necessarily intense interview schedules, confined as we were by costs. We are sorry not to have been able to speak with all the choirs in our Network, but we do still want to work with you to get more of your stories heard. Meanwhile, thanks again to all funders, supporters, participants, friends and comrades. And thank you for reading.
Introduction
‘Inspired by life and love’
Chapter 1
The warm-up
Chapter 2
Finding our notes
Chapter 3
Bursting into song
Chapter 4
Harmonising
Chapter 5
Imagining the future
Chapter 6
‘Street choirs 2.0’
Bibliography
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Index
INTRODUCTION
‘INSPIRED BY LIFE AND LOVE’
I think music goes straight to the soul, and it makes your body literally move, that’s changed – you get goose-bumps, you feel you want to dance, you want to scream: like, music does change people in a very literal way. It makes sense that it can move people to create other kinds of movements. 1
If you can’t necessarily judge this book by its (we think) terrific cover, at least we’re confident that it will live up to its sub-title and so bring you ‘stories from the street choirs’. The stories we present are gleaned from oral history interviews with forty-two members of eleven contemporary street choirs from towns and cities across Wales, Scotland and England, namely Aberystwyth, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leicester, Liverpool, London and Sheffield. We ‘sampled’ these street choirs from a much greater number that we know about. The Campaign Choirs Network, for instance, has 43 street choirs signed up and active, while the annual Street Choirs Festival has attracted more than 100 different choirs over the last ten years. In Chapter 1 we’ll describe the Campaign Choirs Network and the Street Choirs Festival in some detail. Later, we’ll draw on our research to explain more fully how their members define a ‘street choir’ for themselves. For the moment, let’s say that a street choir is a group of people singing together in a public space, the street. But these are also campaigning choirs: they have something to say, sentiments to share through song. The stories of members of these choirs relate to why and how they have brought music and politics together in their lives. From there, we are especially interested in what they are singing for: the sort of world they want to see, both in their individual heres and nows and in the near and far-flung futures of others.
Exploring their role in political culture, this book, Singing For Our Lives (S4OL), aims to introduce the neglected world of street choirs to a wider public. At the time of writing, if you Googled 2 ‘street choirs definition’, nothing about the grassroots movement that we are talking about comes up except – low down the listing – an article we wrote ourselves for the political magazine Red Pepper. 3 We hope to inspire the reader to engage with this neglected world: to find out more about street choirs, to join a choir in their community, to enlist their local street choir to support campaigns for social change and, more generally, to mobilise artistic creativity in progressive social movements. We ask, who are the people who assemble together in street choirs? What are their common and uncommon musical and political backgrounds? Why do they choose singing as a means of political expression? What songs are street choirs singing? Who wrote them? And who’s writing new ones?
We don’t claim that the people we interview from a particular choir represent the views of that choir. And we certainly don’t argue that, taken together, our interviewees represent the Campaign Choirs Network or the wider constituency of street choirs in the UK. Those disclaimers made, we do believe that the interviews provide us with a platform from which to make some useful, if always tentative, observations. So, after we have thoroughly immersed ourselves in people’s stories, we will dare to surface and suggest how street choirs might develop their individual and collective potentials in ways that take into account the everyday realities, hopes and dreams of their members. Holding a mirror to those suggestions, we’ll consider why new people would want to join a street choir, especially people who think they can’t sing, as well as those alienated from, despairing of, or apathetic about politics. Ultimately, S4OL will seek to understand something about how making political music together can contribute to non-violent, just and sustainable social transitions.
By the way, the sub-title of this section, ‘inspired by life and love’, is a line from Billy Bragg’s version of ‘The Internationale’, which is the adopted anthem of the annual Street Choirs Festival in Britain. Eugène Pottier, a former member of the Paris Commune, the radical government of France for a few near legendary months in 1871, wrote the original French words of ‘The Internationale’ in that year. His lyrics were set to music in 1888 by Pierre Chrétien De Geyter, a Belgian socialist, and the song has been a standard of socialist movements across the world ever since. One of the choirs that we interviewed, Côr Cochion Caerdydd, Cardiff Reds Choir, pride themselves in members singing the Internationale in up to five different languages simultaneously! Billy Bragg released his version of the song on an eponymous album in 1990. We think his verse two, in particular, speaks to and says something about the street choirs movement in today’s Britain:
Let no one build walls to divide us
Walls of hatred nor walls of stone
Come greet the dawn and stand beside us
We’ll live together or we’ll die alone
In our world poisoned by exploitation
Those who have taken now they must give
And end the vanity of nations
We’ve but one earth on which to live 4
Of course, given their diverse political characters, we would also expect street choirs to contest and debate these lyrics: what, for instance, would ‘ending the vanity of nations’ mean? Throughout the book we’ll weave in some song titles and lyrics that can contribute