Singing Without a Chaperone

A town I was passing through was advertising a Mitsingkonzert. A sing-along concert, more or less: familiar songs, the lyrics up on a screen, and an evening whose whole stated purpose is that the people who turn up sing them together.

There’s something almost administrative about the honesty of it. People want to sing together; singing together requires knowing the words; so put the words on a screen and the date in the diary.

Britain sings plenty. It just won’t own it while it’s happening. The terraces sing, but it’s football, and football explains it. The pub sings, once the round has gone on long enough that nobody’s keeping count. Karaoke needs a private room, or enough drink in the public one that dignity’s already spent.

The singing is real. It just needs a chaperone, some louder and more respectable reason to be there. Grown adults making a sincere noise together is never asked to stand up and explain itself. If it were, it would sound like a cult induction.

In Germany the date in the diary does the work the third pint does in Britain. Either way you get a crowd. Your voice goes into the noise and nobody can find it afterwards.

The only place I sing in public with any regularity is Sunday Mass. Nobody needs a match or a round there; singing is part of what the hour is for. In German I don’t catch every word of a hymn, and it doesn’t stop me. The tune carries what the words drop.

The room is another matter. The organ gives the note and a few voices take it. Around them the hymn books are open at the right page and the lips are moving, and not much is coming out. In a room that quiet a full voice is easy to pick out, which is reason enough to keep mine down.

The hymn isn’t sung into a crowd. It’s sung to Someone, and the people either side of you can hear whether you mean it.

Some Sundays that’s the reason I sing quietly. The rest of the time I couldn’t tell you whether it’s the same flinch the pub needs a third pint for.