To embarrassed to sing at mass

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greetings,
Do any of you at times find it embarrassing to sing at Mass?.By embarrassed I mean, as a man, trying to hit some of the high notes?.This can be made worse if there are not many people around you, or indeed if there are not many at Mass.If there are a lot of folks around you you can stop singing and hide within their voices so to speak,but if you are isolated then you are truly alone. I can feel my face getting hot and i start to perspire, am i alone in this?, plus my two daughters say my singing is terrible anyway.Hope to hear from fellow sufferers, God Bless, Mick.
 
english_guy said:
greetings,
Do any of you at times find it embarrassing to sing at Mass?.By embarrassed I mean, as a man, trying to hit some of the high notes?.This can be made worse if there are not many people around you, or indeed if there are not many at Mass.If there are a lot of folks around you you can stop singing and hide within their voices so to speak,but if you are isolated then you are truly alone. I can feel my face getting hot and i start to perspire, am i alone in this?, plus my two daughters say my singing is terrible anyway.Hope to hear from fellow sufferers, God Bless, Mick.
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This is no solution for you but FWIW, before music was dropped from schools, people were taught to read music and to find “Doh”. Hymnals were published for 4 part singing, and you could just sing the bass line . . . .

Printing only the melody line and expecting men to sing it is a malicious feminist conspiracy. 😛
 
english_guy said:
greetings,
Do any of you at times find it embarrassing to sing at Mass?.By embarrassed I mean, as a man, trying to hit some of the high notes?.This can be made worse if there are not many people around you, or indeed if there are not many at Mass.If there are a lot of folks around you you can stop singing and hide within their voices so to speak,but if you are isolated then you are truly alone. I can feel my face getting hot and i start to perspire, am i alone in this?, plus my two daughters say my singing is terrible anyway.Hope to hear from fellow sufferers, God Bless, Mick.
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Off key? Nah! Make a joyful noise unto the Lord!! 😃

I once sat in front of a man who was singing his heart out in the key of R flat. 😛 While the musician in me may have cringed a bit, it was such an absolute blessing to be near someone who gave his all, praising God. Made me question why I don’t sing out with such reckless abandon.

If it’s any consolation, whenever my husband (he too is melodically challenged) sings at church my girls cover their ears. 😃
 
kristie_m said:
Off key? Nah! Make a joyful noise unto the Lord!! 😃

I once sat in front of a man who was singing his heart out in the key of R flat. 😛 While the musician in me may have cringed a bit, it was such an absolute blessing to be near someone who gave his all, praising God. Made me question why I don’t sing out with such reckless abandon.

If it’s any consolation, whenever my husband (he too is melodically challenged) sings at church my girls cover their ears. 😃
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Heh, heh. My DH brays his heart out. Mostly more or less on key but it’s still braying. But it’s a Catholic church, so we’re just glad that he sings at ALL!

As for “making a joyful noise” – that’s fine in the congregation but you will note that in Scripture, among the lists of those who returned to Jerusalem, “singers” are carefully numbered apart from the rest. So the tradition of a trained choir is as old as the Temple.
 
english_guy said:
greetings,
Do any of you at times find it embarrassing to sing at Mass?.By embarrassed I mean, as a man, trying to hit some of the high notes?.This can be made worse if there are not many people around you, or indeed if there are not many at Mass.If there are a lot of folks around you you can stop singing and hide within their voices so to speak,but if you are isolated then you are truly alone. I can feel my face getting hot and i start to perspire, am i alone in this?, plus my two daughters say my singing is terrible anyway.Hope to hear from fellow sufferers, God Bless, Mick.
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Yes, I am an alto and there are so many songs that are simply to high. You don’t have to sing if you are alone. In choir it is not a problem for me because I sing what I can sing. But in a congregation, I will feel conspicuous.

Singing is suppose to be a joy and if you have trouble with it, don’t worry about it. Lift your heart and sing with your soul. You probably do better than you think.
 
mercygate said:
This is no solution for you but FWIW, before music was dropped from schools, people were taught to read music and to find “Doh”. Hymnals were published for 4 part singing, and you could just sing the bass line . . . .

Printing only the melody line and expecting men to sing it is a malicious feminist conspiracy. 😛
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It was a malicious soprano feminist conspiracy.
 
Just a suggestion. Please don’t laugh until you’ve given it some seriou thought.

You could take a few voice lessons.

