Tuesday, March 23, 2004 AD
The Sound of Silence
In a comment over on Tentatio, Twylah suggested that the availability of high quality music performances on CD or in concert had the effect of making people "very shy and self-conscious about singing, dancing, performances of any kind".
It certainly seems that the only people who ever sing today are Christians and football fans. If people want music, they put on a CD. Indeed, singing has become deeply weird in some circles: some of my colleagues have never got over the time, nearly three years ago, when I sang a brief snatch of an advertising jingle as part of a seminar I was presenting on intellectual property rights ("he sang!").
But this isn't a new phenomenon. GK Chesterton (yes, him again...) wrote a wonderful essay entitled, "The Little Birds Who Won't Sing", in which he contrasts the depiction of Mediaeval craftsmen singing as they worked with the silence of modern workers. "If reapers sing while reaping, why should not auditors sing while auditing and bankers while banking?" he asks, before suggesting appropriate songs for such professions, and others:
It certainly seems that the only people who ever sing today are Christians and football fans. If people want music, they put on a CD. Indeed, singing has become deeply weird in some circles: some of my colleagues have never got over the time, nearly three years ago, when I sang a brief snatch of an advertising jingle as part of a seminar I was presenting on intellectual property rights ("he sang!").
But this isn't a new phenomenon. GK Chesterton (yes, him again...) wrote a wonderful essay entitled, "The Little Birds Who Won't Sing", in which he contrasts the depiction of Mediaeval craftsmen singing as they worked with the silence of modern workers. "If reapers sing while reaping, why should not auditors sing while auditing and bankers while banking?" he asks, before suggesting appropriate songs for such professions, and others:
"Up my lads and lift the ledgers, sleep and ease are o'er.He concludes:
Hear the Stars of Morning shouting: 'Two and Two are four.'
Though the creeds and realms are reeling, though the sophists roar,
Though we weep and pawn our watches, Two and Two are Four."
...at the end of my reflections I had really got no further than the sub-conscious feeling of my friend the bank-clerk -- that there is something spiritually suffocating about our life; not about our laws merely, but about our life. Bank-clerks are without songs, not because they are poor, but because they are sad. Sailors are much poorer.It's not only the availability of pre-recorded music that has silenced us: it is the loss of faith in God. God's people sing.
As I passed homewards I passed a little tin building of some religious sort, which was shaken with shouting as a trumpet is torn with its own tongue. THEY were singing anyhow; and I had for an instant a fancy I had often had before: that with us the super-human is the only place where you can find the human. Human nature is hunted and has fled into the sanctuary.
