Adoro Te Devote
All Glory, Laud and Honor
(edited to make post shorter)
The Church’s One Foundation
To Jesus Christ, Our Sovereign King
I know what the next post will be: “we sing some of these songs at our parish and men still do not sing.” My point is most men gave up a long time ago, and your not going to get them to start singing again by simply sprinkling in a few majestic hymns. ALL the hymns need to be fitting, and even then it will take a while, and not even then will all the men sing.
Sarabande:* “I think this phenomenon is less about a feminisation and more about certain societies today.”* This is true, but I think the men in some protestant churches and even more so in the eastern rite still sing.
Yes, we do sing these hymns in our parish, along with the more comtemporary hymns (written mainly in 1970s, so they’re technically “oldies”.) We are fortunate to have a nice mix of hymns at our Masses. I like both styles.
I honestly don’t think it would matter what hymns were sung in most parishes or Protestant churches for that matter.
In the U.S., singing corporately is simply not done anymore except by choirs and ensembles.
I believe this is the main reason people don’t sing in church: I think we have become a musically ignorant nation of spectators who prefer to experience our music by watching the professionals do it instead of making music ourselves.
I honestly don’t think it has anything to do with “feminine” music. In the past, many of the old songs were very “effeminate,” e.g., When You And I Were Young, Maggie"–an old ballad with a very sweetly sentimental message and lilting melody. Yet, men sang it. It’s in the old songbooks.
Also, the old hymn, In The Garden, is one of The Most Popular Protestant hymns ever written. When I play piano for groups of older people, inevitably I am asked to play this hymn. I taught it to my daughters when they were very young so they could sing it whenever old people requested it. It’s about a garden, and the melody is a waltz. It’s so sweet and dainty that you should hold your little fingers aloft when you sing it! Yet, MEN love it! Almost every male in my family requested it for their funerals.
So I don’t think it’s “feminine music” that discourages men (and women and children) from singing. I think it’s because in the U.S., singing together is just weird to most people.
Corporate singing has gone the way of croquet, afternoon tea, barn dances, minstrel shows, circus parades, freak shows, and other recreational activities that were once wildly popular in the U.S., but no longer are done except in isolated social settings.
Yes, there are people who still play croquet. There are still families in which afternoon tea is a ritual–my family was one until my grandmother died. There are families who remodel their barns into rec halls and host the church youth group or the church Senior Citizen group. I don’t think minstrel shows or freak shows would be acceptable anywhere in the U.S. right now, but there are occasionally circus parades in circus towns like Baraboo, Wisconsin. .
But for the most part, no one does these things. They’re old fashioned and quaint.
Same for singing with others. I’m not sure if kids even sing “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” on long bus rides anymore. (When my kids were members of an elite synchronized skating team, and rode on buses to competitions, the skater played “Mafia” on the bus–a guess the murderer logic game. They never sang together.)
In another thread, I wrote a post detailing how in the past, men, women, and children in the U.S. sang together for recreation. If you read through the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, she describes many scenes where her father and the other men sang to lighten their workload, and the women did the same thing. Many of the recreational activities of the small towns involved a community sing-along. And many of the children’s activities involved singing a song (e.g., jump rope games).
I have old songbooks published in the early 1900s. These books were meant for family sing-alongs in the “parlor.” I’ve read novels of the past in which the family and neighbors gathered around the piano and sang for an hour in the evening just for fun. I guess that’s what people do when there’s no TV or radio, right?
Singing schools were popular, and many people in the towns joined them.
When television was invented, one of the popular shows was Sing Along with Mitch (Mitch Miller). I remember this show, and my parents singing along!
And sometime in the 20th Century (the 40s, perhaps), the Protestant churches coined the term “Singspiration,” and many songs were written for worship services that consisted of all singing and no preaching. When my husband and I attended a Christian and Missionary Church in North Carolina, every 4th Sunday evening was a “Singspiration” service, during which members of the congregation could request ANY hymn in the hymnal, and I and the organist would play and the people would sing. Wow, that was fun! Our kids just loved these 4th Sundays.
Of course, in the military, men have always done “cadence,” a cross between chanting and singing. And the military has a proud history of making music, although nowadays, it’s the choirs and touring groups, not just the enlisted men, who do most of the singing.
And I think that in African American homes and neighborhoods, there is still quite a bit of corporate singing. When I drive through the predominantly African American neighborhoods in my city, I see small groups of men, women, teenagers, and children singing and dancing together. I envy them.
Nowadays, if I invited all my friends to my house for a sing-along, they would all think I had flipped! Every Thanksgiving, I toy with the idea of inviting friends and neighbors over for an early Christmas carol sing along (before everyone gets sick of carols). So far, I haven’t had the nerve. But I do love playing piano for Christmas carols, and maybe one day, I’ll just send out those invitations, and if they cart me away to the Funny Farm, well, at least I won’t have to work anymore.
Seriously, corporate singing is a dinosaur in the U.S. As I said in another post, many people in the U.S. attended public schools that offered very little musical education. In my city, all the arts were eliminated for two years back in the 1970s due to lack of tax monies. Eventually they were restored, but that’s a lot of kids who spent two years not learning how to sing.
One last point: I utterly refuse to own an iPod. If I ever won one, I would give it away. I always tell people, “I make my own music as I go through life, and I don’t have to wear an earbud to hear it.”
But that is for a totally different thread.
I have been singing in our church choir for 30 plus years. In fact, we basically have a men’s choir so to speak just three of us are left and because we only have one woman, God bless her. I would have to say everyone in our church sings and more so when we have a Mary hymn as a recessional, such as Sing of Mary, Immaculate Mary or Hail Holy Queen,etc. The choir can sing all the verses and the whole congregation will stay and sing the verses with us; men and women.