Singing is a skill and it can be learned just like any skill. Don’t listen to the “American Idol” philosophy that gives people the impression that if they aren’t born with natural talent, they can’t sing. Pish tosh. If you don’t have natural talent, you’ll probably never be a star (although some people who can’t sing have become singing icons in the U.S.). But you can still learn to sing correctly.

Obviously you won’t be trying out for the Met, but you could hire a voice teacher to teach you how to hear pitches more accurately and match them with your voice, and how to sing in a head voice which is generally more pleasant to listen to and less painful to produce than blasting away in the chest or throat voice.

There are a lot of simple things that you can learn to do to improve the quality of your singing. Offer your voice to God and learn to use it properly.

And who knows–maybe with proper training, you’ll discover that you really are a pretty decent singer!

You will be amazed at the results that a few weeks of voice training can produce! And I promise that you’ll have a lot of fun, too! Just don’t let the voice teacher talk you into singing a solo at his/her annual recital!
 
There are only two reasons I don’t vocalize during a song.
One is that I can’t bring myself to even pretend that the song is appropriate for worship.
Two is that some songs are so appropriate that I get choked up! I simply cannot sustain any vocal noise at all for the tears. Thats emmbarassing!
Otherwise I try to sing like Sister Barbara taught us in 5th grade. Low these many many years ago.
 
When the notes are too high, I drop an octave or else just mouth the word. When you sing at Mass, you are lifting up your heart to God in a beautiful manner. If you are really self-conscious, just pray the lyrics in your heart while people sing. The point of music is to honor God. When you sing, you pray twice, so says the proverb. I doubt the people around you care as much as you think. Some of my favorite Masses involved being surrounded by people who are tone deaf but sang out with gusto. That kind of enthusiasm at Mass is contagious, and everyone ends up feeling spiritually refreshed.
 
You are not alone.

If you do heed the advice here to make a joyful noise unto the Lord regardless, please make sure you are a) not a commentator or priest and b) if you are … quietly and calmly now, just back - away - from - that microphone … *before *you let fly. 😃

(We have a commentator with a voice like a donkey who has to be asked several times a year to PLEASE stand well back from the microphone when singing so he doesn’t drown out the cantors.)

Helen Rose is right! People tend to think that sopranos and tenors are the best cantors because these are the lead voice types in most opera and musicals. Altos and basses (generally) make better (or at least happier) cantors - they are more comfortable with congregational ranges. (I’m sure our friend Sarabande, though, who I think is a mezzo, is one soprano who is well aware of ordinary folks’ comfort zone.)

It’s well and good for musicians to play music in keys that are musically correct for trained voices and to let them ring out properly. For congregational accompaniment, though, one of my rules of thumb is that ordinary folks (unlike trained singers) couldn’t care less if they can’t cleanly hit the odd low note, but it will only take one screeched high one to make them close both hymnal and mouth.

It also varies with time of day and occasion, too - the pitch I can ask them to hit during the closing hymn at the Easter Vigil is a bit different to what I can ask at the opening hymn at 8am next Sunday.
 
I’m a basso. I just drop everything down two or three octaves. What’s your problem?

Matthew
 
I am mainly embarrassed to sing because I have a classically-trained operatic-sounding soprano voice. If I’m not the cantor and I’m just sitting in the congregation, I hold way back because I don’t want to appear as if I am showing off, esp. with the high notes which is where my true vocal power lies. I don’t want to make others uncomfortable, so I try to sing just loudly enough to make others around me feel “safe” to join in, but not so loudly that people will look at me and say to themselves, “who does she think she is, Beverly Sills?” :blushing: I know how annoying it is to have someone trying to put on a performance from the pews, and I don’t want to offend anyone that way. So if any of you are shy, come on and join in – our Lord will be delighted with your attempts even if you aren’t cut out for the choir! 👍
 
My next door neighbor once told me that she had a terrible voice, so she sang very loud at Mass to get back at God for it. You have gotten some great advice from other members, and I agree that a couple of voice lessons would probably help you a lot. Most people have more problems with pitch than with timing, and learning to match the pitch of your voice with the pitch of everyone else is not hard to do, but requires practice. Many people call themselves “tone deaf,” but in reality, very few of them actually are.

Musical pitch is something like color. When you were a child, someone had to teach you about the color yellow. As you got older, you learned to recognize not just yellow, but shades of yellow like amber or chartreuse, based on how close they moved toward orange or green in the spectrum. Musical intervals (the space between two notes) are similar in that they help you to gauge the “jump” from one note to the next. Voice teachers have great little tricks to help you learn these things.

I once had the opportunity to visit a Christian Apostolic Church in Oregon, where musical instruments are not used in worship. The congregation sang a capella in four parts, and their hymnals (all German hymns in English) are written in four parts. Interestingly, although they do not accept Eucharistic transubstantiation, their communion hymns are more theologically Catholic than what my paperback “Catholic” hymnal offers.
 
CarrieH said:
I am mainly embarrassed to sing because I have a classically-trained operatic-sounding soprano voice. If I’m not the cantor and I’m just sitting in the congregation, I hold way back because I don’t want to appear as if I am showing off, esp. with the high notes which is where my true vocal power lies. I don’t want to make others uncomfortable, so I try to sing just loudly enough to make others around me feel “safe” to join in, but not so loudly that people will look at me and say to themselves, “who does she think she is, Beverly Sills?” :blushing: I know how annoying it is to have someone trying to put on a performance from the pews, and I don’t want to offend anyone that way. So if any of you are shy, come on and join in – our Lord will be delighted with your attempts even if you aren’t cut out for the choir! 👍
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No! No! A thousand times, NO! Let that voice do what it wants to do! Do you not realize how many not-so-good voices are “hiding” behind yours, content to let you guide them in the tune and cover their bobbles?

I have a fairly decent voice in the baritone range. Not operatic quality or anything, but I learned proper breath support and esophageal resonance long ago in high school and college oratory. The two aren’t terribly different. I let anybody with a tenor voice (that’s almost nobody) carry those super-high notes, but I let it out when I’m in my range. I have noticed that people around me sing more when I do. (I confess that I simply won’t sing some of the sillier songs. I just won’t. I harbor the thought that perhaps the music director will eventually abandon songs for which the singing is anemic.) There is another baritone in my parish who does better with the high notes, not as well with the lower ones. People around him tend to sing too. There’s one lady with an operatic soprano voice, and I have noticed the same thing about her. I think a lot of people would like to sing, and will, if they have some “cover”.

I don’t know what it is about some songs. I have gotten “choked up” too; something I don’t think I would do if I was just listening. There really is something about singing that engages a person’s heart in a way that listening doesn’t.
 
My priest in college said something that has stuck with me ever since. He insisted that he wanted to hear everyone singing, reasoning that 1) if God gave you a poor singing voice, He deserved to hear it good and loud; and 2) if God gave you a good singing voice, it was your job to drown out the others. So though I am firmly in the first group, I sing proudly.

You’ll also find that the more you sing, the more confident you will become, and the better you will sound!
 
When I sing, sure I’m not the best singer. But especially in church I don’t try to let get me down. I’m not singing for a Catholic version of American Idol. I’m not performing for anybody else. I do it because so that I can fully partcipate in the Mass. And I like 99% of the songs being sung by the two English Masses on Sunday (Life Teen and the Contemporary Choirs). For to sing is fun, joyful,
emotional, reverent, pleasing to God (If God truly didn’t like my voice well He can change it.:yup: ) Anyway as one saint put it,“to sing is to pray twice.” The name of the saint that said it escapes me at the moment. Anybody know who the saint was?:hmmm:
 
english_guy said:
greetings,
Do any of you at times find it embarrassing to sing at Mass?.By embarrassed I mean, as a man, trying to hit some of the high notes?.This can be made worse if there are not many people around you, or indeed if there are not many at Mass.If there are a lot of folks around you you can stop singing and hide within their voices so to speak,but if you are isolated then you are truly alone. I can feel my face getting hot and i start to perspire, am i alone in this?, plus my two daughters say my singing is terrible anyway.Hope to hear from fellow sufferers, God Bless, Mick.
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I like to sing at Mass. Even as a woman, though, I agree that too many of the songs are set TOO high! I’m an alto, sometimes I sing a little harmony if I can hear it. :o Sometimes I sing an octave down with the men.

But let me tell you, and I hope this helps; the most joyful noise I ever heard at Mass was an older gentleman friend of my parents who was totally and unflinchingly tone-deaf. He couldn’t hit a note with a bat. But he sang his heart out every week. God made him that way and he praised God with everything he had! I still smile when I think of him. 🙂
 
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